by Kim Harrison
“No touching,” I said, glaring at her. “Okay? Them’s the rules.”
Ivy, too, wasn’t happy, and Jenks was nearly beside himself, sifting a bright red dust as he hovered with his hands on his hips. Nina ignored them both, hands behind her back. “Rachel, you’ve developed your timing to the point of exquisite delayed gratification,” she said. “Use your amulet. I’m dying to know what drew us here.”
“You mean it wasn’t the ambient residual evidence?” Glenn said, and I filed that away for future use. Ambient residual evidence. Nice.
“No.” I frowned as I pointed at the patch of new concrete behind him. “I’ve got a bad feeling about that.”
“That what?” Jenks asked as I went to stand over it, watching the amulet more than my feet clinging damply to my garden shoes.
“That this,” I said flatly, pointing at the new cement.
Glenn came over and looked down. “That what?”
“This,” I said more stridently. “The floor. Where they poured the new concrete?”
Glenn’s brow furrowed. “Uh, the floor looks fine to me,” the FIB detective said.
“No friggin’ way!” I exclaimed as the last of the FIB crew left. “You can’t see the patch of new concrete? It’s right there!”
Ivy and Nina came over and looked down, but I could tell they couldn’t see it, even when Jenks walked right over the seam, spilling a faint hint of dust. “There’s a patch of new concrete!” I said, pointing down. “Right there! It’s about three by four. You can’t see it?”
Glenn crouched and ran a hand over the floor. “I can’t even feel it.”
“No fairy-assed way!” Jenks strutted over the floor, looking for but not seeing what I was. Scared, I backed up. Nina was waiting for me when my head came up, and I froze at the anger in her expression.
“Maybe Ms. Morgan can see it because she poured it?” the vampire suggested.
Ivy’s hands clenched, and Jenks rose up, his fingers on his garden sword. “You take that back!” he shouted. “Rachel can see it because it’s a curse, and she’s in the demon collective,” he exclaimed, and I winced. I had a feeling I could see it because I wasn’t in the collective, not because I had been.
“Will you take it easy!” I exclaimed, and Jenks zipped back to me, leaving a slowly falling cloud of silver dust. “I’ve never been down here, Nina, and you know it. You smell me down here? Huh? Do you?”
“No,” she said, clearly reserving judgment.
Disgusted, I turned my back on her, not wanting to know what was under the floor but knowing we’d have to find out. I didn’t like the fact that I was the only one who could see it.
Jenks hovered close, then landed on my shoulder. “How come we can’t see it, Rache?”
Taking a breath, I brought my head up. “I don’t know,” I lied, figuring it was a demon curse that required the collective to work. Curses stored and doled out from the collective didn’t recognize me because of my complete lack of connection to the lines, a basic, living connection to the source of all energy that even the undead and humans had. I was special, and I hated it, even if it was a good thing in this instance.
“Maybe we should open it.” I looked up, reading worry in Ivy, doubt in Glenn, and mistrust in Nina. “I’m telling you, something is buried under the floor.”
Glenn put one hand on his hip and stared down at the floor. “Where are the outlines?”
My pulse hammered. I went back to my bag on the counter and dug in it until I found my magnetic chalk under my splat gun. Breath held, I carefully crouched over the floor, moving awkwardly so Jenks wouldn’t lose his balance and have to fly from my shoulder as I ran a line next to the seam.
Nina bent over the lines when I stood, a young, manicured hand feeling the line as the old presence in her analyzed what it might mean. “I still don’t see it.” Stretching, she snagged a metal rod from a pile. There were others inside the glass box propping up the pen, and she tapped it experimentally on the floor, her back hunched, making her look old. I retreated to stand beside Ivy as Nina continued tapping, her expression shifting when the tone changed as she worked her way off the new floor and onto the old.
Nina looked up, her eyes fixing on mine with such ferocity I could almost see the undead vampire in them. “There is something under here,” she said, and I shivered.
“Yeah, we know, dirt nap,” Jenks said. “Rachel already told us.”
“Chill, Jenks,” I said, and he clattered his wings, cold when they brushed my neck.
