by D. N. Hoxa
“You think I’m going to try to escape, don’t you.” It wasn’t even a question. He only shrugged and stopped in front of the second door on the left. The silver sign to the side of it said Detective R.J. Dumont in cursive letters.
I was going to say something, but then he opened the door and I was struck speechless.
The office was decent-sized, with a big desk in the middle, easily three times the size of those in the cubicles. A computer and lots of files on it. On the side walls were two white boards filled with markers of all colors, and to the side of them were wooden boards with pictures pinned on them. The one on the right was a mess I couldn’t even recognize.
The one on the right was all about me.
I didn’t even know there was that much information to be had about me. A picture of me when I was eighteen years old, still living in Nana’s Enclave, was right in the middle of the board. I’d had both my eyes then. I looked so, so different. Auburn hair fell straight on my shoulders. Avery had cut it for me that time, and one side was longer than the other. It was the best haircut I’d ever had. I wore a white shirt that somehow made me look brighter, less pale, and my eyes looked bluer because of the bright blue sky behind me. To the side was Nana’s Enclave, and though it looked the same as it did now, in that picture it gave me a different feeling. A feeling of home.
Around it, there were a lot of smaller pictures, and the one closest to me was of Avery. She was the same age as me and was photographed in the exact same spot. All of us had been, for Nana’s yearly album. She kept it to herself and didn’t even let us see the pictures. Avery looked so fresh, so full of life, her straight, dark hair reaching all the way to her waist. Her light chocolate skin glowed under the sun, flawless. Her black eyes were two bottomless pits filled with positivity and affection. God, how I missed her and her cheeky smile.
Katherine, Victor, Barbara, Kole—all students in Nana’s Enclave at the time. Newspaper articles were next, lots of them, most without pictures, but some of them with. Like the biggest one, with a factory burning, the flames rising so high, you’d think they touched the sky. My heart broke into a thousand pieces just to see that place again. The place where I’d lost everything.
“So you were investigating me,” I said breathlessly, as Dumont went and sat behind his desk. I’d made it to the middle of the room and stopped to see my side of the wall.
“One of my first cases when I became a detective—the only one I haven’t solved yet,” Dumont said.
I turned around and looked at him. “What do you mean, solve?” As far as I knew, the case was considered solved. I’d been labeled a murderer, the Magian Ministry had put a price on my head, and I’d been on the run ever since.
“Sit down, Ruby,” Dumont said, putting Collins’s envelope on the desk. There were three chairs against the wall next to his desk, and I went and grabbed one. “I know you’ve wondered why I’ve let you loose since you came back here. I’ve been watching you for quite some time now and know everywhere you’ve been, everything you’ve done.”
“Bullshit,” I said without missing a beat. “You’d have arrested me long ago if you knew.”
Dumont’s expression didn’t change. “And I wanted to. I was ordered to, but after following you around for almost six months, I began to realize that we might not have heard all the sides of that story.” He pointed his pen at the board. He meant the factory fire.
“So what? You intentionally disobeyed your orders?” It was laughable at best.
“You were labeled a murderer four years ago, yet in the four years you’ve been on the run, you’ve never killed anyone.”
“Sure I have.” I hadn’t. And he apparently knew it. Somehow.
“You’ve never caused any trouble, never robbed anyone, never picked fights.”
“Wrong!” I said with a grin. “I’ve been in at least a dozen fights.” And the last one had been in Pushka’s bar in Nashville.
“But you didn’t start them,” Dumont insisted. “So, yes, Ruby, I was keeping an eye on you before, and that’s what I did when you came back to the city. I gave you a chance to prove yourself.”
I rolled my eyes. “And, let me guess, I blew it.”
“Not really, no. You came up with information I don’t have, because the last detective who was put on this case before me didn’t do shit. I don’t regret letting you roam around here freely.”
“Wow, is that Jupiter or your ego?” He claimed that he was the only reason why I hadn’t gotten caught in Richmond, but we both knew that wasn’t true. At least not the whole truth. Because he’d wanted to catch me at Cornelius Graneheart’s Enclave. He’d shifted into a tiger, and after witnessing him tearing those dog creatures apart yesterday, I realized he only shifted when he meant business.
“I’m trying to explain to you why I didn’t come after you,” he said, somewhat angry.
I nodded. “And I understand.” He didn’t say it in so many words, but he believed I was innocent. Or, at least, not as guilty as everyone else thought I was. And I appreciated that. “And thank you for convincing Ford to let me help you with this. Finding Nana is very important to me, Dumont. Very important.”
“So let’s get to it. We only have one day.” He emptied the contents of the folder on his desk. I grabbed my phone lightning fast, afraid he’d stop me, but he didn’t. I immediately sent a text to Logan to tell him that I was okay and that I’d explain everything as soon as I could. Hopefully he wasn’t in the neighborhood about to burn the building to the ground.
“Just to be sure, you took down the price on my head, right?”
“I did,” he confirmed. What a relief. I felt a thousand times better already.
