Precinct 13 (5 page)

“It’s the situation room in the war against the unnatural,” he said dramatically.

“There’s a lot of that in South Dakota?” There were a lot of other things I probably should have asked first, but, honestly, it just sort of slipped out.

“South Dakota. South Hampton. South Wales.” Jack shrugged a delicate shoulder. “The unnatural is everywhere. Anyway, you’re the one knocking at our door. What do
you
think?”

He had a point there. I smiled. “I think it’s a pretty neat trick what you did with the storefront. How did you get it to look abandoned?”

“Magic,” he said simply.

My breath caught. I’d hoped he’d go into some kind of elaborate explanation of the holographic technology involved, not suggesting in such a laid-back way that he’d…

I stumbled a bit when my knees weakened. I had to catch myself on the nearest desk.

“What?” I asked, gulping for air. “What did you just say?”

He stared intently into my face as I slowly pulled myself upright and tried to get my breathing back under control.

“Are you sure you’re in the right place, miss?” His voice took on a sudden formality, and he looked around the busy office space nervously, as if searching for help.

With shaking hands, I pulled out the chief’s note again. I read off the address carefully.

“Right. That’s us,” Jack said, his gaze continuing to skim through the room hopefully. Not finding any relief, he shifted back to me, grimacing at the awkwardness. “You, uh, do understand what it is we do here, don’t you?”

“No,” I admitted.

“I see,” he said, clearly not comfortable being the one to have to explain it to me. “Um, well, you were sent here for a reason, right? Something unnatural must have happened.”

I liked the solid, normal sound to the word
unnatural
. My face brightened. “Yes,” I said. “A couple of uniformed officers brought me this body this morning and the corpse, well, he—”

“Oh, I see! You’re the coroner? Brilliant! Spense will want to hear all about whatever happened. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

He brought me over to where a group of people stood looking down at a map spread out at a table. “Alex, this is—”

“Hey, I know you!” I interrupted, recognizing the police officer who’d brought the necromancer into the morgue. “And you!” I said to his stony partner.

“—Spenser Jones and Hannah Stone,” Jack continued.

The moment he saw me, Officer Jones’s face crumbled into a frown. “This isn’t good.” He turned to his partner. “You did
tell
her, didn’t you?”

“I did,” she said very cautiously, not looking at me. “You
know it can be very difficult for me to explain these sorts of things to humans.”

Humans?

“You warned her about the rib cage, though, right?” Jones barked at his partner.

“Yeah,” I interrupted. “How
did
you know about that?”

“Spense can smell a spell a mile away; it’s in his blood, you see,” Jack said. He was watching the two officers with the expression of a gleeful spectator.

With effort, I held back another choke at the word
spell
. Sweat prickled under my arms. In my heavy coat, the room felt stuffy and hot. Gripping the back of the office chair in front of me, I looked down at the beady, black eye of the snake on the back of my hand. “So, uh, anyway,” I said, my eyes still glued to the snake. “Thing is,” I continued. “That body you brought in, the necromancer? Well, he got up and walked away.”

I looked up when Jones swore under his breath. His fist crumpled the edge of the map he’d been consulting.

His partner seemed surprised by his reaction. “We should have expected something like this. This is why we need a magically aware person in the coroner’s office. I’ve been saying that for years.”

“There isn’t a huge pool to choose from, is there?” Jones snorted. “This is just great.” With effort, he released his death grip on the paper. Smoothing it out, he looked at me. “He walked out? Are you saying the necromancer is still alive?”

“I was halfway through the autopsy. His liver was in the scale. I don’t know how he could be.”

“Well, then, how did he walk out?” Jones pursued.

Holding back a hysterical giggle with effort, I offered lamely, “Through the door?”

Jones failed to see the humor. “I meant, by what magic?”

I swallowed hard.

Stone put a hand on her partner’s elbow, as if holding him back. In reality, he hadn’t moved any closer to me, but I cowered as if he loomed over me. “I don’t think she knows, Spense,” she said calmly.

“Right,” he said, letting out an exasperated breath. “You’d better start at the beginning.”

He gestured for me to take a seat. Fishing into his pocket, he pulled out the kind of notebook detectives always had in the movies. He stole a pen from the cup on the desk. “Tell us what happened.”

