by Jenn Burke
But would this usage count as personal benefit? I had to guess it would—which meant it shouldn’t have worked. If they’d somehow cast a spell to make Iskander compliant for the sole purpose of getting access to his referral code and then another to make him forget...
Okay, but what the hell? Why would they want to contact me so badly? And then, once they got my coordinates, why be all bull in the china shop with their emails?
Whatever the reason, it was clear Iskander was compromised. Which—fuck.
“Isk, you know what I’ve got to do now,” I said solemnly. “I appreciate all the business you’ve sent my way.”
Iskander sighed. “I appreciate all the wins you’ve helped me tally up.”
“Take care of yourself.”
“You too.”
I hung up, popped the back off my phone, removed my SIM card, and broke it in two. Recreating my electronic network was not how I’d pictured spending my evening, but it was the nature of the game.
And once I’d gotten my professional stuff back up and running, I needed to call Lexi to determine what the limits of magic truly were.
Chapter Seven
After staying up all night to wipe my presence from the web, resurrect my business with new IPs and email addresses, and then reach out to my remaining network to inform them of the change in contact information, the worst possible thing happened just as I was eying my bed and fantasizing about how good it would feel to be horizontal.
Someone knocked on my door.
My internal—and okay, external—grumbles faded as soon as I saw Lexi in the hallway, eyes red, nose stuffed, and looking absolutely wretched.
“Did you break up?” I asked gently.
She shook her head and walked forward into my arms. I kicked the door shut behind her and listened as she explained in a broken voice how she’d confronted Marissa, and they’d argued, but hadn’t actually said the words that they were done.
Privately, I thought it would have been better if they had, but I got it. Three years was hard to throw away, especially since it hadn’t always been this fraught between them. I ushered Lexi to the couch, got her set up with a blanket cocoon, and made tea.
I could’ve used the caffeine from coffee, but this wasn’t about me.
When I got back to the living room, Lexi was rifling through the papers scattered on my coffee table. “You burned another network?”
Although I changed emails frequently, I’d only burned an entire network twice in the past ten years. She’d seen me do it before, so she recognized the signs. “Had to.”
I let out a heavy breath as I sat on the couch beside her, close enough that our hips touched, and shared the story about Iskander and the mystery visitor.
When I was done, she echoed my pronouncement of the day before. “That’s fucking weird.”
“Tell me about it.” I shifted on the couch so I was sideways, facing her with my legs crossed, and leaned against the armrest. “So, messing with someone’s mind—is that something you can do?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Technically? Yes. But I never would.”
“Of course not.”
“It brushes too close to personal gain, and if the magic goes wonky...” She grimaced.
“Are you saying the spell shouldn’t have worked?”
“If it’s a spell,” Lexi said with a raised brow. “You have no proof.”
“Let’s say we know for a fact it’s a spell.” I ignored her eye roll. “How difficult would it be to cast? On a scale of one to ten.”
“Fifty.”
“Be serious.”
“I am serious. This isn’t something people mess around with. Where’s your computer?”
“Why?”
“Let me do some digging on the TWW and I’ll get you some better answers.”
The TWW—TechnoWitchWeb—was Lexi’s favorite online playground. It was like the dark web, but with fewer bomb recipes and more magic. Lexi relocated to the kitchen table with my machine and I stretched out on the couch, hoping I’d actually be able to nap. Even a catnap would be welcome. But my body was booking on bedtime or nothing, so I ended up lying there with my eyes closed in some weird non-sleeping purgatory while Lexi tapped away on the keyboard.
After an indeterminate amount of time, she crowed, “Personal gain.”
Maybe I had actually fallen asleep, because it took me a moment to make sense of her words. “What?”
“Personal gain,” she repeated. The kitchen chair scraped against the linoleum and she appeared in the living room a second later. “That’s the general consensus. No matter the reasoning behind spells that mess with the mind, they always have an element of personal gain. They’re not reliable.”
I rubbed sleep dust out of my eyes and tried to get with the program. “Except this one worked.”
“If it was a spell.” She braced her butt against the arm of the couch. “Are you absolutely sure?”
“Iskander’s a good guy.”
“Yeah, but stress could have made him act strangely. Or...” She shrugged one shoulder. “Drugs. Alcohol.”
“He’s not like that.”
“How well do you know this guy?”
And that was the rub, wasn’t it? I didn’t really know him, just as he didn’t know me. But my instincts said he was good people, and I tried to listen to them as much as possible. “Well enough to know this has never happened before.”
She brushed a hand over my messy waves in acknowledgment. “Fair enough.”
“Regardless of the how, there’s still the why. Why go through all that trouble just to get a referral code to meet with me?”
“I think that’s the question you should be scared of.”
My heart thumped hard, because—yeah. She was right.
* * *
Lexi left around dinnertime to have a follow-up talk with Marissa, which I hoped would go better than the first. I considered heading to bed, but figured if I did I would be up at 3:00 a.m. So I held off, thinking I’d go to bed right before my usual time, and get myself back on schedule.
