by Amir Lane
So what if he had? I wasn't his mother. I wasn't his boss. It wasn't my business.
That didn't make me feel any better. If anything, it made me feel worse. He could have been in trouble, or involved in something he shouldn’t have been, and he didn’t trust me enough to tell me. That was what stung. Even if we were just partners, he should have trusted me enough to tell me who really had hurt him, especially if this was related to what we were already investigating.
I had to put it out of my mind. I was going to go crazy if I didn’t.
When I’d finally walked into the precinct, I hadn’t expected Sabine to point at me and say, “Incubus prostitute.” I knew she was mad at me, but not mad enough to call me names.
Now, I wished she was just mad enough to call me names.
Instead, I was walking across the street away from my car, trying to keep from killing myself on the ice resulting from last night’s storm. As much as I liked high heels, I was grudgingly glad I wasn’t wearing them right now. Every year, I lamented how long Canadian winters were, and they weren’t even that long in Toronto. We could expect the snow to be gone by the end of March, rather than well into April like up north. Still, as I evaded another patch of ice, I missed Lebanon.
My first year here had been the worst. I’d been an ocean away from my home, from my family. Of course I’d watched American TV back home, but it wasn’t nearly the same thing as experiencing it. And Canada and America, despite the similarities, weren't quite the same. My English had been sufficient but broken, my French better but different. My older brother, Emad, had been in Boston studying medicine and, despite his insistence that Toronto and Boston were not close enough for weekend trips, I’d thought I would be able to see him more than I really did. I knew people who used to drive to Syria for day trips all the time; Sidon was only a three hour drive from Damascus. Boston couldn’t have been that much farther. And yet, it was. I’d felt lost, out of place, and more homesick than I had ever imagined I could feel.
But Toronto had a huge Arab population. Many of the other students in my classes were international students, or the children of immigrants. Despite the loneliness, I’d managed to find that same Arab hospitality we had back home, and not just with the Arab students. It wasn’t perfect, but it became home for me. The day I’d gotten my Citizenship, I’d also gotten a tattoo on each shoulder blade for my two homes. On my left was the cedar tree Lebanon was so famous for, and on my right was a maple tree for Canada. It became home for my younger brother, Amin, too when he moved to Ottawa to study engineering. My parents moved to follow him not long after. It was easier now that we were at least all in the same time zone, though still not day-trip distance from one another.
I was so lost in thought, I almost forgot what I was doing until a deep, sultry voice interrupted my reminiscing.
“Hey, sweetheart. Looking for a date?”
Ya Allah, this was so below my pay grade. A uniformed officer should have been dealing with this shit, not a proper detective. But I supposed it was my own fault for pissing Sabine off.
The man was what I would call ‘classically handsome.’ Blonde curls framed his angular face, and a smirk rested on his full lips. An obligatory glimpse over his body showed firm muscles. I had enough Muslim decency ingrained into me not to look further, but I could say with certainty that it did nothing for me.
I forced myself to smile, squashing down the feelings of betraying myself that came with it.
“What do you have in mind?”
He was bold, I had to give him credit for that. And he must have thought the many shiny rings on my fingers meant I had money — either that, or I seriously underestimated how much a prostitute cost in this city — because his prices would have made me spit my coffee if I had any. Suddenly, the amount I paid for shoes didn’t seem so outrageous.
I held my badge up, my smile turning apologetic. His own smile faltered for a moment before smoothing out. He leaned toward me and I could actually smell the pheromones radiating off him, strong enough to almost make me waver. These rings weren’t just for show, though. The etchings in the gold band around the knuckle of my index burned as it absorbed the effects of his smoldering eyes. It had been designed for something much older than the man in front of me. I also had a turquoise stone on each pinky for protection, but the gold band did most of the work. What most people here didn’t know was that the European concubi originated from the Mesopotamian lilli. I, personally, had never had opportunity to fall into either of their hands, alhamdulillah w’ashokrulillah, but I knew of people who had.
