officially protoscience-related lung cancer- inhaled too much of the wrong kind of smoke. Bishop spent her last two years as a minor as a ward of the gambit, apprenticing with the brightest minds they had, mostly a man they called the Doctor. When she turned 18, King convinced her to come to Portland.
She never knew her dad. And because she’s by far the youngest member of the gambit, and maybe because she was our only girl- try as Queen might to make that not true sometimes- we all felt protective of her. And despite the fact that she could school any one of us in spellcraft, she looked up to us, probably too much.
She's maturing, aged enough I can't tell myself she's just the kid she was when she moved down here anymore. She's got short, red-brown hair that she's always forgetting to pin back. Because of that, it's rare when she doesn't have a piece of food or corpse hanging from it.
“You always bring me the nicest things,” she says, still smiling at me. “Come in, come in, the coffee’s a little cold, but the hot cocoa’s warm and fresh.”
I set the corpse down on her slab, while Rook stares at her. “You’re so pleasant, and, and bubbly, despite the fact that he just brought you a dead body, and set it down on your table like a holiday fruitcake. It’s weird.”
“It helps that the cocoa’s caffeinated. Loco Cocoa. But it’s only weird because of the dichotomy, since you spent the evening with the glower twins. They see the ugly side of people. I get to see the fascinating side- which is frequently the inside.” Bishop sets down her mug, and tears into the silk sheet, unwrapping the body like it’s Christmas. “You want the sheet back, or the usual?”
“Yep.” She’s got a chute down to her incinerator in the basement, and she drops it in. The silk is contaminated, physically from contact with the body, and magically, because I’ve been carrying it around in my jacket pocket. Burning it means keeping the next crime scene clean, and preventing somebody from dumpster diving and using it as the focus of a sympathetic spell against me.
“So this is the Salem Rook, huh? Seems a bit dainty to be a castle, but it’s nice to meet you.” Rook frowns, and looks at Bishop’s skinny arms with some confusion. “And nicer still that your coven is finally joining the 21st century.”
“Uh, it’s nice to meet you, too.” Rook reaches out and shakes Bishop’s hand. Bishop smiles, and gives it a second, then walks to the sink and begins vigorously scrubbing her hands.
“No offense. But I don’t want to contaminate the body.”
“Okay,” Rook says, while Bishop finishes drying her hands and puts on a pair of gloves. “So what is it a Bishop does?”
“I’m a protoscientist. I study things that aren’t accepted as fact by most people, but that exist anyway. Alchemy’s a good example. Before chemistry was a science, a lot of the foundation for it was laid by alchemists. Same with the astronomical aspects of astrology. But protoscience isn’t just limited to the arcane. A colleague of mine in BC is studying binaurul beats, used to induce specific brain states, applicable for health or just getting someone baked with sound. The theory is that it can be used to induce shamanic trances, but it’s really just sigil magic by a different name and methodology.”
Bishop spends a moment taking in the body, before she says, “I was thinking of getting some KFC. When you said you were bringing the new Rook, I thought we could split a bucket, but now, the smell of this- why go out when we can eat in?” Rook stares at her with wide eyes. “What, are we not laughing about that, yet?” Then she says, “Oh, right- she wouldn’t know the story.”
I take that as my cue to tell it- since Bishop only knows it secondhand, anyway. “Alfil, in one of his later in life oopsies- this was right before he retired- was supposed to check some decomposition for me, to see if it was natural or supernatural. Instead, he spent the better part of an evening performing a complex diagnostic spell on sliced, peppered turkey, while eating corpse, lettuce and tomato sandwiches. Really, he was lucky; he only got mild food poisoning. I get worse from the Chinese takeout down the street.”
“I think that’s because they age their corpses,” Bishop says solemnly.
“How long you think it’ll take to get an idea what we’re looking at?” I ask her.
“I can tell you you’re looking at a big burnt guy. If you want me to be able to point out more than roast chestnuts and a blackened tree stump, you’ll have to give me a few hours.”
“Cool.” I check my phone. “It looks like Pawn’s got his CI to the safehouse. Let us know when you've got something concrete.”
