The Deer Prince's Murder: Book Two of 'Fantasy & Forensics' (Fantasy & Forensics 2)

by Michael Angel

  “Great,” I groused, “that’s singularly unhelpful.”

  “Similar news I must convey,” Shaw continued. “Mine own fortunes amongst my clan were similarly full of vagaries. Yet not completely without import, methinks.”

  “Let’s hear it,” I sighed.

  “Upon the mere mention of the name ‘Sirrahon’, my clan’s elders acted as if they’d stuck their beaks into a hornet’s nest. Worse, they withdrew into counsel and bade me return the next day past noon!” The griffin made a disgusted sound. “Acting like mewling chicks upon a molt-day! Hadst I not seen it with mine own eyes, never wouldst I have believed it.”

  “They sound frightened,” said Liam. “And while I hate to add to the ever-growing pile of ominous tidings, I don’t really have much choice in the matter.”

  “Go on,” I began, and then did a quick double-take. “Liam, your antlers…”

  The Fayleene nodded, and then turned his head so that we could see more easily. His snapped-off left antler had not only grown another two or three inches, it had budded at the end into three stubby knobs. His right antler had also grown, though not as robustly, and it had sprouted an extra tine.

  “Doubtless it is a side-effect of my inheriting the magical mantle of Heir Protector,” he explained. “I don’t know the exact workings of this magic, but it continues to be helpful. I was able to summon birds again – large, far-ranging raptors this time – and I was even able to see through their eyes.”

  “What did you find out? Did you see Sirrahon?”

  “Well, no…not exactly.”

  Galen, Shaw, and I traded puzzled looks.

  “Thou art taxing my brain,” Shaw complained. He rubbed one lion paw against his feathery head for emphasis. “Do start talking sense, Fayleene.”

  “The fey magic allowed me to summon a golden forest eagle to my service. A fine bird in its prime, able to fly higher and faster than anything in our world. I tracked it in my mind for hours as it sped away from the Fayleene woods. Felt it labor to breathe as it flew over the high pass of a range of mountains, a solid fortnight of hard riding to the north. That’s where I saw…”

  Liam had trailed off. I tried to nudge him into finishing.

  “Yes? Where you saw Sirrahon?”

  “Only evidence of his passing.” He shuddered. “Dayna, that entire northern forest…it’s gone.”

  Galen snorted. “I find that slightly hard to contemplate. The forest you speak of is lightly trafficked, free of settlements…and it is of considerable size, if the mapmakers are at all adequate in their craft.”

  “Believe what you wish,” Liam said pointedly. “But I saw what I saw. Piles of ash. Heaps of trees that had been slashed, uprooted, burned, and gnawed upon. Smashed boulders, befouled waters, and air so rank with sulfur that it nearly brought the eagle down and smothered it.”

  We all went quiet at that. I thought of what Galen’s book had said about the size of older dragons. How the normally fearless griffins had recoiled at Shaw’s news. And what Vazura had said about the dread beast…

  I completed my visual inspection. The only anomaly that I’d seen was the bright red-purple of a fresh bruise at Vazura’s neck. I reach out to touch that spot and my fingers encountered something hard. Something that stuck out from the side of Vazura’s neck like a picture nail projecting out of a wall.

  My friends watched with intense curiosity as I carefully removed a pair of thin, brown darts from the side of Vazura’s neck. Dark red blood ran from the wounds as I did so, but it simply oozed slowly from the openings like tree sap in winter. The muscular pump driving the blood through his vessels had stopped beating.

  The wizard pulled a piece of cloth from a saddlebag and held it out. I placed the darts on the fabric and examined them critically. The weapons were dark brown, bloodstained at one end, and had been fashioned out of twisted lengths of a wiry substance. A subtle scent tickled my nose, over the iron-filing smell of blood.

  Pine tinged with peppermint.

  “These wiry things, could they be…pine needles?” I wondered. “No, that’s impossible. Too fragile, for starters.”

  “Not true,” Liam corrected me. “Needles from the sacred pines of the Fayleene grove are strong enough. And the spoor of the spellcraft used to hold these things together…I could not sense it until you pulled the darts from this man’s flesh. It is fey magic. I’m sure of it.”

