Page 46 of Mystic Justice
‘Lead the way,’ Kate said.
‘He’ll follow behind,’ I corrected her. ‘He’s in protection mode.’
She blinked. ‘Do we need protecting?’
‘Someone is kidnapping and murdering Other folk,’ Krieg said drily. ‘Let’s err on the side of caution, shall we?’
I led the way to the car. Loki was still snoozing on my shoulder, which increased my worry. ‘Do you mind if Loki comes in when we reach the morgue? He won’t be a bother – he’s fast asleep.’
‘Not at all,’ Kate replied. ‘He looks like an adorable little guy.’
‘He’s a little shit,’ Krieg grunted.
I grinned. ‘That’s why I like him.’
When we pulled up to the morgue, Bastion and Amber were waiting outside. Bastion was in his human form but was no less deadly for it. Amber looked a shade impatient and I checked my watch. We were two minutes late.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ I said as we approached.
Amber waved away the apology. ‘Show me these bodies.’ Straight to business it was, then.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Kate’s protective receptionist, Sharon, had no choice but to let us in. Today the ageing dryad had her hair scraped back in a bun and was wearing a stone-grey suit that suited her forest-green skin. She looked relieved to see Kate back in the Other. ‘Dr Potter!’ she chirped. ‘Wonderful to see you back.’ Her eyes narrowed on Loki on my shoulder. ‘You arenotbringing that in.’
‘It’s okay, Sharon,’ Kate said firmly. ‘I’ve already said it’s fine.’ She moved past the receptionist and held the door open while Sharon spluttered, muttering words under her breath like ‘contamination’ and ‘avian flu’. It spoke of my admirable self-restraint that I simply walked past her.
Once we were in Kate’s ‘office’, the heart of the morgue, she went to the refrigerator and pulled out two bodies from the body drawer – the dryad and the centaur. The second refrigerator was huge, designed to hold the far larger bodies of centaurs, ogres and trolls.
In my peripheral vision I saw Krieg press his lips together, an expression of regret for a young life cruelly wasted. I turned to face him properly. By then he’d carefully arranged his face intoa mask of indifference but just for a moment, for a glimpse, I’d seen otherwise. He could pretend otherwise but he cared about my dead the same as I did.
‘Goddess bless,’ Amber murmured at the state of the centaur. ‘What a mess. You were dropped from a great height – all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put you back together again.’ Considering that she came across as a hard-nosed bitch most of the time, her voice was not without empathy. Like Krieg, she cared.
I waited until she’d finished her initial examination then said, ‘Dr Potter used her own magic to verify the presence of runes on the bones of both bodies.’
Amber frowned. ‘On thebones?’ she said in disbelief. ‘I’ve never seen that before.’ She looked at Kate. ‘Any ill-effects from lighting them up?’
Kate coloured a little. ‘I used my magic a number of times because I couldn’t see the runes, even though I could feel the tug on my magic. It drained my magic significantly and I had to attend the hall yesterday.’
Amber said nothing but her lips pressed into a tight line. She opened her black tote bag and rummaged inside before pulling out a Kilner jar full of potion, a paintbrush and some purple gloves. She snapped on the gloves, opened the jar and dipped the paintbrush into the gloopy contents.
‘This is a revealing potion,’ she explained to me. ‘I’m going to paint onperthro,the rune for revelations and secrets, then I’ll run my magic through that rather than the dark ones hidden here.’
I pulled out my phone and started to take a video. Amber painted on a small rune on Moss and an instant later it lit up; as it did so, so the runes on the bones started to glow. I zoomed in on them; lit up as they were, you could see their scorched edges.
The potion mistress gave a low whistle. ‘Well, you weren’t wrong. Those are some dark runes. And here, look –angrepetanddagaz.Attack and transfer. The runes are powering something, giving it life.’ She paled. ‘I’ve seen something like this once before, though I’ve never seen the runes branded on bone quite like this.’
‘What do they do?’ I asked.
Amber pointed to some particularly pretty runic markings that had swirls. ‘They’re necromantic runes – they give strength to the dead, return them to the realm of the living. They’re usually painted in the blood of a sacrifice.’ She frowned. ‘Such things are dark and forbidden, doomed to failure. You can return the newly dead to life but they are cursed with a half-life. Something is missing from them, something vital. Their soul, perhaps,’ she mused sadly.
She cleared her throat and continued, but her voice was quiet. ‘They exist, they live, but in abject misery.’ Bastion reached out and squeezed her arm gently and she patted his comforting hand.
I realised that Amber had experience of this, direct experience. She’d known someone once who’d been saved by magic then cursed by it.
She gave Bastion a brief smile of reassurance and turned back to the young dryad corpse. ‘But this…’ She tapped a rune with a gloved hand. ‘This is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It seems to be using runes not just to siphon magic but something more. This is the rune for water.’ She frowned. ‘Let’s look at the centaur.’
She did the same process on Bogan and I continued to video her examination for our records. We watched as she lit up more dark runes, this time on the centaur’s body.
