by Rhys Ford
“Aren’t netsuke cheaper? I mean, they’re all over the lower districts. You can get them practically on every street corner in C-Town or up over in Japantown.” Trent checked my coffee cup, peeking into its empty depths. “I’ll do refills. Keep talking. Why wouldn’t he just grab something close by?”
“The ones the caster is using are high quality. Good clear quartz or solid stone, hand-carved. Not that crude resin or plastic crap you can get for a few bucks. The better the tools, the stronger the magic.” I stretched, counting the number of times my back popped, but the rush of relief along my cramped muscles made the dizzying sensations worth it. “He’d need quality stoneware, something equal to what he was working with. Temples tend to use statues that can withstand weather and people handling them. Remember, he’s got to have something sturdy enough to do damage. The scorpion that attacked me was meticulously carved, so when it was animated, all of its joints and claws worked, and it was damned hard to stop.”
“Trust me,” Trent said from the kitchen. “I didn’t think the damned thing would ever break.”
“Something cheap and plastic wouldn’t have held up. I also don’t think it would be able to contain the magic the caster would have to pour into it in order for it to work. It isn’t just the animation. There’s also the directive to kill,” I reminded him. “That’s a two-stage magic.”
“And that’s what you wanted Jie to chase down.” He came back in with two full mugs, handing me one once he got to the couch. Taking up his perch on the coffee table again, Trent mused, “This person would have to be pretty powerful, and probably someone other mages and witches would know, right?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” I shrugged, welcoming the cup’s heat on my chilled fingers. “You’ve got to remember, I’m Arcane Crimes. Most high-level casters skirt a few laws. You’re talking stealing ground from innocents’ graves, drowning salamanders in red wine, or roasting a baby dragon’s internal organs. One of my first cases at the Asylum was breaking up a black-market spell-component ring. The rarer the item, the more a caster wants it just in case they ever get powerful enough to do the ritual.”
“I’m wondering if the woman from the temple is even alive. Maybe the damned thing we chased up the side of the building killed her and got away.” Trent glanced behind him, staring at the library he’d collected. “Or would the statue have stopped once its victim is dead?”
“I don’t know. She’s been missing for a while now. I was having someone in CAP dig up a list of people who’d disappeared over the past month, but the shit all hit before I got anything back. I suspect she’s being used to fuel the spells. It’s all speculation. For all I know, she’s—” My phone rang, bobbling across the table in a frenetic dance to reach the edge before I could answer it.
Trent grabbed it for me, glanced at the screen, then made a pained face. “It’s Gaines. We’re supposed to be off. Can’t think of anything good he’d be calling you for.”
“Yeah, me neither.” Flicking the Receive button, I answered, “MacCormick here.”
“Shut up and don’t talk,” Gaines growled at me through the phone.
“Hello to you too.” I rolled my eyes at Trent. “What—”
“Did you miss the shut up part? Get your ass over to the station. You and Leonard.” Uncle Will went straight for the jugular, tearing through my eardrum and adding to my headache with his big, booming voice. “We’ve got a damned situation down here, and I’ve got to put you back on the case. And kiddo, make sure you wipe off that fucking shit-eating grin you’ve got on your face right now before I see you, or I’m going to tell the chief he can go screw himself, and you’ll be picking up horse shit until you retire.”
DESPITE THE warnings I’d been given by the morgue attendants, nothing could have prepared me for what I found on the gurney waiting for me. The hallway outside of the arcane labs ran yellow with the miles of crime scene tape someone’d used to cordon off the area, and I’d had to perform a bit of calisthenics to get under a particularly thick spot. Trent followed close on my heels, slicing the tape with a pocketknife, then walking through the cleared space after I’d just twisted myself into a pretzel to get past it.
“Nice. No respect for another detective’s territory, Leonard,” I cautioned. “That’ll win you lots of friends.”
