by DAVID B. COE
We were around, of course, in more places than most people would have guessed. We were cops and school teachers, doctors and lawyers. Hell, there were weremystes in the military. At one time, if the claims that flew around the magical community could be believed, back in the early 70s, and again in the early 90s, the Pentagon tried to create a special unit of magical Green Berets. It makes sense: combine that level of military training with spell casting ability, and they’d have a force that was all but unstoppable. But as with all efforts to integrate weremystes and their magic more fully into American society, the effort foundered on the phasings and their effects on our minds. Special Ops guys went through vigorous psychological screenings. They lived violent dangerous lives, and they needed to be available at a moment’s notice, 24/7. Throwing a three-day phasing into that equation created problems, both immediate and potential. As far as I know, the Magic Special Ops program never got off the ground. As far as I know.
And its failure pointed to the larger problem weremystes faced. The stigma that surrounded mental illness in this country was a heavy burden, for those who were ill as well as for their families, in large part because mental illness was still so poorly understood. Well, so was magic. And as a result that stigma was far worse for those whose mental problems came from being weremystes.
This was why most of my kind used blockers to hide their abilities, and to spare themselves the effects of the phasings. Blockers were a family of drugs, the first of which came into use centuries ago. Many of them were legal; a few, like Spark, were not. But all of them, including Spark, affected weremystes the same way. Rather than getting us high, they guarded us from the psychosis of the phasings and suppressed our magic. If a weremyste was willing to give up magic, he could use blockers to avoid the phasings and the insanity that inevitably came with them. Seems like an easy choice, right? How many people could afford to lose their minds for three nights out of each month? How many people wouldn’t do everything possible to avoid an otherwise inevitable descent into insanity?
But for a few of us, the choice wasn’t quite so clear. Blockers were an all-or-nothing deal. I couldn’t take them for the three days around the full moon and cast spells the rest of the month. That would have been great if it were possible, but as I had learned a thousand times, the world didn’t usually make things that convenient for anyone, runecrafters included. In order for blockers to work, they had to be in our systems at a certain level for an extended period. If I wanted to escape the phasings, I would have had to give up magic entirely, and like my father, I wasn’t willing to do that. So I didn’t use blockers at all. I suffered through the phasings; I accepted as fate the eventual loss of my sanity. And I wielded my magic.
The truth was, even as I argued with Namid about mastering runecrafting, I liked being able to conjure. When I was a cop it gave me an edge over the creeps I was trying to put away, and now that I was a PI, it still came in handy. Maybe more to the point, it’s who I am. I can’t give up being a weremyste any more than I can give up being a Fearsson.
But I wasn’t ready to share all of this with Billie Castle and her readers, and I’m pretty sure she wasn’t ready to hear it.
“Mister Fearsson?” she said, eyeing me with what might have been concern.
“I think he blinds them because he’s nuts,” I told her. “I think he blinds them for the same reason another serial killer might rape his victims or dismember them or do something else that horrifies the rest of us. It gives him a sense of power, of control. It makes him feel like a god in his twisted little universe.”
“And why do you think the police have had so much trouble tracking him down?”
Again, an honest answer would have come back to magic. We couldn’t catch the guy because despite all appearances, he wasn’t a typical serial killer. He wasn’t crazy, and didn’t secretly want to be caught, like some of those nut-jobs you read about in the papers. He killed with purpose, he was sane and calculating and intelligent, and he had managed to leave no clues of value at any of the thirty-plus crime scenes we’d found. But I couldn’t tell her all of that, either. So I tried to punt.
“I’m not on the force, Miss Castle. I haven’t been for some time. Questions about the PPD’s investigation should go to the PPD.”
“You were with the force for the first year and a half of this case. I would think that you’d have some ideas.”
I shrugged. “I think he’s been clever,” I said. “And I think he’s been lucky. But I also think that his luck will run out sooner or later. It always does in these cases. The PPD will get him.”
“Do you think they would have already if you’d remained on the job?”
I laughed, short and harsh, and reached for a piece of pizza. Taking a bite, I shook my head and said “I’m not going to second-guess the detectives working this case.”
“I’m not asking you to,” she said, taking a piece of her own. “But I would think that you’d have spent the last nineteen months second-guessing the department’s decision to fire you.”
I stopped chewing and glared at her. Her gaze didn’t flinch at all. Pretty, smart, and tough. At that moment, I wasn’t sure which I wanted to do more: get up and walk out, or ask her out on a date.
I looked away before she did. “I’m not talking about this.”
“Why were you fired, Mister Fearsson? Did it have something to do with the Blind Angel killings?”
“No.” I said it automatically, my gaze snapping back to hers. As soon as I thought about it, though, I wondered if this was true. I was fired because of the phasings, because my erratic behavior and my inability to function for three nights every fourth week, became too much for my superiors to tolerate, and too much for Kona to cover up. I was fired because I’m a weremyste. And wasn’t that the same reason the Blind Angel killer had evaded us for so long?
