"Yeah, we know, dirt nap," Jenks said. "Rachel already told us."
"Chill, Jenks," I said, and he clattered his wings, cold when they brushed my neck.
"Can we get a saw here?" Glenn shouted, but everyone was gone.
"Back up," Nina said as she took a firmer stance, feet spread wide. "It's hollow. I'll open it up."
I was getting a really bad feeling. Whatever was under the floor was close to but not quite identical to the man in the park. Ivy yanked me out of the way, and I stumbled. My eyes were fixed on the new concrete, hidden by a curse tied to the collective. Someone had made a deal with a demon. Or, even worse, they had succeeded in duplicating demon blood and twisted the curse on their own. Watching Nina lift the bar over her head, I wasn't sure which one scared me the most.
Nina sent the butt of the support bar crashing into the floor with a grunt. The cement cracked at the blow, and Jenks left me in excitement. Again the vampire swung. This time, the pole went right through, the resounding crack of cement seeming to shake me to my bones. Nina stumbled to catch her balance, and Glenn reached out to stop her fall before she could tread on the broken slab.
"I can see it!" Ivy exclaimed, and I jerked my attention from Nina, staring at Glenn's hand on her arm.
"Well, if that doesn't beat all creation," Nina said, and I stiffened at the old-world phrase. I must have heard it a dozen times from Pierce, and it would make the vampire in Nina at least 150 years old.
Cold, I leaned forward over the hole. "You must have broken the charm," I said, not wanting to call it a curse.
Jenks flew down to the dark hole, rising almost immediately with his hand over his face and gagging. I found out why when he brought the scent of burnt amber to me. "Tink's titties!" he exclaimed as he landed on Ivy's shoulder, grasping a swath of her hair and hiding his face in it. "Rache, it stinks more than you when you get back from the ever-after."
"Thanks," I muttered, trying to see in as everyone else backed up. The smell didn't bother me much - anymore.
"That's burnt amber," Ivy said, her hand over her nose. Wincing, she looked over the patched floor to Nina. "Can you open it up more?"
"What the hell is wrong with you Inderlanders!" Glenn protested. "You can't just bust it open! Give me ten minutes, and I'll have a saw in here!"
But Nina was already hammering at it with the regularity of a metronome. Cement chips flew and we all backed up and let her go, dust and dirt layering her new pantsuit. Glenn looked as angry as if Nina were beating up his little sister, but finally Nina set her pole down and wiped her forehead. Rust-smeared hands on her dusty knees, she peered past the chunks of head-size concrete and dust to the small cavern below. The scent of burnt amber was obvious, thinner but somehow more pervasive as it was diluted out.
As one, Glenn, Ivy, Jenks, and myself crept forward and peered down to the burlap bag holding a shape about the size of a large dog. It was tied with a HAPA knot.
"You all see that, right?" I asked, and Glenn nodded, not looking up. "Better open it then," I said as I backed up, and he reached for the blue gloves jammed in his back pocket.
Nina fidgeted at the delay as Glenn put his gloves on again and knelt over the bag, cement chips popping under his shoes. His fingers worked the knot, and I clenched my teeth when it opened to show another mutilated body, curled up as if sleeping, under four inches of concrete. She was wrapped in a sheet. I don't think clothes would have fit her anymore, her limbs were so twisted.
"Please tell me she was dead before she was cemented in," I said, seeing the hoofed feet and curly pelt.
Dropping the sheet to the side, Glenn carefully shifted a wrist, red and swollen. "She was restrained," he said in a flat voice.
"For only a few hours," Nina said, and she shrugged when she met Ivy's gaze. "If it were longer, there'd be more damage."
"And you'd know all about that, huh?" Jenks asked. Yeah, the dead vampire would.
Glenn turned the corpse's face and lifted a lid. Red, demon-slitted eyes stared up, cloudy in death, and I shuddered, making Nina suck in her breath to gain control. Or perhaps she/he was responding to the corpse's teeth, pointed like a living vampire's. The skin was ruddy like Al's, but bubbled and pebbled like a gargoyle. It was hard to see with her curled up, but the arms looked wiry and strong, as if she could haul nets over the side of a boat all day. Wings? I thought, and I backed up fast. What were they doing to these people?
"Okay," Glenn said as he stood. "We need to get this back to the . . . ah, forensics lab. I want to know how long the body was stressed before she died."
"An hour. That's all. Perhaps less." We all looked at Nina, and she shrugged, dust and rust marring her makeup like dried blood. "But by all means, do your scientific poking and prodding. She's suffered so much, what's one more indignity?"
Hands over my middle, I turned my back on one monstrosity to face another that society had deemed too uncomfortable to put on public display. My vision grew blurry, and I wiped a hand under my eye. Damn it, she'd been conscious when they'd done that to her, I could tell by the pain in her face. And it was a her. Something gut deep told me it was a woman, something more than her pointy facial features landing somewhere between a pixy and a buffalo.
