Ask and Answer

by Clara Coulson

  Still, Liam didn’t want to push his friends too hard.

  Unclipping his seatbelt, he peered around the front seat and asked, “You doing okay, Yun?”

  She’d taken a power nap on the way over, and was now nursing a coffee Kat had gotten for her when they’d briefly stopped at a drive-thru for a nighttime snack to boost their energy.

  “I’m good,” Yun murmured. “Head still throbs a bit, but it’s like ninety percent better than it was half an hour ago. I can manage one more brawl tonight…as long as it doesn’t involve somebody punching me in the mind.”

  “Possession is not, as popular media presents it, a quick process,” said Hunt. “It can take several hours for a demon, especially one of substantial power, to fully integrate with a new body. So we should have some time before Glasya-Labolas returns to the playing field.”

  “Good.” Liam popped his door open and carefully slid out into the narrow space. “Then let’s get a move on.”

  Making sure the coast was clear, the five of them hastily crossed the street and split up near the front door of the apartment complex, Yun and Kat slipping around the side of the building to the fire escape. Liam, Hunt, and Gabby waited at the entrance for a moment, until the squeak of a descending metal ladder confirmed the two women were on their way up.

  Liam then hexed the electronic lock on the building’s front door. In the wake of a small shower of sparks, the door clicked open.

  The building had a cramped lobby with thirty-year-old stained carpeting worn down to the concrete in some places, and the whole room smelled like a mix of spoiled milk and cat urine. A man at the tiny front desk, who was presumably supposed to perform some critical function, was dead asleep, his face planted against a crumpled newspaper, a dirty mug sitting next to his outstretched hand.

  The trio strode past the guy without issue—his loud snoring drowned out their footsteps—and entered the stairwell next to an elevator that somehow looked even less functional than the one in Nick’s building.

  Swiftly climbing the stairs, they emerged onto the third floor, with Gabby hanging back just inside the landing door. Hunt and Liam crept onward, as close to flush against the grimy wall as either of them could stand, until they reached the door to Apartment 305.

  Hunt ducked under the peephole and positioned himself on the doorknob side, while Liam pulled out his phone and texted Kat, asking if she and Yun were in position. He received a simple yes not half a minute later, and Liam gave Hunt the go signal.

  Liam, though annoyed by the Enforcer’s intrusion into their case, had to hand it to Hunt. The man knew what he was doing. He checked the door twice over for wards and signaled that there were three etched into the doorframe, but they were all inactive.

  Pressing his palm against the door, Hunt performed a spell that Liam didn’t recognize. Whatever it was, it apparently allowed Hunt to sense what was on the other side of the door, as he mouthed, No traps.

  He must’ve participated in a lot of raids, Liam thought.

  Circle Enforcers often acted like SWAT teams, bursting into the homes and businesses of suspected rogue magicians. Just like the mundane police, they were frequently criticized for no-knock raids. Because when you frightened somebody who could do magic, the result was often explosive.

  Entire buildings had burned to the ground during magic firefights between Enforcer teams and rogue magicians intent on escaping the Circle’s brutal brand of justice.

  Liam wondered how many people Hunt had dragged off to the Circle’s special prison. He also wondered how many of those people were innocent, how many had been victimized by corrupt Circle officials. Liam knew from experience that the Circle wasn’t the paragon of magical virtue they pretended to be—all it took was one personal vendetta to get Liam barred from membership—and that meant there were almost certainly people serving time for offenses that they hadn’t actually committed.

  Had Hunt been complicit in such injustice?

  Liam needed to know the answer to that before he could trust this guy.

  Now wasn’t the time for such questions though. There was too much riding on solving this mystery. So Liam would just have to keep a close eye on the former Enforcer.

  Somewhat assured that there wasn’t anything dangerous lying in wait behind the door, Hunt gave Liam the signal that they were good to enter. Liam responded by employing a simple lock-picking spell.

