No magic, witch or fae, could overcome self-preservation. Not directly at least. Falin had mentioned spells and abilities that amplified emotion. A spell couldn’t compel someone to jump off a building or douse themselves in gasoline, but maybe it could exaggerate situations until suicide appeared the only way out? That would sidestep the willpower dilemma if the victim chose death, even if a spell was why they felt the need to die.

But then why doesn’t the shade remember?

The theory didn’t explain the missing memories, the weight loss, or the chunk sucked out of the ghost. Those had to be explained by a spell, didn’t they? And yet, it couldn’t be a spell. But if it was, the suicide James had witnessed had to be when he’d picked up the spell.

I pushed away from my desk, and Rianna jumped, startled by my sudden movement. That didn’t last long. Her gaze swept over my face, curiosity radiating around her.

“You thought of something?” she asked, sliding to her feet.

“More like made a decision,” I said. I needed to talk to that earlier suicide victim. To find out if his experience correlated to Kingly’s.

But first, I had to figure out Mr. Crispy’s name.

Chapter 13

Tamara’s cell went straight to voice mail, so I called the ME’s office, but reached an intern who informed me that Tamara was in the middle of an autopsy. I didn’t want to get Tamara in trouble, so I left just my name and a message for her to call me ASAP.

While I waited, I pulled up the Nekros Times online archives. I hoped I’d luck out and find something about Kingly’s overcooked mystery man. I knew the date the event had occurred, so I queued the articles from the following day’s paper. The article described the event as “tragic” and “deeply saddening” but was only a couple paragraphs long. Kingly had told me more than the paper’s account of events. And worse yet, the man was listed only as “an as yet unidentified male.” That wouldn’t help me find his family or his gravesite. I searched for follow-up articles, but found none.

The Times having failed me, I pulled up a search engine. It took a good fifteen minutes of playing with keywords before I found an article on a news blog. It was much more detailed—and grislier—than the article in the Nekros Times, but it still didn’t list the man’s name. I checked out the comments, and was disturbed by how many people thought becoming a human torch would be an awesome way to go. More than once commenters asked if he was testing a charm in an experiment that went terribly wrong. Answers went both ways, which tended to happen on the ’net where anyone could claim to be an expert. One commenter linked to a cell phone recording of the event. Okay, my opinion of society just went down a notch. At the same time, there could be something in the video that could help in my investigation. If Kingly’s crispy horror is directly involved.

I bookmarked the location without watching it.

I’d found three more equally unhelpful news posts on the suicide by the time my phone rang. Tamara sounded tired when I answered, her voice rough and throaty.

“You okay?” I asked. “You sound sick.”

She huffed a laugh. “In a manner speaking, so if you’re calling to invite me to lunch, I’ll pass.”

Morning sickness.

Her chair squeaked and I imagined her leaning back and propping her legs up after hours of standing over an autopsy table.

“So what’s up, Alex?”

“I’m looking for the name of a suicide that probably passed through your cold room a little under two weeks ago.”

Tamara groaned. “Another suicide? What are you advertising these days?”

“Don’t worry. I just need a name this time.”

I described the manner in which the man had died. As I spoke, the other end of the line went eerily silent.

“Tam, you still there?”

“Who hired you to look into that case, Alex?” I could hear her frown through the phone. It wasn’t the response I’d expected.

“No one, directly. It came up in the course of the Kingly case. Why?”

“He’s a John Doe. Not that there was much left to identify him by. His hands were destroyed so no prints, and no one would ever be able to identify what was left of his face.”

Nearly two weeks as a John Doe?

“He’s been cremated already, hasn’t he?” A suicide victim who had appeared homeless before lighting himself up? Yeah, the city wasn’t going to hold on to that corpse for long. And while I was damn good at grave magic, no one could pull a shade from cremated remains—the extreme heat obliterated everything.

Well, there goes that lead.

“Actually, that case got to me. He’s still in my cold room.” Tamara’s chair squeaked again and she made a small “mmph” sound as she stood. “Since no family or friends have come forward, how would you like to officially identify our crispy friend?”

And just like that, the red tape was cut and I had legal access to the shade. Now to hope he held the key to this mystery.

“Here he is,” Tamara said, pushing the gurney out of the cold room.

I could sense the preservative charm on the corpse, and the charms in the morgue that moderated the smell were functioning, but as the gurney approached, the scent of burnt flesh wafted over me.

