A mortuary isn't exactly the place a girl wants to spend her Friday night, but that's where I was spending mine. I would much rather have been curling up on the couch under a fluffy blanket, but nope, I was spending my evening looking at a dead body. It was macabre, to be sure, but honestly I've come to expect it.

It’s just one of the struggles of being a witch.

My name is Zelda Valentine, and yes, I am a witch, sorceress, bruja, seidrmadr, or any number of other names for one who can call forth the forces of magic into the mortal world and bend them to their will.

In addition to being a practitioner of the mystic arts, I'm an investigative journalist for the Heartland Grimoire, the Southeast’s premier source for supernatural news, printed, packaged and shipped all across the southeastern United States, right out of Three Trees, Tennessee, so when something spooky goes down, I'm the witch on call.

Now, don't think this is just another one of those fake magazines printed on cheap paper, with stupid headlines like “I gave birth to a Werewolf,” or “Bigfoot’s getting married”. Actually, that last one was true. The service was surprisingly beautiful, if a little smelly.

What? Don’t believe me? Well it's true. The American Southeast is perfect for supernatural types. That's part of the reason I moved here. I mean, think about it. There's a ton of open space, far away from most of civilization, and if anybody sees something they shouldn't, hardly anyone else in the rest of the world would think they're any more than some crazy redneck spending too much time drinking bootleg hooch they made in the woods, if they even talk about it all. There are supernatural things all around us, blending in and adapting to the world. There are so many creatures that can don glamours that make them appear totally mundane, even human, and that’s if they don't come that way out of the box.

Such is the case of the zombie that runs our funeral home.

Thunder rumbled overhead and I could see lightning in the clouds in the distance behind Reagan's Funeral Home and Crematorium. I closed the door to my car, a bright red Camaro from the early seventies that I had named Annie, imagining the opening notes to Toccata and Fugue in D Minor playing in the background. It probably would have been creepier if it was actually nighttime, rather than the golden hour of early twilight. The gray storm clouds were already moving, slowly blanketing the orange southern sky. I could smell the crisp scent of rain in the hot summer air. Another bubbling growl of thunder punctuated my entrance into the building, where Jennifer Reagan was waiting for me.

Jenny had a body like a fashion model, all flowing curves and long legs. She was dressed in a gray sport coat and dark slacks, as well as a pair of black leather gloves that looked incredibly uncomfortable in this southern heat. Her ghostly pale skin and snow white hair could likely confuse her for someone with albinism, if you didn’t know what you were looking at. I did.

While living the dream in Atlanta, working as a pathologist for the CDC, Jenny Reagan had been bitten by an honest-to-God zombie. Now, unlike the shambling masses oversaturating pop culture these days, real zombies date back to Haitian voodoo practices back in the nineteenth century. They can very easily blend into human society, and have been for a couple of centuries. They are completely functional, provided they sate their hunger for human brains.

Jenny's face brightened with a pearly smile. “Hey, Zelda. Thanks for coming.” she said with a sweet southern drawl that would make Scarlett O'Hara swoon.

“Hey.” I said back, holding out my fist. She bumped it.

Jenny never touches someone with an open hand. A zombie's nails and teeth are like razors, perpetually sharp, no matter how much you file them down. It’s the parasite inside them altering the host’s DNA to fulfill its need to reproduce.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “You sounded pretty upset over the phone.”

Her pretty face contorted into a grimace. “This one’s bad, Zee.”

“How bad?” I probed, raising a quizzical eyebrow.

“She's gonna have to have a closed casket service.” Jenny looked like she was about to vomit, which was saying something. As a mortician, she dealt with death on a regular basis. On top of that, Reagan's was the only funeral home to actively cater to members of the supernatural community, which meant that she's probably seen more than your fair share of horrifying things. Not to mention that the woman had to carve out human brains in order to survive. She was definitely not squeamish.

“Come on.” She said turning to go deeper into the building.

The funeral home was quaint, and had that pleasantly musty smell that seems to permeate every old building. It was decorated simply with antique furniture made mostly of creaky wood, and photographs of what I believed to be the Blue Ridge mountains, among other nature scenes. Pamphlets detailing various services the funeral home offered lined a few simple tables along the front hall. We rounded a corner and went through a door marked “Employees Only”, and it was like going into another dimension. As we descended a creaky staircase into the basement, we traveled from a comforting, homey atmosphere to a barren, sterile place that smelled of chemicals and disinfectant. Fluorescent lights hung above us, bathing the halls in a cold white light. We walked into a room with a large steel table bolted to the floor. Across one wall was a line of square steel doors with heavy latches that would open to reveal refrigerated ex-humans.

Rolling up her sleeves, Jenny walked over to a station that looked almost like a medical crash cart, but that had an insidious looking device on top of it that I knew was for replacing the cadaver’s blood with embalming fluid. In the sterile light of the mortuary, surrounded by cold lifeless steel and tile, she looked sallow, sickly…dead. She pulled up her hair and pulled a pair of blue latex gloves over her leather ones. She passed me a pair and I pulled them on.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

As I did I caught sight of myself in the reflection of one of the shiny doors. I didn't exactly look like I should be examining a body. I had thrown on an old long-sleeved flannel over a t-shirt that had a faded Nine Inch Nails graphic over my unimpressive chest. I hadn’t taken the time to brush my hair, so the layered bob I wore it in more resembled something like a hay bail after a windstorm. The dorky glasses on my nose were lopsided, after one earpiece had broken and I had repaired it with crazy glue.