“Nice,” I said, and looked at the things Dumont was putting in order: the napkin, the Enclave picture, the cut newspaper articles and the notebook of Lee Collins, and two pictures of the runes I’d taken with my phone. He’d printed them. “I stand by what I said earlier to Ford. He and his Enclave pissed someone off back in the day. Otherwise Sasha Fortine wouldn’t have left this for me.” I pointed at the picture.
“Possible,” said Dumont, scratching his chin. “But Ford’s Enclave brought out some of the most powerful magians of their generation, so it could also be possible that someone is looking for a big magic source, and that’s why he targeted all of them.”
Yeah, okay, that made sense. “But he went really far. I mean, really far to get them. Do you realize how powerful Nana is? I’m guessing the rest of the high priests are just as powerful. If he’d wanted a magic source, he could have easily targeted weaker magians in a bigger number. It would have been much easier.” At least that’s what I would have done.
“But why the Egyptian runes?” he wondered.
“No idea. We’re all taught from early on that you just don’t use them.”
“And trying to find even one simple spell is almost impossible, which makes me wonder if this guy had access to resources normal people don’t.”
I nodded. “That makes perfect sense.”
“In which case, the main sources of Egyptian rune scripts that I just ordered for our station should help us narrow this down a bit.”
“Oh! That’s smart. Really smart, Detective.” I grinned.
“I’m a really smart guy, Ruby,” he said with a smile that went away quickly.
“We hired a hacker to find information on the people on this picture, but I’m betting you have better resources, don’t you?”
“Already done. We should have the files within the next couple hours.”
“And also the translation of the runes. You probably—”
He cut me off. “Professionals will look into them as soon as we get the scripts.”
Damn, he was good. “You know what’s strange?” I grabbed one of the newsletter pieces that Lee Collins had so carefully cut out. “Why would this guy have all of these?”
Dumont shook his head. “No idea.”
“The way I understand it is that t
he magic blasts happen without rhyme or reason.” That’s what we’d been told all along, anyway, and what made the most sense.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“But why would Collins keep these? What if he knew something we don’t?” I looked through all the newspaper articles, and they all showed the same news with different locations. Magic blast, turning people, magian and human alike, batshit crazy for a couple hours, some for a few days, and only a small percentage suffered permanent damage.
“It would explain why he ran away from his apartment,” Dumont said. “The others were caught in their homes, but he’d already left when you went to check.”
“He and Sasha Fortine,” I said in a whisper. I hadn’t told this to Ford because I’d been afraid of what that would mean for me, but now that Dumont and I were alone, and he’d practically admitted to my face that he thought I wasn’t the murdering monster everyone had painted me to be, it was time to spill the beans.
“When Marcus first came to find me in Nashville to tell me about Nana’s disappearance, he also had a message for me. From Nana.” I looked down at the desk. I noticed Dumont freezing, but he said nothing. “She told him to tell me to find my father.”
“What?” he asked in disbelief.
I shrugged innocently. “And Sasha Fortine called me yesterday, too. Told me the same thing—to find my father.”
“Records show that your father is dead,” Dumont said.
“He is, but according to Sasha, his remains can still be used for whatever game this asshole’s playing.”
“That’s possible.”
“Also, since you’ve turned the security code on my phone off, I’m guessing you already went through it. Bet you can track the number that called me, right? It was private.”
“We’ll definitely look into that,” Dumont said. I didn’t have too much hope because wherever Sasha Fortine had been, it had sounded like she was running, and the fact that she’d called me meant that she still hadn’t been caught at that point. But it was worth a try. “But why would they tell you to look for your father’s remains?”
“No idea.” We all knew that my father was dead.
Dumont remained silent for a few seconds. I wanted to explain to him why I’d said nothing to Ford about this, but when I looked up, I found him staring at Sasha’s picture. Intently. Like his whole being seemed focused on it.
So I looked, too.
His finger slowly stopped on one of the two faces the hacker hadn’t been able to find anything on.
“You couldn’t find anything on these two, correct?”
Suddenly, my ears whistled. “Correct.” My voice came out dry.
Oh, my God.
Dumont looked up at me, and I could see the sorry in his eyes clear as day.
So I shook my head. No.
“It would make sense,” he whispered, but I shook my head again.
How had this not occurred to me earlier? What the hell was wrong with me?
“Ruby, Ford said that these two men were dead. He confirmed it himself,” Dumont continued.
I jumped to my feet, unable to stay in one place. And I needed to get away from that picture.
“No, no, no, there has to be something else.” Because what he was saying couldn’t be true.
That one of the two unidentified males in the picture was my father, which would explain why Nana and Sasha wanted me to find his remains. Because they knew that whoever’s doing this would be looking for them, too.
But that was ridiculous because it would mean that Nana and my father were in the same Enclave. And I knew too much to entertain the idea that she hadn’t known. That it had been just an accident.
Nana always knew. Nana never had accidents.
“Nothing that would make more sense,” Dumont said. “Tanana wanted you to find your father, and so did Sasha Fortine.” He looked up at me, but I refused to acknowledge him. “It would explain why she left this picture to you.”
