I wet my lips before I speak, more to myself than my teammates. “Byers didn’t use any beggar magic while being viciously attacked by the perp. There’s also no sign of beggar magic damage in the attic, and the living room was fully intact as well. So none of them used beggar magic at any point, despite being well aware that a dangerous killer was in their midst. Which means that, unless their beggar rings were somehow disabled—something not feasibly done without magic, whose presence I would sense—Byers and his teammates consciously chose not to use beggar magic. Or maybe…”
I gnaw on my lip. “Not so much a choice as a necessity. They didn’t think beggar magic would be effective. Because…because…”
Ella tips her head up at me. “Because what?”
An answer finally clicks into place: “Because the perp was invisible.”
“You think the perp was veiled?”
“No. Veiled people are hard to pinpoint for two reasons. One, good veil spells are difficult to directly penetrate. And two, by nature, the spells produce very minimal waste energy. What little they do produce is scrambled by the spells themselves into a wide dispersal field, so even if you’re among the rare gems who can pick up those very faint traces of energy, you still can’t track them back to a source.”
I tap my fingers on my pants leg as I recall the passages from the overview on illusory magic I studied in my beginner’s spell book. “Thing is, I am very good—no bragging intended—at sensing magic. So if someone had used a veil here, I would be able to pick up the residuals, I’m a hundred percent sure. I don’t think a veiled practitioner did this. I think it was something that was actually invisible.”
“An invisible Eververse creature?” Desmond rubs his chin. “The only thing that immediately comes to mind is hellhounds, but people with a magic sense can see those, right?”
“Yeah.” I turn over and descend the attic stairs, hopping the last two and landing on the carpet with a dull thump. “My guess would be it’s some sort of obscure summoned creature.”
“Summoned, huh?” Ella backtracks to the doorway of the master bedroom and gives Byers’ body another thorough look. “That would imply a practitioner is controlling it.”
“Here’s the thing.” I fold up the attic stairs, lift the door, and point to the metal loop where the padlock was hanging. “That trace of magic we found on the cork at Coble’s house is identical to the one on this padlock.”
I partially pull the bag with the padlock inside from my pocket to emphasize the point. “And that little smudge on the padlock is the only trace of magic I’ve spotted in the entire house, despite the degree of carnage on both floors. Now, this is only a guess, and it might very well be a wild-ass guess, but I think the energy belongs to a summoner who’s using an Eververse creature as a murder weapon instead of their own magic.”
“Why not just send the creature to attack people by itself?” Amy says.
“Maybe it can’t.” Desmond taps his foot on the floor in an even rhythm. “All beings have limitations. Maybe this particular creature excels at stealth but is not particularly intelligent or stable, and requires its summoner to remain nearby in order to ensure it doesn’t go off script.”
Ella waves a hand, signaling an end to the discussion. “At this point, we’re largely speculating. But I agree we’re on the right track. Invisibility explains the lack of beggar magic use, as well as how the creature got the drop on Byers’ entire team: they couldn’t tell where it was at any point during the attack.”
She motions for Desmond and Amy to check the one room on the hall we haven’t yet cleared, and for me to stand by her side as backup. “That hypothesis tells us we need to proceed with extreme caution, but it doesn’t require a change of general tactics. We need to figure out what Fletcher and Coble have in common, other than being acquaintances, that might’ve drawn this kind of retaliation from a practitioner, and then work our way back to the perp’s identity from there.”
Amy and Desmond stride up to the door, and the latter tests the knob and throws the door open. The room is dark, and there’s no movement inside. Amy enters and does a cursory search of everywhere large enough for a threat to hide, but finds nothing. She shakes her head as she exits the room and tucks her gun back into its holster. The rest of us follow suit, because there’s no point in clutching our guns with white knuckles when we’re at a cooling crime scene. We missed all the action by a literal mile. We’d have had to arrive immediately after Byers’ call to have done any good for his team.