The incubus must have realized he wasn’t having any effect on me. A confused expression came over his face, and he took a step back.
“Sorry,” I said, “gay. And wearing charms.”
His lips pressed into a thin line. I should have realized at that moment he wasn’t going to come quietly, but the pain in my finger distracted me. I hoped the ring wasn’t burned out. If it was, I was going to have to get a new one, and it wouldn't be cheap. A real gold ring was expensive enough without enchantments. He turned on his heels and bolted down the street, surprisingly fast for someone in such tight jeans.
I took off after him, again glad that I wore flats in the field.
“Hey! Hey! Toronto Police, stop running!”
One of these days, that was going to work. Today was clearly not that day.
Heat that had nothing to do with my rings flooded into my hands as I ran. My instinct was to throw a barrier out at him to either stop him or knock him down, but that never worked the way I wanted it to. The last thing I needed was to cause any kind of property damage or, worse, hit a civilian.
Between my long legs and the hours on the treadmill, I didn’t have much trouble keeping up with the incubus. It was actually catching him that was giving me a problem. My jacket weighed me down and made me feel hot. Sweat ran down my spine and under my armpits. Keeping my pace, I fished an elastic band out of my pocket and tied my hair back so I could at least see where I was going. He turned a corner down an alley, and I followed behind him. The heat burned my joints as adrenaline flushed through me.
“Last chance!” I warned. “Stop running!”
Today was definitely not that day. I threw my hand forward. Purple light rushed from my fingertips. Without any contact to harden it into a barrier, it solidified just enough to knock him down. He cried out, toppling over into a trash can. I couldn’t help wince. That sounded much harder than I’d intended to hit him. Grabbing the back of his shirt, I paused to make sure he wasn’t hurt before hauling him to his feet. He had a good few inches on me, and I was worried he would put up a fight. I tugged sharply at his shirt so he didn’t get any ideas.
“You are under arrest for solicitation,” I said. “You ran, so now we have to walk back to my car. Are you happy?”
“Hey, you can’t just arrest me! Don’t you have to read me my rights? ”
“No, I do not. This is Canada.”
“So, what? I have no rights?”
“None I have to recite to you.”
They always did it on TV, but the Miranda rights weren’t a thing in Canada. It probably should have been, but our police system wasn’t nearly as perfect as we liked to pretend it was.
The incubus shouted about rights all the way back to my car, then back to the precinct, even drowning out my music. He had the gall to try using his influence on me a couple times, flirting to try getting me to let him go. I ignored him as best I could, grinding my teeth together to keep from threatening to punch him in the throat.
This was not shaping up to be a good day.
By the time I settled back in the office to do paperwork, after making two more pointless arrests — the man whose cinnamon bird was stealing cinnamon again and a group of teenage nixie screwing with tourists — I felt I had made it up to Sabine. Her hard eyes softened as much as they ever did when I came back, my hair a mess of a bun on top of my hair and my makeup an unsalvageable mess. Kieron was gone, having left to pic
k his daughter up for her ballet lesson, and Rowan was packing up, leaving me and Indira. We didn’t spend much time together, but he was good company, even if it made me nervous when he began to hum or sing along with the radio.
“Night,” Rowan said, waving to both of us.
“Good night,” Indira chirped, and I waved.
I tapped my pen against my desk, bouncing my foot on the floor. A message from Ariadne popped up on my phone. I slid the screen open to read it.
Coming home for dinner? Mom sent me her recipe for stuffed grape leaves
My heart clenched, as it always did, when Ariadne called my parents ‘mom’ or ‘dad’ instead of ‘your mom’ or ‘your dad.’ It made us seem so much more real, even more than moving in together could. I knew part of her still expected her own parents to come around eventually, but I also knew they wouldn’t. Knowing she felt like my family was hers too, made my eyes water.
