Harlow’s shorts. Not just any shorts, but the enchanted pair that sprouted scales when exposed to water. Would an injury sustained to the tail be inflicted on her legs? Had the medics removed clothing in order to treat her?

My faith in the medics’ competence plummeted. They had discarded a high magic article of clothing at a crime scene. Tossed aside like rubbish when they should have ended up in an evidence locker at the local marshal’s office, she would be pissed when she came to without them and her personal effects bag turned up empty. The shorts held sentimental value as well as being critical to her wellbeing as long as she continued her mermaid charade.

Hairs rose along my nape, stinging as they lifted one by one. Magic, cold and eternal, swirled around my ankles and tickled up my legs. I swiped at a tickling sensation on my cheeks, and my fingers came away bloody. A bone-deep wail of grief saturated the night, shaking leaves from the trees and turning my breath to fog.

The bean sidhe sang with all his soul.

Death prowled the woods with me tonight.

Wiping my fingers on my pants, I ventured farther from the chilling melody of Leonard’s song. A glimmer of white caught my eye, and I made my way toward it. The closer I came, the louder the bean sidhe’s music hammered at my skull. I stumbled and caught myself against a tree. When my brain translated what I was seeing, my knees buckled and hit the damp earth. The stretcher rested inches away from my ankle, its canvas center torn to shreds. The medics, what was left of them, were scattered in chunks of glistening meat in a six-foot radius.

The speck of white that had caught my eye was Harlow’s shell-handled dagger, and it was no longer pristine. The grooves were stained pink, the hilt imprinted with a smudged handprint a size smaller than mine, and the blade glistened crimson.

“Harlow,” I cried out, voice ragged, her shorts squelching in my grip. “Harlow.”

The static thrum of white noise answered me. My ears ached, and my throat itched where thin rivulets of blood dried and cracked.

A fly buzzed my nose, and I swatted it aside. Fingers shaking, I reached out and touched a fractured elbow. Dola. This medic had been one of the Slavic spirits who embodied human fate. I wondered if he had foreseen this end. Numbed by the shock, I sent my magic probing, and there it was, as I had known deep in my bones it would be. That now-familiar sheen of energy that coated everything Charybdis touched with his magic permeated the corpse.