Detective Harrison looked happier than Griffen could remember seeing him ever before. A vice detective must always enjoy coming out from undercover.
“Ms. Valerie, most of what I’ve seen tonight has been self-defense. You don’t want to make my life hell by having to drag a pretty lady like you in for murder, do you?” Harrison said.
Val stared as openly as Griffen. Harrison idly waved with the revolver. Despite how little that must have meant to her just then, Griffen was relieved when his sister released Lizzy’s throat and stood up.
Lizzy smiled, her sunny smile, ruined by several broken teeth.
“Din’ wan kill you anyway…” she said hoarsely, blood bubbling from her lips. “Like… to be…’untie Lizzy.”
With that, she smiled brighter, and her remaining eye rolled up into her head. She passed out, though she kept breathing, ragged and slow.
Griffen filed what she’d said away for later.
“Detective Harrison—” Griffen started.
“Shove it, McCandles. You have a hell of a lot of explaining to do.”
Harrison looked around the room, and for a second his eyes seemed haunted. Even before the fight, he had to have seen many things that night, too many things.
“Would this even hurt you?” Harrison asked, pointing his piece at Griffen.
“Are we going to find out?” Griffen said.
The two locked eyes, and for a long moment it looked as if the answer was yes. Griffen saw several people shifting behind Harrison. They had helped him with a dragon; they wouldn’t hesitate over a human cop.
Harrison shook his head and put the piece in his holster.
“No. I’ve got my murderer. You are off the hook on the Slim case.”
“What makes you think she is the murderer?” Griffen said, confused.
People started all around the room. Apparently, everyone had pretty much come to the same conclusion as Harrison. Lizzy was obviously insane, and violent, and a whole lot of other things that would make her suspect number one in any murder investigation.
But Griffen hadn’t once thought to connect her to Slim, and now wasn’t sure why.
He looked around the damage of the room. The broken furniture. The wounded guests. Lizzy’s own trashed and bloodied body. The loup garou she had dragged in.
“What do you mean? Of course she’s a murderer!”
“Probably…” Griffen said distractedly.
He was still running on adrenaline, but now he wasn’t consumed with his fear and anger. He was thinking clearly, thinking fast. The loup garou…
“A murderer probably. But what makes you think she’s your murderer?” Griffen asked.
“Look, McCandles, if you are jerking me around again…” Griffen tuned out the detective for a moment. A body. The search parties. Lizzy.
A wooden stake.
“Tammy,” Griffen said quietly.
“What?” Val asked, still standing over Lizzy, still on guard.
“Tammy isn’t here… She was hunting with the garou. Why wouldn’t she be with them?”
“Maybe Lizzy killed…” Val said.
The doors to the ballroom burst open for the second time tonight. Déjà vu washed over most of those sensitive to such things. This time the shifters dragged in a woman, instead of the other way around. The lesser shifters, dragging an enraged Tammy.
Fifty-four
“If one more person pops out of nowhere, I’m testing whether this gun does any good or not,” Harrison growled.
Griffen was too busy watching the young shifters drag a struggling Tammy into the ballroom. Someone toward the back of the crowd had the intelligence to shut the doors behind them, but Griffen was too focused to quite notice who. Tammy’s otherwise-pretty face was twisted ugly with fury, tears of frustration on her cheeks. She cursed with shocking skill as her captors pulled her toward Griffen.
Her eyes locked onto Griffen’s, and she spat at him. It didn’t have the distance to score.
“Tell your scum-sucking lackeys to let me go!” she shrieked.
Griffen ignored her, not bothering even to argue the term “lackeys.” He turned back to Harrison, whose eyes were a little too wide, and jaw a little too clenched.
“You were saying, Detective. Why do you think Lizzy here killed Slim?”
“Are you kidding me, McCandles? I don’t know who this is or what is going on now, but I just watched ‘Lizzy’ there stake a guy!”