“Can we get a saw here?” Glenn shouted, but everyone was gone.
“Back up,” Nina said as she took a firmer stance, feet spread wide. “It’s hollow. I’ll open it up.”
I was getting a really bad feeling. Whatever was under the floor was close to but not quite identical to the man in the park. Ivy yanked me out of the way, and I stumbled. My eyes were fixed on the new concrete, hidden by a curse tied to the collective. Someone had made a deal with a demon. Or, even worse, they had succeeded in duplicating demon blood and twisted the curse on their own. Watching Nina lift the bar over her head, I wasn’t sure which one scared me the most.
Nina sent the butt of the support bar crashing into the floor with a grunt. The cement cracked at the blow, and Jenks left me in excitement. Again the vampire swung. This time, the pole went right through, the resounding crack of cement seeming to shake me to my bones. Nina stumbled to catch her balance, and Glenn reached out to stop her fall before she could tread on the broken slab.
“I can see it!” Ivy exclaimed, and I jerked my attention from Nina, staring at Glenn’s hand on her arm.
“Well, if that doesn’t beat all creation,” Nina said, and I stiffened at the old-world phrase. I must have heard it a dozen times from Pierce, and it would make the vampire in Nina at least 150 years old.
Cold, I leaned forward over the hole. “You must have broken the charm,” I said, not wanting to call it a curse.
Jenks flew down to the dark hole, rising almost immediately with his hand over his face and gagging. I found out why when he brought the scent of burnt amber to me. “Tink’s titties!” he exclaimed as he landed on Ivy’s shoulder, grasping a swath of her hair and hiding his face in it. “Rache, it stinks more than you when you get back from the ever-after.”
“Thanks,” I muttered, trying to see in as everyone else backed up. The smell didn’t bother me much—anymore.
“That’s burnt amber,” Ivy said, her hand over her nose. Wincing, she looked over the patched floor to Nina. “Can you open it up more?”
“What the hell is wrong with you Inderlanders!” Glenn protested. “You can’t just bust it open! Give me ten minutes, and I’ll have a saw in here!”
But Nina was already hammering at it with the regularity of a metronome. Cement chips flew and we all backed up and let her go, dust and dirt layering her new pantsuit. Glenn looked as angry as if Nina were beating up his little sister, but finally Nina set her pole down and wiped her forehead. Rust-smeared hands on her dusty knees, she peered past the chunks of head-size concrete and dust to the small cavern below. The scent of burnt amber was obvious, thinner but somehow more pervasive as it was diluted out.
As one, Glenn, Ivy, Jenks, and myself crept forward and peered down to the burlap bag holding a shape about the size of a large dog. It was tied with a HAPA knot.
“You all see that, right?” I asked, and Glenn nodded, not looking up. “Better open it then,” I said as I backed up, and he reached for the blue gloves jammed in his back pocket.
Nina fidgeted at the delay as Glenn put his gloves on again and knelt over the bag, cement chips popping under his shoes. His fingers worked the knot, and I clenched my teeth when it opened to show another mutilated body, curled up as if sleeping, under four inches of concrete. She was wrapped in a sheet. I don’t think clothes would have fit her anymore, her limbs were so twisted.
“Please tell me she was dead before she was cemented in,” I said, seeing the hoofed
feet and curly pelt.
Dropping the sheet to the side, Glenn carefully shifted a wrist, red and swollen. “She was restrained,” he said in a flat voice.
“For only a few hours,” Nina said, and she shrugged when she met Ivy’s gaze. “If it were longer, there’d be more damage.”
“And you’d know all about that, huh?” Jenks asked. Yeah, the dead vampire would.
Glenn turned the corpse’s face and lifted a lid. Red, demon-slitted eyes stared up, cloudy in death, and I shuddered, making Nina suck in her breath to gain control. Or perhaps she/he was responding to the corpse’s teeth, pointed like a living vampire’s. The skin was ruddy like Al’s, but bubbled and pebbled like a gargoyle. It was hard to see with her curled up, but the arms looked wiry and strong, as if she could haul nets over the side of a boat all day. Wings? I thought, and I backed up fast. What were they doing to these people?
