Death & Desire: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Detective Series (The Jezebel Files Book 2)

by Deborah Wilde

  Talia subtly nudged me and I found my voice. “Yeah. Five summers at good old Camp Ruach.”

  My mother flashed a tight smile. She had no love for her Jewish upbringing, but after Dad had left and Mom had gone back to school, she’d been forced to turn to her Orthodox parents for financial help with my various rehab and therapy costs after the accident.

  My father had been estranged from his family in Montreal, and I’d never met my grandparents on that side. My maternal grandparents had been incredibly generous, and we’d even become close during those nights when Mom’s classes ran late and I had dinner at their house. My grandmother did nothing to advance the cause of Kosher cuisine, and their religion informed their rather rigid views on a lot of topics, but they weren’t unkind, and we kept up our semi-regular dinners until they’d passed away a few years ago. Talia maintained they’d mellowed by the time I came around. Since their only stipulation for all their support had been that I go to Jewish camp to give me a connection to my faith, I’d gone.

  It hadn’t been all bad. I’d actually enjoyed activities like archery and kayaking and I could hone my sullen teen vibe as easily around a bonfire as in a skate park. I’d even had a few outcast friends to hang with year after year.

  “It’s important to stay connected to our heritage,” Isaac said.

  “I couldn’t agree more. I would hate to deny any part of myself.” I unfurled my favorite toothy smile.

  Talia looped her arm through mine. “If you’ll excuse me, Isaac, I’ll walk my daughter to the door.”

  Walk, strong-arm me, same same.

  “That was uncalled for,” she said.

  “I agree. His son is Head of House Pacifica. He shouldn’t be here.” I tried to snag a bacon-wrapped fig, but Talia denied me even that simple pleasure, hustling me past the server before I could get my hands on one.

  “Isaac is Mundane and if he shares our viewpoint, so be it. It’s actually a coup to have his support. He’s a leading businessman with a lot of important connections.”

  Some of them were even legal.

  “Dad worked for him. Did you know that?”

  “That was years ago.”

  “You disapprove of your baby father’s magic, but having the shady boss he worked for on board is ‘a coup?’”

  Talia amped up her smile as we passed an older couple chatting with Jackson Wu, leader of the provincial Untainted Party, a genial man of Chinese heritage in a well-tailored suit.

  I threw him a cheery wave as befitted my stature as Talia’s sole progeny.

  “This is neither the time nor the place to discuss your father or Mr. Montefiore’s legitimacy as a businessman,” she hissed.

  “How about this then? Take off the Party hat firmly wedged on your head and look at this as a parent. This is the worst betrayal of Levi.” I retrieved my jacket from the coat racks set up by the entrance.

  “Yet you keep insisting he’s nothing to you.”

  “His dad is publicly supporting legislation to impose legal strictures on his life because he has magic.”

  “Levi’s an adult. He can take care of himself.”

  “That’s not the point. Could you hurt me that way? Choose a belief system over what I am?”

  The soft piano music, the hum of chatter, all of it fell away into a loaded bubble of silence as I waited for her answer.

  If she was wrestling with some moral dilemma, it didn’t show in her hostess smile. “You’re Mundane.”

  “Pretend I wasn’t and answer the question.”

  My mother stared into her mostly empty glass like she was wishing for a top up. Or the bottle. “If you had magic,” she said carefully, “it’s not something you’d have to make public. No one would believe it. The hospital certainly didn’t when that nurse made her ridiculous complaint.”

  I flinched. She knew about that? Of course she did. Talia was my mother. They’d have informed her. Which meant… She believed me that I now had magic.

  I wrapped my arms around myself, suddenly uneasy at the truth laying bare between us. “I wouldn’t hide nor would I live as a Rogue.”

  “Why do you have to make everything so hard for yourself? So hard for me?” Her voice broke.

  “No lies. No games,” I said.

  She met my eyes. “Then I’d choose my beliefs. I have to be able to live with myself.”

  Like mother, like daughter had never been such a bitter pill.

