by Kim Harrison
“Good. See that you do.”
“Oh, thank God,” I whispered as Glenn started our way, and Jenks took to the air when I dropped my feet back over the edge of the counter. “Maybe I’ll get out of here before the sun sets.”
“Agreed,” Nina said sourly, standing to tug her cuffs down. “I have things to do tonight.”
I didn’t want to know. Really. The FIB personnel were starting to leave, dipping under the yellow tape and talking loudly in the hall as they made their way back to the elevator. Glenn was taking off a pair of blue plastic gloves as he approached, cataloging my weary acceptance and Nina’s bored apathy as he shoved them in a back pocket. “Thanks for staying out of the way,” he said as he halted before me, and I winced.
“No problem.”
“The room is remarkably clean,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm. “No fibers, no small particles. Nothing. They wiped it down, meaning they knew we’d find it.”
“It’s unusual for serial killers to move like that,” Nina said, and Glenn shrugged.
“The stain in the corner is coolant from the machine they moved. Jenks told you about the ductwork?”
I nodded. “Cleaned out. He told me the computers were wiped, too. It might be nice to know what programs were on them. And the ones that were stolen.”
“Already have a call in to the university,” Glenn said.
Ivy had finished with the lab guys, and Glenn shifted to make room for her before he could possibly have heard her coming. Nina made a small noise as she noted it. “There was a lot of fear here,” Ivy said as she scuffed to a stop. “I’m not registered to do a court-rated moulage, but you can tell what’s coming from the cabin and what isn’t, and there’s a lot to be accounted for.”
Nina closed her eyes and breathed deep. “I taste it, too,” she said, and I shivered when her eyes opened, black as sin. “Perhaps that was why they chose to be here. Someone passing in the hall wouldn’t be as likely to notice. My God, it smells good.”
Camping here because of the cabin’s moulage was a good theory, but I was betting the computers they took were the real reason.
Ivy’s attention flicked to Nina, worry pinching her brow as the dead vampire struggled to bring Nina back under control. As I watched, Ivy suddenly frowned and turned away, as if refusing to acknowledge the incident. Ivy had a tremendous—and usually hidden—need to nurture, and I knew the risk that the master was putting Nina through was bothering her.
“So,” I said as I slid from the counter in an effort to put more space between me and Nina, quietly vamping out. It was a longer drop than I had counted on, and my ankles, stiff from the cold, hurt. “You ready to let me move around, Glenn? I’ve been waiting hours.”
Jenks laughed, and the tension eased even more. “Face it, Rache,” he said, slipping gold dust as he warmed up. “You and crime scenes don’t mix. You should have seen the mess she made of one last year.”
“Which one was that?” Ivy dropped back a few steps to make room for me, worry for Nina showing in her slow movements. “Getting her fingerprints on the sticky silk at Kisten’s boat, or touching things at the house with the banshees?”
“Hey! I’m being good,” I said, not as upset about the ribbing as I thought I’d be. Must have been the cocoa—or that the laughter at my expense was giving Nina’s master something to hook his control on to and calm her down. “I’m sitting here waiting my turn until everyone else gets what they want. And if you remember, I found the information that turned the entire case around. Both times.” My mood became suddenly melancholic as I remembered Kisten. Sorry, Kisten, I thought, my gaze down on my damp, dirty shoes. Damn memory charms. No wonder Newt was nuts.
Recognizing my mood and knowing its source, Glenn tapped his clipboard against his palm. “We’re almost done, yes.”
“Then you want to know what the amulet pinged on?” I said as I pulled it from underneath my shirt. “I do.”
Jenks’s wings hummed in anticipation as he moved to my shoulder where he could watch better, but Glenn looked betrayed. “You mean—”
Nina put a hand on my other shoulder, and I stiffened. “There’s more, yes,” she said, her voice low, rich, and rolling with her master’s accent. Jenks had taken off when I shuddered, and I slipped out from under Nina’s grip.
“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 sai
d, 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.