Jack started to park his butt on the edge of a nearby desk, as though intending to settle in to listen to my story. Officer Jones gave him a sharp look. “Why don’t you fetch our guest a cup of coffee, Jack?”

Jack’s crinkled nose clearly said “why don’t you do it yourself,” but his mouth managed a very terse, “Certainly. Do you take milk or sugar, miss?”

I smiled at the incongruous image of this nose-ringed, leather-jacketed, scruffy man playing butler. My stomach growled at the thought of coffee, but the back of my throat still burned from my recent bout of nausea. From an industrial coffeemaker in the corner of the room wafted the aroma of stale, burnt coffee, so I waved away the offer. “I’m fine, thanks.”

“At least let me take your coat,” Jack offered, still playing Goth butler.

Considering how much I’d been sweating with all this talk about magic, I happily agreed.

He stood up and held out a hand, like a gentleman.

I shrugged out of my coat. When I gave it to him, our
fingers brushed. My tattoo squeezed sharply. I gasped and broke contact. My skin buzzed angrily, and I cradled it to my chest gingerly. Jack jumped back, just as startled. The coat fell to the floor in a heap.

“Bloody hell!” Jack shook his hand out like he’d been zapped by a joy buzzer hidden in my palm. Then his eyes zeroed in on the tattooed arm I had pressed against my chest protectively. He pointed with his uninjured hand. “What’s that?”

All eyes focused like lasers on the snake tattoo on my arm. None of them seemed to approve. In fact, Officer Jones seemed disgusted to the point of hostility. His fingers strayed to his gun.

Was he going to shoot me for having an ugly tattoo?

Stone backed up a step. It was less a gesture of fear than one making ready for a fight.

In fact, the entire office hushed. All eyes turned toward me and I heard whispers of, “Maleficium.”

“Is that what I think it is? What’s your game?” Jack demanded, moving in closer, as if protecting his colleagues from me. “This is natural space. You trigger any kind of maleficium in here, you’re going down.”

“What? Trigger ‘mal’—what? Do you mean this?” But when I raised my arm to show them the snake, Jack’s hands went out protectively in front of Jones and Stone.

Jack pulled something from the inner pocket of his leather
jacket. I half expected a gun, but instead it was one of those whip-thin, segmented car antennas. He pointed it at me menacingly, the button tip waving from the sudden movement.

People around the office ducked behind desks or took up other defensive postures.

It was like I had a bomb strapped to my chest, not just a butt-ugly tattoo around my arm.

Meanwhile, Jack began tracing a series of lines and circles in the air with his car antenna. Underneath his leather jacket, the Wi-Fi indicator on his T-shirt pulsated brightly.

My skin itched under the tattoo.

“What’s going on?” I asked, my eyes frantically searching for a sane answer to this sudden, bizarre turn of events.

“You don’t know?” Jack paused in the middle of his fourth downward swipe. He shook his head, as if he’d lost track of something. “Bollocks. Do you know how hard it is to spell in binary? Now I’m going to have to start over.”

“Start what over?” I was so confused that I was on the verge of weeping from frustration.

Jack must have seen the tears I held back glistening at the corners of my eyes. He dropped the point of the antenna, and frowned into my face, “Are you serious? You have no idea what’s happening?”

“No,” I said. “You’re all acting like I’m the mad tattooed bomber, and I don’t know why, especially since I had nothing to do with this stupid snake on my arm. One minute, I was doing a normal autopsy like a regular, sane person, and the next this…this…thing jumps out from behind the heart and now it’s on my arm.” I looked to where Officer Jones glared at me from behind Jack’s shoulder. “You should understand,” I said to Jones. Turning to Stone, I added, “You, too. You’re the ones who brought him to me.”

“Who?” Jones asked.

“The body! The necromancer, of course!” I yelled.

“The necromancer,” Officer Jones said slowly, his brows still knit tightly, as if he was trying to unravel a particularly difficult puzzle. “You’re saying this spell isn’t yours? That it came out of the necromancer?”

Spell?

Not
that
again.

“Can we please have a conversation that doesn’t use the word ‘spell’?” I asked.

