Dead Man's Hand

by Tegan Maher

  © 2018 Tegan Maher

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system currently in use or yet to be devised.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or institutions is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal use and may not be re-sold or given away to others. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase a copy for that person. If you did not purchase this book, or it was not purchased for your use, then you have an unauthorized copy. Please go to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting my hard work and copyright.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Thank You!

  Connect with Me

  Other Books by Tegan Maher

  About Tegan

  Sneak Peek at Sweet Murder

  CHAPTER ONE

  "JUST LIGHT THE CANDLE, Cori."

  I took a deep breath and gave the candlestick across the room the hairy eyeball. "I'll catch the curtains on fire again."

  Chaos, my arctic-fox familiar, shook her head in exasperation. "Then you'll put them out again, then make them good as new. Practice is practice—look at it as an exercise in crisis management."

  Kat, my roommate, came bouncing down the stairs and groaned when she saw what was going on. "Not the candle thing again. Why does it have to be fire? I'm ... allergic."

  "Don't be a baby," Chaos said, rolling her emerald eyes. "You're not allergic."

  "Yeah, I'm pretty sure I am. Just like I'm allergic to wooden stakes and anything that can decapitate me. My body has an adverse reaction to being dead."

  "Thanks for the vote of confidence, bestie," I said, wiping my sweaty palms on my jeans. To be fair, I couldn't blame her. As a vampire, fire was not her friend and I didn't exactly have a good track record with this particular spell.

  "I have confidence in you," she hedged, "but maybe lighting the candle isn't the best trick to practice inside. You know, just in case."

  I raised an eyebrow at her. "You mean just in case I ignite the drapes rather than the candle, like I've already done half a dozen times?"

  She nodded as she reached into the fridge for a box of faux blood. "Yup. That's exactly what I mean."

  It's not like I could blame her. Since she'd passed on a cerulean amulet that helped me separate my witchy powers from my werewolf ones, my magic had improved in leaps and bounds, but I still had problems with spells that required finesse.

  We were both still getting used to the fact that Chaos, the adorable little black and white marble fox I'd found in the woods as a baby, was much more than just a furry face that bummed food and hogged the couch pillows.

  The minute I'd slipped the amulet on, she'd become my familiar.

  My bossy, sarcastic, demanding familiar.

  From what I could understand, she’d always been my familiar, but I’d needed the crystal to open up my magic so she could step up.

  Chaos had much more faith in me than I did in myself, which I supposed was a good thing. I had to agree with Kat though—fire was an outside toy until I got a firm handle on it.

  "You're almost thirty years old and haven't mastered some of the most basic spells," my dragon-in-fox-clothing pointed out, her fluffy black and white tail wrapped around her feet.

  "I'm aware," I said after I drank half my bottle of water in one go. "But I'm also aware that poor Kat doesn't deserve to have her home burned down around her—or worse yet on her—as I strive for proficiency. Besides, we've been at this for three hours; it's almost dark."

  "Fine," Chaos said, hopping down from the ottoman she'd been ruling from and heading for the couch. "I'm ready for a nap anyway."

  I smiled, glad that some things hadn't changed.

  As she curled up between two pillows on the couch and closed her eyes, I went to join Kat while she had her breakfast. To me, it was way past suppertime, so I scrounged in the fridge and came out with some leftover pizza. Rather than heat it up, I opted to just eat it cold. The werewolf half of me wasn't particular when I was hungry. Plus, cold pizza was like fried chicken—it was just as good cold as hot. Well, almost.

  Kat smiled as she took a pull of synthetic A-positive from the straw sticking out of what we jokingly called her juice box. "I know I tease you, but you've come a long way in a short amount of time."

  I lifted a shoulder as I chewed then swallowed. "Thanks. At least I knew the basics before, even if I couldn't manage them. Now that it all works, it's more a matter of refining what I know. Even when I have trouble mastering something"—I scowled at her when she coughed fire into her hand—"I know once I figure it out, it'll work every time."

  Before Kat had given me the amulet several weeks prior, I had never known when my magic would work and when it wouldn't. My werewolf magic interfered with my witch magic and make it wonky. The amulet served to help me separate the two.

  My spells were always a magical roll of the dice, and as Castle's Bluff's sheriff and the leader of the local pack, the last thing I could do was show that kind of weakness.

  "Charlotte seems to have a lot to offer you, too," Kat said, taking a seat beside me at the table. "She's a good resource to have for more reasons than one."

  She wasn't wrong. Charlotte was a witch who was close friends with Sean, and when he'd helped me out of a sticky situation a few weeks back, he’d offered to have her tutor me. That was right about the time I'd gotten my amulet.

  Now that my witch powers weren't muted and distorted by my werewolf side, I found I needed help more than ever, but for different reasons. I sometimes felt like I was riding a bicycle with no brakes, and Charlotte was helping me learn control as well as teaching me spells and, for lack of a better word, tricks. Like lighting a candle from across the room just by willing it to happen.

