Stone Cold Lover

by Christine Warren

  “I can tell you’re frustrated, Rick, but I can’t tell why you’re taking it out on me,” Fil said, her brow furrowing in concern. “What’s really going on here?”

  Rick threw down his pencil and grabbed his coffee mug, draining the contents in one long gulp. “You want to know what’s going on, Fil? How about that I’ve spoken to the families of each of those dead bodies in there, and every single one of them would give a fucking limb to find out what happened to the person they loved. So forgive me if I get a little cranky when I see someone who might be able to give them some answers, and all she’s interested in doing is playing all closemouthed and mysterious. It fucks with my digestion.”

  “Ricky! I promise you, I’m doing what I can, but you don’t understand what—”

  “You know what? Save it.” Ricky slid from the booth and grabbed the jacket and messenger bag from the seat beside him. “Like I said before, consider us even now in the favor department, Fil. I’ll see you around.”

  Spar did not watch the man stalk to the front of the café and out the door; he was too busy watching his mate. He saw the way the reporter’s words sliced at her tender heart, and suddenly all his own anger drowned under a wave of compassion. She had been hurt by the man’s words, and he couldn’t stand to see Felicity hurt.

  He put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed gently. “I am sorry, little one. You are right, he did not understand, but it did not give him a reason to speak to you so harshly.”

  “No.” She shook her head and stared blankly down at the folder the reporter had left behind. “It’s not his fault. It’s mine. I’m the one who made him angry. I’m the reason he left. It’s fine. It’s no big deal.”

  “It sounds to me as if it’s a very big deal.” She’d spoken flatly, almost unemotionally, but he had heard how thin her voice had grown, how strained it sounded. “You are hurt, little one, and no matter how angry he was, he had no right to hurt you.”

  “I told you, it’s fine.”

  She took a deep breath and visibly pulled herself together. When she looked at him again, her expression was clear, but a shadow lurked in her mossy-green eyes that Spar didn’t like at all.

  “Anyway, right now we’ve got bigger issues to deal with.” She turned back to the folder and flipped to a photocopy of a police report. “I’m just glad Rick didn’t get mad enough to take this all with him. This is going to really help us out. This even has GPS coordinates for where the bodies were found. Apparently, they were all dumped within a pretty short distance. Maybe if we took a look around out there, we could find something to lead us back to the Order.”

  Spar watched her for a long moment. She had shut down again, shut him out of her emotions, but this time the act didn’t anger him so much as it worried him. It seemed it was not he alone who caused her to close herself off, but any sense of loss or abandonment that triggered it. When she was hurt, he began to understand, she pulled back like a turtle in its shell, trying to keep the hurt from reoccurring. But if that was the secret to her emotional vacillation, why would she believe that he ever intended to hurt her?

  She looked at him, her brows raised, clearly waiting for a response. Spar nodded. “Indeed. We should definitely search the scenes. Even if we find no physical evidence, there may be traces of magic that could be helpful.”

  Felicity pursed her lips. “I’m pretty good at picking up on magic, whether it’s in people or objects, but maybe we should bring Wynn with us. An extra pair of eyes can’t hurt, and she’s got training, as a witch, even if not as a Warden. She might recognize something like a spell or whatever that I might miss.”

  “Agreed.”

  He itched to question her as to the origins of her emotional withdrawal response, but he sensed this was not the time. She was still fragile after the episode with the reporter, and he didn’t want to take the chance of provoking the anger she had felt with him earlier in her home. His mate could be a prickly little thing. Instead of pressing, he reached over to shut the folder and grabbed two menus from the holder by the wall.

  “Let’s eat first, though,” he said, handing her one. “The only thing left in your refrigerator is lettuce and a slightly withered carrot, and I am no rabbit. A Guardian needs meat.”

  She managed a ghost of a smile and flipped open her menu. “Yeah, so does a temporarily out-of-work restorationist. Haven’t you ever heard the term starving artist before?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Wynn told them she would be available by late that afternoon. After some debate about light levels and tromping through the woods after dark, they agreed to give the area a quick look that evening and reconvene tomorrow when the light was better for a more thorough going-over.