“Her name's Vanessa DeSilva,” Jenny said as she pulled open one of the fridges on the wall and drew out the slab. She spoke in a calm detached tone, all business. “She was attacked outside of a public bathroom in Three Trees Park two nights ago. Park rangers found her dead in the grass. Parents ID’d the body at the M.E's office yesterday. I got her this morning. The funeral’s in two days at the family's church.

I walked over and looked at the girl. She had been young and slender, with knobby, coltish limbs that hadn't quite finished growing, dark hair and copper skin that used to be beautiful, but had turned gray and waxy in death.

It was a gruesome sight. Large chunks of her torso near her ribs and belly had been torn away and her neck was bent at an unnatural angle. Even, scalloped furrows in her body suggested that something with massive teeth had done this to her. Half of one of her blossoming breasts had been torn away, along with much of the flesh along that side of her ribs, leaving the white, shattered bone visible. A large tear in her abdomen had been packed and stitched up so that whatever was still inside her stayed there.

She’d died horribly, suffering, probably in unimaginable pain. Christ, the girl couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Bile clawed its way up my throat, but I bit it back. It wouldn't do any good to blow chunks all over Jenny's floors.

“So, what’s the story?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level and look at the situation logically, detaching myself from the situation.

“The authorities are calling it a bear attack.” Jenny replied.

“I wish that was it.” I pointed with my gloved fingers. “When bears attack, they mostly use their claws for tearing and rending, and their teeth aren’t nearly this big. Half her chest was taken off with a single bite, for god’s sake. This was definitely something from our side of the fence.”

“Do you have any idea what it could have been, Zelda?” Jenny’s voice was low and she sounded frightened.

“No,” I said, “but it’s probably smart, at least smarter than your average predator.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because it didn’t eat her. Something this big probably could have eaten her entire body in one sitting, bones and all, but this was a brutal mauling. If an animal kills, even a supernatural creature, it’s usually for food or to defend itself. Vanessa couldn’t have been anything close to a threat to something this big, so whatever killed her, it was smart enough to have a motive, or smart enough to be killing for fun. Any other reports of similar attacks?”

Jenny somehow looked even paler, but throughout all of it she remained professional. She was way better at it than me. “Not to my knowledge. No others have come through here anyway. Definitely nothing on the news.”

“Keep an eye out.” I said. “Let me know if you get anybody else with wounds like this. I'll see if I can narrow the field a bit.”

I reached into the pocket of my jeans and withdrew a simple ring. Silver ripples flowed through the almost pink color of polished copper. I put on the ring and held out my right hand over Vanessa's broken body. From the flawless diamond set flush with the band there came a gentle golden glow. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and called forth Chaos.

The primeval, otherworldly force known as the Rainbow of Chaos is where a magician's power comes from. From a plane of total disarray we funnel energy through our chosen focus, in my case, the diamond in my ring, into the mortal world, channeling Chaos through the material like a prism channels white light into a spectrum of colors. It is a great and terrible power that only a select few may wield. I was proud to be one of them.

I looked upon Vanessa DeSilva through a lens of Chaos, searching for traces of magic. All magic comes from Chaos, and with a little focus and training, any magician can learn to visualize the residual traces of Chaos in the world. If she had been killed by a spirit being, or a magician’s familiar, an animal companion created entirely of manifested Chaos, I would be able to sense those traces. The process was different for every magician. Some saw it as abstract shapes and whisking colors. Some heard it as a symphony, or smelled it as a cocktail of different aromas.

I guess I played too many video games as a kid, because I saw Chaos in the form of polygons and pixels. In my deep concentration, the room went black and Vanessa's body was replaced in my vision by a polygonal mesh, its natural softness replaced by sharp lines and vertices that made a near perfect outline of her form. They pulsed faintly as her aura faded from the mortal world, but that was all. There was no magic touching Vanessa's corpse, not a trace. That meant that whatever had attacked Vanessa was of the mortal plane.

I looked up to Jenny to speak, but my words fell short. Her aura pulsed with life, slow and steady in time with a languid heartbeat. Magic gathered around her hands and mouth, and leaked from her eyes, taking the form of a pixelated red flame. Another glow pulsed angrily in the pit of her belly. I saw her wireframe mesh tense in a way that was very unlike her, like a tiger ready to pounce on its unsuspecting prey. Its fingers curled into claws and it appeared to dart toward me. I flinched and for an instant my body went into a fight or flight response, adrenaline pumping through my body.

I closed my eyes and slowed my breathing. I pushed back the Chaos and when I next opened my eyes the world was back to normal. Jenny looked at me with concern. Behind her eyes I could see sadness and shame seeking to claw their way into the expression.

I cleared my throat, pretending that nothing had happened. I just straightened and took off my ring. “I didn’t get anything magical off her.” I said. “That means whatever attacked her was a purely physical being.”

Jenny nodded. “Do you need her for anything else?”

“No,” I answered, “thanks Jenny.”

She pushed Vanessa’s body back into its little arctic chamber. As the darkness consumed the young girl’s body I felt a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold slither down my spine. I turned away from the row of steel doors and took off the latex gloves. I threw them away in a trash can attached to Jenny’s crash cart.

“I think that's all I can do tonight, but I've got an idea of what to do next.” I said, turning back to Jenny.

“Good.” She replied, letting out a breath. “I need a drink.”