I snapped on the latex and looked. I’m no expert, but I’ve watched enough autopsies in real time to know the basics. Her abdomen was distended and firm to touch, her upper thighs and lower stomach marked with thin red lines. It wasn’t a good sign. I glanced over at Heath. “You find any trace evidence?”
Heath grabbed a clipboard, paging through his notes. “Powder beneath the fingernails, probably makeup. Some white fibres caught in the toenail, probably fur. Lots of body glitter, all over. Not just the face. We’re still waiting on the lab reports, but they take time. You know how it is.”
I grunted and the suspicion in my gut started to spread, flowering into real fear. I patted down my pockets until I found my cigarettes. I tapped one out and flipped it into my mouth. Heath started to say something, then thought better of it. “Let me guess,” I said, lighting up. “There’s evidence of bruising and internal bleeding in the vaginal cavity, injuries consistent with rape victims assaulted by a sharp object?”
Heath nodded, grinning. He was enjoying this a little too much. “It gets weirder.”
“I’ll bet.” I closed my eyes and went with my gut. “Scars on the hymen, like it’d healed up after it had been ripped. Glitter in the vaginal cavity? Glowing maggots in the uterus?”
Heath’s smile vanished. “Yeah,” he said. “How’d you know?”
“I’ve seen this before,” I said. Heath grabbed a pair of forceps and folded back the cut along the uterus. You could see the formless shapes within, tumbling and wiggling in the fleshy sack of the womb. The largest of them was already glowing, its sulphurous light disguising tiny arms and legs as they grew from the pearlescent blob. Another hour and it’d be done, a wisp of malicious magic in an inherited human form. “Fuck.” I breathed against the cigarette so I didn’t have to smell the noxious, sugary scent that rose up. “She’s been raped by a unicorn.”
Heath dropped his gaze into the squirming mess, frowning. “You can tell that from maggots?”
“A unicorn in heat is basically a big dick,” I said. “That’s why they have the horn. Fey, unicorns, the lot of them, they procreate using belief, and it’s fucking hard to avoid believing in something that’s sticking twelve inches of horn inside you.” Heath was still frowning at me, and I shrugged. I’ve been around, but I’m far from an expert. I shouldn’t have been his first port of call when it came to stuff like this and we both knew it.
“You’ve called her?” I asked, and Heath nodded. “She have anything to say?”
He didn’t need to ask who I was talking about. “She recommended calling you.”
“Figures.” I shook my head. “You’re going to have to burn the body. Fast.”
“Why?”
One of the glowing maggots started to crawl free of the mass, its tiny form shuddering as the mutation began. I swore and buried it beneath the tip of my cigarette, the smell of burning sugar mingling with the formaldehyde stink.
“Because an hour from now every one of those maggots will look like a six-inch human with wings,” I said. “And every single one of the fuckers is going to be hungry for blood.”
Two
I got coffee while Heath did the disposal, punching the buttons for black with two sugars into the vending machine in the foyer. My hands shook when I lifted the paper cup, the room eerie and silent once the coffee was brewed. Part of me was back in my shitty apartment, still woozy from an evening with too much gin and too little sleep. The rest of me was pretending I hadn’t just told Heath to commit another felony. Somewhere in the bowels of the building, he was feeding the corpse of Sally Crown into the morgue incinerator and hundreds of newborn fairies were dying. By the time he rejoined me, I’d emptied my first coffee into the wastepaper basket, undrunk, and started feeding change into the slot so I could order a second.
“I’ve got a percolator in the office,” he said, hovering by the door.
I shook my head. “I’ve drunk your coffee. It tastes like tar.”
“The machine stuff’s not much better.”
It wasn’t, but I wasn’t really after coffee. The solid clink of coins nesting inside the machine soothed the jagged edge of my nerves. I could imagine the parts inside, working to a coordinated rhythm to deliver my coffee and add the sweetener. Given enough time and access to a computer, I could find out how it worked on the internet, understand all the science and engineering behind it. The machine was rational, understandable, and real.
“I’ve got donuts, if you’re hungry,” Heath said.
