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“What?”

He shook his head slowly. “I’m not sure I can describe it.”

I inspected his face for hints. Maybe it was the way the rising sun’s rays shadowed half of it, but I thought there was nothing there but fear and terror. He usually had a better poker face.

“Okay. Let me grab my hat and boots.”

Part of the life of bones that I lived included helping law enforcement, but the sheriff was more tightly strung than I’d ever seen before. I’d known Sheriff Calloway my whole life, and I sensed that he was about to jump out of his skin.

The fifteen-minute ride out into the middle of almost nowhere, the stretch of desert we called The Wild that was between the town and the Tumacácori Mountains, had been silent and bumpy, the truck’s shocks hating the trip even more than my lower back. We’d gone east, toward the mountains and the Vulture Caves, over terrain crowded with tumbleweed and cactus as well as the occasional camper trailer, parked out there so the inhabitants might be left alone to live off the grid, or just because it seemed like a good place to throw one away. The desert chewed on those before swallowing them.

The small town of Black Vulture was once a semi-thriving mining town. Now, though it wasn’t quite a strong wind away from disappearing forever, the remaining buildings were worse for the wear, chipped stucco and paint, faded signage, most of the remaining windows cracked or punctuated by some random bullet that, so far, hadn’t hit human flesh. The businesses that remained were kept afloat by the locals as well as two nearby large corporations.

The downtown was shaped like a north to south S. My lab that used to be my father’s studio, the place where I examined bones and deciphered their stories, was located at the bottom curve. It was boxed together with the small museum gallery and my upstairs living space. My walled-in patio backed up to The Wild—some might say encroached upon it as I often had to shoo away snakes, scorpions, and the occasional tarantula. A building with three spaces sat at a northward angle from my place. One of those spaces held the diner, but the other two were considered uninhabitable, though they did sometimes offer shelter to squatters or desert creatures who’d run out of other options.

West of town and on the other side of Interstate 19 were the big corporations—a biosphere where the University of Arizona conducted survival studies, and the Institute for Otherworldly Populations, where those inside spent their time staring either at their computer screens or up to the sky in search of alien life. We kept it simple and just called it The Institute. Though some who worked at The Institute lived in town, most of them drove the forty-five-minute commute back and forth from Tucson.

The county sheriff’s office was about a mile south of town and located in a single-wide trailer that had been reinforced with wood walls painted a reddish brown. It was an eyesore, even from the interstate, but it did have a large air conditioner. Manned by Sheriff Calloway and two deputies, they were more prepared to fight crime than the two-person police crew who worked out of an old five-space strip mall at the top of the S.

We were ruled by, lived by, and some even died by, the desert, a place where everything, plants and animals alike, wanted to kill you for your water. Now, as Calloway and I stood in the thick of it and as my eyes landed on something so familiar and foreign at the same time, it was impossible not to think that that place made of all those devils had won this round.

However, whoever had placed the abomination amid the needles and sagebrush was human, no doubt, though made of evil, that was certain.

At first glance, I realized that there was a chance that what I was seeing wasn’t real, not made of the genuine thing, but now I was pretty sure it was, and my stomach was airy, my tongue dry.

“I need to get closer,” I said.

“Let’s go.”

We closed most of the gap.

“Jesus,” I uttered.

“Yeah. Is it real?” Calloway asked.

I let my eyes graze over the skeleton. “Yes, I think so. Look at the coarse texture, the foramina—”

“Foramina?”

I nodded. “The holes. So things like nerves and blood vessels can move from one area to the next. People who create fake bones don’t usually take the time to add the foramina.”

I’d worked with thousands of bones, but the stories they told could still unsettle me.

“I need to get even closer,” I said.

Wilmot had always been adamant about separating life from death, animal from hide, body from spirit, and bone from flesh.

My father’s religion hadn’t resided inside a church building or any sort of book, but according to him, the obvious difference between life and death was enough. His respect for both had been all encompassing and had left behind a reputation I still didn’t quite understand.

However, it was natural for me to separate the two like I’d been taught, but this skeleton was undoubtably meant to shock. I wanted to cringe, draw back, maybe even run away. But this was my job.

The bones had been posed, using wire, sticks, pieces of wood, and probably other things that I didn’t notice right off. It had taken a lot of work—without the connective tissues, the bones wouldn’t stay together on their own, keep their form. A red scarf had been tied around the neck—representing blood was my first guess. The bones were bright against the other building materials. It seemed they had been thoroughly cleaned, but I’d need a closer look. They were a stark white and—I leaned in for a sniff. “They’ve been bleached.”

“Recently?”

“Well, I still smell the chemicals, so I can narrow it down a bit, but maybe not exactly.”

“Bleach took off the …”