by C. T. Phipps
“See, I told you,” I said, looking at Emma.
Emma shrugged. “I didn’t disagree with you in the first place.”
“So who did do it?” I asked, frowning. “Assuming you can put your magnificent FBI wizard abilities to good use.”
“I have not the slightest idea,” Alex said, shrugging his shoulders. “This place is one of the most spiritually dead places I’ve visited, which is probably why Dr. Jones chose it for his temporary base. I was hoping to get your help here, Jane.”
“Deputy Doe here to help,” I said, giving the Girl Scouts’ salute.
“You shouldn’t say that or Clara will recruit you,” Alex said.
“She’s offered,” I said, more tempted than I’d like to admit. “How have you been? Any attacks by griffons or werewolf mercenaries?”
“I can’t say that I have,” Alex said, blinking at my statement. “I did solve a thirty-year-old murder but that turned out to be unrelated to this case.”
“Well, here’s what’s gone on in my past few hours.” I clasped my hands together. I neglected the part where I made out with Lucien.
Alex blinked after I finished. “Well, you’ve had a more productive day than I have.”
“Yeah, I know it sounds a little strange…” I muttered, trailing off.
“Strange? Hardly,” Alex said, smiling. “I talked with Carl Sagan’s ghost once. We smoked pot and discussed the nature of the universe as an accidental place versus a deterministic one as well as whether the nature of the latter would require intelligence. We also discussed how the Klingons looked in Star Trek: Discovery.”
“Who won?” I asked.
“Science,” Alex said. “I admit, I’m not sure how he won the part about disproving ghosts existed, though.”
“Well, clearly he’s an expert on the subject,” I said. “So yeah, Robyn’s a demigoddess and I’m neck-deep in promises.”
“One of which is to kill a god,” Alex said, nodding. “Do you want me to talk to her?”
“Please,” I said, sighing. “I need a break to cleanse my brain.”
“Temporarily dead or not, Dr. Jones is at least off the board for a bit,” Alex said, sighing. “That does give us a bit of breathing room to plan our next move.”
“Good,” I said, waving my staff. “I’d hate to have to use this on some of the cultists over there.”
“Your staff is actually empty,” Alex said, acknowledging what I’d hoped he’d miss.
“Yeah,” I said, grimacing. “I think I screwed up my rune carving since it was three a.m. on a Friday night. I hadn’t been asleep for three days thanks to trying to pass my two-year-degree final exams.”
“If I may?” Alex stretched out his hand.
I handed it over. “Don’t bust it. I worked hard on this.”
“I’ll treat it as my own.” Alex pulled out a large pocket knife that he used to adjust one of the runes on it. “Glyph magic isn’t like other sorcery, since it invokes spirits to allow effects to be done regardless of the skill of the magic user. Yours was leaking do to the wrongly inscribed moon seal. You still need to charge it, though, which the runes serve as batteries for.”
“Yeah, I know that,” I said. Taking my staff back, I closed my eyes and filled it with mystical energy. After a few seconds, it hummed with power. “There, full.”
Alex blinked a few times and opened his mouth to say something before stopping himself.
“Something wrong?” I asked, wondering why the usually blunt FBI agent was holding back this once.
“Just noting it would have taken me a week to do that,” Alex said, showing the barest hint of envy.
“Huh,” I said, looking at the staff. “I guess I was conceived by the midiclorians.”
“I actually know what Lucas was going for with those and I still think it was a dumb idea,” Alex said, looking on at me in amazement. “Your potential is off the charts, Jane. Stronger than any other natural wizard I’ve encountered.”
“Yeah, I just wish I could utilize that potential,” I said, grumbling. Emma’s earlier digs about me not having any ‘boom-boom’ magic were accurate even if I was ten thousand Duracell batteries. I couldn’t resist asking how I compared, though. “How long would it take Lucien and Kim Su to charge up ye ol’ walking stick?”
