Daemon’s Mark

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Sleeping next to Will wasn’t hard, but every time I shut my eyes I saw Lily’s face under the water, skin translucent, suspended in time.

  I kept hoping that the visions of the dead would go away, get less, as I spent more time among them, but it didn’t work that way. My were sensory input made sure that I remembered everything in diamond-sharp detail, and rarely forgot. The victims and I entered into a pact when I stood over their body, and they stayed with me whether or not I was able to fulfill it.

  I was still awake when Will’s alarm went off at 5:30 A.M., and I got up with him, although I could sleep until seven and still make it to work on time.

  Will went out for his run and I dressed in some clothes I’d left at his place, gray suit trousers and a red blouse, nothing fancy. I didn’t want to freak out Russ Meyer.

  I called Bryson once I was caffeinated and dressed. “David, can you pull an address for Russell Meyer in Highland Park and meet me there?”

  Bryson grumbled. “Do you have any idea how early it is? I’m barely out of my tighty-whities from the night before, Wilder.”

  “Just don’t show up naked and we’ll be in good shape,” I said. I wanted to get the jump on Russ, shake him up, try to spook something out of him. A hugely disproportionate number of homicides involving women and girls are the work of pissed-off boyfriends or husbands.

  Plus, he was the only lead I had.

  Bryson texted me back with the address, and I drove to the run-down section of Highland Park, which was becoming more gentrified every day. There was a Java Jones on the corner of Meyer’s street, and an organic market, but the bum sleeping just down the sidewalk shattered a little bit of the ambiance.

  Bryson’s grimy Taurus was parked at the curb in front of a pool hall, and I knocked on his passenger window.

  “Yo, Wilder,” he said, thrusting a white bag at me. “Got you a cruller. Those hippies down the block do a pastry that ain’t half bad.”

  “This is the address?” I said, pointing at the pool hall. Bryson nodded, brushing crumbs off his tie. Bryson was handsome, in a pugilistic way, if you could get past his blocky neck and his appalling taste in fashion, music, women and just about everything else.

  Still, he was an honest cop, and a stand-up guy once you peeled away the layers ingrained by Charles Bronson movies and too much time in strip clubs.

  “Apartments above the tavern,” he said. “Guy shacks up in one of ’em. Credit is for shit—he owes about a grand in back rent from what I could see.”

  “He got a sheet?” I said, starting for the back stairs to the apartments above the closed-up bar.

  “Minor stuff,” said Bryson. “Underage DUI, vandalism, drunk stupid misdemeanors. The kind we all got hiding behind our eighteenth birthday.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I said, mounting the rickety stairs. Paint flaked off the brick wall under my palm and a dog snarled from behind one of the doors we passed.

  “You mean to tell me that you never raised any hell?” Bryson snorted.

  “I raised plenty,” I said, giving him a grin. “I just never got caught.”

  “Guess that’s why you’re the lieutenant, then,” Bryson muttered. “All brass is good at being slippery.”

  “David, you keep talking like that and I’m gonna think you don’t love me anymore.” I raised my fist and pounded on Russ Meyer’s door. After a few moments, a lock clicked and a pale, scruffy goatee with a pale, scruffy face behind it peered out.

  “Yeah?”

  “Russ Meyer?” I said. He squinted, looking me up and down. His eyes were glassy and bloodshot with the tiny roadmaps of veins particular to stoners. Stoned on what was the real question.

  “Maybe. You asking in a personal or professional capacity?”

  I showed him my shield, and a large, predatory smile. “That, Mr. Meyer, is entirely up to you.”

  “Wow,” he said, blinking. “Uh, you wanna come in?”

  “That’s a start,” I said. He stepped back, ushering us in. He was clad only in boxers and a ratty robe, and I could see a tattoo crawling across his stomach, concave where the rest of his skinny body was convex. Oh, yeah, the ladies must drop into a dead faint when this guy came calling.

  We stepped inside, Bryson straight ahead and me to the side, clearing his line of fire. Neither of us was going to take Russ’s laid-back stoner-dude act at face value.

  Nothing sinister happened when I entered the dim apartment. I felt cobwebs brush my face and dust go up my nose, and I sneezed. Bryson stopped inside the door, wrinkling his nose.

