by Gina LaManna
“A woman’s life is at stake,” Dani argued. “He already knew Linsey was missing and surmised that I was on the case. I just asked if he knew anything about the elfin secrets.”
“And did he?”
“Not much,” she admitted. “But he has a source that saw the girls leaving a club on Silver Street the night before they were taken in sort of a rush.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know,” Dani said, “but Silver Street isn’t exactly the ritzy side of the Golden District. Maybe the girls got in trouble at the club, or they met an unsavory type. They could have gotten away, and he chased them down the next day. Maybe it was the same location where Linsey was the night she disappeared.”
Matthew saw where she was going. “You think our kidnapper scouts for talent at this mystery location, then hunts them down later.”
“If that’s what you want to call it,” Dani said, her voice energized. “We know Linsey has been sneaking out. Harry said she likes to dance. If she did go to a club, that could be our link between them!”
“It’s possible.” Despite Dani’s excellent theory, Matthew didn’t let his hopes rise. He knew better than to let his emotions get involved on a hunch. “There’s one girl alive who might know where these women were the night before they were taken.”
“The survivor,” Dani said. “The one with them when they were snatched.”
“Comm me the second you discover anything further,” Matthew instructed Sienna. “Dani, let’s go. And that new dress you have? Keep it. We might be needing it. I have a feeling we’ll find ourselves at a club in the Golden District again before this case is over.”
Chapter 9
I was still grumpy as we loped across town.
“I can’t dance,” I told Matthew. “In all the years you’ve known me, have I ever suggested we go dancing?”
Matthew gave a thin smile. “It’s an order, Detective. I don’t care if you’re good at it or not, but if we find the name of the club that Maybelline and Lillie went to the night before they were taken, we’ll need you there to watch for Residuals.”
“Residuals at a club?” I wrinkled my nose. “Talk about a mess. I tend to avoid crowded places throbbing with music and sexual tension and shady types. That is a recipe for disaster, especially when you can see everyone’s spells. The amount of Testosterone Throttles and Pheromone Potions will be enough to make me sick.”
“You have a strong stomach, Detective. It’s good for you.”
“So, where does this woman live?” I asked, changing the subject. “If we don’t have the name of a club, we won’t be staking out anywhere. One thing at a time.”
“It’s just, so...” Matthew leveled his eyes at me. “Red.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The dress,” he said. “Is your date with the wolf?”
“Captain.” I spoke sternly. “This is considered on-the-job time. My date is my personal business.”
“It is so long as you’re not discussing your cases with him,” Matthew said. “Because if that becomes a regular thing, it’ll be my business. As your captain, of course.”
I rolled my eyes and followed closely on Matthew’s heels. It wasn’t as if he didn’t stretch the limits of the law when it suited him. Frankly, if Grey’s tip helped crack the case, both Matthew and I would owe him.
The day had turned into a beautiful one. The sun shone through a cloudless sky, and the temperature had risen to a pleasant low seventies hum. The borough smelled like freshly cut grass, and the sounds of baby witches and sorcerers playing all nature of games filtered through the residential streets as we strolled through them.
“Here,” Matthew said, resting a hand on my shoulder as he steered me around to face a white-picket fence and a postage stamp front yard on the southern edge of the Goblin Grid. “This is the place. Survivor’s name is Cynthia Nealy.”
Cynthia’s house was utterly ordinary. It appeared to be one and a half stories, complete with a peaked, lofted ceiling that probably housed a quirky little bedroom on the upper level.
The gardens out front were neatly tended, and a few tomatoes and a mint plant bloomed beside the walkway to the house. A few flowerbeds shot bursts of color through the otherwise green yard, the grass just a little bit too dry under the summer heat. A bird chirped from an apple tree one yard over.
Matthew raised a hand and knocked on the door. A shuffling sounded inside, followed by a raised voice shouting words I couldn’t decipher. Judging by Matthew’s thin smile, he had made out what was being said, and it amused him.
“She lives with her mother,” Matthew murmured. “And her mother is nosy.”
“Go figure. A nosy mother.”
The door opened seconds later to reveal a pleasant looking blonde elf. She had Marilyn Monroe-esque features, toned down by a demure, blue-flecked apron and a bright and shiny smile. She wore a white cotton dress and had bare feet, and she looked expectantly at us. “Yes?”
“We’re looking for Cynthia,” Matthew said, hauling out his badge with a flick of his wrist. “I’m Captain King, and this is Detective DeMarco.”
“I’m Cynthia,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “What can I do for you?”
“Invite them in!” A ragged voice yelled from the house. “I want to see the guests, too.”
“Quiet, ma!” Cynthia called back. “You’re being rude!”
“Is it the vampire?” her mother asked. “I heard he was a looker!”
“I’m sorry,” Cynthia said, stepping outside and closing the door. “My mother’s not quite right. That’s why I moved in with her.”
“Is your mother also an elf?” I asked. “And your father?”
“No,” she said. “Well, yes, my mother is, but my father had goblin blood. Hence our home in the Grid.”
“I hate to question you outside,” I said. “But we do need to have a chat. Is there someplace more private?”
