City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set

by Clara Coulson

  Goddamn it, you’re supposed to evacuate a building when a fire alarm goes off! How irresponsible can you be?

  Okay. That’s it. There goes the last of my restraint.

  I kick open the basement door and march across the room in the most menacing stance a guy my size can take. The bouncer spots me coming and rolls up his sleeves, ready to avenge his colleague with the tenderized testicles.

  But that isn’t going to happen. You know why?

  Because I yank my gun out of its holster, point it at the ceiling, and pull the trigger.

  Everybody in the room freezes in terror.

  I stare the strip club owner in his beady eyes and shout, “Evacuate the fucking building!”

  The owner gapes at me. The bouncer, who’s unarmed, shrinks back. And after a thirty-second standoff, alarms and the monotone voice choking the background noise, the Jake from Stanford lookalike, of all people, makes a break for the front hallway, shoves the owner and the bouncer out of his path, and runs out the door. As he goes, he yells, “Screw this! I’m out of here.”

  And that’s the action that sets off the stampede.

  Suddenly, everyone is running, well-dressed party attendees tripping over each other as they race for the doors, half-naked strippers tugging their bras back on as they shimmy for their dressing-room exit behind the stages, the bouncer and the club owner backtracking down the front hall, the latter pointing at me with a wrinkly finger and mumbling vague threats, something about lawsuits and that he’ll have my head for this. The bouncer grabs his boss by the arm and leads him outside, where, I can see, the guy I kneed is crouching on the sidewalk, still trying to recover from the blow.

  I wait inside the main room for another full minute—painfully aware of how little time I have left before the wards activate—until everyone in sight has left, and then I quickly run around, checking the dressing room for any loitering strippers, the offices for any other employees, and the bathrooms.

  When I’m satisfied the club is empty, my flight response kicks in like my pants are on fire, and I rush for the front door. As I near the door, I spot the owner and two bouncers still standing on the sidewalk, while everyone else has now congregated in the park, a safe distance away. Some people have a death wish, I guess.

  Without stopping, I careen out the door, grab the owner by his expensive suit jacket, and drag him along with me across the street. The bouncers immediately give chase, trying to recover their precious boss from the psycho Kook. But despite the old man writhing in my grasp, I manage to stay ahead of the bouncers, cross into the park, and force the owner into the middle of the crowd of party attendees and scantily clad strippers. Then I turn around to face the bouncers, gun held high.

  The bouncers, now in the park with the rest of us, falter at the sight of my gun. I wave the weapon, directing them away from me. They refuse to show any fear on their rugged, tough-guy faces, but they do as ordered and slink off into the crowd.

  The owner, on the other hand, has blown a gasket. He prods me in the back with his knobby finger, and when I spin around to face him, he spouts about a million words compressed into fifteen seconds that all add up to: I’m going to sue you into your grave, you little ingrate.

  “You will regret the day,” he says, spittle flying, “that you decided to mess with me. I will ruin you, you and your entire, absurd, pathetic, worthless, piece-of-shit organization—”

  The strip club explodes.

  The shockwave tears through the crowd, knocking everyone down, shattering car windows, and rattling the park trees hard enough to snap large limbs. A massive burst of fire blooms up from the foundation of Arnette’s, eerily similar to the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb, and the entirety of the building seems to disintegrate in an instant, walls eroding to smoke, floors evaporating to dust, every table and chair and stripper pole, there one second and gone the next.

  The club is so small, and the ward spells so concentrated, that the magic flames run out of fuel in a single minute. And then they puff out like an unseen god blows a breath on an enormous match. And all that’s left is a rising plume of smoke and a crater on the block where a strip club used to be.

  I sit on my throbbing ass on the scratchy park grass, slack-jawed, as fine gray debris rains from the sky, a snow flurry of ash. Shards of broken glass from hundreds of windows clink together as they settle on the pavement, on the floors of businesses and homes, across the expanse of Gloston Square. Alarms shriek from cars parked on the streets, rattled by the intense tremors from the explosion. People begin to wander out of townhouses and offices, wary, terrified to witness what havoc has struck their fair city today, less than forty-eight hours after the greatest tragedy of their lives.

