Page 2 of Reaper (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter #10)

T his wasn’t my first trip to a morgue, not by a long shot.

But one of the biggest changes in my life since getting together with Becks and starting to work for official government agencies was that I no longer had to break into morgues to investigate weird shit.

We just walked in the front door in broad daylight, showed our badges to the balding middle-aged drone at the front desk, and told him what we were there for.

We’d barely gotten uncomfortable in the molded plastic-and-steel chairs in the waiting room when a cheerful round Asian man in scrubs came through the double swinging doors and walked over to us.

“Director Flynn?” he asked, walking over to me.

I jerked my thumb at Becks, who stood and extended a hand to him.

“I’m Deputy Director Flynn,” she said, shaking his hand.

“I am so s-sorry,” the man said, a slight flush coloring his cheeks. “I’m Doctor Yang.”

Becks shook his hand and looked at me.

“It’s okay,” I said, standing up. “Happens all the time. On account of me being so much older. Quincy Harker,” I said, holding out my own hand.

Dr. Yang looked back and forth between us, confusion all over his round face.

I am a lot older than Flynn, but I don’t look my age.

When my powers kicked in as a young man, my aging slowed to a crawl.

I’m over a century and a quarter old, but I look like I’m barely forty.

Becks is in her late thirties, young for her position, but we look pretty much the same age.

I try not to mention this too often, because my couch is uncomfortable and I really like sleeping with my fiancée.

“Um…okay,” Dr. Yang said, obviously wanting to get the conversation back onto more familiar footing.

“Come on back. Alex said you were here about one of our John Does?” He turned and headed back through the double doors, probably as much to get out of the uncomfortable conversation I’d put us in as anything else.

“Yes,” Becks replied. Don’t annoy the coroner until we get the information we need , she said over our mental link.

Ever since I used some of my blood to heal a mortal injury Flynn sustained on a case, we’d been tied together.

We could communicate without speaking and sense each other’s presence and emotions over a huge distance, unless one of us took pains to close down the connection.

Or unless someone severed it somehow, which generally ended very badly for whoever had that stupid idea.

“We understand that he was brought in nude and with no apparent injuries.”

Yang held up one finger as we walked. “Sorry, I don’t like discussing specific cases in the public areas of the building. Some of our clerical staff are…not accustomed to some of the things I see in my work.”

“Got bitched at for making somebody’s executive assistant lose their lunch?” I asked with a smirk.

“More or less,” Yang said, pushing through another pair of swinging doors. I wondered for a moment why there were so few normal doors in the place, then remembered that most of their customers arrive on stretchers.

We followed the short man into the heart of the morgue, passing through one empty autopsy room and into a large room with tables in the center and dozens of drawers lining the walls.

There must have been room for three dozen bodies in the place, and judging by the name placards on each drawer, most of the spots were occupied.

“That’s…a lot of dead people,” I said, looking around. And given the number of bodies I’ve dropped in my day, it takes a lot to impress me.

“You should have seen it during COVID,” Dr. Yang replied. Then he sighed. “No, you shouldn’t have. It was nothing I ever want to live through again.”

I could relate. The COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t my first experience with overcrowded morgues and funeral homes, but I sincerely hoped it was my last. I’ve seen enough mass graves from all over the world to last me a lifetime.

There’s a lot of good to be said for living a very long time, but having lived through the flu epidemic of 1918, the Holocaust, and Pol Pot’s killing fields, I knew the horrors that nature and mankind could inflict upon the species long before the first victim of the novel coronavirus got the sniffles.

It doesn’t get any easier for having survived a pandemic before.

“Hopefully this spate of mysterious deaths won’t turn out to be contagious,” Flynn said, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder. It was a pretty clumsy attempt at condolence, but Yang seemed to appreciate it nonetheless.

“I don’t see how it could,” the doc replied, his cheeks reddening slightly as he looked at Flynn’s hand on his shoulder.

“Since I couldn’t determine a cause of death at all.

” He opened a drawer at chest height and slid a body out of a long metal roller tray.

“There is nothing wrong with this man. No injuries I can see, either by visible exam or on x-ray. No illness of any kind, no organ damage discovered during autopsy. No poisons or drugs in his toxicology report, no alcohol in his system, not even anything out of the ordinary in his stomach contents. I can find no reason that this man shouldn’t be walking around in perfect health. ”

“Except for the part where he’s dead,” I said.

I stepped closer to the body and looked it over.

He looked like a lot of the werewolves I’ve met—tall, muscular, a little hairier than most people, without a scar to be seen anywhere.

He didn’t even have the little callous most people have on their index finger from holding a pen for years.

