Jack’s posture softened. “Aw, Sarah Jane, that’s kind, but you’re not much of an indoor animal, and Alex and I have to go to a meeting anyway.”
She hopped on along the stone steps, and feigned interest in pulling the leaves off a ficus. Her posture made it evident that she wasn’t listening to him. I had to smile. The familiars could talk, just not in the way I’d imagined.
“Oh, all right,” he said, letting the door close. “You win.”
I got the sense Jack said that particular phrase a lot around Sarah Jane. For her part, she continued to disassemble the plant. When he got back to his spot, he sighed exasperatedly. “Maybe you’re lucky you don’t have a familiar, eh?”
Sarah Jane made a sound that distinctly resembled, “Meh.”
Jack ignored her and checked his wristwatch again. “I suppose we ought to go join the others in the war room. You should meet the whole team.”
Sarah Jane dropped a shiny leaf into the pile she was making and shook herself off. With a powerful flap of her wings, she lifted herself into the air. She flew to the coat hangers near the exit and perched there. She apparently wanted to go to the meeting as well. I looked to Jack to see if he was going to try to argue. He looked ready to say something, but then shook his head.
“Come on,” he said to me.
Leaving behind the traumatized koi to return to their mindless circling, we climbed up the step-seats to where Sarah Jane waited. I slipped back into my winter boots. As I bent to fasten them, I noticed a bit of bird poop splattered on Jack’s. I wasn’t sure if that was meant as some kind of comment, but, if it was, he didn’t say anything about it. He just took a Kleenex out from a travel pack in his front pocket and wiped it off.
“Who else is on the team?” I asked.
When he straightened up, Sarah Jane hopped lightly onto his shoulder. She gripped tightly with her talons, and I suspect that was why Jack had kept his leather jacket on all this time. “Well, you’ve met Boyd already, as well as Hannah. Probably the only new guy will be Devon.”
Jokingly, I asked, “So what are his superpowers?”
“Oh, Devon’s a vampire and a werewolf.”
“Both?”
“Yes.” Jack opened the door to the main precinct. I squinted in the harsh fluorescent light, and found myself hesitant to leave behind the comfort of the natural room. We both stood at the threshold for a while, as if working up the courage to go into the noisy, industrial space. “Hey,” he noted, “you’re making progress. You didn’t try to deny vampires were real.”
“Woot,” I said sarcastically. Holding my breath as if jumping into water, I stepped out into the main room. “So, what do you call a vampire who is also a werewolf? A werepire? A vampwolf?”
“Oh, be sure to ask Devon, he loves that question,” Jack said in a tone that made it clear Devon would probably bite my head off.
We both let out a sigh when the door to the interrogation room closed. Sarah Jane made a sad, quiet coo. As we threaded our way through the cluster of desks, I held out hope that the war room would be as unexpectedly pleasant as the interrogation room had been. I was disappointed when Jack led me to a perfectly ordinary conference room. At least there seemed to be donuts on the table and a big set of windows that looked out into a different view of the same courtyard we’d been able to see in the other room.
Before we went in, I had to ask a couple of questions, however. “About this Devon guy,” I said. “Vampires and werewolves seem like they might be, well, unnatural to me.”
Sarah Jane answered before Jack could with a bob of her whole body in a great big “yes.”
“To be fair,” Jack added, “Devon’s a special case. He’s an informant.”
Sarah Jane nipped Jack’s ear.
“Ow!” he said, jerking his head from the range of her sharp beak. “Okay, right, so there’s more to it. Devon’s not exactly a volunteer. Remember how I told you Spenser is half-fairy? Well, fairies have this thing, right, where if you accept a gift, especially of food, from them, even unknowingly, you end up having to do their bidding. Devon bit Spense, drank a bit of his blood. That’s like fairy food times a million.”
“So he’s a slave to—” I wasn’t quite up to calling Officer Jones by his first name, so I trailed off.
