The smell of death and corruption became all encompassing, and the sight of the organs . . . Kyrie swallowed. Even as she swallowed and struggled with nausea, she felt relieved that it wasn't hunger and that she wasn't finding this in any way appetizing. Perhaps panthers only ate fresh meat.
"Are you okay?" Rafiel asked.
She wasn't okay. The smell seemed to be short circuiting her brain and making her blood rush loudly in her ears. But she nodded and got hold of the considerable willpower she resorted to when she had to prevent herself from shifting. She nodded again. "I'm fine," she said, though her voice echoed tiny and distant.
"Look at that," the doctor said. "That's the stab that killed him. Right through the heart." He pointed at an organ that looked exactly like the others, to Kyrie, all of them an amalgam of red and green, yellow and the sort of greys that really shouldn't exist in nature. "There are several others that reached vital organs, but I'd say that's the one that stopped it. Pretty much ripped the heart to shreds, in fact."
Rafiel and Bob had moved closer, and were looking into the opened body.
"What are those white things?" Rafiel asked.
"Damned if I know," Mike said. "They look like some sort of adipose deposits."
"They look like huge ant eggs to me," Bob said. "You know, the kind you find when you break an anthill open in your garden? Just much bigger."
"They seem to be at all the stab wound sites," Rafiel said.
Kyrie wrote "white things" and "ant eggs" and "wound sites."
"So, some contamination on the blade," Rafiel said. "Can you put some—"
Then as the doctor handed him a bag and said, "You'd best keep it in a cooler, though, since it's not been exposed to the air."
Bob produced a normal picnic cooler from somewhere. It was full of ice. He got the baggy and a couple other baggies of what the doctor thought might be contaminants in the wound, and put them in the cooler.
The autopsy progressed along lines that Kyrie had read about, but never been forced to watch before, and she had to call on all her self-control to continue watching, particularly when they sawed the cranium open to remove the brain. But there didn't seem to be any other surprises.
"I think," the doctor said. "There might be some drug in the blood, so I'd like to get that looked at also."
"Drug?"
"Some hallucinogenic. His pupils were like pie plates when they got him in. I'd say he was high as a kite."
She tried to imagine this man high. He didn't seem the type. Well fed, middling dressed, middle-aged. Oh, Kyrie and everyone in her generation had heard all the platitudes about drug use affecting every class and every type of person. And, as such, they might even be true. But there were two classes it primarily affected—depending on the drug—the very rich and the very poor. And within those, whatever drug was the current drug of choice tended to make people sickly or at least skinny.
This man looked robust and neither too rich or too poor. And yet, looking at him, something gnawed at the back of Kyrie's mind. She couldn't quite say what.
She took her leave, with Rafiel, and hurried out of the place. Outside, standing in the sun, holding a cooler with whatever samples they got off the body, Rafiel blinked. His enormous confidence seemed to have vanished and he looked confused and perhaps a little scared.
He looked over his shoulder, but Bob had stayed behind, talking to the examiner. "We have to find who did this, Kyrie. The sooner the better."
"Why?" Kyrie said. There were many things she wanted to ask Rafiel, like why he assumed that one of their kind was bound to have seen corpses before, and why, if that was the case, they should discipline this killer. And why he'd assumed that this too was a death by dragon—other than having seen Tom standing over the body. But she couldn't ask any of those, and anyway, the most important was this—why they particularly and not the police in general should find out what happened to this victim.
Rafiel blinked again. The gesture made him look slow of thought, though it was probably just a reaction to the strong sunshine. "What do you mean why?" he asked.
"Why should we care who did this, if it wasn't a shifter?" Kyrie asked.
Rafiel frowned. "No, but the victim was a shifter. Didn't you smell it?"
* * *
Rafiel insisted on following her home. There was nothing for it. "Can't you see?" he said. "I have to. If something is killing shifters . . ."
"How would they even know I'm a shifter?" she asked. "Wouldn't it take knowing the smell? And knowing what we are?"