Graveyard Shift

by Jenn Burke

  “I love you.” I smiled. “Now, c’mon. Introduce me to your niece again—and this time, do it right.”

  * * *

  Priya Rojas was not what I expected.

  I mean, not that I knew what to expect. A miniature Hudson, maybe? Hudson was one of those guys that came off as grumpy and aloof if you didn’t know him—and that was most people out there, to be honest. His default setting was keeping people at a distance, and he wasn’t afraid to wield the wand of assholishness when he needed to.

  In contrast, Priya was all smiles and sparkling eyes and generous laughter. And her London accent was very cool.

  I made some tea while Hudson and Priya chatted—or, rather, Priya talked about her trip to Canada. “I actually landed in Montreal because I thought it would be a quick jump over to Newfoundland.” She pronounced each separate word in the name, which I found adorable. “Not so much, as it turns out. Your country’s a bit bigger than I thought, innit?”

  “A bit,” Hudson agreed. “So you didn’t get down to the Maritimes?”

  “No. I toured in Montreal for a little bit, then caught the train to Ottawa. That’s a lovely town. The Parliament Buildings reminded me of home.” She accepted the cup of tea I handed her with a smile. “Cheers.”

  “So then you ended up in Toronto,” I said. “What do you think so far?”

  “It’s got a certain feeling to it, doesn’t it? Lively. Young.”

  I shared a look with Hudson. I’d never heard Toronto described as young, but I supposed when you grew up in a city with buildings that were hundreds of years old, it might feel like it.

  While I had Hudson’s attention for a moment, I arched a brow and looked at him pointedly. When he frowned, clearly clueless, I narrowed my eyes.

  “Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Right. I, uh...didn’t... That is, when I introduced... I should have...” He sucked in a breath. “Wes is—”

  “Your boyfriend, yeah?” Her smile widened. “I caught the look he gave you when you called him your ‘friend.’”

  Hudson deflated, but it was with relief, not disappointment. I could feel the faintest brush of his emotions across our bond. “Yes. My boyfriend.”

  I held my hand over the island for a shake. “Nice to meet you. Officially.”

  “Same.” She looked around the kitchen. “You have a gorgeous home.”

  “Thanks.” I leaned casually on the counter. “So you just up and decided to visit Canada, eh?”

  I hadn’t intended to use the ubiquitous Canadian verbalism there, but it made her grin, so whatever. “I decided to take a sabbatical. Saved up, quit my job, and here I am.”

  “What’s your dad think of that?” Hudson asked.

  Some of the light went out of Priya’s eyes. “He’s none too happy. Thinks I’m off my trolley.” At our blank stares she clarified, “Crazy.”

  I didn’t know much about Hudson’s brother, and certainly nothing about Priya’s relationship with him, but I could see why a parent would think their child was nuts for taking off across the world. But I hoped, for Priya’s sake, that deep down her dad appreciated her bravery in going off to explore. It wasn’t an easy thing.

  “Well, you’re welcome to stay here for as long as you like.”

  I blinked at Hudson’s proclamation. Uh... Hudson, Mr. Sometimes-Talks-to-People-Like-Dogs, was opening up his house—our house—to someone who was essentially a stranger? Without me having to remind him to be nice?

  “I’d be happy to tell you what you need to see while you’re here—the CN Tower’s a must, of course. Oh, the aquarium is neat too. Have you ever been to Medieval Times? We could make a day or two of playing tourist.”

  He...he actually sounded enthusiastic about showing Priya some of the sights in TO.

  Who was he, and what had he done with the real Hudson?

  Chapter Three

  “So there’s a mini-Hudson running around Toronto?” Lexi asked with a smirk as she sucked on one of the Halloween lollipops I’d put out on the receptionist desk at Caballero Investigations. Those candies were for clients, but seeing as Lexi Aster, my witchy best friend, occasionally consulted for us for free, I figured I could count those as a payment of sorts.