“Not until you explain that,” Jones said, pointing to my arm.

Explain it? How could I?

Slowly, so as not to alarm anyone, I lifted my arm to inspect the ink. I tried to see what it was that had armed police officers cowering behind their desks. The snake’s eye stared back at me with a kind of dark, unblinking intelligence. I had to admit that, if I were looking at this several months ago, I’d have had no trouble believing it was an evil spell.

All around the room, people held their breath. A blond woman crouching behind her chair watched me with wide eyes and her hand clasped over her mouth, as if holding back the urge to scream. Were they all afraid of the tattoo because they thought it held some kind of magic? Magic that I was assured by many doctors wasn’t
supposed
to be real?

The two uniformed cops and Jack waited for my response to their question. I didn’t have an answer I felt comfortable giving. I had no experience with people asking me the details of my delusions and treating them as though they were real or important.

Finally, I said, “I don’t really know anything about all
this. I mean, I really, really don’t like to think about this too hard, but this thing on my arm started out three-dimensional and came out of the corpse sort of”—what was that word Jack had used?—“unnaturally. Like, as an attack snake.”

When everyone continued to look at me as if they expected me to explode, I finally gave an exasperated sigh. “Believe me, I don’t like this any more than you do. I mean, look at it! This thing is like some kind of prison tattoo on steroids, for crying out loud. Do I look this hard core? Seriously? The only ink I have is a tramp stamp of a butterfly I got when I was too stupid to know better. It’s pink for fucksake.”

Jack’s tight expression melted into a smile at my words. His eyebrow quirked as if to ask: “A tramp stamp? Really?” Lifting his car antenna again, Jack placed the flat of his palm on the button tip. With a deft movement, he collapsed it between his hands. He stowed it back into its spot inside his jacket. The Wi-Fi icon on his T-shirt dimmed to two bars.

As if following Jack’s cue, the others began to relax a little as well. Officer Jones’s fingers left his holster. Stone dropped her shoulders, too. People around the office let out their breath. A few cautiously stood up, though no one went back to work yet. The office remained hushed, though the timbre changed from fearful to curious. The only voices were muted ones coming from the reports or whatever streamed on the video screens.

“You say the snake came out of the necromancer?” Jack asked again. When I nodded, he shook his head. “I don’t understand how it ended up on you. If it was protecting him, it’s done a piss poor job of it. I mean, that is”—he ran a hand through his mess of hair and gave me a half-apologetic, half-thoughtful grimace—“since you’re still alive and all.”

“You sound disappointed,” I noted, unable to keep from smiling at him.

“It’s not that,” he assured me quickly with a bright, disarming smile of his own. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “It’s just very unusual that, well, it seems to have transferred its loyalty to a…uh, that is, someone nonmagical.”

“Or, woefully unschooled,” Jones muttered.

Jack started at that comment, and shifted his attention to Jones. I followed his gaze, and gasped in surprise. For a brief second, I thought Jones’s eyes glowed bright green with an inner light. At my sound, he blinked and the brightness instantly faded.

I took a step back, and nearly collided with a nearby desk. I shook my head, as if denying what I’d just seen.
No glowing eyes
, I admonished myself. All the rest of this stuff, sure. But no glowing eyes. That was too much like what got me in trouble back in Chicago.

I tried to refocus the conversation on something, anything else. “You said something about loyalty?” I asked Jack. “You make it sound as though this tattoo is alive,” I said, trying to keep myself, unsuccessfully, from looking into the tattoo’s glittering eye again.

“You should let me look at that.” Stone came out from behind the desk she’d put between us, and held out her hand. I pulled the sleeve of my T-shirt over my shoulder to let her see all the damage.

She took my wrist without hesitation. I nearly jerked away, expecting another painful response from the snake, like what had happened at Jack’s touch, but it didn’t come. Her hand on my skin was cool, but solid.

The tension I’d carried in my shoulders drained at her
touch. It was like she grounded me. I sank back against the edge of the desk that had nearly tripped me, letting my butt rest against it.

“It’s very attached to her,” she told Jones, letting go of my arm. My arm flopped at her release. I blinked, shaking off the uber-calm her touch had inflicted.