The Hex Files: Wicked Moon Rising

by Gina LaManna

  But the petite necromancer never arrived.

  My fingers came to rest on the handle. The drawer was occupied. I could tell immediately that a pair of legs extended, toes touching the end nearest me. I’d seen plenty of dead bodies, but I couldn’t bear to contract my muscles and draw the handle toward me.

  “Oh, Sienna,” I muttered to myself. “Where are you? What have they done to you?”

  Then I scrunched up my eyes, gathered the last dregs of courage from the bottom of my stomach, and slid the drawer open. I stepped to one side. I needed to open my eyes, but before I did, I took a deep breath, leaned against the cool metal drawers for balance, and mumbled a quiet prayer to the gods that I wouldn’t find one of my only semi-friends inside.

  I opened my eyes...

  And felt the world tilt.

  Chapter 25

  I must have screamed, or called out, or done something of the sort because Ursula came running. She careened around the corner, all of her blobs wiggling as she came to a stop in the doorway.

  “Where’s Sienna?” she asked, struggling to catch up with the scene. “What are you doing in here alone?”

  I couldn’t respond. My throat had entirely closed up; my gut churned. My built-in cop instincts had flown out the window. I couldn’t even lift the Comm to my lips to call for help.

  The only thing I could do was turn my gaze back to Sienna, poor Sienna.

  Poor, poor Sienna.

  I’d found the petite necromancer, all right. But I wished I hadn’t.

  “What did you do to her?” Ursula stepped closer, her eyes widening. “Is that—is she in there?”

  I slammed the drawer shut, looked up to Ursula. With the ring of the metal clanking shut, all of my cop instincts came flooding back. “We have to call the precinct. Get a medic here right away, and Felix. Now.”

  “But—”

  “Now!”

  “I want to see her,” Ursula said, but she was already retreating. “Is she...”

  “I think she’s alive,” I said, “but I’m not sure. Move it, Ursula!”

  Finally, my warnings broke through to her, and she stumbled backward, toppling out the door and moving toward her desk with more speed than I’d ever seen from her before. It was only after Sienna’s assistant made it out of the room that I allowed my fingers to rest back on the handle. I gritted my teeth and tugged.

  The drawer slid out, this time noiselessly. I stared down at Sienna and forced away any feelings of friendship in order to keep my cop instincts sharp. I had to look for Residuals. I had to focus. I couldn’t bear to let the sight of my friend trapped in her own morgue derail my efforts to find the monster who’d done this to her.

  I scanned the drawer again with fresh eyes. The body inside was most definitely Sienna’s. I recognized the clothes she’d been wearing at the crime scene this morning—her bright red shirt and matching hair, along with the shaved side of her head. However, that wasn’t all that was in the drawer.

  Ice. And a lot of it. The necromancer was frozen solid into a block of ice the size of the drawer, as if someone had poured water in and flash-frozen everything. How, I had no clue. It had to be magic. I’d seen Sienna barely over an hour before. This much water didn’t freeze that quickly without a little supernatural help.

  Sure enough, I found the Residuals just as I expected. A Flash Frost, marked by twinkling, pale blue Residuals that sparkled snowflake white around the edges and danced over Sienna’s body. The necromancer’s face was pale, turning a purplish blue. The fact that she’d been so recently frozen had me thinking she wasn’t yet dead. That whoever put her here hadn’t predicted my arrival.

  “Hurry!” I yelled for Ursula. “We need a medic fast!”

  “Medics are on their way!” She yelled back. “I’m holding everyone here for questioning. The precinct has been called. Felix is coming.”

  I raised a hand, rested it against the ice. The Residuals scrambled out of the way, as if I’d displaced them with a brush of air. The ice was cool against my palm and began to melt. Not quickly, but enough to feel the wet on my skin. A part of me longed to grab something—anything—a hammer, a spade, a spear, and bang at the ice until it cracked, but that was far too dangerous. If Sienna was alive in there, she could be injured by my brash movements, or worse.

