The City Morgue

The loup concept was even slightly more likely than the People concept. For one, the beheaded vamp was intact except for its inlet, and loups tore into everything with a maniacal frenzy.

Second, Greg would've slain more than one of them, and no other torsi littered the scene.

Third, if the killer was a loup, or more feasible, numerous of them, they would've vacated a lot of proof at the scene, everything from saliva and hair to their blood.

The medical examiner's bureau had genetic profiles on nearly all known shapechanger categories. As far as I could infer, the file encompassed no sheet exhibiting that any shapechanger DNA had been found at the scene.

Kneading my countenance didn't bestow me any outstanding insights into the predicament.

Most probable, the murders had been perpetrated by none of the above and for the time being, I had to vacate it at that.

The necropsy report corroborated the beheaded corpse as Homo sapiens immortuus, a vampire. An ironic name since the psyche of a human died the moment vampirism took hold.

The vampires anticipated no pity and no fear; they couldn't be equipped; they had no ego.

In a developmental class, they strutted near insects, having a nervous system and still unfit for forging thoughts.

A voracious hunger for blood controlled them and they massacred everything in their way in their urge to alleviate it.

I grimaced. The file incorporated no m-scan. All scandal scenes comprising death or attack were routinely surveyed for magic.

Technically both the police and MSDU could solicit access to this file and be bestowed such access by a tribunal order. The fact that an m-scan was missing meant that it revealed something the Order didn't want to reveal to the general public.

Unless the exact cretin that snatched the photographs somehow managed to plunge the scan in the trash.

The only lingering page in the file enumerated various female names. Sandra Molot, Stephanie Gomez, Mary Ying, Alisa Konova. None of them creaked familiar, and no description of the list was offered.

A fresh assessment of my hair disclosed that it was no longer gleaming. I made an abrupt scramble to the desk and dialled the number inscribed in the police report.

A fierce voice answered the phone. I introduced myself and inquired about the lead detective.

"I'm gawking into the murder of the knight-diviner."

"We've talked to you people," the man on the other end mumbled. "Read the goddamned report."

"You haven't talked to me, sir. I would very much relish any time you could find for me. Any time at all."

The phone clanged and I was welcomed by a disconnect signal. So much for an interagency alliance.

The watch on my wrist showed 12:58 p.m. I'd have time to hit the morgue. The enforced one-month waiting duration for the dead vampires was nowhere near to clearing out and the MA logo would ensure that I'd have no problem taking a look at the bloodsucker's torso.

I closed the file, fixed it into the nearest filing cabinet, and made my departure.

The City morgue stood in the middle of the downtown division. Directly across from it, past the broad expanse of the Unnamed Square, rose the golden dome of the Capitol Building.

The ancient morgue had been levelled twice, first by a scoundrel Master of the Dead, and second by a golem, the same one that established the Unnamed Square when it diminished the five city blocks to rubble in its failed endeavour to break through the Capitol's zones.

Even now, six years later, the city parliament refused to rename the vacant space encompassing the Capitol, surmising that as long as it had no name, nobody could summon anything there.

The new morgue was erected on the tenet of "third time's the charm." A state-of-the-art installation, it gawked like the bastard offspring of a prison and a citadel, with a handful of a medieval castle thrown in for nice measure.

The denizens quipped that if the Capitol Building came under incursion again, the State Legislature could simply ride across the square and hide in the morgue. Gawking at it, I could speculate it, too.

A drastic, forbidding edifice, the morgue hovered among the dolled-up facades of the association headquarters like the Grim Reaper at a tea party.

Its mercantile acquaintances had to be unhappy about its presence in their midst but could accomplish nothing about it. The morgue got more traffic than all of them. Another hint of the times.

I walked up the vast staircase, between granite rafters, and strode through the revolving door into a large foyer. The elevated windows divulged lots of light but lagged to oust the darkness entirely.

It blended in the nooks and along the embankments, lying in wait to clench at the ankles of an unwary passerby. Polished tiles of dreary granite coated the floor.

Two foyers glistened from the contrary embankment, both surged by blue feylantern glint. The tiles halted there, rehabilitated by yellowish linoleum.

The atmosphere is scented of death. It wasn't the substantial nauseating odour of the rotting flesh, but a unique sort of stink, one of chlorine and formaldehyde and bitter medicines, reminiscent of a hospital scent, but nobody would perplex the two.

In the hospital, life vacated certain signs. Here only its absence could be felt.

There was an information desk between the two alleys. I made my way to it and introduced myself to a clerk in green scrubs. He glimpsed at my ID and shook.

"He's in seven C. You infer where it is?"

"Yes. I've been here before."

"Good. Go ahead, I'll fetch somebody to open it for you."

I took the right foyer to a flight of stairs and got down, into the cellar level. I enacted section B and came to a halt at its end, where a steel gate barred my advancement.

After five minutes or so, abrupt steps echoed through the aisle and a woman chafing green scrubs and a stained apron came scrambling around the nook.

She carried a thick three-ring binder in one hand and a jingling key chain in the other. A few thin wisps of blond hair had evaded her futile hair net. Brad's circles enclosed her sights and the membrane on her countenance drooped a little.

"Sorry," I mumbled.

"Nahh, don't bother about it," she asserted, groping with the keys.

"It didn't hurt to take a walk."