Death Comes Ashore

by Corinne O'Flynn

  Most people spend their lives happy and loved, oblivious to the dark things that lurk through the veil of our existence, just a hair’s breadth away. Then there are the others—the ones who slip through the veil, moving to the dark side without even knowing it. Sometimes it happens when you’re twenty and just looking to have a good time. Sometimes it happens when you’re eight and a deranged kidnapper breaks your soul and brings you into the awareness of a child molester. Corey wouldn’t let the memory take hold. She took a deep cleansing breath, in and then out, letting the sea air wash her clean.

  She glanced at Alicia. “You think you can drive? Hold the wheel for a while?”

  Alicia nodded and got to her feet.

  Corey moved aside, making room for Alicia to take the wheel.

  Alicia touched Corey’s hand. A tear fell onto the girl’s cheek. “Thank you,” she said. “I can’t believe she’s dead. Why should I get to live and Nikki doesn’t?”

  Corey’s heart ached for her. “I don’t know why bad things happen the way they do.” She covered Alicia’s hand with hers. “But if something good can come from this, think about the fact that Nikki led me to you, Alicia. And you’re going to be okay. I know it.”

  Corey stepped down inside the cabin and walked through the small galley, stopping in the doorway to the bedroom. She’d been able to raise the bed platform on her own but she had needed Alicia’s help to lift Wingate’s body over the low wall and into the box. She walked over to the box and peered inside. Wingate now occupied the space. She leaned in and checked his pulse. The monster was alive, but unconscious. She had secured him into the narrow space, pulling his hands down and his knees up, wedging him into immobility with chains the way he had done to Nikki and Alicia, and her, and who knows how many girls before them.

  She knew this wasn’t over. She could feel it in her bones.

  She’d wanted to stop him the moment Nikki Soto’s body had washed up on the beach. She’d vowed to find him when she realized he had her friend’s daughter. But this was her business, now. It was personal, and Corey would do whatever it took to find the other girls and bring all those involved to justice.

  “You won’t win. We’re stronger than you.” Tears filled Corey’s eyes. She blinked and let them fall. “You have no power here.”

  She reached up and pulled the platform down, lowering the bed and sending the monster back to the darkness.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Six Months Later

  “And how did that make you feel?” Dr. Lilith Glowden asked.

  Corey laughed. “Make me feel? Really doc? After all we’ve been through?”

  “I’m serious, Corey. If we’re going to get to the core of what’s happening, we need to dig into your feelings around it. I don’t have to tell you that your feelings are directly connected to your energy.”

  “I know,” Corey admitted with a sigh.

  “So, Inspector, when your hands burst into light and you subdued your captor without actually touching him, what did you feel?”

  “I felt like I may have been hallucinating.”

  Dr. Glowden sighed heavily. “Well, I think we both know that isn’t the case. So, if you weren’t hallucinating, then what was it?”

  After all these months since finding Alicia and having that magical episode, Corey wanted to tell herself that she was just going through the motions. It was easy to pretend that she was simply playing along to see her prescribed therapy through to its conclusion, but she finished her last prescribed session long ago. She’d been back on the job for months, and yet, she kept making more appointments to see the doc.

  The truth was, she liked her new therapist. Trusted her. It had been a long time since she’d felt this way about anyone in the counseling realm. Dr. Flowers, her childhood therapist, was wonderful, but things were different now. She needed someone to talk to who wouldn’t focus on her kidnapping and all that happened to her back then. She needed someone who could listen to the crazy shit she’d seen—or thought she’d seen—and not have her committed.

  “If I wasn’t hallucinating, I think… I think…”

  “Yes? This is a safe place, Corey, just share what you’re thinking.”

  “I think that when I worked a case at Rathmoore, one of the students there might have put a curse on me. Maybe I was expelling that energy or something. Maybe it interacted with the tiny bit of magic I have left…”

  Doctor Glowden’s mouth fell open. “And… that is not what I thought you were going to share just now.”