I could hear the soft sound of sliding fabric as Glenn opened the shroud farther, and the creak of his shoe's leather as he shifted his weight. "A body under the floor doesn't match anything you've found at the earlier sites. We need to revisit them for a spell-hidden body."
I nodded, stiffening when Ivy touched my shoulder. "You'll be okay for a moment?" she asked. There was pity in her eyes, and I tightened my resolve even more. "I'm going up to make a call. The reception down here sucks like a dry socket. You'll be okay until I get back?"
"Yes," I whispered, and she strode to the hallway, the sound of her feet vanishing almost immediately. The whining of the elevator replaced it, and I closed my eyes. This might be the last time I had a chance to look at the body, and unclenching my teeth, I opened my eyes and turned around.
Nina noted my pain and said nothing, probably cataloging it as something to be used against me at a later date. "Apart from the young woman whose heart gave out, this is the first female victim we've found," she said. "She's also the most deformed. Even more than the newest victim."
"Meaning?" Jenks prompted harshly as he sat on Glenn's shoulder.
"Meaning perhaps what they're doing is more effective on the female gender," Nina said as she shifted the shards of broken cement around with the tip of her metal rod. "I don't think they expected what happened here. This woman lived for a day. They buried her instead of putting her on display. They weren't ready to move yet, and couldn't risk her being found."
I put a hand to my middle again, sick from the cocoa. I'd grown up with experimental practices and wild theories as my parents struggled to keep me alive, and this was hitting close to home.
"I know this woman," Glenn said, and Nina looked sharply at him. The FIB detective was carefully examining the woman's clenched hand and didn't notice the vampire's dilating pupils. "Not personally, but from the missing persons' files. I looked them over last night."
"The I.S. files?" Nina asked, and Glenn glanced up, blanching at Nina's black stare.
"Yes. I don't remember her name, but her ring matches the description of one worn by a witch who went missing last Friday."
Glenn dropped her hand, and the deformed fist fell against the corpse with a soft sound.
Numb, I stood over her and forced myself to look. "Did you notice if she was a carrier for Rosewood?" But I already knew the answer.
The skin around Glenn's eyes gave away his distress. "Yes. They all were."
Nina squinted at me as if we had been holding out on her. "Rosewood? The blood disease? They were all carriers? When were you going to tell me this?"
"I confirmed it this morning," Glenn griped back. "When were you going to tell me Rachel had found a new site?"
Jenks was a darting blur of silk and glowing dust. "Rache," he said, trying to get into my line of sight. "What more do you need? God to send a telegram? I know you think you're safe, but you need to go into hiding, and you need to do it now!"
"I'm fine," I breathed, my eyes on the woman's hand, the skin red and cracked, as if it was trying to turn into a hoof and she had held the change off by her will alone. "She has something in her grip."
Glenn hesitated, sighed at Nina's gesture, then gave up on protocol and pried her hand open. Jenks flew down and darted back to me, something shiny in his arms. "Hey!" Glenn protested, but I wouldn't let him land, and he finally dropped it right into the collection bag that Glenn had hastily opened.
"It's a piece of mirror!" he said as Glenn zipped the bag shut and wrote on the label.
"Now you can see it," he grumbled as he handed it over, and Jenks landed on my wrist as I took it. I'd seen evidence through a bag before, and together we peered down at the thumb-size piece of rose-tinted glass. My heart sank.
"I think it's a chunk of a scrying mirror," I said, and Jenks hummed his wings.
"No fairy-assed way!" he said, clearly not seeing what that meant.
Demon magic, hidden bodies deformed into increasingly familiar shapes, blood slowly being changed into something else. The scattershot amulet I'd used was keyed to the man's hair. Clearly he wasn't under the floor, which meant the man's structure had been changed right down to the genetic level enough to match the woman and to ping on a scattershot charm. They really were trying to make a demon. They were trying to make a demon out of a witch by using the questionable success of each previous victim and layering it on the next. And by the looks of this corpse, they might be getting close.
"There's blood on it," I said, my fingers trembling as I handed it back. "If it's not hers, it belongs to one of her captors. We can use it to make a locator charm and find them instead of an empty room."
Glenn shifted in excitement, but I felt awful as I looked down at the woman and silently thanked her. She'd been forcibly abducted, experimented on, and tortured. Yet she had given us a clue, hiding it with her body and hoping we were clever enough to find it, recognize it, and then use it.
"Let me smell," Nina said. "I can tell you what species it is."
There were voices in the hall, and, grimacing, Glenn quickly broke the seal and held it under her nose. Nina jumped as the scent hit her, and Jenks and I watched as the two consciousnesses fought for control, eyes closing and hands trembling. It was the elder vampire who looked out at us when Nina's eyes opened again. "Human," the undead vampire said through Nina, a ribbon of excitement in her voice. "It belongs to one of the captors. We have a chance. Finally we have a chance."
I looked at the ruined woman under our feet and silently thanked her again. A chance. That was all I needed.