I handed her one of T. Laine’s business cards. “She isn’t a coven-bound witch, but she can give you good advice on the best people to call for creating a null space.”
Pench pocketed the card. “Thanks.”
“One thing I’ve noticed,” I said, “—and it might be more positional and locational than anything else—but so far we’ve had one male fall really badly ill. Thomas Langer. And he got better. All the dead and accelerated-decomp bodies are female. Well, so far. She needs to be in a null room. Like, right now.”
“Hmmm. It’s interesting but not the enlightening epiphany I was hoping for.” Pench spun and left the room.
“Enlightening epiphany,” I repeated to the comatose patient on the bed. “That’d come in right handy. Like a genie in an old lamp. So,” I said to Erica. “Is it all right if I read you the way I read the land?”
She didn’t answer, not that I expected her to. I pulled off my glove and approached the bed. I touched the bare skin above Erica’s bandages. Electricity snapped at me hot-cold, scalding-freezing, and I leaped back, rubbing my fingers on my spelled gown. The feel ofdeath and decaywas a vile hot/icy/slimy sensation and I’d be doing no deeper read at all. Erica was dying. Fast.
I tried to interview more patients and got nowhere. No onewas physically able or willing to talk to me. FireWind would be unhappy, but there was no help for that.
Quietly, having accomplished little, I stripped off the protective gear, scrubbed my hands in hot water and vile-smelling soap, and left the paranormal wing for the pathology department.
***
It was Monday, so the office was open and working on a normal schedule. When I rang the bell in the outer office, a young woman came to the window. She was wearing an ID with the wordHistologistbeneath her name. I asked for Dr. Gomez; she shook her head and disappeared. Moments later, Gomez came to the window and gave me a look of distaste. It was similar to the expression I gave the cats when they deposited a hairball or dropped a headless rodent on the floor at my feet. Her uniform scrubs looked spiffy clean, but her face and hair looked as if she had been dragged through the wringer. I was guessing she was still here since I saw her last, hadn’t been home, and wanted someone to blame. “You again,” she accused.
“Me again,” I said with equanimity. “I’ve been threatened with death by a bunch a churchmen pointing shotguns at me. A doctor who’s pissy after being on the job for twenty-four hours is nothing.” My mouth clamped shut. The wordpissyhad come out of it.Out of my mouth.
“Pissy?” Gomez said, blinking. She barked a laugh. “A gun, huh? Somehow I’m not surprised.”
I wasn’t sure if that was a sneer against churchmen or against me. Maybe both.
“Come on back.” She punched a button and the door beside me opened. I followed her through a narrow space with a receptionist, offices to either side, and down a hallway that smelled of chemicals, to a back elevator. We got on, the doors closed, and the elevator descended. Gomez didn’t look at me so I didn’t look at her. I knew the silent treatment when I saw it. The doors opened and we were in an even stinkier place, the reek of formalin on the air and the sound of a negative-pressure exhaust fan going in the background, and the stench ofdeath and decayunderneath it all.
“Lemme show you something,” Gomez said. She led me toa microscope, shoved a rolling desk chair up to it, and pointed at the chair.
Feeling as if I were about to be smacked for doing wrong, I sat. I had never looked into a scope like this one, with double oculars and all sorts of magnifiers. I put my face against the oculars and figured out how to focus the fancy scope. I discovered some pretty blue and red and brownish circles and things. “What am I seeing?”
“Liver of a normal human.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah. Dead.” She touched my shoulder and I sat back. She removed the liver and stuck something else under the magnifier.
I returned to the microscope. There were greenish and brown things. Some were washed-out looking. “Looks like ghosts of the previous one. What’s this?”
“Hepatic tissue acquired during the postmortem of the woman from Stella Mae Ragel’s farm. The dead woman’s liver,” she clarified. “And ghost cells is as good a descriptor as any. The microscopic differences are astounding. And the slices of every single organ are similar.
“Come with me. I have more.”
I followed her to a sterile-looking area where we dressed out in sky blue null unis. In the back, she opened a glass-fronted refrigerator and took out a pan full of plastic specimen jars. She opened two. One held a chunk of reddish meat that looked exactly like cow liver. The other was full of olive green goo topped by a green froth. “Normal liver and thedeath and decayliver? You need to get the body pieces into a null room,” I advised. “The first body we sent here in a cooler never made it. It decomposed through the cooler, through the floor of the transport vehicle, and into the asphalt of I-40.”
Gomez cursed colorfully as she put the containers back in the unit. “So that’s what made my commute home to see Mama so terrible. Maybe I need to check on the recent body.”
I didn’t expect her to let me go with her, but when I followed, she didn’t tell me no. She led the way to a separate cold room. When she opened the door, a reek rolled out, a stench like a jungle abattoir. Green rotting soup lapped out the door and into the hallway. Gomez slammed the door and jumped back all in one motion, and cursed some more.
I was instantly sick from the stink and backed away.
“The floor is rotted through,” Gomez said accusingly.
“You need a full coven to deal with this. They can’t fix it yet, but they can put a shield around the energies to stop them from spreading. Call T. Laine Kent. Get her to help facilitate contacting the North Nashville coven for you. It’ll cost, but if you wait any longer, you’ll have to replace the refrigeration unit and the floor, and you might have to dig out the ground underneath this area.” With a hand over my mouth, I got out of there.
***
My clean clothes still held the death stink, so the first thing I did at HQ was to strip in the locker room, shower, wash my hair, and dress in fresh clothes. I didn’t bother to dry my mop but twisted it into a bun before I put the stinky clothing into a sink with hot water, hand soap, and a cup of baking soda from the break room. Then I took my tablet and caught up on my files while sitting in the null room, as the chill of antimagics crept into my bones. Unfortunately, soap and null energies did nothing to stop the stench that was trapped in my sinuses and memory.