  “Uh, you want some coffee, Officers? Maybe a donut?” His mouth twitched, trying to hide his smile unsuccessfully.

  “You think that’s funny?” Bryson demanded, sucking in his waistline. I held up my hand.

  “It’s fine, David. Mr. Meyer should laugh while he can.”

  Russ slumped down on his plaid sofa, eliciting a shriek of springs, and fumbled a cigarette out of the crushed pack on the coffee table. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that Lily Dubois is dead, Russell, and her parents fingered you as the asshole boyfriend interfering with their baby girl.”

  He choked on his first drag. “Lily’s dead? You’re messing with me.”

  I grabbed the cigarette from his hand. “I am so far from messing with you, you don’t even want to know. How old are you, Russell?”

  He glared at me, floppy strawberry blond hair hanging in his pimply face. A rat skittered in the kitchen area, and I caught a whiff of rot. “I’m waiting,” I told him. I was going to need a dozen showers when I left this filthy craphole.

  “Seventeen,” he said, finally. I gave David the nod, and he rummaged on the tabletops and the Murphy bed in the corner until he found a chain wallet, stamped with the Diesel logo. High-end clothes, shitty apartment. Either Russ was a heavy-duty user or he was even more of a poser than he looked.

  “Hey, that’s mine!” Russ said, jolting off the sofa. I pushed him back down.

  “Well, will you look at this horseshit,” Bryson said. “Our boy is twenty-one.”

  I looked back at Russ. “Well?”

  “It’s a fake ID,” he muttered. “She had one, too.”

  Bryson shook his head, tilting the license back and forth under the bedside light. “Not unless they got their hands on a state hologram stamp. This baby’s real as they come.”

  “You cops will do anything to pin a rap on a kid. You’re all facists.” With that pronouncement, Russ reached for a fresh cigarette.

  “You know,” I said, standing over him, backing him into the sofa. “A few things occur to me here: First, you’re a liar. Second, a twenty-one-year-old guy with a fourteen-year-old girl is statutory rape, and third, you don’t seem that broken up about her being dead. ”

  Russ snorted wetly, a snort of the deeply asthmatic or the deeply coked-up. “For all I know that’s a lie. Lily and I talked last night. She sent me a text right after I left late night at the Belladonna.”

  I knew the Belladonna bar. I’d caught a homicide there eighteen months ago. It was a dive, a haven for dealers and burnout students from Nocturne University.

  “So after you were done snorting your daddy’s allowance up your nose, you got a text?” I said. “Show me.”

  He glared. “Show me a warrant.”

  Great, the one connection to Lily’s death was a Law & Order fan. I reached out and grabbed the front of his robe, pulling him halfway off the sofa. “You got any syringes on you, Russell?”

  “Hell no,” he snorted. “Not all kids who like to have fun are junkies, 5-0.”

  “You’re twenty-one,” I said. “You’re not a kid.” I felt around in his pockets until my fingers closed around a high-end cell phone. I checked the message history. Sure enough, LilyGrrl was the last text. C u at tha spot cnt wait 2 tayste u baby.

  I showed it to Bryson, who wrinkled his nose. “Look at that fucking grammar. This country’s going all to hell.”

  “You li
ed to me again, Russ,” I said, snapping the phone shut. “You and Lily were together last night. You’re 0 for 2 here and I’m not a patient woman. You have one more chance to tell me the truth or I’m going to lay your skinny ass out for rape and obstruction, and that’s just off the top of my head.”

  Meyer opened his mouth, but I held up a finger. “Think before you answer. The next smart-ass comment is getting you tossed down those stairs out there.”

  He was silent for a moment, the rats in the kitchen scrabbling and squeaking. Something thin and black tickled the back of my neck.

  “Okay,” he said finally, getting up and thrusting out his chest in the same way young tigers show their teeth.

  “Yeah, Lily and I hooked up. She loved what I did for her. She was only young in years. More mature than any of those spoiled college bitches I met. We had a great time.”

  “You’re a real class act,” said Bryson. “Her father should have kicked your skinny little ass.”

  Russ snorted. “That puppy couldn’t touch me. He knew better.”

