Before, the people who wanted me dead at least had the gall to come out in the open. Now, I had no idea who I’d pissed off or why. Grace Hartley had been in the SCS office when the fire started; Talon was behind bars; Lucas …
I shut my eyes. Lucas would at least have the grace to come do the job himself, face-to-face. He was a warrior at heart, and besides, he didn’t have the magick to do something like this.
At least, I really hoped not.
“You got any ideas?” Fagin said, on cue.
“No,” I said.
“You sure?” He crossed his arms. “No enemies, ex-cons, ex-boyfriends?”
“No one who has a grudge against me is in the wind. I haven’t picked up any tails since this case started. The only people who know where I live are the nut job who sent the selkies after me and my squad …”
I trailed off and Sunny’s eyes widened. “What? What is it?”
Bryson caught my gaze and his face slackened. He knew where my train of thought was heading at breakneck speed. I didn’t want it to stop there, with every fiber of me, but it was the simple conclusion. The logical one. I felt a little sick.
“Oh, fuck me,” Fagin said. “You have got to be joking.”
“Will somebody please tell me what is going on?” Sunny said loudly.
My words came out small, for such an important bit of information, one that had the potential to blow up my entire life. “The people who tried to kill me had to get their information from somewhere. I think there’s a dirty cop in the SCS.”
Seventeen
Bryson’s house rested on the last lot of a dead-end street—somehow appropriate for him.
“Seven-seven-one Mulberry Way,” he said. “Home sweet fuckin’ home.”
I gazed out the windshield of his Taurus. The house was nondescript, a boxy two-story with blue asbestos shingles and planter boxes on the windows. Some late-blooming flowers were still in evidence.
“Well, come on,” Bryson grunted. “I ain’t getting any younger.”
“Could you just give me a minute?” I said. “Go ahead and put potpourri in the guest bathroom or something.”
“Fix us both a drink is more like it,” Bryson muttered. “You take Scotch?”
“Double,” I murmured. “No ice.”
After Bryson stumped inside I got out of his car and walked around his little yard, gnomes peeking at me from behind overgrown shrubbery with accusing ceramic eyes.
Of course I’d known dirty cops—this was Nocturne City, after all. Narcotics detectives were notorious for their “overtime bonuses,” a hundred or two hundred here and there for looking the other way while street dealers did business. There was a bathroom on the third floor of the Eighteenth Precinct that was a favorite spot of vice cops and their complimentary hookers. Nolan Dexter, a burnout homicide cop who’d been around my first year wearing a shield, took a fifteen-grand payout from a husband who beat his wife to death with a piece of his home gym in their Cedar Hill mansion.
Dexter never forgot the crime scene photos, and eventually that woman’s red, pulpy face and her blood-darkened eyes came to him in his sleep, while he drank his morning coffee, over and over again until he took an overdose of Percodan. He didn’t even have the panache to eat his gun.
I’d never liked dirty cops and I’d never considered being one myself. There was something fundamentally weak about crawling into bed with the people we were supposed to be keeping off the streets, something two-faced and parasitic about the whole situation.
And now someone under me, someone I trusted with my life every time we went into the streets, was working with the Thelemites.
I felt like I was going to vomit on one of Bryson’s tacky gnomes.
Instead, I went inside, up the cracked front steps, past the bank of junk mail in Bryson’s box, and into a small hallway wallpapered with yellow flowers and shepherd girls in green dresses.
The front room was crammed with overstuffed pink furniture done in thick shag, a console TV, and a mountain of laundry taller than I was.
“This isn’t the Hilton,” said Bryson, coming down the stairs and rattling the faded photographs on the wall. One of them was of a much younger and less muscular Bryson in a blue and white satin tuxedo—which I would have expected from him—standing next to a pretty round-cheeked woman in a wedding dress.
“It’s fine …” I said. “Is that your wife?”
“Ex, in the big time,” said Bryson. “That’s Annie. We got married in Las Vegas.”
“I’m shocked.”
