Spell Caster

by Clara Coulson

  Desmond, it appears, is still trapped inside the shed, his bulk working against him. I jog up to what remains of the doorway and kneel next to the gap, fishing my penlight from my belt and clicking it on. A quick wave of the light inside shows Desmond pinned underneath the central support beam, the largest beam, that was holding the shed’s roof in place. For a moment, my anxiety spikes, because Desmond is unnaturally still. But then, he groggily responds to the quaking beam of my penlight by tilting his head toward the doorway.

  “You okay, Desmond?” I ask. “You know, besides the being stuck part?”

  “As good as I can be,” he replies. “I’m trying to minimize my movement so I don’t destabilize the structure further. There are some sharp pieces of sheet metal sitting uncomfortably close to rather vital parts of my body right now, and if I move the wrong way, I do believe they may slice clean through me.”

  I take another look at the interior, this time focusing on the chaotic layout of what used to be the walls and ceiling of the shed. One piece of metal with a very sharp edge is less than an inch from the back of Desmond’s neck, and it’s connected to the upper half of a broken wooden beam that’s braced against the floor at one end and against another fallen beam at the other. If Desmond moves his legs about four inches forward, they’ll bump into that second beam, and if he jostles that beam too much, it’ll cause the primary beam to shift position, potentially driving the attached sheet metal through his spine.

  There’s no safe way for me to extract Desmond on my own. It’s doable with magic, I’m sure, but I don’t trust myself enough as a spellcaster yet to pull off a maneuver that sophisticated. I mean, hell, I can’t even cook a hamburger at a predetermined temperature using a spell I’ve practiced dozens of times. There’s no way I’m risking Desmond’s life trying to pull off a complicated telekinesis spell on the fly. Which unfortunately means I’ll have to leave him where he is until one of our new rescue operations teams arrives.

  I carefully reach into the shed and give Desmond’s hand a squeeze. “Hang tight, man. I’m calling in the cavalry. They’ll get you out with everything still attached.”

  He gives me a thumbs-up, but he can’t suppress his fear. His face is drenched in a nervous sweat.

  I tug my phone off my belt, dial DSI dispatch, and proceed to have a clipped conversation with the dispatcher that ends with her assurance two backup field teams, a full complement of medics, and a rescue ops group are en route. That done, I stick my phone back in its place and crawl over to Ella, who’s now curled up in a ball, still clutching the ragged wound on her head. When I call her name, only her left eye opens. I quickly shine my light into her eye before she can close it, which reveals her pupil is slightly sluggish.

  “Yeah,” I say more to myself than her, “that’s definitely a concussion.”

  “Clues to identity,” Ella slurs out. “Don’t lose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Inside.” She shakily lifts her free hand and points at the shed. “In the evidence.”

  It takes me a second to untangle the riddle. “Are you saying that there are clues to the practitioner’s identity among the evidence you found inside the shed?”

  She manages a small nod and repeats, “Don’t lose.”

  I rub her arm gently. “I’ll make sure the rescue team is aware, okay? They can get it all out of there after they extract Desmond. I’ll bag it up, take it back to the office myself, run it through fingerprinting and DNA, and then drop it off with the analysts so they can pick it apart and have some fresh leads for us by morning. I’m sure Edith can tease out another bombshell or two with access to materials the perp actually used to plan his murder scheme.” I smile, but I’m sure it doesn’t reach my eyes. “That sound all right, Captain?”

  “Yeah,” she mumbles, her eye slipping closed again.

  There’s not much I can do for a head injury, so as much as it hurts me to leave Ella’s side, I shuffle around the one standing wall of the shed to check on Amy again. Her skin is still washed out, but she looks more alert than she did when I first walked out of the woods. Her tourniquet appears to be holding back the bleeding for now, though I know if she doesn’t get that swapped out for a surgical repair in a reasonable amount of time, the restricted blood flow could cost her the leg. That medical team better hurry the hell up. We are not in good shape here.

  Correction, they’re not in good shape. I’m already healing. And I know I shouldn’t feel guilty about that, but I do anyway. It’s hard to see everyone else hurting when you’re perfectly fine. Or well, close to fine.

