"Hey, Linus," I said, waving to him. "How's tricks?"

He reached into the tank to retrieve the bullet, then looked up and smiled. Not a wide smile, like you might expect from a friend who was happy to see you, but the sort of casual smile that was always tough to read. "Hey, Tess. How's it going?"

"It's been better."

"Yeah, I heard that you and Marcus had a run-in today."

Shit. I guess news traveled fast.

"Oh-yeah?" I tried to keep my voice neutral. "You heard about that already?"

"I'm sure that people in Siberia have heard about it already. You know how incestuous this lab is."

I rolled my eyes. "True. Guess I shouldn't let it bother me."

He raised an eyebrow. "Being forcibly put on leave? I'd sure as hell let that bother me-if I was the one getting screwed over."

I breathed a sigh of relief. At least he was on my side.

"So-any cool weapons coming through the pipeline?"

He looked at me slyly. "I figured you'd want to know about that Browning Hi-Power that we recovered from the Vailoid demon who attacked you."

"I was curious," I admitted. "You don't have to tell me anything if you don't want to. It's your choice."

"I'm not a complete asshole, Tess." He met my gaze, and I was momentarily surprised by the flash of strength and defiance in his watery blue eyes. "I still trust you, and as far as I'm concerned, you're still on the job."

I sighed. "Thanks, Linus. That means a lot."

"So-" He dug through some papers on his desk, and came up with a set of scribbled notes.

"The gun was a Browning Mark III, top of the line. Available to civilians, but expensive. Not the kind of piece you'd see an amateur criminal carrying around, that's for sure."

"There was nothing amateur about him."

"Yeah, I figured that." He glanced at his notes. "The thing was loaded with Black Talon hollow points."

"Those are like Glazer-Safety rounds, right? They blossom on impact?"

Linus made a face. "Even worse-they send little bits of shrapnel and sheared-off bone throughout your body. You could get hit in the shoulder, and have a piece of metal embedded in your leg. And they're a bitch to remove-the copper jacket around the bullet shreds apart, and doctors get cut up on the shards."

"So he meant business," I said, feeling more than a little sick.

Linus gave me a grim look. "He had thirteen rounds, and we found another ammo clip that was left behind. He meant to take all three of you out. It's lucky as hell that you managed to get that gun away from him."

"You don't have to tell me that."

"Now, why a Vailoid demon felt the need to carry a gun- that's a mystery I still haven't figured out. I mean, he's got claws that can dice you into tiny pieces. It doesn't seem like he'd need any firepower."

"I think whoever sent him wanted it to look like a robbery, or an execution-style killing," I said. "Something for the cops to handle, but nothing that would arouse the CORE's suspicion."

"Unfortunately, I can't tell you much about the gun. It doesn't match up with anything in the Drugfire or ATF databases. "

"Did you manage to lift a clear print off the handle?"

"We found a smudged print, a partial, which is actually pretty lucky-normally you can't get shit off a gun stock. Didn't tell us a whole lot, though. His name's Kor'Vel. Petty criminal- mercenary. He had a rap sheet a mile long, including several murder charges that he'd been 'cleared' on, which seemed like a minor miracle."

I sighed. "It's like an old-demon's network sometimes- everyone always getting pulled out of the fire by someone more powerful."

"I wish I had more to tell you."

"Don't worry about it, Linus. You've told me plenty. And I'm really grateful for"-I tried to keep from blushing- "you know."

"Yeah." He grinned. "I know. It's no problem."

I left the firearms lab and walked toward the morgue, where my next challenge lay. At least one person still trusted me. Now I was going to see exactly how far I could push my luck.

19.

The autopsy room was cold and nearly silent, except for the faint, relaxing strains of hip-hop that drifted from Tasha's iPod. Aesop Rock-"None Shall Pass." Tasha loved her anarchist rap, and it seemed somehow fitting that she was dissecting murder victims while listening to Rock's riffs on class prejudice and police brutality. Her stereo sat on a counter next to a jar filled with organ slices-a "scrap jar," as it was called. Tasha kept histological samples of victims' organs for our toxicology lab, in case they wanted to test something after the fact. She usually held on to the jars, which were filled with a formalin solution to preserve the organs, for up to a year after the body left the morgue. "They're like human pinatas," she told me once. It gave me chills.

There were three bodies lying on steel tables, and with a horribly queasy feeling I recognized Cassandra as the body in the middle. She was covered by a white sheet, but I could still see the topmost part of the Y-incision at her shoulders. Her eyes were closed, and the blue veins in her skin were darker and thrown into relief-a change that happens in the early stages of decomposition. Her hair was ash-blond against the cold metal, but the roots were still gray.

