“Where did you go to school?” That was a question I didn’t expect.
“Nowhere.”
He looked surprised. “You never went to college?”
I laughed. “I never graduated from high school. I’m a dropout, Lieutenant.” I certainly wasn’t going to tell him about the education I had received. He wouldn’t have believed it anyway. “Why?”
Blair shrugged. “I’m always looking for good people that can help me out.”
A job? “Do the police hire high school dropouts?”
He shook his head and stared down at his coffee cut. “No, we don’t.” Looking up at me, he said, “I do contract consulting services from people in the paranormal community, though. If you’d like to make some extra money.”
I laughed again. “We’re a community?” I immediately thought about how nice it would be to have a chair for my apartment. “Extra money is always nice. What kind of consulting do you think I could do?”
“It depends on what your talents are.”
“Oh.” I took an involuntary step back. Telling Blair, or anyone else, about my abilities wasn’t something I was prepared to do—then or anytime in the far foreseeable future. ‘Yes, Lieutenant, I’m a trained assassin, seductress, and fighter.’ That would go over well. All my training involved either attack or defense or spying. I wasn’t even sure how marketable any of them would be for any organization except maybe the CIA or another shadowy secret cult such as the Illuminati. And that wasn’t something I ever wanted to get involved with again, to be a pawn for powerful men seeking to gather more power and wealth. I couldn’t imagine ever trusting anyone playing such games.
“I don’t think I have anything useful,” I said. “Not like those guys with Lost and Found, or one of the seers.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you can do and let me figure it out,” he said.
I took a deep breath. “Do you know the difference between a witch and a mage?”
“Not…really.”
“A witch pulls on energy from the world around her and uses some sort of ritual or spell to twist reality. Some may pull their energy from the earth or plants or animals, or even from something like an electrical line. They study and experiment and learn how to use that energy to cast their spells. With me so far?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Okay. There are other energy sources that run throughout the earth called ley lines, and that is where mages get their power. Depending on how far a mage is from a line, and how powerful the line is, determines how much power he can pull from the line and use. Think of them like rivers and streams of raw magic of varying sizes. Mages tend to have an affinity for a particular type of magic. A mage twists ley energy into a physical manifestation. Like last night with the fireballs and lightning bolts. We call that pyromancy and electrokinesis.”
“Got it.”
“I can’t do any of that. I’m what’s called a ley line mage. All I can do is pull ley line energy and redirect it. I don’t convert it.”
His face showed his confusion as he tried to figure out what I was saying. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“I know.” I wasn’t about to explain all the ways I was able to twist and manipulate ley line energy, but I would probably be of more use to a construction or mining company than to the police.
A customer came up to the bar, and I moved away to take his order.
The City of the Illuminati sat on the intersection of two very powerful ley lines. That was the energy Strickland used to destroy the City of the Illuminati, using the crystal as a focus. My new home of Westport sat between two powerful ley lines that intersected east of the city. That was one of the things that drew me there, and that accounted for the large number of paranormals who gathered in that area. A minor ley line ran beneath Rosie’s and on toward the port, directly under my apartment complex as well. I didn’t have to ask why Eleanor built the apartments where she did.
Blair eventually ordered dinner, and when he paid his tab, he asked, “So, you’ll come by tomorrow?”
“Yeah. One o’clock okay?”
“That will work.”
Later that evening, the three mouseketeers came in and took a table near the pool tables. Jenny took their order and came to the bar.
“I’ll take care of them,” I told her. “I want to thank them for last night.”
She smiled and nodded, then headed back to the kitchen.
I took their drinks out to them and said, “On me, and thanks for last night.”
Josh looked almost shocked, the other two showed mild surprise.
“You’re more than welcome,” Trevor said, raising his glass to me. “It was fun.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You have a strange definition of fun,” I said, and he grinned.
“Yeah, not a problem. Thanks for the drink,” Josh said.
Jolene smiled. “I just watched. I let the boys do all the flashy stuff. But it didn’t look as though you needed much help.”
I smiled back at her. “Maybe, but I’m not super woman, and there were a lot of them.”
“You should have taken a weapon,” Josh said, motioning to the tray I held.
I laughed and went back behind the bar.
The following day, I took the bus downtown, and it dropped me off right at the police station. But that wasn’t the address on Blair’s business card. After asking a policeman, I walked three blocks to the District Court building. I couldn’t find anything about the PCU on the building directory, but I remembered Sam telling me that Blair reported to the District Attorney, so I went to that office.
“I’m a little lost,” I told the receptionist. “I’m looking for Lieutenant Blair.”
“Oh, yes. Go out to the corridor, take a right, and then take the back stairs down to the basement. When you get there, walk down the corridor, then take the second corridor to the right. His office is about halfway down, just before you get to the bathrooms.”
So, that’s what I did. The basement was dingy, and about half-lighted. When I finally found an office that said, “P. Crimes” painted on the glass of the door, I was next to the restrooms, and beyond them were two large metal doors spanning the breadth of the hallway with a sign that said, “Loading Dock.” Obviously, Blair hung out in the high-rent district.
