Chapter 1
Adrian Westergren
Gods, he hated morgues.
The shitty lighting, the cracked stone floors, and the piercing scent of disinfectant and other chemicals that burned his nose didn’t come close to masking the lingering scent of death and decay.
Life as a soldier had brought Adrian to a morgue once or twice.
Training accidents and the occasional deadly fights with things that crawled out of the Ordas meant identifying comrades and saying last good-byes in the morgue.
It was a tradition in Erya for every person to be cremated, their remains planted into flowers and trees to continue the cycle of life and giving back to the planet.
If you wanted to pay respects one last time to something with a face, you needed to do it at the morgue.
Funerals were spent at the family’s home with the deceased in an urn.
Afterward, the family and friends took the urn to where the ashes would be buried along with a sapling for the planting ceremony.
But this trip to the District #5 Bellcairn Morgue had no hope of being a tolerable experience. He and Haru had already visited the morgues for Districts #3 and #7 with no luck, for which he was grateful.
However, District #5 was another story. This morgue served the neighborhoods of Little Stip Garden District and Black Water Gate.
From his early glimpses, these were not nice, affluent neighborhoods.
These were places overflowing with desperate people barely scratching out a living.
They were forgotten and perpetually marginalized. No funding. No support. No relief.
And that meant desperate people doing desperate things.
As a short, round man in a white coat escorted them past the front reception to the main examination room, Adrian winced to see the twin rows of corpses on metal gurneys, half-covered in white sheets.
Small, rectangular metal doors lined two of the four walls, where bodies would be slid into refrigerated units until they could be dealt with permanently.
In the center of the room was a single metal table under a bright light. A man with thinning gray hair, in a white coat and a clear plastic protective face shield, was digging into the body of a deceased woman.
“There. That’s the medical examiner, Dr. Kohn. He can help you,” their guide said with a wave of his hand at the ghoul. With nothing more to resemble an introduction, he beat a hasty retreat out of the examination room, the double swinging doors shifting wildly behind him as he exited.
Well, at least they were in the building.
“Dr. Kohn, I’m Detective Sanders. This is Detective White,” Adrian launched into his spiel.
As he spoke, he flashed a detective’s badge he might have boosted from an off-duty detective in a bar three nights earlier.
So long as no one looked too closely, the ruse would succeed.
“I’m hoping you can help us with our investigation. ”
This was his third trip to the morgue as a “cop,” and no one had bothered to report him to the actual police because he’d done nothing more than sneak into some morgues in search of a possible dead body.
A long, irritated sigh escaped the medical examiner, and his shoulders slumped.
However, the man didn’t lift his gaze from where he was digging into the dead woman’s organs, let alone glance at Adrian’s borrowed credentials.
“As you can see, I am up to my elbows in work and can’t provide any kind of help at the moment. ”
Adrian fought a smirk. A distracted and harried ME might work to his advantage here. He shoved his stolen badge into the pocket of his jeans and pulled a worn picture from a different pocket.
“You don’t even have to remove your hands from your current…
er…guest,” Adrian said as he stepped closer.
He fought to keep his eyes on the medical examiner while holding the picture up at eye level for him.
“Has this guy passed through here recently? Possibly as a John Doe. Large scar on his left cheek, stretching from eye to jaw. Late twenties to early thirties.”
The ME frowned and squinted at the grainy, poorly printed picture of a man in profile. Adrian’s heart squeezed, barely sneaking out a beat as he held his breath, waiting for the ME to end his search in the worst way.
After a second, Dr. Kohn shook his head. “Not recently. Haven’t worked on him. However, you can see my backlog. Those in the fridge have been autopsied and are waiting for pickup. You can check out those still on my docket.” He jerked his chin at the two rows of corpses on gurneys.
“You receive that many bodies in a week?” Adrian gasped without thinking.
“Ha!” Dr. Kohn barked out. “You must be new to the fifth district.”
Adrian cleared his throat and moved away from where the man was working. “Uh, yeah. Just transferred from the third.”
