As it turned out, the devil at my door helped me get an early start on getting the coffee ready I needed to brave the rest of the day. Detective Rice called about ten minutes after I’d kicked Lucifer out.

My phone which had been on the bed next to me, had been swallowed by the sheets, and my search for it was neither very coordinated nor elegant, then again, I’d been woken before noon. It took me about two minutes to find my phone and answer it.

“Christine,” I said, slumping down on the bed slightly breathless.

“Please tell me I didn’t interrupt you jerking off or raising some dead rat out of compassion or something,” she said. She was a good detective and a loyal friend, but after raising that one crow, she always suspected me of secretly keeping a reanimated menagerie.

I rubbed my eyes. “No, Christine, I just had to find my phone. What’s up?”

A growl from my right made me look back over at my table. The cursed poodle had somehow climbed up there and was now sitting in the center like some creepy sentinel. I so needed to get Soul back to Lucifer before her curse could contaminate someone.

“You remember the corpse from last night? The one that was found in the salt marshes?”

“Yes, vividly.”

“You remember what you said about that strappado thing?”

I sat back up. “Yes, because the ME said her arms had been bound behind her back and then pulled upward until breaking, like was done to magic users once before the Inquisition collapsed upon itself. But it’s not like I know for sure that’s what happened to her. It’s not like she was able to tell us.”

I’d learned more than I wanted to know about how magic users had been tortured centuries ago for all manner of crimes real and imagined. The Collegium made that part of our history mandatory.

“Yes, the missing tongue, I know.” Christine sighed. “We found more bodies in the salt marshes, and I need you here. Hawkes, I hope you are wrong about the strappado. If you’re not, if this is a hate crime against magic users, and if they’re being tortured before they’re killed, this case might get ugly.”

In my necromantic opinion, bodies in the salt marshes were already ugly, and I was glad, so glad, I hadn’t had anything to eat yet. I was good at raising people, but it was the smells and the fluids that no amount of training could prepare you and your stomach for. No one at the Collegium had ever warned me about that.

“I’ll be there in twenty,” I told Christine.

The detective snorted. “That’s optimistic this time of day. I’ll give you a half hour unless you can magic traffic to flow faster.” With that, she hung up.

“Fucking psycho killers,” I said.

Soul, still sitting primly in the center of the table, growled in what I could only assume was agreement. Her curse should have slowly killed her, but it just made her creepy, like some magical patient zero. If my landlord saw her, it would be bad. If she bit him…

“I’m taking you, but you’re staying in the car,” I told the poodle. “And then I’ll get you back to the Devil. You look like he took good care of you.”

Following Lucifer’s logic, if I gave the poodle back to him after looking after her for a while, he’d owe me and would have to introduce me to Tiamat. The very thought of meeting her excited me, but there was the small matter of a potential series of hate crimes. I hoped Christine was wrong about that. After all, it had been very late at the morgue last night, and I had no business coming up with theories like the strappado.

Meeting ancient creation goddesses was going to be my reward, something I could look forward to after I’d helped Christine deal with her fresh bodies. Oh, heavens, I hoped they were fresh.

#

Soul had hopped on the passenger’s seat of my Honda hybrid with ease and sat there as if she belonged. I’d gotten car seat covers after my first case with Brunswick PD, bog revenants reanimated by a magical artifact, and so far, they’d more than paid for themselves. Soul could drool all she wanted, and it wasn’t going to bother me one bit.

I’d brought extra coffee in a thermos and was sipping while I navigated the congested streets of Brunswick until I finally got to the salt marshes. Christine’s half hour had been a pretty good estimate, it turned out.

I parked behind the row of police cars that was already there, working a cordoned off area that looked eerily extensive. The media vans and reporters with their cameras and microphones were setting up shop as close to the perimeter as the patrolling officers allowed.

I reached back to grab the consultant windbreaker from the back seat. It had a pentagram on the chest, indicating to everyone what my consulting was all about. The windbreaker’s collar allowed at least for some cover, and the hood could keep me sheltered from the reporters. I really didn’t need my face all over the evening news.

