The Truth About Night

by Amanda Arista

  “’Bout two months ago, he’s stats flashing around some new income. Got himself a girlfriend. Pretty steady girl actual. They had an all-out about his business a few weeks back.”

  “Benny had a girlfriend?” I asked.

  She licked her lips. They always did. There must have been something about telling the truth that made people thirsty. “Yeah, works the mini-mart on 22nd. She stays over on Cumberland. He might be there.”

  “Got a name?”

  “Tiara, friends called her Tay-Tay.”

  I recorded the name and address she gave me.

  The bartender came to pour us another round and announced last call, though we were all here past legal last call. I looked down at the second drink of the night and sighed.

  “What happened to picture boy?” Atlanta asked. Her tone was maternal, the same she’d used to convince the girls to talk the last time Ethan and I had stopped by.

  “We got attacked two Wednesdays ago by a group of men. He didn’t make it.”

  Atlanta slid her hand slowly over the black lacquered bar and patted my arm with her long nails. “He was one of the good guys. As much as we razzed him, we knew you two had our backs.”

  I nodded. “Thank you, girl.”

  “You know,” she started as she pulled her hand away. “There were some strange lights off Chavez. We thought it was just another rave in those abandoned warehouses. Couldn’t hear anything though.”

  Despite my brain being a little fuzzy because of the insomnia and whiskey, I sharpened and listened to her. “Besides the strange lights, did you see anything out of the ordinary? Something that the trade streets don’t usually get? Like a gang of men dressed all in black?”

  “That’s not strange for the trade streets.”

  She was right.

  “Anything else?”

  “No, it was a slow night.”

  “On the first of a month?”

  “Yeah. Like too quiet. Back home, we used to get tornados and everything would get real quiet right before one hit, it was sorta like that.” Atlanta sipped her brandy. “New blood’s got a lot of people trippin’.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Ethan was always right. The good stories always started at Rome. Atlanta was one of those who had tipped us off about a new presence shaking up the usual trifecta of gangs. I’d scratched her information down in my notebook as I gathered the whispers together, trying to see the bigger story. “Really? What else have you heard?”

  “Savannah met this catch. Couldn’t stop talking about all the things he promised her, and then she vanished.”

  “Savannah with the blond hair? I saw her last month.”

  Atlanta nodded. “One night she was here, and then she was gone.”

  That was fast. These girls were family. He must have promised her the moon to get her to leave them. “Anything you can remember about this guy?”

  Atlanta thought, chewing on her bottom lip. “Nothing special. Benny brought him around.”

  Benny. Maybe all roads were leading back to Benny. “Did you file a missing persons?”

  Atlanta laughed. “Some weeks, you and picture boy were the only people who cared about us, Merci.”

  My anger threatened to snap the plastic Bic pen into pieces. I had to put it down on my notebook and stretch out my fingers to calm down. “I have to, Atlanta. You are part of my city, born and bred here just like me. Granted its morally-questionable underbelly, but a living soul.”

  She clinked my glass with hers and tossed back the remainder of her drink in one gulp. She rose, adjusted her bra again, settling her two new rolls of twenties, and looked down at me. “This new blood is another fad. The new ones get hot and then fade out. The old vices will always stay in business.”

  I smiled. “Here’s to job security.”

  The numbers on my watch blurred in the slowly rising sunlight. Was that a five or a six? I rubbed my eyes. My entire worldview had changed in a matter of hours and I was running on fumes. I need to go home, I needed sleep.

  I wished I could write off everything MacCallan had said as one huge lie, but he’d been telling the truth. It clung to me like the warm smell of sandalwood and sage that had surrounded me in that booth. Werewolves were real. Ethan had lied to me about what he did once a month for the past twenty-four months because he’d have to kill me if he told me.

  Right now, Benny seemed like the most solid thing in my life.

