“She’ll know?” Ray prompted, holding his distance, not wanting to push the young man into clamming up.
Landon tipped his head back, eyes closing as he grimaced. He straightened. “What to do. My uncle’s got enemies. And then there’s—” He broke off again.
“There’s what?”
Landon’s expression closed. “I’d better not say anything else until she’s here.”
Several more attempts at questioning resulted in head shakes and dead-eye stares.
Dammit. It would be faster to get the cousin here than try to talk the kid out of his stubbornness.
Ray took out his notebook. “All right. What’s her name? How do I contact her?”
Landon’s teeth bared in a bitter smile. “That’s the joke. I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since before Magicfall. She and my uncle had a big fight. She wanted to be a cop, and he was pissed. Called her all kinds of names and said he’d cut her off. Said she disgraced the Runyon name and if she left, she was no longer part of the family.”
“But she left anyway?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said with obvious hurt colored with reluctant admiration. “Nothing going to stop her. She told him all the ways he could stick his ultimatum up his ass, so he had security escort her out. She didn’t get to take anything with her, just the clothes she had on. She didn’t even get to take her car. That was years before Magicfall.”
“And you haven’t heard from her since?”
Landon’s jaw knotted. “I saw her name in the papers some. She quit using Runyon and went with her mom’s name. I thought maybe she’d come find me at school or practice, but—” He gave a bitter little shrug. “Guess she got busy.”
Ray felt for the kid. Obviously, he’d cared about his cousin more than she’d cared about him. He thought of Kayla. That’s what you get for putting your heart and faith in a woman. They shit all over you.
“You said she was a cop. Where did she serve? Metropolitan police? County Sheriff’s office?” If Landon had seen her name in the papers, then she was local. If she’d survived Magicfall and the Witchwar, he’d be able to track her down pretty easily. A big if. A whole lot of people hadn’t survived.
“Metropolitan. She was a homicide detective.”
Better and better. One or two phone calls and he should be able to find her if she was still on the job. If not, he could at least get her last-known address.
“Give me her name and I’ll send someone to pick her up. In the meantime, you can give me some details on what happened today. It may really help us find your mother and grandmother.”
Landon hesitated. “I’ll talk when she gets here.”
“Every second we waste, the kidnappers get farther away.”
“I’ll talk when she’s here. That’s it,” Landon said flatly, and something moved in his eyes, something like fear.
Whatever was going on, he was afraid. Hopefully his cousin would be able to reassure him. Ray hoped to hell he could find her and quick.
“What’s your cousin’s name?”
And then Landon cut Ray’s knees out from under him.
“Kayla. Kayla Reese.”
Chapter 8
Kayla
KAYLA CURLED UP on the passenger seat in the hazmat van and let herself fall asleep. She dreamed of bodies writhing in pain, dripping blood, and begging for death. Then her dreams turned to Ray. Guilt and sorrow clamped her chest, and in her dream, she longed to confess, to explain what she’d become so he would know she’d done the right thing. He wouldn’t have wanted her around if he’d known. She’d saved them both a lot of heartache.
She startled awake when Zach knocked on her window. Kayla straightened up, blinking groggily. Zach opened the door.
“Almost done here. We’ll drop the van off with the evidence and grab my car. Just give me ten more minutes.” He paused, cocking his head. “You’re not going to back out, are you?”
Kayla’s immediate impulse was to change her mind, grab up her pack, and disappear into the fog. It was the smartest thing to do. But seeing Ray had reminded her of all she’d lost. She didn’t have any friends left, except Nessa, who didn’t really count, since she only half lived in reality, and maybe not even that much. Zach had already proven he was good company, and he didn’t come with the baggage of having known her before Magicfall.
“I’m not sure it’s a great idea.”
He folded his arms and considered her. “How about this? If you come, I’ll get you the results of the coroner’s exam on the three bodies.”
“What makes you think I want to see that?”
He grinned. “Once a cop, always a cop. Am I wrong?”
“I admit I am curious.”
In fact, Kayla had planned to call an old friend down at the morgue to see if she could finagle the information. This was a sure thing.
“Then it’s a deal,” Zach said, correctly translating her comment as agreement.
He shut the door, and in less than the promised ten minutes, the techs clambered into the back of the van while Zach slid in behind the wheel. He fastened his seat belt before waving his palm over a row of copper sigils inset into the top of the dashboard. A green light lit on the steering column, and he slid the gearshift into drive.
The fog had already closed back around them like a cottony fist. If anything, it seemed to have thickened. Zach touched another set of sigils on the center of the steering wheel, and suddenly Kayla could see through the fog. Or rather, she could see a kind of digital stick-figure construct of an area in front of them, probably fifty feet long and thirty feet wide. It reminded her of radar or sonar or some kind of-ar that pinged off their immediate surroundings and showed a constructed electromagical image of the area. It was enough to keep them on the road and off unsuspecting pedestrians.
“Nice trick,” she said.