  I pressed my fist into my stomach. Some betrayals were the sharp devastation of a car crash that you never saw coming. Others were a tornado. You watched it approach from miles away, frozen in its path and unable to do anything about the havoc about to wreck your life.

  “Ashira.” She reached for me, but I shook my head, my hands up. “It’s a moot question because I’ll never have to choose,” she said. “You’d never make me.”

  Tears filled my eyes. “I have to be able to live with myself.”

  All pretense of this being hypothetical was gone.

  We stood, mere feet apart, but the endless void back in the grove hadn’t been this vast.

  I pulled myself together by the skin of my teeth. “I’ll let you get back.”

  She nodded, her expression unreadable, but didn’t stop me.

  My drive home was a blur.

  Priya was out with Kai, the human Cheez Whiz that she was dating, when I got home, so I flaked out in front of the television with food I’d scrounged up. Priya hadn’t made it to the grocery store either, so I sat there with half a box of kinda stale Stoned Wheat Thins crackers, a container of hummus, apple slices, and my billionth rewatch of BBC’s Sherlock, which I much preferred over the American Elementary version.

  As white noise, it did little to quell the storm knocking around in my head. Talia believed me but it didn’t matter. She hadn’t chosen me. Her values were more important to her. There was probably some pithy self-truth the universe hoped I’d take away from that, but I couldn’t get beyond a dull thudding in my head and a profound sorrow.

  The first episode had barely kicked in when there was a knock on my door. Arkady stood there with a bottle of wine and an unopened veggie platter. His chin-length black hair was pulled back with a pink scrunchie and he’d changed into sweatpants.

  “Stay the hell out of my life.” I slammed the door, but he shoved his foot in, conveniently turning it to stone so the door didn’t even hurt him. Lucky for him, my door fared equally as well.

  “It wasn’t what you think,” Arkady said. “Isaac–”

  “Did Levi know I’d be there?”

  Arkady hesitated. “He suspected. Let me in. Please. After a couple hours of all that hate, I want to be around a friend.” His eyes narrowed and he raked a far too shrewd glance over me. “Methinks you need that, too.”

  He hadn’t had the weary tightness at the corners of his eyes when we’d trained earlier, but I was too pissed off to feel compassion.

  “Friends don’t spy on friends.”

  Arkady pulled his now-normal foot back, but I didn’t slam the door. “Levi could have sent someone who you wouldn’t have recognized.”

  “Is that supposed to make it better?”

  “No, but my guess is that he’s struggling with this.” He juggled the wine and the platter. “Could you talk to him directly and leave out the middle man, because this tray is heavy?”

  I cracked the door wide enough to take in the contents of the platter. No peppers and it came with ranch dressing dip. Being alone would do shit for my mental well-being right now, because I’d only keep obsessing over what had gone down with my mother. This way I got food and maybe I could punch Arkady. I let him in, gesturing to the platter. “Are we at catered levels of friendship?”

  “Levi had a meeting with the Heads of House Ontario and Maison de Champlain to discuss counter proposals to the legislation your mother is instrumental in drafting.” He sighed. “Support for the idea is spreading across the country. Anyway, Veronica sent a ‘hands off the catering’ mem
o.”

  “You defied her for me?”

  “See how much you mean to me, pickle?” He shoved the platter at me and flopped on my sofa. “I hate people. How do you stand those events?”

  “Drinking helps.” I got us a couple of wine glasses and some plates, because no need to be total barbarians about our feast, and collapsed next to him. Pouring myself a drink, I clinked it to his. “I hate people, too. Some more than others. Here’s to misanthropy.”

  “Let’s move to an island. Priya can come,” he said.

  “Obviously.” I restarted the episode and shaky images of a battle filled the screen. “How about Miles?” After this afternoon, I’d find someone else to snap Pri out of her dating ways.

  “How about Levi?” he retorted, stuffing a pillow made from pink sari fabric behind his back.

  “Don’t make me vote you off.” Then I put aside all the emotional fuckery of the day and let myself be lulled by the brilliant mind of Sherlock Holmes.

