By the time Inspector Kilduff got his car down the streets to the river drive, Helena figured she’d mastered the whole automobile passenger shtick. It fit nicely in her repertoire of abilities she never wanted to use, alongside milking goats and spinning spider thread. The journey took less time than their trip to the hotel, but walking would have been faster.
The police headquarters was one of the more interesting setups in the Immigrant Realm. It was in the “Town Center,” which was nowhere near the center of the island. Instead it was right at the end of the bridge that formed the magical connection between the two realms. Helena figured it was so the people from across the river could run home quickly. Whatever the reasoning, most of the citizens of the Immigrant Realm did their best to ignore the place.
Of course it was sometimes hard to ignore the police. The building itself was half antique half modern, a dull brick building awkwardly fused to a sleek glass and steel edifice. The last time she’d been here, the officers had taken her to the brick building to answer some rather ignorant questions about the assassin she’d transformed. This time Kilduff led her through the tinted glass doors of the modern office.
The front was filled with people trying to get assistance with problems, and the policemen who seemed trained to ignore them. Except the line for fines. Helena noticed that moved quickly.
Kilduff muttered something under his breath as he walked through the chaos, but she couldn’t catch it over the hubbub. So Helena just followed along. The doors opened for him, and then they were through back into a mass of offices. It was sparsely populated, filled with what had to be expensive equipment, and no one seemed to be working. Lovely.
“We’ve warded the morgue against necromancy,” Kilduff stated as they walked down the halls. “Had it blessed too, so no getting any funny ideas.”
“Smart,” Helena said. Any blessing on a place as cursed as a police morgue was sure to be worn so thin it wouldn’t affect her spells, but it would be a solid defense against lesser magicians. “You should bless the whole building though. There are so many petty curses here that the whole place is unlucky. I’d also suggest being better people so you don’t get cursed to start, but any place of power will gather some miasma.”
Kilduff gave her a suspicious look. “And you can get rid of those curses for a small fee and a bit of taint on our souls?”
“I don’t buy souls. They’re worthless and Hades gets angry if you keep them too long,” Helena replied. “And I could get rid of the curses, but it’d cost you a lot. Definitely more than what you’re paying me now. The place is just crawling with miasma. The right kind of priest can do it for less. Assuming you could find one that will agree to work with you.”
The inspector shot her a dirty look, but continued walking. Helena smiled and added another mark to her petty revenge tally. Today was going wonderfully.
That pleasure was quickly replaced with a mild discomfort as they headed down the stairs. Not from any fear, but from the dark energies oozing around her. She was perfectly safe. Curses were her element after all. But the number of death grudges rivaled some battlefields. The artificial lighting and sterile hallway did not improve the atmosphere.
The morgue was worse. The chill air combined with the aura of ill-fortune to make the place particularly unpleasant. The local miasma felt like cave water dripping on her neck. The corpses hidden under white sheets were almost an afterthought in the grim spectacle. She waved her hand to clean the air around her and stared down the more vicious curses before continuing in.
“Not the nicest smell, I know,” a man in a white apron and what Helena recognized as modern medical gear said. He looked over at Kilduff. “I take it you’re here to see the Regal Hotel victim, Ryan?”
“Aye. The witch here wanted to see the victim. Captain thinks she can help determine the cause of death.”
The man rolled his eyes at the inspector’s dark tone before nodding to Helena. “Brandon Smith. You’re lucky you came here early. I haven’t gotten into any invasive testing.”
“Helena Aoede, and that is good. I’ll do my best to return the favor and get out of your hair quickly.” Helena looked over the room. “Where is Mr. Liang’s body?”
“Here.” Brandon led them to the room’s central feature, a long table covered by a white sheet. “It’s messy, just so you know.”
Helena grimaced. “I’ve seen worse, but thanks for the warning.”
Brandon pulled off the sheet, revealing the body. Helena’s eyes flickered to the face, and she instantly regretted it. The man’s eyes stared vacantly forward while his mouth was frozen in a silent scream of terror. She quickly turned her gaze towards the wound. One of her earliest memories was the death of a slave who’d offended their master. But for some reason the bodies of people she hadn’t killed personally still revolted her a little.
She grimaced and banished the errant thoughts before focusing on the task at hand. It wasn’t hard to see the details. The entire back of the man’s skull was gone, and most of the brain from inside it. The wounds around the edge were from humanoid teeth, though no normal human could bite through a skull. “Someone really put a lot of effort into this farce,” Helena muttered. She reached out to touch the corpse to see if she could get more information from it.
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“Whoa!” Brandon put a hand in front of her. “No touching without gloves please. We need all the evidence we can get to put the culprit away.” The man pointed towards a box.
“Very well.” She walked over and pulled out two of the flimsy gloves. They’d interfere with her senses, but only a little. And most of her magic would still work fine.
Inspector Kilduff folded his arms. “No complaints? That’s a rare thing.”
“Despite our religious disagreements, I approve of your laws,” Helena said. “The idea that everyone, god or devil, magician or human, gets a fair trial is very important. It means angry gods actually might face some consequences for killing me.” She gave the man a hard look. “My problem is with people who consider my magic a crime.”
