by Rachel Lee
“And any one of thousands of people who might have done this. Unless we find the motive.”
“You found nothing today that stood out?”
“With all Chloe and I did, we came to the realization that this guy was a developer and landlord with his fingers in so many pots around the city that we might be able to narrow our suspect list to a few thousand rather than tens of thousands.”
“Great.” He sounded as unhappy as she felt.
The others returned with steamed crab legs, boiled shrimp and some lobster tails. The women gathered around a folding table to eat while the two vampires sat farther away.
“So,” said Chloe, as she forked some threads of lobster from a tail and dipped them into drawn butter, “Caro and I spent our entire day trying to sort through Pritchett’s dealings. It would be only a small exaggeration to say he was involved in about fifty percent of what goes on in this city, from real estate to development to belonging to the boards of banks and other companies.”
“In short,” Caro said, “he was probably a huge target in a lot of ways. You don’t get to that level without making some enemies.”
“What about the rest of the family?” Jude asked.
“Kids had no reported problems at school,” Caro answered promptly. “The police interviewed their friends and school officials. Nobody was aware of any troubles.”
“The brother-in-law?”
“He just started working for Andrew Pritchett a couple of months ago. That’s the only association we could find other than the marriage.”
“What did he do?”
Chloe and Caro exchanged looks. “We don’t know,” Caro said finally. “We only know when he went on the payroll.”
“What did he do before that?”
Caro’s heart accelerated a little and she leaned toward Jude. “He worked for the city-planning department.”
“Ah...” The sigh seemed to emerge from both vampires at the same moment.
“It could just be a coincidence,” Caro reminded them. “He did his job okay, according to everything I could find. Pritchett might have hired him to make his wife happy.”
“Or something else could have been going on.”
“Agreed.”
Damien spoke. “We need to look much closer at that. “While I’ll be the first to allow that life has plenty of coincidences, this one seems just a bit suspicious. We need to look more closely at what Pritchett was doing over the last six months and why he might have found someone from city planning useful.”
Then he swiftly changed the subject, turning to Jude. “I want you to put wards on Caro’s place. Something got to her last night. In her home. From what she said of her dreams, it may have been trying to kill her in her sleep.”
Jude’s smile was almost wry. “I thought you were the mage.”
“I’m taking a refresher. Regardless, Caro came out of whatever was being done to her after she got here. So there’s some protection in your spells.”
“And Chloe’s,” Jude remarked. “All right. When I take Terri to work, we’ll all go and try to make Caro’s place safe.”
Chapter 7
They all piled into Jude’s ramshackle car and dropped Terri at the morgue. Then Jude and Chloe warded Caro’s apartment and Jude gave her some holy water and a tiny vial of sanctified oil. “Carry them with you,” he suggested. “You never know.”
But after they’d returned Jude and Chloe to the office to do more research on Pritchett’s background, Damien and Caro took the car to go visit some more shops that catered to the adherents of alternative religions.
“I really hadn’t realized how many of these shops there are,” Caro remarked. “And I thought I knew this city, being a cop.”
“I imagine they keep a fairly low profile. Most would tend to have a small, select clientele, and they wouldn’t want problems with mainstream religionists.”
“I guess. It just seems odd I’ve never really noticed them before.”
“Why? Because of your grandmother?”
Caro glanced at him. “Maybe I didn’t notice because of my grandmother. Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Ah.” He let that lie, giving her space to work it through if she wanted.
It was then that she remembered another dream from her nap that afternoon, one that had nothing to do with her incredible desire to hop in the sack with a vampire.
Her grandmother. She had been sitting on her grandmother’s lap in the old rocking chair that creaked with every movement. Grandma had been telling her another of her fantastical stories—or had she?
Dreams were elusive at the best of times, and since she’d already almost forgotten she had had this one, it was a struggle to remember much more than how good she’d always felt sitting on Grandma’s lap.
How safe. How cherished. A lump rose in her throat.
You have the gift, sweet child. I feel it in you. It’s a greater gift than mine, perhaps as great as my grandmother’s.
What had that meant? Had her mind made it up? But no, something deep within her felt convinced that her grandmother had said that. A great gift?
She closed her eyes and tried to pull more of the memory or dream to mind, sensing it might be important in some way, whether her sleeping brain had manufactured it or whether it was the result of something she recalled.
Feel within yourself. It’s sleeping now, dreaming of great things, but you can wake it at any time, my darling Caro. Belief is the key.
Belief? All her life she’d refused to believe in much beyond her five senses. Yes, she had a certain psychic skill, but sometimes she even convinced herself she was just good at reading people.
Even though she never quite believed that.
“Damien?”
“Yes?”
“When you were a mage—well, I guess you still are—but back when you practiced all the time, what did belief mean to you?”
“In what way? What I believed in? What I believed about myself? How I used belief?”