Trent looked like he was about to respond with a sarcastic shot of his own, but instead he backed up a step, pulling me to the side until he had me nearly pressed into the wall. There were a lot of cops roaming the hall, and either someone would notice my partner’s overly familiar touch or no one would because they were too busy. I wasn’t holding my breath on the too busy part. Cops were worse than teenaged girls with their gossip, and there was nothing like a juicy rumor to get a station buzzing as if it’d mainlined a gallon of Wild Hunt cold brew.
“You sure you want to go in there?” he murmured into the space between us. “Jie’s… she’s in there.”
“What’s in there isn’t Jie,” I replied, giving Trent a small smile to let him know I wasn’t going to lose my shit in a sea of blue. Just like I needed him to stand for me, he needed to know I’d be there if things went to Hell for him. “We’ve got to do this. You heard Gaines. There’s only us. You’re too green to go solo. Yamada’s in the weeds, Vasquez is working an undercover job with Vice, and Browning’s covering the nest of crested dragons Arnett tried to pillage ’cause they’ve cracked, and that’s when they’re at risk for poachers.”
I needed to shut down what I was feeling. Keeping it light and bantering between us made everything feel safe, and I wasn’t going to walk too close to the dark waters lapping at my feet. I had to shove Jie into a box, keep her ghost hovering around the edges of my consciousness until I could anchor her under my skin. My face was tight from smiling, and I would let it crack before giving in to the press of tears at the edges of my mind.
“There’s other AC units. Other inspectors who can—” Trent cut himself off, probably because he could feel my overwhelming urge to shove a cork into his mouth to keep him quiet. Throwing his hands up, he backed off. “Okay, sorry. I know. This is personal, but I want you to remember you don’t have to take this. We’ve got an out if it gets too bad.”
“If ever I walk away because a case got too bad, it’s because I’ll need a breath before going back in,” I growled. “Now let’s get in there and do the job. Gaines is already watching me to see if he needs to pull the cord. I don’t need your eyes burning a hole between my shoulders.”
“Look, if it were me in there—even in the short time I’ve known you—I’d want you to track down who put me on that slab.” He glanced over his shoulder when one of the beat cops said something under their breath and the pack of blue uniforms around him burst out laughing. With his contacts back in, it was harder to read his emotions, especially since I’d seen the storm of blues in them. “Just remember, I’m right here with you.”
“Got it.” I searched for the pair of latex gloves I’d shoved in my leather jacket’s pockets before we’d come into the hall. Pulling them on, I winced at the squeak my pants were making when I walked. “These needed like ten more minutes. I sound like a cheese curd.”
My jeans were still a little bit damp from coming out of the dryer nearly as soon as they’d been put in, despite Trent having tossed my clothes into the washer when I’d gone for a shower. My underwear’s elastic felt gummy, and I’d chosen to keep Trent’s T-shirt, a good call considering mine was probably going to have a second life as a dust rag after I’d gotten sick on it. Trent’s puke-abused sneakers hadn’t fared much better, and his left shoe was missing in action, more than likely a victim of the vulture pigeons living under the eaves of his apartment building, so it was only fair I’d lost a shirt in the deal.
“Okay, ready,” my partner said, snapping his gloves on. “You?”
“Yeah, let’s do this.” I made sure all the air was out from between my fingers, because I didn’t like the way latex rubbed my skin raw if
there was too much room between the sticky material and my hands. “You said there’s a Forensics guy already in there?”
“Someone named Jaan. Know him?”
“Yeah, good guy. Was he in there when it went sideways?”
Trent nodded, and I winced, hoping Jann hadn’t taken too much damage. Ken Jaan was a good tech, one of the best the Asylum had on staff. Central spent a few weeks trying to coax him away every once in a while, but he always refused, preferring Chinatown’s insane challenges over the cookie-cutter animated-broomstick-gone-rogue crimes committed in the larger district.