“Okay,” Glenn said as he stood. “We need to get this back to the . . . ah, forensics lab. I want to know how long the body was stressed before she died.”
“An hour. That’s all. Perhaps less.” We all looked at Nina, and she shrugged, dust and rust marring her makeup like dried blood. “But by all means, do your scientific poking and prodding. She’s suffered so much, what’s one more indignity?”
Hands over my middle, I turned my back on one monstrosity to face another that society had deemed too uncomfortable to put on public display. My vision grew blurry, and I wiped a hand under my eye. Damn it, she’d been conscious when they’d done that to her, I could tell by the pain in her face. And it was a her. Something gut deep told me it was a woman, something more than her pointy facial features landing somewhere between a pixy and a buffalo.
I could hear the soft sound of sliding fabric as Glenn opened the shroud farther, and the creak of his shoe’s leather as he shifted his weight. “A body under the floor doesn’t match anything you’ve found at the earlier sites. We need to revisit them for a spell-hidden body.”
I nodded, stiffening when Ivy touched my shoulder. “You’ll be okay for a moment?” she asked. There was pity in her eyes, and I tightened my resolve even more. “I’m going up to make a call. The reception down here sucks like a dry socket. You’ll be okay until I get back?”
“Yes,” I whispered, and she strode to the hallway, the sound of her feet vanishing almost immediately. The whining of the elevator replaced it, and I closed my eyes. This might be the last time I had a chance to look at the body, and unclenching my teeth, I opened my eyes and turned around.
Nina noted my pain and said nothing, probably cataloging it as something to be used against me at a later date. “Apart from the young woman whose heart gave out, this is the first female victim we’ve found,” she said. “She’s also the most deformed. Even more than the newest victim.”
“Meaning?” Jenks prompted harshly as he sat on Glenn’s shoulder.
“Meaning perhaps what they’re doing is more effective on the female gender,” Nina said as she shifted the shards of broken cement around with the tip of her metal rod. “I don’t think they expected what happened here. This woman lived for a day. They buried her instead of putting her on display. They weren’t ready to move yet, and couldn’t risk her being found.”
I put a hand to my middle again, sick from the cocoa. I’d grown up with experimental practices and wild theories as my parents struggled to keep me alive, and this was hitting close to home.
“I know this woman,” Glenn said, and Nina looked sharply at him. The FIB detective was carefully examining the woman’s clenched hand and didn’t notice the vampire’s dilating pupils. “Not personally, but from the missing persons’ files. I looked them over last night.”
“The I.S. files?” Nina asked, and Glenn glanced up, blanching at Nina’s black stare.
“Yes. I don’t remember her name, but her ring matches the description of one worn by a witch who went missing last Friday.”
Glenn dropped her hand, and the deformed fist fell against the corpse with a soft sound.
Numb, I stood over her and forced myself to look. “Did you notice if she was a carrier for Rosewood?” But I already knew the answer.
The skin around Glenn’s eyes gave away his distress. “Yes. They all were.”
Nina squinted at me as if we had been holding out on her. “Rosewood? The blood disease? They were all carriers? When were you going to tell me this?”
“I confirmed it this morning,” Glenn griped back. “When were you going to tell me Rachel had found a new site?”
Jenks was a darting blur of silk and glowing dust. “Rache,” he said, trying to get into my line of sight. “What more do you need? God to send a telegram? I know you think you’re safe, but you need to go into hiding, and you need to do it now!”
“I’m fine,” I breathed, my eyes on the woman’s hand, the skin red and cracked, as if it was trying to turn into a hoof and she had held the change off by her will alone. “She has something in her grip.”
Glenn hesitated, sighed at Nina’s gesture, then gave up on protocol and pried her hand open. Jenks flew down and darted back to me, something shiny in his arms. “Hey!” Glenn protested, but I wouldn’t let him land, and he finally dropped it right into the collection bag that Glenn had hastily opened.
“It’s a piece of mirror!” he said as Glenn zipped the bag shut and wrote on the label.
“Now you can see it,” he grumbled as he handed it over, and Jenks landed on my wrist as I took it. I’d seen evidence through a bag before, and together we peered down at the thumb-size piece of rose-tinted glass. My heart sank.