Griffen’s heart sank and twisted, stomach turning. In the middle of action, he had been so concerned for his sister that he had tucked Lowell’s death into the back of his mind. Now it all hit him in a rush, Lizzy slamming a piece of table into his chest. Griffen turned to look for the body, bracing himself and holding as firmly as possible to his outwardly calm face.
And lost it completely when he heard Lowell’s voice from the crowd.
“But Slim was not a vampire,” Lowell said.
Griffen, and most of the crowd, stared in shock at Lowell. He was lounging at one of the still-standing tables, sipping a drink, and with a good six inches of wood protruding from his chest. The other vampires sat with him, looking relaxed. There was a certain gleam in their eyes, a lazy smile on their faces that one gets after a very good meal or a good time in bed.
Once he had the room’s attention, Lowell put down his drink and drew the impromptu stake out of his heart. He winced slightly, and laid it on the table. Oddly, no blood flowed from the wound, but the stake was covered in it.
“You people and your analogies and superstitions,” he said, taking another sip from his drink. “Sure the shock of impact can break a deep feed, but shove a half a foot of anything into me anywhere, and you’ll get the same reaction. It would take a hell of a lot more than a bit of wood to do in a vampire, especially after a meal like that!”
Griffen couldn’t help but smile, relief filling him. All this time he had heard that a vampire fed off emotion and energy, and hadn’t once bothered to think of what benefits they got in return. He looked back at Harrison, and the smile faded as quickly as it had formed.
Harrison had his piece back in his hand, though pointing safely at the floor. His left eye had begun to tick.
“Vampire?” Harrison asked softly.
“Yes,” Griffen said, as plainly and as gently as possible. Like a man talking to someone standing on a window ledge and wearing very slippery shoes.
“He is a…”
“Yes.”
“And are you?”
“No.”
“Then what…”
Harrison’s eyes clouded over for a moment. Griffen suspected he was thinking back to one of their early conversations. And, of course, Griffen had shifted at least once in the fight, maybe more. He was always a little hazy on just how much he shifted, and not once had he had a convenient mirror to tell him exactly what he looked like.
Hopefully nothing like Lizzy.
“Dragon.”
Harrison shook his head hard, yanking himself back to the present. His eyes were back in focus. Cop eyes, cold, acute, guarded. The left one still twitched a bit around the edges, but he was picking up steam again.
“Right, dragon. Got it,” Harrison said. “I can deal with that… later. What I can’t quite get my head around is that you are trying to tell me that, despite having a violent lunatic knocked out practically at my feet, I’m looking for another psycho running around my goddamned town, shoving stakes into people’s hearts!?”
Griffen nodded, the adrenaline rush fading fully now. A wave of sadness filled him, followed by an almost crushing press of exhaustion. Griffen turned toward Tammy, who had gone still in the shifters’ grips.
“One who didn’t leave a murder weapon. Or throw it in the river, because it wasn’t a weapon exactly. She did it by hand… or at least limb,” Griffen said.
“And it took the big bad dragon this long to figure it out,” Tammy said.
The arrogance and smugness in her voice was just as ugly as h
er fury. Griffen took a step forward, and took a tight hold on himself. It wasn’t his way to hit a woman, much less one someone else was holding. But the temptation was there.
“Why, Tammy? What did Slim ever do to you?” Griffen said.
“Nothing, nothing at all. It wasn’t about him. It was about you! Making you hurt because you hurt me, and making you look like the shit you are in front of these idiots who worship you because you are a dragon.”
Tink stepped out of the crowd and up to Tammy. The changeling spokesman had been gentle, coolheaded, serene throughout the entire conclave. One of the biggest helps, in many small ways, to Griffen in his role of moderator.
When he struck the back of his hand across Tammy’s jaw, it was a cold, calculated gesture. The sound of it reverberated through the ballroom, and when he spoke, his anger was as cold and harsh as a blizzard.