  When the lock disengaged with a faint click, Hunt grabbed the doorknob and slid his shotgun off his shoulder, prepared to bring it up if something inside the apartment lunged at them. Liam, likewise, brought out his knife and activated the extension charm that turned it into an invisible taser sword.

  Hunt gave Liam a final nod, which Liam mimicked. Then Hunt flung the door open.

  Silence greeted them from inside the apartment, along with the overbearing smell of decay.

  They reeled away from the door, gagging, and buried their faces in their arms in an attempt to block out the smell. Liam had traipsed through numerous death scenes in his life, and keenly remembered the unmistakable stench of a rotting human corpse. But rarely had the smell been this intense.

  Most bodies he’d examined in his detective days had either died hours earlier (like drive-by shooting victims left cooling on the sidewalk) or months earlier (like murder victims who’d been dumped in the woods to hide the crime). It wasn’t often a body was found in a state of decay between those two extremes, largely because, once a body started to smell, someone noticed it and made a police report before the stench grew this unbearable.

  Yet strangely, Liam and Hunt hadn’t smelled anything until they opened the door, despite the fact that the door had a gap underneath it that should’ve let the smell escape. Pinching his nose shut and breathing through his mouth, Liam poked his head past the doorframe and took a quick look around the foyer. Sure enough, there was a tiny ward drawn onto the wall above a side table.

  The ward had manipulated the air inside the apartment to stop the smell from escaping. The moment Hunt opened the door, the ward deactivated, as one of its parameters had been violated.

  It had been meant to obscure the crime, which was no longer possible.

  Hunt tapped Liam’s shoulder to get his attention and offered him a blue medical mask. Hunt had already donned one himself, and now looked at ease, so Liam accepted the mask and strapped it over his ears.

  Immediately, the intense reek diminished to a reasonable level, thanks to some potion that the mask had been dipped in. Sucking in a deep, refreshing breath, Liam shot Hunt a grateful look.

  Together, they finally, cautiously, entered the apartment.

  The badly decomposed body of Rickie Maitland lay on the floor in front of the sofa.

  His intestines lay a few feet away, near the edge of a chalk array that had been drawn on a piece of plywood placed in front of the television. Based on the blood spatter pattern, Maitland had been standing near the array when someone, or rather something, had plunged its hand into his abdomen.

  In a state of panic, Maitland had backed away from the intruding hand. In so doing, he’d inadvertently helped his attacker pull his intestines all the way out of his abdominal cavity. He’d then collapsed, either from pain or blood loss, just missing the sofa cushion.

  His attacker had left him to die on the floor. Which he had. Several days ago, judging by the degree of decomposition.

  “I’m guessing that’s the summoning array?” Liam said, trying to make out the chalk design underneath all of Maitland’s dried blood.

  “Indeed.”

  “Thought you said the demon was supposed to return to the array after Cunningham died.”

  “The summoner must’ve made a duplicate array elsewhere and re-attuned the demon’s essence to it so that they wouldn’t have to revisit this place,” Hunt grumbled in distaste. “A difficult maneuver, but not impossible. Especially for a magician of this caliber.”<
br />
  “So this person’s no amateur?”

  “Not in the slightest. They used a sophisticated spell here, meant to call forth the three highest orders of demons. This magician has a great deal of experience with the dark craft of summoning demons. My guess is that they’re over the age of fifty, and they’ve been practicing magic since their spiritual maturity during adolescence.”

  “So we’ve either got ourselves a Circle defector”—Liam gingerly stepped over the huge dried blood puddle to reach the window that let out onto the fire escape—“or the Circle hasn’t been as diligent at wiping out dark magic cults as they’ve claimed.”

  Hunt didn’t respond to the jab, which piqued Liam’s curiosity. There’s a story there.

  “This is a Circle-trained magician,” Hunt said. “You can tell by the design of the summoning array. There are a lot of structures within the design derived from standardized summoning concepts taught to all Circle apprentices.”

  “You’d think somebody would’ve noticed that a Circle magician had gone this far off the rails,” Liam muttered facetiously.

