Magic Bites (5 page)

Second, the condition of Greg's ravaged corpse pointed to the shapechangers. That kind of damage had to be done with claws and teeth and by more than one set of them. Perhaps it was a loup, a deranged shapechanger. The bodies of those afflicted with Lycos Virus, or Lyc-V for short, yearned to slaughter without discrimination while their minds sought to restrain the bloodlust. If the mind won over the body, a shapechanger became a Free Man of the Code, existing within a well-structured and highly disciplined Pack. If the body conquered the mind, a shapechanger became a loup, a cannibalistic murderer driven mad by hormones, hunting everything and hunted by everyone.

The loup theory was even less probable than the People theory. For one, the beheaded vamp was untouched except for its neck, and loups tore into everything with maniacal frenzy. Next, Greg would've killed more than one of them, and no other bodies littered the scene. Third, if the murderer was a loup, or more likely, several of them, they would've left a ton of evidence at the scene, everything from saliva and hair to their own blood. The medical examiner's office had genetic profiles on almost all known shapechanger types. As far as I could discern, the file contained no paper showing that any shapechanger DNA had been found at the scene.

Rubbing my face didn't give me any special insights into the situation. Most likely, the murders had been committed by none of the above and for the time being I had to leave it at that.

The autopsy report confirmed the beheaded cadaver as
Homo sapiens immortuus
, a vampire. An ironic name since the mind of a human died the moment vampirism took hold. The vampires knew no pity and no fear; they couldn't be trained; they had no ego. On a developmental level they stood close to insects, possessing a nervous system and yet incapable of forming thoughts. An insatiable hunger for blood ruled them and they slaughtered everything in their path in their urge to quench it.

I frowned. The file contained no m-scan. All crime scenes involving death or assault were routinely scanned for magic. Technically both the police and MSDU could demand access to this file and be granted such access by a court order. The fact that an m-scan was missing meant that it showed something the Order didn't wish to reveal to the general public. Unless the same cretin that took the photographs somehow managed to drop the scan in the trash.

The only remaining page in the file listed several female names. Sandra Molot, Angelina Gomez, Jennifer Ying, Alisa Konova. None of them sounded familiar, and no explanation of the list was offered.

A fresh examination of my hair revealed that it was no longer glowing. I made a quick dash to the desk and dialed the number listed in the police report.

A gruff voice answered the phone. I introduced myself and asked for the lead detective. "I'm looking into the murder of the knight-diviner."

"We've spoken to you people," the man on the other end said. "Read the goddamned report."

"You haven't spoken to me, sir. I would very much appreciate any time you could find for me. Any time at all."

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The phone clanged and I was greeted by a disconnect signal. So much for interagency cooperation.

The watch on my wrist showed 12:58 p.m. I'd have time to hit the morgue. The mandatory one-month waiting period for the dead vampires was nowhere close to running out and the MA sticker would ensure that I'd have no problem taking a look at the bloodsucker's body.

I closed the file, placed it into the closest filing cabinet, and made my escape.

THE CITY MORGUE STOOD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE downtown district. Directly across from it, past the wide expanse of the Unnamed Square, rose the golden dome of the Capitol Building. The old morgue had been leveled twice, first by a rogue Master of the Dead, and second by a golem, the same one that created the Unnamed Square when it reduced the five city blocks to rubble in its failed attempt to break through the Capitol's wards.

Even now, six years later, the city council refused to rename the empty space surrounding the Capitol, reasoning that as long as it had no name, nobody could summon anything there.

The new morgue was constructed on the principle of "third time's the charm." A state-of-the-art facility, it looked like the bastard offspring of a prison and a fortress, with a bit of medieval castle thrown in for good measure. The locals joked that if the Capitol Building came under attack again, the State Legislature could just run across the square and hide in the morgue. Looking at it, I could believe it, too.

A severe, forbidding building, the morgue loomed among the dolled-up facades of the corporation headquarters like the Grim Reaper at a tea party. Its mercantile neighbors had to be unhappy about its presence in their midst, but could do nothing about it. The morgue got more traffic than all of them.

