“There are only a few streets that house could be on,” he said, “so we should find it pretty fast. And when we do, I’m going to give whoever sabotaged my spell a piece of my mind. And by that, I mean a hard slap with magic.”
“And by magic,” Kat said, chuckling, “you mean my magic, since you used up all of your own.”
He deflated. “Oh damn. I forgot about that.”
She patted his shoulder. “It’s okay. I won’t mention your performance issues to anyone.”
Liam scowled. “Very funny.”
“Hey, don’t look at me like that. You’re the one who spent three whole years letting your magic atrophy.”
He deflated even further, like a popped balloon animal. “In hindsight, that was a terrible decision.”
“Well, at least you can undo its consequences, yeah?”
“Oh yeah. It’ll just take me another three years.”
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a little hard work.”
“Hey, I bring home the bacon in this relationship.”
Kat raised an eyebrow. “Oh, it’s a relationship now, is it?”
Liam, realizing what he’d implied, flushed from his neck all the way up to his ears. Backpedaling, he sputtered, “Well, I mean, technically, any sort of frequent interaction between people counts as some type of relationship.”
“Uh-huh.” Kat observed him with a fake suspicious side-eye for several seconds, making him so uncomfortable he turned an interesting shade of purple, before she burst out laughing. “You’re such a smooth talker, Detective Crown. I can see why you solved so many crimes back in the day.” She paused. “Oh wait. That was your magic, wasn’t it?”
He beat his head against the steering wheel. “You can stop rubbing my face in my follies anytime now.”
“When you no longer faint after casting a scrying spell, I promise I’ll stop.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Life’s not fair.”
He turned sharply onto a one-way street. So sharply that Kat got thrown sideways and smooshed up against the window. “You’re being very mean tonight,” he muttered.
Kat peeled herself off the window and shrugged. “Yun said that sensitive insults motivate you to work harder than anything else.”
Liam looked legitimately offended. “That little bitch. I’m going to…”
“You’re going to what?” Kat asked. “Get your ass zapped?”
He sighed. “Yeah, probably.”
They lapsed into a companionable silence, both of them having run out of playful barbs. Kat spent the rest of the ride familiarizing herself with a part of the city she hadn’t been to before. The office buildings and strip malls and dime-a-dozen banks gave way first to duplexes and townhouses and then to single-family homes tucked inside the narrow stretches of woodland that provided the illusion of privacy in a metro area where there could be none.
They skirted around the north side of a park whose key feature was the large oak tree that Kat had glimpsed in the scrying mirror, its enormous branches bare and dusted white with frost. Four stone benches encircled the base of the tree, and a metal plaque lettered in gold filigree had been erected between two of them.
Kat sharpened her eyesight to nonhuman levels as they sat at a red light adjacent to the park, and she managed to make out the gist of the paragraph on the plaque, which described the tree’s history.
Hm, I bet that’s a popular picnic spot in the summertime, she thought. She had yet to experience a warm day in Salem’s Gate, but if her luck with A9 held long enough, she might one day find herself eating lunch on a bench beneath the magnificent old tree.
The light changed, and Liam turned left, taking them down a road that branched off into three nearly identical cul-de-sacs. Two of the cul-de-sacs were still and dark, the only illumination the soft yellow glows cast from a handful of shaded windows. The third cul-de-sac was busy and bright, a disorienting mess of red and blue lights flashing atop half a dozen different police vehicles, a fire truck, and two ambulances.
Liam brought the SUV to a sudden stop. “Oh crap.”
“Let me guess”—Kat leaned forward to get a better look at the house in front of which all these vehicles were parked—“that’s the house the scrying spell showed us.”
“Yep. That’s it.”
Kat rapped her knuckles on the dashboard, nervous energy building in her muscles. “Scrying spells show you stuff in real time, right?”
“They do indeed.” He ran a hand through his hair, frustrated. “Which means that whatever happened here happened after I cast the spell. Because if it had happened before, we would’ve seen all the flashing lights in the image on the mirror.”
“Should we go over there and ask what happened?” Kat pointed to a small gathering of neighborhood residents who were chatting with each other just past the yellow police tape that the cops had hastily strung up in an uneven line.
“We have to.” Liam put the SUV into reverse and backed into the first driveway that wasn’t occupied by a vehicle. As he cut the engine, he finished, “The cops aren’t going to let us into the house, so we’ll have to glean what we can from the witnesses and hope someone saw enough to give us a good idea of what went down.”
“Can you not, I don’t know, schmooze your way inside by flattering your old cop pals?” Kat knew that was a lot to ask—the police reminded Liam of the accident, the one that cost him his wife and son—but this situation appeared to be rolling down a dangerous hill and rapidly picking up speed.
Kat was growing afraid that it would crash into something when it reached the bottom and do a great deal of damage, likely to innocent people. That was usually how public supernatural altercations ended, at least in her limited experience.
