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“Yup.” He glanced over at me. “And if it’s not human, maybe you could ask Mays to figure out what it is?”
One thing Beyond the Veil doesn’t have is a lab. A lab is a big—and very expensive—expansion, and while the company was more than solvent enough to cover its expenses and pay the salaries of five employees—Ward, Doc, Beck, me, and our front-desk-psychic-death-witch, Rayn—it wasn’t making so much profit that we could consider things like private forensic labs.
So we mostly just begged favors from Mays, a CSI tech I’d regularly worked with back in homicide who also collected and repaired old lab equipment he kept squirreled away in a storage unit like a mad scientist. He was more than happy to let us use it. Doc’s old work colleague, chemistry professor Rhoda Keller, was also a regular consultant. Blood and anything obviously biological went to Mays, and weird, unidentified chemical stuff went to Keller. It was a little skeezy, but both of them were good at what they did. And we always kept clean samples we could give to the RPD if it came down to it.
“I can ask, yeah.” I never wanted to presume with Mays. Not because I thought he’d resent the ask, but because he did have an actual job to do, and I didn’t want to keep him from that. Mays was good at what he did, people liked him, and he was human. Everything going for him in the potential-for-promotion department.
And he was a good guy on top of it.
“Great,” was Ward’s cheerful response.
He spent the rest of the drive giving me background on the people opening the museum, although he rather neglected to tell me about the cult who had been living there until we were about ten minutes away.
“Wait, the fuck you mean it was owned by a fuckingcult?” I demanded. “Burying the lead, there, Ward.”
“I mean. They were some sort of communal living group, I guess.” I saw him shrug as I pulled off the highway toward the roads that would lead us to the museum site. “Is it important?”
“If they’re a murdering cult it abso-fucking-ultely is.”
“We don’t know how old this knife is, Hart,” he pointed out.
“Maybe not, but there’s no statute of limitations on murder—although if itismore recent, the killer might still be alive.” I was experiencing some weird mixed emotions. Excitement at possibly having a meaningful case to work. Annoyance that if itwasa recent murder, the police were going to get involved, and that was going to be a pain in the ass, and they were probably going to take the case away from me. Weird guilt that I kinda wanted it to be a murder. Preferably an old one where the killer wasn’t identifiable by the victim so I actually got to do something. A couple centuries old would be nice, because then the cops just sort of hand-wave it as ‘archeology’ and let you do whatever you want.
“I guess,” came Ward’s hesitant response. “I just assumed that it was probably old, because it’s not like ritual sacrifice cults have been terribly popular in the last century.”
“Other than the Antiquus Ordo Arcanum, you mean?” I reminded him, although I really shouldn’t have had to. They’d been responsible for a whole handful and a half of sacrificial killings that had kept us rather busy a few years ago, to say nothing of the dozen or so disappearing bullet killings that had almost included Doc.
“They weren’t a sacrificial cult,” Ward replied. “They’re a secret society who… added sacrifice to the other stuff they do.”
“That’s a pretty fucking fine distinction there,” I pointed out.
“Would you like me to call Mason so he can explain it to you like he did to me?” Ward asked, and I could tell from his tone that there had been a whole lecture that had come along with that. I got it. Doc liked to lecture. Sometimes the lectures were even interesting. “I can assure you that the Ordo isnota ritual sacrifice cult, but a secret society that includes occasional ritual sacrifice. Ritual sacrifice cults haven’t been popular in a while.”
I snorted. “That and they romanticize the ones from the nineteenth century because they had orgies,” I told him.
“And you know this why?”
Apparently he had gotten a different lecture than I had. “Doc.”
It was Ward’s turn to snort. “He would tell you that.”
“Dude knows a lot about ritual orgies.” I mostly said it to make Ward blush, because he turned a really fantastic shade of hot pink, and it wasso easyto do.
“I—we can stop talking about orgies now,” he muttered, and I grinned as I confirmed the flaming magenta of his cheeks. “Oh, look,” he commented dryly as I pulled into a driveway. “We’re here. Oh, darn.”
I couldn’t help laughing as I parked, got out, and fetched his chair from the trunk before helping him into it.
“Shut up, Hart.”
“Didn’t say a fucking word.”
* * *
The blood turnedout to be human. Specifically, a human named Rosemary Carlisle who had died about a year ago and claimed to have been a medium, which put both Ward and I a bit on edge. Ward, because he had a history with magical ghosts that wasn’t terribly pleasant, and me because I had a history with anti-Arcanid radicals who liked to kill Arc-humans, mediums included. The question was really whether or not Ms. Carlisle had been killed incidental to or because of the fact that she was a medium—and she didn’t seem to know. Or, at least, she hadn’t explicitly said so.
I was getting the impression from Ward that she was a bit… scattered.
He’d summoned Archie—one of the ghosts who had met his end at the hands of the not-a-sacrificial-cult Ordo and had decided to stick around because he liked Ward and also liked harassing the shit out of Sylvia. As weird as ghosts always made me feel, I liked Archie, at least once I’d gotten him to stop calling me ‘pretty-boy.’