“—Spense. Yes,” Jack said. “Dev’s a bit grumpy about it, but he’s been an excellent source on this case. I mean, nobody knows maleficium like a vampire.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. I still hesitated in front of the glass-fronted door, even though I could see Officer Jones waving us inside. “Are you sure I belong here? I mean, what am I going to be able to contribute? I don’t know anything about this case. I kind of feel like I should be back at work, you know?”
Sarah Jane cocked her head at me, like she couldn’t quite believe I’d just said that. Jack’s face had a similar expression. “Do you have a lot of cases to get back to?”
The only other body in the morgue was Mrs. Finnegan, and as long as she didn’t have more to say I couldn’t imagine her going anywhere until her family showed up. “Uh, I guess not.”
“Right, then,” he said with a smile. “Come on and meet the team.”
Devon didn’t look like I thought a vampire should. He was neither tall, nor strikingly handsome. His skin was only as pale as most South Dakotans’ after a long winter. There was no cape, brooding expression, or thick foreign accent. He didn’t even sparkle.
Instead, he looked like the average college student. Wavy brown hair cut in a current style and an easy smile were his most salient features. Otherwise, he wore a navy sweatshirt with the letters SDSU in white block letters. His jeans were worn to the point of being more gray than blue.
Sarah Jane, however, watched him carefully. Her black, beady eyes tracked his every movement.
The only clue I had that there might be something sinister beneath his innocuous appearance was the fact that, when we shook hands, there was no reaction from the snake tattoo at all. On the other hand, Devon seemed drawn to it. “Wow,” he said. Still gripping my palm lightly, he turned my wrist to admire my arm. “Nice work. Yours?”
“It is now,” I said.
He looked confused at my response and checked with Jack for clarification. “A gift from the necromancer,” Jack explained.
Devon’s eyebrows rose. “Our little grave robber is still causing problems? The last report I heard, he was dead.”
“Dead and walking,” I said before I realized that, technically, as a vampire, Devon was in the same state—or, at least I assumed so. “Er, but less…together than you.”
Jack covered for my gaffe quickly. “Alex was in the middle of the autopsy when she triggered a protection spell. My guess is that woke him up.”
Devon scrunched his face as if he found the idea disgusting. “In the middle of the autopsy?”
I nodded.
“Dear God,” he said, with a little shiver.
I found it sort of funny that the vampire seemed to be the first one to have the heebie-jeebies about the state of the missing corpse.
Sarah Jane made a noise that sounded like a snort, like she didn’t buy Devon’s act. Jack gave her a sharp look and put his finger to his lips.
From the front of the room, Jones looked up from a pile of papers he’d been sorting. “What is that damn bird doing here?”
Jack shrugged. “She wanted to come. I assume she has something she wants to add.”
“She’d better not shit all over everything,” Jones muttered, going back to his pile of paper.
Sarah Jane cawed loudly, clearly protesting the insult.
Devon smirked at both Jack and the bird. “Well,” he said to me. “Pleasure meeting you, Alex.”
Officer Stone was already sitting at the long, polished wooden table that dominated the room. In front of her neatly folded hands sat a legal pad and coffee mug that had “Got Chutzpah?” printed on it. With her police cap off, her hair was an even bigger disaster. Thick black bang
s hung like a clump in front of her face. I really wanted to help her fix it, girl to girl, but I wasn’t even sure I remembered what her first name was. Hannah?
Devon took the spot near the head of the table where Jones stood. He reached across and took a large, powdered donut from a box.
As Jack took the seat next to Devon, Sarah Jane flew over to perch on the blinds that covered the window at the far end of the room. She shook out her feathers and began preening.
That left me sitting next to Stone. I settled into an uncomfortable office chair with the sort of dread I usually reserved for the start of a job interview. There was even a whiteboard set up behind Jones. I took the opportunity to study it.
In blue dry-erase marker was the headline “Grave Robbery,” underneath which someone had taped the mug shot of the guy who had walked out of my morgue carrying his liver.