She must have colored it just before she died. For some reason, that thought made me want to cry.

The Vailoid demons on either side of her were in much worse condition. The one on the right was a bloody, pulpy mess-I think he must have been the one I found on the desk with his ribs and chest plate exposed. The other body had the flattened-out appearance of someone who had fallen from a great height, and the right half of his face was crushed. If Cassandra had done that much damage before they killed her, I shuddered to think of how powerful she must have been. The waves of strength that I'd sensed from her earlier had been accurate.

Tasha looked up from her desk-which was on the far side of the autopsy chamber, well away from all the blood- and smiled. She had a proper office away from the morgue, but she preferred to do most of her work here because it was quieter.

"Hey, Tesseract." She waved. "What brings you to the crypt?"

I smiled weakly. "Just wanted to see if you'd finished the post exam for Cassandra Polanski."

She nodded. "Just finished up with the two Vailoids as well. Anything specific you wanted to know?"

"Well"-I sighed-"I suppose you've heard all about my fall from grace by now-it's all over the lab."

She smiled. "I have no idea what you're talking about, Tess. You know me, though. I never read my e-mail."

"Thank you," I said simply.

"No trouble at all. It's nice to see a friendly face anyhow. I was just starting to feel a bit hermetic in here. Hardly any visitors of the living persuasion for most of the day."

I shook my head. "I don't envy you this job, Tasha."

"Ah, it's not so bad. I get my lab technicians to do most of the really unpleasant stuff." She grinned characteristically. "They know to be nice to me, or else they could end up scraping out someone's duodenum and lower bowel."

I made a face.

"So who would you like to hear about first? The woman, or the two Vailoids?"

Suddenly, the mirth was gone. I sighed. "Tell me about Cassandra."

She lowered the sheet covering Cassandra's body, and I saw that her Y-incision was traced carefully around the large chest wound that I'd seen earlier. It looked almost like a shotgun blast at first. The wound track was wide and had a stellate pattern: the star-shaped burst of an entrance wound left by a close-contact gunshot. Normally, you'd see that type of wound only on the head, where the skin was stretched tight-escaping gasses from the gun's blowback got caught in the thin layer between skin and bone, and the result was a gaping entrance wound.

But this wound was in the chest, and there were no powder burns left behind, and no "tattooing," or burst blood vessels, like angry red pockmarks. As I looked closer, I realized that it only looked like a gunshot wound because it was so forceful. It was more likely that something large and sharp had actually ripped through Cassandra's chest, making the star-shaped pattern as it was pulled out. It was actually an exit wound-the violent mess left behind when the weapon, whatever it might have been, was torn away.

"We took a sample of the vitreous fluid from her eyes," Tasha said. Her voice was oddly gentle. She must have known what I was feeling. "Judging by the potassium levels, she died about twelve hours ago-shortly before you found her." She gestured to the deep cuts on her body. "These were made by a thin, double-edged blade. I'm guessing the Vailoid demons used their claws. Some of them are up to eight inches deep-they left marks on the bone. Her liver and spleen were both lacerated."

I remembered the Vailoid demon who'd attacked me, how he'd flexed his long claws and smiled. He could have easily carved me up that way.

"She died, rather obviously, of this chest wound," Tasha said, probing the surface of the wound with her gloved fingers. "It looks like a combination of blunt force and something sharp. The weapon cut through the muscle and shattered the chest plate, breaking four of her ribs and leaving bone fragments in the intercostal space. It perforated her right lung, then pierced the pericardium shielding the heart. Her left subclavian artery was completely transected. That artery is below the clavicle, and comes directly off the arch of the aorta. It's a major source of blood for the upper body, including the lateral and posterior neck and shoulder."

"So she hemorrhaged," I said.

Tasha nodded. "Death by exsanguination: massive internal bleeding." She sighed. "I heard that she had a daughter."

"A niece, actually. Her name's Mia. Her parents died, and Cassandra was the only person left to take care of her."

Tasha shook her head. "That's horrible. I hope that little girl never sees what happened to her aunt. Hell of a thing to explain to someone."

"I'll make sure she never sees it," I said coldly.

"Well, this woman put up a hell of a fight-you can tell her that much. No defensive wounds on her palms either, so she wasn't just trying to ward off the blows. She was tearing right through those demons, even as they did the same thing to her. In the end, I imagine they only killed her first because she was outnumbered."

"So what happened to the Vailoids?"

"Well-" She gestured to the demon whose chest had been opened up. "Bachelor Number One didn't have a pleasant exit. Something literally exploded through his thoracic cavity with the force of a bomb."

She lifted the sheet, and I saw a mangled mess of tissue around the Y-incision. It resembled ground beef.

