Harvest doesn’t know how long she stands there, staring at the body. At some point, she feels Quinn’s grip on her shoulder, and she turns to look at him, her eyes white and unfocused. She doesn’t even remember switching to her second-sight, as if it activated on instinct.
Though, if it’s to hide or reveal what she’s looking at, she isn’t sure.
Ezra is nowhere to be seen, and Harvest realizes dumbly that Quinn must have already escorted him out. With his hand gently cupping her cheek, Quinn turns her around and pulls her closer as he leads her toward the front door. She lets him, her body pressed tightly against his to prevent her from looking back. Outside, there is already a patrol car, and she sees Ezra sitting in the back, his head hanging down. His shoulders are shaking.
Her legs feel heavy and light at the same time. She wonders where her year of Bureau training has gone. Her mind is annoyingly blank.
Quinn leads her to his car and lowers her into the seat. She sits and waits, watching Quinn as he makes a phone call. She clutches her necklace, twisting the H around her thumb and forefinger, untwisting it, and then twisting it again. She avoids looking at the back of Ezra’s head and watches Quinn as he motions toward the driver of a white van that has just pulled up to the curb. The witch who jumps out is middle-aged, with long gray hair braided away from her face. She shakes hands with Quinn and then moves with swift efficiency to retrieve her kit from the back.
Harvest wants to curl up and hug herself so tightly that she will stop existing. She can’t decide how to do that without getting her shoes on the expensive leather seats, so she turns, resting her feet on the rim of the car door. She leans forward, her head between her knees.
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Quinn is talking to the crime scene manager, but he can’t help glancing over at Harvest. She looks pale, and as much as he feels sorry for her, he hopes she doesn’t vomit in his car. She shifts—thank the gods—and leans out of the car with her head between her knees.
Two uniformed officers have already cordoned off the house, while two more have set up a roadblock. Magi-Tech begins processing the scene, hands covered in white gloves as they bag certain items and take pictures from this or that angle. Quinn looks over at Ezra, whose head is now held in his hands, his body trembling. He isn’t sure what to think. He can’t imagine Ezra hurting Hazel, but, then again, Ezra had been angry last night. The slurred threats are fresh in his memory.
He makes his way to Harvest, whose posture is a reflection of Ezra’s. “I know you’re not okay,” he says softly, leaning down to catch her eye, “but is there anyone I can call for you?”
She makes eye contact briefly, shaking her head. He places his hand on her back, his thumb absentmindedly tracing circles against the base of her neck. “Let me know if that changes.”
She nods.
Quinn looks up to see his team slipping under the caution tape, though one of them has a harder time of it. Agent Wild Neverbee curses under his breath as the tape snags on the top of his wings. Agent Angel Fernandez attempts to hide their smile behind their hand for a second, but can’t contain the short bark of laughter even as they unhook the tape from his wing.
Wild takes a deep breath, smoothing his tie against his chest. He mumbles thanks to Angel, and they both move forward, spotting Quinn standing by his car with his hand still on Harvest’s neck.
“Hey, boss. What’ve we got?” says Angel when they catch up to him. Angel is a witch, shorter than both Quinn and Wild. Their freshly dyed blue hair is cropped close to their head and their hazel eyes scan the front of the building in interest, mentally noting details that may or may not be relevant. Angel has worked for the Bureau for five years, with two of those years being in SCD. Previously, they worked in the Bureau Archives but decided to trade their desk job for more work in the field. It’s painfully obvious that they are excited about a new case, though a strong sense of professionalism keeps them from bouncing on the balls of their feet.
Quinn motions to the left, taking a few steps away from Harvest. “We have one body, female. CMS is Stella. We should get in there soon.”
Wild hides his excitement a little better than Angel, though his wings, a cross between moth wings and fallen leaves, do flutter slightly. His hands are stuffed in his pockets, and he leans back on his heels. Wild is fairly new to the team, having passed his exams last year.
He wears a standard-issue necklace with a serialized dog tag—an illusion charm that he can activate when needed. Not that it helps much. Even without his wings and pointed ears, he looks entirely fae: tall and slim with curling dark hair and peridot green, slightly slanted eyes. High cheekbones and smooth, dark skin. Long nimble fingers and graceful movements.
Except when he’s trying to slip underneath caution tape.
“Is Dr. Burrows here yet?” asks Wild, looking around for the medical examiner.
Quinn realizes that he hasn’t seen the dark-haired demon yet, and he glances around briefly, spotting her car down the street. “Looks like. We should be able to get in there soon.”
As if on cue, the crime scene manager, Stella, pokes her head out of the door and waves them in. Quinn glances at Harvest one last time before making his way up the front steps.
“That was quick,” he says, approaching the doorway. “Thanks for getting us in here as soon as possible.”
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Stella briskly runs them through her assessment of the crime scene as Quinn and his team follow her up the stairs. “The victim is in the bedroom, though there is one thing of note in the entryway.” She points to the door. “Opened with a key, or unlocked already. There was no forced entry, but the protective charm hanging above it was burned to a crisp regardless.”
“What can cause that?” asks Wild.
Angel frowns, kneeling to look at the burned peach pit and the remains of some herbs. “An intruder. Even if they had a key, if the wards were constructed to keep certain people out, it would fight hard to fulfill its purpose.” Their hands are covered in white cotton gloves, spelled to prevent contamination from the wearer as well as protect the wearer from magical residue that may still be harmful. They use a finger to push the burned peach pit to the side, then they write something down in their notebook. “But it should have done more than just burn if it was working properly.”
“Like what?”