My hands flew up to cover my face as tears stung my good eye. I didn’t want to believe it. Screw what Dumont said. It was too much to handle right now.
“It doesn’t matter,” I heard myself say. “It doesn’t matter.” But it did.
“Of course it matters. If you’d have told me earlier, I could have found out where your father was buried,” Dumont said, pissed off. He grabbed his phone and called a number, but I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted nothing more than to run away from there, to just run and not care about where I was going.
But I was stuck in that office, and the only place I could go was the other side of it. I ignored the pictures on the board as well as I could and tried to focus on my breathing. It was okay. I would get through this. There was an explanation for all of this. And Dumont probably had it all wrong. Nana wouldn’t keep something like that from me. She’d lied to me, countless times, but this? This was big, even for her.
So it couldn’t be true. Whatever the reason why Nana and Sasha wanted me to find my father, they could tell me all about it when we found them.
And I decided to stick to that thought for now.
“Ruby, can you hear me?!”
I spun around fast to find Dumont on his feet, a hand over his phone as he looked at me with eyes wide.
“What?”
“I’ve been calling you,” he said, but I hadn’t heard a thing. “What’s your father’s name?”
My father’s name?
I had no idea.
“I don’t know,” I whispered, completely panicked. Never before did I think I’d need to know his name. And when I’d asked Nana once, she said she didn’t know, either. I’d only remembered my name, not his.
“I’ll call you back,” Dumont said, looking at me like I was a lunatic.
Think, think, think! I urged myself. There had to be a way…
I grabbed one of the yellow post-its on Dumont’s desk and wrote down an address. “This is where we lived when the building burned down and my father died.”
Dumont took the post-it in his hand and looked at the address. “No, this isn’t where you lived.”
You’ve got to be shitting me. “Of course it is. Nana told me the address. The building burned down, and a new one was constructed in its place.”
He looked like he was about to have a heart attack. “She never told me this,” he said. “I asked her and she never mentioned knowing where you came from.”
I flinched. “She did know how to keep secrets.” Unfortunately for the both of us.
Dumont took a picture of the address and sent it to someone. He rubbed his face raw and the tension in his shoulders made me tense, too. Easier to focus on that than…other things.
“Ford knew, too,” Dumont said. “He knew and he didn’t say anything today.”
There he went again. “It doesn’t matter.” Couldn’t he see that I was trying to fool myself? I would have, and I was half blind.
“We need the name of the other,” Dumont continued as if he hadn’t heard me. “We need to know everything about these people.”
“We already know the most important thing: they’re all gone. Some dead, some taken. But you know who could give us information that Ford refuses to give?”
His eyes sparkled with recognition. “Cornelius Graneheart.” Exactly my thoughts. He’d somehow survived, and… “He’s in a coma, Ruby. Nobody thinks he’s going to make it.”
“Come the fuck on!” Slam another door in my face, will you.
“It’s a miracle he managed to even get away when none of the others could,” he said.
“Except he didn’t get away. That fucking grim reaper wannabe is really pissing me off.”
“You said you saw him in Gwendolyn Love’s Enclave. Do you think you could ID him?”
I shook my head. “All I saw was his shadow, a silhouette. He was covered in a cloak or something, hood drawn and everything. And the smoke made it impossible to make anything out, except Gwendolyn’s body in his arms.”
�
��But you think he’s a guy.”
“I know he’s a guy. No woman could have carried another the size of Gwendolyn as easily as that.” Gwendolyn was curvy, and she was really tall. She had to weigh at least a hundred and eighty pounds.
Dumont fell into his chair with a loud sigh. “I keep thinking I’m missing something, something that has to do with you.”
“Me?”
“Tanana asked for you specifically. There’s a reason why and it could clear all this up for us if we knew.”
“Well, let’s ask her the next time we see her.” If she was still alive by then. “How long until you get something back we can work on?” He said he had people working on translating the runes and getting as much information as they could on the Ford Enclave and on my father. Until we knew more, there really wasn’t much we could do here but wonder.
“A couple hours hopefully. Why, you in a hurry?” he said with a grin.
“Actually, I was thinking about going out to grab a bite to eat.” In fact, I wanted to go see Logan. Not that I’d missed him or anything. But it was important to tell him about what had happened. You know, for the sake of the case. Never mind that I did not want him to find Nana.
“If you need to eat, we can order in,” Dumont said, pointing at his phone.
“No, I’d rather eat out.”
He laughed dryly. “You don’t think I’m going to leave you out of my sight, Ruby, do you? I mean, Ford gave you twenty-four hours, and then you’re going to jail.”
“How’s that fair? You’re literally using me. They have to at least consider the help I’m willing to give to the MM.”
“Not at all. You will be arrested, and you will answer for your crimes.”
My jaw hit the floor. “But you just said that you didn’t think I was a murderer!”
“All the proof we have says you are. Nobody’s going to listen to me, or they would have by now. The proof is what matters.” He shook his index finger at me. “Now, if you were smart, you’d tell me your side of the story, and show me how to get evidence and witnesses, and then things just might change for you.”
