Black Ice - Part 3
Jun. 20th, 2011 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeI.
“All of this is true.” Long fingers with
I blinked, feeling every second of every minute I had to spend with this chucklehead grinding on my nerves like sand under my eyelids. “Deep,” I muttered, taking a sip of ice water from restaurant crystal. “But not helpful. Try again.”
He steepled his fingers like a Hammer Horror villain and stared at me from beneath bushy eyebrows. I was pretty sure those eyebrows were camel hair. “You want to know what could be so strong, so powerful, that it murders the stuff of nightmares without leaving a trace.”
Sarcastic remarks filled my mouth. I pressed my lips shut and nodded rather than say any of them.
“Has it ever occurred to you to ask them what they think?”
I blinked. All this investigating, all this poking into the lives of the dead and I hadn’t actually talked to the living. Part of that, yeah, was because I didn’t know who their friends were. And part of it was because I thought of them as animals, living in rent-by-the-week apartments full of meth-heads and prostitutes of all kinds. But the Shade kind of disproved that, didn’t she? One of them had a girlfriend. The other one had someone who hired a necromancer. I’d assumed that was a business contact. Should I be looking elsewhere?
There was another question, too. “You got a Hellhound on speed dial I can ask?”
He smirked. “As it just so happens, I do.” Smug bastard. He moved over to the phone and dialed, rather than going through some long explanation about the risk he was taking and impressing me with the mystical nature of the Hellhounds. I didn’t know if it was my luck or just that I didn’t seem impressed with all his pseudo psychopomp bullshit.
All the real spirit-callers and magic-chuckers in the city and there were still fakes making a good living. I didn’t understand people sometimes.
The shyster talked with someone over the phone for a couple of minutes in a language I didn’t understand, with an accent I couldn’t place. Human, though. I’d heard it somewhere, it was from a human country, I just couldn’t place it. Nepal and Pakistan, maybe.
“I will set you a meeting,” he said, when he came back to me. Like he was doing me an honor with that. I kept my eyes from rolling out of my skull and got to my feet.
“Now are you done?”
Far from taking offense, he looked at me like I had done something curious. Not passed a test but maybe stepped around one. Or just done something unexpected. He wasn’t a fortune teller, not like he went around like a real psychic half in and half out of the future. “For now. You don’t believe me about anything else, there not much more I can tell you.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him. I listened carefully to everything he said, I just didn’t think his information came from reliable sources. I wanted reliable sources. Even if the odds of this ever reaching a courtroom were about as good or better than the odds of me reaching the moon under my own power and taking a good deep breath.
Probably a similar life expectancy, given how everyone else in the case ended up with a bad case of death.
“Send me the details on the meeting,” I shook my head. “I need anything else from you, I let you know.” Bit of a finger wiggle there might push it over the edge, but I did it anyway.
Mockery wasn’t something I indulged in often, but this guy got my back up in ways I couldn’t explain. He glared at me as I left. I felt a little bit guilty. It lasted till I got to the car.
II.
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
I was distracted. She probably wanted to reach through the phone and slap me into next week. “What did he say?”
“I hate fortune tellers.”
Cherry rolled her eyes at me. I could hear her rolling her eyes even though I couldn’t actually, you know, hear her rolling her eyes over the phone. Maybe I snickered a little. She said an unladylike word and something clattered in the background, it sounded like she was in the kitchen. “Are you going to cough it up or do I have to come over there and throttle it out of you?”
“Such language from an officer of the court. I got the number of and a contact meeting with a Hellhound. The guy might be a fake psychic but I think he’s a real mind-reader. Looking at people, figuring out what they’re thinking by the way their faces look, that kind of thing.”
“That kind of thing works way better in the movies than it does in the real world, you idiot.” Her voice had calmed down, though. “Is he going to be there?”
“No, this isn’t about reading the Hellhound’s face. This is about hearing what they think about all this, and they’re the one group that’s not going to talk to me.”
