by Jenn Stark
My phone was on the conference table, and I stumbled over to it as it angrily buzzed. Brody again. His text made me chuckle as the world once more righted on its axis.
Where are u? Get to D’s. Now.
I crackled out of the conference room and back into the space outside Dixie’s chapel in a blink. This time, the expected skiff of heat and pain was almost welcome, grounding me further in the here and now. Around me, the place was almost deserted. It was midmorning, according to my phone, and police tape still encircled the chapel, rendering it officially closed for business. None of the businesses around it appeared open, and only one vehicle was in the parking lot. Brody’s beat-up unmarked sedan.
He pushed himself off his vehicle as I brushed embers from my shoulders. “Are you seriously telling me that’s the most efficient way you have of getting around now?”
“I was completely on the other side of the Strip ten seconds ago,” I protested. “And I didn’t have to embarrass myself in your car. You tell me.”
“Well, prepare to be embarrassed now. We’ve got a dead body, and you’re not going to like where she ended up.”
I thought about the worst possible scenario. “The psychic fair? So why didn’t you ask me to meet you there?”
“Because I need you to pretend to be a little normal for the sake of our collaborating partnership, without drawing too many questions from my peers. Arriving in a car is normal. Arriving in a ball of flames is not.”
I smirked. “You’re such a baby.”
Brody grunted something, but waited until we both got into the car and he’d fired up the beast, pulling out of the chapel’s parking lot before continuing. “Lenora Drake has been discovered on the grounds of the psychic festival, behind one of the tents of the spectral opposition warriors’ camp. Only, she was already dead when they found her—and the CSI guys are backing that fact up, pending a full report from the coroner. She’s been dead awhile, it seems. Like, as far as they’re concerned, she died right around the time she got married.”
“She wouldn’t be the first. But how is that—oh.” I shuddered. “Decomp.”
“Decomp,” he agreed. “I get where they’re coming from. I’ve seen the body, and it’s already in an advanced state of decay. Whatever those things were that leeched inside her, they did a number on her.”
“And her body was dumped at the festival?” I winced, imagining the panic at such a horrific sight. “Has it gone viral yet?”
“That would be negative, which in and of itself is pretty much a supernatural event. Her body was tucked out of sight, thank God, and all the tourists were encouraged to leave early without raising any alarms. Nobody’s left on the premises but the vendors, and most of them have already departed, especially the ones who weren’t local.” He waved off my relieved sigh. “There are two notable exceptions to that rule, of course. Our spectral opposition warrior friends, and the Neo-Celts.”
“Oh, jeez.”
“Pretty much. The warriors are remarkably chill about the whole thing, while the tree huggers are losing their minds—but they’re not posting what they’re finding online that we can tell. We’re sure they’re sending it somewhere, but not out for the general public to consume. Which is interesting in and of itself.”
“You want me to get Simon on it?” I asked, pulling out my phone.
Brody made a face. “Well, that’d be easier than me explaining to my people what the arcane web is, yeah.”
I typed the quick request to Simon, and he responded immediately. Simon had never met a tech challenge he didn’t like. He also let me know he was ready, willing, and able to head to Ireland, and I gave him a time to meet me at Justice Hall.
“He’ll text us both back when he picks up the data trail. What about the Fomorians that were in Lenora? Where’d they go?” I asked, drumming my fingers on my knees. “Everyone’s saying they’re bait, but bait doesn’t usually eat people.”
“Well, it does if it’s pissed off bait,” Brody answered reasonably enough. “We have had no further word on the Fomorians’ next victim, but we got the intel on Lenora. She’s a Neo-Celt all right, one of the tribe that met here at the festival. So was Alison Kay. The Neo-Celts are all in various states of shock, but one thing that’s consistent—they both signed up for this. They were also going for the role of god consort, not trying to marry Conal McCarthy.”
“So they were signing up as human sacrifices, you mean.” I looked at him in horror. “That makes McCarthy a murderer twice over.”