“You little hypocrite! If he wasn’t a dragon, you wouldn’t have given him a second glance. You killed a man who had given you no cause, out of spite?” Tink said.
“Tail or the other shifters would have been too hard, they might have healed. Slim was… vulnerable. Human. And one of the scale bag’s biggest supporters,” Tammy said.
She shrugged as best she could with two other men holding her arms.
“It sounded like a good idea at the time,” she added. She looked at Harrison, then at Griffen. “The human police will never prove anything. And Griffen won’t do anything, not to me. Will you?”
She pursed her lips and took a half step, hips cocked and small breasts pressed against her shirt. Her voice dropped several registers, still sounding girlish but also husky and wanton. The whole act disgusted Griffen.
“I would never have imagined you so cruel, so manipulative, Tammy. Your bubbly, enthusiastic self is one hell of an act,” Griffen said.
“Oh, but it’s not an act; neither is this. I’m fey, I change with the winds.”
Tink nodded and sighed.
“That is an aspect of all changelings, but Tammy more than most. I expected the winds to blow her despair away, not to push her into… this,” Tink said.
Which made a disturbing sense to Griffen. He had seen the mutability of the changeling moods, and it was only one step past that to personality. And the shifts would be all the more dangerous than, say, the mood swings of someone like Lizzy. Where Lizzy was obviously broken, the changelings were just responding to what was natural to them. Making them subtle, deadly.
Griffen felt himself feeling in a very small way grateful that things hadn’t been much, much worse.
“And when I asked you to help the investigation?” Griffen asked.
“The nerve! Asking me to help you, when you didn’t want me, want to help me.”
A tear welled up in the corner of Tammy’s eye and she bit into her bottom lip.
“I did help you, Tammy,” Griffen said.
“Humph. Not enough! So I scried about for a big, nasty-looking power that looked unconnected to the conclave, and led the garou to it. Figured while they were getting the tar beat out of them, I could skip town.”
Griffen nodded, having figured out that much. What he couldn’t figure out was how the other shifters had caught her. The only possibility seemed to be…
“You were following the garou, figuring that they were better trackers after all but that you might be able to beat them back to me with any information they found?” Griffen said to the lesser shifters.
There were some embarrassed glances about, and one of those who wasn’t holding Tammy at the time nodded. In other circumstances, Griffen might have smiled at how the young man blushed.
“Not all of us, just one, me, keeping tabs on them. I saw Tammy break away from them as they went into a building, and a few seconds later the sound of fighting. I called the others and decided to follow Tammy. When she caught us, she tried to shove her fingers through my skull, and that kind of clinched the whole thing for us.”
Griffen looked through the crowd for Jay, Tail, and Kane. The various representatives of the shifters gave embarrassed looks and shrugs back. Silently, he agreed with them; there were other things that took precedence just now.
“You are all missing something very important,” Harrison said.
The crowd turned its attention to him, and, one-handed, he drew a cigarette and lit it, taking a long drag. The other hand still held his firearm, but it was almost as if he had forgotten it was there.
“I don’t know what you all are, or why you are all here. But I know perps and murderers. I can buy this kid doing something like this, but not thinking it up. You said, ‘sounded like a good idea at the time,’ but you said it oddly. So I have to ask—who did you hear it from?”
Griffen played back the conversation in his head. Harrison was right. Tammy’s tone had tightened just a bit, her eyes glancing away for just a moment. She hadn’t come up with the scheme. Someone had played her like a violin.
At the moment she just glared at the cop and clenched her jaw. It was clear she wasn’t going to answer.
Tink, who no one seemed to pay attention to till he moved, slapped her again.
“Answer,” he said, and this time Griffen could practically feel a chill breeze off his words.
“He’s wrong; it was my idea!”
“Bullshit. Maybe your impulse, but you never have been one for planning,” Tink said.
“It was just a guy in a bar, pointed out I couldn’t take Griffen, or Tail, or anyone else I was really mad at. Suggested who I might get at.”