We sat in silence and chewed on that for a bit. Hellhounds didn’t talk to anyone. Wasn’t entirely clear whether or not they knew how to talk to people, not in the sense that they didn’t know how to form words but they had no sense of boundaries. Or decency, even the kind maintained by lifelong whores and pimps, dealers and runners. No one knew where they came from, but they didn’t act like human beings, former or otherwise. Even Shades acted more like people. Mostly because you didn't notice them otherwise.
“You think that’ll do anything?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what it’ll do. Nothing admissable in court, but maybe it’ll put us on the right track. Right now we don’t know what track we’re on.”
“It’ll put us on their track, anyway...” Something started to whistle in the background, her kettle, her coffee, maybe. I heard someone talking in the background. “You go to that meet, you see what you can see, but don’t make any deals and don’t get yourself in deeper than you have to. You hear me?”
“Hear you loud and clear.” I never planned on making any deals or getting myself into anything, anyway. I didn’t want to get involved in whatever the Hellhounds were up to. “We’ll see what I find out, and I won’t do anything but talk to him.”
She snorted like she didn’t believe me. “Don’t be a hero, either.”
“Oh, come on. Do I really look like the sort of person who’d play hero? Have I ever done a stupid or reckless thing in my life that,” I had to add, before she listed off all the stupid and reckless things I’d done in the last six months. “Was in service of the greater good, or some dumb shit like that?”
Cherry grunted. It took a second before I figured out that the wheezing noises that followed were stifled laughter.
“Yeah, you just do whatever it is you’re doing on your end, let me do all the heavy lifting,” I bitched her out. Of course, she was still laughing when I hung up the phone.
Stupid woman. Stupider me.
III.
The meet went down in a laundromat. The Hellhound was sitting on a washing machine when I got in. Lights flickered like they’d been bought off a slasher movie set. I hated laundromats; they made everything turn yellow or green and all the people in them look sick and pale. Neither of us were exceptions. He looked like he was dead already and when I looked down at my hands as I took my riding gloves off they were pale, with blue spider veins traveling down to my knuckles. Fun stuff.
“I’m supposed to ask you who you think is killing your kind.”
Not subtle, but as far as introductions went it was to the point, and it wasn’t likely he would mistake it for anything else. The Hellhound looked at me and I didn’t think it was the lighting turning his eyes yellow for just a second. It was fucking creepy. Only cat eyes did that, and usually when looking at a light source.
He was looking at me. I did not want him looking at me.
“You do laundry in here?”
His mouth curled into a sneer. “Where else would I do laundry?”
“I don’t know, your house?” Why was I smarting off to a thing that could rip me in half without trying? Maybe Cherry was right, maybe I was made of stupid.
The Hellhound shook his head. “Closest we can figure is it was pixies.”
And sometimes, I thought I was made of MENSA-grade smarts compared to everyone else in the world. “Pixies, right? Little guys, fly around, make everyone act like they’re on happy drugs for a little while?” He nodded. “You think I fell off the stupid truck yesterday?”
He didn’t take offense to that, I guess that was good. “Hey, I didn’t say I liked the idea either, or that I believed it. Ilyan believes it, and I guess that means the rest of us do too, or at least it’s supposed to. But it’s not all that far-fetched. Whatever’s doing this has to be smart and sneaky, as well as strong. It’s easy to tell strong. We tear each other apart all the time.”
“Yeah, I know, I’ve seen the news stories.”
“But this? Accidents, suicides? Suicides that aren’t suicides? That’s different, that means sneaky. Someone easy to overlook, easy to underestimate. Pixies.”
I frowned. “That also means half a dozen other things, too, you know that?” I wanted to make sure the Hellhound knew that, because I wasn’t sure I did. There might be some kind of secret pixie weapon against the Hellhounds that I wasn’t privy to, not being a member of either secret club.
“Yeah, but Ilyan...” And then he shook his head, like shaking something off. “Not supposed to tell you that.”
Now that was kind of interesting. “Not supposed to tell me what?”
