The Forever Drug Read Free

But the three bodies were still there. Aside from the elf girl— who had a large and rather obvious bullet wound in her chest—they were unmarked. Cause of death: unknown.
    I hung around after the detectives who followed in the wake of the Force had finished interviewing me, watching and listening as the bodies were tagged and bagged. The two human victims were members of the Weeds, a gang of squatters who dossed down on the site of what used to be the Public Gardens. I'd recognized them by the patterns tattooed on their arms: morning glory vines and dandelions growing out of the eye sockets of grinning skulls. The pair had the usual sort of criminal records: drug-dealing, possession of stolen property, aggravated assault. Like the troll, they'd been carrying handguns. Except that they hadn't used theirs.
    The elf girl was indeed a street shaman, residing on Summer Street. She'd been arrested only once, for using an unlicensed illusion spell. Otherwise, her record was clean.
    As soon as the bodies were off to the morgue and the scene was magically assensed and declared clear, the procedural squabbles about which division was going to investigate the homicides began. Detectives from two divisions had come out to the scene, and now they were embroiled in a loud argument. The detective from the Division of Paranormal Investigation figured that the investigation fell under her jurisdiction, since a paranormal animal with magical capabilities was involved. The detective from Drug Enforcement insisted that it was his case, since these three deaths tied into his ongoing investigation of what had come to be known, in the past week, as the "grinning corpses."
    There had been ten deaths so far, not including tonight's body count. All had been tagged as overdoses. Probably because the first two to die—a dwarf couple from Dartmouth—had been known BTL users, chipheads who'd already fried their brains with silicone dreams. And they'd been talking to friends about scoring a nova-hot new drug on the morning before their deaths.
    None of the ten bodies had shown any signs of violence, and patrol officers who'd responded to the calls had described each of the corpses as "grinning"— despite the fact that this wasn't physically possible. I knew from previous conversations with forensics lab techs that the muscles of a cadaver normally go slack in death, and only begin to seize up in rigor mortis some three hours later. But for some unaccountable reason, the faces of all the "overdose" victims were frozen in an expression that could only be described as euphoric. That should have clued the patrol officers to the fact that it wasn't a BTL overdose they were dealing with. Magic was involved.
    The elf girl killed by the ball of light had the same expression on her face, as had the two gangers who'd died with her in the parking garage. This time, however, the police had a credible witness: me. From the description I gave, the DPI detective concluded that the tentacled creature had used magic to suck the life from all three victims.
    It looked like the DPI was going to get the case, after all.
    I tagged along with the MTF squad, hitching a ride with them back to Lone Star's Halifax headquarters, a building the size of a small arcology that takes up a full city block at the corner of Gottingen and Rainnie Street. I figured it was time for me to report in to the sergeant, to see if he had another assignment for me. As I jandered down the hall, I stuck my nose into the office of Dass Mchawi, a DPI mage detective and probably the best paranormal taxonomist the division had.
    I found her doing datawork. She was hunkered down over her datapad—a laptop computer with a monitor shaped like a crystal ball. The design was almost too cute—a result of the Division of Paranormal Investigation having too much imagination and too large a budget.
    The laptop was responsive to voice-activated commands, but Dass was busy entering text data with a keyboard