AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I muttered under my breath.
“Brutal this way, isn’t it?” Kurtz agreed with me.
“Fuck, yes.” Even though I’d already had a whole goddamn pot of coffee, I’d stopped on the way in for more. This time, the kind that came with more milk and sugar than actual coffee.
So I was tired, jittery as fuck, and still not awake enough for this shit. I took a drag from the paper cup, the taste of cinnamon and milky espresso rolling across my tongue.
The final count when we’d left Hampton had been ten shifters and just as many dogs. At least it didn’t look like we’d missed any, although there were bones missing here and there that were obvious—a leg, one skull, a paw of one variety or another.
“They were buried as bones, right?” I asked Kurtz.
He nodded. “Looks like. Since the time frame your medium gave us wouldn’t allow for full decomp.”
Basically, all we’d found in the museum’s yard was bones—and the bodies weren’t old enough to have rotted all the way down to the skeleton without any trace of skin or fur or flesh left.
“Do we know how they did it?” I asked him. Ward’s attempt to get this out of Rosemary had failed. She’d seen the murder and the burial and nothing else.
“I don’t.” He walked up to one of the tables. “Hey, Izzy.”
A man with bright purple hair looked up. “Hey Kurtz.”
“We know how these poor bastards ended up skeletonized?”
Izzy shook his head. “Not yet. We pulled a few of the smaller bones for testing—heat, residue, microcuts or abrasions, that sort of thing. Might still take a day or two.” He looked over at me. “Who’s your new friend, Kurtz?”
“Oh, right.” The faun gave me a grin that showed his big teeth. “Hart, this is Izzy. Izzy, Hart.”
The guy had a badge clipped to his white coat with a picture on it sporting blond spikes instead of purple and a baby face that I couldn’t see behind the safety goggles and mask he was currently sporting. It read ‘I. Zizek.’
I didn’t offer to shake because he was holding a skull in his hand, gloved in purple nitrile. If I touched them, he’d have to change them.
“Nice to meet you,” I replied.
“Ditto,” he nodded his head.
“Iz here was one of those freaky child geniuses. Graduated college at ten or some shit.”
“Seventeen,” Izzy corrected.
I felt my eyebrows rise.
“My parents were… a little pushy,” Izzy replied. “I didn’t much care, but they were all ‘you have to show these Americans that immigrants are worthy’ and stuff.” He shrugged again, his cheeks coloring slightly. “But I liked school, so why not?”
“Because your classmates were probably little shits about it?” I suggested.
Izzy laughed. “Yeah, they were. But you sit in the corner and never go outside for recess, and it isn’t so bad.”
“We have a different definition of bad, kiddo,” I replied.
“I think he’s legal now,” Kurtz pointed out.
Izzy rolled his eyes, which looked to be grey behind the plastic safety lenses. “Yeah, I can drink and everything.”
Kurtz cackled. “Izzy’s good. If the evidence is there, he’ll find it. You might have to buy him a lollipop, though.”
Izzy shifted the skull to one hand so that he could flip us off, but it looked like he was grinning as he did it, the expression lifting his cheekbones.
“The bones aren’t what you need to see, though,” Kurtz went on, leading me past the tables with their pale white contents.