  “You think these darts came from one of the Fayleene?”

  “If so, there’s only one stag who wants so badly for me to fail that he’d murder someone.” Liam pawed the turf and growled out the name. “These darts must have come from Wyeth!”

  “Crafting these without opposable thumbs?” I objected. “No offense, Liam, but I don’t think that someone in deer form could construct something like this.”

  “It is possible, Dayna. Many magical peoples can craft things in a human fashion, by using an astral, or ‘non-corporeal’ form. I have not mastered this skill, though I could if I tried.”

  “Mayhap this is the type of creature we face here,” Shaw conjectured, with a flex of a talon.

  “Almost as if we were dealing with a ghost,” Galen mused. He snapped his finger and turned to me, eyes bright. “If we do indeed have a non-corporeal being on our hooves, it would be to our advantage if we also had one to work with us. I need to consult my books, see if I can summon assistance. Though I must caution, this task may take me all night.”

  “Time enough for me to speak with my clan again,” Shaw said approvingly.

  “And I can keep ear to ground here at Fitzwilliam’s court in the meantime,” Liam put in. “Wyeth recognized Dayna back at the Grove. He knew about her father’s killing of a Fayleene doe. I’ve been puzzling over that. I think someone here has been passing information to Wyeth. Maybe I can find out who.”

  “Then I’ve got my own work cut out for me,” I concluded. “I want to run these pine needle darts and the handful of dust Galen collected through the forensics lab in Los Angeles. Right after that, I’ll return to Andeluvia. Let’s all meet back at the room in the tower at noon tomorrow.”

  “We shall all be here,” Galen promised.

  That’s assuming that McClatchy isn’t able to use tomorrow morning’s probation hearing to throw me out of the facility, I reminded myself. Otherwise, my chances of solving this may have just dropped to zero.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A flash-bang of white fire, and I arrived back in my living room in Los Angeles. I’d have thought that inter-world transportation would be easier the more I did it. But it seemed like I was still paying for the near-instant travel with my short-term sense of equilibrium and well-being.

  I stumbled over to my couch. Carefully, I set two bags and a tiny wooden box on the side table. Then I flopped onto the cushions for a minute to let my head clear. It was already dark outside. The chirp of crickets percolated through the drawn curtains, and the dim glow of the streetlights winked on as I brushed a dark lock of hair from my face.

  At least I hadn’t been detained that long in returning. Andeluvia had a lot less paperwork to fill out than my adopted hometown, the City of Angels. When the two white-cloaked men who formed the ‘mortuarium’ arrived from the House of Hospitalliers, they didn’t tape off the area like a crime scene. Nor did they ask a single question of me or my three friends. Instead, they silently bowed and then respectfully placed the poor dead captain onto a crude stretcher. From there, they brought him to a waiting cart for transportation to the House itself, leaving us to our business.

  “Upon your next return, I shall have a freshly charged amulet for you,” Galen assured me, just as I mentally prepared myself to wink out of his world.

  “I’ll hold you to that,” I kidded him, and he smiled. It had taken a while for the wizard to adapt to and understand my style of humor, but he pretty well kept up with me now.

  My head finally stopped doing the samba after a few moments. And my stomach grumbled its displeasure with a
vengeance. I kicked off my shoes, grabbed the trio of objects that I’d brought back from Andeluvia, and padded over to the kitchen. The same olive linoleum floor and faded earth-tone cabinets that only a designer from the 1970’s would have loved greeted me.

  I set the box and the two bags aside on the counter. The box contained the deadly pair of darts I’d pulled from Vazura’s neck. One bag, which was made of cloth and tied up with string, held the handful or two of dust that Galen had retrieved from the courtyard. The other was a quart-sized polyvinyl bag that I’d originally used to bring a wedge of cheesecake back to Andeluvia for my friends to try. Now, it held hair, blood, and tissue samples from Vazura’s body. A dim blue aura shimmered around the bag, and an electrical tingle ran up my arm if I held it with more than two fingers. Galen’s hastily concocted preservation spell would keep everything inside in stasis until tomorrow morning, which I was very grateful for. No matter how used to gross things I got in my line of work, I hadn’t been looking forward to storing this bag in my refrigerator, next to the open milk carton and six-pack of yogurt.

