Chapter Nineteen
Masks,” Caleb barked at our students as we neared the door of the dust-filled old grocery on the outskirts of town.
It had been three days since my life started over as Lupa of a clan now approaching five hundred people in size, and it had been a constant whirlwind of activity.
We were still trying to identify and vet everyone moving to Wolf’s Head, figure out what to do with those too infirm or too questionable for Sienna to take in, and keep everybody fed, clothed, nursed, and housed in the meantime.
And now, I had a new challenge on my hands: not getting fired.
The Corps did not understand PTO, unpaid time off, or even sick days if you could still walk, not when they were already stretched to the breaking point, and were more likely than a wolf to bite your head off for any infraction.
I’d stopped by HQ to return Gerald’s coat yesterday and gotten yelled at by half the people I met.
It seemed that winning a battle bought me, at best, a couple of days’ recovery time, and I was past that, so get the hell back to work, mage!
So, I was back at work, only apparently, everybody was even more pissed off than I’d thought, because I’d drawn the shit detail this time.
“Seriously?” Aki said, the sunlight gleaming on his blue-tipped hair. “It’s just dust in there—”
“Dust that could be laced with asbestos,” Caleb retorted. “The report said that part of the ceiling collapsed recently. You want your lungs shredded or cancer in ten years?”
“But we already spent, like, twenty minutes checking for snares and traps!”
“And you haven’t been snared or trapped, have you?”
“Because there was nothing there!”
“It’s still good practice,” I pointed out, and got an eyeroll in return.
Teenagers.
“And if there had been anything, you might be missing a limb,” Caleb added.
“An abundance of caution is better than a lifetime of regret,” he added piously, as if he’d been cautious a day in his life.
But in fairness, he was trying to teach the kids properly, which required safeguards he might otherwise have ignored.
It also required setting an example, I reminded myself, and shielded my own face.
The others followed suit, and we pushed open the door of the ratty little building, where a corpse was supposed to be waiting inside.
And ignored the insistence of the one enchantment we had found, a crap-tier Occulto that had been planted nearby, and that was frantically sending out vibes of ‘nothing to see here, nothing at all, God, how boring, hey, let’s go do something else! ’
“That thing’s really annoying,” Kimmie said, looking impossibly young as she’d traded her usual set of Cleopatra braids for a couple of giant puffballs on either side of her head.
Not having to sleep left her with plenty of time to try the latest looks, and this one went well with today’s ensemble: a cute purple jumpsuit, gold sandals, gold-tipped white nails, and gold hoop earrings.
The get-up looked a little incongruous in the setting, but I couldn’t fault the fashion.
“We’ll check around back, see what else might be hiding,” Jen offered.
She and Sophie were in a badass contest with each other today, at least fashion-wise, with both in jeans, combat boots, and leather jackets, despite the heat.
They gave off the vibe that looking at one measly corpse was beneath them.
“Don’t touch anything,” Caleb warned.
“You have evidence bags?” I asked, pulling some out of a pocket.
“Yes, mother,” Sophie said, and showed off the stash sticking out of her purse before they took off.
“Be careful!” I called after them and got an impatient hand wave in reply. I thought about calling them back, but they were more advanced than the others, and needed to know that I trusted them. And if anyone could handle a surprise, it would be those two.
“That’s how you know it’s shit,” Caleb was saying to Kimmie. “A good ward is subtle. That thing shrieks.”
“Can we turn it off or something?” she asked, looking pained.
“Don’t disturb anything at a scene until you’ve checked everything,” he intoned, quoting the handbook.
“Why? It’s giving me heart palpitations,” Aki piped up.
“Heart palpitations? What are you, like, forty?” Dimas scoffed.
“Forty?” Caleb repeated, having passed that milestone a while ago, although it was hard to tell. Magical lifespans were considerably longer than the norm, and black don’t crack. He still looked and was as buff as ever.
“Okay, fifty,” the boy corrected, which didn’t help. “And why do we have to leave it?”
“You don’t have to,” Caleb said, a little more viciously than necessary. “But annoyances like that are perfect spots for booby traps. Remember Johnson?”
I felt momentary pity for the poor, eyebrowless war mage who was becoming a cautionary tale and decided not to let my kids replace him.
