by L. J. Red
Raven sagged against me, and this close I could feel the thinness of her shoulders under her shapeless sweater.
“You two okay?” Jazz asked from behind me, tension in her voice. I glanced over my shoulder and saw she had her hands spread, fingers splayed wide, the almost invisible tendrils of a shield protecting the rest of the room from the two of us. I nodded briefly, my lips in a flat line. It looked like Raven and I needed to start those sessions after all.
Jazz managed to distract the rest of the kids while I shuffled Raven over to one of the spare chairs and sat her down, fixing her a cup of coffee and pouring in sugar before bringing it over. She wrapped her fingers around the mug gratefully. I recognized the way she hungered for the warmth. Magical exhaustion. That blackness or whatever it was, had drained her, and no wonder; there had been real power there.
“So,” I said, determinedly casual, “how long have you been creating black holes? Is this a regular pastime?”
Raven looked up at me. “It wasn’t a black hole,” she said in a small voice. I’d been worried she’d been showing off, but she was seriously scared and I tempered my expression.
“Yeah, you’re right. It wasn’t,” I said, though I wasn’t entirely convinced. “But it was some serious magic. Where did you learn it?” I asked, thinking about the missing books.
“I didn’t learn it from anywhere,” she said.
“You haven’t been reading any strange books or mucking around online on the dark web?”
Raven rolled her eyes, and for once I was happy to see it. “The dark web?” she said. “You know how old you sound?”
“Hey,” I said, offended “I’m not old.”
“Whatever,” she said. But I noticed she had relaxed her death grip on the coffee cup.
“So, if you haven’t been reading up on it,” I said after a moment, “how did you find out how to do it?”
Raven shrugged. “I just did,” she said.
I sighed. Talking to teenagers was like pulling teeth. “Okay, you ‘just did’, but how did you know what to ‘just do’?”
“I did what Jasmine said. That’s what we were supposed to do, wasn’t it? Practice the forms?” she said, staring at me resentfully.
“Calm down, Raven.” I stretched out my hands. “I’m not angry with you.”
“It sounds like you’re angry with me,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me rephrase. I’m angry with everyone, all the time. That’s my natural state, but I’m not angrier with you right now.” That almost got me a smile. “So, you’re telling me you just did what Jasmine asked. You focused on the forms, you brought the magic out from the half world, and that’s what it looked like.”
“I guess my magic is just evil,” she mumbled into the coffee cup, her shoulders hunched and the smile disappearing.
Shit. That was a problem.
I shoved my chair a little closer to Raven. “Your magic isn’t evil,” I said firmly.
“You saw it,” she said.
“It’s powerful, yes, but it’s not evil.” She didn’t look convinced. “Excuse me,” I said sharply so she would look up. “You do know you’re talking to a bona fide death witch, the queen of the undead.”
She frowned, wrinkling up her nose. “You’re not the queen of the undead. That’s Queen Alexandra of the vampire court.”
It was my turn to frown. “What do you know about the vampire court?” I asked sternly.
Raven rolled her eyes again; apparently that was her favorite thing to do. “Everyone knows about the vampire court,” she said. “It’s like the biggest supernatural deal here in Seattle. You’d have to be under a rock not to know about them.”
Okay, fair enough. “My point is,” I said, trying to get back on track, “your magic isn’t evil. My magic isn’t evil. No magic is. Magic is just a tool. We can use it for good and we can use it for bad. That’s on us.” I hoped I was getting through to her. I leant in slightly closer. “You think I haven’t faced enough stupid people calling me evil? Nobody wants to deal with the necromancer in the room. You want to know what I think? People who tell you your magic is evil? They’re the ones who are evil.”
“That all sounds great,” Raven said, “but what happens when my magic levels a city block or kills someone?”
“All right,” I said. “I think you’re jumping ahead here; you made a tiny dark ball. You’re not exactly Voldemort. But”—I raised my hand—“you do need training. You can’t get out of it any longer. We’re going to start having regular sessions.”