The best intentions and all that.
It seemed like I’d barely closed my eyes before something woke me. Thuds on my door. I thought for a second it might be Lexi again, but she never knocked on my door like that, all authoritative and belligerent. I flung the blankets away from my face long enough to yell, “You’ve got the wrong apartment!” before diving back into my fluff pile.
The bursts of heavy knocks slid into something more rhythmic, an indication that whoever was at my door had settled in for the long haul. I kicked the blankets off with severe prejudice. Who the fuck made that kind of noise at—I squinted at the clock—midnight? I scrambled out of bed and marched to the front door, bouncing off a doorjamb on my way. And banging my knee on the end table. And almost tripping over the edge of the throw rug.
I did not function well without sufficient sleep. I also did not think clearly, or else I might have checked the peephole in the door before flinging it open with a harried, “What?”
Hudson stood there in dark jeans and a black leather bomber jacket open over a plain gray T-shirt, revealing his badge on a chain. His gun sat on his hip, an unusual choice for him, and his hair was...not mussed, but definitely not as styled as when he wore a suit. Five o’clock shadow peppered his jaw, silver glinting among the darker shades.
“You’re not wearing a suit,” I observed. Call me Captain Obvious.
“Night off,” he said distractedly, his gaze traveling from my head down...down...down. The tip of his tongue emerged to wet his lips. “You’re not wearing clothes.”
I jerked my gaze away from him to look at myself and—yep, naked. “Christ,” I muttered, and darted back toward the bedroom.
“You know I’ve already seen it,” Hudson called after me. His voice was rag
ged, strained, as though he had to fight to get the words out. The door clicked shut behind him.
My dick suggested it might be attraction roughening his tone, but my dick was an idiot and way too interested in Hudson—always had been. I flicked the head before it got any grand ideas about standing up further and hissed at the flare of pain.
“That doesn’t mean you get free admission!” I shouted back.
The bite of pain and the shot of adrenaline burned off the sleep fuzzies, so I pulled on jeans, a T-shirt and a U of T hoodie. I didn’t bother trying to clean up any more than that.
When I reentered the living area, Hudson’s eyes widened. “Holy shit.”
I glanced behind me—because, okay, there was not enough adrenaline in the world to make me fully functional after the tiny amount of sleep I’d had. Of course, there was nothing there, and I realized Hudson had been reacting to me. “What?”
“I—It—” He shook his head. “Sometimes it’s like you walked out of my memories. You look—There’s nothing different about you. Like, at all. It’s...creepy.”
Well, there was my answer about how Hudson felt about me returning to his life. It was a short flight from being creeped out to resentment, right? They were at least in the same hemisphere. A different one from happiness and welcome.
See, Little Wes? No attraction.
Oblivious to how his words were pummeling me, Hudson continued. “It’s weird. I know, you know? That you haven’t changed and won’t ever change. But it hits me sometimes. Anyway, it’s not important.”
Not important? Way to twist the knife.
“Why didn’t you call like a civilized person?” I demanded, perching on the arm of the couch. At least then I could have ignored him until I’d gotten a nice eight hours of shuteye.
“Because someone changed his number and didn’t give me the new one.”
“Oh. Right.” I gave him a sheepish look. “Sorry. I had work stuff I had to deal with.”
“We’ll talk about that on the way.” He gestured at the door.
“On the way where?”
All humor fled Hudson’s expression. “There’s been another murder.”
Standing in my building’s small parking lot, I stared at Hudson’s ride.
Never a car guy, I couldn’t tell you what it was, other than big and red, with a black hood and jagged stripes running along the front fenders across the door on either side to the rear quarter panels. I assumed this was his personal vehicle, since the car he’d driven earlier was dark blue, staid and practical, and screamed cop.
“You realize there’s nothing in the guy code that says you have to drive the loudest vehicle, right?”
Hudson started the car and revved it. I was right—the thing’s engine and exhaust were deafening. “Sorry, what? What was that?”
“I have neighbors, asshole.”
Was that a little flush of shame coloring Hudson’s cheeks?
“So who’s dead?” I asked as Hudson pulled out onto the street. Maybe more blunt than I should be, but damn it, I needed coffee. Or more sleep.
It didn’t look like I was going to get either.
“Cyril Horacek,” Hudson said, watching the road. “He’s—”
“I know the name.” Surprisingly, but in that vague where have I heard it before kind of way. “Isn’t he a photographer?”
“Bingo.” Hudson began listing off details and as he spoke, my memory filled in the blanks.
A Breath from Death. That exhibition was the reason his name still lingered in my brain. Everyone who’d been in Toronto in the midnineties—and of a decent age—would remember the controversial show, which featured photographs that captured subjects’ expressions in the moment before they thought they were going to die violently. The papers had had opinion pieces on it for weeks, feeding and being fed by copious amounts of letters from the public on how inappropriate and disgusting the concept was, and I couldn’t say they were wrong. How twisted do you have to be to let someone think you’re going to kill them so you could get that moment of horror, of ultimate truth, on film?