  In close proximity, underneath the scent of body odor, pot and some bitter drug on his sweat, Russ had the distinctive charred scent that always made my stomach drop. He had the blood.

  “You’re a witch,” I said out loud, using the feminine noun on purpose.

  “I have talents that frighten the narrow-minded, yeah,” Russ said. “Including those rich pig parents of Lily’s.”

  I gave him my most predatory smile. “Too bad for you that Lily was killed in a magick ritual,” I said. “You’re under arrest. Turn around and put your hands behind you. Thumbs up.” I reached for my cuffs.

  Russ smirked at me. “I don’t answer to the police.”

  “No,” I said, moving my hands from my cuffs to my gun. “You answer to me. Turn. Now.”

  “I’m not going away,” Russ said. “I’m not going to be framed. I know what they do to kiddie fiddlers in prison.”

  “Wilder…” Bryson said, and then choked off, going to his knees. I drew my Sig Sauer P226 and aimed it between Russell’s eyes.

  “Don’t you move.” I turned my head toward Bryson, trying to quiet the panic that flamed up in my brain. The scrabbling of the rats grew unbearably loud, and I saw a black shadow creep across the floor, overtaking Bryson, who gave a yelp and tried to swat it away.

  “Ambient magick, pig,” said Russ. “Wardings. Can’t wipe that off.”

  I flipped the safety off of my Sig. “Call it off.”

  “No can do,” said Russ. “My boundary ward doesn’t take kindly to uninvited guests.”

  I stepped closer and pressed the gun into his forehead. “I’m willing to bet that blowing your skull a new skylight will take care of any workings you control just fine.”

  “Wilder…” Bryson choked. “Wilder, I can’t breathe…”

  I felt the working crawl over my feet, my legs, and my own breath got short. I’d encountered boundary wards that caused pain, or those that simply paralyzed, but this was new, and I’d walked right into it.

  “He has about another minute before he suffocates,” Russ said, boring into me with his bleary gaze. “Your call, pork sausage.”

  “I take the gun off if you let my detective go,” I said. Russ nodded.

  “Do it.”

  I put the gun up, and Russ exhaled. I felt the prickles on my neck recede, the sound, and the smothering feeling of magick on my skin. I’ve never liked being that close to magick, even though most of my family has the blood. Maybe it comes from feeling left out.

  Bryson wheezed, and stumbled to his feet, his thick face near purple. “I’ll kill you, you little son of a bitch…”

  “David, no,” I started, but it was too late. Russ slammed into me with his whole weight, spinning me around and into Bryson. He was out the door, robe flapping, before I could recover.

  “Go,” Bryson said, righting me. “I’ll call it in.”

  I was already moving, out the door and straight over the railing to the alley a story below. Russ’s orange robe flickered out of the corner of my eye as he rounded the front of the building.

  My ankle twisted when I landed, but I shook it off and kept running. It would heal by the time I caught up with Russ, and if it was sprained, I could at least make him hurt as much as I was.

  Russ had made it across the street, into the alley between a bodega and a handbag boutique. I darted into traffic, nearly clipping the bumper of a late-model Lexus. The driver cursed at me.

  I drew my Sig, aiming at Russ’s skinny back. He fetched up against the blank wall of the building on the next street, rattling the emergency door fruitlessly.

  “Nowhere to go, Russ,” I said. “Now, let’s try this again, with the knowledge that if you try any more magick tricks I’m going to put two in your head. Sound good?”

  He turned around, his lip curling. “I didn’t kill her.”

  “At this point,” I said, grabbing his arms and cuffing them behind his back, “I don’t even care. You’re under arrest.” I Mirandized him while Bryson got the car and helped me load Meyer into the back seat.

  “Get Pete down here to search his apartment,” I said. “If there’s any hard evidence he was with Lily last night, we’ll find it.”

  Bryson rubbed his throat, glaring at Russ in the rearview mirror. “What I wouldn’t do for five minutes alone with you, you little shit.”

  “You know, Russ,” I said. “If you just give us an alibi, I can probably save you from having Detective Bryson here accidentally ram your head into your cell door on the way in.”

  “Go piss up a rope, cop,” Russ said. “I want a lawyer.”

