Justice Calling(6)

“Hey, green light,” I said, too brightly. The car behind us, clearly someone important and in a hurry, honked.
We rode the last couple minutes in silence. I wanted to ask him more about the vision of me, about me being somehow the crossroads between people living and dying.  He seemed to think that meant I was killing people, but the most likely explanation was a lot scarier than that. If Samir, my ex, had found me, everyone I knew was in danger. Maybe his vision had nothing to do with whoever had killed Rose.
I took a deep breath and hugged the bundle, my eyes hot again with unshed tears.
“Left, into that parking lot,” I said, pointing to Dr. Lake’s practice. It was in a Victorian-style house, like a lot of us business-owners in Wylde, Dr. Lake lived on the floor above her practice.
Alek came around and opened my door, taking Rose from me. I led the way into the office.  Christie, a young wolf shifter who does reception for Dr. Lake, was the only one inside and I sighed with relief.
“Hey Christie, the doc in?” I asked.
“Yeah, she’s doing paperwork,” Christie said, eyeing the large bundle Alek carried. Or perhaps she was just eyeing Alek.
“Get her, and tell her we’ll be in the surgery room. Then you might want to close early. Just, trust me, okay?”  I really didn’t want to show the body to Christie. She was barely out of her teens.
“Uh, okay.” She didn’t like it, but she got up and ran down the hall to Dr. Lake’s office.
I led the way to the right to the surgery room.  The smell of alcohol tinged with an undertone of old blood make my skin goosebump.  I knew the vet pretty well since Harper was always rescuing hurt animals a side-swipe away from roadkill and begging me to take them to the vet for her. She couldn’t stomach the times there was nothing to be done but easing the little critters into death, so I got the fun task of hearing Dr. Lake say there was nothing to do but help them cross over.
Dr. Lake came in directly after us. She was a tiny wolf shifter, short enough she would have legally needed a booster seat in the state of California, with a wiry, compact energy about her. She halted and tipped her chin up, her nostrils flaring as she sniffed the air. If I didn’t hang out with shifters practically twenty-four-seven, it would have been creepy, but you get used to the whole sniffing people to recognize them or learn their mood or whatever.
“Another of Harper’s creatures?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” I said. I took the bundle from Alek and set Rose on the stainless steel table, unfolding the blanket.
“That animal is dead,” Dr. Lake said. “And has been stuffed. There’s nothing I can do here.”
“It’s Rose Macnulty,” I said softly. “We need to figure out how she died.”
Dr. Lake’s eyes widened and she took a half step back, looking from Rose to me and finally to Alek. “Ah, Justice. This is a Council issue?”
“Shifter getting murdered is always a Council issue.”
“Can you do an autopsy?” I asked. It wasn’t really a question, since I bet she’d do whatever the big old Justice here told her to do, but no reason to ruffle more fur than Alek already was just by being himself.  
Dr. Lake stepped up to the table and ran her hands expertly over Rose’s body.  She peeled back the fox’s lips, felt along her belly, examined her paws. With a grunt she nodded.
“I have no idea how they did it, but I’ll open her and see if I can find out from the inside. No seams, no bullet wounds. It’s an expert job.”  She shook her head. “Let me glove up. Get her on the table proper, no point getting that quilt icky.”
I lifted Rose up so Alek could pull the blanket out. Nausea swept through me again, along with an electric tingle along my skin.
And I knew, with lightning clarity, where I’d felt that before.
It wasn’t just revulsion at the body, I was touching foreign magic.  There are lots of kinds of magic and lots of ways to draw power.  I drew my power from myself, from something like a well inside of myself. It’s unique to me.  Any other kind of power, be it from a witch’s ritual drawing on ley lines or natural forces, or another sorcerer, feels alien and weird to me. I can’t use it or understand it, only sense it. Like being a native English speaker and finding all the books in your house suddenly written in Chinese.  You know it says something, but the hell you could tell anyone what that was.#p#分页标题#e#
“Wait,” I said.  I closed my eyes, reaching for a thread of my own power.  I gritted my teeth and ran my hands along Rose’s side.  The wrongness resolved into a more solid impression. Black lines, dark on dark behind my eyelids, wrapped all around her body just beneath the skin before terminating in a complex knot in her chest.