Dim Sum Asylum(61)

“Possible, but that would be someone extremely powerful. I think your hunch of the missing person wouldn’t be that far off the mark. It’s happened before, just not for murder. Well, not that we know of. Who knows what goes on out there that we don’t catch.” Armed with what looked like a pair of barbecue tongs, Jaan was back on his knees, his face nearly touching the floor as he peered under the cabinet again. “I could roll this all out, but I don’t want to damage what’s under… ah, here we go. Got it!”

Jaan came up triumphant, his skinny face nearly split in two by his broad smile. Carefully maneuvering the pair of plastic-wrapped tongs up and over the edge of the cabinet’s top, Jaan slowly straightened up, then placed the broad adze-shaped bone he’d found on the floor onto the pad next to the camera. The piece was intact, a bit of something fibrous feathering from one of its ends, and I watched as the grin on Jaan’s face slithered away into a frown.

“Huh.” I had my own frown, trying to make sense of the bone he’d found. “Were there any other people in here? Well, dead people?”

“No, just your friend.” Jaan moved on to full scowl, and he stared across the room at me, his face flushing a deep red. “This is not good.”

“Nope. It is not.” The scapula was a bit battered but fairly whole. Dried blood spotted its surface, and its elegant sweep was unmarred by any markings or breaks. It was, for the most part, a perfect example of a scapula. “You knew she was faerie, right?”

The majority of fae shoulder blades were distinctive: two pieces of bone, joints, and tendons evolution developed to support a pair of wings. Some, like myself, didn’t have wings, but the bone structure remained the same, a splayed-out piece connected to a shorter slice with a Hell of a lot of muscle attached to the whole area. Even though the fae hadn’t been airborne in millennia, our bodies weren’t aware of it and continued to act as if a pair of hollow, fragile appendages could somehow deadlift a hundred pounds off the ground with a few pumps of our shoulder muscles.

It was one of the first things Forensics looked for in found remains, the qualifier in a laundry list of markers used to roughly identify a victim, and there was no way the bone Jaan just found belonged to Jie.

“Of course I knew she’s faerie. I took down her particulars from Yamada. The body we had on the table matched the victim’s appearance,” Jaan ground out. “Her prints and blood samples were sent out, but she was IDed by multiple witnesses on the scene. Everyone there came back with the same identification, Jung Jie. The testing was simply procedure, so I let it go in without a rush on it.”

“Well, I hate to break this to you, but that couldn’t belong to Jie.” Stating the obvious to Jaan got me a withering look, but I didn’t care. The headache I’d pushed back into the recesses of my skull came roaring back, grabbing at the space between my eyeballs and pulling at the muscles there until I could feel my teeth squeaking. “Okay, so two things: who was that on the slab, and then, where the Hell is Jie?”




“WHAT DO you mean that wasn’t Jie?” Ghost rose out of his chair, and I had to place a hand on Trent’s ribs to stop him from shoving the sylph back down. “I fucking found her! It was Jie.”

“And I’m telling you, the person we had on that table wasn’t Jie, Ghost.” I went in soft, keeping my voice to a rolling murmur. “Look, I’m as confused as you are, but that’s the truth of it. That wasn’t Jie. It looked like her, but that body… that woman… was human. So do me a favor. Tell me everything you saw and heard from the moment you entered the club right up until you found the body.”

I’d asked Trent to find a conference room or something to put Ghost in to cool his heels. The last thing I wanted the sylph to do was get his wings up and refuse to answer questions. So rather than use one of the offices, he’d commandeered the research library, plopped my somewhat-brother into a wing chair, and handed him a cup of tea. If the situation hadn’t been so fraught with emotion and tension, I’d have laughed my ass off at the sight of Ghost holding a delicate porcelain cup and saucer as he tried to figure out what he’d landed in to get served hot oolong.

Dim Sum Asylum librarians took great pride in their workspace, transforming what had been an old records storage space into an area resembling an old Victorian study, complete with tall wooden bookshelves, tapestry rugs, and faux silk wallpaper they’d plastered onto the room’s water-stained outer panels. I’d seen more than one cop step back out of the library’s swinging double doors to make sure they were still in the station and not somehow relocated elsewhere, since that was a piece of magic no one’d ever mastered without dire consequences to the transported.

There was a perfume to the library I loved, and I would have laid a bet down that Trent was secretly orgasming over the sweet vanilla muskiness of aging paper and leather permeating the air. I’d caught him making more than a few longing glances over at the stacks, and his rigid shoulders were the only sign I saw of him locking down his impulse control. When the archive’s chunky, temperamental winged caiman trilled at him from its perch on the top of the animal totem reference shelves, I saw Trent fall in love, and I was going to have to work to keep him from stealing the dark purple and lime green reptile and taking it home.

The makeover of the library had been a not-so-silent protest against the arcane morgue winning the battle for the renovated basement despite the researchers’ expansion into the lab’s former area. Kept dry with a liberal application of dehumidify spells, the Asylum’s research library boasted one of the largest collection of spell craft and ritual forensic materials in the entire country, a bragging right they snootily rubbed Salem University’s nose in whenever a visiting librarian came by.