There was that yellow again, and I knew what he meant. I wasn’t a Hellhound. I was outside, not a part of the group, and they couldn’t trust me with Hellhound business. Whatever made them think it was pixies it was something only they knew, or maybe something only they could see or smell.
On the other hand, that was the first time I’d had any sign that my charming personality worked on the bastards. That was kind of interesting.
He didn’t say anything and after a while I got tired of waiting in silence. “Why would pixies be after Hellhounds?”
“Breaking the treaty so they can get some kind of advantage? Jealous of our good looks? Who the hell knows. Who the hell knows why a pixie does anything?”
Treaty?
“Their fellow pixies, I guess. Don’t they run in packs?”
“Tribes.” He shook his head. “There’s seven or eight tribes in the city, all of them have their leaders. Ruling council, I think, they keep to themselves most of the time. It doesn’t even have to be all of them, I guess. It could be a rogue faction through all the tribes, it could be a fringe element of one tribe. It has to be more than one. There isn’t enough juice in one pixie to affect one of us.”
“So you think they’re basically mind-controlling you into killing yourselves.” Which made sense, in a sick sort of a way, but it also didn’t explain why the Hellhounds, why not anyone else, and what was between the two of them.
Except it hadn’t just been the Hellhounds. There was also that Necromancer. For years, decades, ever since the extent of mind-altering magic and practices of several groups in the past had been discovered there was a suspicion that people could use it for further, more drastic purposes. The commonly held belief was that it was like hypnotism, you couldn’t force someone to do what wasn’t in their nature to do. This and a couple other incidents indicated otherwise.
“You guys aren’t prone to suicide, are you.” No one had questioned that yet. Out of all the questions we’d been asking, no one had asked if Hellhounds were likely candidates for offing themselves. He seemed surprised that I asked at all.
But he shook his head. “Not usually. We don’t give up easy, and we’re fighters. We just don’t seem to know when to quit. Doesn’t make it likely that …”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
IV.
“So, you made friends.” Cherry’s hands on her hips and her face suggested how unlikely that was. And friends was a little bit further than I would have gone. “What did your new friend have to tell you?”
Pixies.
“What do you know about this treaty the Hellhounds have...”
“With the pixies and the, um.” Her fingers snapped a rhythm against the palm of her other hand for a second. “Shit. Those other guys, gray-faced, no sense of humor.”
“Shades?”
“No, not them, actual other guys. The wisps.”
I blinked. “The wisps got involved?”
“They used to be. The city oversaw the treaty, one of I think seven cities that did. There was some kind of warfare going on, all of them...” She fell back onto the arm of the couch as something clicked into place for her. “... over territory. They saw us as prey, part of the treaty was with us, too. That they wouldn’t try and feed on us or use us or whatever it was they were doing, I don’t know so much about the wisps, no one does. Pixies...”
“Control minds.”
Cherry cocked her head at me, not like she was surprised that I knew that but more that she was surprised I knew that I knew. “It explains the suicides, but there’d have to be one hell of a lot of them, all with way more focus than pixies in groups can manage.”
I blinked. Not that that didn’t fit with what the Hellhound had said, but it didn’t fit with what I understood. “Back up. Pixies can influence people’s minds.”
“Yes.”
“Pixies could make a Hellhound kill himself.”
“Yep.”
“Pixies in large groups can’t influence people because they don’t have the focus for it.”
She shook her head. “It depends on how focused the group is on what they want a person to do, and how many pixies are in the group. And how inclined the person is to do what they want. It’s not like hypnotism but it runs along a lot of the same lines.”
I frowned at her. “How do you know so much about...”
“She’s an ADA, how you think she knows?”
Tongue lolling out one side of his mouth, looking more ratty than he had the last time I saw him, her coyote friend padded up on sharp nails with bared teeth. On a homid face, he would have been smiling.
I looked from him to her, but neither of them coughed up answers even with my best glare. I had to work on that one.
