Not Your Ordinary Faerie Tale

by Christine Warren

  He made a face. “It’s complicated. Like I said, the Fae age differently from humans, and time passes differently in the two worlds. For the moment, let’s just say that in Faerie I’ll age like any other Fae, but while I’m in IthirI’ll age more like a human would. Now can we please stop worrying about nonsense and get back to the problem at hand.”

  “I wouldn’t call it nonsense,” Corinne muttered, squeezing his hands back, “but yes, we can get back to Seoc.”

  “Good.” He leaned across the table and brushed her mouth with his.

  “It’s not that much more pleasant a topic, though. You’re certain he couldn’t be responsible for Rabbi Aaronson’s death?”

  “As certain as I can be without having witnessed it myself. I honestly don’t think Seoc is capable of that kind of violence.”

  “I believe you,” she reassured him. “If you think Seoc didn’t do it, then he didn’t do it. But it seems like too big a coincidence that one of the witnesses to Seoc’s little magic shows is missing and now another one is dead. It makes more sense if you assume the events are related somehow.”

  “I agree, but that’s my gut talking. I don’t see that we have any hard evidence to back up the feeling.”

  “You’re right. We don’t.” Corinne eased her hands from his and picked up her phone. “Fortunately, I think I know where we might start looking for some.”

  When Corinne had told Luc that she had contacts who might be able to give them a little more information on Rabbi Aaronson’s murder, he’d guessed she was referring to someone on the police force. Reporters were always talking to the police in the novels he read when he visited the mortal world. As it turned out, though, his heartmate must read an entirely different sort of novel. Corinne did have a contact in the police department, but she spoke to him briefly on the phone, then swung by her apartment to pick up a fax he’d sent her before leading Luc back outside and through Manhattan’s grid of streets to the East Side and the cool corridors of the city morgue.

  The sign in the lobby had caught his attention first:

  Let conversation cease; let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights in helping the living.

  It was the kind of message that stuck with a man.

  And gave him a serious case of the heebie-jeebies.

  “You couldn’t have asked these people for a fax and gone to visit the police station instead?” He kept his voice low, whether out of respect or unease, he couldn’t be certain.

  “Everything McMartin had to tell me could be written down,” she said, not even bother to glance back at him as she led the way to the building’s basement. “Dr. Tortelli can show me things that I’d never understand if I just read about them. I’m a bright girl, but I never did manage to fit in the time for medical school.”

  Luc understood her reasoning, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. Gritting his teeth, he followed her through the starkly lit halls past quiet rooms whose contents he didn’t even want to imagine. Like most Fae, he had an instinctive aversion for the dead. It wasn’t that no one ever died in Faerie, but it didn’t happen with anything like the same regularity. For the Fae, death just wasn’t a part of the natural process.

  The people of Faerie had been blessed with immortality. Oh, they could be killed—stop any creature’s heart or remove its head from its body, and it would have a hard time continuing to breathe—but they never simply died. Old age didn’t scare them, because it held no consequences. Their beauty never faded; their bodies never failed. They didn’t understand the human concept of fatalism, because they never worried about Fate.

  Maybe that was why death frightened the average Fae more than the average human. As a warrior, Luc had encountered the mysterious force more than most of his kind, but he never grew accustomed to it. How was someone supposed to grow accustomed to the destruction of a living soul?

  Corinne made no comment on his stiff posture or his uneasy glances, for which he felt grateful. Of course, he had to admit that her forbearance might have owed more to her complete focus on the handful of papers she studied at as she walked and less to her powers of observation. Still, Luc appreciated it.

  He steeled himself for something when she finally stopped walking and knocked on a metal door adorned with a small, square window embedded with crosshatched strands of wire. After a brief pause, the door opened and a girl in blue surgical scrubs stepped back to wave them into the room.

  “Dr. Tortelli is on her way up. You can wait in here.”

