Raven was no stranger to death. He’d seen more people die in more horrible ways than most human beings could see and stay sane. He never managed to become immune to its effects; he supposed that was what had divided him from William. Yet this death, relatively quick and clean, shocked him in a way he had not been prepared for. Maybe because it was quick and clean, just a brief second, a brief twitch of a man’s finger, and the border between life and death, that inexplicable border that no scientist and no mage had fully explained, that border had been crossed. The border had been crossed, the gates closed, and for this man there would be no return. Oh, one could get into the metaphysics, the possibility of planes beyond this one, beliefs about reincarnation. But the fact remained that this man, Harvey Heilman, Harvey the hay man, this man would never exist as he had been on this plane. It seemed wrong that something so quick, so simple, so utterly without magic, should be so utterly irreversible.
Raven had seen death often enough that it should not make him queasy. But he had never been tangled in a dying man’s thoughts before. It was like touching his own mortality. He willed down his gorge, straightened his spine, and reminded himself that he was still alive.
Nothing he could do for the dead. His responsibility was to the living, and he was more certain than ever that they were facing something much bigger than a dead real estate mogul and a mentally unstable hay farmer.
“Are you all right?” The sheriff asked.
“Fine. I didn’t — what happened, I didn’t want him to do that.”
“I didn’t think that you did,” the sheriff said with more faith than most people gave to Raven on such short acquaintance.
“We need to talk.” Raven’s voice sounded strange in his own ears. Flat, slightly unreal. “Once this is all cleaned up, we need to talk.”
“We’ll need a statement from you. Do you want to stick around while we wait for the techs to come and take charge of the scene? I should really be here until the van comes to take the body to the morgue. It could be a while, so if you want you can come in tomorrow. . .”
It was a courtesy for the sheriff to give him a choice. He probably only extended the offer because of how he had treated Raven the previous evening. Raven considered just teleporting back to the B&B and have a good night’s sleep, or try to. Easier to lick his wounds in private, and come to the police station in the morning with his masks and his mental equilibrium intact. But he had sensed something familiar in the darkness within Heilman’s mind. In the heat of the moment, he had not recognized it. Now in hindsight he knew what he felt. It was akin to what he had sensed in the cave at the Devil’s Boneyard. If he was right, they’d already spent far too long to realize a danger that was only growing worse.
“I’ll stay.”
Raven trailed the sheriff as he approached Morgan. The boy was sitting on the ground, hugging his knees to his chest and rocking back and forth. Someone had gotten out one of those silvery blankets that emergency personnel carry and wrapped it around his shoulders. His whole body shook and he was breathing hard but too fast.
“How are you, son?” the sheriff asked. “At some point we need to talk about what happened.”
Morgan just shook his head. “I— I— Just give me a minute.”
It was very clear to Raven that it would take more than a minute for the boy to get himself together. He had seen enough crime scenes to see the effects of severe emotional shock.
Apparently, so had the sheriff. “All right, son. All right. I’d like to take a statement as soon as possible, but I don’t think you’re going to be in any shape for a while. Are you hurt at all?”
Morgan glanced at up at him once, and then returned his gaze to the ground. “I wasn’t hit or shot or anything like that.”
“All right,” Craig said. “I think you should be looked over anyway. I’ll have an ambulance here to take you to the hospital. One of my reserve deputies will meet you there. She’ll take your statement after the doctors clear you.”
The sheriff walked a little distance, indicating that Raven should follow him. “The deputy I’m sending is good with trauma situations. She’s trained to act as a family liaison for the families of victims. She’ll take good care of him.”
“Should I arrange to have a lawyer present for the boy?” Raven asked.
“It’s up to you and him, of course,” the sheriff said. “But I don’t think that’s really going to be necessary.”
“You no longer think he had anything to do with his parents’ deaths.” He phrased it as a statement, but he still wanted the sheriff’s confirmation.
“My money’s on Harvey at this point,” Craig said. “If Morgan were one of my nephews, I’d want to keep the interview as low-key as possible. Do it at the hospital, rather than having to bring him in to the station, like we would if we did a formal interview with the lawyer.”
“So where does he go after that?”
“That’s a good question.” The sheriff frowned. “As far as I know, there is no other family.”
“Damn.” Raven thought for a moment. “There’s a hotel in town, isn’t there?”
“Yeah, the Hotel Grand. A little run down, but they’re clean and safe. I don’t know that Morgan has any money though. I’m assuming he will inherit everything from his parents, but that’ll take a while. I’m not sure he’s on any of the farm accounts.”
“You can help me make arrangements with the hotel. I’ll pay the bill for a few nights. Give him a chance to figure things out.”
The sheriff sighed in relief. “Thank you. We’re not really set up for this sort of thing here. Too small, not enough resources. I may not be Morgan’s number one fan, but I still don’t want to make him sleep in the barn a few yards from where his parents were killed.”
