Jaela ran a hand through her hair, spreading the argan-oil infused leave-in conditioner from the roots of her hair to the tips. She'd just taken down her twists—she never wore her hair down to work—and had a whole routine for getting the smell of death and bleach out of her curls. She didn't mind death exactly, she'd chosen her job, it hadn't chosen her, but other people got nervous when they got a whiff of hospital on her and realized she wasn't a doctor or a nurse (yet).

The door to the morgue locker room swung open on singing hinges.

"Hey, sis. You ready to roll," sounded out ahead of Heron's bombastic appearance. Bomber jacket and lace up boots. Senegalese twists in an ornate updo. She was always ready to greet her audience.

"You have a visitor," said another voice, accompanying the more sedate patter of a second pair of sneaker-clad feet. It was the morgue assistant, Deja. Jaela lost her train of thought the instant she passed over the threshold. She was a deep brown-skinned Native woman who was actually a couple of years older than Jaela. She knew where all the metaphorical bodies were buried at the hospital and despite not even being thirty, she seemed like she knew it all. Maybe that was why Jaela had developed a tiny, miniscule, not at all debilitating crush on her. They spent hours together every week, had for months, and Jaela was just totally enamored.

"Ah, yeah. I told Heron to come pick me up." She did not. Technically nobody but staff, cadavers, and their next-of-kin was permitted in the morgue. The hospital took all that very seriously after a rash of body snatchings a few years ago. The lawsuits were expensive, to say the least.

Deja flashed Jaela an uneven smile. Jaela wasn't all that skilled at making things up, yet this girl dropped her already piss-poor acting into the sewer with all the other discarded bodily fluids. "Sure you did. I'll clear down, run the instruments through the autoclave. Just sign the log on your way out." It was an order wrapped in a request.

Heron tittered. She got a kick out of Jaela's heart eyes. As if she wasn't as out there over Jordan the blood bank receptionist she sniped at but never asked out. I'm not the only embarrassing one in the room.

"I can stay and help." She'd been working eleven hours covering. She probably shouldn't be trusted with a scalpel at this hour and driving was out of the question, but she didn't like to leave her co-workers in the lurch. She was the responsible one.

"Uh no, you can't, babe. We have plans. Plans," Heron emphasized in her usual totally subtle, not at all conspicuous way.

Deja's thin right brow climbed. "Plans, huh? Better not be something that lands you on my slab."

Jaela would do just about anything to have as much attention from Deja as a cadaver got to have. Yeah, it was kinda sad.

"It won't be. We're just hanging out."

"With the dead."

Deja inclined her chin. "The cemetery again?" She was cool with Jaela and Heron's pastime, unlike most people who thought they were a little weird, a little dark for their fascination with the dark corners of their collapsing town. She was cool with the supernatural and the unusual; she'd seen things, she said so herself.

"The lake," Jaela said. The lake where people died specifically four times a year. The lake whose annual body count outstripped the county average. At least, it had until the recent killings started. The lake was just one dumping ground. The Mortland Green in the park was another. The meatpacking district was the latest of them. Jaela and Deja had been personally responsible for preparing the last four bodies for transport to the funeral homes after the county coroner was done with them.

"You aren't afraid of banshees," Deja asked. "You know what that place is like."

"It's a dumping ground, we know," muttered Heron. She hadn't actually wanted to go there. She said it smelled too much like death. Jaela hadn't once been scared of that. She still wasn't. Heron hadn't told her what happened when she lost consciousness at the paper mill. Not that Jaela needed the Cliff Notes to know her best friend had been scared senseless. The dark tended to do that.

Deja stripped off her paper gown to stuff it into the biohazard bin. "It's more than a dumping ground, it's a hunting ground."

"We can protect ourselves," Jaela said, not wanting her to worry. She wasn't afraid of monsters, she was one. Last week was an aberration.

"I'm not worried about the living, Jaela. It's the dead you should be avoiding. They don't rest just because the bodies are in the ground. Sometimes they don't rest at all."

Heron dipped between them to grab her duffel bag, disrupting the charged eye contact Jaela and Deja were sharing. "We're working on that. We're pretty peaceful."

Jaela tore her eyes away from the beauty mark on Deja's cheek to stare at Heron accusingly. They had never once been peaceful and all the respect in the Good Book wasn't going to change that today.

