Catching Echoes (Reconstructionist 1)

by Meghan Ciana Doidge

  “It won’t happen again,” I said.

  Jasmine reached back and squeezed my knee.

  Kett didn’t respond, which was fine. Because I was already working on figuring out how to extricate myself and Jasmine from working with him.

  As best as I could tell, the vampire’s magic was completely volatile. He was an unstoppable, destructive force. I didn’t want to be anywhere near him a moment longer than I needed to be.

  Except … the echo of Gavin’s death haunted me.

  The SUV glided along the slick streets. Rain beaded on my window, Seattle’s lights flaring within the relentless droplets as through a prism. It was hard to think beyond the magic hangover, but the scene of the teen’s death replayed in my mind as certainly as if I’d collected it in one of my oyster-shell containers.

  “Three boys confirms a pattern,” I murmured.

  “Two was rather definitive,” Kett said. His tone was as disengaged as ever, but I got the sense he was mad at me. But for what, exactly, I didn’t know. A blown reconstruction seemed like a tiny complication within the scope of his everlasting life.

  “Wisteria is right,” Jasmine said. “Two, however improbable, might have been coincidence, but three confirms that the boys acted on their immortality pact.”

  “Not Benjamin Vern, though,” I said.

  “He just wasn’t as stupid as the others,” Kett said.

  “Or the vampire hasn’t gotten to him yet.” My statement hung in the dark air between Kett and me.

  Jasmine’s fingers didn’t falter on her keyboard.

  Kett had to be aware that we suspected him despite his declarations of innocence. Who wouldn’t?

  He spun the steering wheel smoothly in his pale hands, guided toward my apartment by the map on the GPS. Jasmine must have punched in my address.

  “It must be a powerful vampire,” I said, pushing my luck and phrasing my question as a statement, “to turn so many in such a short period of time.”

  Kett lifted his gaze to the rearview mirror, but he didn’t answer.

  How vampire magic actually worked was little more than a series of guesses cobbled together by the rest of the Adept community. I couldn’t be sure I actually knew what I was asking.

  “Would you know the maker in that case?” I rubbed my aching eyes. Referring to the murder of the boys as ‘making’ irked me, but it seemed proper.

  “Had the teenagers been fully transformed, then yes,” Kett said. “I would know any vampire capable of transforming the nonmagical. However, I do not know the vampire who is committing these transgressions.”

  “How do you know for sure?” Jasmine asked.

  Kett didn’t answer.

  I hazarded a guess. “The boy in Surrey. Dennis. You … tasted him, didn’t you? That’s how you identified the drop of blood in the bathroom. That’s why you wanted me to compare its magic to your own?”

  Kett stayed silent.

  “The one who went rogue,” Jasmine said, as if it justified Kett killing Dennis. And maybe it did. I’d never been faced with a rogue vampire before. But according to what I knew of the history the witches had accumulated on vampires, a body count of four was blessedly low.

  “You would have known Dennis’s maker, then?” I asked again.

  “Yes,” Kett said, finally condescending to join the brainstorming session.

  “Would you be able to raise so many in such a short time?”

  Jasmine’s fingers paused their incessant tapping.

  Kett rolled the SUV to a stop in the roundabout before the entrance of my apartment building. I lived — when I was in town — two blocks from Pike Place Market.

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” Kett said, lifting his eyes to the rearview mirror. “As little as two years ago.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I have died by a blade created by the alchemist, who is one of the most powerful Adepts currently walking the earth. I have been reborn through the blood of my grandsire, who hadn’t divided his power for more centuries than I’ve claimed since I became a vampire. Then I consumed blood that should have driven me insane or destroyed me from the inside out, like liquid sunshine. And finally, I stood before magic that caused most of the others at my side to falter, coming away burned but ultimately unharmed.”

  My head swam. I’d been holding my breath, my gaze locked to Kett’s in the rearview mirror. He couldn’t ensnare me through the mirror, could he? No. It was his confession that caused my heart to pound in my chest. It was too much information, too much to share with witches he barely knew.