“Technically, it makes him an accessory to murder at best, and even that is sketchy. In an apparently lucid and fully aware state, Lenora Drake and Alison Kay agreed to take part in what the others described as a fun, harmonious marriage ritual to make them the brides of the gods. By the time they showed up at Dixie’s, both of them were high as a kite, on a mixture of stuff so effed up, the coroner’s office will have to centrifuge their blood six times over to figure it out.”
“Premarital counseling might have been a better bet,” I said, my heart twisting. This was exactly the reason why Death was so upset. Humans were far too easily led.
“Yeah, well. As far as the forensic evidence is concerned, midway through the marriage ceremony, Lenora turns on Alison and knifes her, Alison collapses, Lenora leaves the crime scene and is found dead several hours later of an overdose that induced advanced and accelerated necrosis. So the Fomorians didn’t kill her, and neither did Conal McCarthy. In the eyes of the law, it was a murder-suicide.”
“And how do you explain the rookie detective getting a knife to the shoulder?”
“I don’t. The going theory is that there may have been a third, hidden accomplice who got the jump on her and fled. All Dixie’s cameras were turned off at the time, apparently.”
“Even Simon’s extra special cameras? I can shoot him another text.”
“I assumed so, but maybe not. Excellent idea. Not admissible as evidence, but…I’ll take what I can get.” He drummed the steering wheel as he drove, while I typed out the second request. “I saw Death too,” he said, casual as all hell.
I stiffened without quite knowing why. “You did?”
“Yeah.” Brody shivered. “She showed up outside the tattoo parlor when the scene was still a mess. I’ve never seen her so pissed. It was a pretty scary look.”
“I can only imagine. What’d she say?”
“She told me that once I found Lenora Drake, not to touch her skin without gloves, and not to let her breathe on me. She also wanted to let you know that the Archangel Michael doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does, and not to jump to any conclusions until the two of you chat. What was that about?”
“That was about me navigating a hostile workforce of ten-year-olds.” I sighed. “She say anything else?”
“Yeah. She said if we found Lenora dead, that we should know the woman had felt no pain once the Fomorians took over her body. That she’d felt nothing at all, in fact. Death seemed unreasonably broken up about that, though.” He scratched his chin offhandedly as he drove. “I’d think in her line of work, you would get used to people getting capped after a while.”
“I’d think in her line of work, it’s probably best that you never get used to it.”
He considered that, nodded. “Fair enough.”
We reached the festival grounds less than ten minutes later, and as promised, there was a decidedly smaller group of people there, all of them circulating amid law-enforcement personnel. The Neo-Celts and the spectral opposition warriors were segregated to either side of the clearing where the body had been found, while an older couple huddled together as they were being interviewed.
“Those are the festival directors, the Carltons,” Brody said. “But they’re pretty useless. Lenora Drake wasn’t there—and then she was, smack in the middle of the walkway, dead as a rock, no outward sign of distress or trauma. Initial hypothesis is that she had a heart attack, but then she started leaking
and—”
“Got it.” I grimaced.
“Also, she smells funny.”
“Well, leaking bodily fluids will do that to a person.”
“Not like that.” He shook his head. “She smells like Nikki did, and you too, though much less so, when I saw you both at Dr. Sells. I thought if maybe you could identify what was on her, or, like, look at her and determine what she was poisoned with somehow, it could help Nikki. I’m not supposed to let anyone get close to the body, and of course nobody knows about the connection between Lenora Drake and Nikki, but…”
Brody had barely parked the car when I bolted out of the vehicle.
“You’re brilliant,” I shouted, not waiting for him to catch up. As I ran, I shifted through several disguises that I drew from the people I passed, ending up with the most likely one: a low-level CSI tech scurrying up to the body to collect some last-minute required evidence. Nobody looked twice at me as I knelt down by the woman and flipped open my third eye.
