Shifty Magic

by Judy Teel

  "Forensics will have to confirm," Cooper said, "but it looks like the murderer accessed the apartment without force. Then when he attempted to abduct Ms. Billings, the boyfriend intervened."

  "There's some residual magic here, too," Miller said. "But not the same kind as before."

  Everyone looked at me. "What? I didn't see anything," I said.

  Cooper kept his speculative gaze on me for a moment and then turned back to Miller. "Any details?"

  "First impression, some kind of hypnosis spell, but I'll have to get a more detailed reading to be sure."

  "ERT is on its way. You have ten minutes."

  Miller ran a square, broad hand through his hair, sending the thin wisps into chaos. "I'll do what I can. No promises."

  Clapping the other man on the shoulder encouragingly, Cooper gestured for me to walk with him and headed for the stairs. "Did you see anything?" he asked in a low voice.

  "No, I swear."

  "But you smelled something," he stated.

  "The place reeked. It was the same nasty stench, too. Like the one on the vamp."

  That odd look he was giving me intensified. "What do you mean?"

  "Like...the closest equivalent I can come up with is rotten flowers. Jasmine specifically. I didn't think it meant anything then, but now I'm not sure."

  We stepped out of the house into what would have been a cool, peaceful night compared to the city except for the flashing lights and sirens of the cop cars racing up the road. We headed for Cooper's little electric car, and I waited for him to unlock it. No bicycles for the FBI, but a shoebox on wheels was perfectly acceptable.

  "You sure it was jasmine?" he asked as he opened the passenger door.

  "Not exactly, but close. It's this weird, cloying kind of sickly sweet smell like nothing I'm familiar with. Stop looking at me like I'm a freak in the circus. It makes me nervous."

  Cooper palmed his iC. With a quick swipe, he tracked it down the front of me about an inch from my body.

  "What was that for?" I demanded, jumping back.

  "Still human," he mused staring at the read out. "Weird."

  I jammed my fists onto my hips and didn't try to hide my exasperation. "Explain."

  As his gaze met mine, curiosity and a flicker of hope warring against sharp concern. A chill ran down my back.

  "Only one species of Were can smell demons, Addison."

  * * *

  Cooper refused to tell me anything else until we got back to my apartment. I understood that we were less likely to be overheard there, but the delay made worry chew at my stomach like the five-alarm hot sauce at Ally's deli. I wasn't much in the mood to wait, but while I was peeling Wizard off of him and shoving the mewling cat into the bathroom, I realized that a part of me didn't want to know.

  Silently admitting that I was a coward when it came to enduring more hurt over my lack of family, I went into my minuscule kitchen and started a pot of coffee. I didn't know anything about where I'd come from other than a few sketchy stories.

  I was almost eleven when the attacks happened, living in my latest foster home with two other kids. When the family bugged out of the city about seven months into the fighting, they left us behind.

  We lived on the streets during the eighteen months of cleanup following the routing of the terrorists. Once the dust settled and life started to normalize, the cops managed to snag me, and I was placed back into the system.

  During those months of chaos and violence, I got used to worrying more about how to survive than where I'd come from. Introspection became a luxury. By the time I was thirteen, I was one among thousands of orphaned and abandoned kids and reconciled to never knowing my biological heritage.

  A lot of new technology had appeared since then and all of it told me I was human. Seeing the residual magic was probably a hallucination brought on by shock. Cooper's conclusion that I'd phased my fingers into a vamp's neck was ridiculous.

  I filled two mugs with coffee, black for Cooper and lots of cream and sugar for me—a sure sign that I was feeling stressed. With a large dose of reluctance, I took the coffee and plodded to the mismatched pair of living room chairs flanking the broken gas fireplace in the corner of the main room. I never referred to the area as a living room. Such a lofty term would only encourage the nine by eleven space to put on airs. Since it had to share the limelight with the kitchen table, why encourage snobbery?

  "Let's get this over with," I said as I settled into my favorite chair, a red and gold velvet club that I'd salvaged off the curb.

  "If you were officially with the FBI, I could tell you everything." Cooper took a sip of coffee. "As it is, I'm limited."

  "Subtle. And the answer is still no. Now what about these demons? Which aren't real, by the way," I said in a stern voice.

  A smile touched the curves of his mouth. "You'd make a great agent."

  "No, I wouldn't. Especially with all these recent anomalies."

  "Because of all these anomalies."

  I studied him over the rim of my Betty Boop mug while I blew on the coffee. He was hiding something. I wasn't sure how I knew that other than the churning, skittish feeling in my gut, but I did.

  Cooper settled himself onto my tan, overstuffed easy chair and propped one ankle onto the opposite knee. "They're not actually demons, although religion and mythology have portrayed them that way for centuries. They're inter-dimensional beings. Most come from the same few dozen sectors, the areas interested in what our world has to offer. The smaller entities are usually more interested in the natural kingdom—"

  "Imps and fairies and stuff?" I asked.