  Priya spent the night at Kai's so by the time we reconnected at the office on Wednesday morning, I was setting up a whiteboard with Omar’s name at the top. Underneath him was written Edrice Abadi. From there we’d include anyone from her personal or professional life who harbored romantic feelings for her.

  While we worked, I told Priya about my encounter with Talia. I’d have to see my mother again. My magic was going to become public sooner rather than later, and she owed me a heads up on how she was going to respond. And any idea on whether our relationship was salvageable or not. But as excited as I was to plunge into that new familial wound again, I couldn’t see her yet because there were too many other things going on. That, and I’d hope she’d change her mind.

  Priya hugged me, but this defied even her optimism that all would work out.

  Throwing myself into work, I got Chione to call Edrice, saying she required a list of everyone employed by the archeological excavation because their insurance had questions about the security previous to the Tannous family’s arrival. If they didn’t get this settled, it could cost the dig more.

  It wasn’t watertight logic; it didn’t need to be. Edrice got the request from someone she’d previously dealt with, and, thanks to the successful completion of the job that Tannous Security had been hired for, trusted. Throw in an insurance company and their endless inane requests, plus the opportunity to save some money when every cent of the dig would be stretched thin, and Edrice promptly emailed the info over.

  Priya and I split the list, starting with the easiest way to eliminate anyone–by using the House Al Qahirah records in Cairo. Of the twenty people working on the site, thirteen were men, and eight of them were Mundane. Our attacker had magic, so we were down to five possibilities.

  From there we narrowed the field further with social media. Two of them were gay and Edrice was likely not their heart’s desire. That left us with three suspects, except none of them had left the site in the two months that they’d been employed. This was verified by their daily posts about life in the high mountains of the Sinai. It was still a desert ecosystem with a lot of volcanic rock in the area, but the excavation was situated on a relatively flat stretch with a lot of scrubby brush.

  Sifting through this information was boring, detailed-oriented work and made up the bulk of the jobs I’d worked on. Smudges and Angels of Death–even phony ones–were way more fun.

  Edrice’s social media mostly featured her tiny dog Isis. Her other photos tended to be of coffee or group shots of her co-workers.

  “Nothing jumps out.” Priya threw her fork into her takeout salad container. One thing about Gastown, you couldn’t go ten feet without hitting a restaurant or café.

  Salad was not my first, second, or twelfth choice, but Priya had nixed my suggestion of sushi, since Kai always ate sushi after his squash games and hadn’t wanted to upset his routine last night. Priya tried to talk him into something else, but Cheese Whiz had grown a spine on this issue. So when Priya growled that we were having salad today, I’d agreed.

  I leaned back in my creaky chair, munching on a cherry tomato. “How do I play this when I contact Edrice? I can’t cast any aspersions on the Tannous family and especially not on their professional reputation. If I say I work for the Dershowitzes, the whole ‘other woman vibe’ might keep Edrice from speaking to me.”

  “What about the HR angle? Say you got an anonymous report that Edrice was subjected to sexual harassment and you’re checking it out. Even if she’s employed by Cairo University, no one ever knows all the staff in HR.”

  “That would work, if I could speak Arabic. They wouldn’t conduct the conversation in English.”

  The whiteboard remained frustratingly devoid of suspects.

  Priya stood up and grabbed some darts out of the wall-mounted holder. “Darts to clear our heads?”

  Times like this, we didn’t play a proper game, but rather ran through a practice routine.

  Priya positioned herself in front of the dartboard and fired a dart into the double twenty. I took her spot and did the same. We pulled our darts out and moved on to double nineteen.

  None of the ideas we tossed out had merit. Missing double fifteen, I started again from twenty.

  Pri got down to double elevens before she missed. We still didn’t have a viable reason to call Edrice and find out about any men in her personal life.

  “Fuck it.” I pulled out my phone, looking up the time difference between 12:30PM Vancouver time and the Sinai Peninsula. “It’s 9:30 at night,” I said. “Not too late.”