“It’s just...” Cynthia lowered her voice. “My mom’s not exactly mobile anymore. And she’s not quite right in the head. I’d invite you in, but—”
“She doesn’t bother us,” I said. “We’ve got thick skin. If you don’t mind, maybe we can take this conversation inside.”
After a brief hesitation, she nodded. “Fine. Can I get you something to drink?”
Both Matthew and I thanked her and waved off her offers of hospitality. Cynthia led us through a cramped, albeit clean, kitchen and into a dimly lit living area.
A woman I assumed was Cynthia’s mother sat in a medical style chair in the corner, staring out a small window. Cynthia gestured for Matthew and me to take a seat, waiting near her mother while we settled onto a threadbare loveseat. The only other option was an armchair across the room, so Matthew and I opted to squish next to one another.
“What can I help you with?” Cynthia asked, resting her hand on her mother’s shoulder. “Is this about Linsey?”
“What do you know about Linsey?” I asked. “Do you keep in touch with anyone in Gilded Row?”
Cynthia barked a laugh. “No, not particularly. Sometimes my...” She hesitated, cleared her throat. “My work puts me in touch with people there, but that’s it.”
“And what work is that?” I asked.
“I clean houses,” Cynthia said, her gaze leveled fiercely on me. “For the wealthy.”
“I understand,” I said carefully. “Linsey is missing, yes. But you also might have heard we recovered the bodies of two elfin girls not much older than yourself this week.”
“Lillie and Maybelline,” she said, and her voice sounded thick with the effort of saying their names. “Yes, I knew them.”
“They cleaned houses with you?”
Cynthia nodded. “I began cleaning houses when my mother fell ill. I met up with Maybelline and Lillie—we often worked together, watched out for one another. We shared, um, clients sometimes.”
“The reports say that you were with Lillie and Mayb
elline when they were snatched,” I said. “Is that true?”
She nodded. “We had all spent the night together at Lillie’s apartment—she had the biggest place, and we’d been out late. We were such good friends—she had this glorious king-sized bed, and we all crashed in it together. We stayed up until some ungodly hour watching horror movies. I still remember waking that morning and finding a piece of popcorn in my hair.”
“I’m so sorry for the loss of your friends,” I said. “I can’t imagine what you went through.”
Cynthia sniffed, as if pulled from a daydream. “Yes, it was hard. It is hard. One doesn’t get over a thing like that quickly.”
“Especially not if you were there when they were taken,” I said gently. “Can you describe what happened to them in detail?”
“I’ve already told the cops everything I know.”
“I understand, and I’m sorry to drag you through this again,” I said. “But there have been new developments, and we have to revisit everything. Please, it’s imperative.”
Cynthia sucked in a breath, and her fingernails dug in deeper to her mother’s shoulder. Her mother flinched, and Cynthia let go at once. “You think this is tied to Linsey’s disappearance. You think the same people who took my friends took her!”
It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer it. “We need your help.”
“Are they going to kill her, too?” Cynthia’s eyes widened. “That would be a horrible idea. Linsey’s dad is Leonard Luca—he’s making a run for the council of elders next year. He will bring vengeance on whoever took his daughter.”
“All the more reason to get her back safely.”
“You didn’t work this hard to find my friends,” Cynthia said. “They were gone for three months.”
“We did,” Matthew said sharply. “I looked into it myself. There was nothing. No leads. We followed everything we possibly could, and we turned up nothing. Now that their bodies have been recovered, we have more information—more evidence and more leads. We also have a missing person to find. Make no mistake, we will get justice for the dead. Please, Cynthia.”
She gave a shuddering breath, her eyes flicking nervously to Matthew before returning to mine. “I don’t know what more I can tell you that I haven’t already told the other cops.”
“Did you see anyone on the day you were taken?” I asked. “You were coming back from the grocery store—had your attacker followed you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “We were just having a grand old time. We walked up to get things for pancakes—a late breakfast, you know, because we’d stayed up all night watching movies. It was just a regular old girls day...until he arrived.”
“He?” I asked. “What do you remember about him?”
“It was a male,” she said. “The voice was male, and his build was big and burly. He had on a Smoke Cloak though, so I couldn’t make out any of his features.”
A smoke cloak was a cloud of thick, inky black smoke that could envelope its wearer and move around them in a disguise. It wasn’t sneaky, but for a quick snatch and grab, it would do the trick. Even worse, it was a common, off-the-shelf spell available for purchase to every witch, sorcerer, and spellslinger in the borough. It was a non-clue as to the attacker’s species.
“There were three of you,” I said. “Did you fight? Run? How did you get away when the others didn’t?”
Her eyes narrowed on me. “There was nothing I could have done to stop the attack. I have gone over, and over, and over this in my mind, Detective, and I can’t think of a way I could have saved them.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that,” I said quietly. “Nobody blames you for this.”
“Really? Then what about that other cop who came here yesterday barreling my door down and all but accusing me of letting my own friends be kidnapped?”
“The other cop?” I asked. “Which other cop?”
“Marcus,” Matthew said under his breath. “He was assigned to follow up on Maybelline and Lillie’s murders.”
“Asshole,” I said, then realized I’d said it too loudly. “Sorry.”
