Centaur of the Crime: Book One of 'Fantasy and Forensics' (Fantasy & Forensics 1) (5 page)

“I’m wondering if our friend really
was
attacked by a medieval knight, or someone pretending to be one. Because he might have been into the same game himself.” She touched the man’s bare left hand with her gloved one, and then looked questioningly at me.

“You’re right,” I acknowledged, looking at the wound there and above, on his arm. “Classic defensive wounds. Probably against the same weapon that cut his ear, his shoulder.”

Shelly nodded. Next, she grasped Connor’s right palm and turned it over. The inner side of the thumb, fingers, and the palm itself showed callus buildup.

“Exactly where someone would hold a sword by the handle,” I noted. “This ties up with what I’ve been thinking about. The guy’s weird skin pattern comes from wearing chain mail. Maybe this is some kind of dueling club? One that’s into, I don’t know…medievalism? Live-action role play?”

“If so, they ain’t doing it right. You want to know what caused that awful wound on John Doe’s chest?”

I nodded. Shelly smiled as she spoke again.

“So would I. The boys in the lab have no clue.”

No clue? What the hell blew open this guy’s chest?

“I read your notes, Dayna. Your nose is pretty darn good. The lab backs up your findings of sulfur, potassium nitrate, and wood ash. And get this—the wound was almost completely cauterized. High heat, charring of surface tissues. No way was this done with a conventional firearm.”

“No way it could’ve been…” I mused. My voice trailed off as Shelly’s voice dropped a full octave lower and became deadly serious.

“There is one more thing,” she said coolly. “It’s why I wanted to talk to you in private down here. Detective Esteban said that you found a small artifact on the body. Something made of gold. But you didn’t list it on the exhibits turned in to us. Care to fill me in, before department security gets involved?”

I looked at her helplessly and wrung my hands for a moment. I still wasn’t sure what was going on with that damned medallion. But Shelly was my friend, my ally. If anyone could help me save my job over this snafu, this bit of black magic, it was her. I drew the medallion out of my pocket and held it up. It glittered warmly in the bright rays that streamed in through the skylight.

Then the medallion did more than glitter.

A delicate ringing filled the air, echoing off the walls of the morgue. It began to get brighter in the room, much brighter. In a few seconds, the medallion blazed with a white-yellow radiance like I was holding a miniature sun in my hand.

“Oh my lord!” Shelly exclaimed. “Dayna, what are you doing? What’s going on?”

“I’m not doing this!” I shouted back, but my voice seemed swallowed up by the ringing, by the radiance of the star in my palm. The light wasn’t hot, not really, but I could feel pulses of energy coming off the medallion like the heavy swells of an incoming ocean tide. I didn’t dare move—I was worried that if I tried to get rid of the medallion, that I’d end up putting it into my pocket, and right now I didn’t want the effing thing
anywhere
near my crotch.

I squeezed my eyes to slits, but the brightness penetrated right through my lids. Right then, a horrible, ticklish sensation crawled up and down my skin. I let out a scream that would’ve done credit to a Hollywood B-movie actress who’s found herself in a horror movie. One with a scene where she gets a boatload of spiders dumped on her.

And then it was as if the floor itself melted away under me. Like it turned into a bottomless void of white light. I fell into the void as I continued to scream, tumbling end over end into a nothingness that seemed to stretch on forever.

Laundry taken off the clothesline.

That’s the first scent I encountered as I swam back to consciousness.

I lay on something that was feather-soft. A mattress, I guessed. I felt the slick coolness of sheets covering my body. I didn’t open my eyes. I remembered falling, that I must’ve taken a tumble. What’s more, I was a week behind on my wash, so the fresh linen smell meant I wasn’t in my bed. I listened for the tell-tale electronic beeps and hums of a hospital room. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Someone nearby coughed gently. I froze. A sigh, and then a voice spoke from somewhere above and to my right. The voice sounded deep, chesty, and yet surprisingly gentle.

“Are you awake yet, perchance?”

That got my curiosity going.

Perchance?
Did I hit my head and end up in a Jane Austin three-act play? I half-expected to see a brooding, darkly handsome Byronic man with wild locks of hair and a stylish nineteenth-century jacket.

I opened my eyes.

I lay under a set of satin sheets the color of fresh cream. The sheets were neatly tucked into the sides of a four-poster bed. The room was an elegantly done up affair, with a vaulted ceiling, eggshell-white stone floor, and a pair of ornately carved wooden tables that squatted on either side of the bed. Tapestries made of brightly colored fabrics done up in whorls and stripes draped each of the walls, save the one closest to my bed. Instead, a triple set of bay windows let in bright wedges of sunlight. The edges of the windows, like the furniture and the tips of the four bed posters were marked with gilded fleur-de-lis accents.

Let’s just say that Louis XIV would’ve found it homey.

The man standing next to my bed—looming over it, to be precise—was a brooding, darkly handsome Byronic man with wild locks of hair. He wore a stylish cloth jacket the color of sangria wine, punctuated with bell-shaped silver buttons.

That was from the waist up. From the waist down, he had the body of a well-built chestnut draft horse.

I squeezed my eyes shut again.