She hesitated, partly because the question wasn’t really clear to her. “I think my grandmother once said that belief is the key, and I think she meant to my power.”
“That would make sense. Do you want to stop for some coffee before we go to the first shop? You look cold.”
Well, of course she was cold, she thought wryly. He was protecting himself against her scents by keeping his window rolled down again. If she had to ride in the car too often with this guy, she was going to need better winter clothes.
But coffee sounded good, as did a brief break before they met another enigmatic shopkeeper who would seem determined to tell them as little as possible.
He pulled over and parked in front of a nearly empty diner. She noticed as they walked in, however, that Damien didn’t go unnoticed. Eyes immediately looked his way, and then almost subtly, people seemed to pull back a little as if they sensed something. It amused her to see people react so unconsciously to a man who appeared perfectly normal. She wondered what they were sensing.
When he looked around for a waiter, though, a middle-aged woman came hurrying over as if commanded. Could his glance do that, too?
“Two coffees,” he said, then turned to Caro. “Do you want dessert? You didn’t eat all that much.”
The thought of something sweet with her coffee sounded very good now that he mentioned it. She grabbed the plastic menu and scanned quickly. “Cheese Danish, please.”
When the woman walked away to get their order, she leaned toward Damien, who sat across from her. “Can you drink coffee?”
“I can drink and eat. It just doesn’t please me anymore. Most things taste about like dirt.”
“Oh.” She wasn’t sure she’d want to give up the joy of eating lobster or a pastry. “Do you miss it?”
“Never. Most of what you humans enjoy so much didn’t exist in my human lifetime. I ate a lot of lamb, fish, flat breads, fruits, figs and olives. And everything was full of sand.”
She
laughed. “Sand would kind of kill it for me.”
“It was part of life. I didn’t think about it then.” He was smiling, though. “So I’ve never tasted most of the culinary delights you humans so enjoy now. How could I miss them?”
“Good question. I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“When I served at temple and someone brought me a plate of figs or olives, they always poured water over it to rid it of the sand. Hopeless enterprise for the most part, but a nice gesture.”
“But I thought it was the fertile crescent, so full of plants and gardens.”
“Part of it was, although not all of it. We had swamps, too. But the winds would blow and the dust would come from elsewhere. Even today you get the Saharan dust on your East Coast at times.”
She nodded. “I’ve heard about that.”
“Usually not enough for you to notice. Being closer to the deserts, we experienced more of it.”
“You still haven’t answered my question about belief.”
Just then the waitress returned with their order. He waited until the coffee and pastry were served and they were alone again in their corner of the diner.
“Belief manifests in many ways and can be used in many ways. Often, as a priest, I played on the beliefs of our adherents. You see that often in religions even today. Your priest or minister says something and the congregation believes it as an article of faith. Things don’t have to be explained. Nothing is questioned.”
“Did you believe in what you were doing?”
“Of course. I became a priest.”
She nodded. “Okay, so you believed along with your adherents. But what else? What could my grandmother have meant?”
“Belief is indeed a key and not just to the minds of others. If you are a mage, as I am, it’s necessary to believe in your own power, Caro. You have to believe in your gifts to unlock them. You have to believe that you can repel a demon or cause a mountain to move. Whenever you wish to do something you can’t do by ordinary means, you have to believe you can do it by extraordinary means.”
“Belief is a difficult thing.”
“Very, if you weren’t raised to believe something. Jude’s wards are the ones he was raised to believe in—holy water and chrism, the sanctified oils. But ask yourself what empowers water that contains a bit of salt or olive oil into something that protects against evil.”
She nodded, swallowing pastry. “Belief.”
“Exactly. Jude is open-minded enough to take advantage of the wards that Chloe has learned. She believes in them.”
“So belief is the key to accessing power?”
“In a way. Belief is also what makes things powerful. I’m not going to say that forces don’t exist apart from belief, because they do. But to harness them, you must both believe in them and believe in your own ability to do so.”
“But I never believed in this thing that’s attached itself to me.”
“Until you saw what it did to that man.”
He had a point. She definitely believed the evidence of her own eyes and that there was a man lying on a morgue table that Terri had said couldn’t have been impaled that way by ordinary means unless he’d fallen on those horns. Had that helped make her aware of this force that watched her? Helped her to believe it was there? Was she making it more powerful by believing in it?
Damien spoke again. “Belief sometimes comes from experience and sometimes from learning. Sometimes it’s almost inherent. But no spell I ever worked as a mage worked if I didn’t believe it would.”
Caro ate another tidbit of pastry while she thought about that. “Did your belief grow with every experience that worked?”
“Of course it did. It’s a bit like a hump you have to get over.”
“So my grandmother was telling me something important.”
“She was telling you something essential. Two people can use the same spell. One merely hopes it might work. The other absolutely believes it will. Same spell, different outcomes. The person who hopes will probably see little result compared to the one who believes.”