  He nodded. "Generally not a problem. But there are a few that are more sophisticated and fully sentient."

  "Do they all stink?"

  "Only to a specific group of Weres. A secret society that as far as we know died out about twenty years ago."

  Disappointment squeezed my heart. "That was before I was born." So much for finding a clue to who my parents were. I shouldn't have let Cooper's hope that we might be able to be together color my common sense. "I'm not one of you. Why don't you believe the scanners?"

  "I believe what my instincts tell me."

  I contemplated that while he drank his coffee and watched me. "You think it's possible? Even without me being able to shift?"

  "I'd like to talk to a few people about it first, but yeah. I think it's possible."

  I kept my expression blank as a new spark of hope flickered in my chest. Sometimes I wondered how bright I was. When this turned out to be nothing, the pain would be agonizing. "You're wasting your time, but if it'll kill your stupid theory go for it."

  "It's not just a theory." He set his empty mug on the side table next to him, dropped his foot to the floor and leaned toward me. Fathomless silver-green eyes filled with decades of experience, loss, triumph and disappointment, gazed from a face that looked barely old enough to vote. "I'm drawn to you, Addison," he said, his voice soft and delicious. "Even before last Christmas, I felt it."

  I tensed as a savory awareness fluttered over my skin. "Another thing you're imagining. We were under the influence that night."

  "That excuse doesn't work anymore. You know there's something between us. You feel it too."

  My mouth went dry and a flock of butterflies reared their ugly heads in my stomach. "Weres and humans don't mix well," I said firmly.

  "Exactly my point."

  I jumped as he shoved to his feet, but all he did was carry his mug to the sink. "We'll see what ERT finds and what the autopsies show before we decide our next move in the case," he said, neatly changing the subject before I could raise any more objections.

  "I'm not buying that some inter-dimensional whatever is the killer," I said crossly. "Wouldn't it be, I don't know, out of phase with our physical world or something?"

  "True. Normally inhabitants of these other sectors can't interact with ours. All they can do is get close. We catch glimpses of them, like when people see a ghost. But you're
right, they can't touch anything that's out of synch with their vibration."

  "You say that like you're speaking from experience."

  He turned around and that delicious hint of a smile moved across his mouth again. "We're a very old race, Addie."

  "There's no 'we', Cooper. Just you setting yourself up for disappointment."

  "There'll be a pile of information to sift through tomorrow. Try and get some sleep."

  He came over to my chair, kissed the top of my head and strolled out of my apartment. After all the smoldering looks, the unexpected show of brotherly affection threw me completely off, and it took me a moment to collect my thoughts.

  When I did, I realized that in typical Cooper fashion, he'd managed to saunter off without answering anything that mattered. This case and I had more questions than answers. Like what kind of Were had gone extinct? Why would Laiyla be trying to get a Gaia fertility spell when she and her human boyfriend wouldn't need it in order to have children?

  But most of all, why would the murderer want access to another dimension?

  * * *

  When I showed up at the Tryon Bird the next morning, I was directed to one of the small rooms off to the side. I was given a laptop and a stack of files and left alone. Even though technology had slogged diligently onward in the last years, a lot of the old ways had reestablished themselves. When the grid went down under the first paranormal strike and backup facilities were destroyed, places like hospitals and police stations had made an important discovery: hardcopies matter.

  Most investigators relied on technology for their answers. I believed there would never be a computer as sophisticated and creative as the human mind.

  Personally, I liked papers and folders because I could spread them out, rifle through them and look for patterns. Leaning toward the direct and painfully blunt end of the personality scale, my talent for seeing subtle connections often fell short of stellar. Physical methods like highlighters and studying photographs seemed to help, so I used those non-technical methods as often as I could. I was glad Cooper had remembered that about how I worked and provided what I'd need.

  Shoving the precinct computer to the side, I laid each folder from the stack across the table in front of me. I had coroner reports, forensics on Laiyla's apartment and the abandoned house, and photos of the alley. There wouldn't be much, if any physical data on the vamp. The Church had firm and fast rules regarding outsiders touching their stuff, and they got very grumpy when the line was crossed.

  I picked up the report on Laiyla and her boyfriend first. I was surprised to see that she'd worked as an investigator for the southeastern covens union. It was the SCU that had sent her to New York to investigate the siphoning of vampire blood. I would bet a can of cat food that they were also the ones who asked her to track down the practitioner illegally selling Gaia spells.

  After reading a few more paragraphs, I stared at the ID photos in the top corners, acutely aware of the hollow, cold knot squatting in the pit of my stomach. Everything in the report indicated that Laiyla Billings had been a decent person. She'd been intelligent, dedicated to protecting others, and from what I'd seen, had a streak of kindness. Why did she have to die?

  I turned the page to the coroner's report on her and frowned. Cause of death unknown was printed at the top in bold letters. Every organ and system had been in perfect condition. The only anomalies were a trace of vampire venom in her system, a small amount of blood loss, and several non-fatal lacerations on her wrists and ankles.

