Chapter 15

It said something about my life when a heavily armed official accused me of causing magical havoc and I had to wonder which incident she meant. That being the case, I didn’t bother to guess. If being the daughter of the most devious manipulator I’d ever met had taught me anything, it was when to keep my mouth shut. I wasn’t about to volunteer information she might not already have.

I’m not sure what response Briar Darque expected, probably that I’d deny involvement before I even knew what I was being accused of, or perhaps she thought I’d throw myself at her feet and beg the OMIH and MCIB’s mercy. Whatever she anticipated, silence clearly didn’t fit. Or impress.

Scowling, she stalked to the edge of my desk, and putting her palms flat on the surface, loomed as she leaned into my personal space. “You have nothing to say?”

She was so close I either had to lean back or crane my neck to look at her. If I leaned back she’d see the dagger in my lap, so I didn’t have much choice but to meet her challenging stare head-on. So that’s what I did—besides, I hated when people loomed. I’d guess Darque was on the tall side of average and her biker boots gave her another inch or two, but if I stood up, I’d be taller. Not by much, and I had no doubt she could kick my ass from this side of the Quarter to the other, but I still hated the cheap intimidation tactic.

“Are you charging me with something, Inspector?” My tone was flat, neutral. I think even my father would have been proud.

Darque’s lip curled as she straightened and reached into her jacket. She pulled free a folded manila packet and flipped through the contents before dropping a sheet of paper in front of me.

I glanced at it. A good half dozen newspaper clippings had been taped to the page, dates scrawled in a quick hand beside each. The oldest was from a little over three weeks ago and was a very short report about graves being disturbed in the graveyard south of Nekros. The writer dismissed the event as a juvenile prank. The clippings proceeded chronologically and mentioned disturbed graves in other cemeteries across Nekros. The most recent was from last week. Several bodies had gone missing from the Fairmount, a small cemetery I’d visited only once or twice as the suburban area around it—and thus most of the graveyard’s tenants—were of the Humans First persuasion. A reward was being offered for information that led to the return of the bodies and the capture of those responsible.

I looked up at Darque. “Grave robbing? You think I have something to do with this?”

She cocked an eyebrow and dropped another piece of paper in front of me. It was another newspaper article, but not a back-page piece, this one was the lead article from yesterday. I was vaguely familiar with the story—I’d seen it earlier when I was looking for information on Richard Kirkwood. Now I read it more carefully.

A pair of teenagers had driven off the road just south of the city. The car had been found wrapped around a tree, but most of the couple’s injuries appeared to be from an animal attack, not the accident. The girl had been DOA, but the article listed the boy as being in intensive care.

“I don’t get the connection,” I said, handing the pages back to Darque.

“Do you know what kind of animal causes this type of injury?” she asked, dropping several photos in front of me.

After examining Kirkwood earlier, I was already beyond my daily threshold for brutalized bodies. Hell, between Kingly and Kirkwood, I’d like to think I’d hit my cap for the month, especially since John had made it clear the NCPD wouldn’t be calling anytime soon. I didn’t want to look at any more bodies, even in photographs.

Not that Briar was giving me a choice.

I glanced at the array of photos, glad I hadn’t stopped for lunch on the way back from the morgue. Of course, the burn of stomach acid at the back of my throat wasn’t much better. The photos were of the two teens and at first, all I saw was the color red and a lot of pale flesh, then I started picking out details. When my gaze landed on a close-up of flesh torn away to expose bone, my stomach clenched tight enough to knock the air out of me. I tore my gaze away.

“I don’t know what kind of animal did it.”

“Look at them.” She pushed the photos closer to me.

I glared at her, and she crossed her arms over her chest, tapping the folder against her elbow in an impatient rhythm. Oh, I really didn’t want to study those pictures. Of course, if my stomach gave another heave, I’d add a different color to the photos. And look like a weakling. Which I couldn’t do in front of this woman.

I picked up the nearest photo. It had been taken while the couple was still in the car. The boy had been driving, and he hung forward, limp against the restraint of his seat belt, the deflated air bag in front of him. There was so much blood it obscured the actual wounds. The girl had been in the backseat, and not wearing a seat belt. The wreak had thrown her forward, so she was caught with her lower half still in the back and her upper body wedged between the front seats at an unnatural angle.

I put the photo down.

