Authors: Tate Hallaway
As I was getting ready to move to take a close-up of the stomach art, I stopped. The letters on his wrist—had they shifted? Of course, what did I know from Hebrew, but I would have sworn it was different a moment ago.
I took another picture, forgetting about the stupid flash again.
Pop!
Now I was sure the tats had moved. The rude devil was in a completely different position. The last pose had been plenty memorable; I didn’t think I’d imagined it.
I rubbed my eyes. No time to start with this again.
Pushing down my rising blood pressure with effort, I
concentrated on taking slow, steady breaths. I needed to be rational, scientific. Scientists didn’t believe in magic.
“Complicated relationships” aside, magic
wasn’t
real.
Besides, I was safe here in my basement, far away from other people, distractions, and the world. If I thought I saw something, then I needed to prove it to myself.
So I fished my phone out of my pocket and took a picture.
Nothing moved.
Either I
had
imagined it, which would be an enormous relief, or the phenomenon had been caused by the bright light. So I pressed the button on the analog camera to trigger the flash.
I compared the body to the image stored in my phone.
It
was
different.
I did that routine—flash, click, flash, click—about six more times.
When I flicked through the digital images the differences were clear. Some words had changed completely. The gross devil bucked and swayed. In one particularly disturbing picture, it seemed to wink at me.
Stepping back from the corpse, I looked around the room. I half hoped a troupe of cops would jump up and yell, “Surprise!”
You can’t even imagine how disappointed I was when they didn’t.
A shiver shook along my spine. The temperature in the basement space seemed to drop a degree or two.
I would have been a lot happier thinking that the shifting, changing tattoos were some kind of super-elaborate hoax to flummox the new girl. My finger slid through the photos again, marveling at the articulation of the rude devil and the changing facial expressions of his sexual partner.
Turning my phone off, I stuck it back in my pocket. I very carefully set the other camera on the mortician’s table.
Things like this shouldn’t happen.
Yet they always seemed to. To me, anyway.
Snapping the phone off, I shoved it resolutely into my pocket. I was going to pretend that none of this had just happened.
If I didn’t, I’d have to admit Stone was right and this guy was magical.
I couldn’t believe that.
Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes. I’d just keep them shut for a moment and it would be a little “do-over.” When I opened my eyes, I’d be a rational scientist again. I wouldn’t be a scared girl totally willing to believe crazy Officer Stone’s babbling about booby-trapped corpses.
That would be
crazy
, and I wasn’t crazy. Not anymore.
Okay. Two more calm breaths and I’d be okay.
I opened my eyes.
The body still lay on the stretcher next to the mortician’s table. He looked very dead, at least. The tattoos continued to stare at me, but I ignored them. Instead, I smiled again at the PJs.
Before trying to move him, I pulled up the corpse’s lip. The gums were pink. With rat poisoning, they should have been white.
I was going to have to do a full autopsy, after all.
Which meant I was going to have to get the body onto the table…all 190 pounds of it.
I knew I should have stuck with that weight-lifting resolution Robert and I made last New Year.
It took me twenty minutes, but I managed, incrementally, to nudge his body onto the mortician’s table. I was
glad there was no one around to watch me grunt and swear. Sweating and straining, at least, made me feel normal, grounded. Work did that for me.
The crack of the ribs was an ominous sound. I’d been so absorbed in the autopsy that the sound startled me out of a deep concentration. There was no evidence of internal bleeding, which would have been consistent with rat poison. In fact, I was having trouble finding anything wrong with the guy, other than the fact that he was quite obviously dead.
This corpse was so healthy that he didn’t even have any plaque buildup in his arteries. Frankly, that spooked me almost more than the shifty tattoos. Nobody was this healthy and dead. It was unnatural.
The contents of his stomach, which often told you a surprising amount about a person, their whereabouts and general habits, revealed a very mundane mixture of microwave popcorn and soda, brown—probably something like Coke or Pepsi. It seemed he’d died from a home movie night. I did take a sampling of the liquid to send to the lab to make sure there wasn’t any rat poison in it, but that was looking less and less likely in my mind.