  Someone stumbles onto his knees beside me. It’s the club owner. He stares at the ruins of his business, face white as a sheet, mouth working silently as if he’s forgotten how to speak. When he finally regains his voice, he mumbles, “Was that another terrorist attack?”

  “Yes,” I say, half honest, “that was indeed another terrorist attack.” I pat the man gently on the back with my bloody left hand. “So, what were you saying about a lawsuit?”

  The owner glumly replies, “Nothing, sir. Nothing at all.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The sun is shining high in the sky, but the view from the park bench negates any sense of a nice spring day. Concerned bystanders loiter before the recently erected line of police tape that extends half a block out from the smoking crater that was once Arnette’s. The party attendees have mostly dispersed, except for three or four near the ambulances at the end of the street, getting bandages for nasty cuts sustained when the blast knocked them over. The strippers too have headed home, or in search of new jobs, since their place of employment no longer exists. The strip club owner, along with the two bouncers, are engaged in serious talks with the police at the edge of the park.

  Despite being at the center of this chaos, no one noticed me slip away from the crowd in the aftermath of the explosion. Too much noise. Too much panic. Humans can only process so many stimuli before it becomes too difficult to keep track of the little things, like a Kook sneaking off to avoid the press—and boy, is there a lot of press this time. Two dozen reporters fight for a spot in front of the police perimeter, trying to get “good” footage of a huge hole in the ground.

  My mind observes the hectic scene without comment, blissfully muted for the first time in over a day, too worn out to rifle through the heaping piles of bullshit that just landed on my shoulders. But even so, my senses keep catching sparks of recent memory. Deep breaths, and I taste the smoky air. Eyes closed, and I hear the sirens. Cool breeze, and the sun mimics the wave of heat that washed over me when Arnette’s went up. Not enough to burn, but enough to make sure I don’t forget it anytime soon.

  Even if I was miles away from this nightmare, it would still haunt my every step.

  But you wouldn’t have it any other way, would you, Kinsey? Because you chose this life, and you won’t back out, not for anything. Your pride is worth too much to admit defeat.

  My dry lips rise in a resigned, lopsided smirk.

  Sometimes I think I know myself a little too well.

  When the faint footfalls sound off behind me, along with the telltale thump of a cane, I don’t turn to look at my approaching teammates. Ella appears in my peripheral vision first, eyes drawn to the scene of devastation across the street. Riker comes next, rounding the bench and sinking down beside me without a word. He leans forward with both palms atop his cane, a frown drawn deep into his cheeks. Desmond and Amy, I sense, both linger behind the bench, the duo strangely quiet, no banter between them for once.

  It’s hard to watch pieces of the city you love go up in smoke and come out swinging with enthusiasm. Navigating the ruins of the convention center was hard enough. Arnette’s marks the second time we’ve failed in as many days, and failure of this magnitude weighs on the soul.

  After an extended moment of silence, Rike
r asks me, “Any deaths?”

  “None reported yet,” I say. “No severe injuries either. Minor cuts, bruises, etc. The building was evacuated shortly before it exploded.”

  “By you, I assume?”

  “Yep.”

  Riker tightens his grip on the cane. “What’s that in your lap?”

  “The next clue. There’s at least one more building rigged to blow.” I pick up the blue envelope and offer it to Riker. “Ward’s already been disabled.”

  “Did it hurt you?” He hesitantly accepts the envelope, gaze on the blood-soaked bandages on my left hand.

  “No. The person who gave it to me broke the ward beforehand.”

  “Person?” Ella whirls around. “What person? A practitioner? Did you meet the perpetrator?”

  “I met a perpetrator.” I bury my face in my hands. “Just not the one we’re looking for.”

  “I don’t get it,” Amy pipes up behind me. “What’s he talking about?”