I scrambled to wiggle into the windbreaker without getting out of the car, and Soul looked at me with those beady eyes, her low growl filling the car, her judgment tangible.

“What? There are no changing rooms anywhere, and the press is waiting right outside. I like my privacy, okay?”

She licked her nose. Her growling intensified.

“Whatever. Stay,” I told her.

I got out of the car and made it all of two steps before realizing I should probably crack a window so she didn’t suffocate. If the press saw me put a precious pet in such danger, it might end up being uglier than potential crimes against magic users, not something I needed.

Once I’d opened a window, I got my oversized rubber boots from the trunk and slipped those on before walking toward the police tape. The boots were the very ones I had bought that day I’d run into the Devil while shopping.

I tossed my converses into the trunk, shivering not from the cold wind but from the remembered awkwardness of that day. How was it fair to run into someone so utterly hot while you were wearing poorly enchanted socks?

It really wasn’t, but now as then I told myself it had been the universe’s way of telling me to no longer fantasize about…anything related to Lucifer. He was a fruity cocktail that tasted like it didn’t have any alcohol in it, and if you sucked that straw, well, you’d get plastered before you knew it, and then you’d end up dancing naked on a table, and I was a very bad dancer.

For that reason, the Devil wasn’t for me.

At any rate, my embarrassment had made it so I never wanted to go buy rubber boots ever again. The spell I had handcrafted to the boots made them repel pretty much anything that came in fluid form, and they were as durable as Kevlar. No one had taught me how to do that at the Collegium, thank you very much, higher magical education.

As I walked toward the scene, I looked at where officers were working. The day was bright, and only a few clouds broke the perfect blue of the sky over the ocean that stretched out beyond the marshes.

The salty brine smell that rode inland with the waves already tickled my nose, but while the wind was nice, the late-season warmth underneath it did not bode well for the state of the bodies. It was October now, but if they’d been here all through summer, then they were very ripe.

The officer guarding the tape looked mildly bored. He waved me through without checking my ID. Most officers knew me at a glance, because while I wasn’t Brunswick PD’s only magic user on staff, I was their only necromancer. We were rare enough to begin with, even rarer in law enforcement, and it made sense to spread us out over departments, then deploy us as much as was practical.

I spotted Christine over to the right, by the white tents the crime scene people set up for their evidence gathering. Taking a deep breath to steel myself for whatever was to come, I walked up to her.

She was talking to another detective I didn’t know. The sea breeze had pulled strands of her dark blonde hair from her bun, and I realized she’d probably gotten less sleep than I had. She turned toward me the exact moment my foot caught on a rock and I stumbled a little.

“Hawkes, you okay?”

“Sure, just a stupid rock

“Right. Meet Mitch Lewis, the latest addition our unit. He transferred to homicide from vice this morning.” Christine stepped aside to reveal the second most gorgeous man I had laid eyes on that day, except this one was human and mortal and real.

“Hi,” I said lamely and held out my hand for him to shake.

Mitch took it in his without hesitation, which I appreciated. Some magic users could do a lot with skin-to-skin contact—a gleaning of thoughts, controlling physical movement, and more. That didn’t mean everyone could or would, but prejudices still ran deep. It was nice to meet someone who didn’t come with that kind of baggage.

“Hello,” Mitch said with a deep and steady voice that made me imagine myself huddled in a warm blanket by a crackling fire. “Christine tells me you are the one who gets the bodies to talk.”

Oh, sweet gods, yes, please. That voice, short blond hair and deep brown eyes—maybe I could have handled that combo, but the way he was smiling at me and gently squeezing my hand a full two seconds longer than strictly necessary? I was fucked, or more precisely, I wanted to get fucked, by Mister Sexy Detective Lewis.

Next to me, Christine crossed her arms. “Yes, bodies,” she said, the impatience in her voice impossible to miss. “I need you to get to those.”

So much for the pleasantries and my own personal fantasies of Sexy Detective Lewis sneaking away to steal a kiss.