Everly won’t be here for another few hours, but it’s not the morning DJ in the doorway. It’s DK. He steps through the haze in a black leather jacket, black jeans, silver flashing in his eyebrow, lip, nose, and ears. He drops a burner phone on the console. The screen is cracked, but glowing with a single text.
Body down. Pier 19. North warehouses.
I feel the shift in my blood, the old pull. “Girl?” I ask, giving him my attention.
Damon shakes his head. “Male. Unknown age. Looks like a Scratch deal that ended with too many holes.”
I exhale, smoke passing through my lips. “Fuck, that shit is pervasive.”
He smirks, but it’s thin tonight. Tired. “Clock’s ticking, Hunt. We need him in the ground before sunrise, or the rites won’t take.”
“Dude,” I gesture to the soundboard. “I can’t just leave my shift.”
“I got you a replacement.”
On cue, Mateo pops his head in the door, his long dark hair pulled back in a manbun. “Hey, man.”
“Hey.” I give my fraternity brother a glance and then look back at DK. “I’m not handing the station over to some random person.”
“Did you just call me random?” Mateo places his hands on his hips, indignant.
“I mean, random to the station. I had to go through hours of training and work my way up to getting my own shift. One fuck up, and there are plenty of people willing to take over.”
“Look,” DK scratches the back of his neck, “handling shit like this is our job. I know you don’t like it when there’s a shift in routine, but we can’t leave that body out there.”
He’s right.
Mateo steps forward. “I do have some experience,” he adds. “I worked at my high school station. It can’t be much different.”
I run a hand through my hair. “It’s not like I have much of a choice.”
Before I move out of the way, he’s already eased into the seat and has the headset down over his ears. He gives us both a grin and a thumbs-up. “Have fun.”
Ares gets on his feet the second I do, ears pricked, making sure he’s not left out.
I stub the cigarette, pissed about losing out on the second one, and shrug into the jacket hanging on the back of the chair. No robes tonight. We are the city’s undertakers, but not the kind that embalm and shake hands.
When someone dies wrong, the living call us. No police. No paperwork. We come in the black van with the tinted windows and clean up the scene. Once we’re back on Barons’ territory, we wrap the body in linen soaked in river water and myrrh, then carry it down into the crypts beneath our lands, where the soil is consecrated with blood older than the city charter.
There’s a rite for every kind of death.
Gunshot? We wash the wounds with wine and salt and whisper the names of the roads he’ll never walk again.
Overdose? We burn cedar and poppy and bind the arms so the soul doesn’t claw its way back up the throat.
Unclaimed girls are stripped bare, their clothing burned in a bronze basin so no echo of the fight clings to the shroud. Then they’re laid out on a slab engraved with peacock feathers that will watch over them as they pass from one realm to the other.
No questions. No judgment. Only respect. Even the bodies that come from East End, already zipped up in a body bag, because the dead remember who treated them gently.
I scratch Ares behind the ears.“Komm.”
DK pushes open the station door. “Van’s running. I’ve got the shroud in the back.”
The van’sheadlights flash over the chain-link fence, tires crunching over broken glass and river stones as we ease onto the concrete parking lot of the old warehouse. Moonlight barely cuts through the fog crawling in off the water, it’s too thick and dark outside. The building itself looks like it should have been torn down decades ago, red-brown flakes making up most of the walls.
“What is this place?” Carson asks, killing the engine. He was in the driver’s seat when I climbed in the passenger seat with Ares. Two other Shadows, twins named Jace and Slade, sit on the bench next to DK in the second row. They’re the muscle.
“A fucking dump,” DK says, pulling on a leather glove.