Billie must have seen the doubt in my eyes. “Did they blame you for the fact that they couldn’t catch him? Is that what happened?”
I shook my head, resisting the urge to say You’re getting colder. “No. It wasn’t like that at all.”
“Then what?”
I bit into my slice of pizza and chewed.
Billie frowned and took a bite, staring right back at me, like we were kids daring each other to be the first to blink.
“Do you like prying into other people’s lives?” I asked after some time, breaking a lengthy silence and reaching for a second slice of pizza.
“That’s not what I do. I give people information. I tell stories about real-life situations. And occasionally I uncover truths that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden.”
“That’s what you think you’re doing now, isn’t it?”
She hesitated. “Yes, I guess it is.”
“I think you’re going for the cheap thrill. I think what you’re doing here with me is no different from what the tabloids do, or what you see on those cheesy news shows that come on TV after the real news.”
From the way she responded you would have thought that I’d slapped her. Her mouth was open in a little ‘o’ and her eyes were so wide I thought she might cry. But that look only lasted for the span of a heartbeat or two. Then she pressed her lips into a thin hard line and the muscles in her jaw tightened. It’s funny, but I didn’t notice until that instant that her eyes were vivid green and as hard as emeralds.
“You know what I think, Mister Fearsson?” Her voice had gone cold. She wasn’t trying to charm a story out of me anymore. “I think that all the stuff they wrote about you when you left the force was true. You’re a drunk or an addict, or you’re just too unreliable to serve in the PPD. I think you deserved what happened to you.”
Others had said much worse to me. People I’d known for years, fellow cops who I’d respected. Her insults came too late and from too great a distance to hurt.
I put down what was left of the slice I’d been eating, took one last sip of Coke, and wiped my face with a napkin. Then I slid out of the booth and
stood.
“Thanks for dinner.”
I didn’t wait for an answer. And she didn’t try to stop me from leaving.
I went back to my office, intending to do a bit of billing work from my last few cases. I’d let it pile up, and I was still stewing over my conversation with Billie. This seemed as good a time as any to tackle a few mindless tasks. My hands were shaking, I was so mad. But I knew that would pass.
The answer machine was blinking—two messages. The first was from Kona and had come in around the time Billie and I were sitting down to eat:
“Hi, partner. Just got a call from Pete. The Deegan autopsy didn’t turn up anything too surprising. Cause of death is ‘sudden, trauma-induced cardiac arrest,’ just like the others. It’ll be a day or two before the toxicology report comes back, but Pete’s convinced that Claudia was high on Spark when she died. Otherwise, nothing new. Our friend doesn’t change much from killing to killing. Let me know what you found out from Robby. Bye.”
“Sudden, trauma-induced cardiac arrest.” I’d never heard the phrase before Gracia Rosado’s death. Now it had become a morbid joke I shared with Kona. Basically, it was the medical examiner’s way of saying “something really bad happened and it killed her.”
The second message was from Howard Wriker, who wanted to know if I’d learned anything yet about the drugs Claudia had been using. I wasn’t ready to tell him or the Deegans anything. I felt no need to protect Robby Sommer, but the last thing Kona needed was for the Deegans to be breathing down her neck about Robby, when we had no solid proof that he’d been involved in any way with Claudia’s murder. Hearing his voice did remind me though, that I needed to tell Kona that Robby had been running a spark den over in the South Mountain district. She couldn’t arrest him on the little evidence I had for her, but she could pass the word to narcotics and they could keep an eye on him.
I called Kona at her home. Margarite answered, gave me a big hello, and insisted that I join them for dinner this coming weekend. I didn’t bother reminding her that the full moon was coming up; even with friends, the phasings weren’t easy to talk about. I asked for a raincheck. She said the following week would be good, and passed the phone to Kona.
“You been with Robby all this time?” Kona asked without saying hello.
“No. A reporter who I met at the Deegans’ tracked me down at my office and asked me a bunch of questions.”
“A reporter?”
“A blogger, actually. But Wriker was afraid of her, so I assume she’s pretty big.”
“You mean Billie Castle?”
Why was I the only person who’d never heard of her? I guess I needed to spend more time online. Or not.
“Yeah. You know her work?”
“Of course. Who doesn’t?”
“Well, anyway,” I said. “She wanted to know all about the Blind Angel case and why the PPD hadn’t caught the guy yet, and what my firing had to do with it all.”
“What did you tell her?”
“As little as possible.”
I could almost see Kona nodding. “Good. How’d it go with Robby?”
“He admitted selling to Claudia. Seems they were an item for a while. But he denied having anything to do with the other victims.”
“You think he was lying?” Before I could answer, she said “Never mind. Of course he was lying.”
“I doubt we can prove it, though,” I said.
“Yeah, so do I.”
“And speaking of things we can’t prove, you should tell narcotics to keep one eye on Robby and another on a Spark den on 23rd near the freeway and the railroad.”
“All right. Care to explain that?”
“Not really. Not now.”
We both fell silent for a few seconds.