  Ella crouches before me, gently prying my hands away so she can look me in the eye. “Cal, hey, tell us what happened.”

  I tell them everything. The sticky notes. Lucian Ardelean. Mac’s informant status and the wrongdoings of Lucian’s other victims. The Methuselah Group, the Black Knights, the hidden European war. The fact that the ICM High Court knew about the rogue practitioners all along, but chose to leave us in the dark in favor of keeping their internal turmoil a secret. And last, the huge mistake our perp is making by setting up these secondary attacks on the whim of a personal vengeance quest against Riker.

  Everything—and at the same time, nothing. We’re still so far outside the loop, we’ll need an honest-to-god miracle to catch up to the rest of the players in this game.

  When I finish the story, my team is left ruminating in stunned silence again.

  Amy is the first to crack the shell this time. “Jesus fucking Christ. And here I thought I left the war back in Iraq. You’re telling me this shit’s been building for a decade? That’s longer than I’ve worked at DSI.”

  Desmond exhales loudly. “This is quite a lot to take in, I admit. To think the ICM has been hiding such major secrets all this time. Although, admittedly, they’ve been able to do so only because the majority of the action was taking place in their seat of power. Europe. It seems their ability to keep this war on the backburner has eroded quickly and violently now that the action has begun to move overseas. On one hand, that gives us an in. On the other, the result is this.” I don’t need to see his hands to know he’s gesturing at the ruins of the strip club. “And if what this vampire says is true, I fear the consequences are only just beginning to unfold.”

  Ella doesn’t say anything in response. She digs around on her tool belt for a moment and yanks out a wad of fresh tissues, which she then uses to dab at my cheeks.

  Oh.

  I must’ve started crying during my recap.

  Well, it’s not the first time I’ve had a breakdown in front of Ella Dean, now is it?

  “Thanks, Ella,” I mumble. “Say, is Cooper all right? Did you check on him?”

  “Of course I did.” Her voice takes on a hint of anger. “And I’m immensely pissed at you for leaving him alone after such a traumatic event.”

  “Well, he was physically okay, and I made him food—”

  “And he’s immensely pissed that you lied to him and ran off into danger alone, again. You can expect him to yell at you when we get back to the office.”

  “He’s at the office?” I grasp her hand to stop her from scrubbing my face off with increasingly hard strokes from the tissues.

  “He will be. I had Naomi pick him up”—she tugs her hand free from my grip—“and escort him to an urgent care to double-check that he didn’t have any serious injuries. Something you would have done too, if you’d had your head screwed on right.”

  I decide now is not a good time to mention the internal bleeding.

  Or the vampire blood Lucian used to fix it.

  “Ahem.” Amy leans over the back of the bench, between Riker and me. “Not saying the irresponsible actions of our team rookie don’t make for an important topic or anything, but I think we should get back on track with resolving the immediate danger.” She points to the envelope in Riker’s hand. “What’s that new riddle say, boss?”

  Riker tears open the envelope and slips out the new card. Opening the card, he skims what looks to be eight handwritten lines. I can’t read the riddle from where I’m sitting—Amy’s head is in my way—but it turns out I don’t need to. A light bulb goes off in Riker’s brain, eyebrows arcing up toward his hairline, lips parting a fraction of an inch, an easy tension rippling through his posture, straightening his shoulders.

  “Ella,” he says, handing the card to her, “read that and tell me if it reminds you of anything.”

  Ella glances from her captain to the card, a curious tilt to her lips. “Okay, Nick. Whatever you say.” She holds the card close to her face and examines the riddle the same way Riker did, and to my amusement, her expression shifts the same way too; Ella and Riker have been working together for so long, they have identical responses to familiar situations. “Wow,” she draws out in a long note. “Now this brings back some memories. That antique shop on Nielson Street, with all the fragile glassware—”

  “—that we somehow broke one hundred percent of during our pursuit,” Riker finishes with a chuckle. “And that we had to pay for out of pocket because the commissioner used up the last vestiges of our yearly budget on that public pool reconstruction in the aftermath of Nakamura bungling the spree killer arrest.”