  Aside from the Flash Frost Residuals, I couldn’t peel any additional layers of magic away from the scene. I tried to guess at what had happened in here, but it was difficult. Sienna must have been preparing for the autopsy of the body on the table when she was surprised by someone. Had she known them? She must have, I thought, to let them inside the room without alerting Ursula. And this person must have gotten close—too close, in order to perform magic of this magnitude.

  Maybe he or she knocked Sienna out with a Stunner when she wasn’t expecting it, then carefully laid her to rest in her own drawer before flooding it with water and performing the Flash Frost spell. It would make sense, I thought, except for the why.

  I found my gaze drawn toward the body on the table. Maybe Sienna had been onto something, and the murderer sensed she was getting close with her findings.

  There’d been two wolf deaths by vampire bite in the same number of days, and by now, I was convinced the murderer was purposely ramping up tensions between the two species. I’d bet money on it. So, if Sienna had pinpointed the killer and determined it wasn’t Matthew, maybe it wasn’t a vampire at all... It would ruin everything the murderer had worked to achieve.

  Unless he could silence Sienna. Permanently.

  “Company!” Ursula called. “Detective, there’s someone here to see you!”

  The urgent screech told me it wasn’t anyone pleasant, and I knew before I saw the smooth blond ponytail that Watters had trotted her buttoned pants and clear umbrella over here.

  “Do you have a tap on our Comms?” I asked coldly as Lieutenant Watters cleared the doorway and stopped, eyeing me warily. “How’d you get here so fast? You know, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re showing up to crime scenes awfully quick. One would almost start to wonder if you didn’t have insider information.”

  “Funny, coming from the woman who has beat me to the last two crime scenes,” Watters said, equally coolly. “And the woman who’s dating a vampire, let me remind you. A vampire who escaped from the hospital this morning and doesn’t, contrary to your testimony, have an alibi for the time of murder.”

  “You’ve seen Matthew?” I realized my misstep too late.

  “Ah, so you didn’t see him this morning,” Watters said. “As I suspected. Nurses Anita and Nancy filled me in, much to their chagrin.”

  “First of all, you don’t have any testimony from me,” I spat. “You caught me in the rain and tried to back me into answering your questions. Secondly, Matthew didn’t escape from anywhere! He was in the hospital because he was injured. He got better and walked out. End of story.”

  “Right. The press will see it that way, I’m sure.”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “I’m not daring to do anything,” Watters said. “I’m merely investigating and telling the truth.”

  “You haven’t found Matthew,” I said. “You won’t be able to find him until he wants to be found. You don’t know that he doesn’t have an alibi.”

  “No, but I do know it looks like he’s on the run—on the same morning that a vampire murdered another werewolf.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said. “You don’t have Sienna’s report. She wasn’t finished.”

  “Here’s the way I see it,” Watters said. “Sienna was prepared to prove Matthew guilty. He escaped from the hospital, killed the wolf, and when he realized Sienna had enough to pin him to the wall, he silenced her, too.”

  “Matthew doesn’t have this sort of magic.”

  The first true sign of curiosity piqued on Watters’s face. “Oh? And what magic is that?”

  I shut my mouth. I didn’t plan on helping Watters. Especially not while she
was working to pin a murder on my boyfriend after kicking us both off the case.

  “You’ve seen Residuals, haven’t you?” Watters entered the room, her heels click-clacking across the floor as she moved to the open drawer. Aside from a slight stiffening in her posture, she didn’t react at all to the sight of Sienna trapped in a block of ice. “Oh, dear. This isn’t good.”

  “This isn’t your case,” I corrected. “You’re here to deal with the vampire murders. Not this one.”

  “I am if I believe it’s related.” Watters spun and gave me a thin smile. “And it’s related, which means, off you go, Detective.”

  “You can’t kick me off this case, too!”

  Her red-lipsticked smile grew wider. “Watch me.”

  Before things got even dicier between us, I scooted a step closer to Sienna, determined to do whatever it took to get her out of this ice alive. Rules be damned. The chief could fire me if he wanted. At the rate Watters was suspending my caseload, it wasn’t as if I was exceptionally busy, anyway.

