Late Eclipses
Page 46

The air inside was cool, with the antiseptic tang I’ve always associated with hospitals and large institutions. The floor was linoleum, easy to wash and maintain, and the fluorescent lights were refreshingly dim after the glaring sunlight outside. I peered at the classrooms as I walked down the hall. The fifth door was standing open, and Walther was inside, erasing something from the whiteboard. Tucking the duffel under my arm, I knocked on the doorframe. His head jerked up, expression startled. “Hey,” I said. “How long have you had that guy out there waiting for me?”
“Oh, a while now,” said Walther, starting to smile. “I figured you might have trouble finding the place.” He was dressed to fit the professorial stereotype, in tan slacks and a brown sweater. I could see what Jack meant about the “spooky” eyes; they were a piercing, slightly eerie shade of blue even through the filter of Walther’s human disguise. He was wearing a pair of black-framed glasses to blunt the effect, but they weren’t working entirely.
“I did. So it was a good plan.”
“I try to think ahead.” He hesitated, smile fading as he saw the bandages on my hands. “What happened?”
“I had a little run-in with some hawthorn bushes.” I stepped into the classroom. “I brought the cup, and some meat I need to have tested. Do you have the facilities to check for fingerprints?”
“I don’t, but the forensic science class might.” He reached for the duffel. “What’s the meat for?”
“The inhabitants of the Cat’s Court have been poisoned. Whoever did it used this meat. Everyone who ate it has collapsed.”
That stopped him. “What? Is everyone okay?”
“No. There have been several deaths so far, and there are going to be more if we don’t do something. I need to know what’s in that meat.”
He paled. “Deaths?”
“Yeah.” I looked down, trying to put the image of Opal and her children out of my head. “There are a lot of sick Cait Sidhe in Tybalt’s Court right now.”
“I have a lab down the hall; we can go there.” He crossed back to the desk, putting the duffel down on top of a large stack of papers, and then picking up the whole thing. “Did you come straight from the Cat’s Court?”
“I checked in at the Tea Gardens first; everyone’s as well as can be expected.” I didn’t mention that I’d only stopped by long enough for Marcia to bandage my hands. She’d tell him herself, soon enough.
“Right.” Walther walked into the hall, staggering as he tried to balance all the things he was carrying. “I’ll ring for a fingerprinting kit when we get to the lab. Get the lights, would you?”
I followed, flicking off the light as I passed it. “Can I take some of that?”
“Nope. Wouldn’t be right to let a lady carry her own deadly toxins.” He stopped at an unmarked door. “The keys are in my pocket. If you’d do the honors?”
“I—oh, right.” I dug the keys out of his coat, only slightly embarrassed about rummaging in the clothes of a man I barely knew, and unlocked the door.
The lab was about half the size of Walther’s classroom, with messy heaps of paper and equipment I didn’t recognize serving to make the space seem even smaller. I hadn’t seen a room that cluttered since January O’Leary’s office, otherwise known as “the place where paper goes to die.” I fumbled until I found the light switch and clicked on the overheads.
Walther dropped his armload of papers and potential murder weapons onto the counter before reaching for the phone. “I assume you know how to use a fingerprinting kit, and I don’t need to try to lie to a lab tech?” he asked, glancing in my direction. I nodded. “Good.”
“I have many useful skills,” I deadpanned.
“I’m sure you do.” He dialed, waiting a moment before saying, “This is Professor Davies from organic chemistry. Can I get a fingerprinting kit sent to lab four? No, no one broke in. I just need to do a demo.” He laughed. It was a broad, amiable laugh, and didn’t sound forced, even though I could tell from his expression that it was. “Great.”
Walther hung up, removing his glasses and setting them off to one side. “It’ll be here in twenty minutes. What are we looking for, exactly?”
“Anything.” I leaned over to unzip the duffel bag, pulling out the bundle of meat and offering it to him. “Look for floral toxins first. Poisonous flowers.”
“Right.” He pulled on a pair of latex gloves before taking the meat and putting it down on a clean section of the counter. Removing the blood-spotted butcher paper released a musky, rancid smell. He wrinkled his nose. “Well, whether this is poisoned or not, it’s started to go off. At least we shouldn’t need to keep it around long in order to find out what we need to know.”
“What are you going to do?” I dropped his keys on the pile of papers next to the duffel bag before moving to perch on a relatively stable-looking stool.
“Do you know anything about chemistry, alchemy, or hedge-magic divination?”
“Not really.”
“In that case, I’m going to put pieces of meat in jars full of chemicals and herbal tinctures, and see what happens.” He picked up a scalpel, starting to slice off slivers of meat. “Are we looking for floral toxins on the cup, too?”
“I think so.”
“Got it.”
After that, I might as well not have been in the room. Walther produced a startling assortment of jars and beakers from the cupboards and dropped a sliver of meat into each one before producing an even wider assortment of strange-smelling, brightly-colored liquids. He poured them over the slivers of meat, frowning as they fizzed, changed colors, or did nothing at all. I didn’t interrupt. He was right when he assumed I wouldn’t understand what he was doing.
He’d been working for about fifteen minutes when someone knocked. Walther didn’t seem to notice. I stood and moved to answer the door, preparing to lie. I didn’t have to: a bored-looking student pressed a fingerprinting kit into my hands and walked away, not bothering to ask who I was or whether he’d brought us the thing we needed.
I blinked, several times. Then I closed the door and moved to another clean section of counter, pausing on the way to remove the velvet-swaddled cup from the duffel bag. Walther was still off in chemistry la-la land, so I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and started the laborious process of checking for prints.