  “These issues are not always as obvious as you might think.” Hunt slung his gun back over his shoulder, satisfied that the danger in the apartment had long passed.

  Liam, sensing this leg of the conversation was over, pulled back the curtain and rapped on the window in a specific rhythm. The rhythm signaled to Kat and Yun that no hostiles had been encountered inside the apartment.

  “Say,” he asked Hunt as he unlocked the window, “you got any more of those masks?”

  Hunt tossed two more over the summoning array of doom, and Liam caught them as Kat jimmied the stubborn window open. When the overwhelming smell of decay poured out into the night, Kat and Yun both recoiled. Yun, still recovering from the migraine, lost her stomach. She leaned over the side of the fire escape and profusely vomited onto anything unfortunate enough to be in the alley.

  “Sorry,” Liam said. “Should’ve sent a text to warn you. Put on these masks.”

  He shoved his hand under the window. Kat snatched the masks, put one over her own mouth, and helped a quaking Yun slip on the other. They both relaxed a second later, gasping in the considerably fresher air.

  Kat then hauled the window open the rest of the way. “God,” she moaned, “what is that sme…?” Her gaze landed on the gory remains of Maitland. “Oh. That’s gross.”

  “Yeah, looks like Maitland got the short end of the stick for this possession murder scheme.” Liam dug around in his pockets until he found the wad of latex gloves he always kept there. “I can’t say I’m surprised. When a mundane gets involve in sup crime, something like this always happens. Although it’s usually not quite this gory.”

  Kat clambered onto the windowsill, searching for a spot on the floor that wasn’t stained red. “I’m astounded that no one smelled his body and reported it before now.”

  “There was a ward,” Hunt said gruffly, “preventing the smell from escaping.”

  “We broke it when we opened the door,” Liam added, holding out a pair of gloves.

  Kat took the gloves, hopped off the sill, and stood aside so Yun could enter.

  Yun, despite her queasiness, slid through the window like a pro. “That means it’s only a matter of time before the stench permeates the adjacent apartments. We better hurry up and do…whatever we need to do before somebody calls the cops.”

  “We need to search the place.” Liam handed her a pair of gloves as well. “And be careful not to leave any forensic evidence while we’re doing it. I’d prefer not to have to burn down a second building to obscure our illicit activities.”

  He directed that last part at Hunt, accusatory, but the man didn’t bat an eye.

  “It looks like someone went over the place once already”—Hunt gestured to the kitchenette countertop piled high with the contents of the cabinets, and then to the part of the bedroom floor you could see through the open door, which was strewn with clothing—“so our goal is to find whatever they missed.”

  “Why did they search the place though?” Kat asked. “Did Maitland have incriminating information about someone?”

  Liam tossed another pair of gloves to Hunt and answered, “Given how many different lines of business he liked to dip his toes into, he probably had incriminating info about a lot of people. I assume whoever ransacked the place—probably the magician who performed the summoning—was looking for anything that had their personal info on it.”

  “You think they found everything?” Yun asked.

  “Depends.” Liam tugged on his own gloves and let them snap into place. “On how well acquainted this person was with the sneakiness typical of weasels like Maitland. People who get involved in the sort of endeavors Maitland favored always develop a sense of paranoia and go to great lengths to hide proof of their criminal activities. If the person who searched the place wasn’t aware of that, they could’ve missed all sorts of clever hiding places for important documents and other evidence.”

  “All right, Detective,” Kat said, “so where should we look?”

  “Anyplace that could have a hidden compartment.” Liam swept his hand back and forth, indicating the apartment at large. “Drawers or cabinets with false bottoms. Hollowed-out table legs. Pieces of trim obscuring cubbyholes in the walls. Spaces in the ceiling at the base of light fixtures. Loose floorboards underneath rugs. The list goes on. Just be thorough and check everything.”

  Yun raised her hand. “Kat and I will take the bedroom.”

  The farthest place in the apartment from Maitland’s body.