She hunched in on herself. “I can’t always come to these meetings,” she said in a small voice. “I don’t know if I can come to regular lessons.” I thought again about the thinness of her shoulders, about the bruise I was pretty sure she was hiding somewhere under her sweater. “Okay,” I said, “you come when you can, in the meantime…”—I pulled out one of my cards with my cell number on the back—“here you go. You think you’re going to miss a session or you want to change the time, give me a call.” I hesitated. “Or if you need advice about… anything, you can give me a call.”
She stared at me skeptically from under her eyelashes.
“Okay,” I said, leaning back. “I think that’s enough sappy emotional bullshit for the both of us.” She tucked the card into her sleeve so I counted that as a win and left her to finish her coffee in peace.
The rest of the session was uneventful. One of the kids managed to set someone else’s hair on fire but Jazz and I put it out before the fire alarm went off, and the smell of burnt hair mingled with the boiled eggs into a truly disgusting mix. We spent the rest of the session with the windows open, quietly shivering but no further bodily injuries.
By lunchtime, the kids cleared out, some of them collected by parents or older siblings, the others setting off home alone. The young kid with the headscarf stuck around a little longer as Jazz went to speak to her parents about letting her come to the extra classes we ran for older students. We hadn’t done any real recruitment yet, but some of those kids would probably join Starlight if they stayed in Seattle.
I wondered what her parents would say. Did they already have their sights set on a more powerful coven, corporate life, the whole shebang? I couldn’t blame them. Their daughter clearly had untapped potential. I wondered what the girl wanted. Powerful covens, like any community of super-rich assholes, weren’t exactly friendly to anyone who looked even a little bit like an outsider. My gaze snagged on Raven standing gloomily in the corner. With that winning personality, she was going to have a peach of a time if we did send her away. Then again, maybe it would give her the strength she would need as a dark witch. I’d have to run the idea past Jazz before mentioning it to Raven.
Jazz got the remaining teenagers to drag the chairs back into a circle. I oversaw, which meant I fixed myself another coffee and braved the smelly kitchen for another pack of cookies. No luck.
“Who’s doing the talk?” one of the kids asked her friend. I leaned against the wall and inhaled the scent of coffee.
“Dr. Allister, the lecturer from Washington U.”
“Oooh.”
I frowned.
“He’s so hot.”
I frowned harder.
“Right? He’s old, but he’s, like, still hot.”
“Hey. No talking,” I snapped. They paled and scurried off. How come that never worked on Raven?
Rufus, hot? I guessed I could kind of see it, in a certain light, but it felt like looking through a funhouse mirror. Rufus had seen me at my lowest point. When I was barely human, he’d fed me, bathed me, clothed me, put me back on my feet. He was like family.
“Slacker,” Raven said as she went past me, dragging a chair.
I sighed, left my coffee on the table, and grabbed a free chair. I’d forgotten my bag was leaning against it, and as I pulled the chair away my bag fell and the case file Valerian had left me, that I had forgotten for the first time in weeks, fell out, photos spilling across the floor.
Shit.
I dropped to my knees, scrambling to gather them up before anyone saw. Dead bodies at the kid’s session was not the kind of news headline I wanted for Starlight Coven. “Shit, Tiana, you can’t bring that stuff here.”
“I fucking know, all right?” I said, looking up at Jazz. “Here, pass me that.” I pointed at a photograph that had landed under the table.
She started to pass it over, glanced down at it, paused, then looked at me. “This is—”
“Yeah, I know.”
“On the news—"
“Yeah, I know.”
“But you—”
“Jazz. I fucking know, all right? Will you give me the damn photo?”
Raven appeared at my elbow, a lightning rod for trouble.
“That from a case?”
I snatched the photo before she could get a proper look and shoved it in my bag.
Jazz was looking at me with sympathy in her eyes. I didn’t fucking want it. It felt like prickles all over my skin.