Whatever this creature is, it’s a swift and merciless killer. Then again, if it’s really not all that smart, maybe the summoner is the merciless one.
As we head back downstairs, Ella calls dispatch and requests a crime scene team, leaves a message for the busy commissioner with a summary of the unfortunate developments, and finally, has a short chat with an irate Natalie Schultz, who agrees to send over a city morgue van to clean up all the bodies once the crime scene guys finish sweeping the place. That done, we each squeeze through the narrow front door and regroup on the stoop, Ella opening her mouth to give us instructions. But just then, a black-and-white PD car, lights flashing without sirens, rolls to a stop behind Byers’ SUV. Two uniforms cautiously step out, one of them speaking into his radio.
Ella marches down the steps with an air of authority she’s been getting much better at exuding lately, and informs the cops about the crime scene inside the house. After nothing but a serious stare from the DSI captain, the uniforms agree to set up a perimeter around the entrances until our crime scene techs arrive, and one of them grabs a roll of yellow tape from the trunk of the car. They wait for us to trudge on past before they start roping off the scene, and I can feel their eyes boring into my back, partly nervous, partly frustrated, as they wonder when the hierarchy of law enforcement organizations in this city got flipped on its head.
I could tell them it was Delos’ curse epidemic that tipped the scales in DSI’s favor. But of course, they don’t know that was magic. And their ignorance needs to stay put.
So I climb into my designated spot across from Desmond in the SUV, slam my door shut, clip my seatbelt, and sit in silence as Ella pulls the vehicle onto the street and carries us away from yet another scene of painful and bitter loss.
Seven bodies in four hours. I don’t like the direction this day is heading. At all.
Chapter Three
What was supposed to be a task meeting turns into a visit to Riker’s office.
Riker listens with a deep scowl as Ella recounts the details of the scene at Fletcher’s house. The four of us sit in stiff, narrow chairs in front of the huge oak desk, while the big boss himself lounges in his leather office chair on the opposite side, occasionally scribbling notes onto a legal pad with only a handful of pages remaining. The rest of the pages are balled up in a metal trashcan next to the desk, and a few of them are on the floor near the trashcan, indicating Riker angrily ripped the pages from the pad and tossed them over the end of the desk without caring where they landed. My guess is that the legal pad is where he writes down the endless lists of things he needs to do.
I don’t envy his position as commissioner. I too would slowly go mad if I was permanently barred from field work and forced to manage the city’s tangled bureaucracy day in and day out.
His struggle to adjust to the sudden change of pace is displayed clearly on his face as dark circles around bleary eyes and the lingering shadow of stubble. If it wasn’t for Ella, he’d look even worse. She makes sure he eats his meals on time, that he doesn’t stay at the office too late, and that he gets regular haircuts so he doesn’t start looking like a bum.
It’s the same routine she performed after the team lost Bishop, my predecessor, on that disastrous mission in France. Riker fell into a bad depression, partly from Bishop’s death and partly from the nearly career-ending knee injury he suffered avenging Bishop’s death. Ella put him back together again. And she’ll do her damnedest to keep him together, so long
as they both shall live.
Ella rounds off the story with our current theories and our need to find the connection between the victims. “I’ve got as many analysts as we can spare digging through Fletcher’s and Coble’s backgrounds. We know the two had some sort of relationship, since they were phone contacts, but we don’t yet know if they were friends, or lovers, or professional colleagues, or something else altogether. As soon as we establish the nature of their acquaintance, we can narrow down the pool of other possible victims to a number we can effectively manage.”
“By ‘manage,’” Riker says, “I assume you mean you want them brought into protective custody.”
She leans back in her chair and sighs. “I don’t know what else we can do. Until we know the practitioner’s identity, and the nature of the summoned creature they’re using as an attack dog, we can’t let the potential victims roam around freely. These attacks are so swift and so carefully calculated that any guard units watching the potential victims from a distance are unlikely to get there in time to help. And even if they do, Byers’ entire team died because they couldn’t see the creature they were fighting.”