  “Oh, jeez.” Ella picks at the scar on her chin. “I ate ramen noodles every night for a week after that, because my pay for that period ended up a whopping fifty-seven dollars after the garnishment to appease the shop owner.”

  “Fifty-seven?” Riker snorts. “I got forty-six.”

  “Wait a second.” Amy wags her finger at Riker, then Ella. “Are you guys talking about what I think you’re talking about? Who I think you’re talking about? Because I was sure we sent that sniveling bastard away for a long goddamn time.”

  “He received a prison sentence,” responds Desmond, now standing by my shoulder, his shadow cast over me, “of seven years, six months, with the possibility of parole after three.”

  Ella returns the card to Riker. “And three years would have been…”

  Riker sighs. “Sometime in December, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “So it’s safe to assume he’s out and about.” Ella stands up. “And also safe to guess he was recruited by this so-called Methuselah Group shortly after his release.”

  “Oh, great,” Amy groans. “You mean we have to catch this guy again?”

  “Uh, question.” I raise my hand. “Who the hell are you all talking about?”

  Ella crosses her arms—warning me that our conversation about my transgressions is far from over—and replies, voice pinched in annoyance, “Patrick Salisbury Feldman.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Three years ago,” Riker begins, lounging in the back seat of the SUV between Desmond and me, “we got a call about a disturbance in an upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood twelve miles north of Aurora. Townsend Heights. A gated community filled with expensive real estate. Lots of nosy neighbors looking for scandal—you know the type.” He snorts. “Anyway, we arrived there around midnight, coerced the guard into waving us through the gate, and drove up to a gaudy house at the end of a cul-de-sac. So far, so good.”

  “And then a werewolf blasted through the living room picture window out onto the front lawn,” Amy says from the front passenger street. “Woke up the whole damn neighborhood. Thought for sure we were heading for national exposure, but somehow, with his smooth talking, Desmond convinced all the residents it was a wild animal, like, a regular wolf, that had somehow wandered onto the property. Close call.”

  Riker pokes Amy in the arm with the end of his cane. “If you’re done…”

 
“Sorry, boss. Your story.”

  “Okay, as I was saying,” the captain continues, “we walked up to the front door of this house, and as I was ringing the doorbell, a werewolf crashed through the living room picture window. A werewolf who, as we later found out, was experiencing her first transformation. She was confused, scared, overwhelmed, couldn’t reconcile the movements of her wolf body with those of the human one she was familiar with. As a result, she lashed out at us, to the point we had to shock her into submission with our beggar rings. But we managed. Knocked her out, hauled her into the garage to keep her out of sight, and called a Wolf we’d worked with before to come help her with managing the transformation.”

  “And that’s where the story began,” Ella mutters as she stops the SUV at a red light, the halfway mark on our trip back to the office. “From there, it became a lot more complicated.”

  “See, Cal”—Riker leans my way—“it turned out that the woman, Margaret Feldman, was having an affair with a werewolf, Lyle Morrison, and that, one night, in the throes of passion, the adulterous lovers accidentally cut themselves on a sharp rock, and Margaret was exposed to Lyle’s blood, thus infecting her with lycanthropy.”

  “Wait, a rock? So they were having sex outside when it happened?” I ask.

  “Apparently.” Riker shrugs. “But moving on. After we dragged Margaret into the garage, Desmond and Amy stayed behind to watch her while Ella and I headed inside the house to discover who threw Margaret out the window. It turned out that Patrick Feldman—an ICM practitioner—had walked in on his wife having sex with Lyle. The shock of being discovered by her husband, and the stress of the resulting argument, had triggered Margaret’s transformation. Seeing his wife turn into a werewolf had then sent Feldman over the edge. So Ella and I reached the living room, and what did we find? A dead werewolf and a furious practitioner who’d just killed his wife’s lover.”