  “Oh, no. I’m sorry. I know this is totally bizarre stuff, I don’t expect you to… I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening to me…”

  “Corey. Stop. Listen to me.” Doctor Glowden stepped over to the bookshelf and returned with a candle which she placed on the round table between them. We’ve been talking through this for months, and I have never pushed you. But I think it is time to really step forward. “I grew up here, on the island. My family have been here for generations, possibly as long as yours has been in Salem.”

  Corey dropped her hands. “Please don’t tell me this is about what happened to me as a child.”

  The doctor smiled gently. “Of course, it has to be; everything is connected, Corey. But hear me out.”

  Corey shook her head and crossed her arms over her chest. She wanted to disappear. “Doc, I just want to get on with my life.”

  “Perhaps the only way to move forward is by facing the past.” Doctor Glowden lifted her hands off her lap and moved them gracefully in front of her as if miming a dance.

  The wick on the candle flickered to life.

  Corey gaped at the candle flame, not wanting to watch. Everything in her wanted to turn away and run out the door.

  “How does it make you feel, Corey?” She moved her fingers and the candle floated off the table, hovering in the air, bobbing gently.

  “Stop. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to see this… this… this magic. I don’t want it.” Corey fought the tightness in her chest, the panic closing in on her throat, and the tears that threatened to make her fall apart. “I don’t know what to do with magic. That part of me is gone.”

  The flame went out and the doctor plucked the candle from the air and moved it back to her desk. “It’s all right, Corey. You do not have to embrace this at all. There are many in the magical community who choose to live their lives without using their power, but it is a conscious choice, not born from trauma.”

  Her words washed over Corey like ice. “What are you saying? I am not magic, Doctor. No way.”

  “Oh, I think we are well beyond denials, Corey. You’ve described several moments during the events on that boat where you experienced your own magic.”

  “No. That can’t be right. There has to be another explanation.”

  “I believe I have that explanation. I believe that when you were kidnapped as a child, and those deplorable people abused you, you hid your magic away before they could take it from you.”

  Corey shook her head. “No. That… That isn’t possible. They took it.”

  Doctor Glowden spoke softly. “I believe that your eight-year-old self repressed or blocked your magic.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous. They took it from me. You think I wanted it gone? Why would I block it?”

  “To protect it. To protect yourself. If there was no magic, they couldn’t steal it from you. If you had no magic, they wouldn’t need you. Perhaps you thought that if you had no magic, they would let you go.”

  Corey slumped back into her chair, shocked. It couldn’t be. Could it?

  Her phone rang as she was leaving Dr. Glowden’s office. The screen told her it was her partner.

  “Hey, Ethan. I’m just heading in.” She pulled her car keys from her pocket and clicked to unlock the doors.

  “Morning, hey. We just got a call on a body.”

  Corey sighed, relieved to get her mind back into work. “All right. Where are you?”

  “U
nder East Bridge, by the river.”

  She nodded. “I’m on my way.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Corey checked her watch. It was ten fifteen. She needed to be on the road soon if she was going to make it to the office by eleven. After months away in protection, Alicia would have just arrived at headquarters. She had no idea where Alicia had been, only that it wasn’t safe for her to stay local. She was the only one to ever get away alive.

  She wondered if Alicia was glad to be back home, allowed a small break from witness protection, or if the memories from six months ago were still too raw…

  Wingate’s trial was to start in two days. Normally, Corey would have no problem testifying to put the bad guy away. But this time she wasn’t just an inspector on the case; she was a witness, a victim. Corey’s mind traveled back in time to the morning she’d been caught in a trap, drugged and captured by Marcus Wingate, a sicko who kidnapped women, branded them, and sold them into a twisted ring of criminals who cut away their magical souls and then forced the girls into prostitution. In the months since their case, they’d made only a little progress, Wingate was supremely uncooperative and only once did he even mention the name of the organization: The Oasis Group.

