"Take your hands off that dead body!" Priya stared at Tonya.

"I have to look."

"If the cops see you, they'll think you did it," said Priya. "She didn't just drown."

"No, but maybe she was cursed." Tonya went back to sensing energy.

All around the ravaged chest cavity and abdomen there was an aura of lingering power. This wasn't simple life magic from plants or animals. This wasn't the kind of death magic that lingers in dead bodies under normal circumstances. Whoever this victim was, they had been killed by magical means.

"How can you tell she was cursed?"

"That or they were killed by a spell and then eaten by animals."

"How do you this stuff?"

"I don't. Maybe a magic user drowned by accident and it's not murder, but there's definitely some kind of magic lingering on the body."

"So, what do we do, forget the police?" Priya frowned. "Call Helen instead?"

"I'll need her opinion."

"But you will call the police, right?" Priya's voice was pitched up high. "If you call your mother first, it will look bad."

"Don't worry. I won't get you in trouble."

Priya was right, to delay any longer would make her look suspicious. On the phone, the police dispatcher told Tonya to wait with the body, although she walked Priya a few steps further down the beach. From there, they could stand guard without upsetting her friend or herself. Now that she had examined it, Tonya didn't want to come near that body again. No matter how grisly the wounds or how raw meat nasty the body looked, there was a halo of dark power around it that awoke a craving inside her.

Once a necromancer...

She called Helen. Her mother would not be happy if Tonya shut her out and left things to civilians. Neither Tonya nor Helen had been served well by the authorities in the past, but Tonya was ever optimistic. Maybe this would be a simple case, a tragic accident suffered by a magic user, not some an incident linked to the influx of new magic users in town.

Deep inside her body, Tonya felt a shift, as if something had clicked into place and she could see things more clearly. She looked, not at the grisly cavity left by the animals—there was too much waterlogged hamburger for her to look at that without feeling sick. Instead, she concentrated on the girl's face. It was bloated and grey, the eyes damaged from being in the water, but there was something terribly familiar about her.

"Priya, stay here. I want a closer look."

Priya didn't argue about being left behind.

Tonya approached the body. The corpse had light brown hair. When it was dry, it was probably much paler, maybe ash blond? Although Tonya couldn't recognize her face, she felt like she had seen it somewhere. She looked at the cloth coat for a clue, but it was too ordinary. A hundred other girls could be wearing such a long black coat.

On a hunch, Tonya placed her body between the corpse and Priya, so that her friend couldn't see. She glanced right and left to make sure nobody else was watching before she pulled the coat away from the body's shoulder and slid the girl's T-shirt to one side. There it was. She had the Loon Lake Varsity Team logo, tattooed just below her collarbone. What was going on? This wasn't some day tripper who could go missing without triggering a local inquiry. She was a varsity athlete.

And then Tonya remembered why she looked familiar. This girl was one of the swim team members Tonya had searched for. She had found them hidden in a cave on the island, buried by a dragon. When she dug up the mound of comatose swimmers, the authorities had shipped them off to Loon Lake Hospital for treatment. Tonya had thought that was the end of it. If there were more missing swimmers, the news hadn't reached her.

Tonya's face heated up as she realized this girl might have been buried just a little deeper than the other swimmers, left alone to die horribly when the dragon's egg hatched. That's what this was. No animal had scavenged the body after it washed up on shore. It was Tonya's fault for not looking more carefully when she found the nest. As the hungry Dragon's egg inside this poor young woman hatched, the girl had died in agony, eaten from the inside out.

The thought sucked the wind out of her. She suspected the new Mayor, Donna Ashton, had known about this missing swimmer, and said nothing. Since her allies brought two dragons to Loon Lake, Donna had been using the mated pair like her own personal Air Force. They flew the skies over Loon Lake, invisible to the Mundanes, but an ever-present threat to those who understood what they could do. Donna wasn't just mayor. She and her brothers were ruling Loon Lake like gangsters.

Tonya's peaceful life, before the election, felt like years ago. Donna had risen to popularity after of the tragic disappearances of swimmers on Loon Lake's beaches. As a powerful magic user,her supporters believed her promises to protect them. Tonya foolishly thought she and Helen could do better. As she looked at this girl on the pebbled beach,something inside Tonya's guts twisted. If she had missed one, did that mean there would be more? And if the parents hadn't come forward, did that mean the girl's parents had also disappeared? 

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I hope you are enjoying Dragon Town. Good news! This story is revised and published as Double Dead Magic.

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Thanks, and happy reading!

Maaja