  My fingers are abnormally stiff, and every single one of them stings between the knuckle and the first joint. Bringing my hands close to my face reveals that my suppression rings are totally fried, nothing left of the silvery pieces but half-melted slag charred black. With my penlight tucked between my teeth, I inspect the rings more closely and find that the metal is actually fused to the fabric of my gloves. When I try to pull my gloves off, they don’t budge. The metal has constricted around my skin, cutting off my circulation, which goes a long way in explaining why I’m steadily losing sensation in my fingertips. “Oh hell.”

  Since I can’t do anything to help anyone, I sit on my ass and use a knife to pry the remains of the rings from my fingers and cut the ruined gloves off. As the last few strips of fabric fall away, I finally observe the damage from overtaxing the suppression spell: ten matching circular burns, one on each finger. They look roughly second degree, but I know from the extent of the pain I felt during the fight—plus the cooked flesh smell emanating from my hands—that they were considerably worse to begin with. The failing rings burned my skin clean off and probably ate into the tendons as well, maybe even the bones. But my healing factor kicked in immediately and fixed most of the damage before I had a chance to dwell on the fact that all my fingers nearly got melted off.

  Christ. I’m glad beggar rings don’t fail that badly.

  “Still breaking your rings, Kinsey?” says Amy in a drowsy voice.

  I glance up to find her eyes cracked open, one brow raised. Plucking the penlight from my mouth, I let out a breathy laugh and reply, “You know how I roll.”

  “What happened?” She gestures toward the pile of ring bits on the grass.

  “Pushed the suppression spell too hard when I was trying to overpower our perp.”

  She frowns. “He make you as a practitioner?”

  “He did. But he would have even if I’d stayed under the limit.”

  Her frown cuts deeper into her cheeks. “What’d you do?”

  “Something you can’t do with beggar rings.”

  She groans. “Seriously?”

  “Hey, it was necessary. I was frozen like a statue thanks to a spell, and he was aiming to slit my throat. It was either blow my cover or die choking on my own blood.”

  She considers that excuse for a moment, and shrugs. “Fine. But when the fallout comes down the pipeline, you better not bitch about it.”

  “I won’t bitch at DSI. Can’t promise I won’t bitch at Burbank’s cowardly ass. And I’ll definitely bitch at the ICM for their bullshit ‘rules’ they shouldn’t be able to impose on us in the first place.”

  “Hah. Agree with you on that.” She grimaces. “Damn. Losing feeling in my leg. How far out is the med team?”

  “They should be here anytime now. I told them to hurry up.”

  She eyes her injured leg, then changes the subject so she doesn’t keep dwelling on it. “Guessing our perp flew the coop?”

  “Yep.” I sigh. “I caught him off guard and landed a few good blows this time, but after he wised up to the fact that I don’t go down easily, he stopped pulling his punches and let the magic come out to play.”

  “Skilled?”

  “Extremely. At least Erica’s level.”

  She knocks her head against the shed siding. “Shit. Who is this guy?”

  “I have no idea who he is.” I roll the penlight around in my hand, swe
at from my palms coating the rubber grip. “I’m getting a pretty clear picture of what he is though: a coolheaded and calculating tactician, a skilled and powerful combat wizard, and a remorseless killer who has no problem eliminating anyone who gets in his way.” My attention drifts to the tree line, to the shadowed forms of the fallen werewolves who never even saw what hit them. “He’s not afraid to kill DSI agents. He’s not afraid to kill werewolves. He’s not afraid of retaliation. Either because he believes he can’t be caught, or…”

  “Because he doesn’t think anyone can beat him,” Amy finishes. “You think that’s arrogance talking?”

  My lips stretch into a thin, grim line. “No, I don’t. I don’t think he’s arrogant at all.”

  She doesn’t have a response for that, so we sit in silence until the cavalry finally arrives.