  Fortunately, voices—friendly, familiar voices—sounded in the hallway, accompanied by Ursula’s worried one. In the next moments, the lab flooded with folks. Anita came first, and I was relieved she’d gotten wind of the case and had shown up to help. Behind her followed a flood of cops. A very confused looking Felix followed.

  Anita approached the body first. She muttered a curse word under her breath, then made meaningful eye contact with me. “I’ll do what I can.”

  I rested a hand on her arm. “I know. I might have to leave. But anything you need, anything you can tell me...”

  Anita gave a firm nod, then a devilish glance at Watters. Apparently, Anita wasn’t happy about being forced to answer questions that painted Captain King in a bad light. At least I wasn’t the only one annoyed by Watters’s presence.

  The cops filtered into the room, beginning their analysis. I quickly gave a testimony to one of the officers and mentioned the Residuals when I was almost certain Watters wasn’t listening. She’d get the information anyway, but I didn’t want to present it to her on a silver platter.

  My last stop was Felix. I could feel Watters’s eyes on me, and I knew my time was running out. The tech wizard looked like someone had tugged him out of bed. He had on jeans and what appeared to be a pajama top, complete with what I hoped was a toothpaste stain on his pocket. He held a massive mug of coffee in one hand and blinked at me, as if surprised to see me there.

  “You catch the Residuals?” he asked, not wasting a moment’s time.

  “Flash Frost,” I said. “I can’t tell the species that performed the magic, but I can put the time that this happened within the last hour or so.”

  “You can tell all that from Residuals?” Felix looked at me.

  “Well, that and the fact that I saw her alive an hour ago,” I snapped. “But yes, the Residuals are very fresh.”

  “Don’t you think it must have been someone she knew?” Anita joined our little duo and whispered to us. “You know Sienna better than me, but once I had her in the hospital wing for recovery, and she almost bit off the finger of the nurse when he said she looked nice.”

  “The woman can hold her own,” Felix said, raising his eyebrows. “And she’s protective of her workspace. She wouldn’t have let anyone waltz in here.”

  “Those were my thoughts exactly.”

  Felix and Anita’s gazes flicked back to Sienna, and I could tell they were itching to get started.

  “That means we can’t trust anyone,” I said. “Least of all Watters. I’m about to get kicked out of here, and Matthew’s not looking good without an alibi.”

  “Matthew would never hurt Sienna,” Felix said. “Everyone knows that.”

  “Everyone but her.” I nodded at Watters as she approached. “Just... do what you can. Fast. And talk to as few people as possible.’

  “Detective,” Watters said, interrupting our pow wow just as Anita and Felix were nodding in agreement. “Fill me in on what’s happening with the NYPD’s most famous tech wizard.”

  Felix preened. “We’re just discussing Sienna’s case.”

  “Can you fix her?” Watters asked bluntly. “And do you have any idea who might have done it?”

  “We think it might have been someone—” Felix, still glowing under the compliment, blabbed with his big fat mouth until Anita stomped on his shoe and he kindly reconsidered. “We think we’ll have a chance at getting her back to health safely, but we’ll have to get right to work. No interruptions. Have the rest of the techs get what they need and clear out—give us space to work.”

  “You were saying?” Watters asked, looking between Anita and Felix. “Something about how it might have been someone... then I didn’t catch the rest because the nurse stomped on your foot.”

  Felix’s face turned pink. “Just saying it must be someone she knew. Which is quite obvious if you knew Sienna.”

  “Why’s that?” Watters faced the three of us. “The door was locked. Nobody has the key besides Sienna and Ursula. Ursula has her key and the door was locked while Sienna was working. So she either let someone inside or they used magic.”

  “I don’t see any Residuals around the door, yet the deadbolt was thrown when I entered with a Lock Lifter.” I swallowed my distaste. “Another reason you shouldn’t be looking at Matthew—he doesn’t have that kind of magic.”

  “No, but he was a friend. He could have possibly lifted the keys off Sienna after he iced her, or gotten her to open the door for him,” Watters said. “Where are Sienna’s keys—do we have them?”

