“I agree. I don’t believe I’ve even seen a magic that powerful and so positive at the same time.” Verdantia’s soft voice tinkled.
I was at a loss for words. I felt embarrassed and awkward.
“David, I’ll be outside with the brooms,” I declared. I said my goodbyes to my hosts and departed for the porch where our rides were waiting. The cats followed me, and Jet dropped into step with me.
“And just where were you when that freak show was going on?”
“Looking for clues,” Jet said. “You didn’t really think I was just running around for kicks, did you?”
“Yes,” Midnight and I said in unison.
“Ouch,” Jet said. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, guys. It’s not like I could have done much with a floating woman anyway.”
“Maybe run for the nearest doctor if things had gotten too bad?” Midnight suggested.
“Well, if I’d done that, I might have missed what I found in one of the upstairs bedrooms.”
That got my attention. “Whose bedroom?”
“Judging from the oxygen tanks and medical supplies everywhere, probably Infirma’s. I dropped it just outside the porch.” He said as we crossed the threshold to the outside.
A scroll sat on the floor to the right of the entrance. I snatched it up in stride and unrolled the parchment. Thankfully, the language was in classical Latin, so it only took a glance to untangle the words.
“This is a Puppeteer enchantment,” I said, rolling the script back to its former position. It took a second for the connection to ignite in my head. When it did, I stopped cold. Jet nodded at me. “That’s right, Hattie. It looks like we might have just found the cursed charm that pushed Morag from the Ferris wheel.”
CHAPTER 12
Maude’s centrifuge whirred quietly as it separated and sorted the sample I had just given our ghoul coroner.
“Alright, let me get this straight,” David said, leaning against the body freezers with his arms crossed. “You’re saying that what Jet found in Infirma’s room might implicate her as the murderer of her own sister?”
Carbon trotted past me with a pouch of salmon treats in his mouth. Through the closed door of the lab, he made like smoke and wisped and curled his way under the the narrow gap at the bottom of the door, no doubt on his way to warm himself in Maude’s boiler room.
“I’ll be honest, David,” I said, shifting in agitation from one foot to the next. “I hope I’m wrong. And, unless Infirma is a world-class method actor, I’m not sure how she could have given such a convincing performance on the Ferris Wheel. I mean, she very well nearly followed in Morag’s footsteps for Goddess’ sake.”
“I once knew a Method actor who went that far,” Maude said casually while the centrifuge kept spinning. “It’s why he’s dead now. But since we’re talking about the living, girlfriend, how is our one remaining Ms. Devlin doing?”
“A bit shaky but okay,” I said. “Apparently, the Chim … well, the charm I used, cleansed Infirma of whatever was trying to kill her. Because the folks at Howling Mercy still haven’t found anything alien in her system. Anyway, she’s staying in for observation for a couple of days. She’s in good hands, Verdantia’s with her, and Seamus and his kin are looking after the estate.”
Maude glanced over at Hector from the top of her thick eyeglasses. Hector was busying himself polishing the surgical tools. “See, Hector? You’re not the only one who believes in doing his job to the fullest. The brownies could give you a run for your money.” She chuckled happily, her dead-mice eyebrows jiggling above her milky eyes.
The zombie, Muerte, moaned in something approaching contentment as he laid a gleaming scalpel onto the surgical tray.
“There’s no guarantee that we’re going to find anything we can work with in Infirma’s old medicine bottles,” David pointed out., nodding toward the rotating centrifuge.
“It’s still the logical place to start,” I insisted. “According to Infirma, the apothecary she used was also used by Shields and his lackeys. And, if anyone wants Infirma dead, Gideon and his drones are at the top of my suspect list. Even if I don’t have a clue as to why they’d want her dead in the first place.” I motorboated my lips and ran a hand through my hair. It felt greasy. I really needed to make up some Rosemary shampoo soon.
David nodded. He could be stubborn, but he always knew good reasoning when he heard it.
As Hector laid the last instrument on the tray, he grunted at Maude.
“Thank you, dear,” she said. “Now would you kindly bring the body over please?”