Liam grimaced. “I’ll, uh, see who’s on scene. If there’s somebody I know, they might be willing to throw me a bone. Maybe give me a summary of the incident. But I seriously doubt they’ll let me in without a badge. Crime scene access is strictly controlled, because the forensic evidence needs to remain intact until the crime scene team collects all the relevant bits.”
“Well, any info will help, seeing as we have none.”
“We do have some.” Liam unbuckled his seatbelt. “We know that someone involved in this incident, whatever it was, is a highly skilled magician.”
“Which means we should be on guard.” Kat unclipped her own seatbelt and popped her door open, the wintery air creeping into the cabin again. “Because the magician may still be somewhere nearby. They could even be on the property, hiding under a veil.”
“Exactly.” He tucked the keys into his coat pocket and grabbed his door handle. “Keep your magic at the ready. We could be walking into pretty much anything.”
Kat did as she was told, letting her magic energy gather just beneath the surface of her skin, as she and Liam strode into the cul-de-sac. Just before they reached the cluster of gawking onlookers, the front door of the house swung open. Two beefy men wearing loose white body suits emerged, carrying a black bag between them.
They hauled the bag down the front steps, across the lawn, and over to the paved driveway. Where, Kat could now see, with the view no longer obscured by all the emergency vehicles, two other body bags had already been laid out.
The men situated the third bag in line with the other two and signaled to a duo loitering near a gray van—the medical examiner’s van. The ME, assuredly inside the house, had finished the preliminary work on the bodies. Now it was time to load them up and take them to the morgue.
Three people dead, Kat thought sadly. Is one of them Luther Cunningham?
Liam, grim determination smeared across his face, pushed into the crowd of onlookers and pretended to be a concerned resident from another street in the neighborhood. Kat hung back at the edge of the crowd and watched him work several people for information, but none of them had seen anything of value.
With no more info to be had, Liam extricated himself from the crowd. He was making his way back to Kat when a woman called his name. Kat rose to her tiptoes to peer over the heads of the crowd, and found the caller was Frances Baker, the cop that Liam called “Franc.”
The woman stood behind the police tape and had clearly just emerged from the house. She was pale and a little green around the mouth, revolted by whatever had happened to the poor victims. She waved Liam over to the police tape, and Liam accordingly gestured for Kat to follow him there.
As they closed in, Franc shot Kat a wary look. Kat and Franc had seen each other from a distance before, but they’d never been formally introduced due to Liam’s aversion to his past.
Sensing Franc’s hesitation, Liam said, “Kat’s my assistant. Anything you can tell me, you can tell her.”
Franc didn’t relax, but she started talking to Liam anyway. “Please tell me the news hasn’t already hit the supernatural airwaves.”
Liam rocked back on his heels. “What news is that exactly?”
Franc bit her lip, glanced at the nearby crowd, and whispered conspiratorially, “The three victims were shifters. Peter, Lisa, and Lewis Avery.”
“Was it a hate crime?” Kat asked.
She had been keeping a close eye on the news these past few weeks, searching for any hint of A9 activity in what was reported, and what wasn’t, the latter of which would often filter in through the supernatural rumor mill. Slower than the primetime news, but also more accurate and unbiased.
No info that had come through either channel had pinged her keen A9 radar, but she had watched many news stories, and heard many more rumors, about rising anti-sup violence across the country. There had been five sup murders in the past three weeks that were thought to be the work of the same hate group.
Three of the victims were shifters, which wasn’t surprising. They were slower and weaker than vampires, even in animal form, and they couldn’t throw death spells at your face like magicians. They were the easiest group of sups to target.
Franc rolled her shoulders back, uncomfortable. “We can’t designate it a hate crime yet. The investigation is just getting started. But I can tell you that someone wanted these particular people dead. This was not a random attack. They were bound and then killed one at a time. Mother. Father. Son.”
Liam said through clenched teeth, “How old was the son?”
“Fourteen.” Franc shook her head. “It was the most gruesome murder scene I’ve come across in years.”
“What could a fourteen-year-old kid have done to anyone to incite that kind of violence?” Kat snapped.
“You’d be surprised.” Liam ground his boot against the asphalt. “Some people have a very short fuse and go berserk over the strangest things. A bump of shoulders in a public place. A simple cutoff in rush-hour traffic. Other people, worn down by years of fruitless struggle, are constantly teetering on the edge, waiting for a puff of wind to push them into an endless chasm of fury.”
“And some people just like to hurt others,” Franc added. “I hope that’s not the case here, but…I’m not optimistic. The perp spent too much time with the victims, hurt them in too many ways.”
Kat bit the inside of her cheek. “They were tortured?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Kat and Liam exchanged glances, each of them asking the other the same question: What could a mundane ad man like Luther Cunningham possibly have to do with a crime like this?
Franc picked up on their unspoken exchange. “So, if you guys didn’t hear about the murders through the grapevine, then why are you here?”
Kat watched Liam from the corner of her eye as he internally debated how much to tell Franc. He had spent a long time vehemently rejecting any significant interaction with the police. But tonight, he’d crossed paths with a criminal investigation in an irrevocable way.
