Darkest Night - Smoke And Ashes Part 6

"Sure."

What was that supposed to mean?

"Pleasant dreams."

Or that, he wondered as Lee walked away.

Worrying about it probably kept him awake for all of three or four minutes. He tossed. He turned. He realized he was probably dreaming about the time Lee suddenly acquired an impressive and familiar set of antlers. Usually, that kind of awareness woke him up but not today. He heard Leah's voice say something about feeding on s.e.xual energies, and he settled back to enjoy the show.

"Tony!"

No.

"Come on, wake up."

Not going to happen. Not now. Not when...

"I haven't got time for this s.h.i.t."

He didn't have a whole lot of choice about waking up when he hit the floor. Rolling over onto his back, he glared up at Jack Elson.

"What?"

"I've got a body I want you to look at."

"What?"

"They found a construction worker just down from where you lot were shooting last couple of nights, torn to pieces."

Tony took the RCMP constable's offered hand and allowed the larger man to drag him up onto his feet. "Sucks to be him, but what's that got to do with me?"

"Something bit his arm off."

Chapter Three.

"COUGAR. DIDN'T THEY HAVE one in Stanley Park a couple of years ago? Probably ran out of house pets to eat out in the Previous Contents Nextsuburbs and wandered into the city."

"Coroner ruled it out."

"Bear, then."

"No."

"Really big racc.o.o.n." When Jack took his eyes off the road long enough to glare across the cab of his truck, Tony shrugged.

"Racc.o.o.ns can be pretty d.a.m.ned big. I saw one once about the size of small dog."

"You sure?"

"About what?"

Jack downshifted and accelerated through a changing light. "About what you saw. Maybe it wasn't a racc.o.o.n."

"You think I saw a small dog?"

"Don't tell me what I think."

"Fine." Tony sighed. "If you don't think I saw a racc.o.o.n, what do you think I saw?"

Another glance across the cab. "You tell me."

"Oh, for f.u.c.k's sake; sometimes a racc.o.o.n is just a racc.o.o.n!" He sank down as far as the seat belt strap would allow.

Tony hadn't wanted to go look at a dead body, particularly not a dismembered dead body, and he'd half hoped that CB would refuse to allow him the time off. Although CB hadn't been happy about losing his TAD for the afternoon, he was well aware of the benefit of remaining in the RCMP's good graces and he'd waved off Tony's protests that he was needed on the soundstage with one ma.s.sive hand. "As difficult to believe as it may be, Mr. Foster, I believe production can continue for a few hours without you."

"Boss, there's no PA out there yet. I'm it."

"So if an errand needs running, someone on the soundstage will have to run it."

Tony'd opened his mouth to point out how unlikely it was that grips or electricians or carpenters would do any such thing and then closed it again when CB added: "They'll do it for me."

Yes, they would. Because no one who worked for Chester Bane would be suicidal enough to refuse although they'd tell themselves they were doing it because it never hurt to do the boss a favor.

Which was also true.

As Jack pulled into the underground parking at Vancouver General Hospital, Tony's stomach growled. "You made me miss lunch,"

he muttered.

"You may thank me for that," Jack told him, turning off the truck. "Come on."

The city morgue was in the bas.e.m.e.nt near the end of a long hall made narrow by line of gurneys, wheelchairs, and a locked filing cabinet. Cramped conditions along the outside walls of the outer office made the reason for outsourcing the filing cabinet clear. A middle-aged Asian woman wearing the end-of-her-rope expression common to professionals who fought with bureaucracy on a daily basis sat at one of the cluttered desks forking noodles out of a Styrofoam bowl.

"Dr. Wong." She waved the fork in Jack's general direction and continued chewing.

"This is the witness I mentioned earlier. Should we just go on in?"

Fork tines pointed toward the set of double doors in the back wall.

"Thanks. We won't be long."

A large hand between Tony's shoulder blades got him moving again in spite of his brain locking things down by suddenly repeating dismembered dead body over and over as though it had just realized what that meant.

