Sparks (18 page)

"That T-shaped chisel."

"This thing?" Anya picked up the tool that matched the description.

Gina snatched it out of her hands. "Good thing you didn't go into medicine." She jammed the tool into the opening she'd made with the saw, leaned into it.

"This, coming from someone who only works on dead people," Anya muttered.

The cap popped off with a sucking sound, and Gina poked around in the brain with a pair of forceps. "Huh. Looks totally normal." She dug around in the cavity with a scalpel, and Anya's gaze drifted over the body. Hope was leaving a trail of bodies, and she had to find some way to credibly connect her to them.

"Here. Hold this."

Anya automatically stuck her hands out, expecting the skull key to be returned to her. Instead, she was rewarded with a cold, squishy brain plopped into her hands. It had the texture of peeled grapes, and smelled a bit like liver. She held it lightly; it seemed if she squeezed too tight, it would go flying out of her hands like a wet bar of soap. "Ugh."

"Go weigh it," Gina ordered, pointing to a hanging scale. It was identical to the ones Anya had seen in markets for weighing fruit.

Anya heard crunching and sucking sounds from the autopsy table. "Cricoid, hyoid cartilage, and thyroid cartilage are all intact," Gina muttered. "He wasn't strangled."

Anya tried to lift the brain into the stainless-steel bin without slopping it over the edge. She waited for the digital scale to settle on a number. "Thirteen hundred grams."

"Eh. Kinda puny, but well within the realm of normal. Put it over here."

Anya placed the brain on a table. Gina approached it with a bread knife, sliced it as expertly as a chef preparing a turkey. She dropped some small pieces into a petri dish, stuck the dish under a microscope.

"Anything?" Anya asked.

"Meh. Looks like a normal brain." Gina sounded disappointed. "Maybe we'll find something more exciting in the chest cavity."

"Oh, yea."

"Quit sniveling, and hand me those bolt cutters." Gina kicked her step stool to the side and hunched over the body to make a Y-incision across the body's chest and down the belly. She peeled back the skin, and her hands fell.

"Oh," the diminutive medical examiner said. "That's just not right."

Clutching the bolt cutters, Anya leaned over the table. With the skin peeled back from the abdomen, she would have expected to see pink organs and muscle. Instead, a black, charred mess oozed from the body cavity. It smelled like burned meat through her mask and the Vicks.

Gina pulled the flap of skin back, as if to remind herself of the small amount of surface damage on the skin. She reached for her camera, snapped pictures of the burned hole. Even the breastbone and ribs were darkened, reminding Anya of the blackened bones of an overcooked Thanksgiving turkey.

"What the hell am I looking at?" Anya asked.

Gina put down the camera to dig around in the cavity. "Don't know yet. It's a burn--duh. But I don't know where it started or how deep it goes."

Anya bit her lip. She remembered what Gallus had said about a blue flame lancing from the guard's abdomen. Blue flames tended to burn hot. In Anya's experience, they most often involved the burning of natural gas and butane. A blue flame could be the byproduct of burning certain elements, like copper, arsenic, or lead. But those elements weren't common enough in the human body to produce a colored flame... never mind the difficulty in igniting fresh flesh to begin with.

Gina's fingers were laced in blackened intestines. Bits of white ash had chewed through the organs, and she shook her head. "The burn goes all the way back, almost to the spine."

"What does that mean?"

"Either somebody crammed some fireworks up his ass, or it looks like he burned from the inside out."

Anya scrubbed her fingers in the ladies' room at the morgue, determined to get every last bit of gore from her skin. The smell of death seemed to seep through her latex gloves and her surgical gown. Whenever she turned her head, she could smell the stink of char and decomposing intestinal bacteria in her hair.

At her feet, the newt transporter lay on the green subway tile floor. The heat from the eggs was reassuringly warm against her shins. Sparky had tottered off to the wall hand dryer. It was one of the motion-activated ones, and he was enjoying setting off the roaring motor when he stretched up and wiggled his gill fronds underneath the sensor. He looked like a dog sticking his head out of a car window, eyes half closed in the hot air blasting down on him.

Anya's phone chirped. She shook the water from her hands and fished it out of her pocket. "Kalinczyk."

"This is Marsh. Where the hell are you?"

"At the county morgue."

"What the hell are you doing at work? I heard your house burned down."

Anya shut her eyes and tried to hide the break in her voice. "Um... Captain, it's probably better if I'm at work."

The voice at the end of the line softened. "Look, I'm sorry, Kalinczyk. When do you want to come by and fish out the salvageable stuff?"

She swallowed. She wasn't ready to go back to the scene. Not now. Not anytime soon. "Um, Captain... I'll get there. I just..." She bit her lip. "I can't do this right now."

There was a pause at the other end of the line. Marsh wasn't good with tears. "Um... Okay. You do what you need to do. And let me know if you need anything. You got someplace to stay? I'll sign a hotel voucher...."

"I'm staying with a friend, Captain. It's okay."

"Okay. Keep in touch." Marsh ended the call awkwardly.

Anya sniffled, looked at her reflection in the polished metal mirror.

And something looked back at her with eyes that weren't her own.

Anya snatched the newt transporter and scrambled back. She lifted her hand toward the spirit in the mirror, shielding the bag with her body. Sparky dove between her and the sink, rearing up on his hind legs and hissing like a pissed-off cobra.

"Don't you fucking come near us," Anya snarled.

The spirit stepped out of the glass, hands lifted. Anya recognized the spirit's blond punk haircut and black emo duds.
"It's just me. Charon.
"

Anya didn't lower her hand. "I don't care if you're Jesus Christ. If you come any closer, I'll annihilate your spectral ass."