The next two were of the car itself. The first was from the outside, and was a close-up of the car door covered in dried smears of blood around the door handle. The next was of deep blood stains on the backseat—presumably where the girl had been before the wreck. She must have been lying down and bleeding heavily based on the size of the blood pool covering the seat. I stared at the photos, imagining the teens, injured and frightened, clawing at the door to get it open. The girl might not even have been conscious, her boyfriend laying her in the back before sliding behind the wheel. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I pushed the pictures to the side.

The rest of the photos were from the girl’s autopsy. I couldn’t decide if the cleaned and clinical close-ups of her wounds were better or worse than the bloody accident scene. I reached the picture I’d first seen where skin and muscle were stripped away to show white bone behind the flayed flesh, and I was proud that my stomach didn’t heave this time, at least, not hard enough that my body betrayed me to the watching MCIB inspector.

I forced myself to make sense of the image, and decided I was looking at the femur bone in her leg. My stomach gave another painful lurch. Having identified the injury, I shuffled the photo to the bottom of the stack. The next image was of her back. Claw marks crisscrossed over her shoulders, one set ending in deep puncture marks where the creature had dug in its claws. I couldn’t tell the actual depth from the photos, but judging by the location, I’d have been shocked if her lung wasn’t perforated.

Was she even alive when she reached the car?

I stared at the carnage that had been her back and shivered. Then I shut my eyes and forced myself to take a deep breath. I needed to be analytical right now, not emotional. Opening my eyes, I counted the claw marks. They were in rows of five. Not a cougar then, or there would have been rows of no more than four.

“My best guess would be a bear,” I said, looking up from the pictures and hoping I’d never see them again. “There are black bears in this region.”

“Look at the pictures of her arm.”

I gritted my teeth, but shuffled the stack of photos until I found the two Darque wanted me to look at. One was of the outside of the girl’s arm and showed four deep lacerations. The other was of the inside of the same arm. I could see the tips of the gashes from the previous image, but what the photographer had been trying to capture was a single laceration on the inside of her arm that was almost perfectly centered with the outer gashes. The blood drained from my face as I looked from one photo to the other.

Apparently I’d finally given Darque a response she wanted, because she leaned forward and tapped the picture of the girl’s inner arm. “Ever seen a bear with an opposable thumb?”

Crap. Definitely not an animal. Not a mundane one at least. Wild beasts of legend were occasionally spotted roaming the wilderness outside the city. And not just around Nekros, they were appearing in all the previously folded spaces that had opened after the Magical Awakening. I assumed it was only a matter of time before they started appearing in the few remaining undomesticated areas from the pre-Awakening period as well.

But if it was some unnatural or magical beast, why come to me? Or did they suspect a fae? There were any number of fae who sported talons or claws. But again, if they suspected fae, there was no reason for Briar to be here. For one thing, I obviously didn’t have claws, and for another, if the OMIH had any inkling of my heritage, this would be a very different conversation. I was a card carrying, OMIH certified witch, but I had the feeling if Tamara put my DNA sample into the RMC reader that I wouldn’t register human. Not that I was advertising that fact. So why the hell did the MCIB send a militant investigator to grill me?

I gathered the photos into a stack and pushed them across my desk toward Briar. “I don’t see the connection.”

She stared at me, her hard gaze searching my face. Her expression screamed that she expected to find deceit in my features. Fat chance.

Darque glanced at her wrist, and a flicker of surprise crossed her face. “You really don’t get it,” she said as if she couldn’t believe it.

I followed her gaze to a small charm pressed flat against her wrist. A lie detector charm? I tried to focus on the one charm, but she had so much magic on her, picking such a small spell out of the mess was impossible. But I’d put money on a lie detector.

She looked up and opened her folder again. “I have your file. You’re certified to work as both a grave witch and a sensitive, and are ranked exceptional in both. You opted out of attempting to certify in any division of spell-crafting.” That fact earned a note of disbelief, as if she couldn’t understand why any witch wouldn’t certify in at least low-level spell-crafting. I wasn’t about to tell her that I wouldn’t have passed. Not that I needed to say anything as she’d already moved on. “Yes, I thought so. You were trained at a wyrd academy. You must have been taught this. Reports of grave robbing and grave desecration? Victims attacked during the night, and found with wounds consistent with a humanoid not two miles down the road from where some of the reports of nighttime disturbances in a graveyard occurred?”

I hadn’t known they’d been anywhere near the south graveyard. The article had only said the car had been found south of the city. But now that I knew, and she presented it all together…“You think we have ghouls?”

“And she proves she’s not a complete idiot. Yes, ghouls—in at least four different graveyards. Which means you, Ms. Craft, are being charged with murder.”