Caro thought about that for a few minutes. “I’m a great believer in hope,” she said finally.
“Hope is what keeps us going. But belief, as your grandmother said, is the true key to our inherent powers.”
“Well, since I believe that thing exists, I ought to believe in my ability to send it away.”
“You should.” His smile was kind. “But the two are not necessarily interchangeable.”
* * *
Okay, she thought as they drove to the next shop, she certainly believed that force had killed at least five people and possibly a sixth. She certainly believed it had been dogging her heels since she had seen it in action.
So how great a leap should it be from believing in it to believing in her own power to drive it away? But she had to admit, it was a heckuva leap, right across a chasm she’d been avoiding all her life.
Rage had probably been the motivating factor in summoning the elemental, if that’s what it was. So how about she start with a little rage of her own in place of the fear and uneasiness she’d been feeling? Hadn’t her grandmother said something about fear feeding other powers?
It was one of the reasons, she was sure, that she’d grown up to be relatively fearless. Heck, she wouldn’t be able to do her job as a cop if she were constantly afraid of what might happen, and while a little fear could be a good thing in a bad situation—self-preservational, even—she wasn’t sure it was always the most useful response.
It didn’t seem like a useful one now. She wasn’t yet scared enough to reach the flight-or-fight response of adrenaline, which in past dangerous situations had made it possible for her to confront her fears. What was different this time?
The fact that she couldn’t see the threat? No guns were being fired? Or maybe the lingering belief somewhere deep inside that something intangible couldn’t really hurt her.
Maybe that was the hardest bit of all to swallow. Maybe she needed to swallow it, and quickly.
Something had certainly put her into an unnatural sleep early this morning, haunted her dreams, fed on her fears. So it could affect her. Maybe the only reason it hadn’t killed her was that Damien had gotten her to Jude’s, where the spell or effect had worn off.
Or maybe it had something to do with the inherent power her grandmother had always claimed she had.
“Damien?”
“Yes?”
“If I have power, can you teach me how to use it?”
“I can help you start,” he said slowly. “But how far into this world do you want to go?”
“I think I’m already into it up to my neck.”
“That’s debatable. Other people can fight it for you.”
“No. I’ve got to play a part in this. I have to be able to live with myself, you know.”
He didn’t say any more until they were parked in front of the Candlelight New Age Shoppe. “All right,” he said. “We’ll start small because I’m rusty and need to practice, and because if we try anything really big, you’re apt to grow doubts rather than belief.”
“Fair enough.”
As they stepped into the shop, Caro was struck by how different it was from the previous two. This owner believed in light and cleanliness and space. It might have been a large, traditional bookstore except for the heavy scent of incense and the candles burning in sconces. The crammed rows of jars behind the counter made the shop look like an old-fashioned apothecary.
The lady who greeted them apparently didn’t feel her job called for any theatrics. She looked like a middle-aged businesswoman in a hot-pink suit that flattered her coloring. Her graying hair was so perfectly coiffed that Caro almost reached up to pat her own dark hair into place.
The woman’s smile was warm and inviting. “Can I help you with something? I’m Jenny Besom, the proprietor.”
Caro immediately reached out to shake hands. Damien, she noticed, hung back a little, and that was so unlik
e him Caro felt her alert level rise just a bit.
“We’re doing some research,” Caro said when Damien didn’t launch into the matter. “We’re curious about elementals.”
“Elementals?” Jenny sounded surprised. “I don’t get many people asking about that.” She gave a little laugh. “Most want to know how to cast a circle or how to invoke a healing. Or, of course, whether there’s such a thing as a love potion.”
Caro smiled, glancing at Damien, wondering what had made him stay in the background. Damien was never in anyone’s background. “No, not in the market for spells—just some understanding.”
Jenny looked past her at Damien and seemed to do a double take. Her smile faded a bit. Caro immediately wondered if Jenny was seeing his aura or sensing something else. In the diner she had certainly seen people’s body language express some uneasiness as Damien passed.
Then Damien spoke, and Caro heard that tone again, the one that evoked obedience. What in the world had set him off?
“Elementals,” Damien said. “Do you have any personal experience of them?”
“No.” The smile had faded from Jenny’s face.
“What powers do you use?”
“I invoke powers to heal and help.”
“And nothing else?”
“No, never.”
“But help can be interpreted in various ways, can’t it?”
Jenny nodded.
“I thought so. Have you sensed something going on in this town?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know who is behind it?”
“No.”
“Are you sure you haven’t heard anything at all?”
“Nothing.”
He pulled out one of Jude’s cards and placed it on the counter before her. “If you hear anything about someone using power for ill, call this number and report it.”
“Yes.”
“What will you do?”
“Call and report it.”
“Forget I was ever here. You can talk to this lady now. She’s the only one who came in.”
“Yes, the only one here.”
With that, Damien turned and the only sign of his departure was the sound of the door.
