After six hours of recounting my “epic hero tale” to the DSI commissioner, my captain, a bunch of other captains, and more gawping agents than I can count with all my fingers and toes, I finally hop out of my truck in front of my apartment building and head inside. Only to find a witch waiting at my front door with a mysterious backpack.
As I approach, Erica the witch cocks an eyebrow and says, “Heard a rumor you came back from the dead, hot Crow. Glad to see it was true.” Her gaze roves over my entire body, black and blue from head to toe. “Though I have to admit you look more like a zombie right now than a breathing human being.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.” I hobble up to the door and tug my key out of my pocket. “You should see the cut on my neck—eighteen stitches—where the less ugly guardian of the Underworld almost took my head off with a sword.”
Erica gives me a sideways glance. “Sounds like a fascinating story, Crow. You going to let me in, so we can chat about it over a nice drink, or are you planning to make me stand in your hall all night long?”
“As much as I would like to treat myself to some good booze, witch”—I unlock the door and turn the knob—“I don’t have any at the moment. Haven’t been to the grocery store, what with all these Eververse monsters running around.”
“Well, then, Cal Kinsey, I guess it’s your lucky day.” Erica slides the backpack off her shoulder and unzips it, revealing a bottle of wine and a few glasses to match. How she didn’t break those fragile glasses by stuffing them into a flimsy bag, I’ll never know. Must be a magic quirk.
“Okay, that is a little enticing.” I push the door open and gesture for her to enter. “I guess I’ll let you in this time.”
She slinks by me, donning a wicked smirk, and I follow her into my apartment.
For the record, we don’t have sex. This time.
Erica pops the wine cork, fills the two glasses, and we sit on my living room couch, discussing my trip to the Eververse. She’s never been there herself, but she knows a few wizards and witches who’ve dared to venture past the veil and lived to tell the tale. She describes to me a few of the places they’ve visited and the types of creatures they’ve encountered on their journeys. She listens with great interest as I describe, in return, the imposing beauty and prowess of Vanth, the terrifying shadowed form of Aita, lurking beyond the gates, the true nature of Tuchulcha the fire spirit and his creepy head of snakes.
We speak for hours on end, until I start to run out of steam.
Erica plucks the empty wine glass from my hand. “Think it might be night-night time for you, Cal. You’re barely sitting up.”
I lean back into my comfy couch cushion, closing my eyes, and reply, “I don’t disagree with you, but we do have a bit more to talk about.”
“Oh, like what?” She sets both glasses on my coffee table.
“Like our relationship.” I peek at her with one eye. “And if we have one.”
“Figured that was going to come up.” Erica stretches her arms until her joints pop, chuckling. “Going to be frank with you, Crow. I’m not up for any romance right now. Got burned on a long-term relationship last year, and I’m not back in that playing field yet. But if you want to stop by my house every now and then for a fun night, I wouldn’t mind. I’m not against a friends-with-benefits situation.”
I open my other eye and stare at her, then sigh in relief. I was worried this would get awkward, but she’s driving in the direction I wanted her to go. I wonder if it’s because she’s already guessed my feelings, or if her own match up with mine by coincidence. Either way… “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that. I’m not up for a serious relationship either. I mean, hell, I almost got myself killed the other day—who knows what else DSI will throw my way? I can’t be thinking about marriage and kids and all that. Not now. Maybe not ever.” I shrug. “But I can certainly think about sex. They can’t take that away from a guy.”
Erica grins. “No, they can’t. Tell you what. I’ll give you my number. Text me when you’re feeling lonely, and I’ll do the same.”
I match her grin. “Sounds good to me.”
We exchange phones, type in our numbers, say our goodbyes for the evening, and then Erica packs up her things to leave. As she’s slinging her pack over her shoulder, she catches me off guard with a quick kiss to the corner of my lips. At my surprised expression, she says, “That’s for not getting your dumb self killed by jumping into the Eververse. I would have been really bummed to lose your fine ass so soon.” She smacks my cheeks with both her hands and rises from the couch, heading toward the hall.
Before she reaches the threshold, I call out, “Say, what’s the deal with you and Riker?”
Her feet stop padding forward. “You think there’s a deal?”
I crane my neck to peer over the top of the couch, considering how to phrase my response. “There is. No question. You’ve known him for a while, haven’t you? And you’ve been, what, trading insider info in order to push your respective organizations to make the right moves in the right situations?”
“Oh-ho. Look at that. The hot Crow is clever.” She glances at me over her shoulder, eyes narrow and sly. “Me and Nick go back quite a few years. You got that right. And you’re not wrong about our arrangement either. We talk, sometimes about the weather, sometimes about things that have a bigger impact on the world.” A smile of triumph spreads across her face, as if she’s played a long con. “How do you think Riker earned his reputation, solving so many more cases than everybody else? How do you think he’s avoided so many losses—every major loss, until France, until the one mission where he left Aurora for a place an American witch could have no intel on?”