I wasn’t sure if I should admit I found the exhibit fascinating. It had made me wonder what I’d looked like in the moment before my own death. I remembered a flash of panic, an instant of regret. Had it appeared in my expression? Had Michael pulled the trigger despite it?
Cyril, a Czech immigrant, never married but had a string of girlfriends. He hadn’t had a new exhibit for years, so his name wasn’t quite what it had been in the nineties. According to Hudson’s extremely brief background check, he lived in a converted warehouse near Cherry Beach that served as his studio as well as his residence, and that’s where his body had been found by his agent. She’d been concerned that he hadn’t returned her call within a few hours, which was abnormal behavior for him, so she’d let herself into his apartment and received the worst shock anyone could have.
On the surface he had no connection to Meredith Montague beyond them both being members of Toronto’s wealthy and famous, so why the hell was Hudson dragging me out to this scene?
When I asked the question, Hudson kept his eyes on the road. “I heard the call—”
“Of course you were listening to your radio on your night off.”
He ignored me. “And something just pinged. A hunch.”
“Uh-huh.” I squinted at him. “Where’s Edward Harris?”
His jaw worked for a moment. “He had a rock-solid alibi for Amrita’s murder. He was being held on a drunk and disorderly when she went missing.”
“And Meredith’s?”
“He was at a pub near his house. Multiple witnesses.”
Which meant that Edward’s supposed connection to two murders was nonexistent. I made a triumphant noise.
Glancing at me, Hudson warned, “Don’t say it.”
“I—”
“I’m serious, Wes. Don’t.”
“—told you so.”
He growled. I grinned.
Cyril’s neighborhood was not the sort you’d expect a rich guy to live in. It was kind of run down, actually—a testament to a bygone era of industry that no one was interested in preserving. In fact, the city had been studying and planning for years how to redevelop and modernize the area. The only real difference between this stretch along Cherry Street and the industrial park where Edward Harris worked was that this was on the lake rather than landlocked in a suburb. Cyril’s warehouse looked like the oldest of its compatriots, with red brick worn enough in places to shine kind of pink in the streetlights, and huge rectangular windows that looked to have their original leaded glass—or a close approximation. A small parking lot was filled with police cruisers, both marked and not, an ambulance and a coroner’s van. None of them had their lights on, and there was no crowd of curious onlookers.
Hudson pulled to a stop a short distance from the other vehicles, and I shifted to face him. “What exactly do you expect me to do here?”
“I’m not sure,” he admitted, tapping a finger on the steering wheel.
“Because I didn’t find anything at Meredith’s when I did my ghost investigation thing.”
“I know.”
“And there’s no killer hanging out here—unless he’s completely crazy.”
“I know.”
“So... I could be sleeping right now.”
That snapped Hudson out of his thinking milieu. “Christ. I thought you wanted to help.”
“I do, but this?” I waved a hand at the cop cars parked haphazardly in front of the warehouse. “This is your world, not mine. I’m no detective. So I don’t know what you’re expecting, but—”
“I’m expecting that you’re going to go in there and look at things from a perspective that no one else has. Maybe you’ll find something, maybe you won’t. Hell, maybe this murder isn’t connected to Meredith Montague’s
at all, and I’m going to look like an idiot showing up on my night off for a case I shouldn’t be involved in. All I know is that we’re at a standstill with her murder, so I’m going to use any advantage I have—anything, anyone, including you—to help me solve this.” He unbuckled his seat belt, got out of the car, and slammed the door.
Mic. Drop.
I leaned back against the headrest and watched Hudson stalk away. He was frustrated, and I wasn’t helping. I needed to get my head out of my ass, because I did want to help. Looking after number one and only number one—with the occasional expansion to look after Lexi—had become a habit. A nasty one. I was used to living my not-life according to whatever rules I had set up for myself, and ignoring or circumventing anything that challenged me in a way I didn’t want to be challenged. Self-interest had been a habit I learned early and often—it was difficult to expand your focus when you were trying to survive, whether as a teenager among rough out-of-work men or a newly minted not-ghost in an unfamiliar city.
Maybe there was more than a kernel of truth to the comments Hudson had made about me not changing. Not only physically, but mentally. Emotionally.
It was a scary thought.
I slipped into the otherplane and followed Hudson. Noise and light led me up a set of stairs, away from the dark first floor—Cyril’s studio, I assumed—and I found Hudson in the foyer of the apartment, now wearing gloves and booties and talking to the same figure he’d been speaking to at Meredith’s house. I recognized her voice and her slim but curvy shape, but I couldn’t discern any other details about her features. I brushed past Hudson, making him shiver, and he gave the barest of nods.