Fortunately, it got a smile from Cynthia. “It’s fine. Anyway, my friends just... fell. It was so strange. We were walking and laughing one moment, and then the next second, Lillie’s eyes just glassed over. She was holding a donut in her hand, and she just fell over.”
“Did you hear a curse, a spell, something?”
She shook her head. “It looked like a Paralysis Potion hit them or something because it was instantaneous for Lillie, but I didn’t hear an incantation.”
“What about Maybelline?”
“That’s the strange thing,” Cynthia said. “Maybelline booked it. She started sprinting, and she almost got away. She should have gotten away.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because she was fast. She was in excellent shape, and she should have gotten away,” Cynthia said. “I’ve never exercised a day in my life. I actually tripped over Lillie and fell. I just laid there, waiting for the paralysis to hit, but it never did.”
“Maybe he thought you were unconscious?”
She shook her head. “I screamed for Maybelline. He ran after her. I heard the footsteps, saw the smoke. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any defining features of him. The cops tried to get me with a HoloHex artist, but all I could describe was the smoke.”
“The attacker got Maybelline,” I said. “Did he use the same sort of spell or charm to paralyze her?”
“I imagine so,” she said. “I just heard the thump. Have you ever heard the sound of a lifeless body falling, Detective?” She shuddered. “My ear was to the ground. I heard it, and I knew it was over for her. I stood and just ran. He let me go, and to this day, I can’t understand why.”
“What if I told you,” I said, “that I think this was a premeditated grab. That there was something different about Maybelline and Lillie that drew the killer to them, while he let you go.”
“I’d say I’ve come to the exact same conclusion.” Cynthia watched me evenly. “Because there’s no reason I should be alive today. If he wanted me, he could’ve had me. I didn’t stick around long enough to watch, but I suspect that if I had, he would’ve just killed me. For whatever reason, he wasn’t recruiting me.”
“Recruiting,” I said. “Interesting choice of word.”
“He kept them alive for three months, if what I read in the news is true,” Cynthia said. “Which means he needed them for something. What, I don’t know.”
“They were both full-blooded elf,” I said. “No mixed heritage. Could that be it?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. I suppose so. But I don’t know what they had that I don’t.”
“Magic.” The whispered word came from Cynthia’s mother. “They have a magic that the rest of us don’t have.”
“Ms. Nealy,” I said, “Is there a sort of magic that some of you have, but others don’t?”
“Not all of us have it,” she repeated. “I did, though. I had it.”
Cynthia shook her head. “I told you, she’s losing it. I’ve heard this story a hundred times. I’m sorry, Captain, Detective.”
“I’d like to hear it,” I said. “What sort of magick did you have, Ms. Nealy?”
“I don’t know.” Ms. Nealy stared dully out the window. “They wiped me clean. That’s what made me like this: weak, broken, damaged. See, I know I’m not whole. I can feel it. I can feel where my memories used to be, but they’re not there anymore.”
I frowned. “Are you saying the elves wiped your memory?”
“It’s more than that,” she said. “Memory spells don’t leave you with a void. They just block out the memories and replace them with something light and fluffy, like cupcake frosting.”
“But you have a void.”
She nodded, swiveling her old, wizened gaze to mine. “Something I had, a part of me, is gone. And I can’t remember for the life of me what it was. But they stole my magick when I married my husband. He’
s gone now, passed away a few years back. The elves don’t let those from Gilded Row go free.”
“You were from Gilded Row?” I asked, surprised. “Did they force you out?”
“No, I made a choice. But once you’re on the outs, you’re on the outs,” she said. “I don’t remember much from my time there. It’s all fuzzy. But I know, I just know...there was something. I was one of the few, one of the precious.”
“Do you remember anything about it?” I asked. “Cynthia, has she ever said anything that might trigger her memory, any hints to what might have been?”
“You can’t think this is actually real,” Cynthia said. “My mother’s mind has been going since I was born. It just gets worse with age. She clings more and more to the old stories, and she’s started to think they’re real.”
“Maybe they are real,” I said. “We’ve seen the elves do ruthless things. If your mother chose to leave Gilded Row, don’t you think it’s possible they took her memories? Especially if there’s a secret at stake?”
“Memories, sure,” Cynthia said. “But she goes on and on about them extracting some form of her magick, and that is just insane. Whoever heard of an extraction of powers before?”
Matthew and I remained silent. I couldn’t believe our luck. We had one of the special ones, one of the few—an elf who’d likely once had the same unique powers that had caused at least two elves to be taken. Yet she couldn’t remember a thing about them.
“You think this is real,” Cynthia said, her eyes widening. “You believe my mother. You think the other girls—Maybelline, Lillie, probably Linsey—all have this special power. That’s why they were taken. And used.”
“We don’t know anything for certain,” I said. “We’re just trying to find the link between these three girls. A link would help us a great deal in pinning down the why these girls were taken, which could lead us to the who that took them. And maybe it would help in the recovery of the living.”
“I don’t know anything else,” Cynthia said. “It all happened so fast.”
“What about the night before?” I asked. “You all went out, according to my research. Tell me about that.”