“What guy?” Griffen said.
“Why should I help you?!” Tammy spat, and struggled again in the shifters’ hands.
Tink raised his hand, and Tammy subsided.
“It was just a guy, tall, dark hair. No smell of serious power on him. Said he worked for a dragon. Someone who didn’t want your life to be all roses. Never said more,” Tammy said.
It was Valerie who spoke up next, a handful of words that expressed all the frustration Griffen was suddenly feeling.
“Well, that doesn’t narrow it down much,” she said.
Griffen agreed, the list was long in his head. Stoner he hadn’t heard anything from in a while. Flynn he had begun to mistrust. It was the kind of indirect move that could be the style of Melinda, or even George if Tammy had been wrong about the dragon part.
For that matter, where had Mai gone to when Lizzy appeared?
And now he had no idea what to do. Tammy was half-right when she said he wouldn’t punish her. He didn’t really know how.
Harrison was pulling a pair of handcuffs out.
“Right, that’s enough for here. I will get more out of her behind bars. Will these hold her?”
“Links of iron? Oh yes. But you aren’t taking her with you,” Tink said.
And with those simple words the tension level in the room skyrocketed once more. The fairy, still dressed like Alice just out of the looking glass, squared off with the detective, his sheet of a costume lying forgotten on the floor somewhere.
“She is under arrest,” Harrison said.
“Oh? You think you will get her to sign a confession? Think you can prove anything she has said? Hell, if you have a wire on you, I’ll bet you your pension it’s fried and with nothing usable on it,” Tink said.
“You are just going to let a murderer go free?” Harrison shouted.
“No, we will take her, and punish her. She was our responsibility; it is a matter of honor that one of ours who violated this conclave be dealt with by our hand,” Tink said.
Griffen spoke up, feeling the weight of his responsibilities.
“And just what ‘punishment’ do you have in mind, Tink?”
“Death would seem appropriate, or the stripping of her glamour. Or we could just force her form into something else. Does this hotel need a new potted plant?” Tink asked.
“I’m not sure I can let you do that. Another murder won’t erase the first, and I am responsible for this conclave and any decisions
of this magnitude,” Griffen said.
“Decisions between the groups perhaps; this is between us changelings.”
“It’s vigilantism, and I won’t tolerate it,” Harrison said, outshouting the other two.
George moved, and something about the swirl of his cape drew eyes all around the room. He bent next to Lizzy, glancing sidelong at Val, and picked up his fallen sword. The room watched as he wiped it off on a table napkin and slid it into its sheath.
“Murderer aside, may I ask just what you plan to report about all this?” George asked.
“That’s evidence, and self-defense for the brawl. I don’t think anyone needs to see jail time for it. But don’t push me. You were a chief agitator, and, at very least, I could drag you in for aiding and abetting.”
George smiled.
“No, you can’t.”
He turned, took Val’s hand, and kissed it. She was too tired and shocked to pull it away. “Thank you for a lovely night.” He stood and vanished.
“Show-off,” Valerie muttered.
Harrison stared at where he had been and turned back to Tink and Tammy. Griffen could tell some of his resolve had been eaten away.
“She has to go in. This must be settled by due process,” Harrison said.
“Due process, yes, but not yours. This is outside your law,” Tink said.
“No, nothing is outside the law.”
Griffen fought down a clever remark, but it was a funny thing to hear from a vice detective. The room was beginning to fill with life again, people milling about. This was good and fascinating entertainment, but things were relaxing, with the immediate danger well past.
There was a soft sigh behind him, one he recognized. He spoke softly, under his breath, as the two argued.
“What took you so long, Rose?” he said.
“Wrong kind of magic flaring up, things have only just settled down enough for my sort,” she said.
“Did you know how much of a mess you were pulling me into?”
“Would you be happier if I said yes or no? I only wanted what’s best for the conclave,” Rose said.
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