Interrogation
The safehouse is on the other side of town. We stop at Voodoo Doughnut because they have the least bad coffee around at this time of night. Rook orders a voodoo doll and a diablos rex; “You’re practically a stereotype,” I tell her. She refuses to try a bacon maple bar.
On the way back out to the car she says, “I couldn’t help but notice you left a fairly sizeable tip in the jar- well north of fifteen percent. There an actual Vodun Botono in there?”
“I have no idea. Once I complained when their coffee gave me heartburn, and for a week I had blood in my stool,” she looks down at her already headless voodoo doll donut with concern. “But I’m a regular, and you don’t screw with the people who make your food.” She shrugs, and bites off another of his limbs.
The safehouse is within walking distance of Voodoo, and I can’t help but think that isn’t coincidence, but we drive, anyway. Pawn’s smoking in the alley, and I hand him a box from Voodoo, containing the phallic cock-n-balls with “eat me” written down the shaft in red frosting. “Again?” he asks.
“If you didn’t slurp the whole thing down every time I brought you one-”
“Prick.”
“And the nuts. I’m told it’s important you don’t neglect those.” He grinds his cigarette out on the brick and lets it fall. I catch it in my hand and bring it inside, throw it in a trash basket. It’s sloppy- leaving around something personal like that- but that’s Pawn. I can’t honestly tell if he’s just come to expect me to clean up his messes, or completely doesn’t give a fuck.
His vampire CI’s in the next room, visible through a one-way mirror. Rook stares at the glass, trying to figure it out; there’s a slight flicker that gives away that it’s not just half-silvered. Then she spots a small red mark in the corner. “That sigil blocks light going in but not out,” I tell her. “It sidesteps the second law of thermodynamics by mimicking an optical isolator, somehow imitating a Faraday rotator. I have almost no idea what that means, but Bishop was adamant it involves physics.”
Pawn ignores the science talk, and starts speaking through the cock-n-balls in his mouth, “Gothy little fruit goes by Maleficitus. Real name’s Cedric. Kid’s an illegal and a vampire- and a simperer, for what that’s worth. Just a winner on all kinds of fronts.” But he isn’t just simpering- he’s holding his nose, specifically trying to hold the blood in.
“Why’s he bleeding?” I ask.
“He tripped, and landed on my fist.” Pawn laughs, and genuinely doesn’t seem to understand why nobody laughs with him.
I open up the door into the interrogation room. “You’ve really got to be more careful,” I say, and close the door on him before he can follow me in. “You okay?” I ask the kid.
“What the fuck, man? I’ve always been straight up with the gambit.”
“I know.” I pick up a box of tissues on the table, which he seems to be stubbornly refusing, and offer them to him. “And we appreciate that, we really do. But Pawn’s a dick, and about the only way he knows to show his appreciation is to spit in your face.”
He takes one of the tissues and dabs at his bleeding nose.
“You have any idea how hard it is to get vampire blood to coagulate?”
“I know you’re not the first vamp to bleed all over this carpet. We may still have some coagulant factors.” A few seconds pass and Pawn opens the door long enough to hand me a bag and an IV; he waits there a second, hoping his fetching it means I?
??ll let him into the room- but I don’t. I jab the needle in Cedric’s arm, hand him the bag, and position his arm so the bag stays above the needle.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Yeah. I’m sorry, about all of this. It’s inconvenient, even if it weren’t for Pawn. But I have contacts in the police. If I were to handle it the way they’d like, you’d be sitting in their interrogation room. And they wouldn’t make the kind of accommodations it’d take to keep you alive. Not to mention that if you tried to tell them you were a vampire, they’d figure you for a lunatic and pin the murder to you and never bother looking anyplace else.”
“I didn’t do shit, man.” But I get the feeling he doesn’t quite believe that; he’s hunkered down, only occasionally looking up at me, like a dog who hopes his master isn’t pissed anymore about him pissing in his master’s bed.
But I’ve got no reason to beat on him. “I’m not accusing. Or threatening, for that matter. I just want you to know your place in the world at the moment. It’s precarious. You were the first person on my scene. Did you see anyone suspicious? Smell anything?”
He sniffles through the blood still coming out his nose. “Won’t be smelling shit for a while.”
I’m getting tired of the petulant act. “Don’t pretend you couldn’t tell me everything about everyone in the room, down to their blood