.
Chapter Twelve
In the end Raven gave two statements that night. The first he gave at the scene, the official one in which he was little more than a witness to the tragedy that had happened. The second he gave later, in Craig’s office at the bar, after hours.
The sheriff poured a scotch for himself and made up a glass of absinthe for Raven. Raven took his drink without comment. He had never been on official duty here; it was none of his business whether the sheriff considered himself on duty or officially clocked out. They both needed the drink.
Raven didn’t start talking until they were both well enough into their drinks to have the alcohol buzz take the sharpest edge off of what they had seen. And then he told the sheriff what he had sensed. “Either the man had multiple personalities—rare, I know, but it’s possible—or there was something else there. In his head.”
The sheriff shook his head. “Heilman was never known to have any instabilities before this moment. ‘Course sometimes it’s all boiling under the surface and then it just erupts without warning.”
“Right.” Raven leveled him a steady gaze. “And in real life, how often does that actually happen?”
The sheriff smiled grimly and shook his head. “Not often. Not often at all.”
“So, it must be somehow related to what happened in the cave.”
The sheriff shook his head again. “I don’t see how it could be. I mean yes there’s two unusual occurrences, well, three if you count the Jansens’ deaths and Heilman’s suicide as two separate incidents. But you know as well as I that correlation does not mean causation. That’s just sloppy police work.”
“I would agree with you if correlation were all we had. But the darkness, whatever it was, it felt like a separate personality. It makes no sense, but that doesn’t make it any less true. And that darkness felt the same as what was in the cave.”
“So you did sense a magical signature after all?”
Raven took another long sip of the absinthe. Though it had been well-blended with sugar, it was the bitterness of the wormwood that he tasted. “Not a magical signature. At least not like anything that I have encountered before. It was—the whole thing makes no sense in terms of anyt
hing I’ve ever known about magic. And I flatter myself that I do know quite a bit.”
“No flattery if it’s true. You have quite the reputation, and not all of it bad. GII doesn’t hire consultants on a whim.”
Raven rested the empty absinthe glass against his chin. “It all comes back to that damn cave. We need to take another look at it. First thing in the morning, preferably. I have a feeling that time is running out, and we don’t even know what we’re fighting against.”
It took him a second to remember that he was not here officially, this was not GII, and the sheriff had no reason to take direction from him.
“That’s what we’ll do, then,” the sheriff said before Raven could finish the thought. “Do you think you and I will be enough, or do you want to call in more support?”
“Let’s just keep it to the two of us for now,” Raven said. “No offense, but if we run into something there that I can’t handle alone, I don’t think there is another mage within two hundred miles who can be a damn bit of help. There’s a huge unusual surge in magical related crime in Portland, so we’re not getting any help from GII anytime soon. I already asked. So I’m all you’ve got, if you wish to let a civilian walk all over your case.”
“I’m a big enough man to admit when I’m in out of my depth,” the sheriff said “I can handle the regular sheriff thing just fine, but this is something beyond that. My county doesn’t have a budget for consultants. It barely has enough budget to pay for me, my car, and my deputies. But if you would consider working for nothing more than gratitude, I would be happy to consider this your case in all but name.”
“It’s never been about money for me.” Raven gave an ironic chuckle. “Easy enough for me to say that, I know, with all of the Ravenscroft ancestral funds behind me. But if the side of the light comes to benefit from the blood money of my ancestors, then at least that may lessen some of the stain on my family’s name.”
“You’re a good man,” the sheriff said as he took Raven’s empty glass and mixed him a fresh drink.
The words forced an amused half-chuckle from him as he accepted the drink. “Those are words I don’t hear too often.” He knew Cassandra thought him a good man, as did her aunt Ana who had bargained for his pardon. Rafe probably believed the same, though the man would rather die than admit it. He, himself, didn’t think himself a good man so much as he was a man with a past trying to do good to atone. A fine distinction, yes, but an important one.
“No, really, you are.” The sheriff passed him his new drink. “I’m not sure I would be as willing to take on possibly dangerous work at no pay after someone insulted me as I did you.”
“What? You mean earlier, at the bar? You were positively polite compared to others that have torn into me at various times, and those others include my wife, my current nanny, and one of my closest friends.”
He could call Rafe a friend while he was out here; it would never get back to the smug nuisance.
“Besides,” he added, “at the time you thought you had every right. For that matter, at the time I thought you had every right to, as well. I mean, this is your town and your people. It made sense that you had a clearer read on the situation.”
“You would think so. Instead, I nearly got an innocent boy killed. Innocent of his parents’ deaths, anyway. Although if you’re right about everything being connected —”
Raven leaned back in his chair. “You had no way of knowing that Heilman was going to lose his mind, let alone that he would take Morgan hostage.”
“I’m talking about the APB. If I hadn’t made Morgan so afraid of the authorities, he would’ve come to us, instead of trying to find the details of his parents’ deaths from Heilman.”
