eldritch files 07 - elemental blood (16 page)

And speaking of weird shit…

I parked the Jeep on the side of the park, near where I'd confronted Brendi all those months ago and cheated her of her price a second time. Brendi had been the Queen of the Obsidian Court, taking Medbh's place when Brendi beheaded her. I'd kept that head in a porcelain state in my basement for months after that.

Now Brendi was back home in Savannah with her dad and living a normal life, with no memory of ever being inside of
Alfheim
. Medbh was back on the throne. A much calmer, saner, more sophisticated queen these days. And a lot more help than adversarial, though I wasn't holding my breath. Faeries were always Faeries and never to be trusted.

I cursed myself for not reloading my guns. I had a single bullet each, so if I had to shoot, it'd better be a meaningful one.

I entered the park and pulled the map out of my back pocket as my Elementals manifested. I'd pilfered the map from Crwys's wallet. It wasn't my fault I knew where he kept his notes. And his drawings. He always drew a layout of the crime scene.

This time he'd actually sketched the park. I was in the south end, in the middle of Couturie Forest, where the first body was found. Marking off steps to it, I knew the place the moment I walked through it as a shiver went up my spine. I immediately consecrated the place before I summoned my
dex
and focused on the area. I was asking this thing to cover a lot of ground and not one specific thing. My hope was that it would lock onto the most common abnormally and give me an answer.

The bright pentagram I'd drawn in the air hovered in front of me as I watched the Elements move inside. Eventually, it accessed the Akashic Records and—

Undetermined
.

What the hell? That was the same answer as Tas. Making a face, I did a quick go over, but the detectives had been thorough. I visited each of the places where stone bodies had been found, and the same thing happened. Frustration frayed my nerves as the morning wore on until I was headed across the golf course to a blocked off area. They'd constructed a huge, white tent structure over this nightmare, as Crwys called it. It was lit from within and cast an eerie glow on the area. Police cruisers sat unmanned in the area. Yellow crime scene tape strung around the cars flapped in the breeze.

I paused behind one car, my Elementals pausing with me.

-Something is wrong
,- Belenos said.

"Yeah…" It wasn't odd to see cop cars unmanned, but it was odd to not see their drivers at all. I took a few steps closer, this time looking for any of the owners of the cars. No one moved. In fact, nothing moved.

-We shouldn't go in
,- Coventina voiced, and I could just see her small form near the farthest car. I hadn't noticed her running off.

"I have to," I said to the wind. Crouching low, I made way around the side until I found an opening in the tent. Again, that
something's-not-right
bug buzzed in my ear. So I figured I'd go in, get my own intel, and get out.

That is…until I saw it.

The eerie look from the outside was caused by what could only be described as some sick, twisted, freakish depiction of hell, like the ones I'd seen in woodcarvings. It looked like someone had built a bonfire and dropped about twenty people inside of it. But as they scrambled to get out of it, they turned to stone instead of catching fire. The ones on the bottom were completely turned, and the closer I got, the more I could see the decaying Tas told us about. I picked up a stick and touched one of the victim's fingers.

Their hand came off and turned to dust.

Lady Darksome!

I dropped back so fast I heard the wind catch up with me. Damn. What a terrible way to go. But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was the bodies on top, the ones that hadn't stopped transforming into stone. They were all clawing to get out, crawling over the other. Arms of those on the bottom reached for the sky, trampled by the ones on top.

One of the victims, only half turned from the chest down, looked as if he were trying to run when he was caught. I cautiously stepped closer to him. He stared straight ahead, his skin was a sickly shade of gray. His face looked…he looked terrified.

And then he blinked.

I made a seriously girly noise as I stumbled back from him. My Elementals appeared in front of me, ready to charge whatever had just attacked. But there was no attack. There was just horror. I stared at the boy’s profile, willing it to look at me. To not have died such a horrible death.

"
Lady of the mountain
!" I hissed. “What monster did this?”

“That,” came a deep and seductive voice to my left. I whirled, guns out, and aimed at Lethe where she stood in the shadows of the tent's entrance. “Would be me.”

SIXTEEN

Crwys stood at the admissions desk, filling out paperwork. Levi was nearby on his phone. The rest of the coven members were in triage, and those well enough to stand were in the back with Arden. Luckily, the administrator was part of the Witch's Parliament so keeping all this weirdness under the radar was easy.

But also, unfortunately, the administrator was part of all this weirdness, which meant the entire Parliament was going to be stepping into this mess, and Crwys did not want more innocent lives affected in such a horrific way. It was bad enough they had invading armies of Risi running around, but now there were reports of Wolves involved. He knew they weren't part of the Aces because Bastien had just spent two months protecting Sam.

Or…that was how he chose to look at it. Even with Sam's reassurances that nothing happened, there was still a chasm there. A void he wanted to fill between them but didn't know how. And he wasn't sure Sam felt it as strongly as he did.

He realized his pen wasn't moving and set it on the clipboard. He was too preoccupied with the attack on the shop. But most of his worry and stress came from Sam giving over ownership to Brahms. She didn’t say she did…but how else could Brahms have done that spell and the Risi retreated as they did? He didn’t know when she’d signed it over, but she had. And maybe if she hadn’t…

No one would have survived.

Brahms seemed legitimate, and he really wanted to open that basement and get his king back. The way Crwys heard it, Brahms had nearly given his life to save him.

But having the place magically signed over to anyone, or in this case, anything else, set off centuries worth of alarm bells.

Levi appeared beside him. "We have a problem."

Crwys glance up at the ceiling. "When do we not? Is it Arden?"

"No. Max called. We have to get the morgue as soon as we can."

"Why?"

"He didn't elaborate, but he did say he’d been calling you for over an hour and you hadn’t answered.”

