I shove half a biscuit in my mouth. “Like, if this ‘enemy’ the emails kept referring to is a threat to the general practitioner population?”
“Exactly. If they weighed the costs of the ICM’s ire against the benefits of summoning a creature to destroy this unknown enemy, then—”
“You’re missing something,” murmurs a meek voice at the end of the table. Erica and I turn to Cooper, who’s staring intently at a piece of steak on his fork so he doesn’t have to look at us.
“What do you mean?” Erica asks. “A clue?”
Cooper slowly lowers the fork. “Cal, you said the final email sent to Slate by Halliburton mentioned that the werewolves were the ones who acquired the instructions for the summoning.”
“So?” I try to figure out where he’s going with this.
Erica beats me to it.
“Of course,” she groans. “If numerous high-level wizards and witches were working together to perform a powerful spell, why would they rely on Wolves to procure their materials? A large group of practitioners is far more formidable than a pack of werewolves, and definitely a fuck-ton sneakier. So even if the acquisition of the summoning instructions involved a heist, the practitioners would have been the better team to send. Thus, if the Wolves were the ones who did the heavy lifting, it means there weren’t many practitioners working on the scheme with Slate and McKinney’s crew.”
“Huh.” I smirk at Cooper. “Nice catch, buddy. You’d make a fine detective yourself.”
Cooper examines my multitude of bandages. “I think I’ll stick with the library for the time being.”
Erica snickers, then collects herself with another sip of wine. “All right. Maybe Halliburton wasn’t the only practitioner involved, but there couldn’t have been more than, say, three or four. So few that attempting to procure the summoning instructions would have been too dangerous for them. Makes sense.” She taps a nail against the crystal glass. “What I want to know, then, is what the hell were they trying to summon? If simply getting the instructions for dragging this creature out of the Eververse required a dangerous acquisition mission, then this summoning must be serious. Like, Charun serious.”
I grimace at the resurfacing memories of Charun beating me to a pulp. More than once. “Yeah, well, whatever it was, the ‘sinful souls’ they were going to use as fuel have all been Called beyond the veil. So I’m not sure the creature’s identity matters much at this point. What I’m more concerned about right now—beyond Donahue, still on the loose—is the original question at the center of this case.”
Erica responds, “Who killed the Jameson trio?”
“Right.” I stir my potatoes with my fork. “Out of all the shit I’ve waded through on this case, that is the one and only aspect of the investigation for which we have no leads. I mean, clearly, it was an agent of the great ‘enemy.’ But the emails were so vague about the enemy’s identity that we don’t even know if they’re an individual, an organization, or a whole species.”
Erica tilts her head to the side. “Well, I mean, if we’re talking humans and werewolves—”
“Sinful souls?” Cooper suddenly says. “That was the exact phrasing?” His eyes are cast down at the tabletop, but this time, he’s not avoiding eye contact in embarrassment. He’s thinking. Lids low. Lips drawn into a thin line. Fingers stroking his smooth chin. Something in the vast array of Archive knowledge in his brain has pinged his attention.
“Yeah, Coop.” I set my utensils on my plate. “They used the same term many times throughout the emails. Why? Sound familiar?”
Cooper scoots his chair back and rises without answering me. He marches over to his backpack, which rests against the wall next to the fridge. After unzipping the main pouch, he retrieves a tablet. He crouches on the floor, balances the tablet on his knee, and unlocks the screen. Without looking over his shoulder, he says, “Give me some time. I think I might have something in a set of old research notes I made for a missing persons case a few years ago.”
Erica mouths to me, Years?
I shrug and reply, He’s smart.
She looks impressed.
“Hey, Cooper,” I say. “You don’t have to sit on the floor. If you need some quiet time, you can take a chair in the living room, or—”
Cooper stands mechanically, the tablet held close to his face. He then shuffles through the kitchen doorway, takes a sharp left, and disappears down the hall toward my bedroom. The door slams shut a second later. He must have kicked it.
