World Wonders Read online

  Miles’ “fun bag” was a large duffel bag with his ballistic vest, tactical harness, and a slew of customized firearms. When the second shotgun was pulled out of the bag, I raised my eyebrow as I looked at him in the rearview mirror.

  “What?” he asked defensively cradling a shotgun that was almost as large as he was.

  It wasn’t the number of guns. I counted two shotguns, three handguns, and what looked like a subgun. I had grown up on military bases and around gun nuts. Number of guns owned hadn’t surprised me in years. Granted, Miles had certainly upped his gun count since he got jumped, but I didn’t blame him. Having a tool to fight off the bumps in the night probably was comforting.[19]

  No, what was bothering me was the piece of artillery he had in his lap. I tilted my head slightly trying to get a better look in the back seat, not quite believing my eyes. “Is that a drum fed shotgun?”

  “Well, yeah,” he said confusedly as he started checking the weapon in question, “Not sure what the Marshals do, but FBI metahuman containment and engagement procedures dictate an automatic shotgun with a 20-round drum minimum for dealing with unknown threats. Figured I’d at least adhere to that if I’m watching your back.” He hefted a drum covered in green tape,” Do you think I should bring the silver slugs?”

  I blinked rapidly and then sputtered, “What? How did you…” I took a breath to center myself, “No, in fact I don’t think you should bring the shotgun at all.”

  He didn’t even look up from his inspections, “Why not? It’s legal, I have permits for it, and an open carry license.”

  It said something about me that not only was I not surprised but I had no problem with any of that. Still, I kept my eyes on the road as I responded, “And while as an officer of the law, I appreciate that. But as I can’t, justify you being that heavily armed to morgue security you’ll need to leave it in the car.”

  Officially, no one outside of local security forces were supposed to be armed in any government building. Anyone with the Marshals tended to get a pass at the morgue given the new and disturbing tendency for the dead to get themselves off the table. Only needed a single zombie scare to convince all but the most stringent of sticklers that some exceptions needed to be made.

  No one wanted to deal with a vampire or zombie barehanded.

  He glared at me through the rearview mirror. My hairs started to stand on end, and I shrugged sheepishly. “Look, I don’t make the rules here. If it all goes sideways at the morgue, you can totally say ‘I told you so’. For now, keep it low profile.”

  He seemed mollified at that, putting the shotgun back in the bag and pulling out a Beretta.

  “This okay?” he asked me in the mirror.

  I took a quick look and nodded, “All I’m bringing.”

  He nodded back at me and then went to work stripping out of his professor clothes and putting on his ballistic vest, changing topics as he suited up. As the shirt came up, I winced at the flash of ribs. He had always been skinny, but he looked particularly emaciated today. He had a tendency to forget to eat, which is why when we met up, I always made sure it was at a restaurant with a lot of food. Miles would stuff his bird stomach and then have leftovers for another meal.

  Part of me wondered if his lack of height was due to his constant malnutrition. It had already sunken his eyes, paled his skin, and made his hair far stringier than it had any right to me. Keeping him at 5’6” when his father was nearly 6’6” would just one more blow from a lifetime of long hours and forgetting to eat. We had been using alarms to remind him for a while, but that hadn’t exactly panned out. Still, it was relieving in the oddest of ways. This was the same man I had spent most of my life around, the emaciated body serving as a darkly humorous proof of identity. I shook my head as he started talking and focused on the situation at hand.

  “So, you’ve already ruled out the werewolves and the standard fare,” he said conversationally, “Let’s talk abnormals. Merfolk?”

  I glanced at the traffic around me and shrugged, “A bit far from the lake, but close enough to the river I could see it.”

  “Ghost?” he said, tightening the straps on his vest.

  I shook my head, “Too many physical effects and again, too close to sunrise. Unless we’ve got a Revenant. But that seems unlikely. No goo at the scene indicating ectoplasmic residue.”