“Listen, Kona, I know this is the PPD’s investigation, and I should stay away from actual investigating—”
“I never should have said what I did, Justis. It’s not like we’re tracking down leads or focusing in on suspects. We’ve got nothing here.”
“Then you won’t mind if I poke around a little, maybe check in with some of my kind?”
“Not at all,” she said. “Let me know what you find out.”
“Of course.”
“And partner?”
“Yeah.”
“Watch yourself. If you start getting close to this guy, he’s not going to like it.”
“Right. Talk to you tomorrow.”
I hung up and took care of some of that paperwork. I would have preferred to head home, but I wanted to make sure that Billie Castle was long gone before I stepped outside again.
By the time I headed for the Z-ster, night had fallen and the moon was up. It was well past a quarter full and bone white in a velvet sky. And though we were still several days away from the full, I could already feel it tugging at my mind, bending my thoughts, making me shiver in spite of the warm air.
Describing the phasings to someone who wasn’t a weremyste was like trying to describe color to someone who had been born blind. Words weren’t adequate. The closest I’d heard anyone come to getting it right was something my dad told me not long after my mom died. We weren’t getting along at the time, and his grip on reality, which had already become tenuous before Mom’s death, was slipping fast. But what he told me then in anger still rang true to this day.
“It’s like somebody reaches a hand into your stinkin’ brain,” he said, “and swirls it around, making a mess of everything. The thoughts are still there—your sense of who you are and how the people around you fit into your life—but they’re scrambled. There’s no order, no time or space or story line. The boundaries disappear. Love and hate, rage and joy, fear and comfort—you can’t tell anymore where one ends and the next begins. And the worst part is, you know it’s happened—you know that it all made sense a short while before, and that now it’s gone. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”
That was how it felt to me every time. You’d think after a couple of hundred phasings—three days a month for half a lifetime—I’d get used to it, or find some way to fight my way through. But each one feels like the first. I’ve tried to brace myself, waiting for moonrise the way I would a shot at a doctor’s office. It doesn’t do a damn bit of good. As soon as the full moon appears on the horizon, I feel those boundaries my dad talked about being sucked out of my mind.
That was the tug I felt now, with the moon shining down on me. It wouldn’t happen until the end of the week, but already it was reaching for me, testing my defenses and finding them as weak as ever.
I was still staring up at the moon when I reached the Z-ster, which is probably why I didn’t notice anything as I got into the car and put the key in the ignition.
“Ohanko.”
“Geez!” I said, nearly jumping out of my skin.
The runemyste was in the passenger seat, his watery form glimmering with the pale light of a nearby street lamp.
“Good God, Namid! You scared the piss out of me.”
“You need to use more care, Ohanko. Did I not tell you—?”
“Yeah, tread like the fox. I remember.” I shook my head. My heart was trip hammering in my chest. “What the hell are you doing here, anyway? I never see you unless you’re tying to get me to train.”
He shrugged, or came as close to a shrug as a liquid ghost could. “I thought to see how you were faring with your investigation.”
I stared at him.
“Have you learned anything?”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me that you’re checking up on me?”
“Does that surprise you?”
“You’ve never done it before.”
He said nothing.
Abruptly I could see again the scrying I’d done in my office: that ghoulish dark hand, framed against the hot glow of embers.
“Is this about the vision I had this morning?”
Before he could answer, I thought of something else: Crossing the street after my c
onversation with Robby, feeling so sure that someone was toying with the idea of killing me. I still had the instincts of a cop, and normally that was a good thing. But maybe in this case, without realizing it at the time, I had been feeling things a sorcerer would feel.
“You’ve never done anything like this before,” I said again. “Unless that was you following me earlier today.”
He frowned, the smooth waters of his face roughening, like when a sudden wind scythes across the surface of a calm lake. “What happened earlier? Tell me.”
“I thought someone was watching me, an enemy. But I have no idea who it could have been.”
The runemyste’s nod was slow, thoughtful. He turned his head so that he was looking through the windshield at the street. “Good, Ohanko. Trust your senses.”
Great. More riddles. Just once I wanted him to give me a straight answer. “You wouldn’t tell me before what all this is about. Are you ready to tell me now?”
“No.”
“Come on, Namid. You’re interested in my case, though you never have been before. You’re following me around, which you never do. Clearly something big is going on. You have to tell me what it is.”
He faced me again, his eyes gleaming in the darkness. “You misunderstand, Ohanko. It is not that I refuse to tell you, but rather that I cannot. I do not know.”
Well, there you go. That’s a straight answer. Turns out I would have preferred another riddle.
CHAPTER 6
I know precious little about Namid’s life as a Zuni shaman. I’ve studied the A’shiwi, as the Zuni people call themselves; I’ve studied most of the native peoples of the Southwest. But the K’ya’na-Kwe clan has been extinct for centuries, and since the ancient A’shiwi clans left no written histories, information on the runemyste’s people is pretty scarce. And it’s not as though Namid spends a lot of time talking about himself. I’ve asked him questions now and then, but he’s about as forthcoming with information about his own life as he is about anything else.
