Sparks

by Laura Bickle

  Anya opened it. Inside was a bracelet strung with glass beads. The bracelet was made of red cord, knotted between each bead. The beads were cast to resemble eyes, white specks on blue fields with unblinking black pupils.

  “It’s an evil-eye bracelet,” Katie explained. “The knots are spells, sort of like rosary beads. Each one was tied with the intent of keeping the salamanders from harm. The beads were made in Eastern Europe, where they’re believed to ward off the evil eye.”

  Anya tied it around her wrist. “Wow. Where do you get this stuff at seven in the morning?”

  “I’m not the only magickal practitioner in the city.” Katie shrugged. “Some of them are even morning people. By the way, you’re welcome to raid my closet for work clothes.”

  “Shit. I forgot about work.” Anya chewed her lip. “I’m supposed to be in there by nine.”

  “Hang on.” Katie disappeared into the basement, emerged with a lump of calico fabric she handed to Anya. “I think you’ll find this to be useful.”

  “What is it?” Anya turned it over in her hands. The fabric was covered in orange and brown sparrows. It was kind of pretty.

  “It’s a sling bag, from the baby store.” Katie took it from her and shrugged it over her shoulder. The strap rested on her left shoulder, crossed her body, and hugged close to her ribs. “Parents use these to haul their offspring around.” She made jazz hands and wiggled her fingers. “Look, Ma, no hands!”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Katie rolled her eyes. “You put the eggs in here and take them with you. See, I made modifications.” Katie held the bag open. “I put a zipper in the top so that the eggs won’t roll out. I also lined it with insulated, heat-reflecting fabric. If you keep it close to your body like this, you and Sparky should be able to keep them warm. Otherwise, you tuck those heat-up pocket warmers from the camping store inside.” Katie looked at her sheepishly. “I was going to throw you a baby shower, and this was gonna be the big gift. But it seems like you need it more now.”

  Anya pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’m having flashbacks to when I had to carry around a sack of flour in high school. The teacher said we had to treat it like a baby.”

  “How’d you do with that?”

  “Not well. The flour sack broke and I kept duct-taping it back together. When I turned it in, I had a softball-sized wad of duct tape with a fistful of flour left. I got a D.”

  “Why didn’t you fail?”

  “Teacher was impressed that I kept trying to patch it up. Said it was likely that I’d be negligent enough to allow a child to fall off the roof, but I’d at least have enough sense to administer first aid and call nine-one-one after it happened.”

  Katie grinned, put the sling bag over Anya’s shoulder. “Welcome to motherhood.”

  Woe betide any ghost who dared fuck with her today.

  Anya climbed out of the Dart, strode toward the county morgue with as much confidence as she could muster. Katie’s button-down blouse fit well enough, though it was a bit loose on Anya. But Katie was a good five inches shorter, rendering the pants the length of capris. The baby sling was jammed under her left breast, and the eggs bumped against her ribs as she walked. She’d worn a jacket over the contraption, but it still gave the effect of pushing her boobs up to her neck. Sparky rode on her shoulder like a parrot, tail curved around the salamander collar and head poking through her curtain of dark hair. With her evil-eye bracelet, gun holstered on her right hip, and lips bright red with dragon’s blood, she was ready to rumble.

  Her bad reputation with the ghost who’d attacked the girl ghost in the refrigeration unit must have preceded her. Or else Katie’s magick was working. Whichever, Anya heard the scuttling of half-seen things moving away from her as she strolled down the green corridors of the morgue. It was like turning the light on at two a.m. in a kitchen full of cockroaches. They fled for darkness, where they watched and waited, antennae twitching. Anya could feel their eyes upon her but didn’t acknowledge them. She rounded the bend to the primary examination room without so much as a titter from the dead.

  Nobody wanted to fuck with the salamander mama.

  “Lieutenant Kalinczyk.” Gina was washing her hands in a stainless-steel sink. Anya was amazed that she was even tall enough to reach the faucets. She glanced at Anya. “Nice purse.”

  “Thanks. My friend made it.” Anya crossed her arms over her chest. From the corner of her eye, she glimpsed a spirit peeking up from the prone form of a dead elderly man. When she turned her head to look, the spirit hastily scrambled back inside the body. Anya narrowed her eyes. Good. Stay there.

