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“I don’t want to know, Hart,” Raj said, a playful warning in his tone.
“Yeah, well, this one was clean as a fucking whistle. Except for being covered in old coffee and bigot spit.”
Raj shook his head. “That’s disgusting.”
“Tell me about it.”
I pulled up the partitioning software that IT made us use when we opened evidentiary jump drives or files. Because sometimes they were trojans or worms or viruses or whatever other weird terms IT came up with for them. Bad things.
With that running, I popped in the drive and opened it.
In the intervening days I’d dug more into the Oldhams—both of them. They were radio and tv personalities who had a televised radio show calledThe Mundane Fire, because that wasn’t at all evocative of witch burnings and therefore fucking creepy and disturbing. There was no specific word yet on what was going to happen to said show now that Faith Oldham was dead and her husband was currently awaiting arraignment for assaulting an officer. He’d get off somehow, I was sure, but I’m sure that and the whole murdered-wife thing put a wrench in the show’s production schedule.
From the two episodes I’d managed to get through before getting too angry to keep going, I got that the point was that magic users—and magical creatures, including yours truly—were to be seen as some sort of sickness, disease, curse, or punishment being inflicted on humanity because… well, depending on the show’s guest of the week, because of sin, because of the horrors of modern science, and/or because of vaccines.
Seriously, the shit people believe is fucking nuts.
The Mundane Firetalked about the need to return to an “earlier spirituality” in order to purify the corruption and irreligiosity of contemporary society. Their symbol—I shit you not—was a bonfire with a vertical pole in its center. As in, the kind of fire-around-a-pole they used to build in the middle ages to set people on fire for heresy—and witchcraft.
I had absolutely no sadness about the fact that Faith Oldham—whose birth name, by the way, was actually Belinda Bollinger—was dead. I was a bit annoyed that I had the Antiquus Ordo Arcanum to thank for it, mind you, because I didn’t really like the idea that I might agree, even tangentially, with the Ordo, given their history of, well, murder.
But their virulent anti-magic stance did raise some interesting questions about why, exactly, the Oldhams—or one of them, anyway—had employed a witch to seal this jump drive in their office. They probably also should have encrypted it—or at least locked it with a password. Fortunately for me, they hadn’t.
I clicked on the folder containing the drive’s contents.
“Oh, well,that’sinteresting,” Raj said, leaning forward so that he was very much in my space.
I’d apparently found a full database of MFM members that seemed to cover the whole damn country, given the fact that there were addresses running from South Carolina to Maine to California, Wyoming, Texas, and Minnesota. And that’s just what we saw with a quick scroll. Lists like this often became extra interesting when cross-referenced against other things—like the list of arrests from the MFM riots last week.
I left it open to come back to and went on to another file.
This one had an image extension, but no thumbnail. I clicked on it anyway.
“Fuck!” Raj pushed himself back.
“Fuck doesn’t even fucking cover it,” I whispered.
Taavi whined from near my feet, and I reached down to put a hand over his eyes.
I almost absently picked up the phone on my desk and hit Villanova’s extension.
“Villanova,” he answered.
“Sir, you need to see this,” I said, then hung up.
It only took him about a minute.
“Fuck,” he said, his voice rough, when he saw the image on my screen.
It was a body, one that appeared human, flayed. I’d seen that before, unfortunately. But this one was posed with what looked like a bear pelt, and I was horrifyingly certain was actually her skin.
That meant they’d flayed a shifter in animal form, somehow keeping her alive long enough for her to shift back—or they were pretending they had, anyway. While option B was fucking sick and twisted, I was really hoping for that, although in the pit of my stomach I knew damn well that it wasn’t what I was actually looking at.
“Is that the only one on there?” Villanova asked.
Numb, I shook my head.
“Fuck.”