Hector grunted and waved some peculiar signs in the air with this tattered hands. He waited briefly. Hector Muerte’s mud clodded hair stood on end. He shrugged his shoulders and loped off in a slow and deliberate fashion, leaving the electric like energy he had summoned behind. Like a Star Trek transporter beam, Morag’s body, in a layered graduation of solids, materialized on the examination table, still dressed in her funeral finery.
I turned away from the body. “This whole corpse teleporting thing just feels…disrespectful to me, you know? Like grave-robbing.”
“As blunt as it is, my dear,” Maude burbled while snapping on her gloves, “this method works. Morag’s loved ones get their respectful peace, and, if needed, I still get unhindered access to the cadaver.”
The centrifuge ground to a halt.
“Check on the samples, Hector,” Maude said. “If what we’re looking for is here, this shouldn’t take long anyway.”
Maude turned her attention back to Morag’s corpse, and using a flat-faced tool; the coroner delicately scraped some skin cells from the right hinge of Morag’s jaw into a waiting petri dish.
“That’s it?” David asked in amazement.
“Oh, this is just the start of my follow-up exam,” Maude explained, capping off the dish. “Whatever results I get from this cursory overview, I intend to go much deeper to confirm them. Pity that I’ll need to undo that Y-incision. Hector took so much time to sew Morag up, but…”
She took the dish back to the chemistry set that she kept next to the centrifuge. Hector was carefully sorting the freshly spun test tubes on a nearby rack. To my surprise, all Maude did was pick up an ultraviolet flashlight and shine it on the dish. She nodded a second after shutting the lamp off.
“Gather around, dearies,” she said. “I do believe I’ve just found the proof that the Puppeteer charm was used on poor Morag.”
David and I stood behind Maude’s shoulder while she shone the light once more. The small cells in the petri dish started jerking and moving in a frenzied wave of motion.
“I missed this on the initial post-mortem,” Maude said, her face puckered in defeat. “But the ultraviolet never lies. Human cells only react to Ultraviolet like this when they’ve been Puppeteered.” The ghoul coroner shone the light a final time and the cells whipped up into their chaotic jumping. Maude chortled. “Dance, babies, dance!”
David interrupted the coroner’s gleeful game.
“How could you have missed that, Maude?” David admonished. “You knew that Morag stepped out of that car in—“
“Into empty space, yes, CPI Trew…well, empty until she hit the ground, but that’s neither here nor there.”
“It’s also not the first thing you’d necessarily look for, David,” I added, backing up Maude. “She might have been given a post-hypnotic suggestion, mind-altering drugs or even perhaps been under some kind of blackmail threat.”
“Still, I’ll need to confirm that the Puppeteer enchantment you brought me is a match for that of what Morag was attacked by,” Maude said, putting the ultraviolet down. “There are so many variations of that nasty spell in the Warlock grimoires. Each one is as distinct as a fingerprint.”
“Which might tell us who cast the spell in the first place,” David said, looking a little energized at the prospect of having some definitive information.
“Based on what I’ve seen so far,” Maude said, taking the nearest
of the test tubes from the rack. “I think I know why Puppeteer was used as opposed to Hattie’s list of clever suggestions. One true thing of all the variants on this enchantment is the side effect of blotting out any traces of any other active magic on, or in, the person.”
“So, how come Reverend Peacefield was able to spot the spider veins of the Vencap Curse?” David asked.
Picking up a baster and dipping it into a Bunsen beaker of clear liquid, Maude said, “Again, just guessing, but I would say that Hattie’s delivery of the Chimera Charm interrupted the Puppeteer spell and dismantled its efficacy just as Morag fell to the ground.”
“So why didn’t the Chimera Charm stop the Vencap Curse? ” I questioned.
Maude sighed as she extracted some of the liquid into the baster. “Because Morag was already quite dead. Some versions of Puppeteer allow for the animation of corpses. Maybe Ms. Devlin was afflicted by the same variant.”
Hector made an unhappy moan.