  Luc fought back the urge to shudder and reluctantly followed Corinne into the large chamber. The girl offered them something to drink, and he felt his stomach revolt. Thankfully, Corinne refused for both of them and the girl left them alone to wait for the medical examiner.

  The room approximated Luc’s idea of hell—a human hell, since the Fae didn’t believe in any such place. It was big and white and cavernous, painfully clean and polished so that every surface gleamed, from the linoleum floors to the stainless-steel tables and counters, to the tiled and painted walls. The fluorescent fixtures bathed everything in an unrelenting grayish light, but they exposed not so much as a single speck of dust. He imagined human hospitals were rarely so scrupulously clean.

  No amount of scrubbing, though, could disguise the smell of the place. It stank of antiseptic cleaners, a harsh chemical odor laced with a bitter note of cherries, like cough syrup or cheap hard candies. Under it, Luc could smell the death, a thin miasma of suffering, of blood and waste and urine mingling together with the sweetness of rotten flesh.

  He had to brace himself to keep from bolting out of the room.

  Corinne appeared unfazed. She leaned against one of the steel autopsy tables, identifiable by the trough surrounding it and the block positioned at one end to elevate the head of the unfortunate body that landed upon it. It didn’t seem to bother her that she was standing right beside a place where so many other humans had lain, empty and lifeless. Was it a human trait, to be aware of that kind of tragedy and look past it, beyond it, to matters closer at hand?

  “The report McMartin faxed over is a little sketchy,” she said aloud, her eyes still glued to the folder she’d grabbed on their way out of her apartment. She’d stuffed the faxed pages inside, but she hadn’t shut the thing since they’d stepped into the city-owned building on First Avenue. “Probably because there were no witnesses and the officer who responded to the call about the body was a twenty-eight-year veteran.”

  “You’d think someone with that much experience would have learned to be thorough.”

  “Nineteen months to retirement,” she disagreed drily. “That much experience has taught him to be halfway to Fort Lauderdale even while he’s on shift. I like rookies. The ones who still care tend to give you so many details, you know what side the vic dressed on.”

  Luc tore his gaze away from a shelf full of implements that looked like props from a particularly gruesome horror film and decided focusing on Corinne’s face would be much better for his nerves. Her brow was furrowed as she continued to read.

  “You know, I think the ink was still wet on this when McMartin snagged it from the IIC to fax to me. Investigator in charge,” she clarified at his blank stare. “It looks like it’s smudged in places. The guys says it looks like the victim was approached from behind, but it doesn’t say whether he put up much of a fight.”

  “He didn’t.”

  The voice from the doorway had them turning, Luc with a start and Corinne with a friendly grin.

  “Hey, Doc,” she greeted the new arrival. “I hear business is pretty good recently.”

  “Too good.” The woman backed into the room pulling a stretcher loaded with a long, black bag zippered tight from top to bottom. Luc swallowed hard and tried not to look at it too closely. “Not including this guy, of course. You’d have missed him if you’d called me twenty minutes later. He never should have come to me to begin with. Next of kin has already started banging down the front doors wanting him back
. I can stall them maybe fifteen more minutes, but you’re going to have to make do with what I can tell you from just looking at him.”

  “You don’t have an autopsy report?”

  “I didn’t do an autopsy. Can’t.”

  He saw Corinne scowl, then watched as something occurred to her that made her curse.

  “Oh, crap. Jewish law. I should have thought.”

  The medical examiner nodded. She was a woman of about fifty human years, with sandy-colored hair liberally salted with gray and worn short, possibly as a concession to what looked to be impressively stubborn curls. Her blue scrubs and smock covered a figure that leaned toward the plump and square, but her face was pleasantly freckled and spoke of both intelligence and compassion.

  “As soon as I saw his name, I suspected he was Jewish, but when I looked at his ID and personal possessions, I found his cards with the name and address of his synagogue, so I knew I wouldn’t be doing any cutting. He never should have come to me. The EMTs were rookies and routed him here without thinking.” She waved Corinne to the side of the stretcher opposite her and unzipped the body bag. “I was just going to pack him up and send him home when I got your call, so I took a few minutes to do a visual exam. Don’t tell, capice?”