“Wow.” Erica whistles. “Someone’s into their job.”
“He can get pretty intense about this research stuff.” I snatch the last biscuit from the basket and smother it in butter. “While we’re waiting, anything else you want to discuss relevant to the Jameson case, or should I go put on a Jeopardy rerun?”
Lightning fast, she rips the buttery biscuit from my hand and wolfs it down. “Well, if you must know,” she replies, ignoring my betrayed expression, “the only thing I’ve been working on, besides placating Marcus and Ambrose every time they start ranting about DSI’s insolent behavior”—there’s that nasally Ambrose impression again—“is tracking down the location of Halliburton’s safe house.”
“Using magic?”
“What else?” She shrugs. “I’m no detective.”
“Any luck?”
“If I’d had any, I would have said so by now.” She downs the rest of her wine in one gulp. It’s not a small amount. “Halliburton may have been some kind of criminal, but he wasn’t a dumb criminal. Either he’s got his second house warded to the teeth, to the point where it can throw off tracking spells within a several-mile radius of the property. Or, he was paranoid enough to carry charms that masked his whereabouts at all times.”
Pushing my plate away, finally sated for the first time in the better part of a week, I throw my head back and release a sigh so deep it rattles my cracked ribs. I ignore the pain and say, “Hey, you didn’t happen to try tracking me down after I got kidnapped, did you?”
The remaining flicker of Erica’s mirth is snuffed out in an instant. “I did, actually. For twelve hours straight. Halliburton must have set McKinney and his crew up with similar protections. The best I could get from my standard grab-bag of tracking spells was that you were somewhere outside the city limits. Helpful, I know.”
“Twelve hours?” My tone softens despite my best efforts. “Didn’t know you cared that much, witch.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Crow.” She hides a faint smile behind the back of her hand. “I have a reputation as a strong witch to uphold, you know? Can’t be slacking off when my city’s in trouble.”
“Right.” I crack a grin of my own. “I totally understand. You—”
The door to my bedroom swings open with a mighty whoosh and slams against the wall so hard I’ll probably have a hole to match the one next to my front door. Cooper pads down the hall, turns the corner into the kitchen, flips the tablet around to show us a drawing on the screen, and shouts triumphantly, “Ammit! Guardian of Duat, the Egyptian Underworld. Known as the Devourer of Souls!”
As the words fade in the still air, a grim and lonely silence envelops my home.
Cooper lets the tablet fall to his side.
Erica plants her face in her hands and whispers under her breath.
And me? I have to resist the urge to stab myself in the eye with my bent old fork, as I say, “There’s an underworld involved? Just like in the Etruscan case?”
Cooper, now a bit pale, licks his lips. “Could the two cases be related to the same...scheme?”
“Erica.” I rise from the table, palms flat on the surface, back bent painfully. “You told me a powerful sorcerer tricked those kids into stealing Vanth’s key, tricked them into signing their own death warrants, tricked them into getting butchered. Could Halliburton have fit that bill? Was he strong enough for that role? Smart enough for that role? Did he know the Eververse well enough to play the mastermind?”
Erica drops h
er hands to her lap and stares off into nowhere, considering the possibility. “I admit I didn’t know Halliburton that well, but I do remember he had a keen interest in the Eververse. He had frequent conversations with other witches and wizards about Eververse creatures, but they were always in theory, always hypothetical…” She quietly calls herself a fucking moron. “Always phrased in ways that would suggest he’d never actually been there. When of course he’d been there. Goddammit! It was him. He was the bastard who sold those poor kids out to Charun and Tuchulcha.”
I slam my hands on the table. Erica’s wine glass tumbles off and shatters on the floor.
“Yes. It was him.” I stare into Erica’s eyes, my teeth clenched so hard they ache. And then I say in a bleak and furious tone, a dangerous tone, “But was it only him?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
There’s always something spine-tingling about waking up in the dead of night.