"Uh, okay." Jaela shook her head to hide how hard she rolled her eyes. "Gotta go. If there's another body, call me, okay? I'll come back."

Heron grabbed her by the arm. "She won't. Call the other mortician!"

Deja snorted. She stripped off her stained scrubs to switch into a new set. Jaela definitely didn't slow down to watch.

"Less thirsting, more walking," Heron sung. She was such a hater.

"I was busy!"

"Busy staring at your boo. I noticed."

They boarded the dented and scratched elevator.

"Anyway, what's the plan?"

"Explore the dark. Converse with the dead. Same shit, different day." Heron smiled. "Maybe we'll find a band of cannibals and collect some award money from the Crimestoppers."

"I could use a new DSLR."

"It's not my fault you dropped it."

Jaela hadn't dropped anything that night in the paper factory. One moment they had been faced with some creature, some earthly horror not found in their grandmother's diaries, and then Jaela had been on the concrete waking from an unnatural sleep. Heron's reluctance to talk about it only made Jaela more eager to put it behind her. Heron had a healthy fear of the world around them; the otherworldly had never scared her as much as whatever they had seen.

"So...," Heron prompted once they got into the car, "what the hell is happening with that case?"

"Weird shit. A lot of blood. Stuff missing. A few dump sites." Many of the bodies that had crossed Jaela's slab recently had shown signs of rudimentary surgery. Organs missing not accounted for by medical records. Recent limb amputations. Decapitation. Soft tissue excision. Once was an oddity, half a dozen times was a violent trend.

"And we're going to one, why?"

"Vibes?"

Heron shot her some bombastic side-eye. They'd been keeping close to home lately, Really close. Seances and very light interfacing with spirits through a vintage ouija board. Anything was possible if you believed enough and they had been born believers.

*

They parked at Lake Chernow at dusk. Thick fog clung to the swampy grounds. It smelt of peat and sewage, runoff from the handful of factories still in operation gunking up the water's mossy green surface.

The irregular shoreline was cloaked in the shaggy overhang of weeping willows where it wasn't choked by tumbled stones from a stone quarry just over the state line. A century ago, this lake had been an offshoot of the town and then it had been a graveyard. Dozens of handbuilt A-frame houses were ordered flooded by what should have become a reservoir and had only become a swamp. Nothing grew but lichen and weeds. And of course, the inhospitable trees. The water was inedible, undrinkable. Worse, it killed.

Everything in Mortland killed. It was in the name.

Heron surveyed their surroundings with her hands on her hips. Fog bogged down her hair, misting her brown skin like the opposite of sunshine.

"The first poltergeist that tries to strangle me, you owe me take out."

"I'll banish it myself," Jaila said, dropping the branches she'd gathered for firewood in a pile on the ground. They didn't usually camp. They were more of the 'see it, record it, leave it' kind of paranormal investigator. They shared some things online and not others. They followed rumors to see if they were true. There was always some kind of truth to things that went bump in the night. That was what interested them, finding all kinds of truth. Most of all about themselves.

"I really hope those branches burn. I'm not trying to become the victim out here."

"Big bad hypothermia coming for you," Jaela teased.

"Better hypothermia than some of the shit out here."

Heron plopped onto a fallen tree they'd picked as the border of their campsite. It was all but fossilized, just calcified wood and bark warped in the shape of decades of asses using it as a bench.

"What are you scared of?"

"This place has bad juju, J."

"The lake?"

"The lake, the town, the hospital. Hell, my car has bad juju. Sage ain't burning it out no more."

"What do you wanna do about it?" She gestured toward the stagnant lake. "We're doing what we do. We're looking."

"I think we're gonna mess around and find something that doesn't want to be found."

Jaela sat down, shoulder to shoulder, with Heron. "What happened in that factory?"

"I met a monster bigger than anything we've seen."

"You sure? We've met witches." They liked the witches. They just wanted to worship the Earth and mind their business. Heron had dated one for a couple of months. "Succubi. Doppelgangers. Changelings." Mortland was a hotbed of paranormal creatures, of vile hauntings and demonic possessions. Though they couldn't fix everything, they could see it, name it. In matters supernatural, naming a phenomenon was half the battle.

"Those things wanna be left alone. This, whatever it is, wants a fight."

Jaela leaned on her shoulder and took her hand. "Then, we'll give it one."

And this time, Jaela was going to sharpen her teeth.