“All right, so you won’t tell me. Will you at least tell me how we figure out if it was pixies, is there some kind of autopsy thing I should be looking for? Do I need to chop off their heads and bring them here so you can sniff their brains?” I looked down at the coyote. He looked back up at me. I looked at Cherry. Then back at the coyote.
“You’re kidding.”
It’s hard to shrug when you have dog shoulders, but he managed it. “If you think it would help.”
“You want me to go to the morgue and cut off their heads? Assuming the first one’s still at the morgue.” Plus the girl, the necromancer. I didn’t want to know where she’d gone to.
The little shit waited until I was almost at the door before he called out. “You could also check their systems for pixie dust.”
I stopped. Turned around. Cherry was shaking her head, arms folded over her chest and a tight expression on her face that hadn’t been there a second ago. That explained how she knew. Didn’t explain what pixie dust was, what to look for or where I should be looking for it.
“Do I just tell the boys at the lab to look for it, is there some kind of special test number I should tell them to look for?”
Cherry rolled her shoulders, the way you do after carrying a heavy weight for hours. “Tell them to run test Three-Five-Seven. No, not them, tell Anders. He’ll know what I’m talking about.”
Anders. Did I know an Anders at the morgue? I couldn’t remember, but with the necromancers and the body dealers and everything else, it’s not like there’s a shortage of either morgue workers or tests that could be run. Test Three-Five-Seven. I’d remember that.
I nodded, and left.
V.
“She sent you?”
Anders was one of those weird medical examiners, scraggy dark blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, maybe in his forties or fifties so he’d had a good head of steam built up on the weird. He kept a candy cigarette tucked behind his ear for safekeeping and I thought I saw chattering teeth in his pocket. Maybe it was his way of keeping out of the gloom of where he worked.
I shrugged. “She said Test Three-Five-Seven. Said you would know what that meant?”
He whistled, shaking his head. Then turned his back to me to go through some files, and if he said anything I didn’t hear it.
When he turned around I got a look. “You’re still here.”
“Well, yeah. Is this test going to take long? I mean, is this a mass-spectrometer thing, or a spectragraph, or is this like running DNA or Kirlian to find out ...”
“That’s a misnomer,” he shook his head, starting to go through files and write down numbers. I caught one name on top of a file: Chauncey Villiers. One of the Hellhounds.
Kirlian was a misnomer but I ignored it because it would probably annoy the guy. “Whatever, how long does the test take?”
“You’re going to annoy me until I give it to you, aren’t you?” He folded his arms over his chest and gave me a look. Now I knew where Cherry got it from. “Fine. It’ll take an hour or two. Depending on the results the first time around.”
“I’ll wait.”
He had to get the samples out of cold storage. Brain slides, it turned out, nothing up the nosehairs or under the fingernails. Something in the brain that he was going to run through some kind of machine, a scanning machine. Take a couple images and look for something, maybe do a stain, I didn’t know how this worked. This wasn’t my usual circuit.
He looked at all three images on a display, not an x-ray display but a projection on a white wall. Hands against the edge of a table and tapping his fingers on the underside and now I saw where Cherry had got it from. And I wondered how long they knew each other. And how they knew each other.
“Well, Doc? Is it pixies?”
To me, it all looked like a mess of blue veins and splotches. I can only guess he saw something with his arcane medical knowledge and his years of experience at looking at dead people’s brains. “They were around pixies, I can tell you that much. A whole tribe of them. Whether or not they did anything to induce him to commit suicide I couldn’t say, but...” His voice started to drift as he lifted his chin, staring at visions. “They certainly gave him some very nice dreams.”
I didn’t like this guy. “Are you high?”
“No.”
Whatever. I had an answer, at least, I could take that back to Cherry and he could file his report and...
“Are you going to tell her?”
I turned slow so I had time to consider how many ways I could ask him what the hell he thought I was going to do with this information. He must have known it from the way I looked at him because he cracked me across the face with a rib spreader. Still had bits of rib meat. Gross.
It didn’t go dark at first. He had to hit me a couple more times while I was pulling myself together to get me out.
