Ask and Answer

by Clara Coulson

  Kat beamed. “Awesome.”

  Cortez cleared her throat. “One question. How are you going to get a blood sample from one of the victims? Franc?”

  Liam shook his head. “Blood samples are locked up real tight these days, in warded containers, in titanium safes, in precinct evidence rooms that require multiple biometric scans to enter. Largely because the police had an awfully hard time holding on to blood, hair, and skin samples in the first few years following the Unveiling. Once it was decided that the mundane police were legally allowed to pursue supernatural criminals, DNA evidence had this funny habit of simply ‘poofing’ out of existence.”

  “So Franc can’t get to it,” Kat said.

  “No, she can’t. The chain of evidence is too tightly controlled. After collection, the only people allowed to touch forensic evidence are the lab workers who do the analyses. If the evidence goes anywhere it’s not supposed to, the courts will throw it out in a heartbeat. There are simply too many ways to corrupt evidence with literal magic on the game board.”

  Cortez gave Liam a puzzled look. “Then how are you going to obtain a blood sample?”

  “Easy,” Liam said, in a way that implied his forthcoming solution would be anything but, “we’ll sneak into the murder scene and collect our own.”

  6

  Liam

  “We’re going to get arrested,” Kat said for the ninth time.

  Liam shushed her again and crept up to the hedge, peering through a tiny gap between the pointy leaves at the back door of the house where the Avery family had been murdered. They’d parked half a mile away from the cul-de-sac—and left Gabby, who’d insisted on tagging along, at the wheel, as their “getaway driver.” Then they’d jogged up from the opposite direction they’d come from last time, crossing several back yards on tiptoes.

  Now, they were crouched behind the shed of the house next door to the murder scene. On this side, the street view of the Avery house’s back yard was largely obstructed by the attached garage. So Liam and Kat would only have to spend a second out in the open to cross the five-foot gap between the hedge and the garage.

  Liam would’ve preferred not to be in the open at all. But when they’d come up the adjacent street, intending to pass through the patch of woods behind the house, they’d found the path blocked by two cop cars parked in the ditch in order to prevent the pushy press from doing the same thing. They had no choice but to risk being seen as they dashed toward the back side of the house.

  Not that Liam was worried the mundanes would see them; they were going to wear veils when they broke in. Rather, it was the sups he was worried about. In particular, the angry shifters who’d gathered on the street in front of the house, crowding out the neighborhood residents and scaring most of the humans away with vicious snarls and growls.

  The news about the murders was spreading fast, and the shifter community was getting riled up.

  “One good thing,” Liam said quietly, mindful of the shifters’ keen hearing, “is that they’re drawing the attention of the cops.”

  There had been two cops stationed at the rear of the house when they first arrived, one on the back door and one on the exterior garage door. But both had been called over to help with crowd control as the shifter group grew denser and angrier. Now, the back yard was completely unguarded, so they’d have no trouble slipping in through one of the doors or windows.

  The only potential issue was what they’d find inside.

  “Crime Scene Unit is done, it looks like.” Liam pointed to the CSU van, which was slowly backing out of the driveway. “But the detectives or other personnel might still be inside. They haven’t sealed the scene yet.”

  He gestured to the two visible doors, neither of which sported the paper seals that the cops used to indicate a crime scene was contained within. “Just to be on the safe side, we’ll need to keep our veils up the entire time we’re on the premises.”

  Kat frowned. “Veils require steady, continuous energy input, which isn’t exactly my forte.”

  Liam dug around in his pocket and tugged out a small metal ring, offering it to Kat. “This should help.”

  Kat took the ring, skeptical. “What’s it do? I can see it’s got some kind of spell etched into it, but I can’t make heads or tails of the intended effect.” She clicked her tongue. “Clearly, I need to spend more time studying.”

  “Well, essentially, it’s a magic regulator.” He mimed putting on the ring to spur Kat to do so. “It’s something I’ve been working on to help you control your magic in the short term. The design’s not quite polished yet—it can’t handle but so much energy—but it should work well enough to help you stabilize a veil.”

  Kat slipped the ring onto her index finger, looking mildly impressed. “You didn’t tell me you were working on this.”

  Liam smiled sheepishly. “I didn’t want to tell you about it before I was sure it would work. My first few attempts…didn’t go so well.”

  Kat’s lips curled up. “You should be more confident in yourself. You might not pack a huge magic punch, but you really are skilled at spell design. The Circle doesn’t know what they’re missing.”

  Liam’s smile turned genuine. “Thanks for the pep talk.”

  “Anytime.” Kat waggled her finger. “Now, how do I use this thing?”

  Liam gave Kat a simple three-step explanation for how to link the regulator to her magic store so that her energy went through it before acting in accordance with the parameters of a casting. “It’ll work as long as the spell does because it runs off your own energy, so you don’t have to worry about doing anything to maintain its effects after the initial activation.”

  “Cool.” She adjusted the ring. “I’d have preferred to take it for a test run before using it to break into an active crime scene and risk landing in the slammer. But I don’t guess we have time for that, with psychos running around town murdering shifters.”