Given what Devon had just said, my hunch was that my morning’s necromancer must also be responsible for the grave desecrations of the above photos. Why had none of that been in the police reports? Maybe if it had been, I might have—
No, I admonished myself. Even if it had been written in black-and-white, I would never have taken Stone’s claims seriously.
But that got me wondering: How did ordinarium, as Jack called regular people, see magic? Was it completely invisible? Did they look past it? Or, did they make up more “plausible” reasons for it? I knew from experience that there were things other people simply saw differently. When I pointed out trolls under the El bridges, my father would pat my head, laugh, and tell me to be serious: They were just homeless people.
But an unearthed grave was something completely different. It was straightforward: a pile of dirt, a broken vault, an open coffin, and a missing corpse. How could you see that any other way?
So what did the police think of the grave robberies? Did they even know about them? They must.
Unless, I supposed, there was some kind of invisibility spell covering each crime scene. I’d have to ask if that was the case.
Regardless, it still bothered me that no one from Precinct 13 had informed the local cops of the possible connection between the grave robbing and the guy they found dead in his apartment this morning.
That seemed like a strange sort of negligence. I thought it must be possible to keep magic out of things, if need be. You just say, “Hey, this guy is someone we’ve had our eye on;” you don’t have to mention necromancy at all.
Maybe the regular cops did know, but kept it out of the official files. After all, the chief had sent me here the instant I mentioned Stone and this morning’s body. Maybe he knew this was a case Precinct 13 was already working on.
I liked that thought. Otherwise, it seemed a dangerous game, or, at the very least, that kind of unhelpful rivalry I’d seen the FBI engage in when they took over cases from the locals.
Well, I imagined it wasn’t really any of my business how they ran things between the locals and Precinct 13. They must have good reasons for whatever policies and protocols were already in place.
The door opened and Boyd came in looking harried. “Sorry,” he said. He had his laptop under his arm. He looked at our seating arrangements for a moment, and then chose the “boy” side of the table, next to Jack. He set his computer on the table and set the toe tag I’d given him earlier beside it. It was encased in a small plastic bag with the word EVIDENCE on it.
“Obviously,” Jones said, finally looking up from his papers, “we’re now dealing with something a little bigger than grave robbery. The question is: What?” He turned to the whiteboard and uncapped a red marker. He crossed out the headline and put a question mark above it. He added the words, Reanimation spell and next to it, Booby trap?
At that, everyone looked at me.
EIGHT
Shrinking from everyone’s attention, I tried to find some spot on the table to focus on. Into my field of vision skittered my iPhone. I grabbed it and glanced up to see Jack giving me the thumbs-up. Officer Jones gave me a nod, as if to say it was time for me to tell my story again.
This time through, however, I couldn’t get far before people started asking questions or clarifications. “Why take the pajamas?” Boyd asked.
“Maybe he liked them? Or felt naked without them?” Jack offered.
He was naked, I thought but didn’t say. “Does he know about you?” I asked Boyd.
“Me? Why would he know me?” Boyd sounded utterly panicked.
I was so taken aback by his reaction that I had to reconstruct what I’d said. “No,” I said. “I meant does he know there’s a psycho—um, whatever it is you do—at Precinct Thirteen?”
“Oh!” He sounded deeply relieved by my clarification. Boyd raised his light red eyebrows. “You think it’s getting out that there’s a secret team of paranormal cops?” He sounded almost excited at the idea.
Jones, who’d stayed at the board taking notes as I spoke, shook his head. “We work really hard to keep this place and the team members hush-hush.”
So, everything was super-secret. Interesting. I wondered if there was any special reason for that besides the ones I’d come across in my life: i.e., that people thought you were crazy if you talked about it.
Boyd, meanwhile, looked disappointed.
More and more curious. Was there a contingent in the magical community that wanted to be more out in the open?
