“Hmph. I don’t know about that,” Vanit said, turning his tawny glare onto Lakin. “Last I checked, Sillara’s death wasn’t a homicide. Why would you need to dig into it more?”
“It turns out the coroner was mistaken,” Lakin said evenly, his eyes gleaming with impatience. “Sillara died of silver poisoning, just like Petros Yantz’s other victims. Since she was a member of Shiftertown’s tiger clan, her murder falls under my jurisdiction.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Vanit admitted, his scowl lessening slightly. But it returned with a vengeance as his gaze switched back to me. “I’d like to help you, Inspector Lakin, but since you’re attached to this sell-out over here I’m afraid you’ll have to appeal to Captain Galling directly. And as I recall, he’s out of town.” He gave me a vicious grin, baring his fangs.
“You asshole.” I took a step forward, my lip curling back into a snarl of my own. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Sillara was your crew mate. I’d think you’d want her murder solved just as much as we do.”
“Yeah, well she’s been dead for over three months,” Vanit spat. “I think the mystery can wait a few more days if it means I don’t have to lower myself to help a whore like you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Give me a break,” Vanit sneered. “We all know that you’re responsible for the shitty management changes that have been going on down here. Not only did you defect over to the mages’ camp, but you’re sucking mage cock so you can get what you want. So excuse me if I don’t help you.”
“I don’t know where you heard that from, but I’m not sleeping with the Chief Mage.” A hot flush spilled across my cheeks at the accusation, and my thighs quivered with the effort of holding myself back from attacking Vanit. “In case you didn’t know, master and apprentice relationships are supposed to be platonic.”
“Oh yeah? Well you coulda fooled me. Whore.”
Lakin made a grab for my arm as I launched myself forward, but he was too late – I’d already closed the distance between myself and Vanit, my fist hurtling through the air towards him. Vanit side-stepped the blow, a smug grin on his dark face, but I wasn’t going to let him get away that easily – I pivoted on my left foot, then side-kicked him in the midsection with my right. Grunting from the force of the blow, he doubled over slightly but recovered quickly, drawing the sword at his side as he straightened. I jumped backwards to avoid the slash of the steel blade, which gleamed in the light filtering in through the dingy, cracked windows.
Gasps and murmurs broke out all across the room, reminding me that there were several different crews here, and I stiffened. Vanit’s crew was closing in on me with murderous stares, and though Lakin and I could probably take them all on with the help of my magic, I wasn’t going to be able to fight off an entire room of Enforcers if they decided to take Vanit’s side.
“Hang on,” Vanit said, his thick lips curling into a grin as he held up his hand in the direction of his crew mates. “Let’s play this out. I think Little Miss Sunaya here’s let her new position as the Chief Mage’s pet go to her head, and I for one would like to remind her where she stands. What say you and I have a little match, huh?”
My eyebrows shot up. “You want to what, have a duel or something?”
“No, I want to kick your entitled little ass.” He bared his teeth at me, fangs sliding out from beneath his gum line. “If, for some reason, you should happen to win, my crew will more than happily get Sillara’s files for you.”
“Sunaya,” Lakin said, his voice low and urgent. “You don’t have to do this. We can come back when the Captain is here.”
“No.” I glared at Vanit, unstrapping my crescent knives from my right thigh. “If Vanit wants a fight, he’s getting one. Just because he’s got his panties in a twist over me doesn’t mean he’s getting away with this. We’re getting those files.”
Vanit’s expression turned downright ugly, and he shifted into a fighting stance, holding his sword aloft. I curled my fingers around the handles of my knives and took up a stance of my own, holding one knife out towards him and the other close to my midsection so I could block any blow that got past my initial guard, much like a traditional empty-handed stance. The other Enforcers gathered around us in a circle to watch, their eyes gleaming with the thrill of an impending fight, and I saw quite a few of them exchange coins out of the corner of my eye.
