Dervishes Don't Dance: A Paranormal Suspense Novel with a Touch of Romance (Valkyrie Bestiary Book 2)

by Kim McDougall

  Gabe said nothing, but turned to straighten the stapler on his desk for the third time.

  “You do have a hot date! Who is it?”

  He still didn’t answer.

  “Wait, is it someone I know? Are you meeting here?”

  Gabe rubbed his palms down his immaculate pants. He’d changed out of his wet clothes and now looked runway-worthy in his designer jeans and black shirt. That was nothing new. The nerves were.

  “You look like a kid ready to ask someone to the prom. What’s up?”

  “It’s just that…I just really like this guy, so when he shows up, can you just try to be, you know, less you?”

  “What does that mean?” I propped an arm on my hip and gave him a stern look. Somehow my air of authority was always lost on Gabe.

  “I mean, don’t shove an ice sprite into his hands the minute he arrives.” He looked me up and down. “At least you don’t have blood on your shirt or cobwebs in your hair.”

  “I don’t…I mean…” I looked down at my clothes. I’d showered and my jeans were the second cleanest pair I owned. I’d even spent some time with a scrub brush to get at the dirt under my nails. Was I really that bad? It had been so long since I’d had anyone to impress, I had no inner filth filter anymore. I thought of all the times Mason had pulled wads of chewed hay from my hair or wiped a smear of dirt off my face. He’d even seen me puking my guts out. No wonder he was making himself scarce.

  “Fine. I’ll play nice.”

  The office door opened and Dutch walked in.

  “Hey, is everything okay?” I asked. I hadn’t seen or heard from Mason in five months. Seeing Dutch made my heart clutch for a second as I imagined the worst.

  Then I saw the look pass between them.

  “He’s here for me.” Gabe smiled tightly. “Dutch is my date.”

  “Unfortunately, we have to postpone,” Dutch said. “There’s been an incident.”

  Chapter

  6

  Dutch would give me little else. Only that Mason was safe, but a Guardian was dead. Mason had asked that I come to the scene. I thought about refusing. Last June he’d made such a big deal about me staying out of his business. But my bitterness could not outweigh my worry and curiosity.

  I followed Dutch and Gabe in my truck. We drove east along the old highway that once cut through the heart of Montreal. Now it wove around the ruins of expressway ramps and a tunnel that was destroyed during the wars.

  The Old Port of Montreal had once been an important trading post for the European settlers of this land. Later, it turned into a tourist attraction with huge theaters juxtaposed against quaint cobbled streets and eighteenth-century buildings turned into restaurants. Now it was home to an eclectic, though poorer set. Humans and fae mixed freely here, but mostly class two fae like goblins, imps and trolls or those class one fae with weaker magic. The ward was set a kilometer offshore in the deep channel to accommodate the ships coming into port. It was far enough that it didn’t register on my keening.

  Old Port was a magnet for artists, musicians and their hangers-on. The narrow roads often switched back on themselves, and many had been given over to pedestrian traffic. You never knew, walking on those twisted paths, when you might turn a corner and find yourself in the middle of a pop-up music club tucked away in a little alcove or an impromptu art class right in the street.

  As I parked, I thought about leaving my sword in the truck, but I couldn’t bear its whining, so I strapped it to my back and followed Dutch through the winding cobblestone streets.

  “You’re dating Dutch?” I nudged Gabe with my elbow. His hands were shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans.

  “He’s sexy as hell.”

  I watched the slender man stalk up the sloping road ahead of us. He did have that whole silver fox thing going.

  “Besides, you told me I couldn’t date customers. He’s not a customer.”

  “Well, he might be after tonight. Do you have any idea why Mason wants us here?”

  “Only that the death was suspicious, and you might be able to help with the interrogations.”

  We turned into a gated courtyard. Angus stood guard at the open gate.