  I whipped up an impromptu salad out of shredded romaine lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and a quarter-jar of artichoke hearts. The handful of garlic crouton cubes I added on a whim were hard enough to cut glass, so I softened them up by drowning them with olive oil and enough balsamic vinegar to make my toes curl.

  A bleep came from where I’d left my cell phone rested in its charger. A quick check of the screen confirmed what I’d expected: it was a classically blunt text from Bob McClatchy about tomorrow morning.

  Probation hearing scheduled for 9am. Second-floor mtg room.

  My finger moved to type in a confirmation, but I hesitated. Instead, I put the phone back into its charger cradle. Heck with him. I’d be there, but I didn’t want to talk to the man, even via a text message.

  My tummy also wanted something more solid than vegetables. So I pulled out a pair of leftover microwave taquitos and nuked them until they were well and truly sterilized. As I sat at the dining room table and did my best impression of Peter the Rabbit, I considered what to do with the remainder of the evening. I toyed with the idea of going downtown after hours to run my samples. I could probably sneak in the same way I’d done once with Galen in tow – through the medical waste dumpster area.

  Reluctantly, I dismissed the idea.

  Regardless of how the Lead Does felt about Sirrahon, he wasn’t on their front doorstep just yet. Liam confirmed that he’d had his golden eagle flying a pretty good clip for several hours. That put our ancient stone dragon at least two hundred miles from the Fayleene woods. And it didn’t seem like this was the kind of creature that could move around without being detected by King Fitzwilliam’s border patrols. So we were all betting that we had at least a couple of days to figure out something – anything – before Sirrahon hit us like a tsunami of scales and bad attitude.

  Add to that the inconvenient fact that I was already on very thin ice with the M.E.’s office. If I got caught sneaking into the facility and using the lab equipment after hours, it would look very bad at the hearing. I’d probably be asked to turn in my badge then and there.

  I finished my dinner, put my fork down, and made a very unladylike open-mouth yawn. Yes, my body and mind were in agreement that I needed some extra beauty sleep, heavy on the extra. It wasn’t that late yet. But there were things to consider.

  Since this morning, I’d frozen my butt off in a strange forest. Been transformed into a magical doe creature. Learned that Prince Liam was going to have to deal with an ancient stone dragon or be exiled. Confronted a king. Almost got flogged and-or thrown into a dungeon. And then I’d witnessed the murder of a man I’d sworn to protect.

  All of which added up to one thing: I needed some sleep before I completely fell apart.

  A quick stop at the bathroom. I tried to muster up the motivation to brush my teeth. My hands began to quiver as soon as I picked up the toothbrush. The shower called to me, to scrub away the awful feelings that were bubbling under my skin, but I turned away from it and lay on top of the covers on my bed.

  I closed my eyes. Focused on my breathing, the way I’d learned in a long-ago yoga class. It had been a while since I felt the need to relax this way. A month ago, I’d been shot at with a rifle. I had a little more control over my feelings this time. But just as before, my feelings of relief, of knowing that I had survived – it was mixed with the disturbing surety that just out of my sight, horrible things were moving around in the dark.

  When I opened my eyes, I wasn’t in Los Angeles anymore.

  Warm mist billowed from between my lips as I stood in the middle of a snow-covered forest. Bright morning sunshine gleamed off the rime of ice that coated the tree trunks around me. Instantly, I knew where I was.

  It was a frigid December in the woods of Pike County, Illinois.

  I’d just turned seven.

  This was ‘The Dream’. The memory of when I’d discovered that my father had slaughtered the poor Fayleene doe who’d been transported to our world. I’d suppressed the memory for so long that it had become a recurring vision that hovered between unsettling daydream and night terror.

  I took a step, heard a crunch like someone biting into stale crusts of bread. When I looked down, I expected to see the little pink wigwam boots I’d worn back then. Instead, the tops of my boots were maroon. I lifted my foot, jiggled off the dusting of snow. These were the snow boots I’d bought when I’d been in college. My legs were the length that they were now, not all those years ago. That made my blood run cold, as cold as the biting wind.

  I’d always been in this dream as a seven-year old girl. Never as an adult.