A sense of awe washes through my veins, this time for Erica’s cunning, not her raw, impressive magic power. She and Riker have been ducking under every barrier of mutual distaste, every line of bureaucracy between the ICM and DSI for years, in order to clean up Aurora’s streets, stop the monsters, save the innocent. For a guy who pretends so thoroughly to play by all the rules, Riker must be able to lie like a motherfucker, if he’s been hiding his arrangement with Erica this long, finding ways to play off apparent leaps of logic and random guesses, all of them correct, every time, as luck or intuition.
My respect for Riker grows, as does my respect for Erica. She told me straight up the ICM would bind her powers if she helped DSI outside the Council’s given bounds.
I reflect her mischievous smile back to her and say, “Good to know that’s how it is. I was worried, for a minute there, that you were trading Riker in for a newer model. Which would have made for a really awkward conversation with my boss.”
“Well, I never!” Erica huffs, feigns offense, and rolls her eyes. “Riker might be handsome on a good day, Cal, but I can do much, much better.”
“Oh, so I’m better?”
“You’re not bad.” She winks. “In more ways than one.”
“If you’re willing to spend some time teaching me, I can probably reach not bad at all.”
Erica snickers. “Was that another first boyfriend euphemism?”
“You bet.”
Turning on her toes, she marches off toward the door and gives me a short wave goodbye. “Call me, honey, when you want. I’m usually around for—”
“Hey.”
She pauses a few steps from the door and turns to face me one last time, her grin dropping into a frown at the tone of my voice. “What?”
I maneuver onto my knees on the couch, resting my elbow on the top, resting my hand in my palm, and hum a few notes, pondering the questions in my head. “You realize, don’t you, that there are two things in this case we still don’t know. They came up during the task meeting earlier, and no one had the answers.”
“What are those things?” Erica fingers the strap on her backpack. “Important things?”
“One of them, at least.” I sigh. “The less important one is the identity of the person who left the note on my door. The sticky note that had the address for the
forum on it. If it hadn’t been for that note, we might not have figured out who the kids were at all.” My fingernails bite into my bruised face, but I ignore the sting. “I assume it was one of the kids, somebody who saw me at the Memorial Garden and decided to turn the group in, scared of the vengeance they’d brought down upon themselves. But because so many of the kids are dead—and the ones left alive aren’t in any shape to talk, may never be—I’ll probably never find out who left the note.”
“But you want to know?” Erica rubs her bare arms, and I realize she doesn’t have a coat to combat the chilly evening. “You want to know who helped you get the first big break on your first big case?”
“No,” I reply, almost a whisper. “I want to know which one of them had a change of heart, tried to do the right thing. I want to know which one tried their best for redemption, but still paid the ultimate price in the end. I want to know which one tried to be a good person, tried to save their friends from a terrible fate.”
“Oh, Cal.” Erica gives me a look of unwavering pity. “If only good intentions didn’t pave the way to hell.” She sucks in a short breath. “The more important detail. What is that?”
With a push from my exhausted mind, I bury my conflicting feelings about the mystery note writer. “The other thing,” I reply, “is the buyer of the key. The person who gave the kids the instructions on how to break into the Underworld and steal a precious item from one of its powerful guardians. There’s no way on Earth or in the Eververse those kids concocted that heist plan on their own. I saw Vanth, Aita, Charun, Tuchulcha—any of them could have crushed those kids with a single blow. No minor practitioner, or five, or ten could have stood up to their might to steal Vanth’s key. They must have done it sneakily. Must have gotten all the tips and tricks from somebody who, for some reason, knew all the ins and outs of the Etruscan Underworld. Who the hell was that? Who the hell was the buyer?”
Erica the witch clenches her fists and casts me an expression of true anxiety, the same one she wore when I walked into her store and showed her the summoning circle. “A sorcerer,” she answers with certainty. “A sorcerer of great skill, great knowledge, great and dangerous power. Maybe human. Maybe not. Very few Earth-born creatures know the Eververse that well, and most who do know better than to walk its ways. Only the craziest among us practitioners, only those warped by dark, dark magic, would dare journey to the other side often enough to learn the layout of another realm, to learn its vulnerabilities.”
She backs toward my door and reaches out, brushing the hole in the wall I made the night the note appeared. She mutters, so quiet I almost miss the words, “No matter how you look at it, Cal, there’s a major player in this game. And since he failed to get that key, he’s probably not done playing.”
Epilogue
It’s a week and a day after my trip to the Eververse when I finally figure it out.
I wake up late, still home on leave by Navarro’s orders, fix myself a breakfast of sugary cereal and chocolate milk, and plop down on my couch to watch some crappy morning television. As I’m shoveling in the Cookie Crisp, I intermittently flip through the channels, too lazy to pull up the guide and scroll through two thousand options. I mean, you know there’s nothing good to watch, no matter how many channels you have, at 11:00 AM in the morning. After ten minutes of spooning and flipping, spooning and flipping, I surrender to the power of HGTV and start watching one of those shows about house flipping. The people on TV always make it seem so easy that I have it marked as a backup option in case this DSI thing doesn’t work out.