  “But you knew all that,” he said softly. “Didn’t you, Wisteria, friend of Jade Godfrey?”

  “No.” My voice squeaked. I cleared my throat. “Just the first part.”

  “And I have shared the rest. Shall we bond through trading secrets? Will you trust me, then? Do you have anything as damning to contribute?”

  “Don’t we all?”

  Kett’s lips quirked in the mirror, doubtful.

  I laughed quietly. For two days, he’d been dropping hints regarding the depth of his knowledge of my past and family. But I understood now that he knew nothing. Because not even a vampire would sneer at my darkest deeds.

  “Pax Johnson,” Jasmine said, blithely interrupting us before I tried to one-up the vampire. Not that I would have. It wasn’t just my secret to tell. “I thought his first name was just a user name, and then he deleted his profile, which threw me. Pax is the fifth boy in the pact.”

  “Where?” Kett asked, still holding my gaze in the mirror.

  “Tacoma,” Jasmine said.

  “Alive?”

  “As far as I’ve been able to find out.”

  “Keep looking.” Kett dropped his gaze from the mirror. “I’ll pick you up midmorning.”

  And just like that, we were dismissed from the SUV.

  Jasmine swiftly packed up her satchel, then helped me out of the back seat.

  Kett pulled away, circling out of the drop-off area before we’d made it up the four shallow steps underneath the glass-fronted atrium of my apartment building.

  I groaned again, remembering the broken glass at the funeral home. “We need to call a cleanup crew. There’s someone in town, isn’t there?”

  “Already done. Plus, I placed a short-term distraction spell out front that should hold for a couple of hours. Until sunrise at least.” Jasmine paused, still holding me upright by the waist, as I dug into my bag for my keys.

  “Thank you,” I murmured. I was completely unaccustomed to being the one who needed to be cleaned up after, let alone looked after.

  “I don’t think he did it,” Jasmine said, watching Kett drive away.

  “You didn’t see his magic. It haunts him.”

  “So does yours.”

  I glanced at my best friend, surprised. She met my gaze, then lifted her eyebrows expectantly. But I had no idea what she meant.

  Jasmine sighed, taking my keys from me and passing the fob over the reader to unlock the door.

  We didn’t speak as we crossed through the entrance, then rode the elevator all the way to the top floor. Which was always okay. The comfortable silence between Jasmine and me was filled with history, inevitability, and love.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “I expect you to stay attached to the executioner of the Conclave like an overzealous binding spell, Wisteria Fairchild.” Pearl Godfrey’s tone was crisp over the speaker on my cellphone. “You and Jasmine represent the Convocation in this matter. You will not give him any grounds to supersede us.”

  I stood in my pristinely clean kitchen, my bare feet neatly situated within the grout lines of the white porcelain two-by-three tile. A sliver of sunlight broke through the clouds that obscured my view of Elliott Bay and the inner harbor through the window over the stainless steel double sink. The errant rays warmed my peach-pedicured toes while I listened to Pearl’s instructions.

  Since it was only just after sunrise, Jasmine was still asleep on the M
urphy bed in my second bedroom, on the opposite side of the penthouse apartment. The bedroom functioned as a guest room when my cousin was in town, but normally the only piece of actual furniture in it — that didn’t fold up into the wall — was my Pilates reformer.

  Even though I was as far away as I could be in the twelve-hundred-square-foot apartment, I’d closed her door before I’d made the call to Pearl.

  The freshly squeezed orange juice I’d left in the behemoth stainless steel refrigerator before going to Vancouver hadn’t gone bad yet. But the fruit I’d left out on the counter was wrinkled. I also needed to compost the remains of all the take-out containers in the fridge before I left the city again.

  “Are you still there?” Pearl asked, her voice just as commanding over the phone as it was in person. Though I did find her easier to talk to when I wasn’t being constantly exposed to her intense magic.

  I briefly contemplated pretending that my phone had died, which it did every three or four months. But this one was brand new, and I had a strong suspicion that the chair of the Convocation would know the instant I lied.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t bother with the ma’ams, Wisteria Fairchild,” Pearl snapped.