I flinched immediately. Lenora Drake was burnt from the inside out, every last one of her circuits dead, not even a glow to indicate the life that had gleamed so brightly here just a short time before. The exuberance of a woman who thought she was going to get married to the gods, even if she was getting married over Skype. She’d had a future ahead of her, a future in which she might have realized the error of her ways, but now that choice, that realization had been forcefully taken away.
How close had Nikki and I come to this exact same fate? A renewed jolt of anger knifed through me, sharpening my senses. I raced through what was left of the husk of Lenora Drake, bitter tears cresting my own lids as I searched for a hint of what had harmed her. This woman had been Connected, though only slightly; this woman deserved justice. She would get it too. But first she had to help me.
One of my tears fell on her lifeless body—and then I saw it. As my tear slid down her cheek, I saw the other stains of Lenora’s own tears, tracking down her temples. Precious fluid still remained caught in her lashes. I reached out blindly, and Brody was there with a small evidence vial he’d procured from God knows where. I held it up against the woman’s lashes and delicately teased the fluid in. I handed off the vial to Brody, who stoppered it, but I couldn’t…couldn’t quite resist the pull of those tears. I turned back to Lenora Drake’s still form, and touched the fringe of her lashes.
Instantly, my body jerked back, an all-too-familiar queasiness sweeping through me. But this time, the suppression of my abilities wasn’t the only reaction. I spun to the side, my gaze drawn inexorably to one of the few remaining tents standing open…
There, in its shadows, stood the Fomorians.
The creatures from the darkness beneath the world. Tall, lean, their skin oily and dank, their faces long, their eyes hollow. Some had claws for hands and feet, some were almost human in appearance, but all of them were hunched, waiting. Waiting, wanting, and hungering. How many thousands upon thousands of years had they been lingering at the edge of the world, desperate for the chance to return?
When we’d banished the gods back beyond the veil, we’d only been looking up. I’d never thought about the possibility that we should be looking down as well.
Down and across, in the unknown passages of the In Between.
I staggered to my feet, heading toward the Fomorians who waited for me, drawing me closer with their hunger, their pain. If I could just speak to them, somehow understand—
“Sara—Sara!”
The pain across my face was so abrupt, so unexpected, that my hands immediately broke apart in abrupt defense, though no fire spurted forth at first. Brody wheeled away, smart enough to get out of range, and I sank back to the ground.
He dropped beside me. “What is wrong with you?” he asked, helping me back to my feet. “You looked like a goddamned zombie, and I need you to focus. What do you want me to tell Sells when I hand her that vial?”
I shook my head, trying to re-center. “Tell her the compound that afflicted Nikki and me is definitely in the mix of whatever Lenora Drake ingested and in her tears, I don’t know in what concentration, though. Still, it has to help.”
“It will help. And it will help even more if you pull yourself together. Go sit in my car until I can get us out of here.”
“I’m fine—”
“You’re green,” he cut me off. “Trust me, green is not your color. Go. And don’t set anything on fire while you’re at it.”
“No promises,” I muttered.
Chapter Sixteen
Though I much preferred simply fireballing it back to home base, I waited like the good little collaborating partner I was. I used the downtime in Brody’s beat-up sedan to use Brody’s phone for research…and catch my second wind. The pull of the Fomorians on me had been unnerving, to say the least, and unnerving wasn’t good if I was supposed to help Death stare these creatures down.
When Brody finally showed up to escort me back to the Palazzo Hotel, Mrs. French was waiting for us, wringing her hands nervously as she eyed a contraption that looked exactly like the Skype kiosk Dixie had used to pipe in Conal McCarthy for his very own red wedding.
“What’s that?” I asked, striding toward the contraption as Brody shut the door behind us.
“Mrs. French.” He nodded.
“Oh! Oh, good. Detective Brody, I’m so glad you’re here as well.” She drew herself up in her proper Victorian-era business gown, all starched lace at the collar and wrists and thick buttons down the front, and focused on me. “This, ah, machine is Nikki.”
