by Amir Lane
Gift of Shadows
Barrier Witch Book One
Amir Lane
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
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About the Author
Gift of Shadows
Copyright © 2018 by Amir Lane
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form by any means without prior written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real events, places, or characters is completely coincidental.
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Formatting by Keyminor Publishing Services
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Why would anyone try to murder a phoenix?
A corpse with no eyes bursts into flames before Toronto’s Special Crimes Detective Fairuz Arshad can investigate. Her superiors are ordering her to close the case before it’s even been opened, and it isn’t the only one. She tracks down a siren and a faerie, both missing organs and brushed off by the police. Fairuz and her dryad partner, Rowan, suspect there’s more to this mystery than it appears. The evidence points to a string of parahuman murders, with all the victims missing organs.
The police are covering up the crimes, and Fairuz realizes the killer may be one of their own. As Rowan joins the ranks of those keeping secrets from her, the list of people Fairuz trusts grows smaller. More bodies are uncovered, and she fears something far more sinister is at work than a simple serial killer.
With her own team turning against her, can Fairuz catch the killer before he strikes again?
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Barrier Witch
Gift of Curses (#0)
Gift of Shadows (#1)
Gift of Ashes (#1.5)
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Gift of Darkness (#3)
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Rise (#0)
Shadow Maker (#1)
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To 14,
who always had my back.
Even when I didn’t deserve it.
Chapter One
“If nobody else is going to say it, I will. Our victim has no eyes.”
I glanced up at my partner from over the purple lenses of my aviator sunglasses. He wasn't wrong. The victim was also missing several organs: liver, kidneys, maybe something else. That wasn't exactly unusual. It was the eyes that threw me. Based on Rowan’s words, I wasn’t the only one.
I sighed and rubbed my neck. Who would have thought a day would come when missing organs would be normal to me?
I took a sip of my Tim Horton’s coffee. It tasted like burnt water. Until my usual place reopened, or at least until I could get my Turkish coffee maker from my parents’ place in Ottawa, it would have to be enough to feed my caffeine addiction. The paper cup was quickly cooling in the late February winds. I held it between my gloved hands, trying to keep the coffee inside at a drinkable temperature as I stared down at the body.
It was hard to tell just from looking at it whether or not this was a Special Crimes case. Homicide should have been handling this, but my partner of nearly a year now, Rowan Oak, and I had been a couple of blocks away anyway on another, far less interesting case. Plus, the missing eyes definitely suggested something not normal. It could have just been someone who liked eyes, or it could have been someone poaching them for spells. Or maybe the human-looking man sprawled out on the pavement surrounded by police tape wasn't actually human.
The Homicide department was going to have a fit either way. I wasn't going to waste time waiting for them to show up. I'd worked Homicide before Special Crimes. It might not have been in this neighbourhood, but it was all the same. This wasn't my first road trip.
Rowan always insisted the expression was ‘rodeo,’ but that didn't make any sense to me. He was from Alberta, everything was about rodeos to him.
The point was, I knew what I was doing, and I knew that every second counted. If Homicide had a problem with that, they should have showed up faster.
I crouched down to get a better look at the body, moving an arm over my face to block the stench. The end of my jacket almost brushed the pavement Winter had kept the body from decaying some, but it still smelled like a corpse. I’d almost forgotten that smell. I didn't see as many bodies these days as I did in Homicide, and I wasn't as used to it as I had been.
The victim appeared to be a Caucasian male, with almost Mediterranean complexion, dark hair, and a short beard trimmed close to his jaw. Mid-20s or so — it was hard to tell. He might have been of average build if he had all of his organs. On the left side of his neck was a tattoo of what looked like a strange compass. Of course, he had no ID on him. That would have been too easy.
We needed more information. A lot more information.
“Hey. What's black and white and red all over?” Rowan asked with all the inflection of a brick wall asking about the weather.
“A panda that got beat up.” Even if it wasn't the right answer, it got a snorted laugh out of him. I rose back to my feet. “Let’s let the medical examiner get him back to the morgue.” I pulled the lid off my coffee cup and used my teeth to roll up the rim. Please play again, it said. As if I wanted to win more terrible coffee or a stale donut. Roll-up-the-rim-to-win was a stupid game. Still, I was tempted to, in fact, play again. Was this considered gambling? “An autopsy should give us a better idea of what's missing, or if this is even for us.”
“I really don’t think that’s necessary,” Rowan said, his brows creasing beneath the ever-present beanie that covered most of his dark hair. A hat would have been nice to have right about now. I had one on my desk, for all the good it did me out here. “Most of his organs are already on the pavement. All I see missing is the liver and kidneys.”