Satisfied, I drop the remote on the cushion next to me and keep on chewing away, as a demo team comes in and starts gutting the flip house. But, a few minutes later, during the most tense part of the show, when the flippers realize they’ve gone too far over budget and will never sell for a profit—Oh no!—I somehow manage to drop my spoon. It slips out of my fingers and falls between the couch cushions, and I scramble to retrieve it before the milk soaks into the fabric. At some point during my fumbling, I push a few buttons on the remote with my ass. And that exact sequence of buttons happens to equate to a valid channel number.
Yes, it is this sequence of stupid events that leads me to the revelation that changes my life forever.
The TV flips to the butt-designated channel, and a man’s voice comes through my speakers. I look up from the sofa cushions, realizing what just happened, and make to grab the remote, press the previous button, when—
A sense of déjà vu envelops me. So strong I seize up, muscles tight, and the cereal bowl tumbles right out of my frozen fingers. It hits the edge of my coffee table, shatters, chocolate milk and Cookie Crisp and shards of bowl spilling all over my carpet. But my brain doesn’t register the mess quite yet, won’t for nearly half an hour. Until I come out of the stupor that results from what I see on the TV screen:
A man with graying sideburns that I have never seen before but who looks painfully familiar stands at a podium, giving a speech. The live broadcast is on a foreign news channel, or a domestic station relaying foreign news. Whatever the case, the man on the screen is some important official from some important European country, giving an important speech about an important new law. What this law is about, I don’t care. How this law will affect people, I don’t care. Who this man on my screen is, I don’t care.
All I care about is placing his face, placing his voice in my memory. The drive to remember, remember is so overwhelming that I almost cry out like I’m in physical pain. And it does hurt, in my chest, in my head, this burning need to recall the memory of the man on the screen, recall it from where I buried it during a moment of fear and agony, during a moment of mind-shattering confusion, where I witnessed so much at once, heard so much at once, experienced so much at once…
And then it comes to me.
The memory of the man on the screen, giving a speech.
I saw him, from this same angle, at this same volume, during the jumbled vision I had the moment Vanth’s blade kissed my neck.
I…
I…
I sit on the sofa for half an hour, limp and listless, staring at the screen, with the cut on my neck stinging like a brand, before I’m able to process the truth.
When Vanth tried to kill me, my life flashed before my eyes.
The life I have lived. The life I will live.
I saw the future. I saw my future.
All of it.
Shade Chaser
City of Crows Book 2
DSI Encyclopedia Entry #1749
Shade
(see also, Ghost)
A shade is the soul of a deceased individual. Shades detach from the bodies they inhabited in life shortly after death. Most shades are immediately drawn into the Eververse in a process known as “the Call,” wherein they are pulled toward their designated afterlives.
Only a small percentage of shades remain on Earth for any significant amount of time. Those that do fall into two categories: 1) They have unfinished business that overrides the Call, compelling them to stay on Earth until their issues are resolved, or 2) They retain enough magic in their souls after death to ignore the Call. The latter category applies only to those who were magic practitioners in life, while the first category can apply to any shade.
Over time, ninety-nine percent of all shades will move onto the Eververse, either by their own will, or by the force of a magic practitioner banishing them “to the other side.” The small percentage of shades who linger on Earth for decades or even centuries create what people refer to as “hauntings.” Shades are able to create “hauntings” through being glimpsed by technology or certain sensitive individuals, or through using the small amount of magic that naturally builds up inside them over time.
While most shades are nonviolent, some have been known to utilize “hauntings” to scare or cause harm to living people. As such, policy dictates that shades involved in DSI investigations should be banished to the Eververse at the earliest convenience.
Prologue
Everything is going according to plan—until the building explodes.
We arrive at half past nine. The black SUV growls to a stop in the abandoned parking lot of the building on the northern outskirts of Aurora. It’s a nice little plot of land, a large, manmade pond on one side, some nice green space on the other, trees bare for late fall but neatly placed by some thoughtful landscaper. The building itself sports six stories of wide glass windows and is currently unoccupied. It’s being renovated for the new year, when several different businesses are set to move in. Insurance call centers, probably, along with some lonely entrepreneurs and a gaggle of small businesses with dead-end ideas. But really, whatever the building will be is irrelevant. What matters is that, right now, it’s a crime scene. A supernatural crime scene.
Amy is the first one out of the SUV. She slips from the front passenger seat and drops to the asphalt with a sharp crack, her boots shattering the thin ice that had already started to melt under the weight of a clear, sunny sky. Stretching, she surveys our surroundings and huffs out a little cloud of steam. Like me, she wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about being assigned this case—there’s a murder downtown that our team would have been perfect for, but Commissioner Bollinger tossed it to Nakamura and friends. So we get the probable accident case instead, which will last us all of thirty minutes, given our usual track record. It’s so lowbrow that Ella Dean didn’t even bother to tag along. She stayed at the office to help the captain with his never-ending mountain of paperwork.
So here we are, three Matrix rejects standing outside a deserted office building on a chilly Monday morning in Michigan.
Desmond, who drove, strolls around in a wide circle and appraises the area. He whistles, a sharp sound on the quiet air. “Nice place. I wouldn’t mind working here. Think we could convince Bollinger to swap offices?”
City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set Page 26