I jolt straight up in my bed the instant the clock strikes 2:00 AM, a film of sweat gluing the sheets to my skin. My hair is damp, my bandages limp and wrinkled from tossing and turning, and there’s a cooling, sticky sensation somewhere near my hip bone where I tore a stitch and started bleeding in my restlessness. The tail end of a nightmare slinks off toward the shadows of my mind; I can’t recall the subject beyond vague impressions of sharp teeth and echoing howls. But even if I was reliving my time with McKinney and friends in a twisted dream world, that doesn’t explain why I woke up.
Nightmares don’t wake me up. I suffer through the night.
Trying to calm my rapid breathing, I peel the sheets off my bare chest, careful to avoid snagging any of the bandages. My body is stiff and aching, but I popped some meds before I dozed off, so the pain isn’t bad enough to keep me pinned to the mattress. I slip my trembling legs off the bed and rise, using the nightstand to support myself. As I do, I survey my bedroom. Search for signs of a disturbance. Something out of place. An object that fell off a shelf when a big truck blew by on the street below. Or something that loudly shifted under the pressing force of gravity.
Everything looks the same as it did before I went to sleep.
So what woke me?
I grab a pair of jeans sticking halfway out of my dresser drawer, pull them on without buttoning them, and then reach behind my mattress, under the headboard, and tug out the personal handgun I hid there for easy access. I double-check that the little .22 is loaded and flip the safety off, but don’t slip my finger onto the trigger quite yet. I’m too shaky. Heart palpitating. Shivers creeping up my spine. Breaths short and ragged. Still sweating.
Don’t want to blast a(nother) hole through the wall if I jump at the sound of a creaking floorboard.
Quietly, I open my bedroom door and hobble into the hall, checking my bathroom and kitchen for any disturbances as I go. Nothing. Slipping into the living room, I peer over the back of the sofa, where Cooper is curled up under the same quilt I napped with earlier. His blond hair pokes out from the top of the quilt, and a soft, almost imperceptible snore resonates from under the fabric. Whatever disturbed me did not disturb him.
It could have been my imagination, I admit. Maybe nothing’s wrong.
But after my experience with Donahue outside Stein’s, I’m too paranoid to let it go without a thorough investigation. I carefully back away from the couch to avoid waking my designated babysitter and head for the front door. Ears focused on the hall beyond, I hear nothing. Eyes peeled on the door, I see nothing. There’s no strange taste or smell lingering in the air either, or anything else to indicate an intruder. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t someone or something waiting outside my apartment.
Not Erica, I know. She ran off after dinner to look into Halliburton’s ICM connections, in search of possible co-conspirators.
Not any of my teammates. They worry about me, but they aren’t fearful enough to camp outside my home overnight.
Not Charun or Tuchulcha. (I hope.)
And not Donahue either—can’t be. The risk of coming here would be too great.
So…?
With a deep breath to calm my racing pulse, I raise my gun, release the bolt, and haul the door open. The dimly lit hallway is empty.
Peeking out, I check each end of the hall, but I don’t spot anybody scuttling away. And I don’t sense any fresh magic in the air either, so no one veiled themselves a split second before the door moved. I loiter there in the doorway, gun in my hand, for fifteen seconds, thirty. Nothing happens.
It was your imagination, Cal, I chide myself as I turn to head back inside. You got worked up by your nightmare, and the fear carried over into the waking world. Put the gun down and go back to sleep, you—
The gun slips out of my hand and clatters across the foyer.
Not because I’m clumsy. But because I’m stunned.
Clinging to the front of my door, in the exact same place it was last time…is a yellow sticky note.
But it can’t be. It can’t.
The sticky note that led us to the occult website during the Etruscan case—that was from one of the kids. Wasn’t it? And all of those poor kids are either dead now or severely disabled from the injuries sustained when Tuchulcha blew up the boathouse on Lake Contessa. Last time I checked, a couple weeks ago, none of the survivors had been released from the hospital. Two of them had even been moved out of state, to a special burn victim facility.