  Corey wandered along the river’s edge, thinking about what Dr. Glowden had said. She wanted to be angry with the doctor. She wanted to call and cancel all of her upcoming appointments. She wanted to speak to someone who would just believe her and let her be broken.

  She didn’t have her magic. She couldn’t have. All this time? It didn’t seem possible. She recalled how the doc told her that denying her power was perfectly acceptable, as long as it was her choice to do so. But it wasn’t. She knew it and Dr. Glowden knew it. She just didn’t know how to move forward with the idea that she still had it in her.

  Her whole life after her kidnapping was shaped by her lack of magic. She spent time trying to attend the magical schools, but ultimately she was given a tutor who worked with the ‘danes. Even her police training included time in the mundane Police Academy since all of the procedures and skills used by magical detectives were out of her grasp. Shit, she couldn’t even handle the magical administrative tasks required for working in the MCU. It was hard to accept that any of this was self-inflicted. That it really didn’t need to be this way.

  She decided to try. A little. Even though she had no idea what she was doing. Corey closed her eyes, thinking about the way she subdued Wingate on the boat raised a fire inside her. She tried to lean into it, breathe it in the way the doctor suggested. See the heat for what it was… magic, not panic. It went against everything she thought she knew. It was difficult to relax and simply let the heat bloom.

  She thrust her hands out in front of her and exhaled, urging her magic to appear. She had no idea what she was doing, but she wanted to prove the doc wrong. A ball of red heat flew from her hands and shot across the river. She watched as it slammed into the sand on the opposite bank, scaring a flock of blackbirds.

  Corey gaped as the crows cawed and took to the sky. Then she stared at her hands. “Holy shit.”

  “Hey partner, you see this?” Young called from the door of the tent.

  “What?!” Corey spun around toward her partner and shoved her hands behind her back, feeling like a child who got busted with her hand in the cookies. She chided herself. She was back at work. On a case… she needed to focus. She turned and walked over to where her partner stood.

  The dead man’s body lay on the sandy strip of grass under the bridge where the wide mouth of the Forest River spilled into the sea. He was face-up, head tilted back, mouth hanging open, the whites of his eyes visible beneath half-closed lids. He wore black jeans and a gray v-neck t-shirt which clung to his body, accentuating his muscled torso and strong thighs. His dark, close-cropped hair stood in spikes on top of his head. Morning sunlight shone on his bare feet and cast a shadow onto the wall of the tent that had been placed over the corpse.

  From a distance, Corey guessed he might have been mistaken for a drunk. The road came to a dead end at the river and they’d passed a few bars on their way in. Someone who’d had too much to drink could’ve easily stumbled over and plopped down on the grassy riverbank in the middle of the night to sleep it off.

  But his swollen and bloody face and neck told another story altogether. The reason the blackcoats hung around by the cars, and reason Proctor and Young were here, had to do with the swarm of magical hornets—huge glowing wasps made of golden light that circled the man’s body, buzzing loudly and swooping down to pierce him with stingers the size of toothpicks. They looped and dove, slamming into his face, his eyes, and neck, leaving welts the size of lemons and showing no sign of stopping. The body oozed fluid and blood with every new sting. He’d clearly been dead a while, but the hornets just kept on doing their thing.

  Inspector Young squatted to take a look at the dead man’s face, careful to stay away from the wasps, though they seemed to be trained only on the dead guy. “Damn. Whoever cast this spell had some serious dislike for this dude, that’s for sure.” He swatted at a wasp that had flown near his ear, seemed to realize Young wasn’t the one it wanted, and zoomed back inside.

  Corey’s vision blurred as she watched the glowing wasps circle around and around. Morning traffic hummed on the bridge overhead. She let the sound carry her away, chasing her thoughts as they drifted along the lazy river and out to sea. Had Dr. Glowden been right? Could her magic have been inside her all this time? Is that what had saved her and Alicia? It didn’t seem possible at all. And if it was true, what was she supposed to do now?