  I took a sip of the to-go coffee and scouted the apartment building across the street. Benny could be in there. Benny—who was either scared or dead or, worse, a traitor—could be in there with a myriad of answers for me. About Ethan. About this new gang. About the missing people.

  Or this could be my fourth B&E charge. Though in this neighborhood, I’m not sure anyone would notice.

  The real question was, should I call MacCallan? He wasn’t a cop. He wasn’t a reporter, but he was Ethan’s brother. He had every right, possibly more than me, to stick his nose into everything that might have gotten his brother killed. And if it was something strange, something like what I saw last night, then I would need his help.

  Everyone’s better with a partner. Ethan’s words echoed in my small car.

  I looked at the time. It was past dawn now. MacCallan was technically free unless there had been some sort of pack emergency. Someone had gotten treed and couldn’t get down.

  I smiled to myself, but it faded fast. Ethan and I would have made so many jokes about it if he’d only told me. The puns could have lasted for days, but the pack had rules.

  My thumb scrolled back to the newest number on my phone. With a deep breath and a shake of my head, I dialed it.

  “MacCallan,” he answered.

  “Lanard. Up for sniffing around for an informant?”

  I heard a car door shut and his car turn on. He must just be leaving the little shindig in the woods.

  “You’ve already got a lead on your guy?”

  I scoffed. “I am a professional, MacCallan.”

  “Where are you?”

  I gave him the address, and he said it would be nearly forty minutes before he got there.

  I could barely wait twenty. He’d just have to catch up.

  Here’s to staying out of trouble.

  The buzzer on the door was broken, but the label next to 3C clearly read ‘Tay-Tay.” The glass door that should have needed to be buzzed had shattered so long ago that there wasn’t even any glass littering the ground. So it wasn’t technically breaking and entering if the entry was already broken.

  I slipped under the metal handle, the only barrier in my way, and into the foyer. No need to give Benny any sort of heads-up that his favorite journalist was trying to pin him down. The other denizens were also silent on this particular crack of dawn, save for someone in 2A watching old cartoons.

  The building was old and smelled of years of cigarette smoke. It only got worse the higher I climbed along the central stairwell, hot air rising on this cold fall morning and making the cigarette smell new again. I crept along the third floor hallway, paused outside apartment 3C and listened.

  I couldn’t hear anyone inside, but Benny kept the same schedule as I did, so he shouldn’t be awake at this hour. But Tay-Tay might. And Tay-Tay might not know exactly what to do if she found herself eye-to-eye with Merci Lanard.

  I took a deep breath and knocked softly on the door. The slight pressure pushed the door open a few inches, and my heart jumped in surprise. In a neighborhood like this, I would have had seven chains on the door, yet this one was ajar.

  I calmed the swarm of questions in my head, trying to bat them away with explanations. Maybe Tay-Tay had run out to her car to get something or had come back in after leaving for work and that’s why the door was unlocked. But the apartment stayed silent.

  And then I got a whiff of something, like dust and garlic and rotten ground beef.

  Unless Tay-Tay was a particularly bad cook, there was only one thing that smelled as rank as that.

/>   I turned my head to suck in one last breath of the suddenly refreshing smoke smell of the hallway and toed Tay-Tay’s front door open.

  The light from the hallway illuminated the layout of a normal apartment. Small and old and messy, but normal. Foyer table full of bills, coats hanging from a rack. I recognized the black one that Benny had worn the last time I saw him, that large Eagles emblem that hung off him like a trash bag. Atlanta hadn’t steered me wrong. This was the place.

  I readied my phone in one hand and my Taser in the other.

  I stepped in and called out, “Benny? Tay-Tay?”

  Silence echoed back to me, and I took another step into the apartment. My eyes adjusted to the dim dawn light filtering in through the door to my back and what looked like a patio door further into the apartment. My nose was not going to adjust. The putrid garlic smell was only getting stronger.

  A bistro table held to-go boxes piled high with lo mien, but even the worst place in town couldn’t create this smell.

