In a world where magic is real and monsters lurk in the shadows, the only hope people have for saviors are a pair of janitors. They're not too pleased about it either, but they have experience in cleaning up messes. Grace West: A general all around disappointment to her family, now making ends meet with a combination of crime scene cleaning and house flipping. She is as surprised as anyone to be making money from this unhealthy combination. Winterdawn "Poppy" Strongwill: A former child hero in the Fantastical world and now a full-time burnout, trying to live off the magical grid. Making do with a police station janitor job by day and reality TV shows with take-out food at night. Unfortunately for our reluctant heroes the Fantastical World is a mess. Mythical monsters are running amuck, amoral wizards are experimenting on innocents, and one of the worst kinds of trouble is about to crash into their quiet little worlds. Emma is a golem, an unstoppable monster made of clay. For an extra kick the fiend that made her used clay created with the ashes taken from the ovens of Dachau. Emma's set on a "holy" mission, to reclaim artifacts stolen from the victims of the Holocaust camps. Unfortunately she does this by killing everyone and anyone in her way, regardless of innocence, and in the most brutal ways possible. Grace and Poppy are drawn into Emma's orbit by grisly murders of close friends. Knowing that they are the only ones who have a chance of stopping the monster, Grace and Poppy need to face their own demons and become the heroes that this world desperately needs. And they better do it fast, because Emma does not stop, she does not forgive, and every second she's getting closer . . .

Bloody Foundations

A Grace and Poppy AdventureBy Grady J. Gratt

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2009 Grady J. Gratt
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4490-3388-0

Chapter One

- USA, Today -

"So," Grace West frowned as she looked at the mess. "The guy was standing here?" Her paper wrapped shoes toeing the edge of the outline on the floor. They still called it a chalk outline even though these days they used a sort of yellowish-plastic tape. She wished they went back to chalk, adhesive was a bitch to get off of floors.

"Yup." David, the police officer said as he flipped through the sheet of papers on his clipboard. "Wife picked up one of those ornamental porcelain cows on the table and rammed it right into his throat."

"Allegedly." They both said at the same time, sharing a smile.

"Okay, so how did the blood get all the way onto the kitchen wall there? I know arterial spray goes pretty far, but I never heard of it going over 80 feet AND turning a corner."

"Dunno." David said. "I suppose finding that out will be the detective's job. Sign here, here, and here." He handed the clipboard over to Grace and she completed it with her usual flourish. "Okay, place is all yours, Gracie."

She hated being called that, but she also knew one of the cardinal rules was to never give a reason for secretaries, librarians, and people who filed permission forms, to dislike you. They could make your job infinitely easier or almost impossible in this world of paperwork.

"Thanks, David." She pulled on her dust mask and goggles. She couldn't help but smirk a little as she saw David's eyes look for something to latch onto, the letch, and find nothing. In her coveralls, gloves, and hairnet she looked totally sexless. A look she promoted. She knew she wasn't anywhere near a model but she never thought of herself as unattractive. She just didn't spend much effort on her looks, not that there was anything to work with sadly. Her appearance was like most things in Grace's life, she had stopped trying to please the wants of others. Sadly, she didn't know what she wanted either. So she ended up doing nothing.

The result was black hair, a thin rectangular figure, a straight set of legs and breasts, hazel eyes, and decent looking skin that was just a little pale. The most natural expression on her face was, as one of her former co-workers said: 'As if she's always hearing someone tell a bad joke and is trying to be polite about it.' All of it ended up making her look like the caricature of a strict school marm from some Dickensian story.

"You can take off now." Grace said to David.

"See ya, Grace. Happy cleaning. Give me a call if something happens." He waved and left her alone with the gore.

She stared at the mess, trying not to breathe in too deeply. It was a fairly standard mess, save for the errant blood. A little fecal matter here and there, annoying but she had never seen a pair of pants that could contain the contents of an entire voided bowel. It was one of those very disgusting things she had learned in her career. A tad more bile and vomit than she had expected though. Usually victims with gaping neck wounds don't vomit, but it can happen. The cops had attempted to haze her on her first few jobs by describing, in extensive detail, all the various things they had seen. She actually found it more helpful to her than nauseating. Know thy enemy ... even if it's some unknowable ichor staining the wood floor. She hadn't even known what the word ichor meant, or that it was even a word. Grace adapted though, soon she knew all the different words for describing the thin, acrid, watery discharges from wounds.

Grace decided to start with the fecal matter first, then the blood later. Bloodstains weren't too hard to take care of, at least not for her, but somehow a person could always notice the smell of excrement once it had set, no matter how hard she had cleaned. Grace found it was a little depressing that she could now identify four different types of bodily fluids by smell alone.

No one ever sets out to clean up blood, bile, and other organic matter for a living. It's one of those jobs people don't expect anyone to actually do. When they do meet a cleaner, they make an attempt at sincerity and say there's nothing wrong with knowing which type of solvents get intestinal juices out of linoleum without permanently staining the floor. Then when they think no one is watching, they roll their eyes at the person who wound up cleaning crap for a living.

For Grace, however, she was quite content dealing with this kind of fecal matter as opposed to all the other kinds of crap she had to put up with in her earlier jobs. Her attempt in the world of architecture was a spectacular failure; even though she had a degree and two years of apprentice work she just wasn't willing to dive into the world of union kickbacks and zoning law 'negotiations.' Interior design was a living nightmare, infested with unreasonable and hideous demands of customers who blamed her for their own poor choices. Finally, she found didn't have enough of a killer instinct to survive in the living cesspool that was the real estate business.

There was another reason that explained why she was unable to hold a career in general. Psychological issues coupled with massive parental resentment along with a deep fear of confinement to a set 'Plan.' The usual neuroses really, Grace told herself, just another part of the tapestry that explained her life's pattern of failure.

She was just about to end her position in the nightmare job of selling houses, when she discovered the 'disclosure killers.' The series of perfectly nice houses that no agent was able to sell due to one kind of horrible crime or another taking place within. The agents were always stuck between a rock and a hard place. They couldn't just lie about the place, and there is just no way to spin a murder-suicide as something that could help a set-up sheet. That was when Grace, with the help of her combined experiences, had a revelation.

People didn't want to live in houses where people were murdered. Real estate agents knew that to be one of the universal truths, full disclosure was the bane of their existence. Grace had come up with the ingenious concept that people did not want to live in houses that LOOKED like people were murdered there. All she had to do was replace the wallpaper, change the carpet and flooring, and add a new light fixture or two. Almost magically, those horribly lurid photos in the paper could no longer be directly connected with this house. Sure there would be stories but once you disassociated them with the house directly they created even more appeal. Provided that you marketed it to the right kind of person. There were an amazing number of macabre people in this world who thought their lives would be that much richer knowing that someone got their throat slashed in the upstairs bathroom.

Grace explained her idea to Kerri, her co-worker. Kerri was a nice girl who had a very active period of teenage rebellion. As a result her hair was now and forever, despite the best efforts of the city's stylists, streaked with bright bubblegum blue. She was the only one of the city's real estate agents who would talk to Grace. She was low in the numbers, not as low as Grace was but not far from it. Most importantly, she had a cousin who worked for the city in the licensing department.

The set up was elegant. Kerri's cousin got Grace all the licenses and permits she needed to clean up biological material with limited...