So how can I be staring at another, identical sticky note?
That could only mean…the first note didn’t come from one of the kids.
It was left for me by someone else. By someone outside the Etruscan case.
Or someone whose involvement we never discovered.
I reach up with a quaking hand and snatch the note off the door. This time, the message is longer, more detailed. Instead of a simple URL, there are three lines:
BACKUP CLOCK SUPPLY
TWO DAYS TO SUMMONING
5786 PRIMROSE AVENUE
I reread the note twice before the words sink in. And a cold far below the ice outside freezes the blood in my veins.
Because those three lines mean three very important things:
First, the summoning I supposedly thwarted by releasing all the souls in the clocks in Slate’s basement? It’s still possible because the Jameson trio had more than one storage room full of sacrifice fuel. Somewhere in Aurora, right now, there are hundreds more clocks containing hundreds more shades, trapped and awaiting their doom—awaiting the moment Ammit, Devourer of Souls, swallows them whole on her ascent from the Egyptian Underworld.
Second, McKinney was partially right. There is at least one other ICM conspirator involved in the summoning plot, and they are planning to perform the summoning in Halliburton’s stead. Two days from now.
And third—5786 Primrose Avenue? That has to be Halliburton’s second secret house. Where the summoning is set to happen.
I clench my fist around the sticky note, crumpling it.
I don’t understand. Who could be in such a prime position to know these key details about multiple murder cases and yet remain totally unknown to DSI? And furthermore, why are they relaying these details to me, Cal Kinsey, rookie detective? Why not Riker, the famous elite captain? Why not Commissioner Bollinger, who runs DSI, for god’s sake? I’m a relative nobody in the office hierarchy, so who would pick me, above anyone else, as the recipient of this critical information? A witch? A wizard? An owl man? I…don’t have time to wonder.
Forty-eight hours until the summoning of Ammit.
The identity of my mysterious “benefactor” will have to wait.
“Cal?” Cooper, dressed in a faded pair of sweatpants and a rumpled white tank top, leans against the doorframe of the living room. He rubs his bleary eyes and blinks at me a few times, like he’s not sure if he’s awake or still dreaming. “What’re you doing up? Did something happen?”
Dropping my hand to the doorknob, I softly close the door and relock it, then stumble over to the half-asleep archivi
st. I hold the sticky note in front of his face and flick the switch for the hall light so he doesn’t have to squint to read it. He takes the paper in his hand and smooths out the wrinkles as he skims the message.
For some time, he stands there with a blank expression on his face, uncomprehending. But suddenly, his brain finds the on button, and concern races over his expression, tightening his lips and widening his eyes. His back and shoulders straighten, muscles tense.
“Oh, my god,” he whispers. “This is bad, Cal. Ammit is a powerful Egyptian deity. If somebody summons this thing and gains control over it…”
“They’ll have an unstoppable weapon they can use to fight the enemy.”
Cooper swallows hard. “We’ve got to call this in. Riker and Ella need to know.”
“Agreed.” I hold out my hand. “Can I borrow your phone?”
He backs into the living room and finds his backpack, which he left sitting on one of my chairs. After a second of searching, he produces the phone and offers it to me. While I’m scrolling through his contacts to find Ella, Cooper scrutinizes the note again. “Say, Cal, where did this info come from exactly?”
“The invisible man who leaves helpful sticky notes on my front door.”
Cooper gawks. “What?”
“I’ll explain later.” I hit the dial button, and the phone rings three times.
Ella picks up, yawning into the microphone, and mutters, “What’s up, Cooper? Did Cal escape out the window?”
My hand falls to my hip, and I scowl, even though Ella can’t see my body language through the phone. “Is that really what you think of me?”
City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set Page 46