  “Sometimes, a trial by fire is the only way to go.” Liam shrugged. “You memorized the incantation for that veil spell I showed you, right?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, and I practiced casting it too, while you were on that stakeout last Tuesday.”

  “Good.” Liam peeked back through the bushes, eying the escalating confrontation between the furious shifters and the wary police. Franc was among the cops, speaking into her radio handset, presumably calling for backup.

  Liam and Kat wouldn’t have but a few minutes to get in, collect the blood, and get out, before more boys and girls in blue swarmed the neighborhood.

  “I don’t sense any other magic users nearby,” he said, “so the only thing we have to worry about when we cross the gap is interacting with the environment in a manner that tips off the shifters. If we move anything in an overtly unnatural way, even the dead grass, at least one of them is bound to notice. So step lightly and stay quiet.”

  “Got it.”

  “All right. Then we cast in three, two, one…”

  The veils came up with no obvious complications, and Kat vanished, leaving behind only a vague green outline that no one but Liam could see. This particular veil spell was designed so that anyone using it could observe the underlying aura of anyone else who was also using it, in order to allow coordination among groups of invisible people without the limitations of sharing a single veil.

  Kat, hopefully, could also see a blue outline of Liam, defined just enough for her to correctly interpret his hand signals. While Kat’s eyes could pierce fae veils with minimal effort, she’d discovered that human veils were a lot more difficult for her to see through—and she couldn’t do it consistently—so she’d still need to rely on this aura technique.

  Liam gestured for her to wait five seconds and then mimic his movements exactly. Next, he squeezed through the narrow gap between the bushes in the hedgerow, double-checked to make sure the coast was clear, and jumped from the hedge to the cover of the garage�
��s back wall.

  With bated breath, he waited for a shout or a growl of alarm, but neither came. No one in the crowd had noticed him.

  Flush against the brick wall, he shuffled silently to the side, giving Kat enough room to stick her landing. She did so with far more finesse than Liam had demonstrated, twirling to a stop like a ballerina closing a graceful routine. Unsurprisingly, no one raised an alarm at her crossing either, and Kat gave him a thumbs-up.

  Liam couldn’t see her face right now, but he could feel her smirk. She was better at a lot of things than Liam—he got the sense she was a fearsome thing to behold even before A9 turned her into a mega-sup—and cat burglary was obviously among them.

  Not that that was something to be proud of.

  Liam held up his hand to signal Kat to wait and scooted over to the nearest window, which turned out to be a kitchen window situated above the sink. He took two quick peeks over the sill to get an idea of what they’d be in for once they entered the house.

  His first look revealed that the right side of the kitchen, where all the appliances were located, had been left in disarray from a dinner interrupted. Pots and pans full of half-finished food on the stove. A stack of plates and cups set on the counter, never used.

  His second look captured a grim photo framed by the threshold between the kitchen and the dining room. An overturned table surrounded by broken chairs. A crystal chandelier spattered with blood. Long red smears on the walls, left by desperately grabbing hands.

  He could only glimpse a sliver of the living room from here, but as far as he could tell, the carnage continued into that room as well. The brutality hadn’t waned until every member of the Avery family was practically exsanguinated.

  Someone wanted these people as dead as people can possibly be, he thought grimly. Either they committed a great offense, and an avenger came calling, or there’s an honest-to-god psycho killer roaming the streets of Salem’s Gate.

  Liam motioned for Kat to follow him and crept over to the back steps. A tap of the storm door handle revealed that it had been left unlocked, so Liam quietly turned it all the way, opened the door just wide enough to fit his head, and pressed his ear to the main door. Enhancing his sense of hearing with a flick of his charmed earring, he thoroughly catalogued all the sounds inside the house.

  There were two people upstairs, a man and a woman, discussing the parents’ backgrounds as they flipped through what sounded like a heavy book. The lead detectives assigned to the case, probably, trying to find their first solid lead so they had a good place to start in the morning, when the investigation kicked into full gear.

  Two more people lingered downstairs, opening and closing metal drawers on what was likely a filing cabinet. They weren’t speaking, but every now and again, one of them sighed or grunted out of boredom. Somebody in the Avery family had a home office, and two unfortunate rookies had been tasked with stuffing every scrap of paper into evidence boxes so it could all be hauled back to the precinct.

  No one’s in the dining room or the living room right now, he thought, drawing a basic blueprint of the house in his head, but it sounds like the home office branches off the living room, and its door is wide open. So our best bet will be to slip into the kitchen, whose walls should mostly obstruct the view from the office doorway.

  Liam leaned back and gave Kat an exaggerated nod, indicating the plan was a go. Then he grasped the main door’s burnished handle and slowly turned it, until the latch was completely retracted. Kat came up the steps behind him and relieved him of the storm door, allowing him to give the main door his full concentration. Pushing the door open with only the faintest of creaks, he stepped foot inside the house where a whole family had been slaughtered just hours before.

  The overpowering smell of blood smacked his nostrils, and he wrinkled his nose in disgust. The copper tang hung in the air like a miasma, so thick he swore he could feel it sticking to his skin as he inched across the mudroom.