He looked too young for a smallpox vaccine scar, which might have been the only thing he kept.

A lot of weres still have scars from before they were turned, but if they were born shifters, the normal childhood bumps and scrapes didn’t even leave a mark.

I dropped into my Sight and examined him again.

Yep, definitely a lycanthrope. There’s something in their aura that lingers long after death, a kind of greenish brown “woodsy” aura that marks them as creatures that wear multiple shapes.

His was faint, but that was to be expected after nearly a month on the slab.

With my Sight active, my other senses were more acute as well, and I could smell a faint hint of thick musky scent.

This wasn’t just any shifter: this was a were-bear.

That put everything into a different light immediately.

What the hell could do enough damage to a were-bear that it would die before being able to shift?

Normal bears are big, strong, and way faster than they have any right to be, and the whole thing about them not being able to climb trees is abject bullshit, which I learned to my horror one afternoon in the Black Forest. But were-bears were stronger, faster, and even more massive, as they tended to shift into the Grizzly or Kodiak varieties.

So, whatever had killed this guy, it had almost certainly killed a nearly half-ton beast with claws that could rip through sheet metal and enough power to rip a human in half.

This was…not good.

* * *

We spent another half hour pretending to examine the body before confiscating his personal effects, which consisted entirely of a necklace with an odd pendant that looked familiar but I couldn’t place right away.

We bid Dr. Yang farewell, and after he pressed his card into Flynn’s hand and implored her to call him if she needed any more help, we stepped back out into the Carolina spring sunshine.

I took off the hoodie I’d needed first thing in the morning and in the conscientiously cold morgue and followed Becks to her government-issued Suburban.

“Have you ever thought about driving around in something a little less ‘I’m a federal agent’?” I asked. “Besides, this thing has to get absolutely shit gas mileage.”

“The car came with the badge, and I don’t have to pay for maintenance, so I’m pretty good to look like a fed. Also, I am a federal agent, and with the engines we’ve got in our fleet, I get sixty miles to the gallon, so gas isn’t really an issue.”

“Wait, what?” I asked, sliding into the passenger seat. “Are you telling me you’ve got a magic motor in your Suburban?”

“I’m not telling you anything other than it gets better gas mileage than your Honda. You don’t have clearance to know the details,” Becks said, cranking the SUV. I noticed it did run a lot quieter than most enormous parking spot hogs.

We rode over to Southend for lunch at Phat Burrito, a locally owned joint that made burritos the size of my head. I got a Dos Equis to go with it, and Becks gave me a dirty look. “We’re on the clock.”

“I’m a wizard,” I replied. “It’s literally impossible for me to get drunk off one beer, and I really like Dos Equis.”

“And as an independent contractor, I guess I don’t get to tell you how to do your job, just what job I want done and when I need results by,” she said. “But as your fiancée, please stop making me look bad by drinking on the job.”

“Okay,” I said, walking up to the counter and getting a soda.

I finished my beer first, but I did switch to Coke.

I figured that had to count for something, especially since I picked up our burritos while I was there.

“So now what?” I asked, unwrapping the hunk of tortilla, beans, cheese, rice, chicken, guacamole, and salsa bigger than my forearm.

“Now I watch you try to eat that without wearing it,” Becks said.

She’d opted for a more fashion-safe, yet cowardly, burrito bowl.

“Then I go to the office and look for similar cases in the surrounding towns while you go home and do some kind of divination spell to see what the hell that necklace is.”

“And by ‘divination spell,’ you mean look it up on Google,” I said, a little bit of cheese dribbling onto my chin.

“Magic takes many forms, Harker. You recognized that thing, even though you have no idea from where.”

“Maybe Luke will know when he wakes up.”

“Don’t try to rouse him early, you know his attack cat is very protective.

” She wasn’t joking. Nameless was supposed to be my cat, but more and more he seemed like my uncle’s familiar.

It wasn’t fair. I’m the guy who actually casts spells.

If anyone should have a familiar, it’s me.

But cat’s gonna cat, and I know better than to try to force affection on a creature with tiny daggers strapped to the end of every finger.

If you ever want to know if someone understands the concept of consent, ask if they have cats.

They’ll teach you about not touching anything that doesn’t want to be touched, and fast.

“There might be something in one of Luke’s books that will jog my memory,” I said. “Maybe I’ll put in a call to a local Alpha I used to drink with back before you made me all respectable. If there’s something going after the local shifter populace, I bet he knows about it.”

“Respectable?” Becks scoffed. “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”

I chuckled and shoved more burrito in my mouth, trying to come up with a good way to approach a werewolf who threatened to rip my arm off and beat me with it the last time we met.