by Izzy Shows
I just wish I wasn’t so alone.
J.
I shut the book after reading that one entry, not wanting to go any further back. I put the journal back into the drawer and shut it—I wasn’t going to tell Finn that I’d found it. The invasion of her privacy had gone far enough, and I wasn’t an officer of the law. He couldn’t order me to keep doing this, and I wasn’t going to get in any trouble for not telling him about something that wasn’t going to help in the first place.
I walked back to the living room, where Carmen was sitting quietly on the couch, and Finn could be heard rifling through the kitchen.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anything here, Finn,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m starting to think you’re right.” He sounded a little defeated.
“I’m sorry. I wish there was something that could give us a leg up, but it’s not…we’re not dealing with your average killer here, so it’s not like we can treat it that way.”
He came into the living room, dragging a hand over his shaven head. “You’re right, you’re right. I’m sorry, I just don’t know what else to do.”
“If her friends were going missing, she would have thought about it when she went down that alleyway, and she didn’t, Finn. I know that,” I said, sighing.
He frowned. “How do you know that?”
“The spell I did, the one that let me know it was a vampire? I saw her last moments, I was her when she walked down that alley. She wasn’t thinking about how dangerous it was to do that considering she had five friends who disappeared or anything convenient like that, I would have told you if she did. She just thought it might be a little risky but she wanted to get home in time to watch her show.”
“You didn’t tell me that you were privy to her thoughts,” he snapped. “Didn’t you think that was a little relevant?”
I flushed, already regretting mentioning it. “There wasn’t anything relevant to tell! They were her private thoughts, and they weren’t anything helpful to the case. I feel bad enough that I knew what she was thinking, how alone she felt, I didn’t want everyone else to know that too.”
“That makes sense,” Carmen said.
“Thank you.”
“No, not you not wanting to share information,” she said, waving a hand at me. “I meant, it makes sense that he would go after someone who felt lonely, who didn’t belong in a group. An easier target.”
Finn glared at her, and I knew he was going to go off about how that was relevant information too.
“Did you not just hear what I said about relevant information?” There it goes.
“I did, which is why I provided you with some. We are a predatory race, and you are the prey. We hunt alone, occasionally in pairs, and we circle the pack, waiting for the weak or the ill to be separated. They drag behind, and we lunge in for the kill. It should not be news to you, I’m sure you’ve heard how predatory species work at some point in your life. In your school, or perhaps you’ve watched a nature documentary. We are no different. To us, the weak are often those who are lonely, who feel isolated from their groups from a social standpoint and are weak to the affections of our species. It is not abnormal for us to hunt in bars and clubs, to find those desiring our affections. I do not see why this is a surprise to you.” She spoke with such a matter of fact tone that I found myself agreeing with her. What she said made sense on a logical level, and especially considering the little I knew of vampires.
“Well, thank you for the information,” he said, his tone icy.
“Finn, you can’t seriously be mad at her for telling you relevant information after knowing you for less than an hour. That doesn’t make any sort of sense,” I said. I was a little annoyed with him, for his prejudice against Carmen, even though I didn’t trust her myself. Not trusting her didn’t mean that I had to be an idiot every time I spoke to her though, and I would have expected more from him. He was usually so charming and polite. I would have been willing to chock his behaviour up to being mad at me for not bringing up what he thought was relevant information, except for the fact that it hadn’t been and he’d already been rude to her before we’d reached this point.
“Fine, you know what, we aren’t getting anywhere with this,” he said.
“I would agree with that statement,” Carmen said as she stood up. “Perhaps it’s time we leave this place.”
I glanced from one to the other, not certain what was coming next.
“You’re right, we should. Blair, why don’t we go back to the murder scene and see if there’s anything else we can dig up there.”
“I will be coming with you, of course,” Carmen said.
“I don’t see any reason for you to keep tagging along.” Finn’s words were still sharp.
“Believe me, I would prefer not to, but I have my orders, and I will not let you stand in the way of me following them.”
“All right, all right, why don’t the two of you just take a breath?” I sighed and shook my head. “There’s no need for you to behave like this. We can go back to the scene, I’m not sure what you expect to find there, but we can certainly go back. Carmen will be coming along, Finn.” I added, glaring at him.
“Fine. Let’s go,” he said, his mood showing no signs of mellowing.
14
It didn’t take long to reach the alley again, and I saw that it was no longer roped off. That made sense, they’d already investigated everything. I didn’t know why Finn had insisted we return to the crime scene, but I wasn’t going to argue with him after the flop that had been her home search. If he wanted to comb through the alley for anything his men might have missed the first time around, that was fine by me.
We walked into the alley as a group, and I had a strange sense of déjà vu—not from my own walk the day before, but from the woman’s walk that I had experienced with her. It was a strange sense of visual overlay, not quite a memory, but almost seeing the events happening again. It was like she was walking ahead of me…I brushed aside the feeling and continued, not wanting to think about it too much.
“What are we hoping to find here?” I asked Finn.
“Honestly? I was hoping you’d get some…Wizard feeling if you spent time around here again.”