  Miles shook his head as he pulled his shirt back on over the body armor. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve sworn he was just wearing a thick shirt. I’d need to get one of those I thought, as he continued the logic, “Could’ve dissipated. We’ll file that away as an unlikely option for now though. Vampire? Either trying to frame another metahuman or a new breed.”

  I paused and considered that. Vampires, with all the myths about them, were just as diverse as humans when it came to weaknesses, requirements, and gifts. I wouldn’t put it past the group that one of the bloodsuckers to have started eating flesh instead. “No idea. We could go up to Serendipity and ask around?”

  He nodded, pulling his jacket and holster on. “Later,” he offered. “The O’Dell’s won’t be up yet. The day staff will just refer us to them.”

  I shook my head, “You’re out of the loop. Apparently, O’Dell, Cris that is, has started keeping daytime hours. Don’t know if she’s finally that old, or she’s just been faking for a while.”

  I pulled my arm to the side as Miles crawled into the front seat, dressed and armed. “Faking,” he said, “She’s got an oddity in her speech pattern that puts her closer to the 1700’s than she’s ever admitted. Pops up when she’s angry.”

  “Isn’t she always angry?” I asked, carefully making a right turn.

  “Facade. She’s playing the bad cop to Jim’s good.” He said by way of explanation.

  I turned and stared at him for a second. Miles was always really good at getting reads on people. Part of the reason why the FBI had poached him out of basic for their profiling division.[20] Still, the ability to get a read on vampires was a rare fucking gift. The entire group prided themselves on excellent poker faces and duplicity.

  “Eyes front. Red light.” Miles interrupted my thoughts. I slammed on the brakes just in time to avoid rear ending a flashy sports car. I shook my head and once the light changed, we moved on to the morgue.

  ✽✽✽

  The Cook County Morgue is possibly the simplest building on the planet. Seriously, the thing looked like someone took a solid square, sunk it half in the earth, chiseled out two floors of square row windows, and called it done. I thought it was a wonderful statement of how pragmatism still had a place in the world. Building was functional and plain, which warmed my heart. Miles shuddered nervously next to me in the August heat.

  “Really? All the blood and gore in those photos, and a plain government building is what gives you the heebie jeebies?”

  Miles glanced sideways at me, “Too much death stored in one place. Leaves a stink.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at him. Talking about mystical auras and feelings, and that Feng Shui stuff never would’ve come out of his mouth back in basic. I chalked it up to a near death experience and went to comment, but he had already started moving into the building. Things for later.

  Three security checks and a gun argument later, we were armed and in the Vault. The Vault was a retrofit to the Cook County morgue to contain any bodies that were involved in supernatural or metahuman events on the odd chance they stood back up and started causing issues.[21] Officially, all coroners were expected to work the Vault on a rotational basis. Practically, or at least in Chicago, there were two people who worked regular shifts down here. One day, one night, with people picking up the gaps. Not a lot of vacation time was signed off on for Vault workers. The day shift worker was Dr. Lindsey Niccols.

  Lindsey is of average height for a woman, somewhere around 5’8”. Her natural dirty blonde hair was generally up in a bun to keep it out of whatever corpse she was dissecting at the time, but when she let it down it framed her face b
eautifully and really drew attention to her sharp and discerning hazel eyes. You could tell her body was well toned and in shape even through the scrubs, as there wasn’t any bulging and the scrubs looked particularly baggy. This was coupled and confirmed with my knowledge of her outside of work. We often attended the same conferences on supernaturals, the best way to stay up to date in a rapidly evolving world. And since she treated the conferences mostly as weekends off, she’d often go to the bars with us after the lectures were done.

  She didn’t drink much, but she certainly loved dancing and often pushed the tamer and more reserved[22] out onto the dance floor. She had a love for life that was often disturbingly contrasted with her understanding of how the human body would break under strain. It was a great deterrent to people who wouldn’t take no for an answer, as she had once demonstrated in excruciating detail to a creepy drunk frat boy when we attended a conference at Arizona State.

  In case it wasn’t obvious, I had a bit of a crush.