  “Sure, if Hud was shorter, curvier, with long hair and a slightly darker skin tone.” I scoffed. “No. She’s nothing like him.”

  “Huh.” Lexi took the sucker out of her mouth and leaned back more fully into the reception-area couch. Today wasn’t as hot as yesterday, but the sun cascading through the front window was warm. It caught the red highlights Lexi had gotten recently and made them dance among her naturally effusive curls. “What’d you think of her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You had a first impression.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “So? Does she look like her uncle? Is she pretty?”

  I arched a brow. “You fishing, Lex?”

  “Pfft. No,” she insisted. Too quickly. I bit back a smile as she continued. “I’m happy being single.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I am. I get to make my own decisions and do what I want.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  She squinted at me. “And I’ve got a vibrator, so...”

  I threw my hands up in a time-out gesture. “TMI!”

  She laughed. “I knew that would get you.”

  I rolled my eyes, but I was smiling. “I liked her. I kind of wish I’d taken the opportunity to travel when I was her age.”

  There were a whole bunch of reasons why I hadn’t, chief among them money. It was the Dirty Thirties, and then the world was at war...and at war again...and again...and...you get the picture. It hadn’t been only the logistics of travel holding me back, though. I was a homebody—once I had a home, anyway. I didn’t want to leave it for any length of time. But more than that, I’d disconnected from the world to a large extent between the time Lexi’s great-grandmother cast the spell that brought me back to life—kind of—after my murder and meeting Lexi generations later. I hadn’t wanted to be out in the world, I hadn’t wanted to interact with it, and I hadn’t needed to see all it had to offer.

  “You could now.”

  “Yeah.” I could. But I probably wouldn’t. I shrugged.

  My phone chirped and I dug it out of my pocket to see Ren’s name flash across the screen. In the mess of yesterday evening, I’d managed to call him and leave a message. “Hey, Ren. I have news.”

  “So your message said.” Ren sounded a bit distracted—he had multiple businesses to look after.

  “Yeah. Walter’s dead.”

  Ren paused. “I beg your pardon?”

  I explained to him the events of the afternoon before—following Walter to Danny Fortune’s, watching him make a drug deal, and then plow into a tree.

  Ren was quiet for long enough that I cleared my throat and continued. “I think this might do away with the embezzlement theory.”

  “Perhaps,” he responded, that air of distraction back in his voice.

  “What?”

  “It’s just odd.” Whatever he was thinking, he seemed to shake it off, and continued more briskly, “Thank you, Wes. Send me your invoice.”

  “Consider it sent.”

  No sooner had I hung up with Ren than my phone buzzed again—this time with the ringtone I’d assigned to Hudson, “Axel F.” To say he wasn’t amused by it was an understatement—“I’m not Eddie Murphy, for fuck’s sake”—but that was about 80 percent of the reason I kept it. The other 20 percent was that I really liked Beverly Hills Cop.

  “Hey,” I answered. “How’d the client meeting go?”

  Now that Hudson and Evan, his baby vampire and junior investigative assistant, weren’t affected by sunlight anymore, thanks to regular sips of my blood—godhood had its benefits—we’d adjusted the hours of the firm to reflec
t their new availability. We worked late when needed, but usually most nights we wrapped things up around ten instead of after midnight. Hudson had taken to being the lead on client meetings during the day now, since Iskander’s voice was iffy thanks to a throat injury he’d suffered the year before.

  “Lots of crying. Jesus.” Hudson huffed out a breath. “I mean, she knew. She told me at our first meeting she was certain he was fooling around. So I’m not sure why all the waterworks.”

  “Because she knew, but she didn’t know. You know?”

  “No.” I could hear the smile in his voice at the wordplay.

  “You hugged her, didn’t you?”

  He grunted. “Yes. Ruined another goddamned shirt.”

  God, I loved this man. He could grumble and complain all he wanted, but he loved being a private investigator. It showed in the bounce of his step and the lightness in his eyes, even if he tried to maintain the gruffness that had been way more natural when he’d been a homicide detective.

