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Beside me, Ward’s face showed concentration—which meant he was talking to someone the rest of us couldn’t see. We were outside, so I could see his whole face for once—like most humans, he was still susceptible to Arcanavirus and wore a mask indoors. But tonight we were outside, and I could see his lips compress with concentration as he listened to the dead. “There are… were four more,” he said, his higher tenor clear and confident. He frowned. “She’s… pretty hysterical. Keeps saying that they’rebeinghunted.”
“Does she know she’s dead?” I asked.
Ward nodded absently, running one gloved hand through his dark curls. “I think the others might still be alive? Or at least, she doesn’t know whether or not they’re dead.” He shrugged, his grey eyes sharpening as he focused on me instead of the dead woman. “She might not know if they died far enough away, but she’s clearly terrified.”
Great. Missing persons on top of murder just made my fucking day. And week. And possibly month.
“Whatcanshe tell me?” I asked him.
Ward blinked a bunch of times, his nose wrinkling at the top the way it did whenever he concentrated on something. “It’s… hard to say. She’s really just insisting that we find them, but she also doesn’t want to tell me whothemare or who is hunting them, and she’s really freaked out about all the cops here.”
Double great.
Doc frowned, then began to walk down the alley, cautiously avoiding blood and evidence markers, fingering the consultant badge on a lanyard around his neck. I let him go—Doc knew his way around a crime scene.
I sighed, running a hand over my ponytail. I have long, flowy hair, and it gets in the way when I’m working, but I can’t make myself cut it actually short. It grows fast as fuck anyway, although I could just keep it buzzed. But it really is much more epic long. It’s like the one vanity I have. While I prefer a braid, that usually gets me shit from the rest of the precinct for being girly, and I only want to deal with so much shit at once. So ponytails it is.
I looked at Ward, slightly irritated at how little he seemed to be able to give me, although I knew that wasn’t exactly his fault. “Well, I can’t very well find someone I don’t fucking know who or what they are, now can I?” I pointed out to the air somewhere to Ward’s left. That was the direction he was looking, and it was a good bet that it was probably where the ghost was. More or less.
“She doesn’t like cops,” Ward offered, and I snorted.
“Fuck, I don’t like half of the assholes I work with,” I muttered. “Doesn’t mean I’m not still going to try to do my fucking job.”
Ward shrugged. “She’s not talking. Just… uh. Hang on.”
I waited.
“She’s upset about whatever Mason’s found,” Ward reported, a furrow on his brow.
I sighed. “Then let’s go see what Doc’s up to.” I picked my way through the crime scene, and Ward followed in his chair, doing his best to avoid interfering with any evidence, although I saw one of the CSI techs scowl in his direction. I scowled back. It wasn’t like Ward could help the fact that he came with wheels.
Doc was farther down the alleyway, peering over the top of a dumpster sitting on an elevated cement platform.
I walked up next to him, then stood on my toes to look over the edge.
There was the weirdest-ass looking dog cowering inside, half curled up in the middle of a heap of… well… garbage. It looked mostly bald, its skin a mottled brindle with a ridiculous fuzzy crest of hair on its skinny head. “Thefuckis that thing?” I blurted before realizing that the dog was probably not a dog, judging from the ripples of magic surrounding it in the dumpster.
“That,” Doc replied, sounding both annoyed and amused, “appears to be a Xoloitzcuintli.”
“Gesundheit,” I replied. “Now the fuck was that?”
Doc snorted. “Xolo-itz-cuint-li.” He said it slower. “Sometimes referred to as Xolo dogs.”
“Okay. Zolo dog.”
“No. Xolo. With an X. The sound is like a Z and an SH mixed together. It’s Aztec.”
“The dog. Is. Fucking. Aztec.” We were making a sharp left turn to really weird really quickly in this case, and I didn’t like it.
“The breed dates back to the Aztec empire, yes. But he’s not a dog.”
Right. Shifter. “Ward.”
“Yeah?” He was right behind us, but—being in a wheelchair—couldn’t see what it was we were looking at.
“Is one of your missing shifters a whatever-dog?”
“Xoloitzcuintli,” Doc repeated.