  I scanned the apartment. Couch, TV, stereo system. All still here, despite the open door.

  “Benny?”

  There was a grunt in the shadows behind me. My instincts flared and my trigger finger flinched as I spun around.

  MacCallan caught my wrist, and the crack of the Taser’s prods sent a white glow across his freckled cheek and electrified his blue eyes.

  “Calm down there,” he said.

  I released my trigger finger and the lightning stopped. I could taste my racing heart in the back of my throat. “When I called, you said you’d be forty minutes.”

  “Traffic was light.” He slowly let go of my wrist. “Do you know what that smell is?”

  I resisted taking a deep breath—despite needing to calm my nerves. “Of course I know what that smell is.”

  “Shouldn’t we call the cops?”

  “In a minute. Don’t touch anything, walk in straight lines behind me.”

  I turned around and surveyed the apartment again. There was a purse on the chair by the couch. Women’s shoes underneath the table, same place I put mine. But no men’s shoes. Benny’s coat might have been by the door, but his shoes were not.

  From the layout, there was only one more room to explore, the bedroom. I knew the truth about what I was going to find in the bedroom.

  One foot in front of the other, I made my way toward the back of the apartment. Rafe’s heat pressed against me as he followed closely.

  It was on the bed, tangled up in sheets like a rowdy night gone wrong. From the doorway, I could make out a foot and maybe an elbow sticking out from under the white sheet with yellow flowers. Someone had covered up the body.

  “Stay here,” I whispered to Rafe.

  I took another step into the bedroom. Morning light slipped through the windows, and I was glad that no shadows hid in the corners. With one more step, I stood at the end of the bed. I reached toward sheet, but Rafe came to stop my hand.

  “I’ve seen dead bodies before,” I assured him.

  “What about evidence? What about—”

  “I need to know if it’s Benny.”

  He pressed his lips together and released my arm, standing next to me, shoulder to shoulder, a united front against the dead, against what might be under that sheet.

  I rummaged around in my bag for a glove and pulled out the familiar blue latex.

  An arch formed in Rafe’s brow.

  “I’ve seen dead bodies before,” I repeated as I snapped the gloves on.

  I slowly reached to pull the sheet from the bed. It wasn’t what I expected.

  I’d seen dead bodies before. I’ve seen them freshly bloodied. I’d seen them bloated and floating and spread out across the highway like jam. But I’d never seen anything like this.

  It was an experiment human beef jerky. The skin was tanned and dried—all of the moisture completely drained from it. The dress seemed starched, then freeze dried to the figure. The arms jutted out to form sharp angles and her legs were splayed wide, but feet touching. The lips peeled back from white teeth. But the hair was perfect. Long, dark hair splayed out against the pillow made her look like she was peacefully floating in water, like driftwood.

  I could feel Rafe flinch, and I didn’t need my eyes to tell me that he had not seen as many dead bodies as I had.

  “What’s wrong here?” he asked.

  “Everything.”

  “Walk me through it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I might have a few preternatural skills that will help,” he snarled.

  I deserved that. Slowly, I walked him through everything that I saw. “There are no fluids. The bed is clean except for that dark spot there.” I pointed out a place on the sheets that could have easily been spilled cocoa instead of blood.

  Rafe slunk around the corner of the bed, light and smooth, like he didn’t want to disturb a single thread of carpet.

  “How long could it have been here?” he asked.

  “No more than seven days?” Atlanta said they’d had a big enough fight last week to echo through the chain of gossip.

  Rafe leaned over the dark stains on the bed and sniffed, and for the first time in a long time I was actually disgusted. I turned away and noted the trinkets on the dresser. Jewelry, big earrings, and a picture of Benny and his girl.

  I snatched it from the mirror.

  Carefully, I looked back to Rafe, where he stood by the bed.

  “Blood,” he said.

  “That is a relief,” I answered. “But from where?”

