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The glass doors suddenly swooshed open, and I heard a gruff voice call out, “This way, Agent Vavrin.”
Oops!
Realizing I had inadvertently made the god of medicine wait, I hurried past shelves stocked with test tubes storing both human medicine and magical potions and came to a stop when I found a white-haired man in a lab coat bent over the dissection table.
There was a dead body on it: Venus Stratton, sixteen, with long, blonde hair and blue eyes, and declared dead last night by the paramedic who had gone to the victim’s home in response to a 911 call.
“Took you long enough,” the god of medicine said with a grunt as he straightened to his full height. “You’re the one Justice’s gal sent?”
“Uh...” Horae was also the generic-slash-collective term used to refer to the ferocious daughters of Justice, which was what my boss Dike was, but this was the first time I had heard anyone refer to CSI’s division director so literally.
“Well?”
The note of impatience in the god’s tone helped me recover from my shock, and I said quickly, “Yes, umm—-” Oh, cast it. Here we go again. How did one properly refer to the god of medicine, anyway?
Aesculapius let out a harrumph. “Mother of Cronos! Dr. Ace will do, if that’s what’s giving you the heebie-jeebies.” Shaking his head, he then asked, “And you, girl? What’s your name?”
“Blair—-”
“Too short,” he dismissed. “We’ll stick to Vavrin.”
I knew I should feel insulted, but right now I was more amazed by the fact that he knew I was a witch named Blair and he wasn’t laughing his head off.
“How old are you, Vavrin?” His gaze narrowed. “You seem too young.” Before I could tell him I was twenty-six, Dr. Ace then added, “Either that or you’re too short.”
Okaaaaaay. I wished I could feel insulted now, but it wasn’t like he wasn’t speaking the truth. Natural born witches were generally tall and blessed with good genes while self-made witches like me were, well, all over the place. In my case, I was a tiny brunette that stood out in all the wrong places (skin that didn’t tan, curves that didn’t go away) while the rest of me was the definition of mediocrity.
As soon as I was properly suited up, Dr. Ace led me back to the dissection table, asking, “Do you know how to detect carbon dioxide poisoning in a corpse?”
Glancing down at Venus’ corpse, I said slowly, “When a person dies, blood would eventually settle at a certain portion of the body.” I pointed to the victim’s arm. “This part, for instance, should be bluish-purple.” But instead it was a dark shade of red, which was indicative of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Dr. Ace gazed at me with interest. “You’ve done your homework.”
I quickly shook my head, feeling slightly embarrassed at the god’s words of praise. “I just got lucky you asked me one of the few things I know about poisons,” I admitted. “The case I worked on last week involved poisoning, so I had to do a bit of reading on toxicology. I’ve only gotten as far as the letter C so...” I gave him a sheepish smile. “If you want to ask me anything beyond the third letter of the alphabet, could we maybe do it next week?”
“I’ll think about it.” Dr. Ace’s tone was so devoid of emotion that by the time I realized he was joking, he had already moved on to his next question, asking me about the circumstances of the victim’s death.
Scrolling up on my smartphone screen, I started reading from the case report Dike emailed. “The emergency responder found the victim in the living room, no longer breathing, and without any pulse. Both her mother and younger brother were also present, in the exact same room.”
I looked back at Dr. Ace with a frown. “It doesn’t make sense, does it? If she had died of carbon monoxide poisoning, the others should have died of the same thing.”
“Exactly.” The doctor’s grim tone confirmed what I already suspected.
Cause of death: poisoning.
Manner of death: assisted by magic.