Again, he was right. The victim’s intestines were strewn around him, and the rest of his organs were spread around as though on display. That wasn’t enough to work with. Could this be ritualistic? The way his chest was open looked like something I would see in the morgue, not behind a Shopper’s Drug Mart.
As Rowan stood fully upright, hands on his hips, he let out a sounds somewhere between a sigh and a scoff, his nose wrinkled in disgust. Though he handled bodies better than most of the uniformed officers I worked with, they made him anxious and light-headed. Most of the time, I handled strange bodies myself. Even though I’d left Homicide to get away from death, I still had the most experience with it. Whenever I needed a second, he somehow always got pulled in on body cases with me. I suspected the other half of our team pulled seniority to get out of it. Either that, or they were much better at rock-paper-scissors than he was.
I put my hand on his arm and guided him a few steps away from the body to give the medical team room to work.
“Let’s get a few o
fficers asking questions,” I suggested. “A body doesn't turn up in Toronto with half its organs missing—”
“And eyes.”
“—without somebody noticing.”
“Well, nobody’s coming forward. It’s…” Rowan lifted his sleeve to check his watch. “A little after six now. It doesn’t get busy around here until closer to eight. Sun’s not even up yet. It is possible nobody saw anything. I’ve got Henisson checking for security cameras.”
Between the TD Canada Trust bank a few metres from us, the Shoppers Drug Mart on the other side, and the church down the road, there must have been a security camera that picked something up.
Looking around, I saw his point about the witnesses. The place that opened earliest within walking distance was the bakery around the corner, which opened at eight. I’d checked, hoping to get something a little better than Tim Horton’s. Still, we were just off Weston Road, a fairly busy one cutting through the bulk of the neighbourhood. It should have bothered me that this was walking distance from both my house and Rowan’s apartment, but it didn’t. There was nothing to suggest this was more than a one-off thing. The uneasy feeling in my stomach didn't count as proof. In fact, it was likely a side-effect of the coffee. I used to actually like Tim Horton’s coffee, too.
“Has anybody talked to the witness who found the body?” I asked.
Rowan shook his head.
I frowned. “What? Why the hell not?”
“I was waiting for you. There's a bit of a communication barrier.”
He jerked his head toward a woman wearing jogging clothes and a blue hijab, and I understood why. The woman looked up with teary, red eyes as we approached. The hijab was pinned in an Iraqi fashion. Of course it would be too much to hope for a chance to speak Lebanese Arabic. Iraqi Arabic was a nightmare of Turkish slang I could never get used to. I couldn’t judge, though. Lebanese Arabic was a mess of French and other Arabic dialects.
When I was younger, my mother explained to me that we were occupied by France for so many years, Arabic had been nearly wiped out from the country. When we finally got rid of them, Arabic teachers from all over the Middle East, including Iraq, came and reintroduced it. I may not have liked deciphering Iraqi Arabic, but I respected it.
“Hello,” I said, slowly and clearly. “You speak Arabic?”
The woman took a moment to process my words, sniffing, and nodded.
“My name is Fairuz Arshad, this is Rowan Oak. We’re detectives. Can I ask you a few questions?”
The woman nodded again through a sob. I sat down on the bench next to her. It was cold, but bearable with my long jacket. One of the nice things about Toronto was how mild the winters were. There was barely any snow on the ground, even in February, little enough that I could wear what my cousin Imaan up north called ‘fall boots’. It was still much colder than Lebanon.
The woman looked about the same age as my mother. There was no makeup, not even foundation, to hide the lines around her eyes and mouth.
“What's your name?” I asked as I pulled out my notepad and a pen.
I scribbled on the corner of a clean page until the ink began to flow.
“Hanna Kasim. Am I in trouble?”
“Of course not, Hanna. Have you been in Canada long?” I asked, slowly to make up for the difference in dialect.
I’ve found most Iraqi people didn’t have too much trouble figuring out what I was saying, I was the one with trouble understanding them. I heard enough of it in my undergraduate days that I had a decent handle on it by now. It still wasn't my favourite.
“Since ’87. I moved to Ottawa from Baghdad to do my Master’s degree.”
I fished through my pockets for a tissue and handed one to her. She blew her nose and held the tissue in her fist, still sniffling as she looked up at me with teary eyes.
“What's your Masters’ in?” I asked.
It would be easier to figure out what happened if Hanna was calmer. I needed to get her mind off the disemboweled corpse for now.