"Elson."

Jack paused in the doorway, leaving Tony staring into a harshly lit room at a bank of stainless steel drawers familiar to anyone who'd ever turned on a television set.

"If he pukes, you clean it up."

Jack snorted. "If he pukes, he cleans it up."

"Hey!" He turned just far enough to glare back through the open door at the doctor. "I'm not going to puke."

"Yeah." She plunged her fork back into the noodles. "That's what they all say."

And then the door was closed and Jack was walking across the room and opening a drawer.

Pulling it open.

Exposing the dead body.

The dismembered dead body.

For him to look at.

Look at the dismembered dead body.

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Foster. You've seen bodies before."

"I know."

"So get your a.s.s over here."

It wasn't so much the body, it was the morgue and the drawer and the smell-the place smelled like the grade ten biology lab just before the whole fetal pig fiasco; he'd dropped out a week later-the combination made it creepier than he was used to.

Creepier than a dead baby in a backpack, its life sucked out by an ancient Egyptian wizard? Creepier than a man bouncing off a window, every bone in his body broken? Creepier than watching a wardrobe a.s.sistant gurgle out her last breath through the ruin of her throat?

Well, if you put it that way...

At least this guy was likely to stay dead.

Fingers crossed about that whole staying dead thing, Tony walked over to the open drawer.He didn't recognize the construction worker, but then he hadn't seen any of them naked so that might be a factor. The left arm was missing about ten centimeters below the shoulder, the edges of the wound ragged, the end of the bone crushed. "Where's the arm?"

"No one knows."

"Nice."

"Probably not. Losing the arm didn't kill him; whatever took it also broke his neck. What do you see?"

"Dead guy missing an arm."

"Tony."

"Seriously. That's all I..."

"What?"

Frowning, Tony walked around the drawer and stared at the construction worker's other side. Head c.o.c.ked, he spread his fingers and tried to match the tips of the first three and his thumb into a line of gouges ending in deep punctures. "Is there a set just like this on the guy's back?"

"Why?"

Wizards saw what was there. "Because if there is, it's how it held on while it bit the arm off."

There was a set of identical punctures in the guy's back.

"It?" Jack demanded.

Tony shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine."

"Probably not!"

Yeah, okay. That was valid. He took another look at the body. Something with three fingers and impressive claws had definitely bitten the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d's arm off. And that was all he had.

Not an imp, though. Not unless the Demonic Convergence imps were bigger than the regular kind, and Leah's att.i.tude had implied they weren't. She'd said he wouldn't have any trouble dealing with them and, although his ego was plenty healthy, he suspected he'd have a little trouble dealing with whatever the h.e.l.l had been snacking on construction workers.

Worker.

So far.

Great. This meant there was something going on in Vancouver besides the Demonic Convergence. And Henry. Yeah, we're a happening kind of place.

"If you've got something, Tony, spit it out."

He rubbed the edge of the stainless steel table with his thumb. "It's not about this."

"For Christ's sake, try and stay focused. I've got a dead man here, and..." When Jack's voice trailed off, Tony looked up to find the constable's pale eyes locked on his face. "It's more weirdness, isn't it? There're two sets of weird going on. This..." He waved a hand over the body. "... and whatever you decided didn't do this." "It's nothing."

"Oh, no. This is something so the other thing, it doesn't get to be nothing until I say it's nothing."

Tony ran over that in his head and wasn't sure where he ended up. "What?"

"Talk. Or we stay in here until you do."

"So this Demonic Convergence thing, it started a week ago but it isn't responsible for this?"

"No. Probably not." Jack's expression suggested he be more definite and since hanging around in the morgue was beginning to freak him out, that seemed like a good idea. "Definitely not," he amended.

"Demonic Convergence says demons to me, and a demon could have done this."

"Yeah, but there's barely even been enough time for it to wear reality away to the point where imps could get through." Tony was improvising now off very little information, but Jack didn't need to know that. "No way the Demonic Convergence had anything to do with this unfortunate man's death."