Page 78 of Mortdale

He rolled his eyes. “We get it, I am old.”

“Very old,” she sweetly said, with a huge smile. “You didn’t make a note of the level of active decay in your report.”

“As you said, vampire corpses do not decay like we do.”

“Well, something is.” She smiled with all her teeth just to taunt the poor man. “Does anyone have a saw, an ax, anything I can use to get into the corpse? A spoon maybe?” she asked, throwing him a wink.

“She has some form of qualification, right?” He shook his head. “Never mind. You should go behind the glass,” he said, pointing to the glass wall separating the mortuary room with his laboratory and study.

Willow came back with a white apron thrown over her dress, her hair tucked under a white cap, only her dark eyes and pale grey brows visible above the mask she wore.

She carefully read through the vampire’s health records which Alfred had retrieved for us, and then drew thick, dark blood into a syringe she’d stuck in the corpse’s groin.

Carefully, she inspected the body head to toe, checking under every dent, curve and crevice. She ran her gloved fingers over every inch of skin while Alfred noted down all her observations—with some reluctance and annoyance.

I couldn’t help but lean in when she began cutting into the body, pulling her scalpel down from each shoulder blade, meeting at the breast bone and then farther down to the pubic bone in a y-shape.

Things rarely impressed me, but watching her cut through the chest plate and ribs, and weigh and measure those organs was the most fascinating thing I might have ever witnessed. It was art. The patience. The finesse. The gentility as she handled each organ.

It took a few hours. Many bones sawed, much skin peeled, many organs collected later, she was done.

She set a thin, long sheet of cold iron into the vials of samples she’d collected—blood, venom, spinal fluid, bile—and sealed them all tight.

Alfred’s high-pitched voice rang out, spitting cautionary words at her when she pulled her mask off and leaned to sniff over the cadaver’s open sternum. She tipped the cadaver’s head to the side, inspecting the two bite marks on the neck again.

A moment later, she discarded her gloves, hat, and mask with some frustration. “There’s no sign of any hex, curse, no sign of any magic.”

“I could have told you that.” Alfred groaned, rubbing a hand over his eyes and slamming the glass door shut as he left the laboratory to set the samples inside a cabinet.

She stretched her neck back and forth. “But all points where chaos is stored were inflamed, mainly the alchemical nodes in the heart, which means there was likely something in his system that triggered them at some point.”

“You still think this is the work of a witch or the fae?”

She shook her head. “At this point, I’m not entirely sure. It could have manifested some other way, but it would need a potent catalyst. Chaos stored in our alchemical nodes doesn’t just simply denature on its own. In the same manner blood doesn’t denature.”

She knocked on the glass partition, making Alfred jump back.

She pointed a finger at the sample vials. “I will need the results for those.”

He scoffed as he came around the glass partition, taking off his glasses to wipe them on the corner of his shirt. “The Marsh test was conducted several times. As was the Reinsch test, bioassays, colour reactions. All of them!”

“Neither tests for any poison a witch would cook up. Besides, magic can easily alter any results for all of the above,” she said, scrubbing her hands under the tap.

“We are accustomed to your kind, Lady Duncan. We have found our means to detect your trickery.”

My wife straightened her shoulders, and levelled a look on him as she dried her hands.

Leaning against one of the cupboards, I took a cigarette from the tin and put it to my lips, watching it all unfold.

“Have you?” She pointed to the corpse. “What’s wrong with him then? Let’s hear it.”

The old pathologist removed his specs, cleaning them with the corner of his wrinkled shirt. “It’s a matter of evolution. With each plague, science will evolve. Well, at least until the next one hits. And that takes time and lives. It is nature. We’re not on this earth to understand it. Only to not let it destroy us.”

While he was beaming red with frustration and impatience, she was daisy fresh and smiling.

She took a step towards him. “It’s not nature, it is simply arrogance. Do not blame nature for your ego. You refuse to understand it because you fear it, so you let it overpower you until it exhausts itself and you can claim your win. If you’d simply get over your fears instead of letting them teach us a good, painful lesson, we wouldn’t be at these odds.” She leaned close to him, and at her tall height—almost a foot over him—he had to tip her head up to look at her. “Trickery, you said.” She lifted a coin between her fingers, twirling them around until the coin vanished. “This is trickery,” she said, reaching behind his ears and pulling out a coin. “And—” She briefly closed her hand around the coin and then pulled her fingers apart to reveal a toenail. “This is magic.”

His wide eyes jumped between the toenail, me, back to the toenail, and then his own feet laced up tightly in boots.