There was a dead girl in my aunt's bakery.

I let out an undignified yelp and backed up a step, then another, until I ran into the bakery door. We keep the door open most of the time because the big ovens get swelteringly hot otherwise, but it was four in the morning and nothing was warmed up yet.

I could tell right away that she was dead. I haven't seen a lot of dead bodies in my life—I'm only fourteen, and baking's not exactly a high-morality profession—but the red stuff oozing out from under her head definitely wasn't raspberry filling. And she was lying at an awkward angle that nobody would choose to sleep in, even assuming they'd break into a bakery to take a nap in the first place.

My stomach made an awful clenching, like somebody had grabbed it and squeezed hard, and I clapped both hands over my mouth to keep from getting sick. There was already enough of a mess to clean up without adding my secondhand breakfast to it.

The worst thing I've ever seen in the kitchen was the occasional rat—don't judge us, you can't keep rats out in this city, and we're as clean an establishment as you'll ever find—and the zombie frog that crawled out of the canals. Poor thing had been downstream of the cathedral, and sometimes they dump the holy water a little recklessly, and you get a plague of undead frogs and newts and whatnot. (The crawfish are the worst. You can go get the frogs with a broom, but you have to call a priest in for a zombie crawfish.)

But I would have preferred any number of zombie frogs to a corpse.

I have to get Aunt Tabitha. She'll know what to do. Not that Aunt Tabitha had bodies in her bakery on a regular basis, but she's one of those competent people who always know what to do. If a herd of ravenous centaurs descended on the city and went galloping through the streets, devouring small children and cats, Aunt Tabitha would calmly go about setting up barricades and manning crossbows as if she did it twice a week.

Unfortunately, to get to the hallway that led to the stairs up to Aunt Tabitha's bedroom, I would have to walk the length of the kitchen, and that meant walking past the corpse. Stepping over it, in fact.

Okay. Okay. Feet, are you with me? Knees? Can we do this?

The feet and knees reported their willingness. The stomach was not so happy with this plan. I wrapped one hand around my waist and clamped the other firmly over my mouth in case it decided to rebel.

Okay. Okay, here we go...