“All of this is true.” Long fingers with
I blinked, feeling every second of every minute I had to spend with this chucklehead grinding on my nerves like sand under my eyelids. “Deep,” I muttered, taking a sip of ice water from restaurant crystal. “But not helpful. Try again.”
He steepled his fingers like a Hammer Horror villain and stared at me from beneath bushy eyebrows. I was pretty sure those eyebrows were camel hair. “You want to know what could be so strong, so powerful, that it murders the stuff of nightmares without leaving a trace.”
Sarcastic remarks filled my mouth. I pressed my lips shut and nodded rather than say any of them.
“Has it ever occurred to you to ask them what they think?”
I blinked. All this investigating, all this poking into the lives of the dead and I hadn’t actually talked to the living. Part of that, yeah, was because I didn’t know who their friends were. And part of it was because I thought of them as animals, living in rent-by-the-week apartments full of meth-heads and prostitutes of all kinds. But the Shade kind of disproved that, didn’t she? One of them had a girlfriend. The other one had someone who hired a necromancer. I’d assumed that was a business contact. Should I be looking elsewhere?
There was another question, too. “You got a Hellhound on speed dial I can ask?”
He smirked. “As it just so happens, I do.” Smug bastard. He moved over to the phone and dialed, rather than going through some long explanation about the risk he was taking and impressing me with the mystical nature of the Hellhounds. I didn’t know if it was my luck or just that I didn’t seem impressed with all his pseudo psychopomp bullshit.
All the real spirit-callers and magic-chuckers in the city and there were still fakes making a good living. I didn’t understand people sometimes.
The shyster talked with someone over the phone for a couple of minutes in a language I didn’t understand, with an accent I couldn’t place. Human, though. I’d heard it somewhere, it was from a human country, I just couldn’t place it. Nepal and Pakistan, maybe.
“I will set you a meeting,” he said, when he came back to me. Like he was doing me an honor with that. I kept my eyes from rolling out of my skull and got to my feet.
“Now are you done?”
Far from taking offense, he looked at me like I had done something curious. Not passed a test but maybe stepped around one. Or just done something unexpected. He wasn’t a fortune teller, not like he went around like a real psychic half in and half out of the future. “For now. You don’t believe me about anything else, there not much more I can tell you.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him. I listened carefully to everything he said, I just didn’t think his information came from reliable sources. I wanted reliable sources. Even if the odds of this ever reaching a courtroom were about as good or better than the odds of me reaching the moon under my own power and taking a good deep breath.
Probably a similar life expectancy, given how everyone else in the case ended up with a bad case of death.
“Send me the details on the meeting,” I shook my head. “I need anything else from you, I let you know.” Bit of a finger wiggle there might push it over the edge, but I did it anyway.
Mockery wasn’t something I indulged in often, but this guy got my back up in ways I couldn’t explain. He glared at me as I left. I felt a little bit guilty. It lasted till I got to the car.
II.
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
I was distracted. She probably wanted to reach through the phone and slap me into next week. “What did he say?”
“I hate fortune tellers.”
Cherry rolled her eyes at me. I could hear her rolling her eyes even though I couldn’t actually, you know, hear her rolling her eyes over the phone. Maybe I snickered a little. She said an unladylike word and something clattered in the background, it sounded like she was in the kitchen. “Are you going to cough it up or do I have to come over there and throttle it out of you?”
“Such language from an officer of the court. I got the number of and a contact meeting with a Hellhound. The guy might be a fake psychic but I think he’s a real mind-reader. Looking at people, figuring out what they’re thinking by the way their faces look, that kind of thing.”
“That kind of thing works way better in the movies than it does in the real world, you idiot.” Her voice had calmed down, though. “Is he going to be there?”
“No, this isn’t about reading the Hellhound’s face. This is about hearing what they think about all this, and they’re the one group that’s not going to talk to me.”