The ME hummed and returned to his work. “That explains it. Quieter over there. This is from the past two days.”
“Fuck,” Adrian whispered.
The doctor huffed out another rough laugh. “Welcome to Little Stip and the Gate.”
Adrian had no desire to continue the conversation. He motioned for Haru to go along the line on the right while he took the tables on the left. In less than a minute, they’d moved through the room, and there was no sign of Shey among the deceased.
Thank the gods for that small mercy.
Of course, the problem was that they didn’t know where the hell he was.
“Thanks for the help, Doc,” Adrian called out as they hastened toward the doors to leave the examination room. He wasn’t even sure if the ME grunted in return. It didn’t matter.
Adrian led the way down the hall but came to a sharp halt as they reached the last door that would open into the reception area.
He’d peeked through the narrow window at the top of the door in time to see two cops stroll through the building’s entrance.
The man in front with the very pissed-off expression was the same cop he’d stolen the badge from.
Yeah, this was an encounter Adrian was in no mood to brazen through.
He spun on one heel and slammed both hands into Haru’s chest, stopping and turning his companion. “Back door. We gotta find a back door.”
“What’s wrong, my Adrian? Do you need me to kill someone?” Haru inquired in a calm, completely normal tone.
This was why he wasn’t letting the damn dragon utter a single word during the search for Shey at the morgues.
Nothing out of his mouth was remotely sane.
It was “My Adrian” this and “Would you like me to kill them for you?” that, as if wholesale slaughter were the only way Haru knew to prove his devotion to Adrian.
“No,” he hissed. “No killing. You saw the bodies stacked in that room. The ME has plenty to do. You’re not giving him more work.”
Once he had Haru pointed in the right direction, Adrian resumed the lead, hurrying them away from the main examination room and past some tiny cubbyhole offices.
Another couple of turns and they reached a set of large double doors that opened onto a loading dock for ambulances and other large vehicles making deliveries.
Adrian burst outside and jogged for a while, Haru close on his heels, happy to put as much distance as possible between them, the room filled with the dead, and a pair of Damardor cops.
After a few blocks, Adrian slowed to a walk and tossed the stolen badge into the first trash can he passed.
It was tempting to press his luck and milk the badge for one more con, but there was a chance the badge’s real owner had heard whispers that someone had been visiting morgues throughout the city using his name and ID.
Better to move on and try another angle if they had to sneak in to check bodies again.
There was always the option of bribery. Splash some money around, and overworked, underappreciated clerks were usually willing to look the other way while you inspected the dead for a familiar face.
For now, Adrian was hoping they didn’t have to check out another morgue, but he didn’t think their luck was that good. He and Haru from the Omari dragon clan had been in Damardor’s capital for over three weeks but had found very few clues as to what had happened to Caspagir’s missing prince.
Groaning, Adrian shoved a hand through his messy hair.
One minute he was watching Rayne Laurent—dauphin and personal advisor to King Caelan Talos—marry Eno Bevyn, another of the king’s senior advisors, and the next minute, King Caelan was pulling him aside with some crazy story about Prince Shey disappearing in Damardor while on a secret mission to investigate the Damardor government.
Because no one wanted a war between Caspagir and Damardor, Caelan had sent Adrian and Haru in to covertly locate Prince Shey and drag his ass home.
Of course, if he and Haru were stupid enough to get caught in Damardor, they were just as likely to kick off a war between Damardor and Erya. Or worse, if the world discovered Haru was a dragon from the Isle of Stone, everyone everywhere would panic about dragons being real and invading countries.
Thinking about it all hurt his head.
Where the hell is Shey?
They’d literally stumbled across Kaede dead in an alley three nights after they arrived and had since begun haunting hospitals and morgues.
The next night, they’d located Shey’s other companion and bodyguard, Juro.
Things didn’t appear good for Prince Shey if something had happened that was bad enough to kill both his bodyguards.
Yet, there had been no sign of Shey. Adrian was clinging to the desperate hope that the prince was still alive because he had borrowed magic.
“Where do we go now?” Haru asked.