“What killed this guy?” I asked out loud, for the benefit of the tape recorder on the table. Maybe I’d actually have to look for some kind of brain aneurysm, though his pupils hadn’t looked particularly dilated.
When my hand closed around his heart to check it for signs of trauma, something moved. Quite distinctly, I felt something slither along the back of my glove. I made a grab for it. I thought it might be a giant roundworm. It wouldn’t
be completely out of place as they hang out in the lungs during part of their lifecycle.
But, as gross as a giant roundworm is, it doesn’t bite. Nor does it make a wailing hiss, like some kind of banshee from hell.
When sharp teeth penetrated glove and flesh, I screamed. I pulled my hand out with a jerk. When it hit the air a sound echoed through the warehouse morgue like rending metal.
A black snake gripped my hand between its jaws. The scaly reptile twisted and curled around itself, as I pulled thirty inches of it from the corpse’s body. Its beady, black eyes fixed on me intelligently. Once free from the corpse, the snake entwined around my arm, almost like a python, squeezing.
I screamed continuously, bashing its head against whatever surface I could find. Instead of loosening its hold, every bang seemed to push the snake into my skin. It collapsed in on itself, flattening to become two-dimensional. Soon, a black-and-white picture of a snake formed tight circles from my wrist to my shoulder. The only thing that still appeared to be alive was the eye that gleamed maliciously just under the surface of my skin.
The sound of medical equipment hitting the floor with a clatter made me look up. The corpse sat up. I would have mistaken it for ill-timed rigor mortis, but his gaze was different. He looked straight at me, with eyes completely black and hard like the snake’s. Despite his body, open and ruined by the autopsy, he spoke. The words were foreign and strange. I thought that somewhere in all the gibberish, I heard a name. He said it again, much more clearly: “Spenser Jones.”
Swinging his feet off the gurney, he grabbed his liver from where I had left it in the scale. He scowled at the shreds of the PJs I’d had to cut away, but took the plastic bag I’d put them into.
The toe tag made a scraping sound as he walked out the door.
Instinct propelled me to the sink, where I attempted to wash off the snake. Peeling off the shredded remains of my glove, I scrubbed with surgical soap. I rubbed my arm with paper towels, frantic to remove the image.
The lidless eye glinted menacingly at me. Though unmoving, I could tell it was alive.
I screamed at it and poked it. Nothing worked.
In utter desperation, I grabbed a bottle of formaldehyde and splashed it right into the eye just below my pointer finger. “Die, you creepy fucking thing!”
The tattoo hissed. I felt a tightening, and saw the image wiggle on my skin. I didn’t know if it was the shouting or the chemical that seemed to work, and so I squirted more of the liquid on it and continued to yell. “Take that, you evil bastard!”
My arm flailed around like some kind of isolated seizure or a bad comedy skit. I just kept swearing and squirting
until the light went out in the snake’s eyes. The tattoo faded so that it looked like I’d had it for years, but it didn’t disappear entirely.
My knees buckled and I collapsed onto the floor, “Ohshitohshitohshitohshit!”
I cradled my arm against my chest. My eyes flicked from the empty gurney to the monochrome tattoo on my arm. I kept hoping one or the other would return to normal.
No luck.
This
couldn’t
be happening again. I was supposed to be in a safe place, damn it.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on calming my breathing—a difficult feat considering how close to hyperventilating I was. I rocked back and forth until I stopped shaking. Fumbling in my pocket, I found my phone. I should’ve called my therapist.
Why was it, then, that my fingers automatically dialed Valentine’s number, instead?
Was it because I needed the way he picked up on the first ring or the breathless sound of relief in his voice?
“Alexandra,” he said, with that tiniest trace of a Russian accent that made the vowels of my name sound aristocratic, precious. “I’ve been waiting for your call.”
“It’s happening again.” I whispered a choked sob into the receiver.
His response was exactly why I didn’t call a psychologist. There was no hesitation, no question of my sanity.
“Are you in danger?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, looking at the hideous black marks on my arm. “I mean, I don’t think so—at least not at the moment. There was a dead guy…a necromancer, that, uh, just walked away.”
