by SM Reine
“Christ!” he gasped.
She ripped the envelope from his hand and tore it open with her teeth. A plastic VHS tape spilled out. “What are you doing with this?” Elise asked, scooping it off of the ground without releasing him. “Who told you to look out for me?”
“I don’t know anything, lady,” he said. “All I know is, your picture’s been sent around to gas stations and convenience stores, and—and I don’t know, other local businesses. It was forwarded through email. Lots of people are on the lookout, and there’s a reward for sighting you. I get two grand for this tape.”
“Where does the tape go?”
“Jesus, woman—”
Elise used his wrist to jerk his body forward. His knees buckled. He sank to the pavement in front of her. “Where does the tape go, Brick?”
“Grove County Sheriff’s Department,” he said.
Her eyebrows lifted. “Is that who you called? Was it Deputy Marshall?”
“I don’t know whose number that was. It was attached to the email.”
“I think I want to see this email, Brick,” Elise said. “I would like to see it very much.”
To her surprise, he extracted a smart phone from his pocket. Brick hardly looked like an iPhone user.
It only took a moment to load the message in question. The attached image was an illustration, not a photo, and whoever had drawn it was obviously more familiar with Elise’s human form than her demon one. Her current nose was smaller than in the picture—the curved bridge had been straightened after her transformation, and the Aquiline arch was reduced to something more proportionate for her square features. Her broad lips were turned into a frown, which would always be accurate.
Elise touched her eyebrow. The piercing was missing, too. McIntyre had driven the needle through her brow himself, wearing rubber gloves so that he wouldn’t be electrified. They’d had to attach the needle to a car battery in order to keep her body from rejecting the metal. Electricity was the only thing that seemed to damage her now—electricity, and very bright lights.
That drunken experiment had been a year ago. The eight-gauge ring was a permanent fixture on her face now, and it wasn’t in the illustration.
But everything else was there: the lips, the hair, the scowl. The illustrator seemed to know the lines of Elise’s face as intimately as she did. Maybe even more so.
The body of the email was short.
Reward offered for sighting the woman pictured in the attachment. She is armed and dangerous. Do not attempt to restrain. Comply with all demands. $2000 cash reward offered for evidence of arrival, to be delivered to 234 North Ransom Boulevard. Leave a message at the following number to report sightings.
The email address was a random string of numbers and letters. Judging by the six “forward” abbreviations preceding the subject line, Brick hadn’t received it directly anyway.
Elise kept her grip on the clerk as she forwarded the email to Anthony and McIntyre, then slid the phone back into his pocket.
“I’ll deliver the tape,” she said, tucking it under her arm. “The reward is mine.”
Brick’s face went ashen. “But…”
“It’s mine.” She had no use for the money personally, but Anthony and McIntyre got commissions from money collected during hunting activities, and the rest went to an education fund for McIntyre’s daughters. They were going to be able to go to a very nice college at this rate.
He looked like he wanted to argue, but Brick choked on the words. Elise released him. He hugged his arm to his body, rubbing the tender skin.
“Don’t tell them where you found the email,” he said.
“I doubt they even know you exist,” Elise said. She returned the tape to the envelope and tucked it under her arm. “By the way—if you try to report this preternatural to the OPA, I’ll come back for another visit.”
Brick scrambled to get in his car. He locked the doors, as if that might somehow keep Elise from getting through to him. Breaking into a locked car was as easy as slipping through the vent, but he didn’t need to know that. Elise was done with this asshole.
She weighed the tape in her hand. Deputy Lincoln Marshall hadn’t only hired Elise to handle his werewolf problem. He had notified the local businesses to keep an eye out for her. The fact that there was so much money behind the sighting made her doubt that the Sheriff’s Department knew anything about the deputy’s activity.