When no one else had a comment, I continued my tale. This time I stopped myself. “Why would he take his liver? I had all sorts of bits of him scattered all over the room, ready to be sent to the lab for more analysis. He left all that.”
“What’s the liver’s function in the human body?” Stone wanted to know.
“It does a lot, actually. It makes bile, which is used to help digest food. It processes cholesterol and does a number of detoxification functions—”
“Detox? So maybe he took it to hide the evidence of something,” Jack suggested.
“I was looking for poison,” I said. “The police report”—my eyes went to Boyd: Was that where I’d heard his name before?—“said they suspected suicide by rat poisoning.”
“What?” Jones asked, sounding deeply surprised by this.
I looked at Boyd, but he kept his eyes studiously fixed on something on his laptop screen.
Maybe I was mistaken about the name on the report? “Uh, yeah,” I continued. I looked at Jones next. “Weren’t you there? I mean, you brought the body in.”
“Not really,” Jones said. “The place had too-powerful anti-natural wards. We intercepted the body after our guy inside—” He paused as if searching for a name. I gave Boyd a hard look, but he refused to make eye contact. Instead, Jones looked to Stone. “Is it Peterson?”
Next to me Stone shrugged. “One of those guys.”
O-kay.
“So, anyway,” I continued. “I took a biopsy to send to the lab. If there’s something out of the ordinary in their workup, we’ll see it.” For a second, I forgot just who I was talking to. All the faces around the table were highly skeptical. “Okay, so the report will only show the sorts of chemicals they typically look for. I don’t know how to ask them to test for the elixir of resurrection.”
“I doubt he has that,” Devon said. He was slouched back in his chair, doodling on a yellow legal pad. “I’m pretty sure it’s a myth, anyway.”
“What’s a myth?” Jones asked.
Devon set his pen down and seemed a bit surprised to find all of us watching him expectantly. His jaw set and his eyes narrowed. He crossed his arms in front of his chest.
“Don’t get like that,” Jones said. “Just tell us what you know.”
“It has nothing to do with this case, I’m sure of it,” he said.
“I’d like all the facts,” Jones insisted.
I couldn’t be sure of it, but I felt something pass between them as they stared each other down. Eventually, Devon flinched almost imperceptibly and broke eye contact. “It’s stupid,” he said, sullenly. “Ther
e’s just this rumor in my community about someone who used alchemy to transform. I don’t think it’s possible.”
I happened to catch Boyd’s eye across the table. “Transform?” I mouthed.
“Into a vampire,” he whispered behind his cupped hand.
Devon gave us a sharp look.
“ ‘Bile’ is a term used in alchemy, now that I think of it,” Jack noted. “There’s all that ‘black bile’ and ‘yellow bile’ stuff, isn’t there?”
Officer Jones, who had been scribbling notes like crazy, turned to the table. “You’re suggesting that all this”—he gestured at the grave-robbing images—“was to get the ingredients for the philosopher’s stone?”
Jack shrugged his shoulders. “People have done pretty insane things to get eternal life.”
Boyd coughed like he’d swallowed something suddenly.
Devon looked insulted. “It’s not possible to get the dark gift through better fucking chemistry,” he said. “This is a dead end.”
I hated to be the one to point it out. “He did walk out of my morgue.”
Sarah Jane crowed her pleasure as the others joined in poking Devon with “She’s got you there,” and congratulating me with, “Excellent point.”
“Perhaps, if he is a vampire, he’s gone somewhere to regenerate,” Officer Jones said once the room had calmed down a little. I tried to imagine how long it would take to recover from a nearly completed autopsy. There was a lot that needed to be regrown. Jones continued. “What we need to focus on next is finding this man. Let’s break into our usual teams and see what we can find out.”
That seemed to be “meeting adjourned.” I took my phone and tucked it back into my pocket, wondering what I should do with myself.
I was just about to take a donut from the box and think about heading back to the morgue when Stone stood over me.
“You’re with us,” Officer Jones said, coming up beside her. “It would be good for you to see the usual suspects.”
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