“How did you get them?” she asked.
“We’re not talking about it,” I growled.
“Did the police ask you for help?”
They did that sometimes. Not so many magicals on the police force. The elites thought it was below them and lowlifes wouldn’t exactly pass the detective’s exam so they took on consultants. Mostly academics, it was actually Rufus who’d got me the job. Anything magical or plain fucking weird, the cops would bring me in on the down-low to see what I could sense. I worked mainly with homicide on account of being able to talk to the dead.
I was supposed to get Jazz to sign off on cases as coven leader. Paperwork, it’d get you every time.
“No.” I shook my head. “It’s not the police.” I bit the bullet. “Val dropped them off.”
“Valerian?”
“No,” I said sarcastically. “Valerie, the little old lady from two doors down. Yes of course Valerian. The fucking evil vampire who apparently knew where I lived this whole time.”
I had a flash, a sense memory of him standing at my door. The sheer presence of him, like a furnace against my skin, raising the hairs on my arms, catching my breath at the back of my throat.
Raven piped up from behind me. “Your address is on your card. It’s not exactly a secret.”
I dragged my mind back into the present and twisted round to face her. “You, shut it. We’re having a private conversation here. And gimme that.” I took the photographs out of her grip. When had she picked them up? The girl was light-fingered.
“I’m not taking the case,” I told Jazz. She didn’t say anything, just looked at me with eyes that knew me too well.
I wasn’t fucking taking it. Screw the vampires. I wanted nothing to do with them and nothing to do with Val. His hand braced against my door, looming in the hallway. Dark eyes—no, fucking no. Stop it, Tiana. I shook the memories off again.
“It’s about those murders, isn’t it?” Raven asked, pulling me out of my thoughts. “The ones on the news.”
I glared at her. Luckily, I was saved a response by Rufus’s entrance. A ripple went through the group, the breeze as the door swung open and let in the cold. I deliberately ignored Raven, looking over her head toward Rufus. I could almost see what those girls had been talking about. He wasn’t a stuffy old professor, that was for sure. Faded jeans, lightly muscled arms under his pullover, I’d never noticed that before, but it made sense, he went running, ate healthy. I’d been desperate for a cheeseburger the whole time I’d stayed with him.
“Hello, ladies.” He joined us, glancing over the photos I was still holding, his greying hair sweeping over his eyes before he brushed it back. His eyes widened. “New case?”
“No. It’s nothing.” I said quickly, shoving the photographs back in my bag and kicking the bag under the table for good measure.
“Okay, why don’t we…” Jazz stepped between us and ushered Rufus over to the refreshments table. “Coffee, Rufus? Then I can introduce you to the kids.”
I turned and found Raven watching me with eyes that were far too knowing. “Everyone knows it’s the vampires, but no one will say anything. They’re too powerful.” Uneasy memories shifted in the back of my mind. “It’s not right. Someone ought to do something about it.”
“Go take a seat for your talk.” I ordered her, refusing to answer.
“You don’t think it’s right either. I know you don’t. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with killing people. Someone should do something.” She looked me right in the eyes before walking away.
She was right. Someone should do something, but why the hell did it have to be me?
Chapter 7
I was being watched. I couldn’t see him but I knew he was out there. Valerian, my own personal vampire stalker. He didn’t try to approach me again. Smart. I had taken to carrying my wood bladed knife around in my bag. Not that I would have the chance to use it. A human, even a magical one like me, could never move as fast as a vampire. Still, it made me feel better knowing it was there. Something to grip my fist around when I walked home late at night and felt the back of my neck prickle with the sense of his eyes upon me.
It wasn’t just his eyes I could sense. It was something more, something… deeper. Like his appearance that night had woken something within me, a power that had lain dormant for years, ever since I was torn from the vampire court. Something had sparked between us that night in the bar when our fingertips had touched.
Something that resonated with a heavy thrum of magic.