  At the doorway that let out into the narrow hall between the kitchen and the dining room, he took a brief moment to steel himself. Before he stepped into the hall and turned to face the murder scene.

  His glimpse through the kitchen window hadn’t done it justice.

  Bits of bloody flesh and tangles of hair clung to splintered hunks of wood, indicating that the shifters had been brutally beaten and stabbed with pieces of their own furniture. Holes and dents in the walls and floorboards marked the spots where heads had been repeatedly bashed. Shreds of clothing stained deep red were strewn across the dining room, like something with sharp claws had scratched and scratched until every inch of the victims’ skin had been sheared away.

  Trails of blood led from the dining room to the living room, where the end of the torment had taken place. Three distinct pools of blood had soaked into the living room carpet. So close together that mother, father, and son must have witnessed the full horror of each other’s suffering. But far enough apart that they wouldn’t have been able to provide comfort to their dying loved ones.

  This was vengeance, Liam thought. Vengeance born from rage.

  Swallowing the burning bile in his throat, he withdrew three plastic vials and a large pair of tweezers from his pocket. Navigating the dining room with careful steps, he gathered several blood-soaked bits made of different materials. Wood. Fabric. Glass. Drywall.

  Some materials, when mixed with the blood, might interfere with the scrying spell. So it was best to have multiple options from which to pull the sample.

  He would’ve just scooped up some blood from one of the innumerable puddles, but he’d gotten here too late—the blood was already thickening up. If he disturbed it, an obvious mark would be left behind. One of the cops might notice that if they did one more pass of the lower level before sealing the place. Conversely, no one would notice a few missing bits of debris out of thousands unless they performed a side-by-side comparison with the crime scene photos.

  Filling the last vial with a few more bits of glass from a shattered vase that had likely been the centerpiece on the dining table, Liam sealed the vial with its rubber stopper and made to rise as he stuck it back into his coat pocket. Only to come face to face with a detective standing at the threshold between the living room and dining room. He’d been so absorbed with precisely controlling his movements so he didn’t disturb the scene that he hadn’t heard her walk down the stairs.

  The woman shot off a text on her cell phone and glanced into the dining room. Her eyes passed over Liam like he was made of thin air, his veil working flawlessly. But she faltered when her gaze reached the doorway that let out into the hall between the dining room and kitchen. Kat was standing there, her green outline totally still to Liam’s magic sense, her veil apparently stable. But there must have been something about her unnatural magic that tickled a primordial sense buried deep inside the detective’s head.

  The detective marched around the outer wall of the dining room, into the short hall that led to the mudroom, to try and figure out what had caught her attention. Kat silently shifted out of her path, but the woman paused right beside Kat and looked around. Up. Down. Left. Right.

  Left again.

  The detective made to reach out toward Kat—and then froze as something skittered across the dining room floor and into the living room. A small piece of wood that Liam had just thrown.

  The woman backtracked into the living room to determine the origin of the sound, and Liam frantically signaled for Kat to retreat. Kat sprang for the door as quickly as she could without making noise, Liam a scant three steps behind her. Together, they quietly slipped outside and then hightailed it back to the corner of the house.

  Liam took a peek at the street, and found that the conflict between the cops and the shifters had worsened. No one was looking at the house anymore. So he and Kat hopped the gap, crossed behind the hedge, and took off at full speed along the path they’d traveled from the Wrangler.

>   When they were halfway back to the Wrangler, they stripped their veils off, and Kat sputtered, “What the heck was that? Did I screw up the spell?”

  Liam shook his head. “I don’t think so. Your spell must’ve given off a weird vibe to that detective’s magic sense.”

  She huffed. “So she was a magic user then?”

  “Not necessarily.” He passed between two stubby trees, and the Wrangler came into view, parked exactly where they’d left it. “A lot of humans have a magic sense. Very few have the magic capacity to perform more than parlor tricks.”

  “So you’re saying that a lot of people might be able to notice my presence while I’m under a veil?”

  Liam winced. “Um, yeah. I guess that is what I’m saying.”

  She sighed. “Great. Just great.”

  “Hey, don’t worry.” He motioned for her to slow down as they descended a hill leading to the sidewalk. “We’ll tinker with the veil spell until it works for you. It’s just a matter of figuring out the quirks of your magic. All supernatural races utilize magic differently from each other. It stands to reason that you’d need to develop your own style to account for your…unique magical makeup.”

  “That’s a nice way of putting it,” Kat said flatly. “But I guess it’s nice to know there’s hope for me yet.”

  They hustled over to the Wrangler and climbed in, Liam in the front passenger seat and Kat in the back. Gabby put the vehicle into drive as they clipped on their seatbelts. Then the vehicle lurched away from the curb and zipped off down the street, carrying them away from the crime scene using a complicated route designed to throw off tails.

  When Gabby was sure they weren’t being followed, she asked, “You get the goods?”

  Liam tugged the vials from his pocket. “Thanks for playing getaway driver. You going to stick around for the main event?”