“Still, unless you have a talent for clairvoyance that you’ve not told me about, you had no way of knowing how things were going to turn out.”
They finished their drinks in silence then.
“Are you all right to teleport back to your lodging?” the sheriff asked.
“Oh, I’ve drunk far more absinthe than this and teleported.”
It had been a while, and he had been serving under William. William alone was a reason to drink to excess. Never mind that he encouraged the practice. Those days were long behind him in more senses than one. Still, some of that frightening alcohol tolerance remained.
He took his leave of the sheriff, after inquiring and being assured that the man could safely make his way home himself. Then he teleported to his temporary home, where he capped off the night with a glass of wine before seeking his bed.
The morning came all too soon, bringing with it—he wouldn’t call it a hangover, exactly, but he definitely wished he had indulged a little less the night before. He settled his sour stomach with some of the hostess’ excellent baking and cleared his head with several cups of Earl Grey before using the message crystal to talk to Mother Crone. She was one of the representatives of the Craft Community on the Joint Council, but he was more interested in her position as leader of the wiccan community and her knowledge of Craft. He explained to her what was going on at Devil’s Crossing.
“I wonder if that has something to do with the amorphous sense of danger that a lot of covens have been reporting lately,” she said. “I’ve never heard about anything like it, personally.”
“Look, the archeologists and the tribes all agree that these petroglyphs were—created, brought into being, however you want to say it—by a culture even older than that of the Native Americans who live here now. But I also know that the tribes have sacred lore that they do not share with outsiders. I absolutely respect their right to withhold their knowledge, but if there is anything they know that can help me turn back this shadow, I’m begging here.”
“I understand,” Mother Crone said. “I will talk to my contacts among the elders. I do not think they would withhold information when doing so could endanger lives.”
Chapter Thirteen
Raven teleported out to the agreed-upon site a little way away from the cave. Even before he fully regained corporeal being, he could feel the immense, dark power roiling out of the cave. Not only had it not faded with time, it had gotten far, far worse.
The sheriff was there. “It wasn’t like this. It was barely a brush of dark magic when I investigated the scene. I thought it was just residue. No wonder you insisted that Morgan could not be responsible for this.”
Raven shook his head. “This is far worse than when I investigated the scene. At least twice as bad, I’d say.”
“Then what you felt the first time you looked at the cave was still stronger than what I had sensed investigating the scene. That’s why there wasn’t a meeting of minds when we first discussed it. It’s like we were talking about two different things entirely.”
“So whatever it is, it’s getting worse steadily. At an exponential rate, if I had to guess.”
Whatever it was, it was darker and more deadly than any human mage Raven had encountered. More powerful even than any mage of legend that he had read of, even if the strength of those legendary mages had not been exaggerated over time.
“Do we go forward?” the sheriff asked.
Raven could hear the fear in the man’s voice, and didn’t blame him. He himself had not been this afraid when he faced down William, even though at the time he wasn’t certain he would survive that encounter. At least William had been a known quantity. He didn’t know what the hell this was, but he now doubted that it could be human, nor the direct product of any human mage’s power. He thought about soul stealers. Though called forth by a mage, they were not created by mages and could not be controlled by them. He knew well the feeling of soul stealers, and this was not that. Nor did this behave the way soul stealers behaved. And yet that was the closest analogy he could come up with to what they now faced.
Soul stealers came, so far as anyone who studied the matter could tell, from some dimension adjacent to their own. Early magic tomes called them demons from hell, but Raven believed neither in
demons nor in hell. What they faced now almost made him reconsider that belief.
Oh, it would be convenient to be able to believe in demons, and hell, and in a god or gods that would protect them. Raven believed gods to be metaphors for the spiritual powers of nature in the universe, as channeled and directed by Craft practitioners. To his knowledge any indication of their direct involvement in human affairs was nothing more than a fairytale.
“I go forward,” Raven said. “If anyone has shields strong enough to protect against that darkness, it is I. Your strength lies in your knowledge, your training, and your badge. Not to denigrate any of those, but I don’t think they’re going to be much help here. Your shields are not strong enough for whatever is pouring out of that cave. Hell, I don’t know if my shields are strong enough for whatever is pouring out of that cave. But one of us has to get a closer look into what’s going on and I am the most obvious candidate for that task.”
“It goes against every bit of that training for me to hang back and let a civilian go forward,” the sheriff said.
“We both know that this is not any sort of situation that your training was meant to meet. And we both know that I am no ordinary civilian. If nothing else, if I don’t come back, that’s where your training, your badge, and your connections will come into play. If I don’t come back, you’ll need to go through official channels. Maybe evacuate the town, definitely cordon off a larger area. Make an official request to bring GII in and not just as a favor to their wayward consultant.”
The sheriff nodded, clearly relieved and just as clearly guilty about that relief.
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