Charon shrugged.
"I'm just here to talk.
"

Sparky lowered himself to the ground, though his tail still lashed.

"I'm listening," Anya said, but she didn't move her hand.

"You mind if I smoke?"
Charon pointed toward his coat pocket.

Anya narrowed her eyes. "It's your funeral. Or was."

Charon pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He tapped one out and lit it with a chrome lighter.
"One of the benefits of not being human is that I can indulge in all the vices without penalty.
"

"Yeah. But you
were
human, once upon a time." It was meant as a statement, but it sounded like a question.

Charon shrugged. The smoke he blew out of his lungs didn't smell like smoke. It smelled like the incense that Anya remembered from Sundays at the Catholic church growing up.
"Not really. But my biography isn't why I'm here.
"

"Did the other ghosts dare you to come out?"

"No. They're hiding in the cooler with the lights out. I'm not after the salamander's eggs, either.
"

"What do you want?"

Smoke haloed Charon's head, but his gaze was as cold and blue as winter sky.
"Something's interfering with my job. I take my job very seriously.
"

"Taking souls to the Afterworld."

"Yes. I've missed several trips over the last few weeks. I try to be punctual.
"

"Let me guess... Jasper Bernard. Two security guards. And Leslie Carpenter."

Charon tapped ghostly ash into the sink.
"Hope Solomon is interfering with the natural order of death.
"

Anya swallowed, imagining the taste of spirits crumbling under her tongue. "I imagine there are a lot of people interfering with the natural order of death."

"You're doing your job, Lantern."
Charon blew smoke. It curled from behind his back teeth like dragon's breath.
"I have no quarrel with you. But Hope's interfering too much, and I want her stopped.
"

"You and me both," Anya retorted. "But I haven't been able to get so much as a warrant on her."

"This isn't a legal problem."
Charon stubbed his cigarette out on the wall, where it left a burn mark on the tile. He'd have to be a powerful spirit to affect the physical world with such casual effort, Anya thought.

"This isn't even a problem that can be solved on the physical plane. Hope wants your salamanders, and she wants Pandora's Jar. Pandora's Jar will allow her to catch and hold thousands of spirits. With power like that, she will be far above any law you could hope to apply to her. You're going to have to come to the astral plane to fight her.
"

Anya stared at the burden in her hands. She'd die before she'd let Hope get her hands on the eggs or Sparky. Sparky sat at her feet, wagged his tail.

"How's she doing this?" Anya asked. "I get that she's capturing ghosts, but how does that connect with those fires that smell of magick? And how is she forcing them to do her bidding?"

Charon reached out to touch Anya's cheek. She flinched back, but not before she felt the coldness of his fingers.
"Feel that?
"

"Yeah." Her mouth was dry. "I've heard the theory that ghosts pull energy--like heat--out of the environment to manifest. Ghostly apparitions are often accompanied by drops in temperature of dozens of degrees."

Charon nodded.
"And the reverse is also true. When a large amount of energy is discharged, there's an increase in temperature.
"

"The fires," Anya said. "The fires always accompany the appearance of Hope's spirits."

"It takes a tremendous amount of magickal energy to control those spirits, to bend them to her will through the spirit jars. It takes even more for ghosts to move physical objects, to steal things, like the artifacts in Bernard's house. She's burning them out. Your fires are a side effect of the spiritual effort that's being exerted, trying to manifest on the physical world, through a vortex.
"

"I saw something like that... in the ceiling, when Leslie Carpenter's astral double disappeared. And when Bernie's ghost was taken."

"An astral double is as good as any other spirit, for her purposes. Through that vortex, energy can be pushed and pulled. Your ghosts are pushed through that, with explosive force... and they're drawing energy from the other end--from the crystal lining the witch bottles, from the genie-bottle spells she's using to control them.
"

"The bottles, they're the batteries, then these vortexes... they're holes, then?"

"Think of the vortexes like wires hooked up to the batteries, wires through which energy travels. And like any kind of uninsulated conducting wire, they can get pretty darn hot.
"

"What about the fires at Michigan Central Station?"

"Hope's been there, poaching ghosts. I'd bet my last cigarette that those fires are the result of energy expended when the ghosts are trying to escape. As I'm sure you've noticed, there are plenty of pickings there.
"

Charon leaned against the wall, arms folded. His scuffed, unlaced boots flapped over the tile, and a tiny diamond earring glittered in the harsh fluorescent light. With a bit of graffiti, he would look like he belonged on an album cover. She didn't have a sense of whether she could trust him or not.

"How do I know that you're not one of hers? One of her... minion ghosts?"

"Fair enough."
Charon picked at a fraying patch of duct tape on the elbow of his coat.
"I'll tell you how to protect Pandora's Jar in the physical world.
"

Anya raised an eyebrow. "That would be a start."

Charon gestured to the newts.
"You kept your eggs safe from attack with a magick circle. It's not foolproof, and she may eventually batter through it, given enough time. But that would be a good place to start.
"

"How do you know about that?" Anya clutched the bag close to her body. She could feel her heart thudding against the lumpy eggs.

"News travels fast among the dead. On the astral plane, every action is like throwing a pebble into still water--they leave ripples.
"

Anya nodded slowly. "I'll protect the jar. Then we'll talk."

"That's the best I can ask for.
"

A scream echoed down the hall. Sparky pricked his ears up, and Charon turned his head.

He rolled his eyes.
"Fresh dead. You'll have to excuse me."
Charon began to fade through the wall.
"When you're ready, you know where to find me.
"

The scream in the hallway continued for a moment, then was snuffed out, as if the sound had been cut from the air and the ghost who made it never existed.

Anya suppressed a shiver.