Deadline

by Jennifer Blackstream

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “But Arianne is secretive, and she hypnotized me just for asking a few questions about Helen. She knew I was a witch, she knew I was investigating Helen’s disappearance. I’m not sure why she felt the need to hypnotize me.”

  Anton brushed away my concern with a wave of his hand. “Arianne’s desire for secrecy is well known. It would not surprise me if she used hypnosis on everyone who performed work of any kind on her property.” He rubbed his chin. “Perhaps it’s time I found out why she’s so protective of her precious hotel.”

  “Good luck with that,” Dimitri spoke up. “Her wards are insane. No one takes security as seriously as she does. I’ll bet she tests them all the time—probably has hackers try to break in on a regular basis just to make sure they’re foolproof.”

  Anton bristled at the last jab, but Vera blinked and looked up.

  “Dimitri, sweetheart, I had completely forgotten you were here. An interactive hesitation spell. Well done, my love, well done.”

  “It’s a gift,” Dimitri said modestly.

  “And a curse,” Anton muttered. “I never should have let you study with the wizard.”

  “You have so many gifts, Dimitri,” Vera added in the voice only a doting mother could pull off.

  “Why don’t you talk to me like that?” Peasblossom demanded.

  I arched an eyebrow at the blue and pink fey. “You’re not my child?”

  She flopped down on my palm, crossing her arms as best she could with the sticky strands of Anton’s security system still bound around her. “I have many gifts too.”

  I met Vera’s eyes, and she put a hand over her mouth to hide a smile. Anton stared at me with a blank expression, though I thought I caught a flicker of empathy in his eyes.

  “You do have many gifts,” I said, patting Peasblossom on the back between her wings. “You know I would be lost without you.”

  “Yes, you would.” She sniffed. “What are some of my gifts?”

  Anton abandoned the conversation in favor of pulling his phone out of his breast pocket and swiping his fingers over the screen, probably starting his research on Arianne and her hotel. Vera pulled her own phone from the pocket of her coat and pretended to fuss with it.

  “Well, you keep me organized with Post-its, don’t you?” I pointed out. “You make sure I use different colors so it doesn’t get boring. And you’re brilliant at hide and seek.”

  Peasblossom grinned. “And hide the egg.”

  I scowled. “Hide the egg is not a game. It’s something naughty pixies do when they want to be grounded.” I glanced at Vera, then back at Peasblossom. “It took me forever to get the smell out of that closet.”

  “It wouldn’t have smelled bad at all if it hadn’t taken you two months to find it.”

  Vera chuckled, and I shook my head in defeat. “Well, I should be going. It’s getting late, and we have a long drive home.”

  “I’ll walk you out,” Vera offered. “I have errands to run.”

  “Thank you,” I said sincerely. I’d been afraid Anton would escort me out. He’d acted strangely about the vault, and I couldn’t shake the memory of that expectation in his eyes.

  Anton stepped closer and made a not-so-subtle attempt to catch my eye. I looked at his shoes.

  “You will call me if you learn anything. I am trusting you to find that book.”

  Why? I wanted to ask. Why me?

  I didn’t ask. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  Chapter 9

  By the time I walked out of Anton’s office building, it was almost eight o’clock. The flesh between my shoulder blades twitched the entire walk to my car, an unnerving feeling that someone was watching me from behind that cold, dark glass. I turned up the collar of my coat. It didn’t help.

  “Isai hates Anton,” Peasblossom said, breaking the silence.

  I opened my car door and slid inside, closing it with unnecessary force. After a second of hesitation, I locked the doors. “Yes, I noticed that.”

  “I’ll bet he hates a lot of people.”

  “I noticed that too.” I stared at the building, the tinted windows that would hide anyone who might be standing there. Lights on in the offices of the middle floors painted soft orange ribbons around the forbidding black tower, but the farther the building reached into the night sky, the darker it grew.

  Peasblossom struggled to sit on my shoulder, the blue threads still sticking to her catching on a few stray strands of my hair. “Do you think he stole it?”

