Page 118 of Demon's Bluff
“Holy shit, Rachel!” the blond man said as he yanked his feet from the desk and sat up. His handheld game nearly hit the scratched-tile floor, and he exhaled, blowing his bangs from his eyes when he caught it. “You almost gave me a heart attack.” His gaze went to my lack of a building ID, then to Elyse. “Ah, you know I can’t let you in there without an official presence.”
Behind me, Elyse took a breath to be “official.”
“That’s okay.” I bumped her shoulder, immediately rocking away from her. The woman was practically sparking with line energy. “I’m here to get some info for Glenn.”
Iceman’s dented rolling chair squeaked as he leaned back. “Why didn’t he call?”
I shrugged, looking over the small outer lobby/check-in area with the cluttered desk taking up one side, rows of ancient cabinets the other, and enough space in between to handle maybe five gurneys if everyone was friendly. The fourth wall was another set of those swinging double doors leading to the morgue itself. “Because the I.S. doesn’t like the FIB checking up on their misfilings, so I was never here, okay?”
Grinning, Iceman laced his hands over his middle and reclined in hischair. His body language said it all. We weren’t getting the drawer key. Not without the right bribes anyway—which we didn’t have. “What do you need?”
Elyse beamed at him, playing the helpful assistant. “He wants to know if any John Doe Vamps came in since the Jane Doe Wolfs,” she said, her high voice sounding out of place down here. “He’s thinking there might be a cross-species connection.”
“Oh!” Iceman sat up and pulled his chair to the desk. “Just Johnny.”
My heart gave a pound. Dr. Ophees’s failed charge. “Johnny? How can he have a name if he’s a John Doe Vamp?”
“Because he’s going to be here for a while and we’re all friendly.” Iceman smiled at Elyse, and the young woman’s expression went stiff.
“You sure he’s twice dead?” she asked. “Maybe he’s an undead sneaking out for snacks.”
Iceman laughed. “Pretty sure,” he drawled, then hesitated, sniffing suspiciously. “Ophees brought him in after sunup, so even if hehadbeen an undead, he’s twice dead now. I doubt he has anything to do with the current Jane Wolfs. Johnny came in with no body trauma, clean apart from his blood.” The man sniffed again. “As in he didn’t have any. No blood, no aura, no chance. Do you smell something burning?”
I glanced at Elyse, glad now I’d left my bag in the truck. We’d done the best we could to clean up, but the scent of burnt amber sort of stuck to a person. “Keep it quiet,” I cautioned as I felt her pull in even more ley line energy through her familiar.
“Oh, I can be subtle,” she said as she sashayed to the desk.
Iceman blinked, the man clearly oblivious as she smiled and put her palms on the desk. A whispered something passed her lips, and then she blew a haze of aura-tainted magic at him.
The guy didn’t have a chance. His eyes rolled to the back of his head, and he slumped where he sat, hands hanging slack.
“Whoo!” she exclaimed, beaming. “That felt good! He’ll wake up in about twenty minutes thinking he dozed off. He won’t even remember us.”
Which meant it wasn’t just a sleepy-time charm but one affecting memory as well.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Elyse tugging at Iceman until she had his head resting on his arm lying across the desk. “It doesn’t erase what happened. It simply prevents recollections from moving into long-term memory.”
“Same difference,” I muttered, tired of the double standard. Like I wouldeverwork for them. If I was going to bend the law, I’d pay for it like everyone else. Was paying for it.Wake up, Rachel. Take the easy way out for once.
Elyse flushed, her pride taking a hit. “What, you want me to wake him up?” she said as I went to get Kisten from the hall.
“No,” I said lightly. She was ransacking the desk when I came back in, and I cleared my throat. “Morgue key is on the Bite-Me-Betty doll.”
“You’re joking.” Expression dubious, she looked at the naked doll hanging from a nail in the wall, finally using two fingers to retrieve it.
I backed Kisten through the swinging doors so I wouldn’t have to knock them open with his footrest, and Elyse followed me in, slowing as she studied the two walls of drawers, each four rows high stretching the length of the long room. At the far end, a comfortable arrangement of chairs and a coffee table sat for anxious relatives waiting for their dead to arise. The morgue was for self-repair and the truly dead only, vampires on one side, humans and the rest on the other, though I had been assured every drawer had an interior release mechanism.
“They usually keep the unclaimed at the end,” I said, glancing at the names on the drawers and wincing at the three onetime Jane Wolfs now sporting their real names. It seemed odd that I’d been here just a few days ago, though it had been two years.
“I’ve never seen a waiting room in a morgue.” Arms over her middle, Elyse lingered by the doors to keep watch on the outer lobby.
“Key?” I asked, and she tossed it to me, the naked plastic doll landing hard in my hand. Leaving Kisten parked, I began searching. “The morgue has been here a long time,” I said softly. There was a reason Cincinnati had once been known for its grave robbing, and it had nothing to do withproviding the schools up north with cadavers. Our Inderland population had always been high.
“Where’s the furnace?” she asked, and I glanced up at her uncomfortable tone.
“Through there,” I said, and her attention followed mine to the heavy metal door tucked almost out of sight at the end of the long room. My foreboding swelled when she went to pull on the handle and it clunked against the lock. “The door code is 45202,” I said, and I heard her sigh as she began to punch numbers. “Found Johnny,” I added as I reached the last drawer.
The rhythmic beeps of the door lock were loud as I unlocked Johnny’s drawer and pulled it open. Johnny was older, brow creased and crows’ feet about his eyes. It seemed likely that once he lost his youth, his master had gotten tired of him and decided to move on. He’d been drained too far and then killed a second time, circumventing the promise to become an undead. Perhaps it had been a blessing. He might not have had the social structure to maintain his undead existence.