We sat in silence and chewed on that for a bit. Hellhounds didn’t talk to anyone. Wasn’t entirely clear whether or not they knew how to talk to people, not in the sense that they didn’t know how to form words but they had no sense of boundaries. Or decency, even the kind maintained by lifelong whores and pimps, dealers and runners. No one knew where they came from, but they didn’t act like human beings, former or otherwise. Even Shades acted more like people. Mostly because you didn't notice them otherwise.
“You think that’ll do anything?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what it’ll do. Nothing admissable in court, but maybe it’ll put us on the right track. Right now we don’t know what track we’re on.”
“It’ll put us on their track, anyway...” Something started to whistle in the background, her kettle, her coffee, maybe. I heard someone talking in the background. “You go to that meet, you see what you can see, but don’t make any deals and don’t get yourself in deeper than you have to. You hear me?”
“Hear you loud and clear.” I never planned on making any deals or getting myself into anything, anyway. I didn’t want to get involved in whatever the Hellhounds were up to. “We’ll see what I find out, and I won’t do anything but talk to him.”
She snorted like she didn’t believe me. “Don’t be a hero, either.”
“Oh, come on. Do I really look like the sort of person who’d play hero? Have I ever done a stupid or reckless thing in my life that,” I had to add, before she listed off all the stupid and reckless things I’d done in the last six months. “Was in service of the greater good, or some dumb shit like that?”
Cherry grunted. It took a second before I figured out that the wheezing noises that followed were stifled laughter.
“Yeah, you just do whatever it is you’re doing on your end, let me do all the heavy lifting,” I bitched her out. Of course, she was still laughing when I hung up the phone.
Stupid woman. Stupider me.
III.
The meet went down in a laundromat. The Hellhound was sitting on a washing machine when I got in. Lights flickered like they’d been bought off a slasher movie set. I hated laundromats; they made everything turn yellow or green and all the people in them look sick and pale. Neither of us were exceptions. He looked like he was dead already and when I looked down at my hands as I took my riding gloves off they were pale, with blue spider veins traveling down to my knuckles. Fun stuff.
“I’m supposed to ask you who you think is killing your kind.”
Not subtle, but as far as introductions went it was to the point, and it wasn’t likely he would mistake it for anything else. The Hellhound looked at me and I didn’t think it was the lighting turning his eyes yellow for just a second. It was fucking creepy. Only cat eyes did that, and usually when looking at a light source.
He was looking at me. I did not want him looking at me.
“You do laundry in here?”
His mouth curled into a sneer. “Where else would I do laundry?”
“I don’t know, your house?” Why was I smarting off to a thing that could rip me in half without trying? Maybe Cherry was right, maybe I was made of stupid.
The Hellhound shook his head. “Closest we can figure is it was pixies.”
And sometimes, I thought I was made of MENSA-grade smarts compared to everyone else in the world. “Pixies, right? Little guys, fly around, make everyone act like they’re on happy drugs for a little while?” He nodded. “You think I fell off the stupid truck yesterday?”
He didn’t take offense to that, I guess that was good. “Hey, I didn’t say I liked the idea either, or that I believed it. Ilyan believes it, and I guess that means the rest of us do too, or at least it’s supposed to. But it’s not all that far-fetched. Whatever’s doing this has to be smart and sneaky, as well as strong. It’s easy to tell strong. We tear each other apart all the time.”
“Yeah, I know, I’ve seen the news stories.”
“But this? Accidents, suicides? Suicides that aren’t suicides? That’s different, that means sneaky. Someone easy to overlook, easy to underestimate. Pixies.”
I frowned. “That also means half a dozen other things, too, you know that?” I wanted to make sure the Hellhound knew that, because I wasn’t sure I did. There might be some kind of secret pixie weapon against the Hellhounds that I wasn’t privy to, not being a member of either secret club.
“Yeah, but Ilyan...” And then he shook his head, like shaking something off. “Not supposed to tell you that.”
Now that was kind of interesting. “Not supposed to tell me what?”
