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“Am I going to like it?”
“Probably not.”
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense.”
“A dead dog and a dead shifter.”
“You sure about the dog?”
“Yep. Sure about the shifter, too.”
“What’s your proof?”
“Ward.” The medium looked up at me, his eyebrows raised. I waved at him, trying to indicate that it was fine and I didn’t need him to do anything. At least not at the moment.
“Oh,” was what Raj said, and the tone of his voice told me that he absolutely knew that if Ward confirmed it, it was true.
“The weird part is that both bodies had a whelk shell buried with them.”
“A… whelk shell?”
“Yep.”
“The fuck am I supposed to do with that?” Raj wanted to know.
“No idea, but it’s a commonality. That, and whelk shells are apparently a sign of the death and rebirth cycle in Aztec folklore.”
“You got anything else Aztec?”
“The knife used to kill a woman a year ago.” I was enjoying this.
“She a shifter?”
“She isn’t,” I replied. “But she did see the shifter’s murder.” Probably. Either that or there was another body in the ex-raspberry patch. “Or another shifter’s murder.”
“Or another shifter’s murder?” Raj repeated, sounding a little exasperated.
“She seems to be a past-seer and saw a victim get buried where we found the shifter. So it was either this one or there are more bodies out here. But they stopped digging when they found the second one until we could come out and confirm species.”
“They?”
“The not-yet-open Old Virginia Museum of Religion. Hampton Roads.”
Raj sighed. “Don’t dig up anything else until we get there.”
“You want us to stick around?”
“You leave, and I will hunt you down and drag you back by those pointy ears.” He sounded a little annoyed now. “You and Ward.”
“We’ll be here.”
* * *
Rajand one of the other A-branch team members, an older faun named John Kurtzweil, showed up just under three hours later, which means they actually left not long after I called. Kurtz grinned, showing me his too-big teeth as he shook my hand.
“Good to see you again, Hart.”
“Ditto, Kurtz. How are you?”