Zach glanced at her. “You haven’t seen this before? It’s pretty standard in taxis and busses.”
She shrugged. “I mostly walk.”
“Seriously?”
“I don’t have the money to hire a technomage to retrofit a car for me. A lot of us don’t.”
And a lot of people—not human—just preferred using their own feet or paws or whatever they walked on. Kayla would have liked a car. That way she wouldn’t risk getting wet when it rained. But taking a car into a salvage zone wouldn’t be healthy for it. The Deadwood would either shred it into metal confetti or crush it flat. The forest didn’t like steel intruding on its demesnes, and it really didn’t like technomagic.
“But you used to be a cop.”
“So?”
He looked uncomfortable. “They look after their own. I’ve fixed up hundreds of vehicles for former city workers from cops to janitors.”
“I left the force right after Magicfall,” she said. “They figured I’d abandoned them in their hour of need.” Once she’d realized how deeply Ray hated her, she’d gone to great lengths to avoid the rest of her previous colleagues. If her own partner despised her that much, the others had to be rabid. Not that she’d put them to the test.
“Why did you leave?”
“Personal reasons,” she said, turning to look out the window. “Are you always this nosey?”
“I’m interested, not nosey. You never wanted to come back?”
Every day. “Nope.”
“So you decided scavenging was a better career choice? What did you do during the Witchwar?”
She’d fought it in the only way she could. Alone, with tooth and claw.
A shudder ran through her. She’d killed a lot of people—human and not. She couldn’t allow herself to regret it, but she didn’t take pride in it either. She’d been a soldier in a war nobody wanted, and she’d fought to protect her city and the people she’d once sworn to p
rotect. Now that the war was over, many of her former enemies had turned into citizens. The whole thing had been so futile and pointless.
“I mostly stayed out of it,” she lied, aware that he waited for an answer.
“Oh,” was his only reply, but to Kayla’s sensitive ears, the word held a wealth of disappointment and disapproval.
“Don’t feel bad about canceling dinner,” Kayla said into the silence that followed. “Not that you would. Just pull over and drop me off.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I abandoned the job and the city. Because I sat out the war. Because I’m a selfish coward and you’d have to be batshit crazy to spend time with me on purpose.”
Kayla clamped her teeth, bitter self-disgust flooding her veins. The damned fact was that the truth hurt. She was a selfish coward, if not the kind Ray and Zach thought she was. Maybe she should tell them the truth. Which was worse? Being a selfish coward or being a monster? Lucky her, she’d accomplished both.
“I must be batshit crazy, then,” Zach said, interrupting her thoughts. “I’ve no intention of canceling.”
“So why should I want to go to dinner with a self-confessed mental patient?” The urge to get out and go home to lick her wounds in peace swallowed her. She wanted nothing more than to hop into a hole and pull the dirt over her. She’d been wrong to call Ray, wrong to agree to dinner with Zach. Wrong to get near her old life. Better they all forgot she existed.
“Just give it a chance, okay? I swear I’m not judging you.”
“Right.”
“I admit I’m curious why you left when you did, but it’s not really my business, is it? I’m sure you had good reasons.”
Necessary, anyway. Good? Not so much. But the lack of judgement in his response eased the knot of guilt in her gut. Still, she couldn’t let it go.
“What makes you think I had good reasons?”
The technomage turned into the entrance of the police lab without answering. The industrial gray cement building stood two stories and was shaped like an X, with the morgue taking up one arm, the forensic labs and offices taking up two more, and a parking lot and storage area in the last.
Zach drove down under the building into an underground loading dock. He turned around and backed up to the dock before putting the van into park and deactivating its magic. Instead of reaching for the door, he turned to look at Kayla.
“You cared enough about the killings to not only call the police, but also stick around and give a report. You got pissed as hell at the injustice of non-humans getting shafted as far as an investigation into their murders. Somebody who cares for strangers like that, non-human strangers to boot, doesn’t just walk away when people need her. She doesn’t walk away when war shows up on the doorstep of her city, not without a damned good reason.”
Her heart warmed, and tears burned in her eyes. She swallowed them.
What did it say about Ray—once her partner and friend—that Zach, a stranger, could see her better than Ray did?
Feeling suddenly raw and exposed, she felt an urge to run. “There’s a reason you’re a technomage and not a detective,” she drawled, pretending he hadn’t hit the nail right on the head. “Your deduction skills suck.”
He smiled smugly. “Do they? Or does the lady protest too much?”
Kayla shrugged. “I’m not protesting. I’m just amused. Now you should probably get back to work, and I should hit the road.”
She reached for the door handle.
“You said you’d have dinner with me.”
“I was hoping you’d forgotten about that.”
“I have a very good memory. And I want to know you better. I want to know why you are lying about who you are.”
God but the man was too insightful for her own good. He said all the right things, and every word made her want to open up and tell him her secrets. She craved the relief of finally coming out of the dark, craved understanding and acceptance. But it wasn’t going to happen. Because if she told him that when she got wet she turned into a nightmare from a horror flick, it would be game over.