“Engineering. Before the extremists, I taught math. Things changed.”
I nodded, offering a sad, understanding smile. Things definitely changed. “I studied criminology here. I love it here, but what I wouldn’t give for a Lebanese winter.”
Hanna smiled through her tears. She was handling this much better than most people did. I had to wonder if this was the first body she had ever seen. I cleared my throat and shifted a little.
“So, Hanna, I take it you were out here exercising? Why don't you walk me through what happened?”
Hanna wrung her hands together and began to speak in a rush of slang I struggled to keep up with. My pen scratched against the paper as I scribbled from right to left:
Out for a run about 5:10am
Crossed street to avoid man walking dogs (tall, black jacket, beard, toque. 2 yellow dogs, very big)
Saw what she assumed was garbage bag down the street
Stayed on that side because traffic
Saw body
Ran back way she came screaming for help
Found pedestrian to call 911 (doesn't have cell)
Nobody touched body after call was placed (as far as she knows)
Nobody suspicious, street was very empty
“Thank you, this is very helpful,” I said when I was done writing. I handed the notes to Rowan, realizing as he frowned in my periphery that he wouldn’t be able to understand my Arabic scrawl. “Is there somebody we can call to get you?”
“My daughter. She must be wondering where I am by now. We always go for breakfast together on Saturdays.”
Hanna recited her daughter’s phone number, and I flagged down a uniformed officer to call her. I left Hanna with my card before turning to walk back to Rowan and the uniformed officer he was talking to. Her hand caught my wrist.
“Wait! Miss detective!” she cried in an accented English. “There’s one more thing. There was… something over him.”
I frowned. That was specific. “‘Something?’ What do you mean by ‘something?’”
She hesitated, as if struggling to find her words. “It was like a shadow, like a person’s shadow crouched over him. When I screamed, it disappeared.”
I thanked her for the information, even though I knew it was probably just her imagination. It was still dark, and it would have been even darker before we arrived. There were no streetlights here. More than likely, it was nothing.
“Anything useful?” Rowan asked. “I literally got nothing out of that.”
I shook my head. “Nothing. She was running, and she saw the body.”
There didn’t seem to be much point in mentioning the shadow. Rowan rubbed the back of his neck, squinting up at the sun.
“So I have to ask. Who the fuck takes eyes?”
I let out a long breath. I didn't even know where to start. Part of me almost wanted Homicide to show up and start yelling at us for ‘stealing’ their case. The autopsy sounded like the reasonable next step once the canvassing was done. Then we would at least know if our victim was human or something else, something that might have special eyes. None of the usual victims — werewolves, dryads, sirens — had anything unique about their eyes. If I remembered right, Old World sirens could see better in the dark, but that didn't seem special enough. Plus, this victim didn't seem to have the second set of teeth most siren species had. I would have to get closer to confirm, but sticking my hand in a dead something’s mouth didn’t seem like the brightest idea. I had a mental image of checking for a second row of teeth and having my finger bitten off. I could have used a pen to check like I’d done before, but I decided to leave that to the medical examiner.
“You ever feel like you could have gone your entire life without seeing someone scrape organs off a sidewalk?” Rowan asked with a grimace.
I nodded in silent agreement. That was part of why I’d transferred from Homicide. Things like that never really left a person.
A shrill scream and the reek of burning flesh
interrupted my next thought. I threw my arm over my face to protect my eyes from the flames.
Our victim was on fire.
Our victim was on fucking fire.
“Fairuz!” Rowan shouted.
“I’m on it!”
I did the only reasonable thing I could do and ran toward the fire. A focused burn traced out Arabic scrawl across my hip and ran up my spine. I could feel it, but no one could see it beneath my clothes. Not until it continued through my arms and down to my fingers, and by then, things were happening too fast for anyone to notice something so small.
“Get out of the way!” I shouted.
It was an unnecessary command. Most people were already trying to get away from the fire, Rowan included. I was the only one trying to do the opposite. Making sure my body was between his and the flames, I threw my hands up and extended a translucent barrier. The heat against my palms had me grinding my teeth, but I only needed to keep it up until everyone was out of the way. One of the uniformed officers was dragging another out of the flames. Burnt clothes. Melted, bubbling skin. I forced myself to look away, but it was too late. If I didn’t wake up with that image behind my eyelids, I’d be surprised. The sight of it was bad enough, but the smell was worse. It was always the smell.
Sirens wailed in the distance, but this was Toronto. There were almost always sirens going on, and there was no guarantee these were headed in our direction.