  “Ah, Kyra! Aren’t you a sight for crusty eyes!” He took my hand and swept over it for a kiss. Angus was a gargoyle, created through traditional alchemical magic during the Renaissance. Mason had carved him in the form of a green man, a figure of fertility and growing things. Holding Angus’s hand was like clutching a rough-barked branch. The brambles that passed for hair on his head jabbed my arm as his lips brushed my knuckles.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked.

  “Nothing good.” His leafy brows lowered. “Go on in. Mason’s waitin’ on you.”

  Past the gate, the path opened to a cobbled courtyard surrounded on all sides by three-story stone buildings with slate-tile roofs. The building at the far end boasted a belfry with architecture could only be called Gothic Ministry. The buildings on the long sides of the courtyard had once served as dormitories for a nunnery. In the last century, they’d been converted to apartments.

  The night was warm and the air still. Only a few lights were on behind closed blinds in the apartments. Classical music wafted through the cracks of stone. I spotted three gargoyles perched on the roof, watching the scene below.

  My hair was still damp from my shower, and it hung loose around my shoulders. I pulled it away from my neck and searched my belt kit for a hair tie as I headed toward the light from a gleam that floated over several crouched figures. My stomach twisted in knots and my lips wavered somewhere between a smile and a frown.

  Five months. I hadn’t seen him for five whole months.

  The figures stood as I approached. Mason’s eyes roved over me from head to foot. Feeling self-conscious, I quickly tied my hair back and turned to the man beside him.

  “Kyra Greene,” I offered my hand but he ignored it.

  “This is Detective Kesik,” Mason said.

  Kesik was a short white guy with blond hair trimmed in straight bangs across his forehead. He nodded at me, but his mouth pinched in a frown. I knew what he was thinking. He didn’t want a civilian mucking up his crime scene.

  I’d worked with Hub before, usually with Detective Benoit Giroux. It took half a dozen cases before Ben trusted me not to step in blood or otherwise contaminate evidence. But Ben was dead. A lot of good officers had died during Prince Alvar’s attempted coup last spring. That meant new people had stepped into their shoes, people I didn’t know. People who didn’t know me.

  “And this is Susanna Coulter. She’s an alchemist working with Hub.”

  “We’ve met.” I smiled at Susanna and she smiled back faintly. We hadn’t met under the best circumstances. Seeing me probably stirred up memories of death and being hurried out of a crumbling condo in shock while fending off vampires. I couldn’t blame her for the unenthusiastic greeting.

  Ignoring the weight of Mason’s eyes on me, I turned and got my first good look at the body. Except it wasn’t a body. It was a mess of stone and dust. The torso was mostly intact, but the limbs were broken and scattered. A long-fingered hand pointed into the sky, the arm cut off at the wrist and the inner flesh nothing more than jagged stone. The head lay off to the side, partially crushed in the fall.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “If you believe the detective, suicide.” Mason crossed his arms and glared at Kesik.

  “He jumped?” I looked up at the roof.

  “Or he was pushed.”

  “There’s no proof of that,” Kesik said. He tilted his head and squinted as if we stood in bright sunlight.

  Gargoyles are hard to kill. Any wounds taken in their human form heal as soon as they turn to stone. Only decapitation works, and I’ve even heard rumors of gargoyles surviving that. But in their stone form, they are surprisingl
y fragile, if you could call anything that weighs half a ton “fragile.” Break them into enough pieces and they won’t come back. A fall from a three-story roof would do the trick.

  “You think someone did this on purpose?” I asked. “How? That would be like trying to push over a horse.” I couldn’t see how that could happen in broad daylight.

  “Makes more sense than suicide,” Mason said. “Gargoyles can’t generally leap in their stone form.”

  Susanna shone a powerful light at the roof, startling a stray cat that hissed at us.

  “There is a rope or something dangling from that chimney. He could have rigged it so he fell after sunup.”

  Mason turned away and spoke into his widget. A gargoyle on the roof broke from the shadows and moved toward the chimney. A few seconds later, Mason’s screen lit up with an incoming message.