There was that yellow again, and I knew what he meant. I wasn’t a Hellhound. I was outside, not a part of the group, and they couldn’t trust me with Hellhound business. Whatever made them think it was pixies it was something only they knew, or maybe something only they could see or smell.
On the other hand, that was the first time I’d had any sign that my charming personality worked on the bastards. That was kind of interesting.
He didn’t say anything and after a while I got tired of waiting in silence. “Why would pixies be after Hellhounds?”
“Breaking the treaty so they can get some kind of advantage? Jealous of our good looks? Who the hell knows. Who the hell knows why a pixie does anything?”
Treaty?
“Their fellow pixies, I guess. Don’t they run in packs?”
“Tribes.” He shook his head. “There’s seven or eight tribes in the city, all of them have their leaders. Ruling council, I think, they keep to themselves most of the time. It doesn’t even have to be all of them, I guess. It could be a rogue faction through all the tribes, it could be a fringe element of one tribe. It has to be more than one. There isn’t enough juice in one pixie to affect one of us.”
“So you think they’re basically mind-controlling you into killing yourselves.” Which made sense, in a sick sort of a way, but it also didn’t explain why the Hellhounds, why not anyone else, and what was between the two of them.
Except it hadn’t just been the Hellhounds. There was also that Necromancer. For years, decades, ever since the extent of mind-altering magic and practices of several groups in the past had been discovered there was a suspicion that people could use it for further, more drastic purposes. The commonly held belief was that it was like hypnotism, you couldn’t force someone to do what wasn’t in their nature to do. This and a couple other incidents indicated otherwise.
“You guys aren’t prone to suicide, are you.” No one had questioned that yet. Out of all the questions we’d been asking, no one had asked if Hellhounds were likely candidates for offing themselves. He seemed surprised that I asked at all.
But he shook his head. “Not usually. We don’t give up easy, and we’re fighters. We just don’t seem to know when to quit. Doesn’t make it likely that …”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
IV.
“So, you made friends.” Cherry’s hands on her hips and her face suggested how unlikely that was. And friends was a little bit further than I would have gone. “What did your new friend have to tell you?”
Pixies.
“What do you know about this treaty the Hellhounds have...”
“With the pixies and the, um.” Her fingers snapped a rhythm against the palm of her other hand for a second. “Shit. Those other guys, gray-faced, no sense of humor.”
“Shades?”
“No, not them, actual other guys. The wisps.”
I blinked. “The wisps got involved?”
“They used to be. The city oversaw the treaty, one of I think seven cities that did. There was some kind of warfare going on, all of them...” She fell back onto the arm of the couch as something clicked into place for her. “... over territory. They saw us as prey, part of the treaty was with us, too. That they wouldn’t try and feed on us or use us or whatever it was they were doing, I don’t know so much about the wisps, no one does. Pixies...”
“Control minds.”
Cherry cocked her head at me, not like she was surprised that I knew that but more that she was surprised I knew that I knew. “It explains the suicides, but there’d have to be one hell of a lot of them, all with way more focus than pixies in groups can manage.”
I blinked. Not that that didn’t fit with what the Hellhound had said, but it didn’t fit with what I understood. “Back up. Pixies can influence people’s minds.”
“Yes.”
“Pixies could make a Hellhound kill himself.”
“Yep.”
“Pixies in large groups can’t influence people because they don’t have the focus for it.”
She shook her head. “It depends on how focused the group is on what they want a person to do, and how many pixies are in the group. And how inclined the person is to do what they want. It’s not like hypnotism but it runs along a lot of the same lines.”
I frowned at her. “How do you know so much about...”
“She’s an ADA, how you think she knows?”
Tongue lolling out one side of his mouth, looking more ratty than he had the last time I saw him, her coyote friend padded up on sharp nails with bared teeth. On a homid face, he would have been smiling.
I looked from him to her, but neither of them coughed up answers even with my best glare. I had to work on that one.