She sighed. “Look. I don’t know what ideas you’ve got lurking in your brain when it comes to me, but let me set you straight: what you see is what you get. It’s all you get. I am exactly what you see.”
“Don’t you get tired of walking through the world all alone?”
The question punched her in the gut like a fist and the air went out of her. Tears burned in the backs of her eyes. She hadn’t chosen to be alone. Her father had chosen it for her when he’d attacked her and then disowned her. Her mother had chosen to leave her when she’d decided it was easier to abandon Kayla than stay and deal with her bastard of a husband. Her grandmother and aunt had chosen to look away and hadn’t lifted a finger to stop her father’s abuse. Ray had chosen to hate her when she’d quit the force rather than believe there had to be a good reason. The world had chosen to abandon her when they’d decided every magical creature and person except technomages were evil. Kayla hated being alone, but she hadn’t chosen isolation, and she couldn’t change it any more than she could become a pure human again.
She opened her mouth to give a scathing reply, but the words clumped in her throat. She felt her chin starting to crumple and the tears that burned her eyes. She twisted and grappled for the door handle.
“Hey,” Zach said, grasping her arm. “Wait.”
Kayla tried to shake him off, but he wouldn’t let her. She’d have slugged him, but she didn’t want him to see the way she was breaking down. She kept her face averted.
“Kayla, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
She wanted to crawl back into her tough shell, jeer at him, tell him she wasn’t hurt, but if she tried to talk, she was pretty sure she’d start sobbing like a baby. It wasn’t just him. It wasn’t even mostly him. It was Ray and leaving the job she’d loved more than anything else in the world. It was remembering her family, and it was knowing how very alone she was and always would be. It was knowing that on wet days, she turned into a monster. A killing machine.
“Kayla, please.”
A knock on his window caught his attention. He kept his hold on Kayla as he rolled down his window. An older man in dark-blue coveralls waited outside.
“Hey, boss. They need you up in the bio lab ASAP. Got a problem with one of the machines.”
“Have Finch take care of it,” Zach said, twisting his head to look back at Kayla.
“She’s tried. Couldn’t get it working. Says you created the spells to make it work, so you’ll be able to fix it.” When Zach didn’t respond immediately, the older man added, “They’re pretty wild about it. Saying the sky’s gonna fall.”
“Tell them I’m on my way,” Zach said, still watching her.
The other man hesitated, and then walked away, clearly curious about what was happening between Zach and Kayla.
“I’ve got to get to work,” Zach said, and his thumb swept back and forth over her forearm in a gentle motion. “But I can’t go if you aren’t going to stay.”
“Yes, you can,” she said, her voice thick with the tears she continued to swallow. “They need you, and I shouldn’t have come. I don’t belong here.”
“I want you here.”
She snorted and shook her head. “No, you don’t, and if you do, you shouldn’t.”
“Look. I may be a pushy bastard, but I want you to stay. I want to know you. There’s a room where you can nap while I’m getting squared away, and then I’ll take you to the best restaurant in Portland. I promise I’ll be charming and funny, and no rude questions.”
Kayla wanted nothing more than to run, and that made her want to stay, to defy her fears and embarrassment and guilt. Dinner with Zach had gone from a potential enjoyable distraction to a painful punishme
nt, but she’d be a coward if she ran off. Or rather, more of a coward.
“I guess,” she said finally.
“You’ll wait?”
She nodded. “But I wouldn’t take over long if I were you.”
The corner of his mouth kicked up, even though his gaze remained sober. “You don’t cut a man a lot of slack, do you?”
“There are a lot of fish in the sea. It’s not my fault you decided you wanted to mess with a lionfish. You can always go looking for someone easier.”
“I don’t need easy. I just need a chance,” he said.
“You want a chance, you should play the lottery,” she said, deliberately misunderstanding him.
“The lottery doesn’t exist anymore.”
“Then go find a back-alley game of craps.”
He shook his head “Can’t win the prize I want at playing craps. Now c’mon. Let’s get you tucked in. You could definitely use another nap. You’re kind of crabby.” He got out and quickly strode around the front of the van to Kayla’s door and opened it, standing in the doorway so she couldn’t get out. “Though I may be persuaded to cut you some slack,” he added suggestively.
Then he winked. Like, actually winked.
Kayla tilted her head to look up at him. “Please tell me you are not flirting with me.”
He grinned. “Of course I am. Don’t feel special, though. I flirt with everything that moves. It’s my super power.”
Kayla snorted. “Sounds more like a creeper power.”
His grin widened. “Tomato, tomahto. Anyhow, let’s get going. Sooner I fix the problem in the bio lab, sooner we can eat. I’m starved.”
“I’m so going to regret this,” she groused as she climbed out.
Zach grabbed her heavy pack before she could pick it up. He winced. “What have you got in here? It weighs a ton.”
“That’s my grocery money for the month.”
“Find anything good?”
The Witchkin Murders Page 8