  As Miles and I walked in, Lindsey was elbow deep in what looked like the splattered remains of a werewolf mid transformation. The wide-tread truck marks could see over the crushed remains of the legs. Lindsey acknowledged us as we walked in and pointed with her head towards the corner before continuing her autopsy.

  I turned to Miles, politely tuning out what was going on over on the table. He turned from the spectacle to face me. “Alright, Lindsey said she had something important for us, so play nice.”

  Miles regarded me with a polite scorn and amusement, “Just because you want to hook up with her doesn’t mean that I have to accommodate.”

  I shot him my best puppy dog eyes, but all he just shrugged noncommittally as Lindsey walked over. I turned and smiled wide, “Dr. Niccols, you said you had something interesting for me.”

  She smiled her plastic professional smile, raised an eyebrow, and cocked her head at Miles. I picked up the message, “Do I have to act for him?”[23] I simply shook my head.

  Immediately, the smile dropped, and I could see the stress in her eyes. Apparently, it had been a busy week, and her eyes were dulled with tiredness and frustration. “Thank fucking God,” was all she said as she walked back over to the freezers. I heard Miles chuckle under his breath as I followed her over.

  “I finished with your body about an hour ago. Name is Craig Masters, 37. Dentist from North Lawndale.” She began as she slid out the former Doe’s tray and started pointing with a scalpel.

  ”Very few things that I’d imagine will surprise you Silas. Damage was done by something with beyond mortal strength. But that thing was largely human. Or at least humanoid. Indents and tearing suggest human like hand structure. Male, if I had to guess, given the width of the knuckle gouges.” She moved her scalpel up to the shoulder, “Shoulder wound increases the probability of male, as the hand size that goes with these wounds place the perp’s height somewhere around 6’2”. Crushing motion indicates someone using a vise grip. Which given the amount of force it would take to not only break, but crush the humeral head like it has been, was suggests someone at minimum 30 times stronger than an average human. Given the ease this was done with, I’d guess that our perp is possibly stronger.”

  I let out a low whistle at that. On a good day, my full telekinetic kick was somewhere around 7500 newtons[24]. This man apparently could do at least double that. With crushing motion. Which meant if he got his hands on me there was about fuckall I could do. Note to self, don’t get crushed to death. “That’s a lot of info. Thanks Lindsey.”

  She audibly snorted, “Silas, please, I didn’t call you down for that. I called you down for this,” she said, pointing at the half-wolf corpse. “This is the worrying part.” I cocked my head and followed her over to the corpse, sparing a glance over my shoulder at Miles who was curiously, but cautious not to disturb any work Lindsey had done, poking Master’s body. I went to call out, but heard Lindsey snap some gloves on and decided I could ask him later. I turned just as she opened the half-wolf’s cavity with a sickening squelching noise. Undeterred, she talked as she propped the cavity open.

  “This thing came in a few nights back. I had already cut it up as best as I could and written my report, but policy says to hold them for a few days in case we need to use his saliva.[25] I wrote it off as an oddity at the time when I saw it, but seeing Mr. Masters got me thinking.” She pried the chest flaps open revealing a cavity in the creature’s chest. Where a heart should’ve been was a series of broken blood vessels. “I figured at the time it was part of an Alpha challenge and wrote as much in my report.” I nodded along. Such things weren’t unheard of, especially since some werewolf packs, mainly first-generation, believed that eating the heart of another gave you the consumed’s strength.

  I’d imagine with that report, the investigation hadn’t gone much farther. Even though the official marshal policy was to investigate any homicide that might involve an EEP, werewolf pack disputes often mysteriously found their way to the bottoms of paperwork stacks. No one wanted to deal with a group 300 pounds of fangs, claws, and fury that regenerated and responded to police investigations with violence. “But after poking around a bit more, I found similar scooping indents in this one’s chest. And, the knuckle width matches.”

  “Fuck me sideways,” is what I thought. But, not wanting to look like an idiot in front of the pretty woman, I instead said, “So, whatever did this is also tough enough to slug it out with a werewolf.” I paused and looked at the tire marks, “Or at least smart enough to play dirty.”