  “I imagine on her body,” I said through gritted teeth. “But we won’t know until we get Sienna out and defrosted.”

  Watters considered it all carefully. “I think the evidence fits the profile of one particular man who escaped this morning.”

  “Someone escaped?” Felix asked. “From where?”

  “The hospital,” Watters said. “Captain Matthew King.”

  Chapter 26

  My feet dragged along the streets of Wicked, turning up dust and dirt and smoke as I scuffed my boots through the worn paths. After Watters had accused Matthew yet again, I’d been kicked out of the lab with a few choice parting words that had had Felix scrubbing at that toothpaste stain on his shirt to avoid eye contact with either of us.

  There was no way I’d be getting close to any case ever again, so long as Watters was in the borough. It was a good thing I was already on personal time, or else I’d probably be getting a Comm from Chief Newton at any moment with word of my suspension.

  I debated going to the Sixth Precinct and pleading my case again. I knew the chief trusted me, but I also knew he wasn’t willing to rock the boat more than he already had. Not that he’d rocked it exactly—more like given the canoe a bit of a wiggle.

  We were on our own. Or rather, I was on my own since I had no clue where Matthew was, and I was starting to feel a bit annoyed at his disappearing act. He hadn’t Commed, and while I expected he had pressing business to take care of, it wouldn’t have killed him to drop a line when he was freed from the hospital. I hadn’t even been there when he’d woken from the coma.

  Speaking of comas, I had the sneaking suspicion I’d be headed toward one myself, and fast, if I didn’t get some rest. While I hated the fact that I needed sleep and Matthew didn’t—stupid witchy weakness—I knew I wouldn’t be thinking clearly much longer if I didn’t get an hour or two of shut eye.

  A quick nap, and I’d be refreshed and back on the streets. Hopefully feeling less murderous myself, seeing how this last interaction with Watters had gotten my intestines churning in a distinctly homicidal manner.

  I found myself dragged toward Matthew’s place. I considered heading home, but between my silent furniture and the lack of Willa and Jack arguing in the kitchen, it was too depressing. I debated going to the hospital to sleep next to Willa as moral support, but I’d just be in the way. Plus, Matthew had to turn up eventually, and if I knew my vampire, he’d
want to change his clothes.

  I climbed the front steps and let myself into Matthew’s house with the enchanted key he’d recently given me for such occasions. Without bothering to look up, I turned, shut the door behind me, feeling overwhelmed with zombie-like fatigue. Even my limbs dangled tiredly as I huffed over to the stairs and began to haul myself up them.

  I stopped halfway when I caught a glimpse of a dark figure in the sitting room. My head jerked up, my trembling, tired limbs flexed to attention. “Why didn’t you say something, Matthew? You startled me!”

  Matthew looked up, surprised to see me. “Dani!” He moved to his feet, crossed the room. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  I blinked and backed away. “Who are you and what have you done with the real Matthew?”

  The vampire raised his hands. He looked like Matthew, smelled like Matthew, had the markings of Matthew down to the wolf prints still healing across his skin. “It’s me. I was just distracted.”

  “You’re never distracted. You hear everything,” I said. “You hear when I open a candy wrapper from three miles away.”

  He smiled, but it was grim. “I was reviewing something very important. Something you’d like to see.”

  I squinted at him again. “Tell me something that only Matthew would know.”

  He blinked, looking startled, then smiled. “I’m pleased you know me so well. And that you are so cautious.”

  “I’m listening,” I said. “One wrong move, and I’ll drop you.”

  “Ah, foreplay,” Matthew said. “I knew you were romantic. Listen, DeMarco, I know your eyes flash violet when you fight, or when I turn you on. When I stroke that space on your stomach between your navel and your—”

  “Yeah, yeah, move it along,” I said. “Something else.”

  He gave a dry laugh. “Do many others know that about you?”

  “Keep talking.”

  “I know you still carry guilt from Trenton’s death. I know you and Grey are becoming friends, and I don’t like it. I can smell him on you. But I’m trying not to let my jealousy show because it’s unbecoming and you hate it.”