Another sign of the times.

I walked up the wide staircase, between granite columns, and moved through the revolving door into a wide hall. The high windows admitted plenty of light, but failed to banish the gloom completely. It pooled in the corners and along the walls, lying in wait to clutch at the ankles of an unwary passerby. Polished tiles of gray granite covered the floor. Two hallways radiated from the opposite wall, both flooded by blue feylantern light. The tiles ended there, replaced by yellowish linoleum.

The air smelled of death. It wasn't the actual nauseating odor of the rotting flesh, but a different kind of stench, one of chlorine and formaldehyde and bitter medicines, reminiscent of a hospital smell, but nobody would confuse the two. In the hospital, life left its sure signs. Here only its absence could be felt.

There was an information desk between the two hallways. I made my way to it and introduced myself to a clerk in green scrubs. He glanced at my ID and nodded. "He's in seven C. You know where it is?"

"Yes. I've been here before."

"Good. Go ahead, I'll get someone to open it for you."

I took the right hallway to a flight of stairs and went down, into the basement level. I passed section B

and came to a stop at its end, where a steel gate barred my progress.

After five minutes or so, hurried steps echoed through the hallway and a woman wearing green scrubs and a stained apron came rushing around the corner. She carried a thick three-ring binder in one hand and a jingling key chain in the other. A few thin wisps of blond hair had escaped her sterile hair net. Dark circles surrounded her eyes and the skin on her face sagged a little.

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"Sorry," I said.

"Nahh, don't worry about it," she said, fumbling with the keys. "It didn't hurt to take a walk."

She unlocked the gate and swept past me. I followed her to a reinforced steel door. She opened two locks, stepped back, and barked, "It is I, Julianne, who commands you, and you shall do my bidding.

Open!" The magic shifted subtly as the spell released the door. Julianne swung it open. Inside, on a metal table riveted to the floor, lay a nude body. Stark against the stainless steel, it was a queer shade of pale, whitish pink, as if it had been bleached. A silver-steel harness enclosed the cadaver's chest. A chain as thick as my arm stretched from the harness to a ring in the floor.

"We usually just collar them, but with this one…" Julianne waved her hand.

"Yeah." I glanced at the stump of the neck.

"Not that he'll rise or anything. Not without a head. Still, if anything…" She nodded toward the blue circle of a panic button on the nearest wall. "You armed?"

I unsheathed Slayer. Julianne jerked back from the shimmering blade. "Whoa. Okay, that'll work."

I slid the saber back into its sheath. "There was a second body brought in with this one."

"Yeah. Kind of hard to forget that one."

"Any trace evidence?"

"Nice try." Julianne smirked. "That's classified."

"I see," I said. "What about an m-scan?"

"That's classified, too."

I sighed. Greg with his dark eyes and perfect face, mangled and broken, locked away in some cubicle in this lonely, sterile place. I fought the urge to double over and cradle the empty space in my chest.

Julianne touched my shoulder. "Who was he to you?" she asked.

"My guardian," I told her. Apparently my efforts to appear impartial had suffered a spectacular failure.

"You were close?"

"No. We used to be."

"What happened?"

I shrugged. "I grew up and he forgot to notice."

"Did he have any kids?"

"No. No wife, no children. Just me."

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Julianne glanced at the vampire's corpse with obvious disgust. "You'd think the Order would have enough sensitivity to assign someone not related to this mess."

"I volunteered."

She gave me an odd look. "How about that. I hope you know what you're doing."

"So do I. There is no chance you'd let me glance at the m-scan?"

She pursued her lips, thinking. "Did you hear that?"

I shook my head.

"I think someone's at the gate. I'm going to go and check on it. I'm putting my binder right here. Now, these are confidential reports. I don't want you looking at them. In particular, I don't want you looking at the reports from the third of this month. Or taking any copies out of this file." She turned and marched out of the room.

I flipped through the notebook. There were eight autopsies on the third. Finding Greg's didn't prove to be a problem.

The trace evidence consisted of four hairs. In the origin column someone penciled Un. Psb Feline der.