“About a month and two weeks probably,” Alex said, giving me a surprisingly precise answer. “Magic is like music, an art rather than an exact science. Some people have a natural talent they can cultivate and other people are just tone deaf to it.”
“Well thank you for tooting my horn,” I paused. “Okay, that sounded dirty.”
Emma giggled, having been notably quiet during this conversation. It took me a second to realize she was trying to be supportive.
Alex smirked. “I’ll buy you lunch after we take a look at Dr. Jones’s body. I’ll also fix up Yolanda and Larry’s dowsing rod with samples of Robyn’s hair and that piece of bone she brought. I can turn it from a generic evil finding device to a specific Dryad-finding device. I’ll need your help to do it, though. I don’t have the oomph you do.”
“You have plenty of oomph but I’ll gladly do it,” I said, looking across the street at the Falcon. “How did you become friends with those two, anyway?”
“You mean how do I maintain friendships with people who hunt the supernatural while being the supernatural myself?”
“No, you’re ninety percent human. I mean how did you meet them period? Why be friends with them?”
Alex paused and looked at my waistband where I’d hidden the Merlin Gun under my shirt in a leather band I’d sewn into most of my pants. His demeanor shifted and I knew he was about to share something personal. Despite having the typical attitude of Cloud Cookoo Land’s king, Alex had a tragic past. There were things he’d not opened up to me about he kept from everyone else. He’d been abused as a child, killed his abusive father (and innocent sister) during his power’s awakening, and spent time in a mental institution run by quacks. That was before he’d become a hunter and FBI agent.
Finally, he spoke. “I used to be a person who devoted himself to killing. Trying to eradicate evil and quench the fury in my chest from all the things I’d suffered at my father’s and the asylum’s hands. Feeding my bloodlust only made it worse, though. I destroyed two dozen supernaturals and as many evil humans across two years with the Merlin Gun. Rapists, serial killers, human traffickers. The worst of the worst on both sides. I was so successful, the FBI nicknamed me the Huntsman and covered up my crimes. They eventually tracked me down, though, but not to arrest me. They wanted me to take a more legal route to fighting evil. To assist them in coordinating anti-supernatural operations along with other hunters. An offer I accepted. It was during my second mission when I saw that same fury I felt in Yolanda and, to a lesser extent, in Larry. I wanted to give them the same opportunity I was pursuing. A chance to be better than the anger.”
I blinked, processing that. “Did you ever kill an innocent as a hunter?”
“No,” Alex said, sighing. “The Merlin Gun prevented that. I killed people who might have abandoned the path of evil, though. People who were victims before they became victimizers. People I was starting to resemble. Enough that I grew utterly sick of that and wanted to serve as a protector instead of a punisher.”
“Lucien is like you in that,” I said, sighing. “Did you inspire him to do that?”
Alex paused. “No, I was the one who helped him go on his mission of vengeance.”
He is the most successful hunter of the modern era, Raguel said. It is a shame he decided to give it up.
You used him, I said, disgusted with my weapon.
As he did me.
Emma looked deep in thought. “Wait, how did you get a degree in psychology when you were being the Punisher?”
I looked at her. “That’s what’s bothering you?”
“Yeah,” Emma said. “I mean, the numbers just don’t add up.”
“I had Hermione�
�s Time Turner,” Alex said, smiling.
Emma paused before leaning in as if to whisper. “I know you’re joking but I really hope you’re telling the truth. Which is possible, because you’re you.”
“Quite a few of the monsters were in groups,” Alex said, trying to downplay he’d been Van Helsing on steroids when the world had descended into chaos following the Reveal. “I also took a lot of online courses. Lucien was with me on a lot of those missions too. He blamed me for abandoning him when I decided to join the FBI, and he wasn’t wrong for it.”
“Did you drive a black Impala while listening to hair bands?” I asked. Man, I loved Supernatural to an absurd degree.
“No, Jane.”
“Aww,” I said, surprisingly okay with the idea Alex was a hunter. It was massively hypocritical on my part, but I knew he wasn’t the kind of guy to ever hunt my people just for what they were.