  Lindsey shook her head, “Those are post-mortem. Near as I can tell, the werewolf survived getting its heart ripped out, but without the blood flowing started to revert. They managed to make it out to the overpass where they finally lost consciousness, passed out fell over the edge and into traffic. One eighteen-wheeler later, it ends up here.

  “Are you fucking shitting me,” I said aloud this time, decorum be damned. “Since when can a werewolf survive being literally heartless?”

  If Lindsey was offended by my outburst, it didn’t show. With a shrug and a wave of her hand in the direction of the corpse, she said, “Near as I can tell, they can’t. At least not for long.”

  Razor wit to boot. Be still my beating heart.

  “Which means that someone killed an Alpha,” Miles said, suddenly behind me. “They’re known to be stronger, tougher, and extra powered[26] compared to the average run of the mill werewolf.” Lindsey just nodded looking slightly concerned herself. “I’ve written a report for you and sent a copy to Slate. Whatever this is, it’s dangerous, scary, and resilient.”

  I bit my lip in thought, while Miles continued the train of thought. “And I guarantee the local werewolf packs are ready to tear someone up over this. Losing an Alpha always sets them on edge.”[27]

  “Fuck!” I cursed again. This is not how I wanted to spend my day off. Goddamn emergency protocols. Fucking Slate. Fucking werewolves and most importantly and relevantly, fucking werewolf killers.

  I took a deep breath and centered myself. Lindsey looked concerned. Miles just looked bored, but I could tell that was a facade. He was not happy either but didn’t want to show it, I could almost feel his unease in the air. “Okay, well then let’s go find the local pack representatives and see what information we can get from them. At the very least telling them where their Alpha went might keep them off the streets and away from the innocent.”

  “And where is that?” asked Lindsey.

  “I don’t know,” I responded, “But I know people that do.”

  Chapter 5

  Tension

  I then proceeded to make two phone calls.

  The first was to Jacob Danvers, our local IT guy and research specialist[28]. He answered the phone professionally and businesslike, “US Marshal’s, Chicago’s MCD Office, Tech Division. This is Jacob Danvers, how may I help you?”

  “Jakey boy!” I said as unprofessionally as I could.[29] I could imagine Jake smiling on the other end. I even thought I h
eard a laugh. “I need some info if you can spare some time.”

  “Sure thing Silas,” He spoke in clearly a lighter mood, “Hit me.”

  “Three things, in order of importance. Firstly, I need to know if either of the local pack’s Alpha’s are currently missing. We’ve got a body down at the morgue we’re pretty sure is one of them and we need to let the wolves know asap before they think that we’re trying to obfuscate the information, and thus in on it.”

  I could practically hear the color drain from Jacob’s face as he fought every urge to wet his pants right there. Personally, the only reason I hadn’t is because I was too sleep deprived and worried about Lindsey judging me. I wanted to say it was because I was made of tougher stuff, but I don’t feel the need to lie. I gave him a second to process before I continued.

  “Secondly, see who’s in the area and free. I need back up at the morgue for when the pack comes in to ID the body. Some tempers might flare. Slate hasn’t approved it yet, but I want to get that ball rolling before he does cause we’ll need people ASAP. And thirdly, we’re looking for something not yet documented that has enough strength and toughness to go toe to toe with werewolf and handily win. Key phrases: ‘Eating hearts’ and ‘humanoid’. Current perp is probably male.”

  Miles tapped me on the shoulder and added, “Another key phrase: ‘Ravenous hunger’.”

  I gave him my best bug-eye look and mouthed, “How?”

  He pointed at the phone and then when I didn’t relent, mouthed “Later.”

  “Also, Ravenous Hunger,” I added after what must’ve seemed like a horridly bloated pause to Jake.

  “Right. One list of horrific hungers of days gone by, fairy tales, and myths that now are reality coming right up,” He said before pausing and adding, “The fact researching that list is the least scary of the three jobs is worrisome on its own.”