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squeezing my arm painfully.
    The interior transformed completely. Gone was the empty, half-painted space; people bustled everywhere. There were cops in uniform, detectives with gold badges on their hips, and people dressed in street clothes.
    The scene was reminiscent of an old-fashioned newsroom.Desks were scattered throughout the room; some had actual typewriters, others modern computers. Books were piled everywhere, like a library had exploded—a really old library. As Jack led me to the center of the room, I realized that many of the books had vellum or leather covers, gilt lettering, and…runes?
    Every desk had a potted plant, a bouquet of fresh flowers, or a mini fishbowl on it; I’d never seen such a green office space. A row of flat-screen TVs lined one wall. They showed several different channels, including some foreign ones and a video feed to the front of the shop where I’d been standing.
    “What
is
this place?” I asked.
    “It’s the situation room in the war against the unnatural,” he said dramatically.
    “There’s a lot of that in South Dakota?” There were a lot of other things I probably should have asked first, but, honestly, it just sort of slipped out.
    “South Dakota. South Hampton. South Wales.” Jack shrugged a delicate shoulder. “The unnatural is everywhere. Anyway, you’re the one knocking at our door. What do
you
think?”
    He had a point there. I smiled. “I think it’s a pretty neat trick what you did with the storefront. How did you get it to look abandoned?”
    “Magic,” he said simply.
    My breath caught. I’d hoped he’d go into some kind of elaborate explanation of the holographic technology involved, not suggesting in such a laid-back way that he’d…
    I stumbled a bit when my knees weakened. I had to catch myself on the nearest desk.
    “What?” I asked, gulping for air. “What did you just say?”
    He stared intently into my face as I slowly pulled myself upright and tried to get my breathing back under control.
    “Are you sure you’re in the right place, miss?” His voice took on a sudden formality, and he looked around the busy office space nervously, as if searching for help.
    With shaking hands, I pulled out the chief’s note again. I read off the address carefully.
    “Right. That’s us,” Jack said, his gaze continuing to skim through the room hopefully. Not finding any relief, he shifted back to me, grimacing at the awkwardness. “You, uh, do understand what it is we do here, don’t you?”
    “No,” I admitted.
    “I see,” he said, clearly not comfortable being the one to have to explain it to me. “Um, well, you were sent here for a reason, right? Something unnatural must have happened.”
    I liked the solid, normal sound to the word
unnatural
. My face brightened. “Yes,” I said. “A couple of uniformed officers brought me this body this morning and the corpse, well, he—”
    “Oh, I see! You’re the coroner? Brilliant! Spense will want to hear all about whatever happened. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
    He brought me over to where a group of people stood looking down at a map spread out at a table. “Alex, this is—”
    “Hey, I know you!” I interrupted, recognizing the police officer who’d brought the necromancer into the morgue. “And you!” I said to his stony partner.
    “—Spenser Jones and Hannah Stone,” Jack continued.
    The moment he saw me, Officer Jones’s face crumbled into a frown. “This isn’t good.” He turned to his partner. “You did
tell
her, didn’t you?”
    “I did,” she said very cautiously, not looking at me. “Youknow it can be very difficult for me to explain these sorts of things to humans.”
    Humans?
    “You warned her about the rib cage, though, right?” Jones barked at his partner.
    “Yeah,” I interrupted. “How
did
you know about that?”
    “Spense can smell a spell a mile away; it’s in his blood, you see,” Jack said. He was watching the two officers with the expression