“Yes. Ming is crazy. Batshit bonkers.”
“If I had gone to Ming’s alone when she summoned me, I’d never have been allowed to leave, would I? I’d have disappeared.”
Yummy didn’t reply, which I figured was an answer of its own.
I watched Yummy, squeezing herself into the tiniest corner as the light brightened around us, and remembered the burned spots in Ming’s grass. “Are you? Sane? Bonkers?”
“I may be batshit crazy. I still get a really nasty sunburn if sunlight so much as brightens a room I’m in, but I can laugh and be vamped out at the same time.”
“Go inside and get in your vamp hole before you burn to death.”
In an instant, she was gone and the door hung open. The faintest whiff of scorched vampire hung on the air.
I pulled my cell phone, sent an abbreviated report to HQ, grabbed an empty plastic coffee-grounds jug, and walked to thetree line. I dug up a baby vampire tree sapling and stuffed it into the pot with a good helping of Soulwood dirt. “You’uns grow big like the last twig, and it’ll be the last time I take you anywhere,” I warned the Green Knight.
Nothing happened, so I went inside, where I crawled into bed next to my cat-man for a morning nap before I had to face PsyLED and a job that might kill me and mine.
* * *
Work was not at my desk, as FireWind had suggested, but in the field.
A city contractor crew discovered a body while excavating a foundation to support a new electric supply line. The county had a massive, doubly redundant electrical grid managed by the Tennessee Valley Authority, one that connected the various city power supplies to various top secret government and military contractors, all of which needed a steady power supply to run their top secret tests. The benefit of the electric grid redundancy to the rest of us was that power outages were usually localized and quickly restored.
One of those electric grids was being rebuilt, and digging with a backhoe had resulted in the discovery of a body with a brick in its mouth, an iron stake in its chest cavity, and its decapitated head between its legs. It was weird enough that both the lead Knoxville PD investigator and the head of Knoxville CSI had shown up on scene and determined they needed to toss this case somewhere else. They called PsyLED to take a look in case the body was vampire, witch, were-creature, or some other paranormal.
Occam and Margot were off on some other case that might be a witch spell gone wrong. Margot was from a witch family and could sometimes sense witch magics. So FireWind, who needed a witch at the scene with the “brick-in-its-mouth body,” called T. Laine in on her day off and sent me to help. I was assigned as second on the case because I wasn’t a witch. And I wasn’t senior enough yet. I wasn’t insulted. I was relieved.
Lainie, however, was not happy to be called in on her weekend day off, and by the time I arrived on scene, she had already arrived, dressed out, stomped over to the crime scene, andcrawled into the trough. Over my winter coat, I pulled on a white crime scene uni like hers and slid into the hole with her.
“Well, this sucks,” she muttered to me. Her fists were on her hips as she stared at the bones revealed by the backhoe. “I hate it when the city crime scene techs get something right on my day off.”
She looked up to the surface and spoke to the investigator on scene. “Detective, for now this is ours.”
The city investigator nodded, said, “Good by me. I’d rather deal with drive-bys than weird shit. I’ll leave you a uniform to keep the lookie-loos and the media in line. I’m a cell call away if needed.”
“Come on, Ingram,” T. Laine said. “PsyCSI gets to finish digging this out.”
Back on the surface, she called our own paranormal crime scene crew, telling whoever answered the call that we had a cold case, skeletal remains, a partially opened gravesite, and needed their expertise. While we waited, we crossed the street to a row of stores with a little mom-and-pop coffee shop and bought a box of coffee and cups for everyone who would show up. Then we sat in my car to watch.
This team was once again led by Dora Wincome. The lead tech looked as grumpy as Lainie, so maybe it was her day off too. Being in charge meant longer working hours than the usual eight- to twelve-hour stints of most law enforcement. And more paperwork. Dora must never sleep. From her expression, I gathered that being in charge was a pain in the behind.
Also by her expression, and the glares she sent our way, it was clear she recognized us from the last crime scene at my house. She was still glowering her displeasure when the skies opened up again. Following a singular cussword I could read on her lips, Dora and her crew put canopies up over the exhumation site and, with only a few more nasty glances at us, and all of them wearing sky blue P3Es, they crawled down into the ditch.
Over lunch I called Mud to chat, and to make sure she was helping her sister and taking care of the critters at our house. It was Saturday, but her chores still had to be done, and Mama Grace had driven her over and stayed to visit. The two women were currently ensconced at Esther’s, cleaning, washing babyclothes and cloth diapers, folding clothes, and making lunch so the exhausted mother could get a break and take a nap. Cherry, who was usually a high-energy dog, had preferred to stay home, and since there was access to the backyard to do her business, I was good with that. That necessary call over with, and since the rain hadn’t let up, T. Laine and I did a lot of research and caught up on reports while Dora and company worked in the mud. Lots of mud.
T. Laine and I kept warm, stayed dry, did research, and brought in lunch for everyone, paying on the PsyLED Eighteen credit card.
* * *
Two hours in a steady downpour later, a thoroughly unhappy PsyCSI team had the body exhumed, all evidentiary materials bagged, and the skeleton in a body bag on a gurney in the back of their transport vehicle.
T. Laine and I climbed from our nice warm car into the back of the PsyCSI unit, and Unit Eighteen’s resident witch began species and paranormal identification of the skeletal remains. Immediately after placing her hands on the bones, Lainie said, “Female. No residual magic in the bones, so not a high-power practicing witch. Not a were-creature.” She flipped the skull over and looked inside at the upper teeth and what remained of the palate. “No hinged fangs, so not a vamp.”
Dora Wincome cursed with interesting imagination, words that once would have shocked and embarrassed me but in which I had recently taken what Mama would call an unhealthy interest. Not that I wanted to cuss, but the use of words to relieve stress or attack others was fascinating.
“You telling me that our crime scene people worked in those miserable conditions for nothing?”
“Not nothing,” T. Laine said. “Somebody thought she was a para and murdered her. All I can tell is that the body wasn’t any known, or at least currently detectable, powerful paranormal creature. Maybe she had been bitten by a vampire and her family killed her to keep her from rising. Or she had been born a low-power witch. A woman punished for magic of some kind, since she was staked and her head was between her legs. That’s not nothing.”
