shrugged. “Shouldn’t be a problem, Doc. Can you tell Astra what you told me?”
Snapping on some gloves, she twitched aside the cover over the first body to bare the head and torso. I swallowed.
“The medical term for this is cooked,” Dr. Sinclair “Call me Abby” said. “Which is impossible.”
The body hadn’t been burned, even I could see that. It—he—still had his dark shock of hair and thick eyebrows.
“The victim’s clothes were intact,” she said to me. “Not even singed, and he collapsed in the middle of a crowd. Until then nobody noticed him. The first reading of his core temperature was ridiculous; he couldn’t have been alive, let alone walking down a street, and the degree of...baking…indicated he’d been that hot for hours.”
Fisher watched me, and I forced myself to think about what I was looking at. There was something wrong about it, and not just the condition of the body.
I opened my mouth, and a different question spilled out. “Was it… did it hurt?”
“No way to tell, kid,” Fisher said softly. “But I don’t think so. Witnesses said he was just walking slowly, and dropped without a sound. Like he’d passed out. The others were the same.”
That helped, but he didn’t offer anything else, which wasn’t like him. Even Abby looked puzzled.
When I took a step closer, the wrongness grew. I spun to look at Fisher.
“This is—”
“This is what?”
“Magic.” The body didn’t have the same too-real feeling of the special room in the Dome, but it was close—like a lingering smell or fading after-image.
Fisher didn’t blink. “And the other one?” I stepped around to the second table, shaking my head when Abby offered to uncover the body. “This one, too. But… not as much.”
He snorted. “That one is the second victim, found on Tuesday. Our man here died last night. Dr. Cornelius told me about your ‘sensitivity’ before he skipped town, and that it might last awhile. Good to know he was right.”
Abby looked interested. “You can sense supernatural effects, honey? That would be very useful. We get a few ‘cause unknown’ cases every year, and we’ve got no magic breakthroughs on staff to sniff out curses.”
I must have let my panic show, because Fisher shook his head. “We can talk about that later, Doc.” He took my elbow. “We really need to be going.”
“But—”
“I’ll call. Promise.” He got me out of there quick, leaving the doctor with her mouth open, and didn’t say anything else until we were back in the car.
“Wow,” I said when I could trust my voice. “You’d better apologize with wine and candles.”
He glanced at me. “You’re laughing.”
“Yes,” I giggled. “And thanks for the save. Ugh!” Shuddering, I leaned back and closed my eyes, trying to get the image of the dead man out of my head. What a wonderful first day back… Think of kitties. “Those were some of the hits you talked about?”
“Actually, no. The first case didn’t even cross my desk—Garfield gave it to Phelps. I caught the second. He’s a John Doe, but his face came up in our image recognition software.”
“Huh? How?”
“After you told me Mr. Miyamoto was probably Kitsune, I pulled the security footage from The Fortress. Nemesis found his target because victim number two pointed him out. The weird bit is that, looking at all the tapes, number two got plenty of room—like everybody could smell him and gave him lots of space, but nobody even looked at him. He had to grab Nemesis to get his attention. You can watch the files if you want.”
“But you couldn’t ID him.”
“Nope. But his picture went in our database, and two days later he popped up dead on the street.”
“So, what—”
The curbside mailbox shattered the windshield into a million tiny flying slivers and hammered Fisher through his seat and into the back of the car. I stared at the blue box steel beside me, and then reflexively ducked and covered my head as we swerved, slid, caught something and rolled end over end. The crunch as we met the tree and wrapped around it ended our trip. I found myself upside down and pinned against the shredded bark, my window gone.
No. No. No. He’s dead. He’s dead. God, please let us have missed everybody.
“Are you commuting now, Astra?”
Villain-X waited in the air above me, back in his black costume minus the hooded facemask. He flared in my infrared vision while my inner woogyness told me there was more to him than there should have been. Like the bodies on