“Masks on,” I repeated, because Aki had dropped his, becoming too distracted by the ward.
“You don’t have to use full shields without cause, and shouldn’t, as it drains your magic, but spot shielding a face or hand can save you a trip to see Sedgewick,” I added, naming the Corps’ irascible doc, who included a free lecture with every boo-boo healed.
Aki masked up again, and we waited just inside the door for our eyes to adjust.
There was bright, searing Vegas sunlight outside, brilliant enough to give anyone a headache within minutes without shades, but someone had painted over all the windows in here.
The defunct grocery hadn’t paid the electric bill in a decade, so the tired fluorescents swinging overhead, laced with spiders’ webs, no longer worked.
And the wedge of sunlight spearing through a shattered window had to force its way past the mass of dust hanging in the air to provide any light.
What little illumination managed the journey lit up a chipped vinyl floor strewn with dirt, broken glass, tumbled metal shelving, and much of the ceiling. And a half-obscured body on the floor in the middle of the room, covered in more ceiling and a lot of flies. At least what was left of it.
I sighed.
“If you have to throw up, go outside so as not to contaminate the scene,” I warned everyone. “And remember to remove your mask first, or you’ll be aspirating the stuff.”
“Speaking from experience?” Dimas muttered.
“Yep.” He seemed surprised that I admitted it. “Everyone tosses their cookies sooner or later, just don’t do it in here,” I added, while my partner scowled around.
I didn’t have to ask why.
Normally, we had a number of forensic spells to use on crime scenes, but that ceiling was a problem.
Even magic needs something to work with, and the enchantments we used pulled information from minute particles in the air or on surfaces, many of which had likely been disturbed or eradicated by the fall.
I didn’t think we were going to get much from this mess.
Caleb agreed. “This is gonna be a shit show,” he said, but cast a reveal spell anyway, to cover the bases.
And caused the kids to gasp and stare around as the formerly darkened room exploded in brilliant scrawls, like neon graffiti.
They covered the walls and edges of the floor, which had remained largely undisturbed, and sparkled like gold dust in the air.
It almost looked like a firework frozen in time, and in spite of everything, I smiled; I’d had a similar reaction in my training days.
Unfortunately, the pretty firework effect meant that a lot of evidence had been scrambled to the point of uselessness.
One of the exceptions was the cracked window, or should I say, what had come through it.
Specifically, an army of blow flies, which had been the first to discover the corpse hours ago.
They’d entered sometime late last night or early this morning, judging by the number, and by the fact that some of their eggs had already hatched.
The gossamer-fine trails they’d left in the air had been picked up by the spell, forming an almost solid, ghostly drapery between the body and the broken pane, as if delicate sheers were fluttering inward in a soft breeze.
It was strangely pretty, and it wasn’t the only thing.
A few radiant moths fluttered across the beam of sunlight, ghostly rats scurried along the baseboards, and the memory of an owl, which should have been just a pale smudge on the air because of the rapidity of its transit, gleamed in exquisite detail over by a counter, its wings outspread and a mouse in its beak.
The accuracy and precision of the spell depended on how often something had been here and how long it had lingered.
The longer the better, as it shed more skin cells, hair follicles, and powder down in the case of the bird, that way.
The owl showed up as it had a nest on the shelves that used to hold cartons of cigarettes before this place went out of business, and had been in and out so often feeding its young as to leave an imprint.
“Ooh, look! Babies!” Kimmie said, spying the half-grown chicks, who were watching us through huge, reflective eyes.
“We’re not here for birds,” Caleb reminded her.
There was little sign of the two war mages who had taken a brief look this morning and then noped the hell out, just a few shimmery outlines on the air, blurred by their motion.
And even less of the magical scavengers who had spied the body from the doorway after noticing the Occulto, which had been so bad that it attracted attention instead of repelling it.
But the spell did provide one piece of useful information: a host of fingerprints spotted the landscape like gleaming polka dots.
Caleb summoned them, and they peeled off the shelving and walls and floated into the air, flushing a rainbow of different colors to differentiate the various individuals who had left them behind. And there had been many recent visitors to the long-defunct grocery store. Too many.
“Drugs?” Caleb guessed, thinking the same thing.