  My mom—who was also a powerful witch—had offered, but we couldn't even work together when I needed help with my homework; butting heads seemed to be what we did best. Besides, she was all the way up in North Carolina.

  "Charlotte's been a lifesaver,” I agreed. “It was great of Sean to hook us up."

  "I'm sure it helps having Chaos and Alex, too," she said, sucking the last of her breakfast out of the bottom of the box. "I'm glad you have a support system to help you adjust. Let me tell you, it makes all the difference in the world."

  I took a big drink of tea to wash down my pizza. "It does, and don't forget yourself in there. I don't know what I'd do without y'all around to coach me."

  Kat was a vampire, but she had her own brand of magic and had shared with me
what she knew. She was also my head cheerleader, which was more important to me than she realized.

  A shadow crossed her face, and I knew she was thinking back to her own first few months as a vampire. She'd woken up in an alley with no memory of whom she was or what had happened to her. She wouldn't go into details about those first couple of weeks, but a vampire high in the ranks took her in, protected her, and taught her what she needed to know in order to survive and thrive in her new reality. That vampire, Sean Castle, went on to found our town.

  Castle's Bluff was an interesting mix of folks. Sean had won the land in a poker game and built the town with the intent of it being a pocket community for paranormals, but when humans inevitably found it, it wasn't like we had a way to keep them out. So, magic went back in the closet and law enforcement—and life in general—became much more complicated.

  Don't get me wrong—people were people and I didn't care whether they shifted, cast spells, drank blood, or just hung out and drank beer. Or sweet tea, as was typical in any town south of the Mason-Dixon Line. My little slice of Georgia was no exception; fried chicken, sweet tea, and manners were as much a part of life as humidity and potholes.

  The only downsides to having humans under my watch were that they were fragile, and they weren't nearly as open-minded a species as the rest of us were. Living in the magical closet sucked, but it beat being studied in some lab or starting a war humans were sure to lose.

  Not all of them were clueless, though. A portion of the town knew the deal, and many more suspected but chose to swallow our often-flimsy explanations because it was easier than admitting magic and fairy-tale creatures were real.

  Thankfully, the humans closest to me knew what was up, so I didn't have to come up with bogus excuses when I used my gifts to do my job or heat up a cold cup of coffee.

  I'd just stuffed the last piece of crust in my mouth and was brushing my hands off when my phone rang. I wiped my hands on my jeans and pulled it from my pocket; it was Sam, my second in command at the sheriff's office.

  "Hey, Sam," I said as a finger of foreboding slid down my spine, causing goosebumps to pop up on my arms. "What's up?"

  He took a deep breath then released it. "We have a body in the alley behind the Hook. So far, no witnesses and he’s not carryin’ any identification."

  Great. We'd just gotten everything put to rights after a rogue werewolf tried to start a turf war by killing people a few months before. The last thing we needed was another murder to send folks back behind locked doors. This was my town and I wanted my people to feel safe.

  "Please tell me it's not an animal attack," I said. That would be a worst-case scenario, because pack politics were still touch and go between my pack and an isolationist pack on the coast. Even though relationships were improving because their leader and I were working together to mend fences and change old beliefs, there was still much work to be done.

  "Nope.” Sam said. “It looks like he was shot. There is something odd though." He sniffed, and I could see him take his sheriff's department ball cap off, run his hand through his hair, then slide the cap back into place; it’s what he did when he was agitated.

  "Well, what is it?" I asked, prodding him to get on with it.

  "He’s holding a hand of cards. Aces and eights, to be exact."

  "Dead man's hand," I said, my mind flipping through in a dozen different scenarios. No matter which one I picked, none of them were good.

  It was gonna be a long night.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BY THE TIME I GOT TO the scene, darkness had fallen. Sam had the area cordoned off and had parked his truck sideways to block off one end of the alley from the looky-loos, but they'd just gathered on the other end.

  The dead guy was sprawled across the middle of the alley and the space was so tight that, had I parked my Jeep there to block the scene from that end, the EMTs wouldn't have been able to maneuver the gurney around it to get him out of there.

  "Hey Cori," Lila, the owner of the donut shop, called as I ducked under the tape. "Who is it and do you know who offed him?"

  I scowled at her. "You've been watchin' too many old mobster movies. Nobody said he was offed anyway. Could be his ticker gave out."

  I should have known better than to respond because the crowd went wild—so many questions zinged at me that they all ran together, but they were all variants of the ones she'd asked. Except one. I took a deep breath and scrubbed a hand over my face.

  "Cori—do you reckon it was aliens?" One of the Johnson twins—either Raymond or Robert, I couldn’t tell which one—yelled.

  I reached deep for my patience, but his brother slapped him down before I got the chance to.

  "Course it wasn't no aliens, you idjit,” he said, elbowing him and glowering. “It wasn't even dark yet. They ain't gonna do nothin' in the middle of town, in daylight."

