24. DOWN AT THE STATION （ACT 1）
THE RAVENWOOD POLICE DEPARTMENT WAS A MISNOMER. THE whole thing was an arm of the Table, a satellite office, functioning within the confines of the nonmagical world.
If any nonmagical people stumbled onto Ravenwood Island and into town, it wouldn’t seem any different to them than any other charming coastal community. One with a jewelry box row of adorable storefronts, a post office, and of course a police station.
The good news for Embry and Rye was that not only did the Ravenwood Police Department simply look like a normal police station, it was built like one, too.
At least on the outside. Magical reinforcements abounded on the inside of the building, but the exterior was of typical, state-funded redbrick construction.
Even better, because it was a public building, no wards were allowed to keep out citizens, only to keep in prisoners.
Embry was prepared to shell out her secret invisibility spell to get them inside despite the energy it took to sustain and her current deficit of actual rest, but it turned out Rye had a better plan.
And with one spell aimed at the security camera and quick work when Inspector Brown left out the back door with a pack of coffee-clutching Table agents, they slipped inside the building, made a beeline for the boiler room, and shimmied into the ducts from there.
The bad news—because of course: Apparently zombies manned the morgue 24–7.
The Table often used the “working stiff” propensity of certain types of Stitches to its advantage.
Though in Embry’s experience, the current generation of Stitches, like Cass and Taviana, pushed hard against the “all work and no play” societal expectations.
Unfortunately, these zombies were old school, endlessly typing away.
“They have to do a shift change at some point, right?” Embry whispered after a solid hour of waiting face-to-face with Rye at the confluence of two ducts, peering down through one of the vents over the morgue.
Set off from the heavily trafficked jail cells and interrogation rooms, the morgue seemed to be its own contained area in the basement level, consisting of an examination room, refrigerated holding area, and wall of three sterile-looking offices with filing cabinets and secure computer stations.
Embry didn’t need to whisper—they’d cast the same sound-muffling spell Rye had used in the quad days ago—but her frustration required the pressure valve of a well-placed annoyed hiss. “Bathroom break? Lunch break? Coffee break, definitely. Everyone knows zombies run on caffeine and decomposition.”
Not that Embry was suggesting that these zombies would take a nibble on anyone unfortunate enough to be in the drawers.
The magical group had excellent food safety protocols and standards that could teach the FDA a thing or two about avoiding E.
coli and salmonella. They probably enjoyed the scent of a fresh cadaver, though—zombies had an excellent sense of smell, and blood, guts, and rot were at the top of their favorites list.
To Embry’s surprise—and relief—Oakley’s body wasn’t laid out on the table.
In fact, there wasn’t a body there at all, just clean stainless steel. The pair of zombies currently located within were stationed at the computers, one in each office, the far corner office of the medical examiner dark and locked—and exactly where they needed to be. Eventually.
“Surely,” Rye whispered back, catching her impatient expression in the twin glow of the palm light spells they’d lit once they’d entered the ducts.
Not for the millionth time was Embry relieved she didn’t have to share a duct with Rye.
That would be even tighter quarters than the drama closet.
Literal hours had gone by and she could still feel the ghost of him pressed against her back, his finger warm against her mouth.
Covert operations had their drawbacks, and one was the need to hide in close quarters, apparently.
“We’ll just have to be patient,” he continued. “You can close your eyes if you want. I’ll wake you if they say anything relevant to each other or leave.”
Considering those zombies hadn’t uttered a word in the past hour or moved anything except for their fingertips, incessantly typing, Embry’s hopes weren’t much. But Embry Woodcross was nothing if not extremely resourceful and her own three-latte morning gave her an idea. “Give me your phone.”
“What are you going to do with it?” Rye asked, even as he was already reaching into his pocket.
“Create a distraction.”
Rye arched a sandy eyebrow. “You’re not going to light it on fire or anything, are you?”
“I’d say don’t be dramatic, but we both know how you roll.” She held out her hand.
Wordlessly, Rye set the phone in her palm.
He kept the space illuminated as she extinguished her light, using both hands to thumb tap with the rapidity of a modern teen.
To his credit, Rye didn’t ask for details when she finished typing, hit Send, received an immediate response, and, after a quick thumbs-up emoji, handed the device back to him.
Within minutes, both zombies wordlessly stood up in near unison and half ran out of the morgue, the door thunking with a heavy metallic whoomph behind them.
Rye leveled a slanted gaze at Embry. “Do I want to know?”
Embry just grinned. “Special delivery from the Raven’s Head social committee, thanking the Table and Ravenwood PD for all their hard work for the past few days with a massive vat of Black Cat night owl blend and four extra larges from Mystic Pizza.”