Or maybe that was just indigestion. It was easy for your mind to play tricks on you where vampires were involved. They had a way of warping reality to suit them. I’d learned that lesson already. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake a second time. Valerian and his fucking queen could find some other patsy to take the case and exonerate them.
Still, I hadn’t been able to stop myself reading through the files. By all accounts, Oliver and Sevda had been two normal, innocent people. She had been about my age, Oliver a little younger. Both of them with their lives ahead of them. Snatched away at the teeth of some vampire. They deserved justice but they weren’t going to get it.
At least not from me.
Surely someone would do something. Things weren’t looking so good for the vampires; whatever Queen Alexandra had done to keep their names out of the press was starting to fail. The bite marks, the draining, the vampire connection was too obvious. Still, they’d got away with it before. Could they get away with it again? Covering up one murder wasn’t the same as a series of them. Did the vampires have that kind of pull with the authorities? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. It wasn’t my business
I could see Raven’s face in my mind, her eyes silently calling me a coward.
Maybe I was a coward but I had a reason. The last time I’d gotten involved with vampires had ended with me bleeding out next to a dumpster, cold and alone. I’d barely escaped death once. I didn’t think I’d be so lucky a second time.
I gathered up the papers that Valerian had given me and swept them back into the folder, shutting it into one of the drawers on my rickety desk. The door stuck as I tried to push it closed and I shoved it hard, rocking back in my chair.
Out of sight, out of mind.
My desk was pretty empty, the only papers left on it were bills. Cases had been thin. As much as I hated to admit it, Valerian had been right. I was dangerously low on funds. Joe might let me work behind the bar a couple nights, enough to keep the lights on. I’d given up on hot water three months ago.
I still hadn’t heard from Michelle. That was concerning. It wasn’t like her to go off-grid for so long. I didn’t know if she had family in the city. I realized I didn’t know much about her at all. Some friend I was. We were witches of the same coven and I barely knew anything about her. I wasn’t really close with any of them, Rufus I barely saw ever since moving out, Jazz I only spoke to at coven meetings. I’d closed myself off, retreated inside myself. It had
been so long, I’d forgotten how to reach out.
What if it had been me, I wondered. What would happen if I disappeared. Would anyone notice? Jazz might if I skipped enough meetings. She’d come around here, get Joe to open up my apartment for her. I looked around: empty walls, a couple of threadbare lounging chairs in the corner, and an old couch that had seen better days. My rickety desk shoved up against the bookshelf that was little better than cardboard and leaning dangerously to the side.
Across from me, the breakfast bar separated me from the tiny kitchen cubicle. On the other side of that, my bedroom, a bed that was little more than a mattress on the floor.
It was a shit hole, that much was true, but trying to make it a home, trying to do anything at all beyond getting through the day, just seemed like too much effort ever since… ever since I’d lost my sister.
I made myself a packet of ramen with a fried egg for protein—actual food; score one for Tiana—then I fell into bed.
I was exhausted, but my mind wouldn’t stop circling the case and I slipped in and out of sleep. I was woken sometime in the early hours of the morning, when it was still dark out, to the noise of the sticky desk drawer thunking open and someone cursing under their voice.
Someone was in my apartment.
I kicked off the covers, rolled off the mattress, and into a crouch, still bleary from the half-sleep I’d been in. I swept my hair back from my head, out of my eyes, so that it fell, tangled, down my back. I reached into the half world and felt the flickering presence of the dead, the spirits in the bar below but faint, almost like they’d been scared away by something.
Valerian, that fucker. Ghosts didn’t like vampires. Maybe they resented that vampires got to be dead and still hang out with the living, unlike them.
Whoever it was rummaging around in my study I was going to have to tackle them the old-fashioned way. I crept over to the wall and reached down for the baseball bat leaning behind the door that I kept for the worst of my cases and nudged the door open with my toe. It was too dark for me to make out much but I could see at least one person rifling through the papers on my desk and someone else standing by the bookshelf.