  “Works for me,” Kat replied, and the two of them scuttled across the living room, deftly hopping over the rotting corpse in the process.

  Hunt chuckled and said to Liam, “I’ll take the kitchenette and bathroom, unless you want to do a coin toss to try and get out of searching the living room.”

  Liam rolled his eyes. “I can handle a messy crime scene.”

  As gross as Maitland’s corpse was, it didn’t hold a candle to the nightmarish scene at the Avery house. The oppressive atmosphere created in the wake of the violent murders of innocent people was far more disturbing than the bloated, liquefying body of the criminal who had helped make those murders possible.

  “If you say so.” Hunt trudged over to the kitchenette and began sifting through the detritus on the countertop.

  Liam shot off a text to Franc and Gabby—Maitland’s dead; searching apartment for clues—and when they both replied that all was clear on their ends, he got to work.

  Carefully avoiding the gore around Maitland’s body, he felt the underside of the sofa for any deformities that might indicate a section had been tampered with. Finding none, he moved to the faux-wood side table, rapped on each leg to test for a hollow spot, and then opened the drawer to look for a false bottom. Nothing.

  Taking the opportunity to get away from the reeking corpse, he crawled over to the wall and tugged on the trim every six inches in search of a loose segment. Just as he was nearing the first corner, Yun let out a soft “Aha!” from the bedroom.

  Liam and Hunt stopped what they were doing as Yun poked her head past the bedroom door and held up a small, rectangular piece of paper. “Found this in the pocket of one of the shirts on the floor. It’s Cunningham’s business card. His cell phone number is circled, and there are some more numbers written on the back, thirty thousand and change, along with Tuesday’s date.”

  “That’s the day Cunningham went missing,” Liam said, “and likely the exact amount of money that he owed Maitland.”

  Kat leaned out of the bedroom behind Yun, staring forlornly at the summoning array. “You think Maitland forced him to come here, using his debt as leverage?”

  “Either that,” Hunt said, “or it was a trick. Perhaps Maitland told Cunningham that he was willing to provide some method of debt relief, but to hash out the details, Cunningham had to meet him
in person at this apartment.”

  “And then he somehow convinced Cunningham to agree to demonic possession as a substitute for paying off the debt?” Yun’s nose scrunched up. “You really think Cunningham was dumb enough to fall for that?”

  “He didn’t have to be dumb,” Kat murmured, “just ignorant and desperate. If Cunningham didn’t know how dangerous demonic possession was, then it’s possible Maitland, or the rogue magician, convinced him that it wouldn’t leave any lasting damage.”

  Yun rubbed her aching temple. “But even if he thought that, he must’ve known that the demon would use his body to do horrible things. It’s a demon.”

  “That’s where the desperate part comes in.” Liam turned at the corner and resumed checking the trim. “Cunningham found himself between a rock and a hard place, and made the choice he believed would at least give him a chance to get his life back in order. I seriously doubt he thought that his stint as a demon’s host would end with his head getting blown off by a shotgun after his body was used to murder three people and critically injure another.”

  Yun retreated into the bedroom again, muttering, “This is just all kinds of wrong.”

  Liam didn’t disagree. Rarely had he come across a criminal scheme as fucked up as this one, and he’d never come across one where a mundane human was used by sup elements like…this.

  Under the weight of a grim silence, everyone continued searching the apartment. Until, at a patch of trim just past the TV, Liam found what he was looking for. “Hey, I got something here,” he called out.

  Using both hands, he carefully pulled the loose piece of trim free, revealing a crudely cut hole in the drywall. Taking out a small penlight he always kept on his belt, Liam clicked it on and shined it into the dark space.

  The hole was empty save for a thin plastic object tucked inside a sandwich baggie. Liam reached into the space with two fingers and dragged the baggie out by one corner, revealing that the object was an early gen smartphone.

  “Jackpot.” He turned off the light and rose to his feet, holding up the baggie for everyone to see. “Ten bucks that this is the burner phone Maitland used to arrange all his bets, among other criminal activities.”