It was massively hypocritical on your part since you are a hunter.
You shut your damned mouth! If you had one!
Divine mouth if I had one.
Stupid grammar angel.
“To answer your earlier question, yeah, I’d love to get lunch with you,” I said, smiling. “I’m about tuckered out from people trying to kill me and I need to vent about a thousand different things.”
“Consider me your ventilator,” Alex said, pausing. “Which doesn’t sound dirty so much as stupid.”
“I’ll forgive you. We should eat at the Deerlightful where you should leave a big tip despite two out of the three owners sucking,” I said, smirking. “Cherry pie is on me, but everything else is on you—but not because I’m a woman. Instead, it’s because I’ve got debt up to my eyeballs.”
“So noted.” Alex nodded. “I may not have Lucien’s money, but special agents are unlike other government employees in that we can actually survive off our salaries. I also put everything on my expense account. That allows me to save money for when I have to inevitably go into hiding for all the various crimes I’ve committed as an agent.”
“Thank the Goddess for Uncle Sam’s deep pockets,” I said before turning to Emma. “Emma, you stand watch outside of the crime scene and bark once for yes and twice for no if anyone is coming toward us.”
“Oh, ha-ha.”
“You think I’m kidding but we almost got eaten by an eagle-lion.” It single-handedly explained why no one wanted to ride them to Mordor. That thing with the One Ring would have been worse than Sauron.
It really wouldn’t have been, Raguel said.
Hush you. Just stay on the lookout for evil to kill.
As you wish.
Chapter Fifteen
There was a sense of peace walking beside Alex that I didn’t quite understand, since he just admitted to being a guy who’d killed a fifty people. Then again, I’d seen just how evil and awful the world could be, so maybe I just didn’t care there were a few less monsters. Human or otherwise.
“So were you serious about coming to work here in Bright Falls permanently?”
“Yes,” Alex said, taking a deep breath. “They offered me a permanent position teaching magic at Quantico, but I don’t have any interest in that.”
“Wow, you want to come here that much?” I asked.
“Yes and no,” Alex said. “Yes, I love Bright Falls and its environment. Murder is a stranger here and the people are kind in a way I don’t feel in Washington D.C.”
Wow, did he misjudge this town.
Alex continued. “But, actually, it’s also the fact magic isn’t easily taught. You either have the knack for it or you don’t, and the type of sorcery you do is determined by the person you are. You can’t standardize that. The FBI would be far better off recruiting existing magicians and letting them recruit at their own pace.”
“Magic is like music,” I muttered.
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Plus, there’s someone in town that I’m very interested in.”
“Kim Su?” I asked.
“Ha-ha. You know who I mean,” Alex said, showing he did consider me his girlfriend.
That made me smile. “So you’re okay with dating a nineteen year old?”
“If only there was a law for when it was appropriate to date someone younger than yourself. Like, say, if they were an adult at eighteen.”
“Old enough to kill, old enough to date an FBI agent.” I snorted. “In any case, I won’t lie to—”
The two of us reached the crime-scene door, but no sooner did we do so than two figures stepped in front of it. The first of them looked like a younger, better-looking version of Dr. Jones with silver-white hair but a face showing him to be in his early thirties at most. He was wearing the typical white suit of an Ultralogist but of a much more expensive and finer cut than the majority of them around us.
The second one’s appearance made my blood run cold, as it was the twelve-year-old girl from my vision. She was wearing a white blouse and skirt but had a little blue vest on as well as a headband that gave her a little color. The twelve-year-old girl had auburn hair and freckles, but this didn’t disguise the fact there was a crazy zeal in her eyes as well as a magical aura stronger than Lucien’s.
I grabbed Alex’s arm. “Oh hey, uh, hello, Ultralogy people.”
“David,” Alex said, looking at the man in front of me. “Judith.”
David was notably the name of Dr. Jones’s son according to Robyn. Robyn had also said he was a decent person compared to other Ultralogists.