  “I dig the lipstick, too. What color is that? Strumpet Scarlet?”

  “Gina…” Anya sighed.

  “What? I thought you might have a date or something.” Gina shrugged, wagged a finger at her. “Nice girl like you should have a husband.”

  Anya rolled her eyes, glanced at Sparky. “I’m in a committed relationship.”

  “No ring? Bastard.”

  “He is not—” Anya shook her head. “Gina, why am I here? Did you call me over here for something other than to offer dating advice?”

  “I’m working on your security guards.” Gina doddered over to a body stretched out on a coroner’s slab. The head and body were propped up on blocks to expose the chest, and Anya recognized the face as that of the crispy guard she’d pulled from the airtight Greco-Roman exhibit. His bare torso was remarkably clean, with only a burned area the size of her hand on the abdomen. Pieces of hair were burned and disintegrating around the site.

  Gina snapped on a pair of pink examination gloves and handed a blue jar of Vicks VapoRub to Anya. “Vicks?”

  “Sure. Thanks.” Anya rubbed the menthol-scented ointment under her nose. “Where’s the other one?”

  “Eh…” Gina waved her latex-clad hand. “He wasn’t so interesting. I gave him to the medical interns. Simple suffocation. I’ll fax the report over to you. Now, this guy …” Gina cracked her knuckles. She reached over the head and squished the lips of the corpse’s face together like a doting grandmother would to a child too small to fight back. “This guy is interesting, so I saved him for you.”

  “Do you think he suffocated, too?” Anya leaned forward to look at the body. On the surface, the burn didn’t look too bad. Certainly not fatal.

  “I took the liberty of sending the toxicology at the same time as I sent over the other guard’s blood work.” Gina scribbled with a wax pencil on a clipboard covered with a plastic page protector. She shaded in a dark spot on a simple line drawing of a male body, indicating where the burn was. “No petechial hemorrhaging on the eyes or face. He didn’t suffocate.”

  “What the hell?” Anya chewed her lip, stymied, as Gina began combing over the body. “That little burn would be enough to send him to the ER. Maybe a skin graft, if it got infected, but I don’t see how that could kill him.”

  “That’s why we’re looking for trauma.” Gina took a series of pictures of the burn and the body. “Maybe the other guy whacked him on the noggin with the fire extinguisher, and he hemorrhaged into his hat. But we’re gonna find out.” Gina pointed to a box of gloves. “Get some gloves and prepare to be useful.”

  “But…” Anya blinked.

  “My interns are at a seminar about swine flu.” Gina rolled her eyes. “Get gloved up and bring on the love.”

  Anya groaned, pulling the latex gloves on. She made certain to tuck the evil-eye bracelet under the glove. No telling how cadaver blood would screw up the evil-eye spell. She snagged one of Gina’s blue operating-theater gowns and stuck her arms in it. The ties hung loose over her back. No point in staining the newt transporter. One of Gina’s surgical caps and a mask completed her ensemble. The mask was pleasant: It reflected the smell of Vicks back into her sinuses so that she could barely smell the disinfectant and fresh meat.

  Gina pried open the corpse’s eyelids. “As I said, no blood spots or pinkness. No asphyxiation. But I’m chomping at the b
it to get in there to take a look. You mind if we start here, instead of the chest?”

  “Knock yourself out.” Anya was well aware that Gina was going to do whatever she wanted, with or without Anya’s input.

  Gina climbed up on a step stool conveniently located next to the table. Without it, the tabletop would have reached her armpits. She lifted a dissecting knife and began to cut through the skin on the crown of the head. There was surprisingly little blood, and the process reminded Anya of peeling blanched tomatoes.

  Sparky shifted his weight on Anya’s shoulders and harumphed. Bored by the proceedings, he climbed down her back, burrowed under her armpit, and began to doze on the top of the newt transporter. His tail brushed against the backs of Anya’s legs, making her jumpy. But she was glad that someone was able to sleep through the whine of Gina’s electric saw biting through the skullcap.

  “Give me the skull key,” Gina ordered.