Bryson took me by the elbow and pulled me away from the row of photographs. “Your room’s in the back, up the kitchen stairs.” The kitchen was as old lady as the rest of the house, giant yellow enamel stove and fridge humming away like two sleeping, contented beasts and more wallpaper, this time with a windmill-and-tulip motif.
“Your aunt Louise has questionable taste,” I told Bryson.
He snorted. “Beggars can’t be choosers, Wilder.”
The room itself was under the eaves, a twin bed made up with a quilt, and none of the stuffiness of downstairs. I sank down on the bed, hugging an embroidered throw pillow to myself.
“Okay?” Bryson asked anxiously. I flopped backward and stared at the cobweb-strewn roof beams, the dead spider silk drifting back and forth in the draft.
“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s more than fine.”
Bryson stood, breathing, and stuffed his hands in his pockets like he was waiting in line at the DMV.
“I’ll be better after I’ve had a few hours’ sleep and gotten some clothes,” I said. “You don’t have to babysit me.”
“Wilder, do you really think there’s a bent cop in the SCS?” he blurted.
I sat up, still hugging my pillow to my chest. It smelled like cinnamon cookies and mellow dust. “Yes,” I told him. “There’s no other explanation for how they knew I would be home in the middle of the day, and the address of my cottage.”
“Maybe those Thelema freaks read your mind or something, or looked in a crystal ball …”
“No, David,” I said. “Someone gave one of those freaks the information, and someone cursed me, and someone has been trying to make me deceased for a while now.”
“That blows,” he said flatly. “It’s someone I eat lunch with every day.”
“Me, too,” I said. “We’ve had a drink with them, probably sang ‘Happy Birthday’ and eaten a piece of that crappy cake Norris buys from the day-old bakery.”
“It’s not me,” said Bryson flatly. “I may not be in line for a commendation, but I’m not bent. I wouldn’t do that to you, Wilder.”
I threw the pillow at him. “I know that, you dumb bastard. You think I’d be staying in your house if I thought you were the one passing information about the unit?”
He turned the pillow in his hands. “I guess not. Hey, you hungry? I got some meat loaf. Meat loaf sandwiches?”
“Easy on the mayo,” I said. Bryson backed out of the room and I heard him rattling around in the kitchen. I went back to staring at the ceiling and wondering what the Hex I was going to do.
After I ate two meat loaf sandwiches, a bag of barbeque chips, and downed more than a few fingers of Scotch, I fell asleep in my clothes on the bed, only stopping to kick off my shoes. I checked in with Norris before I dozed off and told him I was at a motel downtown that was a well-known crash pad for cops going through house painting or divorces.
I gave him a nonexistent room number and hung up. Everyone except Bryson was suspect at this point.
Gods, what would I do if it was Batista or Pete? People I’d considered friends. Because it could be them. It could be someone in HR. It could be someone on the commission who had a bigger problem with the SCS existing than Mac realized.
Anyone. Anyone who had met my eyes in the department in the seven years I’d worked there.
Paranoia feels like a spider on your neck, light and fleeting, enough to send shock waves down your spine.
“Jumpy,” Lucas said from the rocking chair in the corner. I bolted up and smacked my head on the eave.
“Daemons below, Lucas! What the Hex are you doing here? How did you find me?”
“I followed your scent,” he said. “Your blood. Weres are distinctive. Much easier to track than humans.”
“Did you come here to take another shot at me?” I snapped, rubbing the lump on my forehead. “Still Hartley’s good little lap Wendigo?”
“There’s no contract on you that I’ve heard of,” Lucas said, standing. “And my job with Hartley was over the minute she got arrested. Those are my terms.” He switched on the bedside lamp even though we could both see reasonably well in the dark. He was unshaven and wearing a different set of clothes, but he looked as much at ease here as if it were his own bedroom and I belonged in it, instead of the other way around. His dark hair was shorter than when we’d last been together, and it curled at his neck, brushed his high forehead and his dark, melting eyes. Lucas radiated lust, hunger; his thin nose and full lips and large hands made for tactile sensations. Made to consume. I shivered, and got ahold of myself.