Unidentified, possibly a feline derivative. Not a feline shapeshifter. They would've pegged it as Homo sapiens with a specific felidae genus.

The long folded sheet of the m-scan came next. Obeying the shake of my hand, it unfolded to its full three feet, presenting a graph drawn by the delicate needles of the magic-scanner. The faint colored lines on the graph wavered, a sure sign of many magic influences colliding in one spot. It was inconclusive by the most lax of standards and no court would have permitted it into evidence. The small header in the top corner identified it as a copy. Oh, goodie.

I squinted, trying to make sense of it. Greg's body had continued to release its magic even after his death and the scanner recorded it as a sloping gray line, sometimes an inch wide, sometimes almost invisible.

The deep jagged purple cutting across it had to be the vampire's magic. I looked harder. There was a third line, actually a series of lines, faint and dashing at irregular intervals through the reading. The longest was about a quarter of an inch long and the color was undeterminable. I raised the graph so the light of the ceiling bulb shone through it. The ink stood out. Yellow. What the hell registered yellow?

I tugged at the graph, tearing it along the perforated lines and slid it into my folder. Julianne returned shortly. "Nobody there. Well, I'll leave you to it."

She took the binder and walked out, leaving me with the vampire's corpse. I slipped on a pair of medical gloves and approached the body. The placement of brands depended on the personality of the Master of the Dead. Phillian marked his with a big Eye of Horns smack in the middle of the forehead. Constance marked hers in the left armpit. Since the forehead on this one was conveniently missing, it could have belonged to Phillian. Theoretically. I set about finding the brand.

The armpits were clean, so was the chest, the spine, the back, the buttocks, the inside of the thighs and ankles. The only place remaining was the scrotum, so I spread the vampire's legs. The testicles diminished immediately after the human's death and continued to shrink during the vampire's life. There
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was a whole study on dating the bloodsuckers based on the size of the reproductive organs. I didn't care how old this one was, but judging by the signs he had to be pushing fifty. And he was clean. No brand.

There was a scar, however, cleaving the scrotum at the base on the left side. It looked like it had been stitched together.

A quick glance about told me I would find no scalpel in this room. I took Slayer from its sheath. It smoked, sensing the undead. Thin tendrils of pale haze curved from the blade.

"Don't start dripping," I murmured and pressed the very tip of the edge against the scar.

The undead tissue hissed as the blade sank into the flesh. I let it cut about a quarter of an inch and withdrew the saber, leaving a neat incision. Taking the flap of the skin, I pulled on it lightly, and it came away from the groin, revealing a smooth burn scar about an inch wide and three quarters of an inch long.

In the middle of the burned scar sat a neat scorch mark, an arrow tipped with a circle instead of an arrowhead. Ghastek's brand. Why wasn't I surprised?

"You do know there are penalties for mutilating corpses?" said a male voice.

I spun around, blade in my hand. A tall man stood leaning against the doorway. He wore scrubs, which meant he had more right to be here than I did.

"Watch out there," he said.

"Sorry," I lowered the saber. "I don't like being startled."

"Neither do I. Except by young attractive women." He looked to be in his mid-thirties. The colored stripe on his shoulder shone bright orange. Third-level clearance. The tag clipped to his suit confirmed it: I'd gotten a bloody unit supervisor.

A unit supervisor could make a person non grata in the morgue faster than I could blink.

The man waited until I finished staring at his tag and held out his left hand. "My name's Crest."

I peeled off my left glove without putting down Slayer and shook his hand. "Kate. Is there a first name that goes with Crest?"

"Yes, but I don't like it."

A funny guy. Perhaps I would get away without a black eye for dicing a corpse.

"It's a vampire," I said. "I was looking for the brand."

"Find it?"

"Yes."

He approached the table to examine my handiwork. I moved to stand across from him. Dr. Crest was actually on the appealing side. Auburn-haired, tall, and quite muscular, judging by the forearms. A pleasant face, open and honest, with large, well-defined features and nice eyes, honey brown and warm.