Rosemary and Rue

Almost against my will, I was moving toward the body, the weight of Evening’s binding seeming tight and heavy in my chest. I flashed my increasingly crumpled receipt at every officer I passed. None of them tried to stop me from approaching the body—or what was passing for it, anyway. If the police were already this ensconced, the night-haunts would have long since been and gone. I’d have to be content with what they’d left behind.

Fae flesh doesn’t decay. It makes sense; the fae don’t age past the point of physical maturity, so why should they rot? But it means something has to be done about the bodies, and that’s where the night-haunts come in. They come when we die, take our dead for their tables, and leave replicas behind. Their toys do everything the natural dead do. They bleed, stink, and decay with a perfection that says a lot about their makers. Really, there’s just one thing that differentiates the night-haunts’ mannequins from our real dead: they’re human. Their ears are round, their eyes are normal, their skins are white or brown or tan, but never blue or green. There’s nothing about them that can give us away.

The night-haunts devour our true dead, and they leave pretty fictions in their place for the mortal world to mourn. I don’t know when we made that bargain with them, but there’s no breaking it now, and disgusting as it is, it has its purpose.

Knowing that what I was dealing with wasn’t really Evening’s body didn’t make it any easier. The night-haunts only mimic what they see.

The replica was sprawled by the couch, open eyes staring at the ceiling. I fought the urge to turn and run, perversely glad that I’d already thrown up breakfast. Part of me was still able to marvel at the detail the night-haunts had worked into their creation. Every inch of her human disguise was flawlessly replicated, even down to the obvious violence of her death.

I knelt beside the body, letting the analytical part of my mind click on as I scanned the area around it. There were bloody footprints on the near-white carpet, but those were unavoidable; there was nowhere to step that wasn’t covered in blood. A few of the officers had plastic bags tied over their shoes and if the killers were smart, they’d done something similar; none of the prints I could see had a distinctive enough tread to let me pick them out of a crowd. If the murder weapon was left behind, the police tagged and bagged it before I got there. Back when I was a P.I., I sometimes lamented not working directly with the cops—my job would have been a lot easier if I had access to hard evidence. Unfortunately, I hate the sight of blood and I can’t work mornings, so a career with the force isn’t really in my future.

I caught myself with a jolt, realizing where my thoughts were going. No. This was a one-time thing; it was about necessity, not about my future. I gave up that life. I wasn’t going back.

There was one way to distract myself from thinking too hard about police procedure, or much of anything beyond why I never wanted to do this again. Steeling my nerves, I turned my attention to what was left of Evening.

Her bathrobe had been white when she put it on; now it was a dark brownish-red, except for a few spots on the sleeves. The body holds an amazing amount of blood. There were two obvious gunshot wounds, one in the shoulder and one in the stomach, but neither should have killed her. They would have hurt like hell, but she would have lived.

Everything considered, she probably died when they slashed her throat.