“You were hit by a spell.” It wasn’t a question. Somehow, hundreds of miles away, Valentine
knew
.
I pulled the cell away from my ear and frowned at it. I could see his face in my mind with its hard, sharp lines and
that
look in his storm-colored eyes—the one that bordered on a fanatic sort of protectiveness, the one that often preceded…violence.
“I shouldn’t have called,” I said almost to myself.
“If there is magic, you need me there.”
“Don’t talk about magic, please.” I whispered. Then my mind hit on the rest of what he’d said. “Wait. Are you saying you’re coming—here?”
“Of course. If you call, I will always come.”
Coming?
Had I told him where I was? “Valentine, you can’t come. I don’t have a guest bedroom, and don’t you remember all the trouble we got into last time we talked about spells and magic? It wasn’t just trouble, either, it was really fucked-up.” My voice bordered on a kind of desperate screech.
He laughed kindly. “Yes, I’d say. But I sense this time is different. At any rate, I’m already on my way,” he said, full of calm reassurance.
Then air, like a hurricane wind, roared through the speaker.
I pulled the phone from my ear again when the sound became deafening. “What’s all that noise? Valentine! What about the body? I mean, I’m kind of responsible for it, and it’s wandering around town and no one is going to believe me…
again
. I can’t take that. I can’t.” My fingers on the phone were turning white from the pressure with which I gripped it.
My phone…
I had pictures.
Proof.
I sat up so suddenly that I banged the top of my head on the bottom of the sink. He was right. This time
was
different: I had photographic evidence.
“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “I’m going to be okay. Never mind. You don’t need to come. It’s not magic. It’s…it’s…Well, I’ve got pictures at any rate. And, really, I’m not sure I’m ready to see you again and, uh, South Dakota really isn’t your scene. Too quiet.”
My voice trailed off when I realized he’d hung up some time ago.
Valentine was coming.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. Part of me was excited, of course. This place had never felt like a home without him. Hell, I’d been missing him from the moment I’d left Chicago and run out on him while he was still serving time.
I hated leaving him in prison—without even a note of explanation. I’d changed my number and done all the things the psychologists told me I had to do in order to start over, but I felt like a heel.
Yet, he hadn’t had an angry word for me. He said he’d been waiting for my call.
I’d tried to explain this to other people, but Valentine was different with me. Never once had his darker side ever spilled over onto me. The only time I ever saw his fierce nature was when he was protecting me.
My therapist, however, was going to be furious. For some reason, every mental health professional I ever dealt with hated Valentine. Their abhorrence increased if they met him, it seemed. All I ever heard was how much healthier I’d be without him. I was going to get an earful if I confessed to calling him.
Well, I’d deal with that later.
I rubbed my head where I’d bumped it. I took a deep, steadying breath and pulled myself up on shaky knees. Opening up the pictures, I reassured myself that they were still there.
There was always the possibility that the chief of police would look at my phone’s images and tell me he only saw the same photo twelve times. He could look at my arm and see nothing.
But I couldn’t get away from the fact I was going to have to explain the missing corpse. I could lie, I supposed, but whatever I said I’d end up in the same amount of trouble, possibly worse if I told a bad lie. Unfortunately, I had a lot of experience with that as well. If I was going to get fired or sent to the loony bin, I might as well get there honestly.
I straightened my apron and caressed the tattoo on my arm where it tingled uncomfortably under the lab coat. “Okay,” I said out loud to help steel myself. “I can do this.”
“Of course you can, dearie,” said a muffled female voice somewhere in the room.
“Hello?” I looked at my phone, briefly thinking I must have butt-dialed a number by accident. Seeing that it was off, my next thought was of my assistant. However, a quick scan of the room showed me it was still empty. “Where are you?”
“Not sure myself. It’s dark and cold.”
The freezers. “Mrs. Finnegan?”
“Yes, hon?”
I rushed over to wrench open the drawer. I pulled it open, expecting to find Mrs. Finnegan miraculously recovered. Instead, she was still very much dead. Her lips were a deep shade of blue. I stared at her for a long time before
working up the courage to poke her on the cheek. She didn’t flinch. In fact, her skin was stiff and hard.