Definitely Dead

suspect you do, too.”
    “Why do you say that?” she asked. Her open face was closed now, as if keeping her expression blank would keep me out of her mind.
    “You put a stasis spell on the apartment, right? To keep everything exactly as it was. Before you warded it against intruders?”
    “Yes,” she said cautiously. “I told you that.”
    “No one’s been in that apartment since the night Hadley died?”
    “I can’t give you my word on it, because I suppose a very good witch or wizard could have breached my spell,” she said. “But to the best of my knowledge, no one’s been in there.”
    “So you don’t know that you sealed a body in there?”
    I don’t know what I expected in the way of reaction, but Amelia was pretty cool about it. “Okay,” she said steadily. She may have gulped. “Okay. Who is it?” Her eyelids fluttered up and down a few extra times.
    Maybe she wasn’t quite so cool.
    “I really don’t know,” I said carefully. “You’ll have to come see.” As we went up the stairs, I said, “He was killed there, and the mess was cleaned up with towels. They were in the hamper.” I told her about the condition of the towels.
    “Holly Cleary tells me you saved her son’s life,” Amelia said.
    That took me aback. It made me feel awkward, too. “The police would have found him,” I said. “I just accelerated it a little.”
    “The doctor told Holly if the little boy hadn’t gotten to the hospital when he did, the bleeding in his brain might not have been stopped in time,” Amelia said.
    “That’s good then,” I said, uncomfortable in the extreme. “How’s Cody doing?”
    “Well,” the witch said. “He’s going to be well.”
    “In the meantime, we got a problem right here,” I reminded her.
    “Okay, let’s see the corpse.” Amelia worked hard to keep her voice level.
    I kind of liked this witch.
    I led her to the closet. I’d left the door open. She stepped inside. She didn’t make a sound. She came back out with a slightly green tinge to her glowing tan and leaned against the wall.
    “He’s a Were,” she said, a moment later. The spell she’d put on the apartment had kept everything fresh, as part of the way it worked. The blood had begun to smell a little before the spell had been cast, and when I’d entered the apartment, the spell had been broken. Now the towels reeked of decay. The body didn’t have an odor yet, which surprised me a little, but I figured it would any minute. Surely the body would decompose rapidly now that it had been released from Amelia’s magic, and she was obviously trying not to point out how well that had worked.
    “You know him?”
    “Yes, I know him,” she said. “The supernatural community, even in New Orleans, isn’t that big. It’s Jake Purifoy. He did security for the queen’s wedding.”
    I had to sit down. I exited the walk-in closet and slid down the wall until I was sitting propped up, facing Amelia. She sat against the opposite wall. I hardly knew where to start asking questions.
    “That’s would be when she married the King of Arkansas?” I recalled what Felicia had said, and the wedding photo I’d seen in Al Cumberland’s album. Had that been the queen, under that elaborate headdress? When Quinn had mentioned making the arrangements for a wedding in New Orleans, was this the wedding he’d meant?
    “The queen, according to Hadley, is bi,” Amelia told me. “So yes, she married a guy. Now they have an alliance.”
    “They can’t have kids,” I said. I know, that was obvious, but I wasn’t getting this alliance thing.
    “No, but unless someone stakes them, they’ll live forever, so passing things on is not a big issue,” Amelia said. “It takes months, even years, of negotiations to hammer out the rules for such a wedding. The contract can take just as long. Then they both gotta sign it. That’s a big ceremony, takes place right before the wedding. They don’t actually have to spend their lives together, you know, but they have to visit a couple of times a year. Conjugal-type visit.”
    Fascinating as this was, it was beside the point right now. “So this guy in the closet, he was part of the security force.” Had he worked for Quinn? Hadn’t Quinn said that one of his workers had gone missing in New Orleans?
    “Yeah, I wasn’t asked to the wedding, of course, but I helped Hadley into her dress. He came to pick her up.”
    “Jake Purifoy came to pick Hadley up for the