“Well, somebody sure as shit wants me in a freezer down at the morgue,” I said. “They burned down my house earlier today.”
Lucas inhaled sharply. “Thought I smelled smoke.”
“Do you know who it is?” I said.
He shook his head. “I only hear about paid contracts, hits and bodyguard jobs and run-of-the-mill stuff. What you got after you is someone doing it on faith.”
“Then why did you come here?” I demanded. “I get really cranky when I don’t get my full eight hours, Lucas.”
“I came to apologize for this morning,” he said. “I know I probably caused a lot of trouble for you by running. Are you suspended?” He sounded almost anxious.
“No,” I said. “They don’t suspend lieutenants; they just fire us.” I stretched, popping my neck. “Not to bruise your male ego or anything, Lucas, but you running off is the least of my worries right now.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, suddenly close, like a shadow in a dark room. “So you’re not going to be chasing me, Lieutenant Wilder?”
“Depends on how far you run,” I said. “Now get out of my room and let me get back to not sleeping.”
Lucas snaked his hand out and put it on the back of my neck, fingers closing with gentle pressure. I grabbed his wrist, just as fast.
“Stop it,” I said.
He didn’t stop. He leaned close and pressed his lips against mine. It was a high school kiss, dry and sweet and soft, the way that shy boys would have kissed me, if I had kissed any that were shy. Or still boys.
I grabbed Lucas’s neck in turn, my fingers sliding through his raggedy black hair, and pushed back, opening his lips with my tongue. I could tell him later that the were had overtaken me and consumed me with lust, or some crap, but it would be just that—crap. I wanted to kiss Lucas, and his no-strings-attached closeness was something I needed and hadn’t even realized until now.
A light flicked on downstairs, and I heard Bryson grumble to himself as he opened the refrigerator. A second later a bottle opener clacked and a beer opened with a hiss.
Lucas pulled away from me just enough to speak. “Take care of yourself, Luna.”
I pulled him back down when he started to rise. “Listen. Don’t you dare pull some lone wolf/mercenary disappearing act on me. You come back.”
Lucas laughed, just a vibration in his throat. “Well, when you put it that way …” He flowed to his feet. “See you soon, beautiful.” He shifted to mist, and flowed around the cracks in the small casement window above the bed, disappearing into the moonless night.
Eighteen
“You know what we need?” Bryson said the next morning around a mouthful of bear claw. I’d gone and gotten donuts as a protest against both his cooking skills and the rapidly advancing age of most of the food in his icebox.
“What?” I grunted from where I sat with my forehead on the table. Even a double-tall latte that I’d procured along with the donuts couldn’t rouse me.
Lucas may be a fantastic kisser, but he had lousy fucking timing. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about without wanted fugitives sneaking into my bedroom. Lucas still had outstanding warrants from the swath he’d cut through Nocturne when he was possessed, plus the flight from the jail.
And I had let him into my bedroom and made out with him like I was a fucking teenager. Every time I saw Lucas, I screwed up. I forgot I was a cop, and became wholly a were. I liked what he did to me.
That made him too dangerous to even consider.
“We need an outsider,” said Bryson, snapping me back to the real. “I been giving this a lot of thought.”
“That never bodes well.”
He gave me the finger and continued. “Someone who ain’t attached to the department, who can help us figure out who the mole is. They do it on TV sometimes.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Yeah, since real police work so often mirrors what all the hot TV cops are doing.”
“Hey,” said Bryson, brushing crumbs off the front of his Nocturne University T-shirt. “You can sit there and be bitchy all morning or you can admit that what I’ve got is a solid plan.”
“No, a solid plan would be figure out what the Thelemites want the heartstone for, why they set the fires, and what they were planning to do to my city,” I snapped. “And I have none of the tools to do that, so please just eat your pastry and shut the Hex up.”
