Karhi Emelyn

“I feel like we haven’t figured out anything,” Karhi said as he set the car into park outside of the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s office. “We don’t know who owns that house or why that shifter was where they held Mikko.”

“Well . . . we know your kidnapping and Mikko’s are likely connected from that. But you’re correct—we don’t know much else.” Lunette got out of the car.

Karhi followed her. “But who would want to hurt both me and Sloane?” His car chirped back at him when he locked it.

Lunette gave him a look telling him he knew that answer.

“This is too haphazard for Ilona. Kidnapping a friend of Sloane’s and torturing him but then just putting me in a random safehouse? Those two things don’t line up properly.”

“You don’t know that they didn’t plan on torturing you. You just killed your captor before they got the chance.” She pulled out her cell phone to type on it.

That still didn’t feel right. If Ilona wanted to punish both him and Sloane, she would have just taken them at the same time to be tortured together.

They stopped outside of the building housing the medical examiner’s office. It took up the entire block, just a monolith of white reflecting the late afternoon sun onto them. Karhi had on sunglasses to block the glare.

They stood at the back of the building, next to a door that said Employee Entry Only.

Lunette put her phone back in her pocket. “He’ll be here any second.”

“So, who is this—”

The door opened, revealing a man in a lab coat and light blue scrubs. Karhi found his mind blanking for a moment, only the word Persian flashing in his brain.

His hair was dark, pulled back in a ponytail to reveal a stunning jawline and wicked high cheekbones. His amber skin was radiant and Karhi found himself wanting to touch it. It looked so smooth, especially where it stretched over his large, strong hands.

His eyes were so light, they were almost silver. He had a band-aid over one cheek and another on his forehead.

Why the hell was the morgue attendant this fucking gorgeous?

“Are you Hashem?” Lunette asked. She wasn’t even fazed. Though she had always criticized Karhi for being so much hornier than she was.

“I am,” he said, smiling. He had the deepest dimples. “But I go by Michael. You must be Lunette.” He glanced at Karhi. “And you are . . . ?”

“My brother, Karhi. Can you take us to the body?”

“Of course. I am currently processing the paperwork to bring her body, and another body, to the funeral home. All of the county personnel have gone home for the day, so you shouldn’t be bothered.”

They followed Michael through the door and into a maze of hallways. He led them with the effortless ease of someone who had done this many times. As they moved, Karhi had the opportunity to appreciate Michael’s backside from over the top of Lunette’s head.

They stopped at another door, and Michael opened it to a set of stairs. “Down the stairs, and it’s the first door on the right.” He caught Karhi’s eye and smirked at him. Karhi knew, without a doubt, that Michael knew he had been staring.

Karhi returned the smile and went through door after Lunette. As he did, Michael brushed Karhi’s hip with his fingers. Karhi barely held back a shiver.

The room they entered was quiet and sterile with a tiled floor and steel walls filled with roll-out body storage units. The faint hum of a condenser filled the room, scents of bleach and ammonia hanging in the air. And there was this musty scent, almost like ammonia but not quite. It was familiar, but Karhi couldn’t place it.

A steel examining table stood in the centre of the room with a single sheet covering the profile of a human body.

“You’re Emelyns?” Michael asked as he shut the door behind them.

Karhi and Lunette looked up sharply before glancing at each other. From Lunette’s expression, he could tell that she, like Karhi, hadn’t thought Michael knew who they were.

“Emmo mentioned it,” Michael said.

That seemed to mean something to Lunette, but it didn’t mean anything to Karhi. He had to assume that was Lunette’s contact here. “Yes,” Lunette said.

He nodded. “Cool. I don’t really see vampires in my line of work much. You know, the whole not-dying thing.”

He left it unspoken that vampire bodies dried up and shrivelled away within hours of dying. Eventually they blew away to dust.

“This is Rhegium Phillips,” Michael said, walking to the examining table and pulling back the sheet over the body. He let it fall across her chest.

Karhi didn’t feel even a spark of memory at seeing her face.

She had been beautiful, a brunette woman in her early thirties. She looked like she would have been at home at Lazarus. Dancing and singing and flirting with people that she came across.

She didn’t belong here.

He wished that he could remember her because this wasn’t the memory he wanted with her. She was pale, the colour of periwinkle flowers, and her throat was a bloodless mess of flesh. It was jagged and stuck out at oblique angles, revealing flesh and bone deep inside.