I ignored him, busied myself with the fresh paper cup. “A unicorn.” The scar running down my chest ached, the pain dull and insistent. “Fuck, another one.”
“I called Kesey and passed along the good news. He threatened to fire me for destroying evidence in an ongoing investigation.”
“Had to be done,” I said, and Heath shrugged. There was a smudge of ash on the edge of his cheeks, a thin crease of black in the crevice of his nails. Stuff like this was done off the books, and Heath knew better than to leave the ashes where they could be found. “I was going to call Anya,” he said. “Keep her informed, since it’s her purview and all. Unless you want to do it?”
I shook my head. “I’m done with the fey. I’m working for you and Kesey,” I said. “I’m an advisor, nothing more. I came, I saw, I advised.”
Heath nodded. He was fresh to the job last time there was a unicorn loose in the city, a gangly kid straight out of medical school and obsessed with the dead. Good at what he did, sure, but kept in the dark more often than not. He never would have heard of Anya Titan if he hadn’t been on duty the night I turned up dead. She called him while he was doing the autopsy and suggested putting me back together and stitching me up before I came to. Anya frightened him, back then. I had a sneaking suspicion that these days he had her on speed dial.
“I gotta tell you, Heath, it worries me that you keep in touch with her.” He retreated into his office, and I trailed along behind. Heath busied himself with scrubbing the ash off his hands at the small sink in the corner. I angled myself to glare at his reflection. “Anya isn’t safe.”
“She’s safe enough as long as I don’t get too close, and she needed a new pair of hands after you were turfed out.” He soaped up, watching my reflection in the mirror above the sink. “House of secrets and all that. Even she needs a favour done every now and then.”
I shook my head to shut him up. I knew the drill, had recited it myself when I was the one keeping Anya’s secrets. That’s the way she worked; you kept secrets for the common good, traded favours with her because that’s the way it had to be. It’d cost me my job when I got in too deep, cost me even more than that in the long run. “The favours you end up doing for her are rarely the problem.”
I scratched at my chest, my smile grim. I told myself Heath was a big boy and tried to let the past go. “Fuck it, if we keep this up, I’m going to need a drink.”
“Scotch in my desk drawer,” Heath said. “Help yourself.”
If I was smart, I would have taken him up on the offer. “No, I’m working. You’re a bad influence, Heath Morrow, and it’s late. I’ll give you a list of people to chase down who can help you find the fairy horse; pass it on to Kesey.”
Heath turned, wiping long fingers on a grubby towel. Scrubbing had done little to remove the black ash under his fingernails. “You’re seriously going to sit this out?”
“I seriously am. I’ll send Tim the bill.”
Heath scrubbed a hand through his hair, refusing to meet my eyes. “Listen, before you clock off, Kesey called—he wants to see you.”
“He never wants to see me.”
“This time he does.” He gave me the address of the crime scene, grinning. “I guess hell froze over or something.”
His good humour faded the moment I checked the details and started swearing.
• • • •
They found Sally Crown in an alleyway off Carmody Street, her corpse discovered by a pair of beat cops who lucked on
to it while chasing a purse-snatcher. Heath’s directions to the crime scene were vague, but I knew the area well enough to place it. It was a little dogleg laneway tucked behind a row of Asian restaurants and cut-price liquor stores. It smelt of rot and cardamom and cinnamon-sharp curry powder. The entire place gave me a bad feeling of déjà vu.
I showed my ID at the crowd control perimeter and walked in, found Kesey giving orders to a pack of uniforms. “Aster,” he said, nodding. He straightened up, doing his best to loom. I shuffled into his shadow and lit another cigarette. Kesey never changed, not where it counted. He just replaced the size and stiffness of the stick up his arse and put on a little bulk around the stomach every time they gave him a promotion. He glared at me. “Thanks for coming.”
“Good to see you again, Tim,” I said. “How’s your sister?” I watched what little goodwill he had left for me drain out of his face, his mouth twisting into a stiff sneer. I gave him a bland smile, sweet and innocent.