“My therapist is gonna be very unhappy with you,” said Bryson. “You’re an enabler, is what you are. A perpetrator of diet sabotage.”
“If I give credence to your idea will you be quiet?” I snarled, feeling my teeth fang out.
Bryson shivered. “Always gives me the creeps when you do that. Anyway, yes. An outsider with the skills to help us take down the rat on the inside, like Tom Berenger in The Substitute.”
“Fagin,” I said, putting a hand over my eyes.
“Now you’re thinking,” Bryson said. “He’s federal and he ain’t native to the city. Plus, he’s a dick and that always helps when you’re dealing with scum like dirty cops. He’s got that killer look in his eye, if you can get past the stupid Dean Martin getup.”
I groaned. “He will love me crawling back to him and asking him for help.”
“Don’t see that we have much of a choice,” Bryson said.
I downed the rest of my coffee and dug my BlackBerry out of my purse. “Me, either. He’s going to love that, too.”
Fagin’s office phone went to voice mail, so I tried his cell number and got a muffled, “Hello,” after a dozen rings.
“Where are you?” I said. “You sound like you’re in someone’s trunk. Did that big mouth finally get you in trouble?”
“You think about my mouth often, Lieutenant? Tell me more.”
I held the BlackBerry away from my ear and gave Bryson a murderous glare. “Where are you?” I asked Will again.
“In my car,” he said. “I’m sitting on the Hartley place.”
“What?” I said. “Will, what are you up to?” I really hoped his next words wouldn’t be And I have a gun sitting in my lap to shoot the immortal witch who cursed me. Then I’d have to go running outside with my hair tangled and in yesterday’s clothes. I really hate that.
“You had to let her go, but I’m sure I can think up some illegal-weapons charges if pressed,” Will said. “I’m not losing the Maiden, Luna. I won’t. I’m so close.”
“Will …” I stood up and paced away from Bryson, into the front room. A small boy with red hair was riding a tricycle in concentric circles in the street in front of the house. “We are not doing this again,” I growled. “I told you, if you want to stay in my city then we’re going to do things my way.”
“Your th
reats work most of the time, don’t they?” Will sighed. “But not on me. You have your case and I have my project, and never the twain shall meet. I will find her, Luna, and I will break the curse.”
He was right, and my cheeks went warm under the plastic of the BlackBerry. Threats were my preferred method of making people do what I wanted—you had the control that way, the upper hand. But I needed Fagin, and I couldn’t have him pushing the Thelemites into something worse than setting fires.
“Listen, Will,” I said, letting my voice soften. “I’m going to trust you. I need to trust you.”
“Oh?” He sounded marginally less hostile, so I pressed on.
“There’s a crooked cop in my division, someone who is passing information to the Thelemites, and I can’t trust anyone in the SCS. I need allies. I need to find this person and use them to figure out what the Thelemites are doing, because …” A calculated pause, a tremor into my voice. “I think it’s bigger than me, Will. I’m scared for what it means for the city.”
He breathed into his phone for a minute. “Where should I meet you?”
“After Dark bowling alley,” I said. “Make it an hour.”
“Will do,” Fagin said, and rang off.
Bryson came into the front room. He’d added a Hawaiian shirt to his ensemble. I cocked an eyebrow.
“I’m pretty sure it’s not theme day at the office, David.”
“Office?” He snorted. “With everything that happened, I sort of figured today was an off day, Wilder.”
“Oh no,” I said. “You’re going to work and you’re going to behave like everything is normal. Tell them that I’m taking a personal day to meet with the insurance adjuster after the fire. Tell them that I’m fine—better than fine. The mole needs to know that they can’t get to me that easily.”
Bryson rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet.
“Problem?” I inquired.
He heaved a sigh. “What if the mole goes after me next?”
I let out a short bark of laughter, curbing myself when Bryson looked offended. “David, I think you’re safe. But I need you to be there. If we’re both out of the office the informant will know something’s up, and I can’t have that. Not yet. So do this for me, all right, Detective?”
Witch Craft Page 15