If most of them were betting on Vanit, that didn’t bother me. It just meant they were going to lose their money.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” I demanded. “Weren’t you going to teach me a lesson?”
Vanit let out a snarl of rage, then rushed forward, jabbing straight for my mid-section with his sword. Magic crackled at my fingertips, and I itched to simply blast him with a fireball, but I knew the Chief Mage would be pissed at me if I ended up killing Vanit, so instead I simply caught the blade using one of my knives, then side-stepped him. Off balance, he had no time to move out of the way as I slashed down the length of his forearm with the knife in my right hand. Blood gushed from the wound, splattering across the front of my leather jacket, and Vanit howled in agony. His fingers went limp, the sword clattering to the ground, and I wasted no time, swinging my fist back around to my ear and then smashing it into the side of his jaw, a vulnerable spot regardless of the size and strength of an opponent.
Vanit dropped like a stone.
The resulting silence in the room was deafening. All eyes were on me, and my skin prickled under the weight of the crowd’s attention. Ignoring them all, I nudged Vanit in the side with the toe of my boot just to make sure he was down. He groaned slightly, but didn’t budge otherwise.
“Anyone else feel like challenging me?” I lifted my head to meet the eyes of the rest of Vanit’s crew.
One by one, the rest of the shifters lowered their eyes submissively, accepting their defeat. No, they didn’t hate me any less, but damn if they weren’t going to respect me, and that was all I really cared about at this point. Now that I was finally out from Garius Talcon’s thumb, nobody at the Enforcer’s Guild was going to push me around anymore, no matter who they were.
“Very well,” a dark blonde woman stepped forward from the rest of the crew, her gaze hot but steady on mine. “Come this way. I’ll take you to the files.”
4
Vanit’s crewmate took us to where Sillara’s files were stored – which turned out to be in the basement, on the same floor as the jail cells I’d been forced to spend the night in after the whole city found out I was half-mage. There were several boxes of files, so Lakin and I had to call a cab to help transport them to his house in Shiftertown, driving alongside the cab with our bikes. No way was I leaving my steambike at the Enforcer’s Guild parking lot – Vanit’s crewmates were liable to slash my tires for what I did to their foreman, or worse.
“You really did a number on that guy, Sunaya,” Lakin commented as we lugged the banker’s boxes into his living room, admiration in his voice. The one-bedroom house was sparsely furnished, with only a single armchair and a low wooden coffee table in the living room. Still, the space was open and airy, with a large window that let in plenty of sunlight, and a fireplace that would make the space very cozy in the winter. “He looked like he was twice your weight, but you didn’t even break a sweat when you took him down.”
“Eh.” I set down my stack of boxes on the ground, then shrugged. “I’m used to fighting opponents bigger and stronger than me. That’s why I have these.” I lovingly patted my crescent knives, which were strapped to my thigh once more.
Lakin glanced at them curiously. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone use weapons like those before,” he admitted.
“They’re Garian-style weapons,” I explained, sitting down cross-legged on the hard wooden floor so that we could start going through the boxes. “Great for close quarter fighting, and also for deflecting larger weapons. They’ve saved my hide more times than I can count.”
“I’ll bet.” Lakin joined me
on the floor, then turned his gaze toward the sea of boxes between us and sighed. “Let’s start with the most recent one,” he said, grabbing a box that was a few feet away from him. “That’s probably where we’re going to strike gold.”
The first couple of files were pretty dull – they were all bounties for small time thieves or racketeers, stuff I’d seen a thousand times before – but the fifth file I opened proved to be much more interesting.
“Get this,” I told Lakin, scanning the first page. “Looks like Sillara was looking into some shifter disappearances.”
Lakin raised his gaze from the file he was looking through. “Shifter disappearances? You mean kidnappings?”
“Not sure.” I shrugged as I flipped through the notes in the file. “As far as I can see there were no ransom notes left, or any demands made on the family members of the victims. They just disappeared, and were never heard from again.”