“Oh, I doubt that any of them would work on you, Hector,” Maude said, putting some drops into the tube. “You’re way too stubborn to…”
Her voice trailed off as the sample started to bubble in response to the freshly introduced liquid. Maude quickly put the tube back on the rack and picked up the next one. Eventually, every last one of the samples reacted the same way.
“Oh, Hattie,” Maude sighed. “Infirma is very, very lucky that you were on hand to save her life. We’re looking at a prime example of Unterkrieg.”
“Under war?” David asked, translating the German.
“I didn’t name it, Chief Para Inspector,” Maude protested, emptying the remaining liquid in the baster back into the beaker. “You can thank Paracelsus for that development.”
“So it’s a poison?” I asked.
Maude shook her head. “Not in the traditional sense. For it to work, it has to be coated in the molecules of the CONTAINER of the liquid you want to spoil. Attempting to introduce it directly into the liquid itself makes it harmlessly dissipate.”
“That makes no sense,” David said, wrinkling his brow.
“Does anything from Mag Mell usually?” Maude countered. “Anyway, with Unterkrieg death is usually somewhat painful, extremely quick and almost totally untraceable in the victim’s system afterward. It’s entirely Unseelie territory, I’m afraid.”
A thought occurred to me. “Infirma talked about how her regular apothecary went out of business just last week. That’d be convenient timing if someone gave her enough of the poison to kill her. Plus, the Unterkrieg would have had to have been introduced then, at the time of packaging, am I right, Maude?” I looked to my ghoul friend.
“Quite right. Unterkrieg leaches from the container at the time of packaging the medicine.”
“Bran the Blessed, won’t those Unseelies ever stop?” David’s fists balled at his sides, and for a moment I saw a blaze of light in his eyes. I blinked, or he did, and it was gone. “You think we’re looking at another Fae murder contract?” I asked.
I shuddered as I thought of Baphomet, the Unseelie Mag Mellian, and his contract with Hagatha Jinx to kill her mild-mannered husband, Aurel Nugget.
“While I defer to the both of you in investigative matters,” Maude said. “I would hazard to guess that you two have just found a lead worth pursuing.”
“Now, all we need is an address for this lead,” David said eyeing Infirma’s used medicine bottles. Maude cleared her throat as she lifted up one of the containers. On the bottom was a label. The name Grave Matters was written underneath a cartouche of an Eye of Ra and a prostrate body on a bed. There was some smaller, worn print underneath. We squinted to see the words.
“A few minutes and I should be able to get you both an address,” Maude assured us. “Hector, would you mind grabbing my print restoration kit from the storage room?”
While Hector shambled out the door to get Maude’s tool, I looked at David. “If this was a contract, then it may mean that the apothecary was sitting on a gate to Mag Mell. You know how the Unseelies like to make their lives easy.”
“Which we will need to close tout suite, if that’s the case,” David added. “ We’ve closed one before; we can do it again. I mean, I don’t know how we closed that one in the rock grumlin mines, but we certainly put it out of operation. For a spell at least.” The chief sighed and rubbed his face with fierce vigor. “But, ultimately, we’re going to have to figure out a way to stop this Fae energy for good. I don’t know what they’re up to in the end, but I don’t like the direction we’re headed in.”
My friend was right. Our whole world; our beloved Isles was becoming an unsafe place to live. The Fae needed to be stopped and stopped before they reached their master plan. That’s if they had one. But I didn’t believe that the Unseelies would create so much mayhem for nothing. They were undoubtedly working toward something big. Something final. My wand! I fished the applewood from my pocket and then frowned. My newly unlocked rune was great for opening gates to Mag Mell. But I wasn’t sure if it was up to the task of closing them. Then I remembered the kitty I’d brought with us.
“I’m going to go see if I can tempt Carbon into coming along for this ride,” I said, heading for the boiler room.
“Bingo!” Maude cheered. She pushed her kit to the side and scribbled on a piece of scrap paper. “Here’s your target, Hattie, my dear,” She danced her way across the room to me, proffering the address details of our lead.
“Maude, you’re the best,” I said. “Now to go and wrench Carbon away from his holy warm spot.” I turned to the door, and mumbled: “Wish me luck.”