I’ll be home. You should start now. They take forever to roll. Lol
“Are you all right?” Indira asked.
I looked up at him and nodded. Out of habit, I pressed the back arrow to show all my messages, including the unanswered ones from Rowan that morning. A thought occurred to me. In the chaos of running around town, I’d almost forgotten about my call to him and my thoughts about a second dryad.
Rowan would be gone by now, and even if he wasn’t, it was dangerous to talk here. Even in the garage, there was the risk of someone overhearing. Beyond my team, I didn’t know who I could trust. I looked back over my shoulder at Sabine working at her computer through the blinds. Truth be told, I couldn’t even be sure I could trust her. Her loyalties were to the department, not to me.
“Are you sure you’re all right? You look stressed,” Indira said.
“I’m fine,” I assured.
I wasn’t fine, and I was stressed. My stomach was in knots at the millions of things I couldn’t even begin to sort out.
Maybe Mama was right. Maybe I should have become a doctor.
Chapter Twelve
Some days, being a cop was chasing down underdressed incubi. Some days, it was getting caught up on paperwork.
Some days, it was standing in the middle of a blood-covered room. When I said covered, I meant wall to wall to wall to wall to wall. Even the ceiling was dripping. I held my arm over my head, a pale purple barrier acting as an umbrella.
“There’s a joke here about this not being the most blood I’ve ever seen, but I’m not going to make it,” Rowan said, almost sounding bored.
I shot him a dirty look. He was usually the squeamish one. How could he be drinking coffee like this was, well, not the most blood he’d ever seen? He said it was the smell that got to him, but this was a lot of blood. A drop of it fell on his face from the ceiling, and he wiped it off with a shaking hand. Either he’d had too many of those coffees, or he was actually way more uncomfortable with this than he was letting on. Somehow, it was a relief. We probably should have been wearing some kind of protection besides the thin ponchos and boot covers, considering the biohazard surrounding us. That would have made too much sense.
“I think you just made it,” I said dryly.
This crime scene was in the 13th division which meant, technically, we weren’t supposed to be here. Somehow, rumour had spread that I was looking for cases like this, cases where the victims were disemboweled, and one of the Homicide detectives I used to work with had tipped me off to this one. It hadn’t taken any convincing to get Rowan to tag along, though I noticed him trying to look at anything other than the body taking up most of the living room.
I covered my face with my arm, pressing my nose into the crook of my elbow. The symbols on the walls were unfamiliar to me, which meant they were anything but Middle Eastern. I’d tried to learn other symbols but there were so many, I couldn’t keep up. Most of the common ones, I knew. Some Scandinavian runes and the elemental pentagram symbols, for example. The rest, I couldn’t remember having ever seen before.
Around us, uniformed officers and the crime scene people took photographs of whatever the hell this was.
The furniture in the apartment was pressed against the wall, which left plenty of space for the tenant, 27-year-old Wesley Andrew Cohn, to be eagle-spread in the middle of the floor. He was cut open from navel to sternum, and his organs were spread in a pattern that looked almost deliberate. Flies buzzed around him, some settling on a piece of intestine, and I had to turn to stare at one of the markings on the wall.
“What is this?” I asked, more to myself than anyone else.
“Looks like necromancy to me,” Rowan said. His voice wavered a little. He squeezed his eyes and gave his head a firm shake to clear his head. “Opening the Gates of Hell, Calling of the Spirits. This one looks like, Hiding from… something, I’m not sure. We've got some carvings on his arm that look like beacon symbols. We’re going to need to get a weird shit expert up here.”
He motioned as he spoke, first to the sets of symbols on the wall, then to the victim. I raised an eyebrow and stepped closer, partly to get a better look and mostly because I was worried he was going to pass out.
“I thought we were the ‘weird shit’ experts.”
“Weirder shit.”
“What about all the blood? It couldn't have all come from him,” I said.