“All right, so you won’t tell me. Will you at least tell me how we figure out if it was pixies, is there some kind of autopsy thing I should be looking for? Do I need to chop off their heads and bring them here so you can sniff their brains?” I looked down at the coyote. He looked back up at me. I looked at Cherry. Then back at the coyote.
“You’re kidding.”
It’s hard to shrug when you have dog shoulders, but he managed it. “If you think it would help.”
“You want me to go to the morgue and cut off their heads? Assuming the first one’s still at the morgue.” Plus the girl, the necromancer. I didn’t want to know where she’d gone to.
The little shit waited until I was almost at the door before he called out. “You could also check their systems for pixie dust.”
I stopped. Turned around. Cherry was shaking her head, arms folded over her chest and a tight expression on her face that hadn’t been there a second ago. That explained how she knew. Didn’t explain what pixie dust was, what to look for or where I should be looking for it.
“Do I just tell the boys at the lab to look for it, is there some kind of special test number I should tell them to look for?”
Cherry rolled her shoulders, the way you do after carrying a heavy weight for hours. “Tell them to run test Three-Five-Seven. No, not them, tell Anders. He’ll know what I’m talking about.”
Anders. Did I know an Anders at the morgue? I couldn’t remember, but with the necromancers and the body dealers and everything else, it’s not like there’s a shortage of either morgue workers or tests that could be run. Test Three-Five-Seven. I’d remember that.
I nodded, and left.
V.
“She sent you?”
Anders was one of those weird medical examiners, scraggy dark blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, maybe in his forties or fifties so he’d had a good head of steam built up on the weird. He kept a candy cigarette tucked behind his ear for safekeeping and I thought I saw chattering teeth in his pocket. Maybe it was his way of keeping out of the gloom of where he worked.
I shrugged. “She said Test Three-Five-Seven. Said you would know what that meant?”
He whistled, shaking his head. Then turned his back to me to go through some files, and if he said anything I didn’t hear it.
When he turned around I got a look. “You’re still here.”
“Well, yeah. Is this test going to take long? I mean, is this a mass-spectrometer thing, or a spectragraph, or is this like running DNA or Kirlian to find out ...”
“That’s a misnomer,” he shook his head, starting to go through files and write down numbers. I caught one name on top of a file: Chauncey Villiers. One of the Hellhounds.
Kirlian was a misnomer but I ignored it because it would probably annoy the guy. “Whatever, how long does the test take?”
“You’re going to annoy me until I give it to you, aren’t you?” He folded his arms over his chest and gave me a look. Now I knew where Cherry got it from. “Fine. It’ll take an hour or two. Depending on the results the first time around.”
“I’ll wait.”
He had to get the samples out of cold storage. Brain slides, it turned out, nothing up the nosehairs or under the fingernails. Something in the brain that he was going to run through some kind of machine, a scanning machine. Take a couple images and look for something, maybe do a stain, I didn’t know how this worked. This wasn’t my usual circuit.
He looked at all three images on a display, not an x-ray display but a projection on a white wall. Hands against the edge of a table and tapping his fingers on the underside and now I saw where Cherry had got it from. And I wondered how long they knew each other. And how they knew each other.
“Well, Doc? Is it pixies?”
To me, it all looked like a mess of blue veins and splotches. I can only guess he saw something with his arcane medical knowledge and his years of experience at looking at dead people’s brains. “They were around pixies, I can tell you that much. A whole tribe of them. Whether or not they did anything to induce him to commit suicide I couldn’t say, but...” His voice started to drift as he lifted his chin, staring at visions. “They certainly gave him some very nice dreams.”
I didn’t like this guy. “Are you high?”
“No.”
Whatever. I had an answer, at least, I could take that back to Cherry and he could file his report and...
“Are you going to tell her?”
I turned slow so I had time to consider how many ways I could ask him what the hell he thought I was going to do with this information. He must have known it from the way I looked at him because he cracked me across the face with a rib spreader. Still had bits of rib meat. Gross.
It didn’t go dark at first. He had to hit me a couple more times while I was pulling myself together to get me out.