As if Trent read my worry, he said, “He’s fine. Said he was in another part of the lab, so he didn’t see all of it, but the night tech came rushing in and took a few pieces of bone to the face. But other than that, they’re okay. The medics gave him a full clear, and he went right back in.”
“Okay, good to know.” I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and stared at the morgue’s entrance. Exhaling slowly, I sent my apologies to Jie’s soul for treading over what remained of her and pushed my way into the lab’s heavy double doors.
And walked into Hell.
I did need a moment, and I took it. Trent paused behind me, holding the door partially open, probably just in case I needed it. I might have. I was trying not to, but there was an enormous slice of my being screaming to turn around and go drink until I forgot what it felt like seeing the remains of a childhood friend splattered over nearly every surface of the Asylum’s arcane lab.
The number I heard tossed around for how many cups of blood in a body averaged between twenty-five and thirty, depending on weight. Looking at the nearly dried ruddy film covering the walls and counters, I’d have guessed at least seventy. There was no mistaking the flash point of the explosion. The outward ripple pattern was clear, and based on the tiny flecks of grayish white riddled through the bloody shock wave, whatever caused the incident was powerful enough to turn bone into powder and shear dead skin clean off, rolling bits of it into stiffening twisted strips and tossing them as far as the doors….
I could only take someone’s word that the remains I was staring at were Jie’s. There was no hint of her in the carnage. Hell, I couldn’t even tell if the body’d been human or faerie. There simply wasn’t anything there to recognize, and if anything saddened me, it was that Jie was once again an invisible shadow on the edges of the world she’d longed to be a part of.
“Jesus and Odin’s birds, this is….” Trent exhaled, his breath hot on my neck. “What the Hell happened?”
I didn’t get to answer. I didn’t have anything to say other than admit my ignorance, but as I turned to speak, shouting came from the hall behind us. The words were in a slang only found in the gōngyù, a filthy knit of words and sounds meant to communicate mostly desperation, anger, and violence. The man outside in the hall was beyond rage, caught up in a tornado of grief and injustice I could understand in the marrow of my bones. The cops trying to console him were failing miserably, and I caught the tail end of a curse ordering a ginger-haired patrol office to not only suck his own dick but to find a were-lamprey to do it for him.
The one word everyone could understand in the stream of red-hot shouts was Jie’s name, but only the most ruthless and cruel could ignore the pain under the rage.
“Should I go out and see who that is?” Trent asked when I finally spotted Jaan, a slender, bony man with skin the color of ancient parchment and a thick head of black hair with a white streak at each temple.
“No.” I laughed. “I know who that is. Give him a minute to work that out of his system. Then we’ll shove him in one of the rooms so we can have a little talk.”
A flash of white caught the corner of my eye, and I turned to see Ghost shoving his way through the cops, his wings spread out around him, their heft shoving people aside when he flexed them open. Trent took up most of the doorway, but it was open enough for the sylph to spot me. His eyes were wild and his expression ugly, a far cry from the aloof, sensual creature who’d dismissed Trent with a flick of his gaze when he strolled past. This was a different Ghost, one with the stink of Chinatown’s gutters ground into his skin, whose stomach remembered the hollow pit it’d been for weeks on end.
“Roku!” he snarled, fending off a beat cop who’d thought he could take Ghost down. I knew better. There was strength in his lithe, compact frame. He switched to English, but his words were heavy with the thick cant prevalent in Chinatown’s rooftop villages. “Do you know who did this to her? What are you going to do? What are you going to do about who did this to Jie?”
“He seems a bit… pissed off at you,” Trent remarked. “You sure you don’t want to toss him into a cell? He looks like he wants to wring your neck. I’m kind of scared he’s going to hurt you.”
“Nah, not Ghost.” I turned my attention back to Jaan, who’d moved away from his original spot and was now scraping something tacky from the front of a cooling unit. “Ghost won’t hurt me, Trent. I’m his brother.”