  Given that the three of them wouldn’t fit on the Tiger, Fil broke out her van for the trip. Spar looked at it with surprise when she pulled out of the cramped garage behind the storefront.

  “This is your vehicle as well?”

  “Well, it would be pretty hard to transport valuable works of art on Laurent.”

  “Laurent?”

  Fil grinned. “My motorcycle.”

  Spar eyed her oddly. “Your motorcycle has a name. And it is Laurent.”

  “After the patron saint of Canada.”

  He opened the door of the hulking white van and climbed inside. “You are a very strange human.”

  Fil hauled herself up behind the wheel and reached for her seat belt. “Hush. Don’t call me names. You’ll make Josephine angry.”

  “Josephine?” Spar asked, then groaned. “Do not tell me. That is the name of the van?”

  “Yup.” She grinned and pulled out into traffic.

  They found Wynn waiting outside her small apartment building, wearing worn jeans and closed-toe shoes. The tennis shoes looked old and battered and comfortable enough to cover rough terrain. She climbed into the back of the van without a word for the lack of seating in the cargo area. She just dropped to the floor, tucked her legs up tailor-fashion, and set down the bulging bag she carried with her.

  “Nice ride,” she said, glancing around the huge cargo space. “I could really use something like this for making deliveries. I could get everything done in one trip.”

  “It has its uses,” Fil agreed. “Sorry it’s not more comfortable for you.”

  Wynn dismissed her concerns with a wave. “I’m fine. So where are we headed, anyway?”

  “We’re going to the park.”

  “Mount Royal?”

  Fil nodded. “That’s where the bodies were found, in the woods behind the Belvedere Kondiaronk. We’ll have to park at Maison Smith and walk up.”

  The drive to the mountain passed quietly. Wynn seemed absorbed in cataloging the contents of her sack, and Spar had been walking on eggshells even since the scene in the café. She didn’t know if he thought she’d shatter at the slightest push, or if he’d just given up trying to get her to talk to him. She couldn’t even decide which she’d prefer.

  Not that she had time to deal with either. Being rejected by a good friend, being in love with a man who wasn’t a man and couldn’t stick with her through the long haul, and dealing with her own messy, tangled emotions had to take a back burner to averting the coming apocalypse. That was her story, and she wasn’t just sticking to it, she’d metaphorically superglued her ass right in the middle. Dynamite couldn’t shake her devotion to denial and avoidance. She embraced the duo as her new best friends.

  Fil pulled the van into the lot beside the maison and parked close to the roadway that became the Chemin Olmsted. The trail would lead northeast toward the chalet at the Kondiaronk lookout, forking before it reached that point to loop around on either side. In the center grew a dense patch of forest, technically off limits to the public. According to the bylaws of the park, no off-trail activities of any kind were permitted, but people being who they were, hikers and nature lovers occasionally wandered into the heavy trees. Apparently, so did murderers.

  Pulling her phone from her p
ocket, Fil opened the GPS app and programmed in the coordinates listed in Ricky’s file. “Come on,” she urged the others. “We’re heading this way.”

  They had reached the park in the waning hours of afternoon, and dusk hovered in the background, waiting to descend. Technically, the park would close when it did, but Fil hoped it wouldn’t take them too long to make a first pass over the dump site. She’d spent many happy hours in these surroundings during her life, but today the woods possessed a quiet sense of foreboding that raised the hairs on the back of her neck. She didn’t want to be here after dark, not tonight.

  Spar stuck close to her side as she led the way up the well-worn trail that funneled visitors toward the chalet, which boasted some of the most spectacular views of the city to be found anywhere. Once they reached the split in the trail, the right-hand path would take them to the lookout at the chalet and the left would take a long, far-from-direct path around the forest to the huge steel cross that decorated the northeastern peak of Mount Royal. After that, it would circle down and back to rejoin itself at the chalet. But it was the central path at the fork that Fil followed.