Cryws checked his phone. It was on mute. Six calls from Max.

Oh. Great. Only one message, so he listened to it.

"Where the fuck are you? I need you and your posse to get to the morgue fast. I don't know how much longer I can keep Prescott and my boss away."

"And?" Levi was looking at him.

"Morgue." He finished the forms, signed, and turned to the nearest coven member. "Milly, right? Good, will you call me or Samantha Hawthorne the moment you hear anything on Arden?"

The girl's eyes were as big as goose eggs the entire time he spoke to her. He got that a lot from Arden's bunch, now that they all sort of knew he wasn't human and more of a mythic creature.

Oh joy.

He and Levi made it to the coroner's office in record time, given the time of the morning it was. He called Tas a few times and left her a message to join them. She was probably trying to open the basement with whatever magic she had.

Inside, they had to wait while Max unlocked the main doors, then the doors to the examining room. "What the hell, Max?" Crwys said on his way inside, assuming Max had opened the doors electronically since he wasn’t standing behind them. He paused. Something smelled…
wrong
.

He spotted Max across the room, and he looked awful. His lab coat and scrubs were coated in some kind of gray dust. It also coated his disheveled hair, turning it from its usual brown to a light mud. His face was streaked with the stuff. He held out his hands from where he stood across the room. "Stop! Look down."

Crwys had nearly taken a step inside the room before Levi grabbed him at the same time Max warned him. The floor was covered in the same grayish-looking color as Max. Crwys took a closer look at the room and saw a silty powder covering everything, from the sheets over the bodies to the silver equipment, and some of it stuck to the walls. "What in the hell?"

"About a half hour ago," Max said, "everything exploded."

"Exploded?" Crwys looked around. "What exactly…exploded?"

"All those bodies. Everything brought in on this case." He held out his arms. "I was standing in the middle of it all when it just went…poof!"

Crwys wasn't sure if this was considered a crime scene or not, though Max had obviously done what he could to preserve it. But he and Levi couldn't stand at the door and yell at Max. "Max, I'm coming to you. Levi and I will make a single path and stay in it."

"I'm not stepping in that," Levi said, shaking his head. "You go right ahead. I'll stand at the door."

Giving his partner a narrowed eye, Crwys carefully moved through the odd silt. He nearly slipped on it twice, but caught his balance as his invisible wings righted him. He was careful not to knock anything else over as he folded them back in place. That's the fun of Dragon Magic. The rules were different.

"That's why I haven't really moved much," Max said as he offered Crwys his hand to guide him in.

"Yeah…that also explains why you locked the doors. That shit's like walking on ice."

"It's like silt, and on these well-polished tiles…" Max shook his head. "Yeah. Ice." He brushed at his hair and the stuff floated in the air.

"Tell me exactly what happened."

"Well—" Max gestured to the room. "I was over there by those pieces I'd shown you earlier. They brought in a few more of the parts they chiseled off the piece at the park and set it on a gurney over…" He looked. "There…I think. I was working on gathering a sample of what was left of the organic material when suddenly…it started spreading. The way I showed you. The stone process accelerated abruptly, and once it reached the end of it…everything exploded. Simultaneously."

This really didn't make sense. It wasn't as if the end process caused that kind of reaction. He'd seen body parts fully turned and the process slowed. Nothing explosive. Usually, when things ignited at once there was a logical explanation…but that was mostly true for things that didn't deal in magic. "Max…" He looked around. "What about the rest of your research? Is it intact?"

"Your brain just went where mine did. Yeah, I went and checked everything and made backups. Oh, but this is interesting—" Max carefully walked into one of the smaller labs where the silt didn't reach. Though, there were signs Max had been in and out of the room, depositing the stuff everywhere. He sat at the computer and typed a bit before a graph showed up. He turned and looked up at Crwys.

"I don't speak graph, Max."

"That anomaly? I was able to analyze it. Take it down to its smallest molecular parts."

"And?"

"It's bark."

"Like a tree?"

"Exactly like a tree. An Ash tree, to be exact."

"Ash?" Crwys was aware of certain trees possessing Magical Gifts, especially for the work of witchcraft as well as Faeriecraft. The Oak and the Ash were prevalent in the lore, but…he'd never heard of it being in blood. "So…how did tree parts get into blood?"

"I’m assuming it’s all part of whatever was injected into them." He sighed. "But now that I've shown you, I need to call this in. There's no way I can clean all this up without help."

An awful thought came to Crwys. "Have you heard anything about the larger formation? In the park? Did it explode too?"

Max's eyes widened. "I don't know. No one's phoned anything in."

Crwys carefully made his way back over the path he'd cleared previously until he got to Levi. "Call Prescott and see if anyone's checked in from the site in the park."

Levi had his phone out before he followed behind Crwys. "Where are we going?"

"To the park."

***

I HAD her in my sites. "Lethe."

"Samantha Hawthorne…Witch and daughter of Elizabeth Hawthorne." Lethe slowly, and a bit haltingly, moved inside the tent and began an odd limp-walk around the perimeter. I kept my guns trained on her as my Elementals appeared. They surrounded her as she stumbled, but they didn't attack, and wouldn't until I gave them the okay.

"Lethe, Dream Dragon and the murderer of my mother."

"Now, now, Sammy…" she said mockingly, knowing my mother used to call me that. "You and I both know if your mother had stayed out of my way, that wouldn't have happened. But instead, she decided to shift into a damn harpy and shoot me with a cursed arrow." Lethe kept her arms folded in front of her. From what I could see, it looked as if she was wearing an oversized sweater, large sweats, and boots. She wasn't anything of her former self. No ethereal beauty, no haughty looks or evidence of power. From the way she favored her left side, I knew that's where the arrow struck her. I just regretted that it didn't go in far enough or stay connected to her long enough to finish her off.