  Of course. Because that was the only logical reason why aliens didn't kill random guy number 1 in an alley in central Georgia. I rubbed the back of my neck as I approached the body, the sounds of their bickering making me shake my head. Fortunately, the classic rock pouring out the back door of the Rusty Hook was loud enough that it drowned them out as I moved closer to the body.

  "What do we have?" I asked, bending down to look at the guy. Thank goodness for werewolf vision, because the watery glow from the streetlight didn't do much. That was to our advantage, though, because it also limited what the onlookers could see.

  Sam rubbed the back of his neck, then took off his sheriff's-office ball cap and shoved an errant hank of salt-and-pepper hair back before slapping it on again. "Jenna from the bookstore found him twenty minutes ago or so." He lowered his voice. "I'm guessing he's a vamp. Ice cold, and look how pale he is."

  "Or maybe he's just been here for a while." I squatted down to get a closer look. The guy was wearing a custom-tailored charcoal vest, and a bullet hole about the size of a quarter had torn a hole in the fabric right over his heart. From the lack of blood on the asphalt, I assumed it was small-caliber.

  "Nope,” Sam answered. “He hasn’t been here more than an hour." Even though the music was loud enough to drown out his words to humans, Sam kept his voice low so supernatural ears would have a harder time hearing him.

  "Jenna said she was back here a half-hour or so before she found him for a smoke, and he wasn't here. I guess he coulda been dumped, though. She's in the store; I told her to lock up and wait for us there so the vultures wouldn't hassle her."

  I mulled his theory over in my head. "Bullets don't kill vampires." I said, leaning forward to feel his skin. I used the pretense of checking for a pulse, even though a blind man could have seen that he was dead as a doornail.

  Normally, I could tell whether he was human or vamp by his scent, but the smell of cologne was so thick I tried to breathe through my mouth. Good lord, when were people gonna realize that stuff was supposed to be spritzed on, not bathed in?

  As soon as I touched him, the world around me disappeared and a feeling of recognition washed over me, then surprise and a starburst of pain. The last details I picked up before losing the final wisps of the vision was a black floor rushing toward my face as I fell forward, and the toe of a black lace-up boot in the peripheral once I landed. It was sorta like I was looking through a camera that had been dropped on its side, then it went black.

  "What did you see?" Sam asked, his lined brown eyes both curious and concerned.

  I sighed. "Not much." I relayed the bits I'd gotten. "And either I didn't get any sound, or there wasn't any. Hard to believe, since he was shot."

  I’d had visions all my life and even with the crystal, they were still wonky. It wasn't like I could practice having them.

  "Great," he said. "So we're looking for somebody wearing black work boots. We’ll have this buttoned up in no time."

  "Well," I said, "and he knew his killer. At least it's something."

  One of the man’s hands was draped across his stomach and the other was sprawled bes
ide him; that was the one holding the cards. His fingers were relaxed, but four of the cards were tucked in between them and his thumb. The other was lying face-down on the asphalt between his hand and his body. Sure enough, as Sam had said, he was holding the ace and eight of spades and the ace and eight of clubs.

  Because of its position, I couldn't see the fifth card without picking it up. I didn't want to do that before Colleen, our ME and CSI, had a chance to do her thing.

  The coroner’s van pulled in, and a low grumble rose from the crowd when it obstructed their view. I was glad to see her; she was good at her job and I had no doubt she’d have more information for me before they took the body away.

  Colleen and Sam both knew all about the less human side of our community. Sam had known me all my life; he'd grown up with my mom. Colleen had known me almost that long, though she'd been brought into the secret later. Once she took the coroner's job, she sorta had to be clued in, for obvious reasons.

  I turned to Sam as the petite blonde grabbed her black bag of tricks from the back of the black county van. “Did you find out who he is yet? I know you said he wasn’t carrying a wallet, but has anybody else recognized him?

  He shook his head. "Not yet. I haven’t had a chance to talk to anybody."

  "So maybe a robbery gone bad then, then." For some reason, that didn’t sit right with me, though. Somebody just interested in his cash wouldn't have taken the time to stuff cards in his hand.

  There was nothing left to do with the scene or the body until Colleen was finished and had at least a preliminary report, so Sam and I headed into the bookstore to talk to Jenna, a teenager who worked there part time.

  He rapped on the back door, and it took a few seconds for it to open just wide enough for me to see a flash of pink before a high-pitched voice asked who was there. The girl's fuchsia hair was bright even through the crack, her brown eyes large behind a pair of bedazzled glasses.

  "It's just us," Sam said.

  She let out a breath and pushed the door open for us, shooting a glare toward the looky-loos at the end of the alley as she did so. "I've known most of those people all my life, but now it's like a Walkin' Dead episode. They're looking in the windows and pounding on the glass; lordy, what's wrong with 'em?"