  “Look, I’m going to miss lunch. I got a call from Kat—she wants to meet me at the morgue.”

  “Uh...” That was not where I thought this conversation would go. “Why?”

  “Weird stuff.”

  Of course. Hudson’s old boss, Detective Sergeant Katrina Li, brought him in on anything that seemed hinky these days. “Anything to do with our buddy from yesterday?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Okay, come get me.”

  Silence came over the line. “It’s the morgue, Wes.”

  “I’m dead, Hudson.”

  “Yeah, but not—not dead-dead. Not morgue dead. It might be gross.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “Wes—”

  “I can handle it. Come get me. You might be able to use my godly insights.”

  Hudson made his trademark can’t react don’t react breathy-grunt noise, but I wasn’t sure if he was holding back a chuckle or a groan. Maybe both. I had that effect at times.

  “Fine,” he finally said. “I’ll be there soon.”

  I hung up, triumph flashing through me. Lately he’d made a real effort to show, on a regular basis, that he trusted me and my judgment. This was progress, and I was excited.

  “The morgue?” Lexi bit off the last of her lollipop and crunched it. “Ready to witness an autopsy?” She smirked.

  My elation faded. “He didn’t say anything about that.”

  “Oh, cool. Maybe it’s not that, then.” She chucked the stick at the garbage can next to the end table and got it in. “Could be an identification request. Sometimes bodies come in so decomposed or damaged—”

  “Lexi—”

  “Watch out for the brains in jars.”

  Yeah, that definitely wasn’t happiness in my stomach now.

  * * *

  The morgue wasn’t located in any of the hospitals in the area but in a huge, modern complex on Morton Shulman Avenue. It looked like a tech firm’s headquarters, with all the walls of glass and defined angles. You’d never guess the main business inside those walls was death.

  Kat met us in the foyer and escorted us deeper into the building. I tried to keep my gawking to a minimum, but man, the building was really nice. It kind of made me wish we’d splurged a little more at the Caballero Investigations office. I mean, our office was stylish and modern, but not on this scale. Eventually Kat led us into a room filled with stainless steel cupboards, and I’d seen enough TV to know what was in them.

  The gravity of what I was about to see crashed down on me. Hudson, always sensitive to my strong emotions thanks to our vampire-mate-bond-thing, squeezed my hand. “It’s okay if you want to wait outside,” he murmured, low enough that Kat wouldn’t hear.

  My stomach was dancing with nerves, but I didn’t get anything but a sense of calm reluctance from Hudson. It occurred to me that while I was dead, Hud had been around way more dead people than I ever had. This probably wasn’t even his first time in this building—scratch that, I knew it wasn’t. It was strange. Like, I knew he’d been a homicide detective, but sometimes I forgot what that had meant. Beyond finding bad guys, I mean. He’d been exposed to all manner of death, the depravity of humans, the callousness of murderers, day in and day out. Or, well, night in and night out.

  I tightened my fingers on his. “I’m good.”

  A woman in scrubs and a white lab coat approached us, her straight blond hair swept back in a ponytail. She wore a name tag that read Dr. Sorrento, and held out a hand for Kat to shake.

  “Good to see you again, Sergeant Li.”

  “Same,” Kat said. “These are my consultants, Hudson Rojas and Wesley Cooper. Can you share with them what you told me?”

  Dr. Sorrento nodded at us. “Sure. We’ve got five drug overdoses over the past three days with a similar characteristic.”

  “Symptoms?” Hudson asked, slipping back into his homicide detective persona as if he’d never retired.

  “Well, yes, but more than that—a physical characteristic.” The doctor retrieved a folder from the side table and extracted a series of photographs printed on regular paper. They weren’t the best quality, but they were good enough for us to see what that one physical characteristic was.