“Huh.” Frowning, Lakin moved some of the boxes aside so he could sit next to me. “Is there anything tying the victims together other than the fact that they’re shifters?”
I pursed my lips. “According to Sillara’s notes, they’re all in their early twenties, and nearly all of them are clanless, with the exception of one.” I pulled out a letter and passed it to Lakin.
Lakin’s eyes widened as he read the letter, which was the original request sent in to the Enforcer’s Guild that sparked the case. The letter had been sent from a wolf shifter family that belonged to the Solantha wolf pack, several days after their son Tylin had gone missing.
“I remember that name, Tylin.” Lakin looked up at the ceiling, tapping his chin in thought. “Roanas had a file on him too. From what I understand, he wasn’t able to find out what happened to the boy, and the family just assumed he’d defected to the Resistance.”
“I bet that’s what a lot of the families ended up thinking.” I pulled out the list of names, my heart sinking as I read through them again. Many young shifters, especially the ones born into poorer families, ran off to join the Resistance in hopes of a better future. The clans tried to take care of their own as best they could, but the government levied heavier taxes on the shifter community, and in return for leaving shifters alone they expected them to take care of the majority of their own welfare programs and civic upkeep. The Chief Mage, who wasn’t from Solantha, had seemed surprised when I’d mentioned this to him, and with any luck he might dig into this issue eventually and help out Shiftertown and the other shifter communities scattered across the state. But from what I understood, the Chief Mages who ran the other forty-nine states in the Northia Federation were more than happy with the arrangement. As far as they were concerned, mages had created shifters, and if they weren’t allowed to use us as slaves anymore, they weren’t going to help us either.
Lakin and I spent the next half hour going through Roanas’s missing persons files, cross-referencing them with Sillara’s list. We crossed off every person who was a known member of the Resistance, and unsurprisingly, the majority of the names we were left with matched up with Sillara’s list.
“I wonder how she compiled this list,” Lakin murmured, staring down at the two sheets of paper, which he’d laid out side by side on the coffee table. “I see how she got Tylin’s name, but her notes on the others are sparse. It’s almost as if they’ve gone missing.”
I frowned. “If someone went to the trouble of taking the notes, why wouldn’t they just take the entire file? Seems like extra work to me.”
Lakin shrugged. “I’ve worked on cases where I felt it necessary to keep the most important notes in a separate file at home, away from my office, where my deputies and others couldn’t access them. It’s possible Sillara did the same.”
I nodded – that made sense. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d taken work home with me. “So that means either the separate file is still at her home somewhere, or it’s been destroyed.”
“Sillara’s partner said there were no work-related papers at their place. I’ll have to question her again to see if there was any sign of a break-in recently.” Lakin braced his hands on his knees, then pushed himself to his feet. “In the meantime, though, I’d like to go ahead and interview the families and friends of the shifters on this list. Perhaps something new will come to light.”
“I’ll come with you.” I rose to my feet as well, eager to continue tugging on this thread.
Lakin hesitated. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I think the interviews would go easier if you didn’t come along. The residents of Shiftertown … well, they’re not sure how to feel about you just yet.”
I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it again. Lakin was probably right. The shifter community wasn’t friendly towards mages to begin with, and on top of that I was a reject of the Jaguar Clan. Nobody around here was going to be welcoming me with open arms.
“That’s alright,” I said casually, as if Lakin’s rebuff didn’t bother me. “I’ve got to get back to the Palace anyway.”
A look of chagrin shadowed Lakin’s eyes. “Sunaya –”
“No, seriously, it’s fine.” I held up a hand, not wanting his pity, and flashed him a grin. “You’ll let me know if you dig up anything interesting, right?”
“Of course.” Lakin’s face relaxed into a smile, clearly deciding to let it go. “I really appreciate your help today,” he said as he walked me out.
“Anytime.” I looked over my shoulder as he held the door open for me and winked. “Just make sure you have something for us to sit on the next time I come over.”
