when sealed. “Rene said this place was warded.”
Henderson nodded. “Twice. The inner ward starts at the top of the driveway and protects the house and the workshop. The outer starts at the bottom of the driveway and circles the property.”
“Are we inside the inner ward right now?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the threshold?” The defensive spells varied by intensity. Some let nothing through; some let specific magic through.
“If you’re magic and not keyed to it, you can’t pass,” Henderson said. “It’s a level-four ward.”
The level-IV ward would keep out pretty much anything. “So a shapeshifter wouldn’t be able to pass through it, correct?”
“Correct,” Henderson confirmed.
“We just watched Andrea walk to the car and back. The magic is up. Where is the ward?”
We stared at the driveway.
Henderson pulled a chain from around his neck. A small piece of quartz hung from the metal next to his dog tags. He marched to the driveway and held out his hand. The stone dangled from the chain. Henderson stared at it for a long moment, swore, and turned down the driveway. I followed. At the foot of the gravel road Henderson waved the crystal again. It remained dull.
Henderson looked at me. Wards were persistent spells and they didn’t just go missing. It was possible to break a ward—I’d done it a few times—but wards began to regenerate almost immediately. They absorbed magic from the environment. If the wards had been broken, they should’ve started rebuilding themselves as soon as the new magic wave came. We were standing right at the ward boundary and I felt nothing. It was as if the defensive spells had never been there in the first place. That just didn’t happen.
Besides, having your ward shattered felt like a cannon fired inside your skull. Sleep bomb or not, if someone had burst the wards, the guards would’ve awakened.
“The wards are gone,” I said. Kate Daniels, Master of the Obvious.
“Looks that way,” Henderson said.
“Were the wards present last night?”
“Yes,” Henderson said.
“Sleep bombs emit magic even when sealed. You can’t carry one through a level-four ward, so it must’ve been brought in during tech. Did Adam have any visitors?”
“No.”
Muscles played along Henderson’s jaw. I didn’t need to spell it out. The person who had dropped five grand worth of rare herbs onto the inventor’s lawn was wearing a Red Guard patch on his sleeve. And since everybody else was off in dreamland, that left Laurent de Harven as the most likely culprit. The Red Guard had a mole in it, and since Rene had handpicked people for this assignment, the buck stopped with her. She would have steam coming out of her ears.
That still didn’t explain what had happened to the wards.
Andrea emerged from the shed, carrying an m-scanner printout in her hand.
“We have a problem,” I told her.
“More than one.” She handed me the paper. A wide strip of cornflower blue sliced across the paper, interrupted by a sharp narrow spike of such pale blue, it seemed almost silver.
HENDERSON PACED BACK AND FORTH AT THE TOP OF the driveway. The three remaining guards from the graveyard shift stood in front of him at parade rest. Judging by Henderson’s face, he was unleashing an ass-chewing of colossal proportions. Both Debra and Mason Vaughn, a stocky redhead, looked pissed off and embarrassed. Rig Devara did his best to pretend to be pissed off and embarrassed. Mostly he looked bored. According to the file, he was the most junior of his shift. Usually shit rolled down the hill, but by the time it got to him, there would be nothing left.
Andrea and I watched from the porch. Henderson had a lot of frustration to vent. He wouldn’t be coherent anytime soon.
“We have a dead body and the weather is warming up,” I said. “We have to figure out what to do with de Harven or he’ll go ripe.”
“What do you mean, what to do with him? We’ll just call it in to Maxine and . . . oh, fuck it.” Andrea grimaced.
Yeah. The telepathic Order secretary, who conveniently took care of minor details like dead bodies, was no longer available. Welcome to the real world. If we called it in to the cops, they would quarantine the body. Neither one of us was law enforcement, and getting access to the corpse would be next to impossible. We might as well load our evidence into a rocket and send it to the moon.
I started toward the house. “If the phone is working, I’m going to call Teddy Jo.”
“You’re calling Thanatos? The guy with the flaming sword?”
“He is Thanatos only part of the time. The rest of the time he’s Teddy Jo, who isn’t that bad of a guy. He bought a mortuary freezer a few months ago for a job he had to do. It’s sitting in his shed.” I knew this because the last time I stopped by Teddy’s place, he bellyached for an hour about how much the damn thing had cost him. “I’m going to make him an offer and see if I can take it off his hands. I think he might have a body bag or two to throw in with the freezer.”
Andrea sighed. “I’ll start processing the house.”
The phone did work and Teddy Jo answered on the second ring. I had once read that every day offered a new lesson. The lesson for today, among other things, seemed to be that bargaining with the Greek angel of death should be avoided by any means, because it cost you an arm and a leg.
“Seven thousand,” Teddy Jo’s gruff voice announced over the phone.
“Four.”
“Six five.”
“Four.”
“Kate, the thing cost me five grand. I’ve got to make a profit.”
“First, it’s used.”
“Now look here,” Teddy Jo growled. “It’s not a Cadillac. It’s a body freezer. The value doesn’t drop because you drive it off the lot.”
“I don’t know what sort of bodies you stuck in there, Teddy. You might have put a leucrocuta in there. Those things stink.”
“It’s not like the dead gonna care. They can’t smell shit, and they themselves ain’t gonna get to smelling any better.”
He had a point, but I didn’t have to admit it. “Four five.”
“How’s the business going, Kate?”
Where was he heading with this? “Business is going fine.”
“The way I heard it, you ain’t doing shit. So the fact that you’re calling me about a body freezer says to me that you suddenly have a body in dire need of freezing. That means you finally landed a client. Now then, about four minutes after death, the body cells experience oxygen deprivation, which raises the level of carbon dioxide in the blood, simultaneously decreasing the pH, making the body environment more acidic. At this point the enzymes begin to cannibalize the cells, causing them to rupture, releasing nutrients. This is called autolysis or selfdigestion, and the more enzymes and water organs contain, the faster they degrade. Organs like the liver and brain go first. Before you know it, your body is putrefied, the skin sloughs off, and all of your evidence has degraded down to nothing. So you’ve got to ask yourself, is it worth it to keep arguing with me and risk losing the body and the client, or should you just give me my damn six thousand dollars?”
God damn it. “If you know that I haven’t got any clients, then you probably know that I can’t afford to pay you through the roof for the freezer.”
Teddy Jo fell silent for a long second. “Five grand. My last offer. Take it or leave it, Kate.”
“Three grand now, with two one-thousand-dollar payments within sixty days and delivery to my office.”