  Anya glanced at the tools lined up neatly on a cart, arranged on pristine white paper like a dentist’s tools: scalpels, knives, chisel, saws that said BLACK AND DECKER, forceps, and a pair of bolt cutters. “What’s a skull key?”

  “That T-shaped chisel.”

  “This thing?” Anya picked up the tool that matched the description.

  Gina snatched it out of her hands. “Good thing you didn’t go into medicine.” She jammed the tool into the opening she’d made with the saw, leaned into it.

  “This, coming from someone who only works on dead people,” Anya muttered.

  The cap popped off with a sucking sound, and Gina poked around in the brain with a pair of forceps. “Huh. Looks totally normal.” She dug around in the cavity with a scalpel, and Anya’s gaze drifted over the body. Hope was leaving a trail of bodies, and she had to find some way to credibly connect her to them.

  “Here. Hold this.”

  Anya automatically stuck her hands out, expecting the skull key to be returned to her. Instead, she was rewarded with a cold, squishy brain plopped into her hands. It had the texture of peeled grapes, and smelled a bit like liver. She held it lightly; it seemed if she squeezed too tight, it would go flying out of her hands like a wet bar of soap. “Ugh.”

  “Go weigh it,” Gina ordered, pointing to a hanging scale. It was identical to the ones Anya had seen in markets for weighing fruit.

  Anya heard crunching and sucking sounds from the autopsy table. “Cricoid, hyoid cartilage, and thyroid cartilage are all intact,” Gina muttered. “He wasn’t strangled.”

  Anya tried to lift the brain into the stainless-steel bin without slopping it over the edge. She waited for the digital scale to settle on a number. “Thirteen hundred grams.”

  “Eh. Kinda puny, but well within the realm of normal. Put it over here.”

  Anya placed the brain on a table. Gina approached it with a bread knife, sliced it as expertly as a chef preparing a turkey. She dropped some small pieces into a petri dish, stuck the dish under a microscope.

  “Anything?” Anya asked.

  “Meh. Looks like a normal brain.” Gina sounded disappointed. “Maybe we’ll find something more exciting in the chest cavity.”

  “Oh, yea.”

  “Quit sniveling, and hand me those bolt cutters.” Gina kicked her step stool to the side and hunched over the body to make a Y-incision across the body’s chest and down the belly. She peeled back the skin, and her hands fell.

  “Oh,” the diminutive medical examiner said. “That’s just not right.”

  Clutching the bolt cutters, Anya leaned over the table. With the skin peeled back from the abdomen, she would have expected to see pink organs and muscle. Instead, a black, charred mess oozed from the body cavity. It smelled like burned meat through her mask and the Vicks.

  Gina pulled the flap of skin back, as if to remind herself of the small amount of surface damage on the skin. She reached for her camera, snapped pictures of the burned hole. Even the breastbone and ribs were darkened, reminding Anya of the blackened bones of an overcooked Thanksgiving turkey.

  “What the hell am I looking at?” Anya asked.

  Gina put down the camera to dig around in the cavity. “Don’t know yet. It’s a burn—duh. But I don’t know where it started or how deep it goes.”

  Anya bit her lip. She remembered what Gallus had said about a blue flame lancing from the guard’s abdomen. Blue flames tended to burn hot. In Anya’s experience, they most often involved the burning of natural gas and butane. A blue flame could be the byproduct of burning certain elements, like copper, arsenic, or lead. But those elements weren’t common enough in the human body to produce a colored flame… never mind the difficulty in igniting fresh flesh to begin with.

  Gina’s fingers were laced in blackened intestines. Bits of white ash had chewed through the organs, and she shook her head. “The burn goes all the way back, almost to the spine.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Either somebody crammed some fireworks up his ass, or it looks like he burned from the inside out.”

  Anya scrubbed her fingers in the ladies’ room at the morgue, determined to get every last bit of gore from her skin. The smell of death seemed to seep through her latex gloves and her surgical gown. Whenever she turned her head, she could smell the stink of char and decomposing intestinal bacteria in her hair.

  At her feet, the newt transporter lay on the green subway tile floor. The heat from the eggs was reassuringly warm against her shins. Sparky had tottered off to the wall hand dryer. It was one of the motion-activated ones, and he was enjoying setting off the roaring motor when he stretched up and wiggled his gill fronds underneath the sensor. He looked like a dog sticking his head out of a car window, eyes half closed in the hot air blasting down on him.

