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“Fuck. Sorry.” I undid my seatbelt. “Right, then. I’ll be back in a minute.”
I carried the chair inside and set it up as soon as the floor evened out, then went back for my medium, who held onto my neck as I ferried him inside and settled him in his chair. “Thank you, Hart,” he replied mildly, although I could tell there was a displeased undercurrent, although whether he was annoyed at me or just annoyed in general I couldn’t tell and didn’t want to ask.
I led him back through to the main crime scene, where the Dan and Little were coordinating the lowering of the first of the three shifters—the lynx. Beside me, Ward made a small noise of distress in the back of his throat. It wasn’t an impending vomit noise, though, so I ignored it.
Ignoring people’s distress is something you get really good at when you work crime scenes. First of all, nobody at a crime scene is happy—if they are, you need to call somebody, because the person is either about to crack or they’re probably your killer. Everybody’s on edge, everybody is wrestling with their own mortality, and everybody is carrying a giant pile of baggage.
People break down, sometimes. Maybe it’s because the victim wore the same perfume as your mom or because you know your fiancée could have been one of the dead shifters hanging from a chain or because your husband was almost the dead guy on the floor with a bullet hole in his chest.
It happens to all of us, sooner or later, at least once. The longer you work homicide, the more often it happens—and the better you get at pulling yourself back together quickly. By this point, I’m a fucking expert at it. So I might have been creeped the fuck out and screaming internally about the fact that Taavi had been here and very well could have died on that fucking plastic folding table in the back, but unless you knew me well enough to read that in my eyes, you’d never fucking know.
Ward knew me pretty fucking well at this point, and I didn’t dare look in his direction. Part of my secret was never making eye contact with anyone who actually knew I had feelings.
There used to be a lot fewer of those people.
Beside me, I heard Ward draw in a deep breath. “Who am I starting with?”
“Let’s see who Dan wants,” I replied, catching his eye and waving him over. “You remember Dan Maza?”
Ward nodded. “Of course.”
“Mr. Campion.” Dan extended a hand he’d just peeled a glove off of, and Ward shook it.
“Detective Maza. Where would you like me to start?”
“What are my choices?”
I watched Ward’s grey eyes flick around the room, a wrinkle on his forehead. “There are a lot of them. I’m not sure if any of them are your shifters.”
Well, I guess I was right about the ghosts. Yay? Who am I kidding? Definitely not yay.
A muscle twitched in Dan’s jaw, suggesting he agreed with me. “Why are they here, then?” he asked.
Ward shrugged. “Let’s find out.”
I winced when he flinched. I did not want to know what could make Ward fucking Campion flinch. He put two thin fingers to one temple.
“Okay, Ward?” I asked him.
There was pain in his eyes when he glanced over at me, and, unthinking, I extended a hand. I was surprised when he gripped my arm, his palm meeting my forearm. And then I felt the faint, strange tugging feeling I got when he tapped into my innate elven magic. It was weird—like the feeling when you sit on ice or fall in the snow and feel the heat getting sucked from your body, although not quite that strong.
“What’s going on?” I asked him, trying to keep my voice even and calm. Alarming a room full of kitted-out cops wasn’t high on my list today, and having to explain to Doc why his husband had been arrested and/or shot by a room full of jumpy cops was also very much not on my list.
Maybe Raj was right and I needed a career change. I spent an awful lot of time these days thinking about how my job was going to kill me—specifically, how my coworkers were going to kill me.
“There are… probably a dozen or so? They’re very upset.”
“Define ‘very upset,’ please.” I get polite when I get stressed. Well, okay. I get even more vulgar first, andthenI get polite. We’d skipped over the even more vulgar stage already.
Ward swallowed. “They were… in a lot of pain. Scared. Some of them aren’t making a lot of sense—like…” He blinked rapidly. “Maybe like what you’d expect someone to say if their brain wasn’t thinking like a person?”
“What?”
“I think…” His frown deepened. “I think some of them—well, obviously,” he interrupted himself. “Some of them were shifted when they died. And I don’t think their brains work quite the same way in animal form that they do in person form. So some of the things they’re saying don’t make a lot of sense. And they’re all talking at once, so it’s hard to concentrate.”
“And you can’t get them to focus?” I had a hard time believing that.
“I don’t want to be mean,” he admitted.