  And for some strange reason, that scared me more than anything.

  A blood trail stood out against the snow. Scarlet patches splattered in an uneven line like some piece of performance art gone dreadfully wrong. The line of droplets meandered drunkenly between the trees. I nodded to myself. Felt my mind retreat from the fear by diving into the analytical portion of things. The Fayleene doe had lost a lot of blood by this point. She’d been swaying back and forth on her four spindly deer legs. The legs that I’d gotten to try out this past morning.

  At one point, the droplets became a splatter. The doe must have fallen for a moment, probably onto her front knees. Terrified of the figure in the orange hunting jacket that stalked her, she’d heaved herself up and continued on. I followed.

  Off to the left was a bright gash against the papery-thin bark of a sugar maple tree. Reeling worse now, feeling the effects of extreme blood loss, the doe had trouble keeping her head upright. One antler tine had gashed the tree as she had staggered past.

  Then the trail of blood drops changed direction. Now it headed towards my family’s house. The snow grew more disturbed here, just as the red-green glow of the Christmas lights that rambled along our front porch shone through the tangle of branches and snow-choked undergrowth.

  I stopped. Saw the snow for the first time with my adult eyes. Here was when the doe had finally come to rest and not gotten up. Not as much blood as I’d expected. Her body, though failing, was trying its best to seal the wound, to plug the horrible hole in her side. Next to the deepest imprint in the snow, the smears of weakly flailing legs, the scrape of the head as it hit the hard ground, were my father’s footprints.

  Right next to the deer, deeper prints where he’d knelt on one knee to look at her. Where she’d raised her head and asked: Why? Why did you kill me?

  In shock, in wide-eyed disbelief and in certainty that he’d done something monstrous, my father had picked up the doe’s body. Somehow, he’d carried her back to the garage freezer. Against my will, my feet carried me along the same path. Up the side of our driveway, past our beat-up station wagon and up to the garage’s side door.

  I reached out to grab the knob. Lime-green flecks of paint flaked off on my glove as I turned it. The smell of wood smoke from our old house fireplace filled my nose. Followed by the stink of
paint thinner and gasoline and blood.

  I pushed the door open.

  The all-weather bulb inside the garage hung from the rafters by a single paint-spattered cord. Daddy’s orange hunting vest was streaked with red. He knelt before the white, coffin-shaped chamber, sobbing as he gazed upon the bony nubs of antler that projected from within.

  He turned to look at me. But his eyes were gone. Ragged holes like gunshot wounds gazed back at me. His voice rose to a thunderous shout.

  “Look at what you’ve done, Dayna! See how the Fayleene die!”

  My insides turned to water as the Fayleene doe sat up in the freezer with a dull thump. Her hooves were claws, her teeth sharp, and her skull flattened into the reptilian shape of a dragon’s head. She let out a shriek like a winter gale off the plains.

  “Your fault! YOUR FAULT! You’re a worthless little pipsqueak of a girl!”

  That was enough for my steadiest nerves to roll up shop and bar the doors. I turned and ran, whimpering like the seven-year old that I was inside. An awful, slow run, like jogging in quicksand. Darkness fell with the suddenness of a thrown blanket, smothering light. My breaths came in hot little pants, ears splitting with the screams and shrieks of the things behind me.

  Around me, too. Black shapes with glowing eyes coiled around to my front even as the noises behind faded away. The sound of hoof beats. I staggered to a stop, chest pounding, eyes full of tears as I realized that I was surrounded. The largest of the monstrous shapes coalesced in front of me. I threw my arms up in front of me, let out a final scream as it opened its cavernous mouth, fangs bared…

  “We need your help, Dayna Chrissie,” it said.

  Well, I wasn’t expecting that.

  “Uh…” I gulped, “who…I mean, what do you want?”

  “I am Reveé, the Dream Speaker,” the shape continued, in a reasonable, vaguely female voice. There was an accent there too, but I couldn’t quite place it. “We have been summoned to assist you in your investigation. Our price is that you help us in turn. One of our number cannot do that for which he was born. No magic has been able to find out what is wrong with him. Maybe, we feel, a person of science is what is needed. So. Will you give your word that you will meet our price?”