  This path led into the trees before opening onto a clear area behind the belvedere most people more grandly termed “the chalet.” Fil led her companions along the trail for about two-thirds of its distance before she turned off and pointed north.

  “That way.”

  The going quickly became rougher as they moved off the gravel path and into the woods themselves. Fallen leaves and twigs snapped underfoot, almost seeming to echo in the quiet. The trio had to step around trunks, push aside branches, and forge through the occasional bramble as they followed the map to the coordinates of the dump site.

  They were no longer in the open, and the shadows had deepened. The last rays of the afternoon sun didn’t penetrate so deeply here, and Fil tried to tell herself that the chill that raced through her came from the dropping temperature. Given the way it intensified as they drew closer to the coordinates, her self didn’t seem convinced.

  “You know, Frederick Olmsted designed this park after he finished Central Park in New York,” Wynn commented, her rich voice pushing away a little of the uncomfortable silence. “I’ve visited there once or twice, but I don’t remember it being quite as wild as this.”

  Fil glanced over her shoulder. “You’ve been to New York City?”

  “Sure. I mean, I grew up in the Midwest, but I think everyone makes a pilgrimage to New York at least once in their life.”

  “The Midwest?” Fil stopped in her tracks, surprised. Somehow, circumstances had distracted her from noticing the other woman’s accent. “You’re American?”

  “Well, yeah. Didn’t Tim tell you that?”

  “No. I think I would have remembered. What are you doing living in Montreal?”

  “I’ve been working at McGill.”

  “You’re a professor?” Fil hoped her tone conveyed something other than skepticism. She’d figured out Wynn was a very smart woman, but somehow she couldn’t see her as a college professor.

  Wynn chuckled, sounding unoffended. “Goddess, no. As far as I know, they don’t have a Department of Wicky-Woo-Woo.” She winked at the other woman. “No, it was a temporary position assisting one of the botanists in the Department of Plant Science with his research looking into the physical properties of traditional medicinal herbs. The grant is almost up, though, so I get to say in all seriousness—my work here is done.”

  Fil laughed, but the sound faded almost as soon as it passed her lips. Her next step cracked a fallen twig, but what startled her was the sensation of stepping into a cold, clammy fog. The level of light didn’t change, but the atmosphere did, going icy and unnaturally still. The sounds of birds and insects and little forest creatures disappeared, so that the beep of her phone indicating the approach of their destination almost made her jump.

  “We’re nearly there, aren’t we?” Wynn asked unnecessarily. “I can feel it.”

  Spar touched Fil’s arm. “Stay close to me.”

  She had no plans to argue with that. She could feel a serious case of the creeps coming on.

  After only a couple more minutes, Fill pushed through a thick stand of fir trees and stumbled into a small open area, not even ten feet in diameter. It looked less like a clearing and more like a bald patch, a scar left behind by a fallen tree, which would explain the odd mess in the center of the space.

  It couldn’t technically be called a stump, since the tree—a fairly massive maple, she guessed—obviously hadn’t been cut down. She didn’t know if it had rotted until the trunk could no longer support its weight, or if it had been struck by lightning or toppled in a storm, but judging by the uneven spikes of wood sticking up out of the churned-up earth, it hadn’t gone down quietly. It almost looked like it had been ripped from the ground by some angry giant, and wasn’t that a comforting thought to be popping into her head? As if demons and demon worshippers hadn’t given her enough to worry about.

  “Right here,” Wynn breathed close behind her. “Can you see it?”

  Fil wished she could say no.

  A miasma hung low to the ground, only a few inches beyond the ruined remains of the maple tree. For some reason, Fil had thought that if she spotted something like this, it would take the shape of a person, like a magical chalk outline of the spot where a victim had lain. Instead, she saw thick, disquieting tendrils of greenish black, the color of healing bruises or rotted flesh. They twined around one of the wooden spikes, beneath the carpet of fallen leaves, and up again into the air. The tip of one waved, as if stirred by a breeze, only there was no breeze this deep inside the forest, and the motion looked more like an animal sniffing out prey than an innocently swaying plant frond.