  Anya’s phone chirped. She shook the water from her hands and fished it out of her pocket. “Kalinczyk.”

  “This is Marsh. Where the hell are you?”

  “At the county morgue.”

  “What the hell are you doing at work? I heard your house burned down.”

  Anya shut her eyes and tried to hide the break in her voice. “Um… Captain, it’s probably better if I’m at work.”

  The voice at the end of the line softened. “Look, I’m sorry, Kalinczyk. When do you want to come by and fish out the salvageable stuff?”

  She swallowed. She wasn’t ready to go back to the scene. Not now. Not anytime soon. “Um, Captain… I’ll get there. I just…” She bit her lip. “I can’t do this right now.”

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. Marsh wasn’t good with tears. “Um… Okay. You do what you need to do. And let me know if you need anything. You got someplace to stay? I’ll sign a hotel voucher.…”

  “I’m staying with a friend, Captain. It’s okay.”

  “Okay. Keep in touch.” Marsh ended the call awkwardly.

  Anya sniffled, looked at her reflection in the polished metal mirror.

  And something looked back at her with eyes that weren’t her own.

  Anya snatched the newt transporter and scrambled back. She lifted her hand toward the spirit in the mirror, shielding the bag with her body. Sparky dove between her and the sink, rearing up on his hind legs and hissing like a pissed-off cobra.

  “Don’t you fucking come near us,” Anya snarled.

  The spirit stepped out of the glass, hands lifted. Anya recognized the spirit’s blond punk haircut and black emo duds. “It’s just me. Charon.”

  Anya didn’t lower her hand. “I don’t care if you’re Jesus Christ. If you come any closer, I’ll annihilate your spectral ass.”

  Charon shrugged. “I’m just here to talk.”

  Sparky lowered himself to the ground, though his tail still lashed.

  “I’m listening,” Anya said, but she didn’t move her hand.

  “You mind if I smoke?” Charon pointed toward his coat pocket.

  Anya narrowed her eyes. “It’s your funeral. Or was.”

  Charon pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He tap
ped one out and lit it with a chrome lighter. “One of the benefits of not being human is that I can indulge in all the vices without penalty.”

  “Yeah. But you were human, once upon a time.” It was meant as a statement, but it sounded like a question.

  Charon shrugged. The smoke he blew out of his lungs didn’t smell like smoke. It smelled like the incense that Anya remembered from Sundays at the Catholic church growing up. “Not really. But my biography isn’t why I’m here.”

  “Did the other ghosts dare you to come out?”

  “No. They’re hiding in the cooler with the lights out. I’m not after the salamander’s eggs, either.”

  “What do you want?”

  Smoke haloed Charon’s head, but his gaze was as cold and blue as winter sky. “Something’s interfering with my job. I take my job very seriously.”

  “Taking souls to the Afterworld.”

  “Yes. I’ve missed several trips over the last few weeks. I try to be punctual.”

  “Let me guess… Jasper Bernard. Two security guards. And Leslie Carpenter.”

  Charon tapped ghostly ash into the sink. “Hope Solomon is interfering with the natural order of death.”

  Anya swallowed, imagining the taste of spirits crumbling under her tongue. “I imagine there are a lot of people interfering with the natural order of death.”

  “You’re doing your job, Lantern.” Charon blew smoke. It curled from behind his back teeth like dragon’s breath. “I have no quarrel with you. But Hope’s interfering too much, and I want her stopped.”

  “You and me both,” Anya retorted. “But I haven’t been able to get so much as a warrant on her.”

  “This isn’t a legal problem.” Charon stubbed his cigarette out on the wall, where it left a burn mark on the tile. He’d have to be a powerful spirit to affect the physical world with such casual effort, Anya thought.

  “This isn’t even a problem that can be solved on the physical plane. Hope wants your salamanders, and she wants Pandora’s Jar. Pandora’s Jar will allow her to catch and hold thousands of spirits. With power like that, she will be far above any law you could hope to apply to her. You’re going to have to come to the astral plane to fight her.”