  “I don’t know.” I winced and brushed my hair back, trying to keep it from the sticky pixie. “But I have a hard time believing he’d hold on to it with Anton threatening to burn his spellbook.”

  “Maybe he realizes that Anton will probably kill him as soon as he returns it.”

  “Anton can’t kill him, it’s part of their accord. However, as the vampire said, there are fates much worse than death. Perhaps Isai understands that better now.” I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. “But he could arrange for it to be found. There’s no physical evidence tying him to the theft, no direct evidence. If he planted it on someone, he could get away with it.”

  “But instead, he’s auctioning it off.”

  I flopped back against my seat, wincing when my hand struck the seatbelt buckle. “And that doesn’t make sense either. If Isai went to all that trouble to get the book, then why not keep it? All that blackmail is exactly what he needs if he’s going to—”

  “Take over the world?”

  I stopped rubbing my knuckles and arched an eyebrow at Peasblossom. “Sort of.”

  Peasblossom half climbed, half fell down my arm to land in my lap. After prying her wings free of my jacket, she fell to her knees on top of the pouch around my waist and tugged at the zipper. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m hungry. You have cookies in here somewhere.” She grunted and tugged harder.

  I put a hand over the zipper. “You aren’t getting any cookies until you have dinner.”

  Pink eyes widened and she flopped back to land on the seat by my thigh, pasting herself to the fabric in a seal of blue goo. “But that’s two hours away!”

  “We’ll stop somewhere on the drive home.”

  “I want a cookie.”

  “Well, you’re not getting—”

  “You have a hole in your leggings.”

  I glared down at my leg. “Damn. I forgot—”

  “I did not attack you, you simple-minded female. I removed the spell that someone else put on you. The spell someone else was using to spy on you.”

  The wizard’s barrage of insults came crashing back. Suddenly, I remembered the blonde woman, remembered what she’d done. I jerked back in the seat, simultaneously drawing a spell to check myself and Peasblossom for any such magic. Stupid, stupid. If I fell for the same trick twice...

  “Revelare.” The silver net of my spell spread over my body, bowing out to encompass Peasblossom and the rest of the car. No answering spark met the glittering strands. Either there was no such scrying spell, or there was, but someone with a lot of skill had hidden it from my magic. I put my fingers to my temples, soothing the sudden headache forming there.

  My kingdom for some physical evidence.

  Peasblossom peeled herself off the car seat and climbed up my coat, leaving an interesting blue design as the remnants of the sticky spell clung to the fabric. It was a testament to my disturbance that I didn’t care, even though the coat’s tag demanded I hand-wash the stupid thing. I could use a spell to clean it, but I knew Mother Hazel would find out. She’d sense it somehow, and then I’d get a lecture on using magic for my personal convenience.

  I picked up my phone. “There are cameras all over this city. I wonder if any of them caught that woman who tried to spy on me.”

  “I’ll bet Anton’s cameras caught her.”

  I glanced up at the building, then quickly down at my phone. “I’ll ask Bryan first.”

  “You don
’t want Anton to see you getting tricked by blondie,” Peasblossom guessed.

  My cheeks heated. “Quiet, I’m on the phone.”

  Bryan picked up on the first ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Bryan, it’s Shade.”

  “Mot— Shade, good evening. Hold on just a moment.”

  He put his hand over the phone and I heard the murmur of a brief conversation, followed by footsteps on tiled floor and then a door closing.

  “All right, sorry about that.” A chair creaked as he lowered his weight into a seat. “Have you found something?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, Bryan. Mrs. Miller is dead. You were right—her ghost is haunting her house.”

  Bryan sighed. “I was afraid of that. Do you know how she died? Who killed her?”

  “She was in pretty bad shape, so I couldn’t speak with her. But I might have something. Is there any way you can access the security camera footage of stores in the area around 1300 East Ninth Street?”

  “Without a warrant I can’t demand it, but I can ask. What are you looking for?”