But he couldn’t be the mastermind, either. He wouldn’t know Lucinde Ramirez. He wouldn’t have known Elise when she had fierce, hawklike features, and no eyebrow piercing. And he didn’t look like the kind of guy that could afford to throw that kind of money around. There was another chess piece on the board she didn’t see yet—one that was wealthy and influential.
Elise could already tell that she wasn’t going to enjoy her visit to Northgate.
The Grove County Sheriff’s Office was quiet in the middle of the night. Elise sat on the lawn of the school across the street to watch it, wasting a few pensive hours until the sun rose and forced her into hiding.
She tasted two heartbeats on her tongue. Two people were staffing the station in the early hours of morning. Dispatchers, maybe, or deputies lucky enough to be on night shift. Neither of them would be Lincoln Marshall. McIntyre had found his travel itinerary; the deputy had a reservation for one more night at the old Hilton.
There was a lot of interesting information to be collected about Northgate, just from sitting in front of the Sheriff’s Office. The autumn colors were as beautiful here as anywhere else in the northeast, but there didn’t seem to be accommodations for tourists. The town was sleepy. Silent. And there was a giant crucifix on the lawn of Bain Marshall Elementary, though it didn’t seem to be a religious school; those were usually named St. Something. Bain Marshall definitely wasn’t a saint. Elise also suspected the surname shared with the deputy wasn’t a coincidence, either.
A religious school, a deputy with a local legacy, a street on which Elise hadn’t seen a single car pass. Far cry from Las Vegas.
As if to challenge her previous thought, a car slowly rolled past the sheriff’s office. It wasn’t a cruiser—it was a long, sleek muscle car, with the kind of grille that made it look like it was out to eat someone. It was too dark to tell if it was silver or blue, and the windows were tinted dark enough that she couldn’t make out the illuminated dashboard, even with her keen eyesight.
It inched past at five miles per hour, almost as if the driver was looking for something. Once it reached the street corner, it accelerated again.
The heartbeats inside the sheriff’s office continued to beat slow and steady, unaware of the lone passerby. One of the hearts had a murmur, and the other seemed to struggle for other reasons—obesity, maybe. But they were both calm.
Slow night in Northgate. Maybe slow enough to look at the sheriff’s records.
Elise sauntered across the street, padded envelope tucked under her arm. There were two security cameras near the front door—one aimed at the entrance, and one aimed onto the lawn. A few steps forward, and their cameras would pick her up. They wouldn’t need to pay for footage of Elise. They would have their very own copy for free.
She let out a slow breath, unraveling into the night.
It felt right to loose herself upon the darkness, like she was intended to be no more than an amorphous fog, and it was her human body that was foreign. She sank into the sounds of night. The locusts whispering in the grass, the whirring moth wings, the steady tha-thump of heartbeats. A family snored in a house two blocks away. A teacher was in early to grade papers at Bain Marshall Elementary. Elise let all of the tiny, meaningless details slip past her.
She hugged everything that mattered inside her amorphous form: her clothing, the falchion and scabbard, the gold chains, and the surveillance tape from Brick’s gas station. There seemed to be some strange, extra-dimensional property to her demon body that allowed her to carry objects anywhere she could fit. And tonight, Elise was
interested in fitting underneath the weather stripping of the Grove County Sheriff’s Office’s front door.
Extending into long tendrils, she slipped fingers of mist under the door.
She struck an invisible wall.
Magic shocked through her. Elise became corporeal again with an unpleasant jolt, and it was all she could do to reassemble herself back inside of her clothing.
Elise staggered and caught herself on the doorframe, nails digging into the wood. Her heart beat wildly in her chest.
“Shit,” she said.
There were wards keeping Elise out of the building—heavy ones, the kind cast by a coven of witches powerful enough to exert their will over demons. The kind of coven that shouldn’t have existed in the same town that had crucifixes on the lawn of public elementary schools.
She took a closer look at the doorway she gripped. Tiny pentagrams marched up the wood, covered in whitewash.