“The morgue called,” he said. “Heath was saying something about fairies.”
“Unicorn,” I told him. “You’ve got a problem with a unicorn. A big one.”
Kesey leaned over me. He had a mean face, the kind that accepted years of weathered abuse and locked itself into a permanent frown as an act of self-defence. I stood my ground; Kesey was a foot taller than I was and had plenty of extra weight to throw around, but we both knew who’d win if it came down to a fight. He believed in rules and I didn’t. That’d come in handy the last time he’d pushed the issue. “I hope this isn’t a joke, Aster,” he said. “This is a dead girl, and if I find out you’re stringing this along because you need to make rent—”
I held up a hand. “You called me, Tim. I can walk, if you want. I was ready to, back at the morgue. If not, I’ll give you what you paid for. You got unicorns, okay? White horse, big horn, nasty attitude. I guarantee you it’s worse than you’re thinking.” Kesey fumed. I ignored him and looked into the alley, watching the flashlights strobe as the cops searched for clues. “Is it safe to go in, or is forensics going to jump all over me?”
Kesey lifted the tape. “Just put out the cigarette before you stomp around. The entire scene’s been contaminated enough.” He rolled his eyes. “Beat cops.”
The smell hit me twenty feet down the alleyway, a subtle blend of hickory smoke and hothouse flowers. Anya’s smell, distinctive as a fingerprint. For a moment I felt like I’d stepped back ten years; cutting through the alley after an Indian meal, our bellies full of korma and our hands beginning to wander. I’m twenty-eight again, in love and full of promise, the youngest homicide detective in city history. Three steps later I was back in the present, years settling over me with the stench of rotting vegetables and week-old naan. Kesey looked at me, scowling, his mouth open and working. I couldn’t hear a damn thing he was saying. I shook the feeling off, focused on his face. “I missed that.”
Kesey gazed into the gloom of the alley, his flashlight a bright sheen as it worked its way across the garbage bags and chipped backdoors. He rolled his eyes and sighed. “Bad place for a kid to die,” he said. I gave him a grim smile through the gloom.
“She didn’t die here.” I fished a penlight out of my jacket pocket and clicked it on, joining the searchers as they scoured the grey concrete. “This is just the place they dumped her body.”
Kesey’s eyebrows shot up. “They?”
“They,” I said. I pointed my flashlight at the dumpster. It was squat and rusting, stained with red streaks in the light blue steel. I tried to imagine Sally Crown’s body inside it and shuddered. “No unicorn is dumping a body in a thing like that on its own.”
“How do you know?” Kesey frowned. I held both hands up in front of his face, waggling my thumbs in tandem.
“No thumbs,” I said. “It makes lifting lids hard, and the report said it was closed when the body was found.”
“Could have nudged it.” Kesey threw his hip against the steel, checking the weight. “Dump the body while it was open, then shove it until the lid fell.”
“Doesn’t wash either.” I rapped the side of the dumpster, listened to the muted bong it made. “Steel. Your average exile can handle it, if they have to, but the unicorn’s pure fey and they treat the shit like poison. Can’t touch anything that rusts; the sensation is supposed to be kinda like pushing your hand down on a razor blade.”
“Christ.” Kesey killed the light on his torch and leaned up against the wall, hand running through his thinning hair. “I’m getting too old for this bullshit, Aster. It was bad enough the first time around.” He said it calm, casual, but it was a baited hook and we both knew it. Kesey wasn’t big on trust at the best of times, and I’d violated his a dozen times back when I carried a badge.
“You could sink the file,” I said. “That’s what they do, most places. Write it off, bury it as a cold case, forget it ever happened.” Kesey shook his head, an angry gleam in his eyes. He was old school, in more ways than one, the kind of cop you always dream of when you make up something like “to protect and serve.” The way he figured, his city wasn’t going to run like most places, even if he didn’t always understand what happened inside the city limits. That’s the only reason he tolerated having me there, earning my fee as a special consultant by giving him the lowdown on things he didn’t want to believe in. I left him to his angst and started poking around the alley. “Have you found anything else out here? Fur, glitter, bone fragments. Anything but the body?”