I tried the door, but it was locked, so I pushed what looked to be a doorbell. Then waited. After a while, I pushed the button again. As I started to turn away, a voice from a speaker next to the button said, “Yes?”
“I have an appointment with Lieutenant Blair.”
“Your name?”
“Erin McLane.”
“Just a moment.”
I stood there for another few minutes, then a buzz came from the door. When I tried the handle again, the door swung open.
Inside, the office was better lit than the hallway, but still as dingy. A woman in her thirties with orange hair stood behind a counter, and beyond her, I saw a number of cubicles.
“Come with me, please,” the woman said, and without looking back took off down a narrow hallway. I followed her past the cubicles on one side and several doors on the other side until we reached a door at the end.
“Go on in,” she said, turning around and going back in the direction we came from.
I turned the knob and walked into the office beyond. Blair had his jacket off and sat behind a desk piled high with precarious-looking stacks of paper and manila folders.
He glanced up, and said, “Please sit down, Ms. McLane. I’ll be with you in just a minute.”
I sat for five minutes while he typed on the computer and then, finally, pushed the keyboard away.
“Sorry to keep you waiting.” He stood, walked around the desk, and opened the door. “We’ll be doing this in one of the interview rooms.”
I followed him out, and at the end of the corridor, he took a left into the cubicles. Some of them were obviously unoccupied, others had computers and papers on the desks, and a couple of
them actually had people. We passed a cube where the woman with the orange hair sat, and then stopped at another cube.
“Frankie, Ms. McLane is here,” Blair said. Then to me, “Frankie Jones is one of my colleagues. She’ll be sitting in on your interview.”
Frankie turned out to be a stunning black woman who was at least six feet tall. I would have judged her to be in her early thirties, but the symbols of witchcraft hanging on the walls of her cube made me defer that assumption. Telling the ages of paranormals was always tricky.
Blair led me back to one of the doors opposite the cubes that I had seen earlier. Inside was a table, four chairs, and a camera on the wall.
“Is this where you interrogate your prisoners?” I asked.
“This is it,” Frankie said with a smile. She winked at me. “We keep the torture devices behind a hidden door.”
She laid what looked like a Native American dreamcatcher on the table in front of her. There was a tape recorder on the table. We sat down, and Blair turned it on, then he asked me to tell them about the night Lizzy intervened with the vampires. I wasn’t sure who else they had talked to, so I tried to give as sparse an account as I could but kept with the truth. Next, they asked me to tell them about the ambush Blair and Sam set up the night before.
When I finished, Frankie asked me several questions that were mostly aimed at why I felt threatened and why the vampires accosted me. Blair hadn’t said a word through the entire interview.
“You’re a ley line mage, is that correct?” Frankie asked. To that point, magic hadn’t been mentioned.
I pointedly looked at the tape recorder and then back to her. Blair leaned forward and turned off the recorder. I glanced up at the camera and pushed some magic at it. They wouldn’t find out it was broken until they tried to play the recording of my interview.
“Yes, that’s correct,” I said. “I don’t know what that has to do with anything.”
She shifted her questions again. “Are you aware of a Hunter here in the city?”
“No, I’m not. I know a lot of people have speculated about one, but I haven’t seen one, or any evidence of one.”
“Are you aware that several vampires have been decapitated recently?”
“So I’ve been told.”
“If not a Hunter, who do you suppose might be responsible for that?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you know about the Illuminati?”
Now, that was something I didn’t expect. “Weren’t they one of those secret societies like the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians?”
“Why did you come to Westport?”
“I flew in on my broomstick because I heard the weather was balmy and I hoped to improve my tan,” I said. It was the most outrageous lie I could think of off the top of my head, considering the temperature outside was in the forties and it had been overcast for days. Frankie nodded, then her eyes widened, and she stared at me. “And if you think that truth spell is going to catch me in a lie, you’re sadly mistaken, Ms. Jones.” I turned to Blair. “Are we through?”
He gave me a tight smile. “Yes, thank you.” He and Frankie exchanged a look I couldn’t decipher.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been so blunt, but I was getting tired, and the whole interview irritated the hell out of me. Either I was going to tell them the truth or I was going to lie my ass off, and trying to trick me with their line of questioning wasn’t going to change that. They already knew I was a mage. Did they think I was so ignorant that I didn’t know a lie catcher when I saw one?
When we stood, Blair said, “I hope you’ll reconsider signing on as a consultant. I think you could really help us out.”
“If you come up with a specific task you think I can help with, let me know, and I’ll consider it,” I said. “And Ms. Jones, come by Rosie’s sometime. I think you’d like it. Bring the other witch I met earlier with you.”
Chapter 11
That night was one of my nights off work, and Lizzy had invited me to go out clubbing with her.
“Come with me,” she pleaded. “We’ll go dancing and it will be fun.”