  “Have it your way,” I sighed, and drove toward the SCS offices.

  CHAPTER 4

  The SCS doesn’t get a real office. Like most of the unpleasant things that normal people like to keep out of sight, we’re hidden in the basement of the main administrative building in downtown Nocturne City. The top floors of the Justice Plaza are full of Narcotics, Vice, SWAT and other noble pursuits.

  The freak squad is in the old bomb shelter. In a way, it’s appropriate.

  I walked Russ Meyer to an interview room and cuffed him to a chair. He smirked at me. “You think these will hold a witch?”

  “They’ve done pretty well so far,” I said. “And if you get cute, look up.” Russ blinked, staring at the ward drawn on the ceiling of the interview room. “Think of yourself as a cell phone,” I said. “This is a dead spot. That ward mark makes sure of it.”

  Bryson knocked on the observation mirror, and I stuck my head out the door. “Bright boy here doesn’t have a lawyer. I called the public defender’s office. Couple of hours.”

  I gave Russ a smile. “Make yourself at home, Mr. Meyer.” Ducking out, I walked into the bullpen with Bryson.

  “Let’s use the time we have and dig deep on Russ’s no doubt sad and inadequate life. If he’s got a sealed juvenile record, find a judge who will unseal it. Look at his financials. See where he’s getting his drugs from. Everything.”

  My detectives bent their heads over their computers. I tapped Kelly on the shoulder. “Hunter, do me a favor.”

  Kelly raised his eyebrows. He was about as strong and silent as they came. I said, “Go offer our suspect a coffee and see if you can get a read on what kind of magick he’s messing with, and more importantly, if it involves pulling hearts out of little girls’ chests.”

  Hunter nodded. “My pleasure.” He lumbered up, like a landslide in reverse, and headed for the interview room.

  I went into my office, settling down with a cup of microwave coffee and the overnight dispatches that had come in. Two assaults at were bars, one drunk and disorderly, a domestic dispute between a witch and her live-in boyfriend.

  I shoved the dispatches into my outbox for Norris, our unit’s civilian assistant, to distribute to the detectives and put on the board, and was about to call Kronen for the autopsy results on Lily Dubois when my office door opened and Detective Just-Ca
ll-Me Natalie Lane came in.

  “I know SVU is one big happy commune, but around here we knock,” I told her without looking up from my email.

  “The desk by the coffee machine was empty,” Lane said. “I put my things there. Hope that’s okay.”

  “I can’t imagine you’d care if it wasn’t,” I said. Lane spread her hands.

  “Is there some problem I’m not aware of?”

  “The squad might not be too happy with you,” I said, gesturing at Andy and Javier, who were looking at Lane’s box of things and her potted fern with frowns. “Lot of baggage comes with that desk.”

  Lane raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”

  “Annemarie Marceaux used to sit there,” I said.

  “Really. That detective who went bad?”

  “The same,” I said. Lane shook her head.

  “That was a real shame. Whatever happened to her?”

  “I shot her in the stomach after she tried to kill me.” I closed out my email in-box and stood up. “Was there anything else I could help you with, Detective? A welcoming fruit basket, maybe?”

  Lane shook her head and backed out of my office, giving me a twitchy look over her shoulder. I smiled. I was having a crappy morning and I didn’t feel bad at all about taking it out on Lane. She sat down at her desk and started to arrange her knickknacks.

  I took a minute to dispel the memory of Annemarie, the detective who had sold me out to the Thelemites and almost gotten Will, Bryson and me killed. I’d trusted Annemarie. She’d been a friend. Lane’s cutesy framed photographs and ceramic figurines wouldn’t change that.

  Kelly came out of the interrogation room and stalked across the bullpen, beckoning me. “He’s a warlock, like me, and a piss-poor one. You believe he had the nerve to give me attitude?”

  I snorted. “I know biker gangs that wouldn’t give you attitude, Kelly.”

  “No call for cutting out the heart,” Kelly said. “Warlocks don’t use fetishes for their workings. You’re looking for some low-down, dirty blood magick.”

  “Great,” I muttered. There was nothing to do but wait for the public defender to show up. “Andy.” I snapped my fingers at him. “What’s going on with the security footage from the port?”