“It’s clean.”
The itch came back, the same one I always got when magic was around. I closed my eyes and breathed in, tasted a lung full of hickory smoke, felt the ghost-memory of Anya’s hand working its way down the length of my spine. I gritted my teeth and ignored it. Kesey stepped towards the police line, right into a puddle of day-old curry sauce.
“Listen, Tim, I got a bad feeling about this one.” He looked at me, shaking curry off his foot. “I’m not saying I won’t work it, but I’m not doing it hands-on, okay? I’m here to advise, to give you what you need, and your boys handle it from there.”
“Right.” Kesey gave me a long look, calculating, and walked away. I followed him back to the police line, watching the puke-yellow footprints he left behind as he scraped his shoes across the bitumen. “Advise and let us do our jobs,” he said. “That’s the point of consulting, anyway, isn’t it? Just do the fucking job, Aster. I want this shit put away—get me a lead and point me in the right direction. Then you can tell your friends that it doesn’t ever fucking happen here again.”
I opened my mouth, ready to tell him they weren’t my fucking friends anymore, caught the whispering press of a phantom tongue writhing against mine. I started, surprised, and Kesey was gone before I recovered. Sunlight crept up over the horizon as I climbed into my car, still feeling the faint press of Anya’s kisses brushing against my lips.
Three
I spent about twenty minutes sitting in my car, watching the uniforms work crowd control as the early morning joggers and dog-walkers started wandering over to check out the commotion. I’ll never understand people who get up before five. My eyes hurt from too little sleep and my stomach churned with an oily fusion of bad coffee, gin and hunger. I should have gone home. I don’t make good decisions in the early hours of the morning and Kesey would’ve had my licence if he knew where I was going instead. I stalled for time, counting the number of day-glo jogging suits in the crowd. Three blue, one pink, two a sickly shade of yellow. Eventually I dug my phone out of my pocket and dialed the direct line to the morgue office.
“This is Morrow. Go.”
I took a deep breath. “Heath, I need her address.”
“Aster?” He sounded wary.
“She’s all over the goddamn crime scene, Heath. So many memories of Anya it could have been an episode of This is Your Life. ”
“You told Kesey?”
“What do you think?” The silence on the end of the phone said everything that needed saying. My g
ut said putting Kesey and Anya together was a bad idea. Kesey’s approach to the weird stuff had always been complicated, and Anya had a way of making expediency sound more attractive than procedure. “Kesey wants the horse gone, he doesn’t care about the paper trail. I wouldn’t be here otherwise, yeah?”
“Maybe. Maybe you just want to see her. It could be wishful thinking; a unicorn shows up, you see all these signs—”
I smashed a fist into my steering wheel, pain sparking down my arm. “I don’t think about her, Heath,” I said, my voice cold and even. “Ever. Got it?”
“Whatever you say.” I could tell he was smirking. “She hasn’t moved; same address as before. I’ll send it over if you don’t remember.”
I hung up before he had a chance to become a complete idiot. I remembered how to get there well enough.
• • • •
The last time I’d been to Anya’s place, I was three days away from losing my badge and the spectre of internal affairs hovered over me while they investigated a shooting I’d written up as self-defence. It didn’t go well. We’d dated for three years, me doing favours for her the entire way, but the shooting was the first time I felt like I’d crossed a line. Maybe I’m wrong about that. When you ask questions for a living, you get used to truth being fluid.
Think of it this way: Most people get through their entire lives without encountering something big, something that rewrites their perceptions and tells them they’re not alone in the world. We call those people lucky. Some people brush up against the strangeness and disregard it as unimportant; you see them at parties, talking about how their flat is haunted or they think they saw some strange lights while they were cruising the highway at four in the morning. Humanity, as a species, is fucking aces at denial, and you can tell those people talking about their haunted flats don’t really believe what they saw. If they did, they wouldn’t be talking about it, bragging about it almost, like they wanted it to happen again.
Lightspeed Magazine - September 2016 Page 15