  “A blonde woman ran into me outside the building, and I need to talk with her. She was wearing a purple coat, black leggings, and huge silver earrings.”

  “I’ll do my best. There’s a Chase Bank right across the street. The manager has a soft spot for law enforcement since we stopped a robbery last year, so I can ask him. He’s usually there by seven thirty in the morning. I’ll swing in on my way to work.”

  “Thank you, Bryan.”

  “Thank you.” There was a pause, then he sighed. “So she’s really dead.”

  I propped an elbow on my car door and laid my head in my hand. “I’m sorry, Bryan. I was hoping for a different outcome.”

  “Yeah, me too. I don’t know how I’m gonna tell Andy.”

  “Well, if you think it would help, I can be there when you do.”

  Another pause, this one longer. When he still hadn’t said anything after a full minute, I took a guess. “Bryan, if Andy’s there and you’d like me to have a word with him, I’m in Cleveland. I could come over right now.”

  “Could you?” Bryan exhaled, his relief palpable. “I can’t stand the thought of keeping this from him when he’s in his office trying to find this woman.”

  “I’m on my way,” I promised, sitting up.

  “I’ll meet you at the front door. The address is 1501 Lakeside Avenue East.”

  I started the car and grabbed my GPS, typing in the address before I could forget it. “It’s no problem at all, Bryan, I’m happy to help. See you in…” I blinked. “Five minutes. You’re only half a mile away.”

  “Big city, small world,” Byran agreed.

  I looked at Peasblossom. It was a little disturbing how close the vampire was to the federal agency. On a paranoid day, I might wonder if it was intentional…

  I got off the phone and tucked Peasblossom securely into the passenger seat—after retrieving a napkin from the glove box to protect the fabric from the blue goo. I had enough pixie-prints to scrub as it was. The short drive was a blessing, since it limited how long I had to listen to her complain about the cookie I’d denied her.

  The FBI Cleveland field office was a wide three-story building of beige brick with white trim. Even at night, with only the illumination of the security lights, the building looked new and polished, as if it were an agent itself, treating its duty to represent the Federal Bureau of Investigation with the utmost seriousness. The landscaping spoke of similar care, and even the wrought iron gate had the decency not to rust—except a little at the very bottom and very top. As I got out of my car, I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder toward the Winters Group. Anton’s building towered over the cityscape, looking for all the world like it was spying on the government headquarters. If I closed my eyes, I could picture Anton on the top floor, looking out his penthouse window. Watching…

  “Isn’t there a rule about vampires living this close to a government building?” Peasblossom asked, following my gaze.

  “He doesn’t live there, he works there,” I said absent-mindedly. “But if there isn’t, there should be.”

  Peasblossom snorted and huddled in my coat pocket, tacky blue residue taking care of the pesky lint that had gathered there. Bryan met us at the door, and we made polite, mundane small talk as he walked me through the security checkpoint. He nodded to his coworkers, then escorted me to an elevator across the lobby.

  As soon as the elevator doors closed, Peasblossom hauled herself out of my pocket and climbed up the arm of my coat. “Are we going to see Andy so we can tell him about the ghost?” she asked.

  Bryan blinked, but recovered quickly, inclining his head at the pixie in a small bow of respect. “He said it was all right to come up. I didn’t tell him what it was about. He’s in a meeting right now, but he said to wait in his office.”

  Peasblossom hid again as the elevator doors opened. We walked down a plain white hallway that ran by a room full of cubicles, then rounded a corner where a row of offices took up the left-hand side. Bryan led us to an office with Andrew Bradford written on a gold plate on the door. It was the corner office.

  Bryan let us in, and we both took a seat in front of Andy’s desk to wait. He rubbed his hands together and faced me. “So how is this going to work? Am I just supposed to say you saw her ghost? Is there any way to prove it to him, any sort of…evidence?”

  “Well, that depends. Do you want to tell him about the Otherworld, or do you just want him to know she’s dead so he stops treating this as a missing person case and starts treating it as a murder?”

