Page 33 of The Turning of the Tables

I hate talking about my knee. Or my back or wrist. And sometimes my hip, my jaw, and my hands, especially when they get cold. Because people ask what happened, and then they get this panicked little look when you tell them that you were bitten by a tick eighteen years ago and now have chronic pain due to Lyme arthritis for life. Inevitably that leads to questions likeCan’t they cure that now?to which I have to explain that you can only do that if you treat it early, and mine was not treated early because my parents were religious fruitcakes who thought they could pray it better. So now it’s a permanent part of my life.

People are perfectly happy to express sympathy about illness and injuries when they think they’re going to get better. They don’t like it when you tell them that you’re just always in pain—sometimes less, sometimes more, but it’s always there. Because then they have nothing tosay, no well-wishes or hopes that it will clear up soon. Because it won’t.

I don’t know—maybe it forces people to confront the fragility of their own bodies.

Like when Ward’s spine got damaged. People were super weird around the poor guy when he started working cases again—and not just because he was putting tire tracks on our scenes. Hart yelled at more than a dozen people the first several cases, which, honestly, made me like him about a million times more. I hadn’t known him all that well at first, and I’d been tricked by his gruff asshole exterior. But then I heard him chewing out one of the other CSIs for whiningabout Ward’s chair and asking whether we couldn’t get a normal medium, and I immediately knew that he was the detective I wanted to work with.

The guy might have the mouth of a sailor on a grog bender, but underneath it, he’s actually a genuinely empathetic person.You think he asked to be in that fucking chair, Hollings? You think he woke up and went, ‘you know what? Today I’m going to fuck up a crime scene with some wheels?’ and just got in a chair? No, dumbfuck, he did not. So how about you shut the fuck up and be helpful about where he can go instead of bitching like an entitled teenager whose daddy won’t let her use the Mercedes?

I missed Hart.

And yeah, sure, I got to see him from time to time, but it wasn’t the same. And yeah, Maza’s a good guy and a good detective, but he’s not Hart. Nobody’s Hart but Hart.

I finished putting the DNA swab into the appropriate part of the evidence collection bin and logging its entry on the case clipboard, doing all of them with deliberate slowness so that I could stall having to climb back up that damn hill until my knee had settled back to a dull pounding instead of an acid-soaked ice pick.

Then I realized Ramirez was being nice and waiting, so I smothered my sigh and followed her back up the hill.

The next day,my phone rang, and I put down my peanut-butter and jelly sandwich—I know, living the high life—to answer it, wiping my fingers on the square of paper towel I’d taken from the bathroom to serve as a napkin. “Hi Detective, what can I do for you?” I asked Maza.

“You’re not going to believe this one, Mays.”

“Believe what?” I asked him, feeling a frown furrowing my brow.

“The victim from Belle? Positive for Arcana.”

I felt a punch to the gut. “Are youshittingme?”

That was two bodies in close succession, both positive for Arcanavirus. “Sadly, I am not. Fortunately,” he continued before I could swear again, which really wasn’t like me—sure, I swear plenty, but I try not to do it in professional situations. “By the time we found him, the virus had gone inert. But it was active when he died.”

I felt my brain turning it over. “But he was dumped on Belle, right on the pathway,” I said.

“He was,” Maza agreed.

“Doesn’t that—” I cut myself off. I wasn’t the detective here.

“Imply that our killer is deliberately trying to infect people with their victims?”

“Something like that, yeah.” I hadn’t worked out in my head whether I thought the point was to infect just anyone or us, specifically.Usbeing the medical examiner or the police.

“It does, doesn’t it?” came Maza’s response. “You mask at all the scenes, but I’m going to ask the chief to instate a mandate for all homicide or possible homicide cases from here on out, at least until we can figure out if the Arcana is part of the victim profile or a deliberate attempt to infect the homicide team. Or we catch the bastard.”

“Jesus,” I whispered.

“Yeah,” came Maza’s response. “We’re gonna need his help.”

It took me several minutes after Maza had hung up to fully comprehend just how much of a mess this was going to be. It wasn’t so much the potential for a policy change thatwas going to piss off a lot of the uniforms, or even the fact that we might be looking at a serial killer, although that was definitely bad.

The problem was that if this killer was trying to cause an outbreak, that meant that they hadn’t actually succeeded, and they were going to keep killing people with Arcana until they did manage to spread the disease to their real targets.

The question was why.

Targeting people with Arcana seemed like the sort of thing the Magic Free Movement might do—to stop people from becoming Arcanids or Arc-humans. But none of the victims we’d seen with it had shown signs of transformation. An Arc-human’s DNA wasn’t distinct from a human’s, although Arcanids absolutely had genetic markers of difference. But killing anyone with Arcana would potentially be killing a normal human. Statistically, it was actually more likely than eliminating either an Arc-human or an Arcanid.

Now if Maza was right, and the killer was attempting to spread Arcana to the cops… I had no idea what could possibly be the motivation. Revenge, maybe? Maybe a Nid or Arc who had been arrested, or someone who had a loved one who was a Nid or Arc who had been arrested or even killed? Or whose murder had been dismissed or gone unsolved?

And what about someone who was just trying to cause a widespread outbreak? Why? Technically, it was an act of bioterrorism—germ warfare.

The Magic Free Movement might have been the focus of the news for the last several months, but they weren’t the only organization out there making headlines. Sure, there were reasonable organizations like the AARC, the Arcanid-Arc-human Rights League, or Hands and Paws, but therewere also the UberArcs, an organization that was as equally fucked-up as the MFM, just in the other direction.