If Liam chose to walk away without telling Franc some version of the truth—and Franc was obviously smart enough to ferret out any overt lies—he’d be trashing an extremely valuable resource that could very well help them locate their elusive ad man. If Liam chose to try and work past his reservations, and the trauma that had birthed them, then not only might they find Cunningham sooner, but they might also be able to help the police solve this heinous crime.
Please make the right choice, Liam, Kat silently begged. Don’t let the past get the better of you again.
Liam shut his eyes and sucked in a deep breath. As he let it out, white on the air, he said, “We’re looking for someone, and we have a good reason, a magic reason, to believe he was at this location a short time ago.”
Franc was taken aback. “Who?”
Liam dug his phone out of his coat pocket and brought up a picture of Cunningham. “This guy.”
Franc took a good look at the picture, and recognition slowly spread across her face. “That’s the ad guy, Luther Cunningham. The one who went missing recently.” She looked over her shoulder at the house of horrors. “He was here? You’re sure?”
“Not a hundred percent sure,” Liam admitted, “but a scrying spell I performed showed me this exact house, presumably around the same time the murders were taking place.”
Franc pursed her lips. “So this guy could be our killer.”
“Doesn’t sit right.” Liam put his phone away. “Guy’s a middle-aged businessman with a bald spot and a burgeoning beer gut, and he’s got no supernatural abilities. No way he murdered three shifters on his own.”
“Perhaps as part of a team then?” Franc shifted her weight from foot to foot as she contemplated. “Anti-sups usually work in groups, due to the inherent power differential.”
“Maybe, but I don’t yet have enough information to brand Cunningham a vicious murderer.” He rubbed his chin in that way he always did when trying to solve a puzzle. “Also, if he was plotting a triple murder, why disappear a few days in advance? That got him branded a missing person and sent the cops sniffing around his personal life, which is the last thing you want when you haven’t yet succeeded at committing your planned crime. Not to mention that it completely stripped him of an alibi, since he can’t claim he was at any of his usual haunts or with any of his usual associates while the crime was being committed.”
Franc crossed her arms. “You’re right. It doesn’t really jibe. But if he’s not a murderer, then why was he here while people were being murdered?”
“I don’t know yet.” Liam eyed the house again, his gaze drifting across the front wall. It paused on the living room windows, whose white curtains had been stained red in so many places that Kat had at first mistaken it for a crimson floral pattern. “But I’m going to find out.”
Franc abruptly reached out and grasped Liam’s hand. “I know you don’t want anything to do with us, Liam, but if you stumble onto something dangerous, please contact us. Whoever is responsible for what happened inside that house is not someone you should take on yourself. I know you’ve got magic and friends with magic, but this is too serious for a PI to tackle. So if you get any good leads, call us immediately. Please. We’ll pay you a consulting fee. We’ll give you the credit. Whatever you want.”
“You make big promises for a beat cop,” Liam said, trying to veer off topic.
Franc didn’t bite. “Nice try, but I just passed my sergeant’s exam, and I have the captain’s ear after I stopped a couple jewelry store robbers from getting away with a cool million in priceless gems last month. So yeah, I can make big promises.”
Liam pressed his free hand to the back of his mouth, and for a second, Kat saw all the pain from his past flash through his watery blue eyes in a powerful wave of sorrow. Somehow though, he suppressed it before it overwhelmed him. He rep
lied, “All right. If I learn anything about Cunningham on the supernatural side, I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks.” Franc squeezed his hand. “I mean it, Liam. I really appreciate it.”
I know how much this hurts you, how much you struggle, she didn’t say, leaving Liam’s pride intact.
Liam, at his limit, pulled his hand from her grasp and turned to Kat. “We should get out of here. Looks like we’re going to have a long night ahead of us.”
“You think this needs to be solved in a hurry?” Kat gulped, the image of the bloody curtains haunting the edge of her vision. “You think this might happen again?”
“Whenever a sup killer isn’t caught, it always emboldens others to attempt copycat crimes,” Franc said. “If we don’t solve this one fast, there will be more sup deaths. And if the sup community gets too riled up by those deaths, then…”
“We’ll have another sup riot,” Liam finished, “and we’ll find ourselves digging mass graves by Christmas.”
4
Liam
After talking to Franc, Liam felt like he was swimming in syrup, his every muscle fiber weighed down. He wasn’t ready to associate so closely with the police again, but Franc was right about this incident.
A missing persons case was one thing. Rarely did those turn out to have more complicated explanations than “they ran away” or “they committed suicide.” A murder investigation was on a whole different playing field. People who committed triple murders almost never had qualms with trying to off anyone who got in their way. If Liam and Kat came upon these people, there was a fair chance they wouldn’t emerge from the resulting conflict unscathed.
At the same time, however, he thought as he turned the Wrangler back onto the highway, the cul-de-sac once more hidden behind its curtain of trees, Kat and I have fought comparable foes. And if nothing else, having an unaffiliated supernatural element working to solve the crime alongside the cops may help ease some of the tension that will inevitably build between the mundane and supernatural communities in the coming days.
Ask and Answer Page 4
