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Prieto looked even sicker as he ran it through his head. “Okay. So where’s our starting point?”
I held up a file. “We could try working it from the burials. An avatar witch needs a piece of the real person to make the physical body—bone, hair, flesh, blood. You start exhuming them and see if any of the bodies have been tampered with; I’ll bet you find they’ve all had samples taken. If I understand forensic rules properly, he—or she—should have left some trace evidence behind in the process—digging up a body is a messy, sweaty business.”
“And what will you be doing?”
“Tracking avatar witches. There aren’t more than a few dozen of them in this state; it isn’t a common skill in our circles, and they all have to be licensed.”
“Couldn’t it be somebody out of state? Somebody brought in just for this purpose?”
“Sure,” I said, and shrugged. “But we’re a close-knit community. Someone will know something about it, even if it’s just the supply shops who furnish what we need.”
“How am I supposed to get bodies exhumed? I need family consent,” Prieto said. “What kind of excuse am I supposed to use for that?”
“The serial killer’s struck again, but you have a revolutionary new scientific technique that wasn’t available before,” I said. “As far as I can tell, most people don’t understand science any better than they understand resurrection magic. Families will give you permission for the exhumation, almost certainly, if you tell them it
will help us catch him.”
“You mean, if I lie my ass off to them.”
“Do you want this stopped, or not?” I thought about it for a few seconds, and continued, cautiously, “There’s a third thing we can do. We can keep an eye on the dump sites. He reused one, he might reuse others. These places mean something to him.”
“Well, that’s a problem,” Prieto said. “This isn’t officially a crime, and overtime’s not something we can throw around like confetti; our budget’s stretched so thin it squeaks. There are five other dump sites. Can’t cover them all, especially not during the night.”
“I’ll take the one that comes next in the series,” I said. “Just in case he sticks to the pattern.”
“Not by yourself, you’re not,” Prieto said.
“Andy could—”
He made a sharp movement and cut me off. “I want one of mine in on it,” he said. “I’ll find a volunteer. You want to bring Toland along, that’s on you, but I need somebody who isn’t on the side of the witches.”
That was insulting, but I understood his position, really. He didn’t trust witches in general, and if he sometimes, grudgingly accepted me, that was only a temporary thing.
“Fine,” I said. “You put whoever you want with us. But I’m definitely going.”
Prieto nodded, got out of the car, and began giving orders to break down his investigation.
Andy and I would find these people.
And when we did … hell would descend if Andy had anything to say about it.
* * *
I braced myself at the front door for the smell. On top of the trauma of the evening, I wasn’t sure that I could really face it, but I needed to see Andy. I needed to talk to him about all this, pour my heart out, tell him just how awful I felt. He was the only one I could tell.
I unlocked the door and came inside, locked it, and realized that I was holding my breath, dreading the moment … but I forced myself to relax.
And the smell that washed over me was nothing like what I’d been imagining. It was unbelievably sweet and clean and lovely, and I found myself closing my eyes in an explosion of sensual ecstasy. I moaned in utter satisfaction and sank bonelessly into the nearest chair as it rolled over me and through me, taking all of my day’s frustration and exhaustion along with it.
The ultimate aromatherapy.
“Wow,” I said dreamily.
“See?” Andy said. I opened my eyes—I hadn’t even realized that I’d closed them—and saw him standing in front of me, arms folded, smiling. “I promised it’d get better, didn’t I?”
“Wow.” It was all I could really manage. The only thing I could compare this feeling to was that of waking up safe in his arms in the hush of the early morning after a fantastic night of sex and sleep. “That is—wow.” I was a pretty fair potion maker, but this—this was a master class, and it was beyond amazing.
Andy helped me stand up, then he put his arms around me and kissed me, and for a man wearing a girly apron he kissed with a lot of authority and great skill. It took awhile before I was able to get my head together enough to murmur, “What is that stuff?”
