14. Chapter 14 #3
A moment later, she discarded her gloves, hat, and mask with some frustration. “There’s no sign of any hex, curse, no sign of any magic.”
“I could have told you that.” Alfred groaned, rubbing a hand over his eyes and slamming the glass door shut as he left the laboratory to set the samples inside a cabinet.
She stretched her neck back and forth. “But all points where chaos is stored were inflamed, mainly the alchemical nodes in the heart, which means there was likely something in his system that triggered them at some point.”
“You still think this is the work of a witch or the fae?”
She shook her head. “At this point, I’m not entirely sure. It could have manifested some other way, but it would need a potent catalyst. Chaos stored in our alchemical nodes doesn’t just simply denature on its own. In the same manner blood doesn’t denature.”
She knocked on the glass partition, making Alfred jump back.
She pointed a finger at the sample vials. “I will need the results for those.”
He scoffed as he came around the glass partition, taking off his glasses to wipe them on the corner of his shirt. “The Marsh test was conducted several times. As was the Reinsch test, bioassays, colour reactions. All of them!”
“Neither tests for any poison a witch would cook up. Besides, magic can easily alter any results for all of the above,” she said, scrubbing her hands under the tap.
“We are accustomed to your kind, Lady Duncan. We have found our means to detect your trickery.”
My wife straightened her shoulders, and levelled a look on him as she dried her hands.
Leaning against one of the cupboards, I took a cigarette from the tin and put it to my lips, watching it all unfold.
“Have you?” She pointed to the corpse. “What’s wrong with him then? Let’s hear it.”
The old pathologist removed his specs, cleaning them with the corner of his wrinkled shirt.
“It’s a matter of evolution. With each plague, science will evolve.
Well, at least until the next one hits. And that takes time and lives.
It is nature. We’re not on this earth to understand it. Only to not let it destroy us.”
While he was beaming red with frustration and impatience, she was daisy fresh and smiling.
She took a step towards him. “It’s not nature, it is simply arrogance.
Do not blame nature for your ego. You refuse to understand it because you fear it, so you let it overpower you until it exhausts itself and you can claim your win.
If you’d simply get over your fears instead of letting them teach us a good, painful lesson, we wouldn’t be at these odds.
” She leaned close to him, and at her tall height—almost a foot over him—he had to tip her head up to look at her.
“Trickery, you said.” She lifted a coin between her fingers, twirling them around until the coin vanished.
“This is trickery,” she said, reaching behind his ears and pulling out a coin.
“And—” She briefly closed her hand around the coin and then pulled her fingers apart to reveal a toenail. “This is magic.”
His wide eyes jumped between the toenail, me, back to the toenail, and then his own feet laced up tightly in boots.
“That’s not—” He looked at me and screamed. Dropping on his ass to the ground, he started undoing his boots with shaky hands. Sixty seconds later, the old man was sprawled on the ground naked from the ankles down and with all his toenails intact. Missing only a sliver of his sanity.
“Never said it was yours,” my wife said sweetly, dropping the toe on the necropsy table.
A little humiliated, frustrated, and with some newfound respect, he got to his feet and nodded at her. “I will bring the results to you myself.” He quickly bowed his head in my direction before heading to the washroom behind the glass partition. “If you’ll pardon me.”
“Do you think he’ll report me for witchcraft?” she asked.
“Not if he wants to keep all his toes.”
Her cheeks took the slightest rosy tint. “I wasn’t going to do that. I don’t even know how to go about doing that. I never paid attention to those classes.”
“No, but I will. His fingernails, too.” I pushed some hair from her face. I could see she was tired. Maybe I’d let her push herself more than she should too soon after her fainting episode. “What are you thinking?”
She shook her head with a sigh. “I need to see someone who wasn’t—” She thought about it for a moment.
“Turned? Someone who didn’t catch it from being bitten.
The smell was stronger around the bite wound where the vampire venom was injected.
The alchemical nodes were more swollen on the surface, around that bite mark, too. ”
“You think it’s a sign of something.”