  “I owe you.” Corinne leaned close to the body while Luc tried not to turn visibly green. “Please tell me you found something interesting.”

  “What’s interesting is what I didn’t find.”

  The doctor eased apart the sides of the bag so that they could take a closer look. Luc would have gracefully declined for his part, but his heartmate appeared fascinated.

  “No defensive wounds, so like I said, the rabbi didn’t put up a fight, which indicates that he either never saw the killer coming, or he knew him and trusted him.”

  “Him?”

  Dr. Tortelli shrugged. “Figure of speech. Easier than saying him or herover and over again. But with that said, the cause of death appears to be a single blow to the back of the head with a blunt object. Impact shows a downward trajectory. Since our Dr. Aaronson here isn’t exactly a shrimp, whoever struck him would have to be either a player in the WNBA or a man of above-average height.” She paused and nodded at Luc, curiosity showing in her shrewd hazel eyes. “Your friend here could have managed it easily.”

  Corinne glanced over at him with a small smile. “Nah, I can alibi him out.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “What else can you tell me?”

  “Very little, I’m sorry to say. No evidence of debris under the fingernails, so he didn’t even touch the guy with any kind of force; no stray hairs that could have been transferred by a handshake or a how-you-doing hug. Other than the bloody mess at the back of his skull, the rabbi is lean, clean, and pristine.”

  Corinne grimaced. “Wow, you really meant it when you said you had very little to tell me, didn’t you?”

  “I never lie about death.”

  “Damn, I was hoping for a little more,” his heartmate grumbled as she stepped back from the body. He could read the frustration in her expression as well as in her body language.

  The doctor nodded her understanding. “Do you mind my asking what made you curious enough about the doctor that you bothered to ask me about his autopsy? I didn’t realize you knew him.”

  “I didn’t. His name came up in, uh, a missing persons case I’m looking into,” she hedged. “It was a long shot that his murder might have had something to do with it, but stranger things have happened, and this has been a really strange case so far.”

  Dr. Tortelli looked thoughtful for a moment, then moved the edge of the bag slightly to expose the corpse’s left shoulder and upper arm. “Well, if you’re looking for strange, this is the only thing that comes to mind.”

  She pointed as a small spot on the front of the man’s shoulder, just above the crease made by his bicep lying against his side. The skin there looked slightly different from the surrounding tissue, slightly paler and smooth, almost shiny in texture.

  “See that scar?”

  Corinne nodded. Curiosity even moved Luc enough to peer a little more closely. His feet didn’t budge, though. He preferred to keep his distance.

  “It looks old, so I didn’t bother to connect it to the cause of death or the precipitating attack,” the doctor said. “It’s bugging me a little bit, though, because I can’t tell where it came from.”

  Corinne looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “It doesn’t look quite like any other scar tissue I’ve seen. It’s not a knife or a bullet wound; those are easy to spot. It doesn’t actually look like any sort of puncture wound. It’s the wrong surface texture for a burn, too. Frankly, the closest I can come to describing it is like a skin graft, but that’s not quite right, either.” She shook her head. “I just can’t quite make it out, and I hate things like that. They make me look bad.”

  As Luc listened to the medical examiner’s words, something about them penetrated through his cloak of unease and discomfort. Penetrated far enough that he actually moved a step closer to the dead man to take a look at the small, round spot marring the man’s gray-tinged flesh. What he viewed made him stiffen.

  Corinne saw it. He knew by the way her gaze shot to his face, searching his eyes for a clue to his thoughts. He gave his head a small shake and shifted back to his previous position. Now was not the time to talk about what he had seen.

  Thankfully, Corinne picked up on his cue and stepped back from the stretcher herself to offer her contact a rueful smile. “Well, I appreciate you helping me out, Doc. Especially under the circumstances. But I think it’s time we let Dr. Aaronson go back to his family. They’ll want to bury him as soon as possible.”