“Lincoln Marshall, you’ve been a bad boy,” Elise murmured. She thumbed the ring on her right hand. It was a warding ring that blocked some of her powers—magical powers, in fact, which no kopis was meant to possess. If she took it off, she could try to break the wards.
She didn’t get a chance to experiment. The muscle car returned, rubber treads whispering on asphalt.
This time, the car pulled into the elementary school parking lot. The emergency brake groaned. Both doors opened, and two people stepped out.
With a thought, Elise darted across the street, lingering in the shadows underneath the bus shelter.
Two black men in their early twenties met each other at the bumper of the muscle car—according to the insignia on the grille, a Chevy Chevelle SS. The smaller of the men wore a leather jacket much like Elise’s. It bulged under the arms. She didn’t have to get closer to know that he was armed. She recognized the look of a man prepared to shoot.
But his companion looked far more dangerous. It had nothing to do with the fact that he stood well over six feet with shoulders so broad that he might not fit through doorways. It was the scars mangling the left side of his face and neck.
They definitely had Elise’s attention.
“I told you. The records room is dark; we can go in,” the smaller one said.
“You’re still fucking crazy, bro.” Scarface’s voice was low, growling, tinged with annoyance.
“Dude, keep your voice down.”
“What, do you think someone’s listening in? We’re in St. Bumfuck-Nowhere. It’s not filled with spies. Nobody gives a shit.”
The smaller man rubbed the back of his neck, shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Quiet down. It’s dark tonight.”
“Yeah, it’s nighttime. Dark? Wow, shocker. Give this guy a diploma.” Yet the other man’s paranoia must have been contagious, because Scarface’s derision was softer than earlier.
Elise slid across the earth and curled around their ankles. Her eyes and ears were everywhere—the shadow under the car, the branches of the trees, the spaces between the rubber treads of their hiking boots.
Their boots were a whole different type of interesting, in fact. They were muddy to the ankles, flecked with tree bark and fragments of leaves. The smaller guy’s heel smelled like shit. He had walked through animal droppings and didn’t seem to have noticed.
“I’ll just pop in and out,” said the first man, rubbing the back of his neck again, almost like a nervous tic. “They won’t see me coming.”
“Seth…”
“I’ve got this. Five minutes.”
The one called Seth flipped up the collar of his jacket so that it covered the bottom half of his face, jammed a ball cap on his head, and jogged across the street.
Swearing under his breath, Scarface followed.
Elise slipped after them.
She reached the unlit back door of the sheriff’s office before Seth did, clinging to the trees as he dropped to his knees. Metal glinted in his hand—looked like picks of some kind. It took about five seconds for him to turn the lock and disappear inside.
Scarface paced beyond the range of the security cameras. His muscles seemed to ripple under his skin when he paced, like his veins ran with quicksilver. He was a little hunched, almost prowling, and Elise imagined he was the kind of man who enjoyed hunting. But she didn’t think he was the type to rely on guns. No, he was someone who would prefer a knife—or maybe even more primal weapons.
She curled around him, making his skin prick with goosebumps. Elise drew close enough that she could get a good look at his face.
His irises were unmistakably gold.
Seth slipped out the back door again, manila folders barely concealed under his jacket. It made the leather gap enough that Elise could verify that he was carrying a handgun. Big one, too. Elise’s fog dropped back to the grass.
“Told you I could do it,” Seth said.
Scarface grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. “Great. You proved your nuts are the size of cue balls and your brain’s the size of your prick. Now let’s go before we get arrested and I have to spend the full moon behind bars.”
Seth slapped his hand away, then itched the back of his neck again.
It wasn’t a nervous tic, Elise realized. Seth was sensing her presence. That was how kopides felt demons—like an itching scalp, or eyes on the back of one’s neck.
A werewolf and a kopis. Possibly brothers. And they were working together.
Suddenly, Northgate seemed a hell of a lot more interesting.