There was no way he could have done this. He had never fed so savagely.

But . . . how did he know? He couldn’t remember.

“Is this the only wound?” Lunette asked.

Michael had picked up a sheet protector hanging from the table. He pulled out pages from it and flipped through them. “She also had similar wounds on her inner thighs.”

Lunette lifted the sheet to take a look. Shame welled like tar in Karhi’s stomach, heavy and thick. He would feed from thighs as part of foreplay.

“Her stomach is heavily bruised,” Lunette remarked as she examined the body. Karhi couldn’t look.

Michael looked up from the papers, grimacing. “It looks like whomever killed her . . . er . . . ripped out her reproductive organs prior to her death.”

Karhi stared at Michael. “What?” he whispered.

“It was a savage murder,” Michael said, glancing at the corpse. “Poor woman. I have to imagine whoever did that really hated women.”

Karhi glanced at Lunette. The tar disappeared, replaced with the slightest hint of relief. This wasn’t something he was capable of. Even when Ilona had forced him to kill people that she disliked over the years, he had always done it as quickly, and as painlessly, as possible. He had spent a long enough portion of his life being tortured by Ilona. He would never inflict that on someone else.

Lunette met his eyes, nodding. She had come to the same conclusion.

Michael cursed, looking at the paperwork. It sounded like Arabic. “Coroner forgot to sign off, I can’t take this body. Just the one then.” He glanced up past them. Karhi heard the ticking of a clock over the door they had come through.

Michael looked back to them. “Do, uh, do both of you need to examine the body?”

Lunette eyed him. “Why?”

“Since I have you, I was wondering if, as payment for helping you out, one of you could help load up my van with the body I can take?” He grinned sheepishly. “It’s not every day that you have a pair of vampires around. You’re stronger than I am.”

Lunette rolled her eyes, looking back at the body. “Karhi, help him out.”

He would gladly do that. He hadn’t killed the woman on the table, but he felt too close to her to be comfortable with looking her over. He doubted he could do it as clinically as Lunette could. He couldn’t be objective enough.

Michael grinned, this time a sharper glint to it. “Excellent. If you’ll follow me.”

He followed Michael out of the room and down the hallway.

They entered another room identical to the one they had just left. There were more autopsy tables in here. Michael grabbed this table and rolled it to one of the cabinets and opened it.

He checked something inside of the cabinet before rolling it out. The body inside was wrapped in plastic tarp. Karhi couldn’t even tell the size of the body beneath the tarp. It was maybe six feet long, but a lot of that could have been the plastic.

“This one?” Karhi asked.

Michael nodded.

Karhi lifted up the body and placed it on the table.

Michael sighed in relief. “Thank you so much. That would have taken me so much longer.” He rolled the body towards the door that he hadn’t bothered closing.

“Don’t you do this for a living?” Karhi asked, following him.

“Yes. But it doesn’t get any easier to move bodies around. I’m better at it than the average person, but I don’t have the strength to just casually pick up that much dead weight and set it down. There’s a process.”

Karhi shrugged. He had lived with his strength for so long, that he did sometimes have a hard time remembering that humans really couldn’t easily lift things that seemed so trivial to him. A hundred or two hundred pounds of dead weight was nothing.

Michael led him into another hallway that opened into an enormous loading dock. The ceiling was cavernous above them, reaching maybe two or three stories up. Michael led them to where a white van was backed into one of the bays.

Michael wheeled the table down the ramp to the back of the van, and together, they got the cadaver into place. When they were done, Michael reached for a dispenser by the doors of the van. The harsh scent of alcohol burned Karhi’s nose as he pumped the button. Hand sanitizer.

He hopped out and shut the door. “Think she’s done yet?”

Karhi checked his phone. “No.” Luna would have texted him.

Michael moved the table so the long side was against the back of the van and hopped onto it. “I guess we wait.” He leaned back against the van.

Karhi tilted his head. “Wait?”

“You seemed unhappy about what was in there. We can hang out here until she’s ready.”

Karhi paused for a moment before nodding. “Alright.”

Michael patted the table next to him for Karhi to sit.

Karhi got on next to Michael, leaning against the truck and letting his legs hang over the edge of the table.

There was something oddly soothing about sitting in the loading dock of the back of a morgue. It was quiet, the AC compressor a low drone, the water moving through the pipes with a light rippling sound.