“Wizard feeling?” I asked with a lifted eyebrow. “What is that supposed to mean?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Like you walk by and hit a cold spot or have a vision or something.”
I snorted. “Yeah, cause that’s how all of this works.” I rolled my eyes and shook my head. Sometimes Finn was a complete dork.
“If it means anything to the two of you at all, I do not think we will find anything here either,” Carmen said. She walked a few steps behind us, demonstrating her status as not quite one of us. Here but not here, she didn’t want to be a part of any of it.
“It doesn’t,” Finn said with another shrug. “But thank you for your pointless comment.”
I sighed and glared at him. “Could the two of you play nice for maybe five minutes? Please?”
Neither of them answered me, which was all well and good as we had just reached the approximate location of the murder. We stood as a triangle for a minute or two, no one saying anything. I felt awkward, aware now that Finn was expecting me to magic up an answer for him but knowing that wasn’t how any of it worked.
Before he could make the feeling worse by asking me anything, two women walked toward us, eyeing us suspiciously. I expected them to pass us by, but they walked straight up to us. One had long, straight, brunette hair and the other had a mass of blonde curls. Both wore solid coloured blouses, one white and one red, and jeans.
“Would you mind leaving? We’re here to pay our respects.” The blonde piped up first.
“I do mind,” Finn said. “My name is Finnegan O’Malley, I’m a detective, and this location is relevant to our investigation.”
I groaned quietly, wishing Finn had gone for a more innocuous reason as to why we were here. There was only one reason
why anyone would be paying their respects in this alley, and that was if they knew the victim. Now they were going to play twenty questions with us, and we were never going to get out of there. Finn probably had questions for them too. This was going to take forever.
“You’re the detective working on Jolanda’s case?” The brunette gasped, staring at him as if he was her hero now.
“Yes. And you are?”
“My name’s Lizzy, this is Carol. We are—were—her friends. We saw her only an hour, maybe less, before she was…I think…” Her voice trailed off before she finished her sentence. Unable to come to terms with what had happened, I thought, too bad that didn’t make it any less real. If we could all close our eyes and wish really hard that something hadn’t happened. That would be a perfect world.
Or a horrible one. It depended on what you were wishing away.
Wait hold on, the blonde was Carol. My eyes snapped over to her, widened slightly, as I searched her face for any sort of meaning. She hadn’t been involved at all, and the only reason I knew her name was because I had read it in the diary, but still…it was so strange to be looking at her and seeing her as a real person. She was the last person Jolanda had written about before she died, and that felt meaningful in some way. Not relevant to the case at all, but still. Meaningful.
“Did anything seem out of the ordinary?” Finn had been asking them questions while I was zoned out. I finally shifted my gaze away from Carol and listened back in on the current conversation.
“No, nothing was strange at all. She decided to leave early, but even that wasn’t abnormal. She was fond of her shows, and she gets bored when we talk about our partners or children…” Lizzy sounded guilty, as if it was her fault that Jolanda had left early that night. I wanted to reach out and tell her that it wasn’t her fault; that Jolanda had just been set on watching that show, that was why she went down the alley. It wasn’t anything to do with them, and if they’d been talking about a more interesting subject it probably would have only served to rush her down the alley even more, because she would have been even later.
I couldn’t tell her any of that, though, because there was no way to explain how I knew any of that. There was no way to tell her that I had been with Jolanda in her last moments, albeit through a magical spell, that I had known what she was thinking and feeling.
I had to stay silent and watch her pain, pain that was normal in grieving friends, but pain that could have been alleviated if only magic were an accepted part of society.
Sighing, I backed away from the group for a moment, walking a few steps down the alley. I spread my awareness throughout, searching to see if perhaps Jolanda’s ghost had stuck around. That was something I could do, not quite the vision or feeling that Finn had been looking for, and it wouldn’t do to give us any new information. I had already gathered anything that Jolanda could have told us, but this was a way to give her some peace perhaps.
I felt nothing in the alley, no hint of a spirit floating around.
I’m not disappointed. It’s good that she’s moved on and found peace, it’s good that she isn’t watching all of this go down. I told myself, though it did not quite ring true. I would have liked to talk to her—it felt like I knew her.
I walked back towards the group, shoving my disappointment down. As I neared the group again, I picked up on the conversation once more.
“We already went through most of this at the station, is it necessary?” Carol was asking Finn.
“I just wanted to make sure we had everything down, sometimes you remember something that slipped your mind after you’ve had some time to think about it. Here’s my card,” he said, reaching into his pocket to pull out two business cards. “If you think of anything else, no matter how unimportant you might think it is, just give me a call.”
“We will.” Lizzy bobbed her head, and they turned around and left.
He sighed and looked back at Carmen and me. “Well, this hasn’t got us a lot further either. I don’t suppose you picked up on something I didn’t?”
We both shook our heads.
“I tried to see if Jolanda was hanging around, but no dice,” I said, shrugging. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s OK, I doubt that would have given us much of anything. She wouldn’t have known him. How the hell are we going to catch this guy?” He shook his head, looking down at the ground as if it had all the answers he was looking for.