  By calling this early in the morning, I’d really been hoping to simply leave a voice message. Unfortunately, Pearl was apparently an early riser with call display.

  “I could send Jade,” she said.

  “No,” I said, too quickly. Then I attempted to cover my bluntness. “I’d be concerned that my reconstructions might fail around her magic.”

  “She could clear the area while you were casting,” Pearl said sourly.

  “Yes, ma’am. But not really the point.”

  “Never mind.” Pearl sighed. “It was a stray thought. Jade is … overkill. By your own admission, Jasmine doesn’t need any help charming the vampire. Otherwise, I’d send Scarlett. You’re not afraid of him, are you?”

  I opened my mouth, ready to declare myself utterly terrified of the ancient being who’d been chauffeuring me from site to site. But then I hesitated. A Fairchild didn’t admit fear or lack of ability to a Godfrey. Pearl wasn’t going to be the head of the Convocation forever, though witches were long-lived, and any elders who hadn’t gone dark were particularly powerful. Usually, I didn’t care about witch politics, or about aligning myself with the Fairchild philosophy. But I didn’t like the idea of appearing weak or inefficient either.

  “I’ll do my job,” I said instead.

  “You always do,” Pearl said. “And very well. I know he is difficult to be around … but I’m not sure we’d all be alive right now, especially after Tofino, if he hadn’t joined us. The Convocation, as well as the shapeshifters of the pack, owe him some consideration.”

  ‘Thanks to Jade’ was the unspoken ending to that statement. Once again, I opened my mouth to ask all the questions that Pearl had placed so conveniently before me. And then once again, I shut it. I didn’t need to know any more secrets, and I already knew too much about the vampire.

  Secrets were a commodity in the Adept world if you knew how to use them, but I was already playing that game with one powerful witch family. My own. I didn’t need leverage against the Godfreys or the Conclave. And even if I wanted to, I also didn’t have the backing needed to make any sort of power play.

  “He’s different than he was …” I said, but then I corrected myself midthought. “An echo of what he was in London.” I hadn’t actually met Kett in London. I’d just collected the residual magic around what had appeared to be his final destruction.

  “Yes,” Pearl said, but she didn’t bother to elaborate. “He’s not a danger to you, though. He won’t incur Jade’s wrath. I believe he loves her in some way.”

  I nodded, then verbalized my response for the phone. “Yes.”

  I’d seen Kett take a killing blow for Jade in London. That had to be some sort of love. But I wasn’t completely sure that a centuries-old immortal being beholden to the Conclave would completely mitigate his behavior just because he didn’t want to upset a dowser in her midtwenties.

  “All the victims have been human?” Pearl asked.

  “Yes.”

  I knew it was prejudice that made her want that clarification, not any issue of whether or not the Convocation had jurisdiction. For all the sneering that Adepts did at humankind, and at other Adepts they saw as less than them — or as dangerous to them, like the vampires — they very carefully kept themselves hidden from human eyes. Being massively outnumbered by beings you saw as little more than worker bees was still perilously outnumbered.

  I would have assumed that Pearl might have been more concerned about exposure. But vampires died rather tidily if fire was involved, and their rogue kills were often written off as savage animal attacks by human authorities. Humans who didn’t want to see magic or bogeymen on top of the everyday horror of their lives.

  “You will duplicate any relevant reconstructions.”

  “I will.”

  “Thank you, Wisteria.”

  “As always, Ms. Godfrey.”

  “Have a good day.”

  “You too.”

  Pearl ended the call.

  I sighed, noting that the stovetop clock read 2:14 because I could never be bothered to set it properly. It was just after 8:00 a.m. I wanted to snuggle into bed with Jasmine, as we’d done as kids before Declan had turned our duo into a trio, before we’d been apprenticed to our uncle, before everything had eroded into nothing.

  Well, the walls had always been tarnished and crumbling, but we just hadn’t known it.

  If I stood around in the quiet apartment any longer, the death-vision loop of Gavin’s cremation would reassert itself in my mind. The continual remembrance of his horrendous death had already disturbed my sleep so much that I’d been up with the dawn. I needed to keep moving, to help Jasmine and Kett solve the case, and to hope that the reconstructions of the dead teens didn’t haunt me forever after.

