“Does coffee interfere with your powers or something?” DS Judge raised her cup to her lips and gulped back the foul liquid.
“No. It offends my fragile soul,” she snorted, downing the last of her cup before moving on to mine.
“I wish I had magical powers. I’d use them to do the paperwork.” She rubbed her eye. “You might wonder why I’mhere so early, but the truth is, I never left the station. I haven’t had any sleep since that night at Briarwood. I’m not even exaggerating. I’ve got a sleeping bag behind my desk and I tried to take a kip earlier this morning but Wallace was watching so I couldn’t. A whole bunch of reporters came in here shouting about some spectral horses that chased them across town and then vanished into thin air. I told them to jog on. We’ve got real crimes to solve, can’t waste time with no spectral horses. Incidentally,” she trained me with a fierce glance. “There aren’t going to be any more spectral horses, are there?”
“I’d say you’re in the clear.”
She sighed with relief. “We’re still taking statements from all the people in that mob. As of now, we’ll be charging five people with various crimes. I imagine there will be many more. Arson, property damage, assault, manslaughter, inciting violence… you sure know how to make friends.”
I shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a likeable guy.”
DS Judge’s eyes darted to the door, then fixed on mine. She drew her phone out of her pocket and placed it on the table in front of me. “Check it if you like. It’ll show you I’m not recording this conversation, Blake. There are no cameras in this room. No one is listening in. It’s just you and me.”
“I believe you.” Mostly because I had no idea what to do with her phone.
“So maybe you can tell me why the only record I can find about you is a death certificate from when you were only a few months old?”
“Why don’t you tell me why you think I have a death certificate.” I knew about death certificates from episodes ofElementaryon the telly. It was actually kind of cool, being at the station and seeing the human justice machine clanking along in real life.
Judge tapped the edge of her phone against the table. “There were reports that one Aline Moore – that’s Maeve Moore’s mother, another person connected to Briarwood with a death certificate to her name – was sighted at the castle a day before this mob attacked. That’s not a coincidence. I think you’ve been meddling with some kind of magic you don’t understand.”
I flashed her my winning Blake Beckett smirk. “You’ve got everything exactly right, and also completely backward. I’m on an urgent errand, so I can’t sit here forever and chat over these delightful cups of watery grit. I do have a question, though. Does Corbin have a death certificate?”
“Not yet. You’ll need to register his death. The front desk can give you a pamphlet to tell you what to?—”
I leaned back in the chair. “We might hold off on that for a wee while.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why? You think he might be coming back?”
“I couldn’t say,” I shrugged again. “Incidentally, what would you do if someone you thought was dead appeared to return to the world of the living?”
“I’d have to conduct a serious investigation. If it was found that some shenanigans had taken place to waste police time, there could be serious consequences for the people involved.”Tap, tap, tap,went her phone. “Jail time, even.”
“That’s fine. We can wash our hands of this and leave the next army of the dead for the law to deal with.”
Judge smiled. “I like you, Beckett. I’ll get the paperwork for you to fill out and you can have his body back immediately.”
“Did the autopsy reveal anything?” Corbin would be proud I’d remembered the word for human scientists dissecting bodies to figure out how they died. In the Unseelie Court, dissections were usually performed while a subject was stillalive, and they served no legal purpose – the Princes just found disembowelment fun.
“I’m not supposed to share details from an active investigation. Will it help you in your, er, magic?”
I nodded.
“Corbin Harris was killed when a knife entered his abdomen, and he bled internally. His body was then thrown on a fire and impaled on a stake. We have some DNA material, but it’s a mess. There’s human, fox, and some other DNA we can’t identify that the pathologist believes is a corrupted sample. The fire destroyed much of our physical evidence. All we know is he had several pens and a sweet wrapper in his pocket. Oh yes, and there was a metal object around his neck. It’s filled with some kind of weird organic sludge the pathologist couldn’t identify.” She pulled out a plastic bag from her pocket and tossed it on the table.
I picked up the bag, hating the way the plastic crinkled beneath my fingers. The object rolled across my palm. It was a tiny metal vial, encrusted with rust and stoppered with a tight wooden cork. A symbol was carved into the side – the same cross I’d seen on the pages of Clara’s book.
The cross of Saint Lazarus.
Even with my paperwork, I had to sweet-talk the women at the coroner’s office to get the body released. She said it wasn’t normal for the family to pick up the remains. Over and over again she asked me for the name of my funeral director. “A guy named Lazarus,” I finally said. “I can’t remember his number.But he’s going to do the ah...funeralingat our home, so he suggested we swing by and pick up the body. It just saves time.”
The flustered secretary finally gave in, and a few minutes later I returned to Arthur’s car with a large box under my arms. “That’s it?” he asked, peering at the box that held the last earthly remains of a larger-than-life human. We could both tell from the shape that Corbin wasn’t even whole any more.
“That’s it.” I placed the box on the floor in the backseat, slammed the door, and slid into the passenger side, glad that ordeal was over. “Don’t break hard. The lid isn’t exactly sealed, and I don’t want bits of Corbin through my hair.”
We raced back to Briarwood. On a normal day, the driveway would be choked with tourist vehicles as people showed up to get their fix of turrets and wonky stairs. But Corbin put the tours on hold a couple of weeks ago to focus on the fae. It was just as well because two guys carrying a body in a box through the grounds wasn’t going to get the castle top-rated on TripAdvisor.
Everyone was already gathered around the sidhe when we arrived with Corbin’s body. Arthur placed the box under a tree on the far side of the meadow, next to Maeve’s body. He kissed the tips of his fingers and placed them on her lips. I looked away, not wanting to intrude on his private moment.