Riker swipes his phone off his desk. “I’ll give Burbank a call and let him know we’ll need to utilize some PD safe houses.” He snorts. “If the man can be bothered to take a break from his reelection campaign for five minutes.”
The mayoral election for Aurora is only two weeks away, and Burbank is pushing back hard against his opponent, Barbara Durant, who was only two points behind him in the last poll. I don’t care much for Burbank as a person or a mayor; he’s spent most of his career stonewalling DSI’s every attempt to obtain more funding and expand our ranks, right up until the Wellington disaster and the curse epidemic finally beat the truth about supernatural threats into his bloated head and forced him to change his outlook. But at the same time, Durant isn’t yet in the know, and we have no way of telling how she’ll respond to DSI once she learns about the things that go bump in the night.
We’re all standing on pins and needles just like Burbank is. But unlike him, we can’t let political uncertainty distract us from doing our jobs.
“I’d like to put together a task force,” Ella says as Riker scrolls through his contacts to find Burbank’s direct line. “Delarosa’s team returned from their mission to Galworth yesterday afternoon, so they’re rested and ready to go. I’d like them as second to our team. I may also recruit a couple auxiliary teams at some point, so we have some extra boots on the ground if we need to cordon off a combat zone or evacuate civilians.”
“Works for me.” Riker holds the phone to his ear while it rings. “Keep me updated by the hour, please. I want to make sure we have a handle on this from all angles, in case there are additional casualties.” His grip on the phone tightens. “Bad enough I have to send out death notices to five families at once.”
Ella bites the inside of her cheek. “I’m sorry we didn’t get there in time, Nick.”
Riker holds up his free hand. “You didn’t have enough information, coming off a single murder. No one except the perpetrator did. No point in beating yourself up about it.”
Ella frowns. “I know that. It’s just…they were so young. Even Byers was only thirty.”
“The problem with having a mass recruitment drive”—Riker casts his heavy gaze out the narrow window on the far wall, at the skyline of the city beyond—“is that you get a big influx of novices who can barely tie their own shoes. But you have to send them out onto the battlefield anyway, no matter how ill prepared or naïve they are. Because if you don’t, none of them will ever get shaped into the soldiers you need to win the war. The fact that a lot of them die in the process, well, that’s just collateral damage.”
“Is that much collateral damage acceptable nowadays?” Ella wrings her hands.
“It’s not a matter of acceptability. It’s a matter of necessity. We dealt Methuselah and the Black Knights a blow, but they’ll be back. And if we aren’t ready for them, it’s going to be the civilians who suffer the most. Just like with the curse. Just like with the Wellington Center.” He smacks his open palm against the desktop. “It’s always the civilians who get the raw deal. Our job is to make sure we shield them from the worst of it, even if that means taking the brunt of the damage.”
Amy sucks in a stilted breath. “War always fucking sucks like that.”
I wince. She would know, wouldn’t she?
“Then we better hope it ends sooner rather than later.” Desmond rises from his chair. “Even so, we have to take things one step at a time.”
Ella follows his lead. “Let’s go set up the task room. I’ll call Delarosa on the way.”
The four of us shuffle out of the office.
As the door swings shut behind us, Riker is still waiting for Burbank to answer his call.
The task rooms in the new DSI buildings are a major upgrade from the old fare. Instead of a dinky projector in the middle of the table, there’s an enormous high-definition touchscreen bolted to one wall. The main table in the room is a half-circle that faces this screen, and two extra tables for less important meeting attendees are situated diagonally in each corner behind the main table. On both walls adjacent to the touchscreen are whiteboards that roll up to reveal corkboards beneath, so that we can jot down notes, pin up pictures, and display any other visual case information that hasn’t yet made it into the digital record.