  They come with the fanfare of engines growling in the night, their arrival announced by bright headlights cutting through the trees. On approach, they’re nothing but a line of slinking silhouettes in the darkness, right up until they breach the tree line armed and ready for a fight. Leading the pack is Ramirez, three members of his team close behind him. Harmony Burgess, resident sniper, is nowhere to be seen. Which I take to mean she’s shimmied up a tree, found herself a perch, and is now watching the proceedings through a high-powered scope. Watching my team languish in defeat.

  Ramirez signals for his teammates to spread out and secure the perimeter, and when they find nothing of concern, the captain throws up another signal to the waiting agents loitering in the woods. A six-person rescue ops crew emerges first, carrying all manner of equipment to dig a person out of a building collapse or free them from a car wreck or extricate them from one of the other terrain mishaps we detectives often get ourselves tangled up in.

  The crew leader and her second run past me and squat in front of the toppled doorway, locating Desmond’s trapped form inside. The second, a young man wearing a headlamp, pulls out a small tablet with a stylus and sketches a rough rendition of the interior of the crumpled shed. The leader barks out orders to the rest of the team, and they begin setting up their equipment in various specified locations around the structure.

  Behind the rescue crew come the medics, marked by their red-splashed arm patches. I wave off the one that darts toward me and redirects him to Amy, finally pushing myself to my feet as Ramirez shuffles up to the shed through the unruly grass. He takes one look at Ella—she’s being treated by a pair of female medics, one of whom already has a neck brace ready to go, while the other is telling Ella to stay still so she can stabilize her head—before he defers to me, the last man standing from my team. “Details from dispatch were a bit sparse. Tell me what happened here, Kinsey.”

  I give him a play-by-play of how this disaster shook out, and when I finish, Ramirez grinds his boot into the grass and swears. “Three elite detectives and six werewolves,” he says, “all bested in a matter of seconds. I don’t like the way the dice are rolling on this. I can’t see us defeating a practitioner this smart and skilled, and a creature this hard to detect, without drawing them into a sound trap and throwing a verifiable army at them. But…”

  “But how do we trick a man who’s already outsmarted us multiple times?” I finish.

  “Right. That’s the conundrum.”

  “Only way to do it is to get ahead of the curve somehow. We need to ID him.”

  Ramirez gestures to the shed. “Ella said there are clues in there?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know how clear cut they are. I’ll take a look once rescue ops is done.”

  “Sure you don’t want to take a breather?” He eyes my gloveless fingers, and the pile of fabric scraps on the ground behind me. “I can manage from here.”

  I shake my head. “No, this is my team’s mission. I’ll see it through.”

  “Have it your way. There’s a spare seat in the auxiliary team’s SUV—guy out with a broken ankle—so you can ride back with them.”

  “You mean they can babysit me to make sure I don’t get into more trouble between here and the office.”

  Ramirez gives me a wry smile. “It’s you, Kinsey. Can’t be too careful.”

  “Very funny.”

  Amy is the first out of the woods, four medics ferrying her through the trees on a stretcher, her foul mouth blathering what I can only assume are Japanese insults the whole way out. Ella goes next, barely conscious and unable to speak, her concussion worsening by the minute. I have the urge to follow her to the med van—aka the second-hand ambulance whose purpose is masked only by a coat of black paint—to ensure there aren’t hiccups that slow her transport to the office, but I root myself to the spot and stand firm. My captain ordered me to secure the evidence, and the least I can do today is succeed in listening to basic instructions. Seeing as I’ve failed at pretty much everything else.

  Can I go back in time and roast Lizzie Banks again? Because I really need some kind of win.

  The rescue ops crew somehow manages to dismantle the entire ruin of the shed without so much as nicking Desmond with the rubble. Once he’s free, the medics move in, and in five minutes flat, they’re spiriting him off through the woods to join Amy and Ella on the trip to the infirmary’s triage unit.

  The rescue guys then scour the piles of rubble they laid out across the clearing, collecting every single relevant-looking item and stuffing each into a separate evidence bag. When they’re done, the crew leader examines everything to double-check none of it is potentially toxic or otherwise hazardous, and finally hands the bags off to me.

  I become the owner of fifteen bags of paper.

  Yay.