I wasn’t sure about that. The only dancing I had ever done was ballroom dancing. It was part of my training aimed at getting close to powerful old men the Illuminati targeted. But I agreed to go. Sitting around my empty apartment by myself was starting to get really boring. I had gone to a used book store and bought a few dog-eared paperbacks, but I had read them all.
I took the bus, and then walked to a café downtown that Lizzy liked. After dinner, we strolled down by the ocean, something I still hadn’t seen since coming to town. I thought about how strange that was. I had my days off, and I had always enjoyed walks out in nature but totally missed that opportunity in Westport.
A cold wind blew in, but I faced into it and breathed deeply. The air smelled clean and fresh. After a few minutes, I realized Lizzy was shivering and her teeth were chattering.
“Hey, are you cold? I’m sorry.” I pulled her into a hug and drew on the nearest ley line to generate some heat as we walked back to where we were sheltered from the wind by tall buildings.
Lizzy was dressed in all her emo glory—pink top, floral pink miniskirt that barely covered her butt, horizontally striped pink-and-white tights—and I worried that my white top and new blue jeans would be too sedate. The nightclub was exactly what I feared—loud, garish, and crowded. But Lizzy came alive in that setting. Her face lit up, and she laughed at everything. Considering her preferred drink was fairly low in alcohol, I didn’t worry about her getting hammered. I had never seen her truly drunk at Rosie’s except the night people were buying us drinks.
I stuck with beer and a self-imposed limit of three.
Lizzy knew a lot of the people, and we had barely taken a sip of our first drink when a guy asked her to dance. She asked me to hold her drink, and I told her I would look for a table.
“Erin!” someone shouted as I wandered around the bar.
It took me a minute to figure out who was calling out to me, and then I saw Trevor standing and waving at me. I made my way across the room and found Josh and Jolene sitting at the table with Trevor.
“I never would have guessed you were a two-fisted drinker,” Josh said.
“It’s Lizzy’s,” I said with a laugh and took a seat between Jolene and Trevor.
“The pink popsicle?” Josh asked.
I leaned close to Jolene, who was taking a sip of her drink. “You would think by his age he might have figured out why he’s never had a date.”
She snorted, spraying the table, and started coughing. When she recovered, she shot me a glance and winked.
“So, what have you been doing with your day off?” Trevor asked.
“Undergoing the inquisition at Lieutenant Blair’s office.”
“Ah, yes. We did that this morning,” he said. “Didn’t take too long.”
“Really? I was there for two hours. Blair and some witch who works with him named Frankie grilled me on everything they could think of.”
“Frankie?” Jolene asked.
“Yeah. He introduced her as Frankie Jones.”
The rolled eyes of all three tipped me off that something wasn’t quite right.
“Tall black lady?” Jolene asked. I nodded. She put her hand on my arm. “That was Francis Jones, Assistant District Attorney. Blair’s boss. And she’s not a witch, she’s a mage. An aeromancer.”
I stared at her. “She was in a cube with lots of witchy stuff, and she brought a lie catcher into the interview.”
“Window dressing,” Trevor said. “Distraction. That was someone else’s cube. Girl, you got the big gun pointed at you. What kind of questions did they ask you?”
Shaking my head, I said, “All kinds of stuff about Hunters and the Illuminati, and a bunch of other fanciful bullshit. For some reason, Blair and the vamps seem to think I’m a big, bad Hunter. But no one has explained how I managed to decapitate a bunch of people before I even got to town.”
“Magic,” Jolene said, and everyone burst out laughing.
Lizzy found us and sat down, then Trevor asked me to dance. I must have looked somewhat panicked, because Jolene and Lizzy teased me into going with him. I discovered it wasn’t very difficult. I watched the other women and just shook my butt and waved my hands in time to the music. Trevor didn’t seem embarrassed to be dancing with me, so I decided it was good enough.
“Where did you live before you came to Westport?” Jolene asked.
The kind of question I dreaded, but I had been asked about my past several times at the bar. I gave her the standard answer I had devised.
“I really don’t like to talk about the past. I’m here, I’m starting over, and I only want to think about the future,” I said. I knew of some of the rumors concerning me at the bar. People speculated that I was running from an abusive relationship. Lizzy told Jenny that she thought I had escaped from a cult. Not too far off the truth.
During the course of the evening I discovered that Jolene was a finder-tracker and Josh’s older sister. Trevor was an electrokinetic and a computer whiz, and Josh was a pyromancer and the brawn of their group.
I tried to relax, but the only times in my life when I’d been in social situations I was on a mission, and old habits were hard to break. I found myself memorizing the faces of everyone who came within ten feet of our table, and by the end of the evening, I knew the body language—every expression and gesture—of the people sitting with me.
Josh drank heavily, just as he did when he came into Rosie’s, and got louder and more obnoxious as the evening wore on. The louder he got, the quieter Jolene got and the more Trevor tried to talk to me and divert my attention. I had danced with Josh a couple of times, and he kept his hands to himself, but his leering and fixation on my chest made me uncomfortable. Trevor, on the other hand, always smiled at me, and when he ran his eyes up and down, it gave me kind of a warm feeling.
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