  “I see it.”

  Spar grumbled. “We should take a look around in case any physical evidence remains. I trust the human authorities were thorough, but it is better to check for ourselves.”

  They split up to section off the ground. Fil made a point of staying away from the foul area near the trunk. She decided to begin at the edge of the clearing and work her way in toward the center. Picking up a stick, she began to search the ground, poking at rocks and shifting aside piles of leaves to be sure nothing hid underneath. She worked quickly, since they did not want to linger too long this evening. She didn’t really anticipate finding anything.

  She didn’t think any of them would, so when Wynn made a startled noise, she expected to hear about a snake or a spider that had caught the other woman off guard.

  “I think I found something.”

  Dropping her branch, Fil hurried to the witch’s side, Spar moving close behind. The woman crouched near a tumbled pile of rocks along the tree line at the northwestern edge of the tiny clearing.

  “Look.”

  Fil followed the tip of her pointing finger to the ordinary-looking stones. At first, she could see nothing unusual in the little arrangement. Various shades of gray, the rocks looked like … rocks. Some bore chunks of dirt or moss; others were cracked or chipped from weather and natural forces. It wasn’t until Fil blinked and opened her other set of eyes that she understood what Wynn had spotted.

  The dull glint of pyrite in a crack between two stones had disguised the glitter to the naked eye, and the swiftly fading light hadn’t helped. With her inner vision, Fil could make out the edge of a woman’s earring, a thin wire of gold curled into a sweeping hoop. It glowed with a subtle blush of pinkish light.

  “Do you think it belonged to one of the victims?” she asked.

  Wynn reached out and shifted the stones, deftly plucking the piece of jewelry and holding it up for a closer examination. “Given this right here? I think there’s a decent chance.” She pointed to the post, where dried blood had collected to stain the metal. “It looks like it was ripped free. You know, like during a struggle.”

  Fil winced in sympathy and tugged her own bare lobe. “Well, if it did belong to one of the girls, it didn’t do her much good, desp
ite the blessing.”

  “It was blessed?” Wynn glanced at her curiously. “I thought I felt something subtle, but it’s barely enough to ping my senses. How can you tell?”

  “I can see it.” She told the witch about her small magical talent. “You’re right that it’s subtle. In fact, it’s so subtle I doubt it was much more than someone saying a prayer over the pair before they gave them to her. Too bad they didn’t carry something stronger. Maybe we wouldn’t have had to find them out here. Or her.”

  Wynn nodded in silent agreement and slipped the earring into a small pouch she pulled from her bag. “I’m taking it home. I’ll scry over it later. That should tell me definitely if it belonged to one of the girls. If it did, I can try to use it to trace back to the Order. If she was still wearing it during the ritual, I could get lucky and find the sacrificial site.”

  Fil grimaced. “Damn. So it’s not here? Not even someplace close to here?”

  “No. The energy here sucks, and I’m taking like three showers when I get home to wash it off, but it’s not nearly gross enough for that. I think what’s lingering in this site came with them when they dumped the bodies, and it clung to the remains. It’s been too long for me to feel it leading back anywhere else.” She rose and tucked the little bag into the bigger bag. “You feel anything different?”

  “Just maybe a fourth shower.”

  “It will be dark in a few more minutes,” Spar pointed out. “Take one last quick look at the area, but we need to start heading back.”

  Fil sighed and shook her head. “I was really hoping we’d get lucky and find a great big sign reading ALTAR OF DEATH with an arrow pointing us in the right direction.”

  Wynn snorted. “Our lives would all be a lot easier if the nocturnis were only that stupid.”

  The trio made one last quick sweep around the clearing, but of course they found nothing. Fil could only wish things were that easy. The sole thing that changed on her second look around the clearing was her discomfort with the energy of the area. The darker it became, the less she wanted to be here. She found herself instinctively moving closer to Spar just waiting for him to give the signal that he was ready to leave.