I creaked my way over to where Arielle was still reading tarot cards. "I finished with everyone, so I'm going to call it a night. Have you seen Roxy?"
She shook her head.
"Never mind. How about Raphael?"
"He was here a few minutes ago. He said he was checking on a problem someone had reported, but he would be back directly after that."
"Ah. Well, if you see him again, would you tell him I've gone to have a bath, but I'll be back?"
She nodded, her eyes warm with thanks. I left the cash box with her and did the salmon-spawning-upstream thing again through the crowds until I reached the edge of the fair. The noise from behind me indicated the first band was about to play, which accounted for most of the people heading in that direction. I stepped over the usual signs of people having fun—a puddle of vomit, empty wine bottles, discarded condom wrappers, and miscellaneous trash blowing across the crushed grass—and headed away from the noise and lights to the relative calmness of the outer fringes.
Voices raised loud in song made me pause as I was about to take my usual path past the tent city. Eight or nine people were dancing in various stages of undress around a burn barrel, clearly members of the intoxicated group Raphael had ushered out earlier. Rather than risk attracting their notice, I cut sharply to the left, huffed and puffed my way up a steep hill made slippery with pine needles, and plunged into a small stand of fir trees at the far end of the hotel's property. It was a dark, close area that smelled heavenly, but gave me goose bumps with its isolated location. After the experience in Christian's dungeon, I wanted the security of lights and people around me.
As I rounded a large pine tree, I stopped. Ahead of me someone was hunkered over between two trees at the fringe of the stand. Probably just a solitary drunken Goth ralphing up too much cheap wine, I told myself. But as I quietly tried to edge my way around him, I could see that the person wasn't a Goth, wasn't ralphing up anything, and wasn't alone.
The figure silhouetted against the distant hotel was large, muscular, and extremely familiar to me. But what held my gaze, and what kept me from calling out in delight, was the person at his feet.
Even in the almost dark I recognized the crimson hair that spread like a stain from her head.
If Raphael had been attempting CPR, or trying to slap Tanya awake, or even talking to her, I'd have run forward to help him, but the silence he maintained, the economical but efficient movements as he searched Tanya, kept me frozen behind the tree that partially hid me from his view. Raphael plucked something from the ground near Tanya, examined it for a moment, then tucked it in his pocket and looked out into the night, his head turning slowly as he made a scan of the area. I ducked back behind the tree, my heart pounding madly, unsure why I was hiding from him, but doing it nonetheless. When I peeked out a moment later, he was gone.
Tanya wasn't, however.
"Please just let her be sleeping. Or unconscious. Or playing possum. Or in a drugged stupor. Please oh please oh please don't let her be…" I couldn't even say the word, which was stupid because I knew full well she was dead. Raphael's body language screamed it, Tanya's still form screamed it, and every hair on my head that stood on end as I'd watched him looking her over screamed it.
She was dead. She lay on her side, curled up into a ball, resting on a pine-needle mattress with her hair streaming out around her like a red halo. Her eyes were closed. I didn't see any sign that she was breathing, but figured I'd better check to make sure she wasn't gravely wounded instead of dead.
I leaned forward to look at Tanya, felt a warning tickle high up in my nose, and threw myself backward, pulling out a handful of tissues from my pocket as I did so. I sat back on my heels a moment later, praying there wasn't any bad karma to be had from sneezing on a possibly dead person. She sure looked dead. I swallowed back a lump of revulsion before I reached out with a hand that shook more than I was willing to acknowledge, pushing back the collar of her jacket and touching one fingertip to her chin. It felt warmish.
"Pulse, you idiot—you can't tell anything from a person's chin. Check fora pulse," I lectured myself. I scooted forward until I was leaning over her, moving her head gently to the side so I could find her pulse point.
My hand froze.
A scream tore through the heavy night air, startling the birds nesting in the trees around me. I ignored the screaming, unable to take my eyes from the horrible sight, unable to believe I was seeing what was in front of me. A distant part of my mind wished that whoever was screaming would shut up so I could think in peace, but the rest of my mind, the part that was staring at Tanya's neck, was too stunned to do any thinking at all.