Fifteen
“YOU DON’T have to come in here,” Jaan finally said after staring at me standing in the doorway while I debated my conscience. “I can tell you what you need to know in one of the conference rooms.”
Trent was off dealing with Ghost. It was easier to send him to do battle with the sylph than to have him next to me while I fell apart. He had questions, and I probably was going to be grilled like a piece of shrimp on a hibachi once he came back from putting Ghost into an interview room, but for now I was going to be able to face the room without anyone waiting to catch me if I stumbled. I already knew I was going to crack. There was no getting around that. But despite what Jaan or Trent said, I needed to step into the room and face what I was hunting, even if that meant walking through some of my childhood friend’s remains.
I took a step inside, breaking the threshold spell placed around the entrance to keep outer elements from compromising the morgue, and took the scent of Jie’s death into my lungs.
The barrier kept most things in: gases, the occasional curse, and any ambient odors. In this case, the spell held Jie’s dignity, keeping the foulness of her abused body behind a thick impenetrable wall of sigils. I stepped in carefully, avoiding the areas Jaan taped off as part of his crime scene. There was no avoiding the outer droplets, but the booties I’d shoved my feet into would go a long way to warding off any damage I did.
“Just stay outside of the yellow line and you’ll be fine,” he said, glancing at me. “Don’t throw up on my evidence.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time I horked on Jie.” The joke fell flat, mostly because my heart wasn’t in it and Jaan wasn’t the best of audiences. Jie would have found it funny. She’d laughed heartily at anything remotely macabre, her sick sense of humor honed to a cutting sharpness from living on the streets.
I hated looking at her remains. I couldn’t reconcile the carnage with the vibrant, sarcastic fae whom I’d gotten drunk with, stole oranges with, and did a million and a half mostly illegal things with when we’d been too young to go to jail for them. I missed that Jie. The woman she’d grown into hardened a shell around herself I couldn’t break open, and after a few years, admittedly, I’d stopped trying.
“Shouldn’t have stopped trying, Jie,” I murmured, swallowing the regret and sourness burbling up from my stomach. “You shouldn’t be here. Not like this. Did you forget? You’re supposed to come to my funeral, drunk off your ass and wearing a dress short enough to make the priest lust after you. That was the deal. Now who’s going to pour whiskey in my coffin and tell them I’m ready to go?”
I kept walking, circling the lab and the space I was allowed to be in. Jaan worked silently, humming to himself and talking into a recorder. Forcing myself out of my past and into the present, I looked at the scene, divorcing Jie and everything she’d been from my mind. I didn’t want to punt the case over to someone else, and Gaines was risking his neck by giving me a crack at the investigation. Least I could do was to put some
effort into bringing Jie’s killer in.
“When did this happen? Was anyone besides you in here?” There wasn’t much left of Jie’s body, only the splatter and a few larger fragments, along with a grit I’d assumed was bone, but the color was wrong. Or something was off about it. “What happened to her skeleton? If the explosion was big enough to….”
I took a breath, reminding myself Jie’d been dead when the curse went off. If I went down that dark hole, I’d think about how she’d died, and then I’d be next to useless. My brain flirted dangerously with the imagery anyway, wondering what part of the gore at my feet held her off-kilter smile.
“Most of the subject’s remains have already been retrieved, but there are a few pieces I’m missing,” Jaan informed me. “Stay over there. I don’t need you to step on anything.”
“Can you walk me through what happened?” Focusing on the job helped. Taking notes as well as recording the interview went a long way toward keeping my mind from wandering, and the scratch of my pen across my notebook helped me keep my eyes on the page.
“The night tech was taking his thirty when it happened, so I can’t tell you what triggered the incident. If it was anything other than a timed event,” Jaan added. “I was in the testing room, but it was loud enough to get my attention. Right now I can only guess at what occurred, but it looks like the foreign object lodged in the victim’s throat was embedded with a secondary curse. One I didn’t find in the other two objects secured from… well, you and your grandfather.”