“You’re telling me you convinced Skye Wolverton to distract this entire building with caffeine and perfectly melted mozzarella?”
“No, I’m telling you that Fairfax is the committee’s treasurer and holds the purse strings.
” Embry caught the upward flicker to Rye’s pout as she muttered a spell that loosened the vent screws one by one, until the whole thing gently popped off and propped itself against the junction of their conjoined ducts.
Then she pulled up a sleeve and flashed her vintage watch at Rye—they’d planned for five minutes, no more.
“Try the corner office and go from there?”
“Indeed.” Then he held out a hand as if he was asking her to dance. “Ladies first.”
Ah, there were those Ryszard Knighton manners, yet again.
Embry placed her hand in his and held tight as she lowered herself with the same levitation spell she used on inanimate objects like coffee cups and her school trunks.
The spell was much better for objects you could aim at and less precise when piloting your own body, especially through a tight space.
But with Rye’s strong grip and her excellent casting ability, she made it through the narrow square and to the tile floor without a single whisper of sound.
Rye dropped down noiselessly behind her as she hurried to the corner office, the metal hexing spell she didn’t use at Marlow Theatre already on her lips.
With just the slightest disturbance to the inner locking mechanism, Embry had the medical examiner’s office open before Rye even magically replaced the vent.
Rather than turning on the office light, Embry pulled something extra she’d packed in her belt bag: an old iPhone Daddy had left in the junk drawer.
When they’d slipped out of the house, she explained to Rye what she wanted it to do and why.
He’d been able to work some technical wizardry to bring it to life and assured her he could transfer any photos she took with it off it.
Which meant her personal device would never show evidence of this little trip if Brown confiscated it.
She’d brought it on a whim—a just in case—and hadn’t used it yet but realized how helpful it would be when Rye had explained how he planned to record the autopsy. Now they could do it twice as fast.
Embry clicked to the camera app on the old phone and got to work. Rye entered the room in a flicker of shadow and a fresh burst of rosemary, shutting the door quietly behind him as a precaution, and began searching beside her.
It didn’t take them long to find Oakley’s preliminary autopsy report—her death was the only active investigation. Embry flipped open one of the topmost files, and there were Oakley’s dark eyes, staring into nothing atop a face so pale it was near translucent.
“I’ll take the autopsy photos; you take the paperwork,” Rye whispered, scooping the vampire’s corpse headshot out of her line of sight and placing a second folder into her hands.
Embry didn’t blink for several seconds, her friend’s fathomless stare feathering at the edges of her vision. Finally, her grip tightened around the manila folder. Embossed on the front were the words preliminary forensic autopsy, while on the tab was a handwritten Riddle, O.
She swallowed around the swelling sadness in her throat. “Thank you.”
“Of course,” he whispered back, while efficiently snapping pic after pic on his phone.
Embry launched herself into the same, methodical set of motions. She didn’t have time to read the file—the timer on her own phone was merrily ticking closer to zero—but with each snap and turn of the pages, she couldn’t ignore the words in front of her.
Forensic autopsy. Observations. Test results. Causation. Conclusion.
On the conclusion page, she stopped.
Right there, in black-and-white: Cause of death.
The guillotine of presumed guilt had been dangling precariously over Embry’s neck since the moment she arrived at the stadium on Saturday morning. Their five minutes was nearly up, but the words on this page and the ones following it could be the first definitive step in—
“Forty-eight seconds,” Rye muttered. “I’m going to go have a look at the body. I’ll be done before it goes off.”
“Okay,” Embry whispered at his back as he slipped out of the office. “I’m almost finished.”
Forcing herself not to actually read the words on the page, Embry snapped a shot, then flipped the page over and got the other side. No more hesitation; they just needed to—
In the silence of the morgue came a new sound: the confident tapping of a code on a keypad and the whoosh of a pneumatic door unlocking outside the department door.
No, no, no!
There wasn’t time to run for the vent. To hide, to mutter her invisibility spell and hope to sneak out before it wore off. To recast their muffling spell and call for Rye to come back.
Instead, Embry lunged for the office door, her invisibility spell on her lips, fingers ready to aim it toward Rye—when she saw him react to the exterior noise by crawling into the open cadaver drawer and sliding it shut from within.
Good, he was safe—and he couldn’t fit in that drawer with another body, right? Not even tiny Oakley? She couldn’t think about that. Only that he fit and was hidden.
Then, with a magically muffled snick, Embry latched the office door, crawled to the desk, and silently replaced the autopsy files where they’d found them.
Heart pounding, she then moved back to the office door, mumbled a sound-amplification spell, and furiously hoped she could hear these zombies coming before they discovered the corner office was unlocked.