Death's Ethereal Enemy

by Ruby Loren

  She was going to take a leaf out of Emerson’s book.

  15

  Doing something as drastic as separating herself from her body… and then actually going somewhere, was going to take time and planning. January knew that book, filled with all the knowledge the Old Ones possessed about enchanters, was still going to be waiting for her, even centuries from now - and she was going to get her hands on it, one way or another.

  That didn’t stop her from wanting it right now, but perhaps all of this time spent around vampires was teaching her patience. She would do a few practice runs until she had things properly figured out. Considering what a struggle it had been to jump across to Gregory when he’d been right next to her, she dreaded to think what it would be like trying to find a location in the real world. And then there was the visible/invisible thing to consider. How would she know if she was see-through? There were so many things she didn’t yet know. Somehow, Emerson could still focus on the real world, while technically being in two places at once. She knew he’d been both downstairs talking to Gregory and upstairs with her in that room, where she’d found the dress.

  January shook her head and got out of her car. She didn’t need to be able to do anything fancy like that. Even so, it did afford her a little grudging respect for Emerson’s abilities.

  She still definitely wanted him dead.

  “And here I am on the doorstep of two people who probably want me dead,” she said, walking up the path towards the house that had once belonged to her parents.

  It was strange coming back here after all this time. She’d never actually visited her parents’ house since returning to Hailfield. She’d known it would only stir up memories of the life she’d run from. She hoped that Jo managed to turn the place into something else, although if she were being honest, she hardly saw herself coming around for a Sunday roast - even if everything returned to being relatively normal.

  The door opened before January had a chance to knock. She found herself face to face with the man whose skull she’d shattered with a single kick from her rear hooves.

  All things considered, he looked pretty good.

  “My head’s fine, thanks for asking,” Luke Bingley said, with an easy smile.

  January opened her mouth to say something like ‘glad to hear it’ but then shut it again. Was she glad to hear it? He had been trying to kill her and Gregory when it had happened.

  “Come in. I know Jo is eager to get started on the search for your parents’ killers.” He stepped aside for January to pass.

  She walked by, her nostrils flaring and picking up on the familiar scent of coconut hair wax, that Luke had always favoured. He looked just the same as he had when he used to stalk her at her job, working at Madame Rose’s Tearooms. The only noticeable difference was that he’d swapped the suits for jeans and a t-shirt. She wasn’t sure if he looked quite as good as when he’d dressed more formally, but it did make him a lot more approachable.

  “What are you up to these days?” she asked, and then immediately regretted it. What he was up to, was dealing with the consequences of getting her sister knocked up.

  “Not much,” Luke confessed and rubbed an anxious hand through his reddish hair. “I want you to know, I didn’t have anything to do with Jo trying to kill you.”

  “You didn't exactly stop her though, did you?” January replied, privately noting the fact he’d said ‘trying’ instead of ‘killing’.

  “You think I could have stopped her?”

  “I distinctly remember you having this little trick where you can yell at people in their heads and make them bend to your will,” January replied, none too bitterly.

  “Yes but… she’s pregnant,” he said, helplessly.

  January sighed and walked away from the emasculated ex-pack leader, to where she could hear her sister in the kitchen. She noticed that her sister’s newly bald head was covered with a flawless, deep red wig. If anything, it made Jo look even more attractive and put together than normal.

  “Ready to solve a murder?” January said, and then regretted her flippant tone.

  Jo gave her the look she always did when she was about to kick off, but to January’s surprise, she just waved a hand. “Let’s go into the dining room and I’ll tell you what Luke and I have found out so far. I made some doughnuts, if you want one.”

  January stared at her sister. “You made them?”

  Jo grabbed the plate and held it out. “You are not the only one who can bake. I just haven’t chosen to before now,” she said.

  It turned out, she was telling the truth. January had never made doughnuts before, but Jo’s were everything they ought to be. They were coated in sugar and had the most beautiful jam filling. Supermarket doughnuts had nothing on these.

  “They’re good, aren’t they?” Jo said, her dark eyes meeting January’s light pair.

  For the first time in goodness knows how long, January smiled at her sister. “They’re amazing.”

  They spent the next hour looking at surveillance photos of random Parisians and discussing wild theories about the method of murder that had been used on their parents. Jo and Luke seemed convinced that there had to be a clue in the CCTV footage of the street outside the apartment the Chevaliers had been renting at the time of their murder, but January wasn’t so sure. She herself would have staked a place out long before executing the crime. Any killer worth their salt would have known about the cameras and known how to not be caught.

  January believed it was the work of a professional. It was a sense you developed after being in the business yourself. The way her parents had died had been clean and efficient. The person who'd done it had got in and out and left nothing behind. It would have been almost as if they were never there at all.

  Unfortunately, her sister wasn’t going to let it go until she had someone to blame for their deaths, and for once, January didn’t want that person to be her.