“What?” I skidded to a halt, immediately imagining the worst. “What are you talking about? She’s locked in a computer now?”
“No, no,” Mrs. French said as she wheeled the machine around to face me. On it, I saw Nikki sitting up in her hospital bed, grinning wearily. She looked a little wan, but the pink sheets definitely helped put some reflective color back into her cheeks.
I squinted, looking more closely. Those were pink satin sheets. “Where are you?”
“Still at Dr. Sells’s.” Nikki’s voice was barely more than a rasp, and I stiffened, trying to wipe the concern off my face. As usual, I didn’t do a great job of it.
“It’s okay, dollface.” Nikki smiled. “Apparently, I should have been dead several times over with as much juice as I got hit with. But the fact that there’s no way I could have been so afflicted by just touching a damp postcard is freaking everyone out, especially Armaeus. He’s been at my side almost constantly, I gotta tell you, even when I suspect he’s other places too.”
“It doesn’t make sense, I agree.” I fought to keep my voice steady. “Has he found anything out?”
“That would be negative. He feels like he’s missing something obvious, some nugget of information that he should know but doesn’t. But I’m sure he’ll track it down, and I look forward to spending the rest of my life yelling at him for not doing his job in a timely manner.”
Her gaze shifted to Brody. “Detective Delish! How goes it?”
“Good…” he allowed, glancing at me. “Why aren’t you asleep or something? Why are you wearing yourself out talking to us?”
“Because I had an idea about how I could help, even in quarantine, and this is the only way they’d let me do it,” Nikki said. “I’ve had a lot of time to think since I’ve been forced to do nothing but lie around and contemplate my manicure. And it occurred to me, I touched Seamus’s wrist, right? Enough to know that he legit believed the line of bullshit we thought he was giving us.”
“Right.” I nodded. “But all that’s been verified now. His son is really a problem.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “But what if there’s something I know about him that I didn’t realize? Something that imprinted on my mind but didn’t seem important? I can’t stop thinking about it. That maybe I know something but just can’t quite reach it. Like it’s right there, but I need to reach for it to bring it into focus.”
&n
bsp; I blinked. It wasn’t an unreasonable thought, but I didn’t see how it could help us, and I told her as much.
“I thought the same thing,” she practically crowed. “And I was complaining about it to the Devil as one does. Let me tell you, the Devil is not a dumb spirit, I don’t care what anyone says.”
I could hear Kreios snort in the background, and my heart gave a tight little shimmy. I was glad he was with Nikki, keeping her company in her sterile hospital room. Some people could handle the isolation of a quiet room with no distractions, but Nikki was not one of them.
Now she was looking off-screen. “You want to tell them?” she asked, but Kreios’s noncommittal answer was clear enough.
She refocused on her camera. “Kreios said I would reveal my most important truth if he demanded it of me, but Dr. Sells started screaming bloody murder, that I was too weak, not right in the head, an idiot, and a few other choice descriptors I’ll leave to your imagination. She refused to sign off on it without approval from my medical power of attorney.”
I made a face. I was Nikki’s medical power of attorney. “Nikki…”
“I’m telling you, I think I know something,” she insisted. “I can’t see Seamus in person, even if I wanted to, not right now. My immune system is too compromised. But I don’t need to see him again. I already have any information he could provide inside me. I just need to bring it out. How dangerous could it be for me to simply talk?”
She appeared to be asking this question off-screen, and the camera spun to Dr. Sells’s unforgiving face. “The Magician has calculated the odds of this procedure contributing to Nikki’s recovery versus impeding her progress,” she informed me icily. “Do you want to know his calculations?”
I winced. I didn’t want to know. But I did need to understand everything that Nikki did about Seamus.
Mrs. French piped up beside me. “I’ve not been sitting on my hands either, Justice Wilde. But I don’t have anything current. There’ve been no calls to Justice from the druids since the late 1800s. So I can’t help you with the present troubles, I’m afraid.”