“Whoever you are, you’re not going to believe this,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking, “but I think I must’ve hit my head. Like, bad.”

“I’m certain that I would believe you,” the man said.

Man? Or would that be ‘stallion’? No, a centaur? A centaur stallion?

“I somehow doubt that.”

“Relinquish your doubts,” he said. “My name is Galen, of the House of Friesain. I was tasked with summoning you.”

“Yes, you certainly did a good job, I am most definitely summoned.”

I cautiously opened my eyes. Yup, Galen still looked like a centaur.

My gaze flicked down low. Very low. Not ladylike, I know, but see where you look the next time
you
wake up with a centaur standing next to your bed.

Whoo. Galen really
was
a stallion.

“I swear,” I said, as I sat up and rubbed my eyes with my knuckles, “Galen, if I find out that someone laced one of my ginger snaps with lysergic acid, I won’t rest until I’ve hunted them down and…I don’t know, keyed their car, shaved their cat. This is really wild.”

“Surely you’d think so,” Galen said agreeably, “but you’re not under the influence of any substance, fair or foul. This is reality. One should accept it.”

I looked down at myself. Someone had thoughtfully removed my scrubs, but I still had on the violet top and open cardigan I’d started the day wearing. That probably convinced me more than anything else that I wasn’t tripping on acid or having any sort of nervous breakdown.

To triple-check that I wasn’t dreaming, I pinched myself on my arm. Hard. Yeah, it hurt. I blinked again, shuddered, and then rubbed my arms as I looked at the rest of Galen, House of Freeze-Sane a little more closely.

His equine body and tail matched the dark brown color of the hair on his human head. Muscles bulged under the skin of the horse body like bunches of the kind of rope they use to keep ocean liners tied firmly to the dock. Interestingly, all four of his legs were fringed with long, silky black hair below what I think they called the ‘knee’ on a horse.

“Okay,” I said cautiously, “I’ve really got no choice but to accept what I’m seeing here. I’m…well, I’m sure as hell not in Kansas anymore, I guess.”

I threw the covers back and got shakily to my feet. Galen reached out to steady my shoulder, and I accepted his help. I placed my hand on his for a moment. His skin felt warm, dry, and completely human. Though the clip-clop sound of his hoofs on the stone floor as he took a step back was utterly alien. It was a real mind-bender.

“No, you are not in ‘Kan Sass’ anymore, Dayna Chrissie,” Galen said with a smile. He gestured towards the windows at the far end of the room. “You’ve been summoned to Good King Benedict’s palace, the capitol of the land of Andeluvia. For the moment, you’re the honored guest of Grand Duke Kajari.”

For the moment. I pushed that thought aside and asked the more pressing questions on my mind.

“How’d you know my name, Galen?”

He shrugged. “It was printed on the badge hanging at your belt.”

I sighed. “Okay. So, how did you bring me here?”

“I set a pair of enchantments on a medallion of King Benedict’s reign,” Galen replied. “One was to bring you here, to our world. The other was a
geis
, what we call a ‘spell of obligation’. To ensure that the medallion wasn’t lost.”

“Yeah, about that,” I said wryly. I fished the damned thing out of my pocket and held it up in my palm. “Can you, I dunno, revoke that? I don’t want to have to carry this thing around like pocket change for the rest of my life.”

“Certainly.” Galen covered my hand with his. He spoke a word or two of some guttural, Nordic-sounding tongue. I felt a tingle in my palm, and then I felt the strangest sensation yet. A ‘snap’ like a cord of filament line around my wrist had just been cut. “There, now you should be able to throw the medallion away.”

I cocked my arm as if I was about to fling the little golden disk away—and then I curved my arm so that I stuck the medallion back into my pocket. Galen started. His nostrils flared and he flicked his curly chestnut tail. I pulled the coin back out and tossed it to him.

“Just kidding,” I said. Galen stared at me for a second before breaking into a grin. I returned it. “So, you’re the magic guy here, are you?”

“I’m the wizard for the court of Andeluvia, yes.”

“Well, then I suppose that you were ‘tasked’ to bring me here. Care to fill me in on what King Benedict had in mind?”

“That would be quite difficult,” Galen said, and his face took on the brooding aspect that I’d expected to see from someone who could’ve stepped off the set of
Fantasia
and into the world of
Wuthering Heights
. “You see, that goes to the heart of why you’ve been summoned.”

“Oh?” I didn’t like where this was going.

“You see, Good King Benedict’s been slain.”

“Slain. Ah.”

“Yes. He met his end two days ago.” Galen gestured with a sweep of one mighty arm. “It’s imperative that we unravel the mystery and expose whoever murdered him.”

“Imperative?”

“Oh, yes!” He stomped one of his black forehoofs in emphasis against the stone floor with a loud
clack
. “Why else would we need the services of a crime scene analyst?”

It figures. No one ever invites me anywhere for the sparkling conversation.

Chapter Six

The doors throughout Benedict’s palace were made of a light-colored wood bound with iron bands. They were each topped by a narrowly pointed arch, set high enough to let my centaur companion through without bending his head. According to Galen, that was a courtesy, a sign of tolerance and respect between Benedict’s realm and the centaurs.