“Well…” I hesitated, glancing at Carmen. She was looking at me with raised eyebrows, and I knew she was waiting for me to break the news to Finn. “We probably ain’t dealing with just one killer, Finn.”
His head snapped up and he glared at me. “What?”
“It just doesn’t seem likely. The amount of attacks that have occurred, and then…well…” I knew he was going to yell at me for not having mentioned the vampire I’d killed yet, but I hadn’t wanted to worry him when it had occurred, and there hadn’t seemed to be a good moment since then. I knew it was relevant information though, and he was going to blow up as soon as he heard it.
“Well? What?” he demanded.
“Well. I interrupted a vampire attacking a woman the other night, and I killed it. I didn’t think anything of it at the time,” I said.
His eyes were wide, almost frenzied, and I could see his balled-up hands shaking at his side. “Are you trying to give me an aneurism?” he asked quietly. “Why do you keep not telling me stuff?”
“OK, to be fair, nothing else I left out was even remotely important. And I told you, I didn’t think it was relevant at the time, and I’m telling you now, when I realised it was,” I said, wincing because even I knew that was a weak excuse. I should have mentioned it as soon as I realised we were working on a vampire case. I just hadn’t thought about it then.
He blew out a breath of air, rubbing a hand over his head. “Is there anything else pertinent that you didn’t think I should know about?”
I paused, chewing on the inside of my cheek. There wasn’t anything that I could think of that might be relevant, but I didn’t want to end up in this situation again. I shook my head after a minute of thought. “No, there’s nothing else. Finn, I’m sorry I didn’t say anything sooner.”
“Yeah,” he said, sighing. “I know, I know.”
I breathed out a groan of relief, he seemed to be calming down.
“What happened to the girl?” he asked.
“The girl? Oh.” I frowned. “I cleaned her up and sent her on her way. She was a little shell shocked, but that’s understandable.”
“You didn’t ask her any questions at all, did you?”
“Well, no, at the time I didn’t know we were dealing with multiple deaths. I thought it was an isolated incident, and that I had taken care of the threat. There was no reason to ask her any questions.”
“We’re going to have to bring her in then,” he said.
I started to protest, but just then a figure blurred into Finn, slamming him into the wall. I was thrown for a moment before I jumped into action, my blood heating and demanding I attack. I lunged for the man and grasped a fistful of his hoodie in one hand. “Vis,” I snarled, yanking him backwards with the strength my cuff afforded me. He flew into the opposite wall.
It gave us a second to orient ourselves. The man who had attacked was covered from head to toe, wearing a bandanna, sun glasses, and a hoodie, completely covered and unrecognisable if we didn’t do something to clear his face.
Carmen blurred in front of me, moving too fast for my eyes to focus on her, she lifted the man and proceeded to slam him into the concrete. I gaped, opening my mouth to tell her that she couldn’t just kill the man because she felt like it. Before I could, he staggered to his feet, and I heard the distinct sound of a hiss coming from behind that bandanna.
Vampire.
How was there a vampire out? It was late in the afternoon and the sun had just started to pass down into what would soon become sunset, but it was still too early for a vampire to be ou
t. It didn’t make sense.
I shoved the thoughts aside, aware that there wasn’t time to think too much about any of this. I could only focus on the fight currently at hand. I yanked one of the stakes out of my thigh holster, raising my arm to cover my chest with the stake pointed out.
The bark of a gun firing came from my right, the vampire’s body jerking a few times before a hole blossomed in its head and it fell to the ground, and a quick glance confirmed that Finn had just emptied a clip.
“No, that’s no bloody good!” I snapped, even as the vampire lurched back to its feet, turning its attention to Finn.
A guttural growl came from the vampire’s chest and he lunged towards Finn, but Carmen blurred again and pinned the vampire to the wall. “Blair!” she shouted, and I darted forward, reaching the two of them in three steps.
With my arm pulled back, I grabbed Carmen at the waist with my other arm and yanked her away from the offending vampire. “Lux!” I shouted the word to activate the enchantments, ramming the stake home in its chest with all my might. I backed away, the stake lighting up orange and red in front of me. I took in several breaths of air, forcing the racing blood within me to calm, as I watched the vampire ignite, burning to ash much more quickly than I had thought it would.
Silence returned to the alley as the three of us caught our breaths and processed the fight that had just taken place. I was the first to interrupt the quiet.
“What the hell was that?” I asked, turning to look at Carmen before I darted my gaze to the ground, trying to orient myself; the urge to fight still raged within me for a moment or two before quietening.
“A vampire?” she said with a breathless laugh.
“Yeah, but why was it…” I started to ask what it was doing out in the daylight, but then it hit me. Carmen was out in the daylight. Carmen had been out in the daylight all goddamn day long, and I hadn’t even thought to question it. She had just left the house with me without a word as to the sun burning bright overhead. How was that working? “How the hell are you out in the daylight?”