“You’re both going to burn in hell,” Judith said, looking between us. “You’re unworthy before the eye of the Preceptus.”
“And a fine hello to you too, little girl,” I said, sighing.
“Be kind, Judith,” David said, the man said, pressing his hands together as if in prayer but aimed downwards.
“The black knight and the pawn turned black queen are our enemies,” Judith said, glaring at us both. “When our father returns from the dead, he shall wreak a terrible vengeance upon them.”
Judith then walked off, actually hissing at us.
“She reminds me of a movie star,” I said, watching her depart. “Linda Blaire.”
Alex looked away, clearly trying not to laugh.
“Judith has the misfortune of having been raised in the Ultralogist family,” David said, surprising me. “She’s been fed nothing but a steady stream of father’s propaganda and his rules since childhood.”
“And yet you continue to serve your father’s will,” Alex said, sounding more confused than condemnatory.
“I believe in the principles of Ultralogy,” David said, simply. “I helped write them after all. I just dislike how my father misuses them. As to why I continue serving him, he is my father and we live in a world where any source of hope is a good thing.”
“Their wallets would disagree,” I said, not having any sympathy for this guy or his religious convictions. “You know your dad is going to come back from the dead, right?”
“Yes,” David said, his voice low. “The last time it happened, my elder brother Saul was wiped away. I’m terrified of being next.”
My eyes widened. “He possessed his own son?”
“Replaced,” David corrected, as if it were just an issue of grammar. “Blood ties make the Eternal Life spell easier to perform. My father has tried to sire children with other cultists so he has a host of other bodies but that is a long term project. I expect him to possess me only begrudgingly because I am unsuitable.”
“Unsuitable?” I asked, trying to guess what was wrong with him in Dr. Jones’s eyes. I couldn’t feel any aura of power from him. He had less magical people than even quote-unquote “normal” people did. Perhaps because his father had sucked it all out of him. “Because you don’t have magic?”
“Because I do not like women,” David said, sighing. “The Prophet of the Earthmother has some decidedly retrograde beliefs.”
Prophet of the Earthmother? Was that coincidence? I briefly considered reading up on their religion before decidi
ng that would make me suicidal. “No offense, Dave, but I think you should drop your Selfosophy card fast. It sounds like a raw deal all the way.”
“I could,” David said, sighing. “Then my father would kill me. Even if he didn’t, though, then who would look after Judith? What little I can do is better than nothing.”
“All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to think the lesser evil is enough,” Alex said, sighing. “I didn’t kill your father, David.”
“No, Huntsman, if you did then he would not be returning.” David let out a sigh. “It seems we have a common enemy.”
“No,” Alex said, pointing to his side and gesturing for David to get out of the way. “We don’t.”
Charles stepped aside and Alex waved his hand over the police tape, causing it to shimmer like it was a blurred picture. Alex walked through it without breaking it. Blinking, I did the same and it felt like the tape was water rather than an actual physical substance.
Charles watched us enter the room. “I want to help you, Alex.”
“Just like you helped Laura?” Alex asked. “She trusted you and she’s dead. Did you lift a finger to help her or did you just stay silent when your father murdered her?”
Charles had no response to that and departed.
I walked past it and headed to the location we needed to investigate. The interior of hotel room seventeen was the kind of place I didn’t really want to run a black light over because of what I might find. The walls were pea green while the windows were covered with a set of pine-tree drapes that would look tacky on, well, a cheap motel’s windows. The bed had numerous maps of Shadow Pine Park spread out over it, black-and-white pictures of Robyn, plus pamphlets as well as poster designs for a ‘Save Shadow Pines’ project.
The body of Dr. Jones was on the ground at the foot of the bed, a silver knife stuck through his chest, but surprisingly little blood. His expression was one of surprise with his mouth hanging open as well as his eyes staring up at the ceiling. A knocked-over chessboard was on the ground, the only pieces standing up being a white bishop and pawns.