  He reached toward the body with an open hand.

  “Don’t touch it,” I snapped.

  “Magic lesson number one, Miss Lanard,” he said smoothly. “Wanderers, people with natural abilities, have heightened physical senses. And some can tell if something magical happened here, like me.”

  I waited and I watched. Ethan hadn’t done any of this with me, but it didn’t mean he hadn’t used some of his senses before. He’d hidden other things from me, so why not this? The night of our attack flashed back. Ethan had heard something coming before I noticed anything. Before the Shadow Men came. Maybe he had used his super-skills and I’d just never noticed.

  I really was a self-centered ass-hat.

  MacCallan’s voice quietly soothed away a few of my rougher questions as he narrated exactly what he was doing. “My magical abilities allow me to expand outside of myself, increase my own senses, to feel the energy in others, in places. And sometimes that is residual energy from spellcraft.”

  He focused on her body and, though it was slight, I felt a shift in the air; the room’s stifling stench lessened and I got a whiff of sandalwood with the garlic.

  And as I watched him, he paled and pointed toward her upper torso. “There’s something on her arm. Some magic on her.”

  I tiptoed around the room and stood close to him.

  “Where?”

  He pointed and I leaned in as far as I dared. I could see a mark, a shadow of something that at some point had maybe been a brand or a tattoo. But I couldn’t make out an actual shape. The skin was too dry and wrinkled.

  “Well, you got magic, I’ve got tech.”

  I pulled out my cell phone and its camera had enough pixels to get details. I took a few shots of the arm. There was something there, and I was comfortable zooming in on the picture. I really couldn’t make out exactly what it was. Something with a line and a cross maybe?

  I went back to the picture of her and Benny in my hand. She didn’t have a tattoo there when this picture was taken. I went back to the foot of the bed and took a few shots of that as well, stretching as far as I could to get as aerial a shot as I could muster.

  I heard a door shut somewhere in the complex and a mother yelling for her daughter.

  I shoved my phone in my back pocket and pulled off the blue glove. “We need to scoot.”

  Rafe looked back at the body. “Who is she?”

  I licked my lips. And I shouldn’t have. I could tast
e the oily decay from the air. “Her name was Tay-Tay, and it’s time to lay her to rest.”

  Rafe and I left the apartment and he followed me down to my car, but I didn’t get in—not yet. I was going to smell like dead body for the rest of the day. The stench had worked its way into my coat, into my pores, like rotten French fries. My face I could wash, my car upholstery I could not. I needed a moment to air out my coat and my thoughts.

  This was a second dead body associated with Benny. Benny whom I had worked with a hundred times, whom Ethan had worked with. And now another person was dead and he was still on the wind.

  I took another lungful of air and let out a cloudy breath into the cool morning.

  “I’m going to call this in to a police friend of mine. He’s going to rake me over the coals, so you need to not be here when he shows up.”

  “What am I supposed to do? There’s a dead body with something magical on it.” He started to pace in front of me.

  I felt the truth in his words, and my own wound started to itch. There was something rasping underneath what he said, like a puppy needing to get outside. He needed to do things and there were still too many questions spinning around to get a direction to act in. He was just as compelled as I was to keep doing until it was done. It was all so familiar, so I used familiar words to calm him down.

  “Walk me through it,” I suggested.

  His entire being changed. They were the right words. He stopped before me and stood up a little straighter. He really was a professor to his core and this was something he could teach me, because heavens know, I don’t speak magic.

  MacCallan put his hands on his hips and studied the neighborhood. “Everything has energy, a spirit, a chi, whatever. Places, people, even things—they all hum with that energy.”

  He pointed toward the apartment. “That place, didn’t have an ounce of energy left in it, except the essence of something on her arm.”

  I furrowed my brow, doing my best to follow. “So you’re saying that whatever sucked that body dry of water might have sucked the energy out of the place as well?”