“I think it’s a chunk of a scrying mirror,” I said, and Jenks hummed his wings.
“No fairy-assed way!” he said, clearly not seeing what that meant.
Demon magic, hidden bodies deformed into increasingly familiar shapes, blood slowly being changed into something else. The scattershot amulet I’d used was keyed to the man’s hair. Clearly he wasn’t under the floor, which meant the man’s structure had been changed right down to the genetic level enough to match the woman and to ping on a scattershot charm. They really were trying to make a demon. They were trying to make a demon out of a witch by using the questionable success of each previous victim and layering it on the next. And by the looks of this corpse, they might be getting close.
“There’s blood on it,” I said, my fingers trembling as I handed it back. “If it’s not hers, it belongs to one of her captors. We can use it to make a locator charm and find them instead of an empty room.”
Glenn shifted in excitement, but I felt awful as I looked down at the woman and silently thanked her. She’d been forcibly abducted, experimented on, and tortured. Yet she had given us a clue, hiding it with her body and hoping we were clever enough to find it, recognize it, and then use it.
“Let me smell,” Nina said. “I can tell you what species it is.”
There were voices in the hall, and, grimacing, Glenn quickly broke the seal and held it under her nose. Nina jumped as the scent hit her, and Jenks and I watched as the two consciousnesses fought for control, eyes closing and hands trembling. It was the elder vampire who looked out at us when Nina’s eyes opened again. “Human,” the undead vampire said through Nina, a ribbon of excitement in her voice. “It belongs to one of the captors. We have a chance. Finally we have a chance.”
I looked at the ruined woman under our feet and silently thanked her again. A chance. That was all I needed.
Chapter Eleven
The kitchen was overly warm and smelling of chili, the black square of night past the blue-curtained window dark, clear, and frigid. The waning moon had a harsh crystal clarity to it that matched my mood, cold and hard. A waning moon wasn’t the best time to be making spells, but I didn’t have much choice. That I’d gotten them done before midnight made me feel better.
Bis and Belle were on top of the fridge having an impromptu reading lesson, Jenks was in the garden, and Wayde was upstairs getting some wolfsbane
to spike the chili with. With all that, I should’ve been in a good mood, but the memory of what we’d found under the floor of the museum kept my motions quick and my shoulders tense.
I’d been in the kitchen since getting home from the museum. My feet hurt from being on them all day, but the new set of scattershot amulets was already at the FIB and I.S. Glenn, who had brought us home, had waited for them. I’d also made more batches of sleepy-time charms.
The cookies I’d wanted to bake had turned into flicking the oven on and cracking it to warm the space. Not efficient, I know, but Jenks had been nearly blue with cold by the time we’d gotten back from the museum basement. I wasn’t going to risk him getting chilled and possibly slipping into a stupor he might not wake from until spring. His kids had enjoyed the updraft until their papa had warmed up enough to yell at them from the salt and pepper shakers on the back of the stove. I could hear them in the back living room, arguing over a moth one of them had dug out of a crack. Jenks’s kids were kind of like cats, playing things to death.
The kitchen was warm, but I was cold as I finished injecting the last of the splat balls with the sleepy-time potion. It wasn’t the night seeping in around the kitchen window frame, but the cold from the memory of the woman curled up in the fetal position, twisted and broken, buried under a slab of cement and a demon curse. What they’d done to her was so horrific that they’d tried to bury it—and yet I’d found her.
My jaw clenched, I held the tiny, empty blue ball up to the light as I injected another portion of potion into the specially designed paintballs. Slowly the ball inflated, and I pulled the needle out, being careful not to get any potion on me despite my plastic gloves. Waking up to a bath of saltwater and Jenks laughing at me was not my idea of a good time.
It had been the last, and setting the empty syringe down, I wiped the ball off on a saltwater-soaked rag before I dried it and dropped it with the rest in Ceri’s delicate teacup. It was overflowing with little blue balls. Maybe I’d gone overboard, but I wanted to nail these bastards, and thanks to the two would-be assassin elves last year, I now had two splat guns to fill.