They jogged across the street and got back into the Chevelle. Their conversation probably continued inside. Elise was tempted to follow them—find out why a werewolf and demon hunter might want to steal files from the sheriff’s department, what they were doing together, where they were going. But Anthony’s warnings drifted to the forefront of her mind.
Someone had beckoned Elise to Northgate. Someone, maybe, who knew how to hurt her.
Like another kopis?
The Chevelle pulled out of the parking lot. Elise fell into her corporeal form again, standing in the middle of the road to watch the taillights retreat. They were gone in moments. If sunrise hadn’t been a short hour away, she would have followed, Anthony be damned.
Any doubts she might have had about Deputy Marshall’s werewolf problem were certainly gone. But those doubts had been replaced by a thousand questions.
Brick’s surveillance tape felt weighty in her fingers.
Where was the tape meant to go? Who was willing to pay two thousand dollars for a glimpse of Elise? How were they connected to those two brothers? And who, in such a barely-populated county, would bother warding a sheriff’s department against incorporeal demons, yet have an easily lock-picked back door?
She threw the tape into a trash bin and vanished.
FOUR
LINCOLN MARSHALL’S RETURN flight from Nevada was due to arrive at five o’clock in the afternoon. It wasn’t hard to find where the deputy lived; public employees weren’t afforded a good deal of privacy, and a quick call from McIntyre gave her access to a pay stub with an address. Elise reached his home thirteen hours before he would be back, chased by the first hints of dawn, and prepared to receive him.
His neighborhood was cute. A few clusters of duplexes with vinyl siding stood together in a field off a dirt road, like it could protect them from the lurking dangers of the night. He had a well-tended flower bed and a doorway painted cerulean.
The color of the door was far more interesting to Elise than any other detail of Deputy Marshall’s tidy duplex. She hadn’t seen that unusual door color outside the southwest. It was common in New Mexico, where they thought it warded away evil, but definitely not back east. And his was the only door painted like that.
She probed his threshold, searching for the same wards that had prevented her from slipping in the GCSD building. Color of the door aside, there was no hint of magic.
Elise slipped through the cracks of his window frame, then helped herself to the deputy’s phone. McIntyre answere
d the call immediately. “There’s a reward on my head,” she said. “Not for capturing me. Just for sightings.”
“Fuck,” he said. She had to agree. How was she supposed to investigate murders when the entire county was clamoring to report her to an anonymous player?
She peered out the front window. A dark shape moved over the path between houses, then disappeared into another duplex. Someone was awake awfully early. Maybe a shift worker.
Elise held the phone between her ear and shoulder, flipping through the accumulated mail on the table. It looked like the deputy was friendly with the neighbors. Someone had bringing in his bills while he was on the trip.
“Anthony wants you to come home,” McIntyre said.
“I didn’t know he cared,” Elise said.
“Bullshit.”
Okay, she knew that Anthony cared. He had always cared way too much, and becoming a seasoned demon hunter under her tutelage hadn’t changed anything. If anything, saving people had rendered him more empathetic, not less. The fact that he wasted that empathy on Elise didn’t escape her.
“I’m looking out for myself,” she said. “No attempts on my life yet. No reason to worry.” Of course, the week was young.
She ripped open an envelope with no return address. There was a slip of paper inside with four words printed on it: I’ll be there soon. It looked like it had been produced by a typewriter. Charmingly eerie. Kind of had a low-budget serial killer vibe to it.
“Should we join you?” McIntyre asked.
“Not yet,” Elise said, stuffing the paper back into the envelope. “I’m going to have a talk with our favorite deputy later today. I’ll update you after that. Have you heard from Augustin Ramirez?”
“The number you gave me didn’t work. He’s closed his Reno law offices.”
No surprise there—pretty much everyone left Reno after what happened in 2009. Elise scowled at nothing in particular. “I already found the werewolf, by the way. Did you receive the payment yet? This might end quick and messy.”