  “It is a rope, but too old and frayed to hold a gargoyle. And short. If it snapped, where’s the rest of it?” He pointed at the ground. There was no evidence of rope.

  I thought over all the possibilities: suicide, murder, accident. None of them seemed plausible.

  “Who is he?” I leaned over the body, pushing the gleam to illuminate what was left of his face. He was a classic “grotesque” gargoyle with a wide mouth and vaguely simian features.

  “His name is Cyril. He was a Guardian and an alchemist.” Mason nodded to the others standing vigil on the roof. “They found him on their patrol.”

  The Guardians were a group of gargoyles that kept watch on the parts of the city that Hub ignored. Some people called them vigilantes. Some called them saviors. Mason was their captain, which caused friction with his alchemist cohorts.

  “I was an alchemist before I was a gargoyle,” he’d once told me. “And they can’t take that away from me.”

  But they could make life difficult for him. Gargoylism had no classification with the fae. And though they were originally made by alchemists, that sect didn’t want to claim them either. They were a species apart, as Mason’s trial had proven. Compounding the problem, the Guardians had set themselves up as folk heroes who often tweaked the noses of authority. Could this incident be an attack against the Guardians or their captain? I kept my suspicions to myself. For now.

  Susanna rose, packing away her thaumagauge.

  “First tests show no magical residue, other than Mr…uh, Cyril’s signature.”

  I could have told her that, but alchemists only trusted their gadgets. They would consider my keening as something less than hedge-witch hocus-pocus, but I had sensed the lack of stray magic from the entrance of the courtyard. I gave her points for at least remembering Cyril’s name, and that he was a person, not just a pile of rock dust.

  Detective Kesik scrolled through something on his widget. He stopped and read the screen for a moment, then turned to Mason.

  “Isn’t it true that gargoyles are in constant pain, a side-effect of their conception?” He weighted his stare with lead.

  Mason’s lip curled as if he almost blurted an obscenity, then he raked a hand through his hair.

  “Pain is a strong word. A gargoyle may experience discomfort, but we get used to it with age. And Cyril was over two-hundred years old.”

  I understood what they were talking about. Except for Mason, the magic of every gargoyle I’d met resonated badly, like a square peg mashed into a round hole. I didn’t understand the mechanics of it, and the art of creating gargoyles was lost, but the discord had something to do with the way the original stone was imbued with life. Angus had explained it to me.

  Life could not be created. It could only be stolen. And the alchemists had stolen the spirits of dead fae to bring their stone creations to life. It left a spiritual dissonance in the new creations and was one of the reasons there were so few gargoyles left. Most either killed themselves or went mad and had to be put down.

  Kesik said, “But you agree that this discomfort could lead to depression.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Not Cyril. He was working with me on an experiment to fix the problem.”

  “So you admit, this is a problem for all gargoyles.”

  Mason’s nod was sharp enough to cut glass.

  “And is your experiment on the verge of any great breakthrough?”

  Even I withered under Mason’s glare and it wasn’t directed at me, but Detective Kesik just shrugged it off.

  “So, Mr. Mason, could it be possible that your experiment gave new hope to Mr. Cyril? Hope that his constant agonizing pain would end? Hope that turned out to be false? Sounds like a good reason to throw yourself off a roof.”

  A nerve twitched in Mason’s jaw.

  Susanna opened a case of glass vials. She removed one and held it up.

  “I’d like to examine the body more closely. It might provide more clues, but it would also help with my research. May I have permission to take samples?” She looked to Kesik.

  “No crime here as far as I can see. I’ve got no claim to the body. You’ll have to take that up with the next of kin.”

  Susanna turned to Mason. She held up a small tool, ready to scrape some of the dust into the glass vial. “May I?”

  “No.” Mason’s voice was flat.

  Susanna’s expression wilted, but she didn’t protest.

  “We’re done here then,” Kesik said. “Do you want me to call the coroner?” Just the fact that he had to ask implied that Cyril was less than human in his eyes.

  Mason shook his head. “No. We’ll take care of him.”