  A few of the pages were torn or dirtied during the shed collapse, but as I flip through the bags, I confirm all the text is still readable. Tucking the collection of bags under my arm, I turn to Ramirez again. “Looks like I’m done here. If your auxiliary team is ready to move out, then I’d like to head back to the office now. It’s getting late, and I want to make sure a particular analyst gets this evidence before she clocks out.”

  “Which analyst?” he asks.

  “Edith something-or-other.”

  He smiles. “Ah, I know who you mean. We’ve had her on some of our cases before. Very shy but whip smart. If anyone can glean something from that messy stack”—he flicks one of the bags—“Edith is your best bet by far. And she hangs around pretty late in the evenings. She should still be there when you get back.” He taps the com in his ear and orders the auxiliary team to return to their vehicle. “There you go. It’s the one parked in the last driveway on the left before the intersection.”

  “Thanks.” I begin to back through the clearing, taking in the scene one last time. “Say, you got a crime scene unit with you?”

  “Yeah, they’re on standby.”

  I point to the area of the woods where the practitioner and I had our final showdown. “Practitioner got knocked to the ground and shot twice over there. I got a blood sample, but there may be other DNA evidence I didn’t spot. Hair. Fibers. It’s a long shot, I’m sure, but I think at this point we should grasp at all the straws.”

  “I agree.” Ramirez taps his com again and tells the crime scene people to move in. Then he waves me away. “Have a safe trip back now. Don’t get kidnapped by werewolves. Or vampires. Or Methuselah agents. Or…what else have you been kidnapped by?”

  “Just those three.”

  “Really?” He scrunches his eyebrows. “I thought it was more than that.”

  “Fuck you too.”

  He chuckles. “All right. Off you go. And for real, don’t get attacked on the way back. Else Riker will have my head.”

  “Why do you think I’m in control of whether or not I get attacked by a bad guy?”

  “Like I said, Kinsey”—he glances at the field of trees scorched black by my fire vortex—“it’s you.”

  Chapter Ten

  Edith works in a tiny corner desk on the north end of the expansive cubicle farm on the second floor. Thankfully,
the cubicles are a modern variety, with sleek plastic half-walls that are white on the bottom and clear at the top, so I don’t have to spend half an hour slinking through a maze of beige panels to find the right desk. Coming fresh off a visit to the forensics lab, where I dropped off my sample of the wizard’s blood and processed the papers, I hurry over to the analyst’s station, the stack of evidence bags clutched securely in my hands.

  I spent the ride back to the office—during which I was not sidetracked by monsters or magic or any other sort of mayhem, thank you very much—perusing the contents of the papers and photos, and organizing them by priority. The ones at the top of the stack contain what I believe are the best clues to the practitioner’s identity: handwritten notes about the layouts of the victims’ homes, pictures of the victims taken while the perp stalked them, a reloadable bus fare card, and printed screenshots from decades-old news articles I’m almost certain came from a local library’s non-internet-accessible archive.

  Edith perks up at the sound of my footsteps and slips her headphones off as she turns to greet me. She pauses, however, lips parted in uncertainty, cheeks flushing pink, when she gets a load of me and not whoever she was expecting, a fellow analyst or supervisor maybe. She tries to get words out several times, but the furthest she gets is, “Oh! Detective Kinsey. I…”

  Awkwardness settles in the space between us.

  Pretending I’m not stuck halfway between a grimace and a chuckle—because again, she reminds me of Cooper, and I miss Cooper, badly—I offer up the stack of bags and break the stretching silence so she doesn’t have to keep tripping over her pile of failed socializing attempts. “Evening, Edith. Sorry to barge in on you like this, but there have been some important developments in the case, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to do a little overtime tonight to analyze this new evidence we just collected during a raid.”

  Since I don’t want to unsettle Edith any more than necessary, I forgo mentioning that all my teammates are in the infirmary with serious injuries as a consequence of that raid. “There’s a lot of stuff in here that demonstrates his methodology for planning the attacks on his victims, and I think some of it may give away key details about his identity, or at the very least a clearer picture of how his mind works. Are you up for it?”