I turned away, then trotted down to the sidewalk where my steambike waited for me. As I looked around at the rows of houses lining the street, the realization struck me that I was out of touch with the shifter community. Ever since I’d moved out of Roanas’s house and taken up residence in Rowanville to be closer to the Enforcer’s Guild, I’d stopped coming to Shiftertown except on business, and as a result I didn’t really know what was going on. When I was under Roanas’s care, I’d often tagged along with him on errands, and aside from the Jaguar Clan the rest of the community had tolerated me just fine. There were a few grandmothers who gave me tea and cookies, and I’d had both shifter and human friends at school – one of the few civic programs Canalo did fund for everyone in the state. But I hadn’t seen any of those people in a few years. By Magorah, for all I knew those grannies could have passed away by now.
So instead of heading down the hill and back towards Solantha Palace, I drove in the opposite direction, heading toward the Cat’s Meow, a popular diner run by the Tiger Clan. It stood proudly near the center of Shiftertown, sandwiched between a welder’s shop and a florist, the storefront wall painted a dark orange with black stripes running across diagonally. My lips twitched at the outrageous paint job – that was one thing that hadn’t changed.
Rather than parking my bike in front of the diner, I went around the block, then ducked into an alley. Closing my eyes, I mumbled the Words to the illusion spell Iannis had taught me, envisioning myself as a tigress shifter with short blonde hair wearing a pair of jeans and a conservative sweater. If I went in there as myself no one would talk to me, but I also didn’t want to look too attractive and draw attention I didn’t want. I made sure to add an extra layer of illusion to mask my scent before I sauntered around the block and into the bar.
Like the exterior, the inside of the diner was much the same as it had been when I’d left Shiftertown – rows of orange and black booths along both walls, tables scattered in the open space between, and a bar dominating the center that stood bastion between the dining area and the kitchen. It was around ten in the morning, and though the place wasn’t packed a good portion of the booths and tables were taken up.
I chose a seat at the bar, the best place for me to listen around and strike up a conversation if needed, and ordered a stack of pancakes since I hadn’t had time for breakfast this morning. The food arrived quickly, and I tuned my sensitive ears into the buz
z of conversation around me, hoping to hear something of interest.
“… we’re going on vacation to Naraka next weekend,” a woman was saying, her voice high pitched with excitement. “I can’t wait!”
“Naraka?” the other woman asked, sounding amazed. “That’s across the Western Sea, isn’t it?”
“It’s a nation of islands, right off the coast of Garai,” the woman said. “We’ve never had the money to go abroad before, and my mate is so excited!”
“… I’m going to invest in the mining business,” someone else, a male, was saying, his voice lower than the woman’s. “Someone recently told me about a great opportunity in the mines up north.”
“Mining?” another male scoffed. “I’ve never taken you for a businessman before. Listen, pay off your house and buy up as many supplies as you can. With the rebellion coming, you don’t know how the economic landscape’s going to change.”
I gave my plate a bewildered frown as I continued listening to the conversations in the room. About half the people here seemed to be talking about finances -- investments or vacations or paying off debts – which I wasn’t used to hearing from shifters. Most of us don’t have a ton of money, and the conversations I remembered when Roanas used to bring me here usually revolved around the shifter community’s discontent with the status quo. But today everybody seemed hopeful, optimistic even.
“Hey there.” A male tiger shifter with dark, shaggy hair and orange eyes sat down on the bar stool next to mine. “Don’t think I’ve seen you around here before.”
“I’m not from around here.” I smiled, dragging my attention from my thoughts and focusing them on the male next to me. “Just visiting from Parabas, actually,” I said, pulling the first town that came to mind – the city up north that Lakin had transferred from.
“Oh really?” the male’s eyes brightened. “It’s beautiful up there – so much greener than Northern Canalo.”
Bound by Magic: a New Adult Fantasy Novel (The Baine Chronicles Book 2) Page 3