Ella takes the designated lead captain’s seat, the chair in the exact center, and grabs the mouse and wireless keyboard to log in with her credentials. The rest of us sit to one side of her and fidget in the tall-backed ergonomic chairs until Delarosa’s team shuffles in a couple minutes later. Delarosa sits next to Ella, and his team situates themselves in the chairs to his left, filling out all but one spot at the main table. Behind Delarosa’s team comes a trio of analysts carrying stacks of printouts, which they hand out to each of us before hunkering down at a back table. One of them, a young woman I haven’t met, has a pensive expression on her face, as if she discovered something disturbing during her research.
I’m about to flip through the info packet she gave me, when Ella clears her throat. “Let’s get started, guys. We need to move fast on this one, because there’s a distinct possibility our perp isn’t done for the day.” The room falls silent, and Ella brings up the case documents on the screen and scrolls through the overview, down to the section that lists all the important developments in chronological order. Ella begins recapping everything that happened between our team arriving at Coble’s house and leaving Fletcher’s, and though she glosses over the gory details of the downfall of Byers’ team, everyone in the room looks grim and mildly ill.
“And that’s where we are now,” Ella finishes as she types up the last few details about the scene at Fletcher’s house. “Questions?”
Delarosa threads his fingers together and drops them on the tabletop. “Any signs this could be MG related?”
That always lingers in our heads nowadays, every time a practitioner is involved in a case.
Ella replies, “None yet, but we shouldn’t discount the possibility.”
The nervous-looking analyst in the back inhales sharply.
Ella swivels her chair toward the woman. “You have something to say, Edith?”
Edith goes rigid as all eyes land on her. “I, uh, it’s just…” With a shaking hand, she points to the printout she gave us. “It’s all in there. I found, well, a family connection, and I don’t know…”
Her nervous disposition reminds me so much of Cooper, it physically hurts. Before Ella can respond, I say, “How about you walk us through it? Having your thought process outlined aloud might reveal some additional details that didn’t make it into the typed summary.”
I bend my lips into something resembling an encouraging smile, and gesture to Edith’s own copy of her handout. For a second, she seems absolutely terrified at the idea of speaking more than two lines to an audience bigger than her own ref
lection. But something in my expression must flip the right switch, because she returns my smile with a wobbly one of her own and looks at the first page of her document.
Ella glances at me over her shoulder, eyebrow raised. I take it to mean: What was that about?
I shrug. She needed a push.
Ella gets the message and turns back to face the analyst just as the woman begins.
Edith’s first few words are indistinct mumbles, but then, as she wades away from the pressure of an elite team’s task meeting and back into her specialty, organizing and analyzing data, her nervousness falls to the wayside and she ups her volume:
“…to thoroughly examine and cross-reference the family and work backgrounds of the two primary homicide victims. At first, I found no significant connection between Ms. Coble and Mr. Fletcher, nothing to indicate they were anything more than acquaintances. Their phone records revealed their conversations were far and few between, and there were no text messages or emails exchanged between them. Based on this lack of frequent contact, I inferred that they were either friends of friends who only peripherally moved in the same social circle, or that they were distant relatives.”
She turns the page in her handout. “Though I briefly considered that Coble and Fletcher might’ve been involved in the same illicit activity that brought them into the same social circle, their professional lives, lack of law enforcement encounters, and the statements collected from Ms. Coble’s neighbors that praised her character convinced me I should leave that possibility on the backburner and pursue the family angle first. So I did.
“Ms. Coble’s closest living relative is a terminally ill eighty-seven-year-old aunt who lives in Detroit. Her late mother’s older sister, maiden name Marsha Snyder, married name Marsha Derringer. Marsha Derringer was married to the late Harold Derringer. Harold Derringer had a younger sister, maiden name Alma-May Derringer, married name Alma-May Fletcher. The late Alma-May Fletcher was Jeremy Fletcher’s mother. So Sarah-Jane Coble and Jeremy Fletcher were not biologically related, but through marriage, they sat on the same extended family tree, with one living connection between them: Marsha Derringer. She was Coble’s biological aunt and Fletcher’s aunt by marriage.”
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