  “He’s not just a coworker,” Bryan said, his voice tight with frustration. He shoved a hand through his hair. “He’s my friend. I can’t be half honest with him. If I’m going to talk to him about Helen Miller’s ghost, then I need to tell him about everything.”

  “I think you’re right,” I said, trying to sound encouraging. “If you want, you can introduce me. Tell him I’m a witch. I’ll tell him about Helen’s ghost, and then I can answer any questions he might have about me, her ghost, or the Otherworld.”

  “Easy peasy,” Peasblossom said sarcastically.

  I gave her a warning look, then turned back to Bryan. “It’ll be all right. Honestly, of all the Otherworldly beings we could be dealing with, at least ghosts are fairly mainstream. For all you know, Andy might already believe in ghosts.”

  “No, he doesn’t,” a new voice deadpanned.

  I spun around in my chair and found the door to the office wide open. A man stood there staring at Bryan with an expression that was not entirely happy. He wore a navy-blue suit with a sky-blue shirt. His tie hung straight despite the late hour, and his brown hair had been combed back from his face.

  “Andy,” Bryan said, standing.

  “Is that why you needed to talk to me right away, Bryan?” Andy asked, his voice even. “You want to tell me about a ghost?”

  Bryan froze. It wasn’t a deer-in-the-headlights expression, though, more the stillness of a parent who’d stepped on a creaky spot on the floor and wasn’t sure if he’d woken the baby.

  Andy crossed his arms and refocused his attention on me. “What are you selling him?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Selling him?”

  “I caught what you said about wanting him to introduce you so you could tell him about a ghost. You’re a psychic, right? Trying to ‘help?’”

  I didn’t appreciate his tone, or the insinuated quotes around “help.” I crossed my arms, mirroring him. “No, I’m not a psychic.” I pressed my lips together, smothering the urge to give him the rest of my thoughts on his initial impression of me. This wasn’t about me, or my pride. It was about Bryan, and his desire to help his friend. Drawing out this argument, this little conflict, would only complicate matters, drag out the conversation in a way that might damage Bryan and Andy’s relationship. I needed to cut through Andy’s denial quickly, before he said something he’d regret.

  F
ixing my attention on the pen sticking out of Andy’s pocket, I focused on my magic and snapped my fingers. “Ignesco.”

  Andy’s pen flared to life, glowing with a soft but strong yellow light. Like a torch with no heat.

  “What the—?” Andy blinked down at his pocket. There was a moment of panic as his instincts told him he was on fire, but to his credit, he realized that there was no pain, no smoke. He grasped the pen between two fingers, holding it as if it might explode, and drew it out to hold it in the air between us.

  Seconds ticked by, the silence growing heavier. His eyes met mine. “How did you do that?”

  “I’m a witch.”

  Bryan shifted uneasily beside me, but I kept my attention on Andy. He stared at me for another long minute, and I could almost hear the gears turning in his brain.

  “A witch,” he repeated.

  “Yes.”

  He gestured with the pen. “This was a spell.”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. Then he put the pen back in his pocket and buttoned his jacket, hiding the light. “Excuse me a moment.”

  I watched him with renewed interest. It was an intriguing reaction. Most people either passed straight to denial, or—if they had been predisposed to believe in the Otherworld—they got excited. Andy seemed stuck in the middle.

  I doubted he’d stay that way. He obviously had an analytical mind. That didn’t bode well for a state of not knowing, so eventually, he’d have to decide. Bryan watched Andy leave without another word.

  For a moment, silence reigned.

  “I think that went well,” Peasblossom offered.

  I winced as she walked down my arm, ripping out a few hairs that had stuck to her when she’d crouched behind my neck. “Bryan, if you could give me a small dish and some very warm water?” I said.

  Bryan stared out into the hallway after Andy, but he nodded and went to fetch the requested items. He returned after a minute with two coffee mugs. Steam curled up from one of them. After setting them on the desk, he poured a little water from the non-steaming cup into the steaming one.

  “Tell me when the temperature is to your liking,” he said to Peasblossom.