  She thought the only real chance they had to catch the killer would be to figure out the motive. Who had wanted her parents dead? Why had they been killed at that precise time? January had quizzed Jo on what they’d done together in Paris, and what they’d been involved in, but she’d said that her parents had only spoken to the local wolf pack. Aside from that, they’d kept to themselves. When January had asked her what she and Luke had been up to, she’d been less forthcoming. January had decided to let sleeping leopards lie (in Luke’s case). The events that had led up to Jo and Luke getting together were probably not ones she wanted to hear about.

  January bit her lip and stared at the irrelevant surveillance photos. Unless there was more to her parents’ new life in Paris than Jo and Luke knew, she was fast coming to a conclusion. It was one that may actually justify Jo trying to kill her.

  Her parents death had something to do with her. She just had no idea why.

  “Full moon tonight,” Luke said, breaking the silence and changing the subject.

  January nodded and then realised both Jo and Luke were watching her.

  “You’re going to be running somewhere else, right?” she said.

  They both nodded and looked away.

  “Where are you running?” she asked, unable to keep the grit from her voice.

  “We were thinking Hobbling somewhere,” Luke said. “There’s not much space, and it might be risky for me, but it can’t be helped.”

  January fixed him with a look. “No, it can’t be.”

  She grabbed the last doughnut from the plate and stood up. This meeting had just come to an end. She was willing to give solving her parents’ murder a fair shot, even if she didn't think it would succeed, but she wasn’t about to rip apart her pack by reintroducing the tyrannical previous pack leader, who’d used mind control to force the other shifters into submission, and her sister, who’d been his number one sneak.

  She sighed and hesitated in the dining room doorway. “I know Witchwood Forest is nice, and there’s the social side, too, but you gave all of that up when yo
u forced people to do what you wanted them to do,” she told Luke. “And Jo, you gave it up when you coupled up with him… even before he was single.” She’d meant ‘coupled up’ as in ‘betrayed her friends by working for him’, but Jo’s blush told a different story.

  “I’ll see you later,” she carried on, determined to leave the house whilst still being civil.

  “We thought of some names for the baby. We’re not sure if it’s going to be a boy or a girl. We thought we could call her April, if she’s a girl, and August, if it’s a boy.”

  “You think naming a child after a month of the year is a good idea?” January said, not sure if they were joking or not.

  “We thought it would be nice. As a tribute to you. You’re the most talented one in the family. You’re the only one who’s ever done something.” Jo looked down, suddenly uncharacteristically self-deprecating. “Surely it’s not bad for me to want the baby to take after you, rather than me?”

  January found she was at a loss for words.

  She settled for a smile, which didn’t turn out too badly. “I know that whatever the baby turns out to be, you’ll give them a better time than our parents did us.”

  “We’ll give the baby a better time. You’re going to be an auntie, remember?”

  January felt dazed. These days, she mostly spent her time trying to figure out how to kill the people she didn’t like and stop them from killing her in return. Something as mundane as being an auntie felt out of place. She wasn’t sure if she’d be around to see the baby grow up. And if everything did work out okay, she worried that she would live to see them die. What could be more terrible than that?

  She felt a lump settle in her throat and had to take a couple of deep breaths.

  “I can’t wait to meet the baby,” she told Luke and Jo.

  Her happy mood evaporated when she suddenly remembered something that she’d been meaning to ask the new couple. “Did either of you throw an axe at me when I was mowing the lawn? Was it Morgan?”

  Jo and Luke exchanged a look.

  “It wasn’t me, or Morgan. Luke wasn’t involved in any of this, remember?” Jo said.

  January tried not to roll her eyes at the nuances. “So, someone else threw an axe at me, before you decided to use one,” she acknowledged.

  Wasn’t it nice to be so popular that multiple people wanted you dead?

  She waved goodbye to Jo and Luke and went to hunt for the person after her head.

  “Just the person I wanted to see,” she said when Emerson materialised in the front room of Tor’s house. January had broken into the house again. Although, she had taken Simon’s advice and done it a little less crudely.

  “Really?” Emerson said, raising a ghostly eyebrow at her.

  January gave him a knowing look. “You did try to kill me, but I’ve moved onto other matters.”

  Emerson’s mouth curved up a little. “Kill you? That was never my intention.”

  January rolled her eyes. “Leave me wandering in the spirit world, or whatever it is that you call it. It’s the same end result.”

  “Even so, that wasn’t my intention. I have faith in you, and you proved worthy. It was your first lesson.”

  January shut the book on scrying spells she’d been fruitlessly searching and focused her full attention on Emerson. “Are you saying that you’d have come to save me if I’d got myself stuck there, covered in that black stuff?”

  Emerson examined his fingernails. “Of course,” he said and quickly moved the conversation on. “You said you wanted to see me.”

  “I was hoping for another lesson,” January confessed, knowing better than to continue the previous argument. She was hardly convinced that the ancient vampire was telling the truth about rushing in, like a knight in shining armour, but she’d get no real result from pushing the point.

  “What would you like me to teach you this time?” Emerson lounged on the sofa, managing to look ridiculously inviting. January was uncomfortably reminded that he was an attractive man. Fortunately, the memory of the last murderous stunt he’d pulled - which had showed him to be something quite different from ‘a man’ - was still very fresh in her mind.

