"Who did your genesplicing?" He licked his thin, colorless lips. "It looks like an expensive job."

Expensive? I guess you could say so. It cost me my life and someone I loved. I felt it like a sharp pinch on already-bruised flesh. So maybe he would manage to annoy me. One point for the Ludder doctor. "That's none of your business. I'm here to view a body in a legitimate murder investigation. Should I come back with a court order?" My voice made the glass in the door rattle slightly. I think I'm behaving badly. A lunatic giggle rose up again inside of me. Why did I always have the urge to laugh at times like this?

Dr. Caine's wiry eyebrows nested in his nonexistent hairline. "Of course not. I know my duty to the police department. Despite their habit of sending me cadavers."

"Why, Doctor, I thought it was your job to deal with cadavers." I didn't move, my feet nailed to the floor despite Jace's sudden grip on my elbow. I hated the syrupy sweetness in my voice—it meant that I was about to say something unforgivable. "Perhaps you should retire."

"Not until I'm forced to, young woman. Come inside." He laughed mechanically and didn't look pleased, but ushered us into a small office jammed with a desk, two chairs, two antique and crooked metal file cabinets, piles of papers and files, and a thriving blue-flowered orchid on top of another file cabinet, this one wooden and glowing mellow with polish. That was interesting. Nearly as interesting was the dry-erase board set on the wall across from the second door. Dr. Caine's handwriting was spidery, and it wandered inside the neatly-ruled sections, keeping track of what body was in what bay and what tests needed to be done. At least, that's what I assumed the complicated numbers and letters meant. It looked like a code based on the old Cyrillic alphabet.

"Now I want it to be very clear," he said, once we were all crowded in his office, "this is happening against my will, and under my protest."

"Mine too," I muttered under my breath, taking refuge in snideness. Gabe cast me an imploring glance. I shut up.

The good doctor studied me for a long moment. I noticed he had two lasepens in his breast pocket and a capped scalpel too. "The body is of a Necromance." His lip curled. "Cause of death, as nearly as we can determine, was some type of psionic assault."

That was something new. Dr. Caine noticed my sudden attention. "We can tell because of the MRI and sigwave scans." He directed his words at me. "Bleeding in the cortex in characteristic star-patterns. It seems that, just as manual strangulation leaves petechiae, psionic assault resulting in death leaves these starbursts of blood and scarring in the brain."

Thank you for that incredibly vivid mental image, Doctor. I glanced around his office again. I smelled chemical reek, dying human cells, and pipe tobacco mixed with synth hash. So the good Doc was a smoker. Most medical personnel were. His hands didn't tremble, but they were liver-spotted and thin as spider's legs. I imagined his hands on a lasecutter and had to shudder. He probably talks to the cadavers. And very patronizingly, too. I glanced up at the ceiling, where the random holes in the soundbreak tiles almost began to run together and make sense. Dust swirled in the air, forming little geometric shapes as the room heated up with four adult bodies in it—and the extra heat I was putting out. Power trembled at the outer edges of my control, straining to leap free. I invoked spread-thin control, clenching my right fist so hard I felt the claws prick my palm. It felt comfortingly like fingernails digging in as I made a fist.

"What kind of psionic assault?" Gabe asked. "Feeder, Ceremonial, Magi, what?"

"I am unable to determine. I was under the impression that was your job." This sneer he directed at me. I ignored it. Instead, I studied the dry-erase board, watching the shape of the letters blur as I unfocused my eyes. With it all hazy, I could almost pretend there was a pattern there too. If I spent a little Power, I could probably decode it, my minor precognitive talent turning a randomness into a glimpse of the future.

I came back to myself with a barely-covered start. Took a deep breath. I couldn't afford to get distracted here. No amount of precog was worth even a momentary lapse in attention.

"What else can you tell me, Doctor?" Gabe was in her element. I almost forgot she was a cop; she looked like a wide-eyed med student. Caine preened under her attention. I overrode the urge to rub at my left shoulder. The mark was burning, a piercing, drilling, fiery pain I only felt rarely over the last year. Was it just because I had allowed myself to think of Japhrimel again? Was thinking of him more frequently now?

As if I ever stopped thinking about him, even while I was being shot at by panicked, psychopathic bounties.

"There is a high likelihood that Miss Moorcock was also sexually assaulted before she was dismembered." Caine's poached eyes glittered. "There was tearing and severe bruising in the vaginal vault. Unfortunately, we were unable to recover any DNA evidence because of contamination by blood and foreign matter in the vagina."

My throat closed again, hot bile rising. Why do I keep wanting to throw up? I braced myself. Jace's thumb drifted across my elbow, a soothing touch.

Too bad I wasn't soothed.

Gabe waited.

"There's nothing else," he said finally. I'd have bet my house and the rest of Lucifer's blood money Caine was enjoying this. "We're running toxicology screens and reanalyzing some of the forensic measurements."

"Reanalyzing?" Gabe fractionally raised one eyebrow.

"Either we have made an error, or whatever ripped her into pieces did it simultaneously. Her arms, her legs, her head—all at the same time. As if she was quartered. Are you familiar with quartering, Ms. Valentine?"

His poached-egg eyes rested on me now, his thin mouth curved into the slightest of smiles. I dropped my right hand back down to my side, both my hand and shoulder burning. "I'm somewhat of a student of history, Doctor. I'm familiar with the term."

The tiled vault of the body-bay was chilly. Steam rose off my skin as soon as I stepped through the airseals into climate control. I had to spend a moment's worth of attention readjusting—my internal thermostat was set on "high." I ran very warm these days, not needing a pile of blankets like I used to when I was human. That was one thing Jace had been good for during our affair, even though he ended up kicking off the covers. I supposed it was living in Rio that made him so warm.

Nowadays, if he collapsed on my bed it was because he was drunk, and he slept on top of the covers more often than not, or woke when I poked him in the ribs to haul himself down the hall to his own room.

I scanned the room habitually—nothing but the usual security net and countermeasures; the holovid captures set in strips along the ceiling to get everything in 3-D. Steel lockers took up one side of the room, tools hung neatly, racks of equipment and scanners. My teeth ached until I took a deep breath and made my jaw relax.

The tough blue plasticine bodybag lay on the stainless-steel table. The shape was subtly wrong, of course—there were only parts of Christabel Moorcock left.

I was alone in a morgue with a body. My skin roughened, smoothed out. All of a sudden I was more comfortable than I'd been for almost a year. I knew how to do this. I'd been doing this most of my life.

Then what are you afraid of? a cool, deep voice asked inside my head. I shut that voice back up in its little black box. It hurt too much to hear the shading of male amusement, the flat ironic tone of a demon's voice stroking the most intimate of my thoughts. Why couldn't I just let the sound of his voice go?