"I barely needed to open him up, since his chest was already a gaping maw. Ribs were completely shattered. The vertebral column was pretty much pulverized, and the thoracic vertebrae were just gone. They're probably decorating the floor of the office where they found his body. The organs were liquefied."

"So instant death," I said. "Like a bunch of C-4 going off in your chest cavity."

"Pretty much. He was dead before he hit the floor. I'm assuming that she hit him with some sort of ultra deadly magic, since he blew up from the inside. There are some necroid energies that can do that, but I wouldn't want to try them."

"Cassandra would have had access to some powerful magic," I said. "Which is why it seems strange that the Vailoid demons were able to sneak up on her in the first place. You'd think she would have seen them coming."

"Only takes a second to lose your concentration."

I nodded. "That's true."

Tasha walked over to the second Vailoid demon. "Now, this guy is even more interesting, if you can believe it."

"He's a bit of a mystery," I said. "He jumped out of a fourteenth-story window after he'd killed Cassandra. I assume he'd rather die than be captured."

Tasha looked skeptical. "I'm not entirely sure that he jumped."

"You think he was pushed?"

"Come here and take a look-I haven't sewn the top of his skull back on yet, so we've still got easy access to his brain." She twisted off the skullcap carefully, and it came apart with that characteristic sucking noise.

Tasha peeled back the dura tissue with her gloved hands, gently probing the surface of the Vailoid demon's brain. I could see a large mass of blood in the brain tissue near the base of the cerebellum-some kind of hematoma.

"There's bleeding in the subarachnoid space," Tasha pointed out, "between the arachnoid and the pia mater. The pia mater is the inner covering of the brain, beneath the periosteal and meningeal layers. It's called the 'tender mother,' because it's the innermost covering of the brain." She pointed to a spiderweb-type layer of tissue, which was covered with blood. "This is the arachnoid, which is another protective layer-and separating this part of the brain from the pia mater is a cavity filled with cerebrospinal fluid, called the subarachnoid space. As you can see, there's a lot more blood in here than anything else."

I felt an eerie sense of deja vu as I stared at the blossom of red. "This type of hematoma-it's similar to the brain injury of the vampire that we had in here last week. A subarachnoid hematoma. Right?"

"It's exactly the same," Tasha said. "Which is why I said that this body was even more interesting. This demon may have fallen from fourteen stories, but that's not what killed him. He died of massive intracranial bleeding."

"Is there any way that he could have lived for a few moments after the bleeding started?" I asked. "Maybe he lost motor control and fell through the window by accident." It sounded lame even as I said it.

"It's possible, but doubtful. He would have blacked out very quickly. I don't think even the weight of his body falling against the window would have been enough to shatter it." She adjusted the sheet covering his body, and I saw a number of lacerations on his neck and shoulders. "I found glass embedded pretty deep within these cuts. He must have hit that window at a high velocity."

That trace of power that I'd felt, back at SemTec Labs-it hadn't been coming from Cassandra. She would have already been dead. Instead, I'd felt the power of whoever was left behind.

"I also found some fibers in the neck wound, during the gross exam," she added. "I sent them off to Trace about an hour ago."

"What kind of fibers?"

"Indeterminate. Kind of glossy, though. Maybe acrylic?" She glanced at her notes. "We won't know until we look at them under microscopy."

I nodded slowly. "So this mystery person-they killed the remaining Vailoid demon with a massive brain injury, then pushed him out the window, hoping that the fall would cover up the suspicious internal injuries. And maybe they even left a few fibers behind for us to track."

"They needn't have bothered with the staged suicide, though," Tasha said. "Vailoid demons have a much thicker skull than humans. Their occipital protuberance-that bony ridge on the back of the skull that's more pronounced in men-is twice as large, and acts like a spiny sort of armor. Their cranial bones are especially tough, and even a nose-dive onto the concrete, fourteen stories below, shouldn't have shattered the skull."

With a single, sharp tug, she pulled down the flap of skin behind the demon's ears, reflecting the surface of his skull. It was jagged and spiny, not smooth like a human skull. It was also very much intact.

"As you can see, the skull is clean. No fractures. Not only didn't the fall kill him, but his brain damage wasn't caused by any sort of head trauma. It's the same as the vampire. This hematoma was caused by something different. Some kind of psychic force, maybe."

"So we've got a murderous telepath," I said. "Great."

"That's all I can think of."

"Did D-AFIS come up with any info on either of the demons?"

"We matched their prints, yeah. And you won't believe this." Tasha shook her head. "They were cousins. L'askor and D'alashar. They worked together as petty mercenaries- it was a family affair."

"I'll bet they've got a friend named Kor'Vel, too."

"Who's that?"