“The dead are quiet,” Michael murmured.

Karhi glanced at him, raising an eyebrow.

“Your shoulders untensed for the first time since you walked into the building,” he said. He smiled a lazy, disarming smile. “This is one of my favourite places to just be at peace. The dead are quiet.”

Karhi nodded, looking back ahead, up the ramp.

“How familiar are you with vampires?” Karhi asked.

Michael shrugged. “I sorta grew up in the Underground. So, pretty familiar.”

It made sense why Michael had just taken them in stride. Though, usually anyone who was familiar with the Emelyns gave them a wide berth. Ilona was infamous.

“I was afraid I had killed that woman,” Karhi admitted, watching Michael to see how he responded.

Michael glanced at him. “And you didn’t.” It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t even sceptical. It was just a statement.

“I did not.”

Michael nodded. He didn’t seem even a little unsettled to be sitting next to someone who thought they had killed a human. It was unusual.

“A dedicated duck could kill a human if it wanted to.”

Karhi blinked. “What?”

“Vampires always seem weirded out when the idea that they could kill me doesn’t frighten me. Another human could kill me. A dedicated duck could kill me. It’s really not this scary thing everyone thinks it is.” He shrugged, chuckling. “It could be all the death I work around, but it’s not really the terrifying thing it was when I was younger.”

Karhi smiled despite himself. “I suppose.”

“Are you afraid of death?”

Karhi shook his head. “I doubt it can be much worse than living.” The words came out more bitter than he meant them to.

Michael looked down at the table. His expression had turned from amusement to melancholy. “You’re one of Ilona’s children.”

Karhi nodded slowly, unsure where this was going.

“I’ve heard she’s . . . unkind.”

“That’s an understatement,” Karhi scoffed. But he found himself wanting to comfort Michael. Or at least distract him. They didn’t need to talk about Ilona or how she treated her children. That was too heavy for a human to bear. “But she’s not here, so we don’t need to discuss it.” Karhi put a hand on his arm.

Michael searched Karhi’s face before grinning. His dimples were absolutely stunning. Karhi was drawn into them.

Before he knew it, Michael’s mouth was against his and Karhi was grabbing onto his coat. He pulled Michael against him. Endorphins flooded Karhi, and he felt lightheaded. Michael’s breath was heavy against his mouth. He smelled like myrrh and cloves.

Michael pressed hungrily into Karhi, moving to straddle him. Karhi wound his fingers into Michael’s curls and braced himself against the van. He heard the van groaning against him, but Michael wasn’t complaining about his grip being too tight.

“Hey, get the fuck away from him.”

Michael sat up straight, shouting in pain.

Karhi sat up just in time for Lunette to throw Michael off of him. Lunette grabbed Karhi’s arm and yanked him away.

“Lunette, what the . . .” He trailed off as Michael stood up. The band aids on his face had fallen away to reveal coal where skin should be. It was just cracked and black, as if lava had cooled into place on his skin. A human shouldn’t have skin damage like that . . .

His pale eyes were glowing gold as he wiped silver liquid from his mouth. His bottom lip was bleeding silver.

Michael shook his head. “What a shame. I was actually having a good time. It’s not often I get to interact with vampires.”

Karhi stared at Michael. “What the fuck?”

“Don’t get me wrong, it would have been fun to hook up with you. You’re a very attractive man. But what I actually needed was to see if you knew anything about Sloane Briallen. Unfortunately for me, you do not.” He shrugged, glancing at Lunette. “That cruciopathy is a bitch. Haven’t been hit by that in centuries. Impressive.”

And without another word, he was gone.

Karhi looked at Lunette. “What the hell just happened?”

“I found a body stuffed in one of the morgue drawers. The body looked exactly like Michael except his coat actually said ‘Hashem’ on it.”

“And he completely transformed to look like him.”

“Apparently. Whatever he was, he was powerful.”

“Fuck.” Karhi ran his hand over his hair, tugging at it.

“Yeah, I noticed.”

Karhi sneered at her, but she was already moving to where the silver blood was still on the ground. It wasn’t dissipating like most magic blood tended to.

He followed her. Focusing on something else beside the man he almost fucked in a morgue might help make the embarrassment a little less.

This wasn’t even the first time he had done something like this.

“We have some clean up to do,” Lunette said.