  “I need to find someone. I was hoping there was a spell to do it. I’ve looked in Tor’s books, but I haven’t found anything useful yet. So far, there’s just scrying, and that’s a psychic skill, which is one thing I don’t have,” she admitted.

  Emerson shrugged. “That sort of thing is only the domain of humans, and even then, it’s notoriously unreliable.”

  “Is there another way to find a person? I need to do it without their blood, or hair, or anything,” she said, knowing that these were common methods to keep tabs on someone.

  “That depends… who are you looking for?” Emerson tilted his head, and January blinked.

  “A werewolf. He worked for you in the past, actually.”

  Emerson smirked and nodded. “I remember. I still watched you back then, of course, but we needed someone who could get to know you in order to fully manipulate your actions.”

  “Thanks, that’s really interesting to know,” January said, dryly.

  “Don’t be such a spoil sport,” Emerson said with an even bigger smirk. “You’ll learn to play the games, too, if you’re fed up with losing.”

  “Who says I’m not already playing them?” January said, keeping her expression blank.

  Emerson looked curious, but then shook his head. “The day you surprise me will be one to remember for us both.”

  It won’t be as long coming as you think! January thought, knowing he didn’t believe she could do something unpredictable. She had a feeling that when she’d figured out how to do Emerson’s favourite trick, and had floated into the research centre to liberate the knowledge in that book, he wouldn’t be saying the same tired lines.

  “Can you help me to find Joe Milan, or not?” she pressed, wanting to pin him down.

  “I could find him immediately, of course.” He made eye contact, his blue eyes intense. “That’s what I do. But… you said you wanted a lesson.”

  January tried not to grit her teeth. She would have asked him to tell her where the scheming wolf was straight off the bat if she’d thought there was even a sliver of a chance that he’d actually tell her. She’d dealt with vampires long enough to know they did not give you anything for free. There were always strings attached.

  That was why she’d thought she’d make Emerson feel superior by asking for the lesson.

  “So, teach me,” She said, trying to look suitably penitent.

  “Perhaps. Why do you want to find your ex-boyfriend?” Emerson asked, not making eye contact again.

  “Jealous?” January couldn’t help saying. She bit her tongue when she remembered it wasn’t Gregory she was talking to.

  Emerson’s eyes lifted to meet her own, and for a second, she felt something like a shiver run up her spine.

  She shook her head. “I think he might have thrown an axe at me while I was mowing the lawn the other week. It could have been someone else. You know what it’s like when everyone wants you dead… But I’d kind of like to discount Joe from the lineup. I need to know if he’s nearby.” She tried to keep her gaze steady, but knew there was a flicker in her eyes.

  “Trouble with the pack?” Emerson asked, sounding sincere.

  “Hopefully I’ve already cut the head off the snake, but you never know. There’s a new leader of the wolf pack. I like her. It wouldn’t be good if a past leader suddenly reappeared and was reinstated, you know?” She raised an eyebrow.

  Emerson lifted his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, you’ve made your case. You want to know how to keep tabs on Joe.” He tilted his head at her. “Of course, it wouldn’t have crossed your mind that anything I might show you could likely be used to keep tabs on anyone?”

  “Not at all,” January said, knowing the game they were playing.

  Emerson sighed. “Naturally, I completely believe you. I’ll show you where t
o start.”

  “Really?” January said, surprised he'd even agreed to that much.

  “I said I’d teach you, and here I am about to do some teaching. Stop acting so surprised. Now… the first thing you’re going to do is close your eyes.”

  January shut them and listened to Emerson’s voice instructing her how to separate herself from her body and join him in the world of interconnected neurones, where all things living in the world could be found.

  How do I find people? she silently communicated.

  It’s easier when you know them, Emerson communicated back. He shut his eyes and January saw someone light up, far away in the distance. They glowed blue. January focused and saw that it was Simon.

  I only met him once, but I can always find people again. It’s easiest when I meet them in real life. Otherwise, they have to have something… memorable about them, he communicated, looking at January.

  She followed Emerson’s instructions and summoned up what she sensed was the essence of Joe. It was a strange thing to do. In her mind, she formed up every ounce of his character she’d experienced. She threw in his treachery and murderous intent, but also the way he’d seemed so loving and such a strong leader when she hadn’t known any better.

  Something black and gold shone out, far closer than Simon’s signature had been.

  Uh oh, looks like you may have trouble, Emerson communicated and indicated that they should return to the physical world.

  January opened her eyes. “Trouble?”

  “You must have sensed that he was nearby. Or at least, far closer to here than one might expect,” Emerson answered.

  “I didn’t really get a grip on his actual location,” she complained.

  “That’s higher level stuff. You actually have to pay someone a visit, if you want to know an exact location. You can get an idea that tips you off to an unexpected movement, like Joe being pretty close by, but until you follow him down into where things get physical again, you can’t actually see where he is,” Emerson explained, rather openly.