  Dr. Tortelli rezipped the body bag and nodded. “Your family’s done plenty for me over the years, Rinne. You don’t owe me for this. But you’re right about the burial. His family’s been reminding me about it for the last two hours. There’s a funeral director upstairs waiting for him even as we speak. I’ll make sure he’s taken care of.”

  “I know you will.”

  Corinne smiled again and touched the older woman’s arm briefly and affectionately before turning toward the door. Luc moved to follow. The medical examiner stopped her with a comment.

  “If the missing person you’re looking for is the one who did this to him,” the doctor said, “I hope you find him. And I hope he’ll pay for it.”

  “Don’t worry.” Luc spoke for the first time since the older woman had wheeled in the corpse, meeting her eyes as he urged Corinne out of the autopsy room. They exchanged a long glance of assessment, then understanding. “We’ll make certain he does.”

  When they reached the entrance of the building and stepped out into the fresh afternoon air, Luc inhaled deeply, savoring as never before the scents of the city, food mingled with trash mingled with humanity mingled with stone and metal and earth. Nothing had ever smelled so good. He couldn’t really recall the last time he’d felt as grateful to leave a place—or as glad that he’d been there. For all the misery being in those haunted corridors had caused him, he knew the dead would be delighted they had visited.

  ELEVEN

  Corinne barely contained herself until they reached the sidewalk. She gave Luc half a second to draw in a deep breath—one he’d needed desperately, judging by the gray-green tinge to his skin—then pounced. Metaphorically, of course.

  “What was it?” she demanded right there on the sidewalk at First and 32nd. “What did you see when you looked at that scar?”

  He sighed, but the sound held no impatience, just a bucket-load of relief. A visible release of tension followed closely on its heels.

  “The doctor was right about the cause not being any of the things she mentioned,” he said, beginning to walk down the street and away from the ME’s office. “He wasn’t shot, stabbed, burned, or grafted. She was wrong, though, about the mark’s age. It was recent; probably as recent as last night.”

  Corinne swore under h
er breath. “Then it was related to the attack.”

  “Almost certainly. I’ve seen scars like that before, but very rarely. They don’t happen to the Fae; only to humans.”

  “What causes them?”

  “A very powerful blast of Fae magic.”

  She paused to chew on that. It left a bad taste in her mouth. “I thought you said Seoc wasn’t capable of hurting anyone.”

  Luc’s jaw clenched. “I didn’t believe he was, but clearly I was wrong.”

  Corinne didn’t want to doubt Luc’s judgment, and she didn’t want him doubting it, either. “Just because the blast was caused by magic doesn’t necessarily mean that Seoc is to blame,” she said carefully.

  He snorted. “So there just happens to be some other person from Faerie with enough power to summon that kind of energy wandering around Ithirat the same time as Seoc? No, that kind of magic is specific to the sidhe. The noble race of Faerie. People like me and Seoc and the Queen. Brownies and imps and the other sort of creatures from our world just don’t have that kind of ability. It had to have been Seoc.”

  Corinne took a deep breath and let it out carefully. “Okay, so now we know.” She stopped walking and reached out to grab his hand, pulling him to a stop beside her. “Finding out was the first step. It’s time to move on to the second.”

  He nodded curtly. “We have to find Seoc immediately.”

  “Well, we have four witnesses left. So let’s go knock on some doors.”

  The knocking elicited very little other than a burgeoning headache for Corinne and an increasing sense of urgency for them both. There at been no answer at the apartments of two of the models Ava had told them about. At the third, they found only a disgruntled roommate who bitched at them for waking her up in the middle of the damned night (it was three in the afternoon) and told them that if they saw Leena before she did, they should tell her that if she was late with the rent again, her “ass” would be “grass.” A trip to the bartender’s place yielded nothing until the super poked his head out to see who was knocking next door and told them that Mark Ingram had moved over the weekend.