Wordlessly, Rye set the phone in her palm. He kept the space illuminated as she extinguished her light, using both hands to thumb tap with the rapidity of a modern teen. To his credit, Rye didn’t ask for details when she finished typing, hit Send, received an immediate response, and, after a quick thumbs-up emoji, handed the device back to him. Within minutes, both zombieswordlessly stood up in near unison and half ran out of the morgue, the door thunking with a heavy metallicwhoomphbehind them.
Rye leveled a slanted gaze at Embry. “Do I want to know?”
Embry just grinned. “Special delivery from the Raven’s Head social committee, thanking the Table and Ravenwood PD for all their hard work for the past few days with a massive vat of Black Cat night owl blend and four extra larges from Mystic Pizza.”
“You’re telling me you convinced Skye Wolverton to distract this entire building with caffeine and perfectly melted mozzarella?”
“No, I’m telling you that Fairfax is the committee’s treasurer and holds the purse strings.” Embry caught the upward flicker to Rye’s pout as she muttered a spell that loosened the vent screws one by one, until the whole thing gently popped off and propped itself against the junction of their conjoined ducts. Then she pulled up a sleeve and flashed her vintage watch at Rye—they’d planned for five minutes, no more. “Try the corner office and go from there?”
“Indeed.” Then he held out a hand as if he was asking her to dance. “Ladies first.”
Ah, there were those Ryszard Knighton manners, yet again.
Embry placed her hand in his and held tight as she lowered herself with the same levitation spell she used on inanimate objects like coffee cups and her school trunks. The spell was much better for objects you could aim at and less precise when piloting your own body, especially through a tight space. But with Rye’s strong grip and her excellent casting ability, she made it through the narrow square and to the tile floor without a single whisper of sound.
Rye dropped down noiselessly behind her as she hurried to the corner office, the metal hexing spell she didn’t use at Marlow Theatre already on her lips. With just the slightest disturbance to the inner locking mechanism, Embry had the medical examiner’s office open before Rye even magically replaced the vent.
Rather than turning on the office light, Embry pulled something extra she’d packed in her belt bag: an old iPhone Daddy had left in the junk drawer. When they’d slipped out of the house, she explained to Rye what she wanted it to do and why. He’d been able to work some technical wizardry to bring it to life and assured her he could transfer any photos she took with it off it. Which meant her personal device would never show evidence of this little trip if Brown confiscated it. She’d brought it on a whim—a just in case—and hadn’t used it yet but realized how helpful it would be when Rye had explained how he planned to record the autopsy. Now they could do it twice as fast.
Embry clicked to the camera app on the old phone and got to work. Rye entered the room in a flicker of shadow and a fresh burst of rosemary, shutting the door quietly behind him as a precaution, and began searching beside her.
It didn’t take them long to find Oakley’s preliminary autopsy report—her death was the only active investigation. Embry flipped open one of the topmost files, and there were Oakley’s dark eyes, staring into nothing atop a face so pale it was near translucent.
“I’ll take the autopsy photos; you take the paperwork,” Rye whispered, scooping the vampire’s corpse headshot out of her line of sight and placing a second folder into her hands.
Embry didn’t blink for several seconds, her friend’s fathomless stare feathering at the edges of her vision. Finally, her grip tightened around the manila folder. Embossed on the front were the wordspreliminary forensic autopsy, while on the tab was a handwrittenRiddle, O.
She swallowed around the swelling sadness in her throat. “Thank you.”
“Of course,” he whispered back, while efficiently snapping pic after pic on his phone.
Embry launched herself into the same, methodical set ofmotions. She didn’t have time to read the file—the timer on her own phone was merrily ticking closer to zero—but with each snap and turn of the pages, she couldn’t ignore the words in front of her.
Forensic autopsy. Observations. Test results. Causation. Conclusion.
On the conclusion page, she stopped.
Right there, in black-and-white:Cause of death.
The guillotine of presumed guilt had been dangling precariously over Embry’s neck since the moment she arrived at the stadium on Saturday morning. Their five minutes was nearly up, but the words on this page and the ones following it could be the first definitive step in—
“Forty-eight seconds,” Rye muttered. “I’m going to go have a look at the body. I’ll be done before it goes off.”
“Okay,” Embry whispered at his back as he slipped out of the office. “I’m almost finished.”
Forcing herself not to actually read the words on the page, Embry snapped a shot, then flipped the page over and got the other side. No more hesitation; they just needed to—
In the silence of the morgue came a new sound: the confident tapping of a code on a keypad and the whoosh of a pneumatic door unlocking outside the department door.
No, no, no!
There wasn’t time to run for the vent. To hide, to mutter her invisibility spell and hope to sneak out before it wore off. To recast their muffling spell and call for Rye to come back.
Instead, Embry lunged for the office door, her invisibility spell on her lips, fingers ready to aim it toward Rye—when she saw him react to the exterior noise by crawling into the open cadaver drawer and sliding it shut from within.
Good, he was safe—and he couldn’t fit in that drawerwithanother body, right? Not even tiny Oakley? She couldn’t think about that. Only that he fit and was hidden.
Then, with a magically muffledsnick, Embry latched the office door, crawled to the desk, and silently replaced the autopsy files where they’d found them. Heart pounding, she then moved back to the office door, mumbled a sound-amplification spell, and furiously hoped she could hear these zombies coming before they discovered the corner office was unlocked.