“This is going to be bad, isn’t it?” I asked as I drew my circle.

“I’ve worked on worse, but yeah, he’s pretty bad.” She looked vaguely green, but I’d seen Tamara examine a corpse’s innards without so much as a crinkle of her nose. She looked at the body clinically, not seeing a person. I guessed that her current pallor and the fact her face was all tight lines had nothing to do with the man under the sheet.

“Why haven’t you made a charm, yet?” I asked.

Tamara frowned, cocking her head to the side and giving me a puzzled look.

Right, I’d totally skipped the segue. “For the morning sickness, I mean. Why not make a charm to take care of it?”

“Oh.” She looked away. “If I make a charm, anyone the least bit sensitive will pick up on it. Including my mom and sister who are flying in this weekend. Theoretically, Ethan and I were the only two who were supposed to know, but I suppose you’ve told Holly by now.”

“That’s not my place.” After all, we were all keeping secrets these days.

If I hadn’t been looking right at her, I’d have missed the fact her shoulders relaxed ever so slightly. She really is worried about people knowing.

“You ready for me to turn the recorder on?” she asked, changing the subject. “I want to know who our John Doe is.”

“Yeah, go ahead.” I looked down at the shape under the sheet. “But first, why this one?”

“Huh?”

“You said this case got to you. Why?”

She stepped over my still inert circle, and joined me beside the gurney. “You think you can look at him in the flesh?”

I cringed back. “Can’t you just tell me?”

“No, this is something you have to see.” She folded back the sheet exposing no more than a foot and a half of the body beneath.

I knew it was a body only because my innate ability to sense the dead told me as much, but my eyes certainly didn’t agree. My brain rejected the blackened mess mixed with areas of dark red and thick, puss-colored blotches as ever having been a living person.

“You’re not going to be sick are you?” Tamara asked. I swallowed the taste of bitter bile and shook my head. She nodded in approval. “Good, then come closer and look at this.”

I stepped up to the side of the gurney again, staring at the thing she’d exposed. I’d expected a charred skeleton when I heard how he’d died, but there was still a lot of flesh left. I stared, not making sense of what I was seeing until I noticed the two translucent splotches almost evenly placed in the front.

His eyes. It was a head.

I’d stopped breathing at some point, which I didn’t realize until my body forced me to gasp in air—air that tasted of char and dead flesh. My stomach twisted, and for a moment I thought I’d lied to Tamara and I would, in fact, be revisited by the half pot of coffee I’d called breakfast. I squeezed my eyes closed. You can do this, Alex. Calm down. Slow, shallow breaths.

I could feel Tamara watching me, but thankfully, she said nothing about my reaction. I might need dead bodies, but I most definitely didn’t like them.

Opening my eyes again, I made myself look at the thing on the gurney. The ear closest to me was gone, and I could only barely make out a blackened lump that had once been a nose between cheeks that had split open, exposing that yellowed, pustules substance.

“What am I supposed to—” I lost the question as my gaze moved to where the lips had shriveled and drawn back, exposing a mouth full of pointed teeth. They looked like something that belonged in a shark’s mouth, not a man’s.

“Damn,” I whispered the word, more to myself than anyone. Tamara nodded her agreement, but I couldn’t look away from those teeth. Nothing human had teeth like that. “Is he fae?”

“No, I had an RMC test run. Not only is he a human; he was most likely a null.”

The Relative Magic Compatibility test, or RMC, was still considered fringe science by most. The results weren’t admissible in any court, but they were fast, easy, and inexpensive. With a DNA sample, a tech created a slide and placed it in the RMC reader. The machine stored a minor charge of Aetheric energy, which it attempted to infuse into the sample. Then it measured the reaction to that energy on a cellular level and created a pretty little chart.

Norms, as in the two-thirds of the population who were nonmagical humans, created low level readings that looked a lot like a rolling wave well below the first marker. Nulls, the humans who not only lacked any magical aptitude, but often had at least partial immunity to magic, registered on the chart as a flatline. Witches produced charts filled with large mountains and valleys. The more powerful the witch, the higher the spikes. But regardless of what the Humans First Party preached, norms, nulls, and witches were all human, the difference being that some could channel magic and some couldn’t. Fae, on the other hand, weren’t human. Placing a fae sample into the RMC reader produced no graph. Instead it spit out a single, vertical line in the center of the chart.