  It looked like a brand—a type of brand I’d seen before. I spread out the pictures and took in each symbol. I spotted a moon, a star, a circle, a set of three wavy lines, and—

  I sucked in a breath at the last one. Swallowing hard, I asked, “These are all located behind the ear, on the neck?”

  “Exactly,” Dr. Sorrento said.

  Shit. Shit. Fuck.

  “Would I be able to see the, uh, owner of this one?” I tapped the image of the circle bisected by a diagonal line, with two small offshoots.

  “Wes?”

  I met Hudson’s concerned gaze. “I think it might be Isabel.”

  “Who?” Kat asked.

  “A client.” Sort of. “Their daughter is missing. This is a practice among, uh, a particular alternative religious group to identify their, um...deity.”

  I could tell from Kat’s narrowed eyes that she knew I was spouting bullshit, but I cast a meaningful glance in the doctor’s direction, and she seemed to get what I was trying to wordlessly communicate. No sharing of paranormal secrets in front of someone who didn’t know.

  “If you think you can identify her...” Dr. Sorrento moved over to one of the stainless steel drawers and unlatched it. “She’s been here for three days. No wallet, no phone, and her fingerprints don’t come up on a search. There was nothing to identify her but that mark, and I couldn’t find it in any of the databases.”

  Bracing myself, I walked over as she pulled out the metal slab bearing a sheet-covered body. With clinical precision, she drew back the covering to reveal a face that had once been beautiful but was now cold, gray and still in death.

  Trying to control the trembling of my hands, I pulled up on my phone the photo of Isabel that her parents had provided. It wasn’t the peace-sign one, but another where she was looking directly at the camera, both eyes open. She was smiling, her hair flowing around her shoulders as she enjoyed the summer sun.

  Hudson looked over my shoulder. “Fuck. Yeah, that’s her.”

  Kat pulled out a notebook. “What’s her name?”

  “Isabel Garcia.” I handed over the phone with the picture when Kat gestured for it.

  Dr. Sorrento was making a note of it too. “The coroner’s office will handle notification.”

  I opened my mouth to protest—Juanita and Victor were mine, and therefore my responsibility—but Hudson caught my eye and gave the slightest shake of his head. I got it—there was a process to be followed, and it would be odd if I insisted on doing the notification myself, when the rest of the world saw me as nothing more than the hired help. But we were going to haul ass over to the Garcia house o
nce we were done here so we could support them.

  “You said all of the owners of those symbols died of drug overdoses?” Hudson asked.

  Wait—if these were all shifters, drugs shouldn’t be that dangerous for them. Unless they took huge amounts, but even then, their innate magic should protect them from the worst effects. And what were the chances that more than one shifter took lethal doses of a drug?

  “That’s right,” Dr. Sorrento confirmed. “I haven’t been able to identify the specific drug, but it has some similarities to fentanyl poisoning.”

  “Nasty stuff,” Kat murmured.

  The rise of deaths due to fentanyl-laced street drugs had been all over the news. That shit was deadly and not something anyone should mess with—it was potent and terrifying, with the tiniest amount having lethal consequences. But the question remained, why would five shifters suddenly decide to try it out?

  “Did they all die at the same time?”

  “No,” Dr. Sorrento said. “They’ve been spaced out over about a week, with the latest victim coming in yesterday. He was actually involved in a single-car accident and pronounced dead on the scene.”

  I froze. “Walter Gordon?”

  Dr. Sorrento’s brows rose. “How did you know?”

  I shared a look with Hudson, who appeared as disturbed as I was. “Unlucky guess.”

  “Thanks, Doc,” Kat said. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

  Kat hustled us into a private meeting room. One black tuft of her cute pixie cut pointed upward instead of being nice and smooth, which matched the slightly rattled expression she turned on us. Katrina Li was a phenomenal cop, someone I respected greatly—and not only because she knew how to get shit done. We’d pulled her into the paranormal world about a year before, and even though she hated knowing about vampires and ghosts and demons and everything else, she still powered through to find the truth...even if she couldn’t always share it.