  I grabbed my phone and my navy-blue trench coat, texting Jasmine as I left the apartment.

  Going for coffee and breakfast sandwiches.

  I knew she’d check her phone the moment she woke.

  As I walked, I calculated that if I killed some time grabbing coffee, I could be in line when Beecher’s Handmade Cheese opened. I adored their grilled sandwiches, and saw no reason why bread and cheese shouldn’t have been considered a reasonable breakfast.

  ❒ ❒ ❒

  “I’ve been thinking about how Teresa Vern opened the door for me, specifically after I gave her my name.”

  I was sitting cross-legged on the blond-oak hardwood floor of my second bedroom, resting my back against my Pilates machine. Jasmine was snuggled underneath a cashmere throw and a white cotton sheet on the Murphy bed, with only her hands and face uncovered. I had just finished the second half of my basil, tomato, and Beecher’s Flagship cheese grilled sandwich. The fragrant basil flawlessly complimented the nutty flavor of the aged cheddar. And the perfectly cooked tomatoes had drizzled across my fingertips while I ate, so I licked them clean. Jasmine didn’t care about proper etiquette, and it wasn’t as if I was going to lick the parchment wrapping as well.

  “What about her?” Jasmine asked around a full mouth of smoked turkey paired with Flagship and Just Jack cheeses. She’d woken immediately at the waft of coffee steam I’d deliberately blown in her face. It was a ritual we traded — depending on who woke first — whenever we visited each other.

  “She knew my name. That’s why she opened the door.”

  “Did she say she knew you? Fairchild is a common surname among humans too.”

  “Don’t say that within my mother’s hearing.”

  “I’m very careful to stay way, way out of your mother’s reach.”

  “I know you are.”

  Silence fell between us. I savored my dark brew. Seattle boasted a multitude of fantastic coffee roasters, many of which were within walking distance of my apartment. I was an equa
l opportunist when it came to which cafes I frequented and what drinks I ordered. Today, I’d opted for a dark roast from Ethiopia, no frills. Jasmine hadn’t even sipped her triple-shot latte yet. Food was her foremost focus at all times, while I was pretty sure I could live on coffee if it ever came down to it.

  Unfortunately, that was a trait I shared with my mother, Violet Fairchild, the potion master of the Fairchild coven.

  When I was growing up, our backyard had been a jungle of plants that — when prepared in perfect combinations — could kill without a trace. Of course, the Convocation frowned upon such things, especially since poisons were notoriously difficult to counter with magic. So my mother channeled her skills into more benign, highly sought-after brews. Cosmetic enhancements were probably still her bestselling products, but a lot of witches bought ready-made spells from her, either because those spells were beyond their own skill level to brew, or because they contained elements that were rare and difficult to obtain or store.

  Jasmine’s perfect curls and clear complexion were due to an exceedingly pricey shampoo and skin cream sold by a witch based out of San Francisco. I purchased the peach-scented twelve-hour lip gloss I favored through the esthetician I saw every three weeks in order to maintain my French manicures. She also happened to be a half-witch who had a special set of wares she sold to Adept clientele only.

  I took another sip of coffee, letting the perfectly dark-roasted brew drag my thoughts away from my family as Jasmine reached for her second sandwich, a sinfully simple grilled cheese.

  I wasn’t fully Academy trained like most reconstructionists. Some investigators held that against me — though always privately, never to my face. I hadn’t taken interrogation or investigative training, then specialized. Rather, I had challenged the exams after my first year of courses. I hadn’t been granted the right to do so before, though I’d requested it.

  The Academy didn’t typically certify reconstructionists at the tender age of sixteen. However, they had given me my accreditation in a private ceremony a week before my seventeenth birthday. Jasmine, who joined me a month after I’d entered the Academy, had taken three more years to graduate. But I’d been training with a former instructor since the age of nine, and Jasmine had chosen to focus on tech, a branch of magic the Fairchilds sneered at.