There was no way the human body could hold this much blood. Rowan shrugged.
“My bet, he made an offering and it was rejected. Might not have even been a spirit he called. Ten bucks says he's non-magic. People are fucking stupid.”
“So that's what we’re attributing cause of death to? Fucking stupid? We should check for anything missing.”
Rowan snorted. “What, you think a spirit stole his wallet?”
I scanned the room, stepping onto another dry spot on the carpet when one of the crime scene technicians needed to get by me. There was a stack of books on the side table wedged between the couch and the knocked-over TV. I couldn't read the covers from where I stood, but the one on top was old and leather-bound with a skull etched into it. It did suggest necromancy, I had to admit that.
“I meant organs.”
“Fairuz.” The warning in his voice was clear despite the hoarseness. “Don't start going down this path.”
Defensive anger rose up in me. ‘This path’ was a perfectly reasonable one given the circumstances. Checking for missing organs or body parts was the logical next step here. It would be irresponsible to assume nothing out of the ordinary — more out of the ordinary — was going on. Plus, whichever medical examiner got stuck taking care of what was left of Wesley would need an inventory of anything missing for their report. Rowan was normally much more thorough than this. I managed to stop myself from saying so. Growing up, Mama, in all her infinite wisdom, had told us that as soon as we felt like we were being attacked for something, it was time to consider the fact that maybe we were wrong. If we were right, why would we feel so threatened when someone disagreed?
I thought it through. Maybe I was a little obsessed with our unofficial case, yes. Just a little bit. I could admit that. But it would still be irresponsible to assume nothing was missing, even if it was unrelated. Maybe a spirit had stolen his wallet. Or maybe the scene was staged. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had thrown us off by pointing us to the wrong parahuman. Maybe something had eaten his liver. I didn’t know. He didn’t know. That was why we were investigating in the first place. Otherwise, what was the point in us being here? Not just Rowan and I, but any cops. Our job was to figure out what happened, regardless of whether or not it was what I wanted to have happened.
Not that I wanted whatever had killed the phoenix and the siren to have struck again, successfully this time. I just needed another lead, anything that would help me stop it from happening again.
“I want these books for evidence,” I said to one of the technicians, turning my back to Rowan for a moment. “I want the fingerprints on it checked. Get some pictures, too.”
“Sure thing, Detective.”
Rowan left the apartment, and I followed. There wasn’t much we could do until the body was out of the way.
“Twenty bucks says cause of death is heart attack.” Rowan held his hand out to me.
“I’m not betting on what killed him.” I paused. Making terrible jokes to distract ourselves from how bad it was was one thing. Bets were another matter entirely. Still… A heart attack was probably the last thing that killed that guy. Exsanguination was more likely, considering how much blood was all over the place. “If you’re wrong, you have to do the paperwork.”
He snorted, but shook my hand when I held it out. There was a certain point when we had to do things like this to deal with it, to distance ourselves from the reality that some kid in his twenties was dead — had probably been murdered — and was literally coating the walls of his own apartment. They called it ‘gallows humour.’
I didn’t like it, but I was used to it.
We went for lunch at a deli down the block. Neither of us should have had any appetite after what we had seen. I could still smell the blood, and some of it had seeped through the plastic poncho and stained the shoulders of Rowan’s jacket. And yet, we walked down the street together, him eating a roast beef sandwich and me eating a falafel wrap. It wasn't the best falafel I'd ever had, but it was good enough.
After three years in Homicide, bodies didn’t stop me from eating. It looked like Rowan was developing a stronger stomach from being constantly saddled with me on the weird death cases.
I knew he thought this was an isolated incident, and it very well could have been. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed he was right. The other murders were… maybe not subtle, but nowhere near as obvious as this. That could have been the point, though. They could have been trying to throw us off.
Or I was paranoid.
I was probably paranoid.
“Shades are a sort of necromancer, aren’t they?” I asked.