  “Corey?” Young called again.

  Corey blinked and forced herself to focus yet again. “Yeah. Sorry. What?”

  Young tilted his head. “You all right? I got this if you want to head back to the station.”

  “Hmm? I’m fine,” she said, though she could barely pay attention and was probably better off at her desk doing paperwork.

  Young stood up and left the tent. “Dr. Albarexi should be here soon. Let’s see if anyone else saw anything.”

  “Right.” Corey agreed and followed her partner toward the people.

  A small crowd had gathered near the barrier of yellow crime scene tape. They craned over each other, hoping to get a glimpse of the body, but there was nothing to see now but a plain canvas tent.

  Officer Vera Yuki and her team were busy processing any potential witnesses. Most of the people arrived after news of the dead guy had spread; none of them saw anything that could help them. Corey watched as Officer Yuki lined everyone up so they could meet with the blackcoats who had a table set up in the shade of the trees. It looked like they were collecting information from everyone, but as the people wandered away, none of them realized their memory of what they’d seen was gone—like it never happened.

  Proctor and Young approached officer Yuki, who had pulled one guy to the side. He wore water shoes and khaki shorts, and a faded red sweatshirt. His bleached hair had been pulled up into a messy bun on top of his head.

  Corey took a deep breath and tried to keep her mind on her job. “Mr. Kane?”

  The man nodded. “Ernie.”

  “I’m Inspector Proctor. This is Inspector Young. How you doing?”

  His wide eyes kept moving back in the direction of the body. “For real? I’m losing it. I ain’t never seen a dead body before. And what the hell is going on with those bugs?” He chewed on the corner of his thumbnail, oblivious to the black grease lining his nails and filling the creases in his skin.

  Corey nodded. It was easy to forget how unsettling it could be for people the first time they saw a body, even more so when they were killed in an obviously abnormal and grisly manner. If it weren’t for the blackcoats, this one could give a person nightmares for a while. “It will be just a few more minutes here. I’d like to talk to you for a moment and then my colleagues over there will take your official statement, all right?” She pointed to the line for the blackcoats.

&nb
sp; Kane nodded and stepped from side to side as if pacing in place. “Did you see those bees man? And his throat? What the fuck?”

  Corey glanced in the direction of the body. “Yeah. That’s some nasty business. What can you tell me about when you found him? What were you doing?”

  He shrugged. “I just came out to get the kayaks ready.”

  Corey pointed her pen toward the rear of the one-story building lined with racks of brightly colored kayaks and overturned canoes. “That’s your tour company?”

  He nodded. “My brother and me, we own it. We have tours today, up the river to the palisade.”

  “Your brother inside?” Young asked.

  “Yeah. His name’s Henry. He couldn’t stay out here with…” His gaze found the tent with the body again and he grimaced.

  Young glanced at Corey. “I’ll go see the brother.” He clipped his badge on his belt and walked toward the shop.

  Corey turned to Kane. “OK, tell me what happened.”

  “Well, I went down to the river and pulled the kayaks, got them lined up and stuff.” He pointed toward the grassy area near the water’s edge and a line of ten small, colorful boats with their tips in the water.

  “When was this?” Corey asked.

  “I don’t know. Seven thirty, maybe? The sun was just up when I came out. I got done with the boats and I was folding up the tarp. That’s when I saw him.” His eyes locked on the tent.

  “Then what? Did you approach the body?”

  Kane put his hands up. “I didn’t touch nothing, I swear it. I told the officer lady that.”

  Corey smiled, trying to reassure him. “I know. It’s all good, Mr. Kane.”

  “It’s just Ernie.”

  “It’s all good, Ernie. We’re simply putting together the facts, that’s all.” Corey slid her notebook into the pocket of her jacket, trying to appear a little less official. “How close did you get to the body?”