“You said there was no common denominator between all the infected so far. It might be a long shot, but this is all I have for now.” Her fingers drummed against her thigh as she looked around and leaned in close to whisper to me, “They were terrified.”
My eyes dropped from her pale lashes framing eyes dark as night, to the pale freckles dusting her slender nose, tracing over her slightly more defined upper lip. “Who was?”
“The spirits in that room.” She winced. “Petrified at having been trapped in that tiny room with that vampire’s body in there.
There’s no soul in the corpse. I dread to know where it is lingering and who it is haunting.
And they are dreading his return to the body.
They always come back unless their corpse is properly disposed of.
Rules of the dead: never leave your body uninhabited for long periods of time. Who knows what or who will get in it.”
She leaned in again. “Do you think you could keep Alfred away so I could try to talk to them?”
Pretty sure I could tell Alfred to set himself on fire and he’d do it, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.
“I’m the distraction now?”
She shoved me towards the doors. “Show him some ankle or wrist or something. Dazzle him, pretty boy.”
My brows rose up when she dragged me back. “Wait, wait. Can I have your lighter? They feel safe when they have light.”
“Please, Logan.”
Rolling her eyes, she stuck her hand in my pants pocket and grabbed my lighter.
After a few very short minutes of tasking Alfred in search of all the records for the cadavers he’d inspected, she went back into the room, drawing the curtains shut and flicking the lighter on.
Her smile was gentle, safe, and welcoming as she spoke into the void.
And I wondered if her gift had ever given her grief.
What a burden it must be; to be the only one who can understand something no one else does.
She handled everything with such grace and made it so easy to forget the tribulations of it all.
But better than anyone, I knew comfortability wasn’t a skill easily achieved or an endowment that came with the gift she bore; it was a consequence—she was simply desensitised to it by means I doubted to have been easy.
A few minutes later, she blew on the lighter and came around the glass wall. “Are there tunnels under the Basilica?”
The Basilica? “How do you know?”
She gave me a pointed look. “Most spirits return to where they think they will find spiritual salvation. Many return to their faith. Maybe I can corner them there and ask them how they’ve felt before the Madness, of any symptoms or irregularities, anything that happened to them that might be out of the ordinary.
” She shook her head, gathering herself.
“There’s something else,” she said, itching the tip of her nose.
“When we came out of the Basilica after the mass, I could smell the sweet scent of putrescine, but Arthur couldn’t.
The shrubs were all dead—practically rotting—but the acolytes were still watering them.
I think something is really happening there, Logan.
It might sound insane, but it could be worth a look. ”
“It doesn’t sound insane.” And no, it wasn’t a long shot.
This was the only real lead we’d even had in all the years since this had started.
However, there was a problem. “I can’t storm into the Basilica without the king’s permission.
The Basilica is run by the exarch, separate from the king.
If I mention anything about this to the exarch or the parliament, they will send the entire of Mortdale into chaos.
” This would be Ulric’s fall. Faith was all the people of Mortdale had, and I’d be robbing them of it.
Not to mention I’d be accusing the exarch, who wasn’t particularly fond of Ulric—famously a non-religious king who’d divided the Basilica and the crown the furthest any king or queen had ever managed before.
“It will have to be on the next Tuesday mass.”
“I know you don’t want me to have it, but…how about my Cleansing Ceremony? If you create a big enough distraction, I could have a look down the tunnels. I could make a concoction of herbs that can burn down the tunnels to expel the presence of anything dark.”
She winced. “Or maybe not the last part. Henry still mutters a prayer under his breath when he sees me. Art’s getting used to me though.”
Why did it bother me so terribly every time she said his name?
“His name is Arthur.”
“If you say so,” she threw over her shoulder, grabbing her parasol and poking my chest with the end of it. “You’ll not punch him again. You’re doing his ugly face no favours.”
My lip twitched. “He isn’t ugly.”
“You can’t snog him either. You’re married to me.” She turned around again, her eyes narrowing on me. “Have you three ever—”
Saints. “No.”
“But you have—”
I rubbed a hand over my eyes. “Yes.”
She nodded slowly. “Huh.”