A Belated Burial: A San Amaro Investigations Novella by Kai Butler

Author:Kai Butler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2021-11-29T21:46:36.787643+00:00

Chapter Four

Normally, on a case like this, I would get inside the building by some extralegal means. Pretending to be a cop worked sometimes, and other times I could convince whoever was working upfront to let me in by either slipping them a couple of twenties or using some magic on them. With Nick at my side, I wasn’t enthusiastic about trying either of those options.

So, instead, we got a tour.

“Are you sure you’re okay walking?” the employee asked, breathing heavy.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re good walking.”

We’d waited until Damon left because I knew it would be suspicious if we went in immediately. Plus, if we’d gone in while he was still there, we couldn’t search the place.

So we were taking a walking tour of the facility. Luckily, it wasn’t so massive that it would be awkward to have the employee let us walk down every alley. She was still unhappy we’d been unwilling to ride in the golf cart the facility used for tours.

“I like to get my ten thousand steps in,” I’d said, a shit-eating grin on my face. “Gotta keep the goods.”

I let Nick do most of the talking, focusing on the crumbs I’d smashed onto Damon Griffith. I didn’t need a lot of them, just enough to hear their voices. Crumbs were like toddlers, young and only half-developed. They weren’t old enough to have an actual personality beyond excitement.

The first time I’d talked to crumbs, it had been an awkward realization. Did all food have a spirit if you got down deep enough, or was it just baked goods that had that essence—ahem—‘baked’ in by whoever had spent hours focused on the sole task of making bread or muffins?

Then I realized that I only heard voices when I pushed in enough magic to cause a hundred gingerbread men to jump up and say, “You can’t catch me, asshole!” After that, the way I ethically ate anything was the same way I ethically ate meat. Sure, at one point the burger I was chowing down on had been a cow, but at the point I was chewing it, it was food.

Plus, talking to most baked goods was like listening to a room full of Tickle Me Elmos. Lots of high-pitched screeching all jumbled together so that I could’t hear one clear word. Still, when the surrounding spirits were all concrete, metal, and scraggly weeds, the crumbs should stand out.

We passed a unit on the corner, and I paused, bending as though I needed to retie my shoelace. Nick caught on, interrupting the employee’s pitch to ask about pricing and what we could and couldn’t store. I was almost one hundred percent certain the storage employee thought we were serial killers looking for some unit to turn into a kill box.

Her eyes kept darting to me, then to Nick, then the security cameras as though she was already picturing how they would cut her episode of Dateline. Nick glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, but he kept her attention on him.

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