“Prevent the intruder from entering, most likely. Or give the intruder spell-burn, if they managed to get past it. But really, it depends on what it was meant to do, I suppose. We should ask the owner of the apartment.” Angel looks up at Quinn.
“Harvest Rosenbloom,” he supplies. “She’s outside. We found the body together.”
Angel raises an eyebrow. “The body that’s in her bedroom?”
“I noticed the door was open as we walked up the stairs, and when I entered, I smelled blood,” says Quinn. “Ezra Evans was here already. He was standing in the bedroom.”
“And how is Ezra involved?”
“Ex-fiancé,” says Quinn. The fact that he doesn’t specify whose ex-fiancé is not lost on Angel, who raises a delicate eyebrow in response.
“Let’s move on,” Quinn says to Stella, who nods and continues toward the bedroom.
“There were no other clear disturbances in the apartment. The victim is female, late thirties,” she says. “There is no formal identification on the body.”
They follow Stella into the room, where Dr. Burrows is kneeling next to the bed, examining the body. Her curtain of black hair obscures the two, short horns protruding from her forehead and her black eyes. She has turned the body just slightly, and the victim lies in the middle of the bed, a navy blouse wrinkled and pushed up to reveal a pale torso. The victim’s left arm is not visible from where Quinn is standing, but the right arm is, with the hand hanging over the edge of the bed. The victim’s jeans are skin-tight, highlighting the awkward way the hips are turned, the way the legs are twisted.
Quinn knows there must be lacerations to both of the wrists, though there is so much blood, clotted and turning the sheets brown, that he can’t see the actual injury.
Burrows is looking at the victim’s right hand and frowning. “It looks like a suicide,” she says quietly as Quinn kneels next to her. “But it’s such a clean cut. One movement, no hesitation. Almost too perfect.”
“Do we know who she is yet?” asks Angel, looking up from their notebook, pen poised in their white-gloved hand.
“It looks like Hazel Rosenbloom, but I would like to get a formal identification.”
“There’s no need,” says Harvest from the doorway. “It’s not her.”
“How do you know?” asks Angel.
Harvest blinks, her eyes turning white. “The death is recent, and Hazel’s aura should still be visible. This—” Harvest waves her hand toward the victim, “—is not Hazel’s aura. I think something is covering the body. An illusion, maybe.” She blinks again and looks at Quinn. “The aura looks like…well, it looks almost like static. Interference.”
Angel frowns and leans closer to the body, patting their pockets until they locate a small brass magnifier, similar to a jeweler’s loupe. Unlike a jeweler’s loupe, however, the end is capped by a thin layer of labradorite. They spin a focusing ring until they find what they’re looking for: the fine, intricate weaving of spellwork. Normally, Angel would be able to cast a spell to reveal magic such as this, but doing so at a crime scene risks contaminating potential evidence, adding spell residue or magical signatures that could interfere with the samples taken by Magi-Tech.
“She’s right,” they say. “There is an illusion. It’s sitting so close to the skin, I might have missed it if I wasn’t looking.”
“What does that mean exactly?” asks Quinn.
“It means,” answers Harvest, “that we’ll have to break the illusion before we can properly identify the victim.”
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Quinn tasks Angel with dismantling the illusion. Their connections in the Archives will be helpful with research on this type of spell.
He tells Wild to take a uniformed officer to interview the neighbors. He knows Harvest’s downstairs neighbor is fae, and he’s hoping that Wild’s presence will display a certain measure of good faith. Fae can be notoriously close-lipped around authority on a good day and even less forthcoming to someone outside of their species. For a brief moment, Harvest looks eagerly at him, awaiting her own task. Her expression falls almost imperceptibly when he instead asks her to wait in his car. She goes willingly, at least, as he leads her out of the crime scene and down the stairs.
He instructs a second uniformed officer to take Ezra to the Bureau headquarters, where he will have Angel and Wild interview him. Ezra still seems to be in shock. As Quinn read him an official caution, Ezra merely nodded in response and hung his head low.
Burrows finishes her preliminary examination, though she tells Quinn that it might not even matter. “If this is an illusion, I don’t know what the real victim looks like, let alone what the injuries might be or even the time of death.” She looks up at him, her black-filled eyes softening. Pleading.
He thinks about the last time he saw that look: two nights ago when she casually handed him a spare key to her condo. He pocketed it silently, hiding his reluctance with a kiss. The key is on his kitchen table. He hasn’t used it.
“Will you come by later?” she asks.
He nods, his eyes flicking briefly to Harvest, sitting in the passenger seat of his car, clutching her body as if she’s trying to fold into herself. “I’ll try.”
Her mouth hardens. “I know. If you can…” Then the softness is gone, replaced with cool practicality. “Come by the morgue in the morning. Even if we haven’t broken the illusion, we can still test the blood.”
Quinn thinks about stopping her from walking away, considers putting his hand around her waist, and dropping a kiss to her cheek despite their colleagues already surreptitiously ducking their eyes.
Instead, he keeps his hands in his pockets and watches her as she makes her way down the sidewalk, slipping under the caution tape and sliding into her car without a backward glance.
He makes his way over to his car, where Harvest has leaned back against the headrest, her arms folded across her chest as she frowns at her front door, Magi-Tech technicians still filing out with evidence bags.
“He didn’t do it,” she says when Quinn gets in the car. She looks over at him. “Ezra wouldn’t hurt anyone, let alone Hazel. He’d be more likely to throw a fireball through the wall if he were truly angry.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, but I still have to interview him.”
She nods. “I know. Let’s go.”
He gives her a sidelong glance, wondering if it would be worth it to remind her that he is still the senior agent. Probably not, so he starts the car.