An hour later, the gibbous moon lit our flight path back to Cathedral. Per the Orne mapping app on my phone, the address for Grave Matters was in as remote a spot as the Devlin estate. It overlooked the southern coastline, facing the west coast of Glessie Isle. The abandoned apothecary took up roughly three times the ground more than the cottage that led to Ankou. In the moonlight, it looked like it’d been left for years; crumbling in an advanced state of decay. Fluorescent mold colonies hung from the walls, creating a soft glow in the shadows.
“Sure, I can burn this down in a heartbeat,” were Carbon’s first words as he stepped from the broom.
“Shh, kitty. Not so fast. If there’s another way to close this gateway, then we’ll use that first. The fire comes last, okay?” Carbon said nothing, just kept staring at the apothecary, surveying its most flammable spots with focused eyes. “Carbon? Do you understand?”
I bent down to stroke his head, and my pyro cat purred a heat-emitting purr.
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” he conceded.
David landed his broom just behind us and immediately pulled out his smartphone. He activated the flashlight app and took point. The thin blue beam of the phone swept the walls with a practiced motion.
“You said that this place closed down a week ago?” he asked me, looking over his shoulder.
“That’s what Infirma told me,” I said. “We might be looking at another set-up like Mutley Crew.” I reminded David of the charity that Spithilda Roach had donated most of her money to. After Spithilda’s untimely death, the charitable offices of Mutley Crew had been turned into a Faery portal to Mag Mell. And, David and I had fallen for the ruse.
“I hope not,” David sighed, pushing the front door open with his free hand. “Once was enough.”
Carbon’s eyes took everything in as we stepped into the dilapidated place. His nose wrinkled as he sniffed the air. “It’s a little damp in here, and it reeks. But it’s nothing a good fire can’t cure.”
The pungent odor of the inside slammed into me and instantly burned my throat. The glowing mold riddled the walls like veins of ore in a mine. It gave the place an eerie greenish-blue glow. I noticed that the light made David’s skin take on a reddish hue. I looked at my hands. Weird. The light didn’t seem to affect me in the same way.
“So,” David said, turning around to illuminate the area with his flash. “Where do we start loo
king?”
I turned on my Fae Sight, and the glow in the room became brighter, turning into more of a soft white light. We all froze at the sound of footsteps
“What was that?” David asked cocking his head
“I…don’t see anything,” Carbon admitted with uncharacteristic nervousness. “Sure you don’t want me to torch this pl—“
“Not yet,” I said. I heard the footsteps again, this time from a different direction. I noticed how heavy it sounded; like it belonged to something with a weighty body mass.
I whirled my head around as I heard the footsteps pass close by.
“I’m not seeing any—“
Another set of stomps, this time from a third direction.
“That does it,” Carbon said, fear and apprehension giving way to indignity and anger.
He then called out in his loudest voice, “Whoever in the hells you are, would you knock it off and just COME OUT?!”
A stomping sound directly in front of us, but there was nothing for us to see. A second stomp to the right, closer than the first one. A third…a fourth…a fifth…all different directions but they were getting closer to us in the room.
My heart started hammering as I began to wonder if we’d painted ourselves into a corner
We gravitated to the center of the room, all three of us with our backs to each other as we helplessly scanned the doors, the walls, everything.
“I think you just made it mad, kitty cat,” David said, the fear trying to break through his armor of courage.
Hard to argue with him on that point. Then came the next stomp…right behind me. Oh my goddess, what—
“Stop that!” an outraged voice yelled out to my right. “This instant!”
The tone reminded me of a mother dealing with a disobedient child. But the accent was all too familiar. Shutting off my Fae Sight revealed the owner of the voice, and it was as I suspected: Queen of the Faeries, Hinrika Jonsdottir.
She all but glided across the room to the doorway on the right, seething with anger at our unknown stalker. An indistinct shape formed up in the doorway, which I turned my Fae Sight onto. The blinding light from looking at it convinced me that it was a Fae being and that I needed to really think about getting something along the line of Fae Sight sunglasses.
Moggies, Magic and Murder Page 33