  “Hang on a sec.” Priya leaned over her desk and double-clicked her trackpad. “When Malach kicked you, he was wearing steel-toed boots, right?”

  “Right. Oh. That could narrow it down to someone in construction that she knows.”

  “No. They wear them on the sites.” Priya turned her laptop around to show me a photo. It was one of the group shots and everyone in the front row wore dust-streaked work boots. “You can’t tell if they’re steel-toed or not, but a bunch of websites discussing equipment for digs mention them.”

  “We’re back to the dig and out of suspects. Nothing to it but to do it.” I phoned Edrice and introduced myself.

  “You’re from Canada? Why do you wish to speak to me?” she said.

  “Your friend Omar was attacked right before his wedding.”

  She laughed. “I’m sorry. That’s not funny, but Omar is hardly a friend.”

  “You had a relationship with him,” I said.

  “We slept together once and I’m in Egypt. I can hardly be a suspect.”

  “You’re not, but we’re investigating the possibility that someone saw you and was jealous.”

  “Doubtful. I haven’t left the site in two and a half months.”

  “Perhaps they outsourced?”

  “A hitman?” She laughed harder. “This is a joke, yes?”

  “No. Could anyone there harbor romantic feelings for you?”

  “With this bunch? Not likely.”

  “You’re sure?” I tapped a dart against the desk.

  “Positive. We’re here day in and day out. Together all the time. I’d have noticed.”

  So much for that. “Did any of the items that you excavated contain magic?”

  “No. Everything is catalogued in detail.”

  There was nothing further to learn.

  “Back to square one?” Priya said.

  “Back to square one. I still maintain the attacker was under the feather’s compulsion when he assaulted Omar, but there’s no motive and no identifiable suspect.” I needed a win and phoned Levi. “Make yourself useful, Leviticus, and help me work out my frustrations,” I demanded. My voice went low and sultry. “I need you bad.”

  Chapter 15

  Levi choked on his end of the phone and Priya’s eyebrows shot into her hairline. Even I wasn’t sure where that had come from.

  “I could spare fifteen minutes,” he said.

  “A glowing recommendation.”

&
nbsp; “And have five left over after I’d gotten you off.”

  “If I was that hard up,” I said, “I’d visit the laundromat with the rattly dryer and do the job myself. Gavriella’s workplace. Houdini me into looking like her so I can pay a visit and see what shakes out. Someone there might know Evil Wanker.”

  “That’s a brilliant idea. While you’re there, you can pick up a shift, make a couple bucks in tips,” he said.

  I drew a picture of a dick on the whiteboard and gave it blue eyes. “It’s a lead and we’re sparse on those. Besides, Gavriella might have left personal effects behind in a locker, given she didn’t intend to be abducted.”

  “I’m sure the motorcycle gang owners of the place will be reasonable about returning them. Or not holding a grudge about being left in the lurch.”

  “I doubt these people expect two weeks’ notice. I’ll be at the club in twenty minutes. Do what you want with that.” Sliding my phone into my pocket, I grabbed my leather jacket off the back of my chair. “Did you get a hit on Moran or the Queen? Her interest in this wedding doesn’t make sense. Ivan Dershowitz isn’t a major league criminal, and she doesn’t need to cultivate Mundane connections.”

  “You’re thinking it’s personal?” Priya said.

  “Yeah.”

  “My script didn’t come up with anything, but I’ll adjust the filters and try again.”

  “Thanks, Pri. By the way, what happened with Miles?”

  “We’re meeting to discuss my proposal. A working relationship. That’s all this is. I saw your stupid gleam when we met. This isn’t a case of besties double-dating.”

  “Levi and I will never date.”

  Priya slapped twenty bucks on her desk and smirked. “Care to take that bet?”

  “I think Miles may be interested in Arkady.”

  She sat up so fast, the twenty flew off the desk. “You sure?”

  “Mostly.” I laughed. “Now who’s got the stupid gleam?”

  “Me.” She waved me away. “Go give lap dances. I have plans to make.”