  Kesik turned and left. Susanna finished packing her kit. She smiled and shrugged as if to apologize for the detective’s behavior, then followed him out of the courtyard.

  More lights had come on in the apartments. Faces appeared silhouetted in the windows. Dutch and Gabe, who had been loitering near the gate, now came over.

  “Berto should be here soon with the truck,” Dutch said, even as I heard the beep-beep of a vehicle backing up into the courtyard. The van pulled right up to the remains and stopped.

  Berto jumped out of the driver’s seat and opened the back doors. He was a taller-than-average gargoyle with wide-set eyes and a pointed mouth that hinted at a duck bill. He pressed a button and a gurney-like contraption floated out of the van, then lowered to hover about two feet off the ground.

  “I thought you’d want to examine him back in the lab,” Berto said.

  “Agreed. Let’s get him home.” Mason bent to gather the remains.

  Feeling that this was a deeply personal moment, I left the Guardians to pack away their brother and wandered to the edge of the yard, looking for…I didn’t know what exactly—that big glaring clue that pointed to foul play, clearly defined boot prints at the base of the wall, or a monogrammed handkerchief left by the assailant.

  I found none of those, not even a whiff of stray magic. I glanced up at the rooftops. If there had been a crime, it had happened up there. A lone bench tucked away in the corner of the courtyard was a good spot to wait. The night was warm enough that I felt the need to remove my jacket. If this heat wave didn’t end soon, we’d have unrest in the streets. The weather could easily be interpreted as Terra’s displeasure.

  Mason joined me on the bench, and we watched the others carefully pack Cyril into the van. Berto and Angus drove it away. Dutch and Gabe waved to us before heading out.

  “Right about now, Gabe is thinking ‘Worst first date ever,’” I said.

  “Dutch will make it up to him.” Mason leaned back on the bench. I wanted to comfort him, but any words I thought of seemed unequal to the task.

  One by one, the lights in the apartments went out now that the excitement was over. We sat side by side, listening to the muted noises of a city. Our legs were close but not touching. Only his magic bumped against me, familiar and exciting at the same time.

  “I’m surprised you asked me to come,
” I said before the silence between us became overwhelming.

  “You mean because I told you to butt out of my business.” His voice was flat, giving me no hint of his emotions.

  “You were rather adamant about it. And this is definitely gargoyle business.” The five months of silence spoke louder than his words.

  He grunted quietly. “I understand the urge to commit suicide.”

  Whoa! That change of subject nearly gave me whiplash. I glanced sideways, trying to gauge his mood. Was that anger, frustration or sadness that made his shoulders tense and his magic clang like a church bell announcing an invasion?

  Mason rubbed his temples with stiff fingers as if he could massage away the last few hours.

  “I’m sorry. I’m doing this all wrong.” He turned to me, and I saw real pain in his eyes. “I asked you here to help. You didn’t have to come. And now I’m being an ass.”

  “Your words, not mine.” I nudged his knee with mine and he smiled.

  “It’s just that Detective Kesik is not wrong. Being a gargoyle isn’t easy. After a while, so much of daily life seems pointless. Washing dishes, cleaning house. It all just has to be redone. The small talk conversations, the same words repeated over and over for centuries. It wears on an immortal.”

  My heart seized. I’d once loved a man who made that same argument right before he forced me to stab him through the chest.

  A mosquito buzzed in my ear. The warm weather had kept the bloodsuckers around late in the season.

  “Did you know that only female mosquitoes bite?” I followed the buzz until it landed on Mason’s arm, then squashed it with a slap. “Take that, little lady.”

  Mason quirked an eyebrow at me.

  “How about this? I promise never to bore you with small talk. Only relevant information.”

  “Like the gender of biting insects?” He chuckled, a deep throaty sound, and I realized how much I missed making him laugh.

  “Exactly. And in return, you promise not to kill yourself.”

  “Deal.”

  It felt so right to be sitting there with him, swapping morbid banter. I let the feeling go on for a bit before I asked, “Why did you really ask me here?”