“It is a crime against God,” Kilduff snapped. “But since the fools in government don’t consider it a crime against the people, I’ve no choice but to let you perform your witchery.”
Helena stretched her hands. “Thank you for your permission.”
Having scored the final word, she turned her attention fully to the corpse. The missing brain would have killed any human, but she had no way of telling if that was the fatal blow or if something else had killed the man first. Instead she placed her hand over the man’s center and reached out with her mind.
There was nothing. No magic. No sense of life.
Helena stepped back and peered at the corpse. “Curious.” She looked over at the two policemen. “You don’t embalm the corpses or banish any magic on them before you bring them down, do you?”
“No,” Brandon replied. “Some of the corpses get last rites of course, but I’m pretty sure the victim wasn’t Catholic.”
“I would have noticed that,” Helena said before turning back to the body and looking over it again. What little remained of the man’s hair was white, and his skin was leathery. “Geras granted his painful blessing in full,” she muttered before looking up at the policemen. “How old was Mr. Liang?”
“Fifty two,” Kilduff said. “His driver’s license picture was taken at twenty years old, so no way to tell if the white hair is natural or not.”
“Well the skin isn’t natural. Fifty is too young to end up with skin like this. It could be a disease, but given everything else…” She needed to get more information. Trace the pattern of life and death in the corpse. Depending on what had killed him there should still be bits of life energy lingering in various organs. The proper spells could search that out, but she’d need some duckweed.
Easy enough. She pulled off her hat and reached into it. One of the simplest magic tricks was finding an owner using their possession. Helena just reversed the process. A thousand ‘threads of ownership’ branched out and connected her to her possessions. Years of practice allowed her to quickly sort out the lines to the plants she used for magic. After that it was just thumbing through the various lines until she found what she wanted and pulled the small broad-leaved plants out.
“Do you actually keep water plants in your hat?” Brandon asked eyes wide.
“No. But it’s easier to cast the spell if you can’t prove that,” Helena replied as she placed her hat back on her head. “I’ll need to sprinkle these on the body. Will that be a problem?”
The two policemen looked at each other. It obviously was outside the norm for them, but they seemed to actually consider it. “I can’t think of anything,” Brandon said.
“It won’t ruin the investigation,” Kilduff said.
“Good.” She pulled out a wand from her pouch, then drew a shimmering circle in the air. Runes in both her native Greek and Chinese filled out the border of the circle, drawing the forces of yin to the area. The curses around the room started moving towards the circle as well, flitting and darting to lap at the energy Helena was summoning. She glared at the miasma and shooed it off. They hissed and spat at her, but without strong wills to guide their hate they acknowledged her as their mistress and dispersed.
With that handled she tossed the duckweed onto the circle. The rootless plants hit her circle and absorbed the yin energy before sinking down onto the body. They would drift to the few remaining areas of yang.
She froze as the green leaves fell straight down before wilting and rotting away. Within seconds none of the plants that had fallen on the body were still alive. “Hecate preserve us,” she whispered.
“I won’t be liking your answer, will I?” Kilduff said.
Helena took a deep breath. “No. You won’t. I was looking for life energy, but the spell actually was designed to sense chi.”
“So what does that mean?” Brandon said, pulling out a notepad.
“It means whatever killed him did it by completely draining his chi. And I mean completely. The duckweed withered because his body is so imbalanced the corpse wants more chi.” Helena tapped her chin as she considered the possibilities. “There’s no way this was done by accident or part of another spell. To drain the body this completely would require a powerful magic attack or some sort of east Asian monster.”
Kilduff raised an eyebrow. “So you’re saying you could have done it? Or a Chinese magician?”
“Maybe,” she admitted. “But as I keep saying, there’s no magic. And biting through someone’s skull to eat the brain would be impossible. Also disgusting.” A summoned creature could do it, but she didn’t bring that up. No reason to muddy the waters.
She looked at the body again. Now that she knew what to look for it was easy to see the bruises on the shoulders. “I’m guessing this is from before the victim died?” she said pointing at the marks.
“Yes, or very shortly after,” the coroner replied. “We assumed it was from when the killer ate the victim’s brain. Most people try to resist that.”
“Reasonable, but I believe the killer was actually holding the victim still while it sucked out the man’s chi.” Helena stepped away from the body. “Have you finished reconstructing the door?”
Brandon frowned. “Mostly. The lab techs say there’s some weird things they’re trying to figure out about it.”
And the riddle was solved. “Let me guess. Someone punched their fingers through the door then ripped it out towards them.”
“Why would anyone do that instead of just kicking the door down?” Kilduff asked.
“Simple. Because the killer wasn’t trying to be effective.” Helena placed her wand back in her pouch. “It was using Xiao Liang’s fear against him. Reenacting a horror story to help paralyze its target with fear. Just like how it used your captain’s knowledge of zombies to try to put you off the scent.”
Helena folded her arms and looked at Inspector Kilduff. “Your victim was killed by a jiang-shi. Which means you’ve got a problem.”