  I read the report again, convinced that I must have missed something. The same conclusion kept glaring me in the face. She shouldn't be dead.

  Frustrated, I moved to the information on Keith Sanders, listed as human, just like the guard had said. Six feet, two hundred pounds, ranked third place in a local amateur weightlifting circuit. His spine had been fractured in two places, but he'd died from a broken neck the morning of Laiyla's murder. Nothing unusual in his blood stream except a trace of aspirin. I rubbed my forehead where a headache had started up.

  Seeing the lives of two people reduced to nothing but a few pieces of paper was beyond depressing. How did Cooper do this day in and day out without completely losing it?

  I put the two folders aside and picked up the evaluation of their apartment. Forensics had found fibers on the coffee table that matched Keith's T-shirt and cotton pajama bottoms, which explained the fractured back. Also a syringe with vamp venom residue and a match to Laiyla's blood on the needle. That explained in part how the assailant got her out of the apartment quietly, and why she had traces of the stuff in her system. Practitioners were partially immune to the venom, so it wasn't the whole picture, but at least that was one question answered.

  The hard office chair creaked as I leaned back and stared at the reports like they would suddenly snap to attention and tell me everything. Laying the last page down in front of me, I retrieved the folder on the abandoned house and flipped through the report.

  Cooper had been right, the symbols of the incantation circle tested as vampire blood and were a match for Danny's DNA—John Doe in the report. I wondered who'd been brave enough to scrape a bit of dead skin from him before the Church showed up.

  Otherwise, there were no prints, trace evidence or other giveaways at the house that would identify the killer. The only interesting part was the final page where the forensics scientist had entered "Unknown" next to a description of the powdery substance found near the body. It was described as being an eighth of an inch wide and making a perfect circle three feet in diameter.

  Picking up the folder with the pictures from the alley, I flipped through them looking for the circle of white powder that I remembered seeing. I found it in a close up of the pavement next to the body.

  What the hell was going on?

  I put the two photos next to each other and studied them. I'd never heard of a magic containment circle that didn't use symbols of some kind and certainly not one with a substance described as "unknown compound with a texture similar to cornstarch". I decided to try and get a sample to run by Falcon. A lot of bizarre things came through the shop in his uncle's quest for the unusual and strange. If anyone might know what it was, Falcon would.

  Stacking the crime scene reports to the side, I lined up the ones from each victim. Keith's was straightforward, but Laiyla's and Danny's were both a mystery. For Danny, I could only speculate that he'd died from blood loss, but even that was a gray area. As far as anyone knew, vamps could only be killed from decapitation or the sun. After what Ms. Fairview had let slip, they might have rehydrated him and at that very moment the guy was partying at Bellmonte's mansion.

  I looked again at the photos of the impaled body and tried to recall my interview with the Regent. My temper flared all over again at how he'd assumed that I worked for him. Bring him the names of the ones responsible and he might forgive me? Like I cared.

  The names of those responsible for the assault on his nephew, I mentally amended. I felt even more certain that Danny wasn't actually our first victim, but merely a means to an end.

  I mulled over the implications of that for a few more minutes and decided that in the end it didn't matter. Whatever the vampires were up to, it was ultimately no concern of mine. I had as much interest in supporting the Church's hunger for petty revenge as I did in working for them.

  If their precious vamp princeling wasn't dead, he wasn't part of the case. But two other lives were and the guy who'd killed them was still on the loose—a person with a thirst for black magic, access to a whole vamp's worth of blood and, according to the reports, also illegal venom. In other words, an immoral scum bag who was probably itching to kill again if we didn't stop him.

  The door pushed open and Cooper ambled in juggling another folder and two cans of Dr. Pepper.

  "Hope you're ready for the latest," he said as he set a can down in front of me and took a seat at the other end of the table.

  I popped open the top and took a long swallow of
sweet, ice cold goodness with that just-right hint of cherry. Heaven. "If it's something that will pull all this nonsense together, bring it."

  "The night guard's alibis hold on all counts. Check-in scans show he was at his post during the vamp slaying and the attack at the apartment, and then in his own apartment when Laiyla was killed."

  Cooper put his soda down on the table and flipped open the folder with one finger. "He's still on the books for aiding in the trafficking of dangerous magical substances and was very willing to do a plea bargain."

  "That bargaining didn't happen to include a description of the murderer leaving Morrocroft with Laiyla, did it?"

  "We wouldn't be plowing through all this if it did." He slid his report toward me. "But apparently there's been a lot of interest in the Gaia fertility myth recently. Laiyla was working a case on it, and she and her boyfriend had been fighting about it. One of their shouting matches went down yesterday morning."

  "The morning after I was attacked."

  He nodded. "Two neighbors reported hearing a third person in the apartment, but they couldn't tell if the individual was a male or female. When furniture started getting thrown around, they called the day guard and laid low."

  "So we're looking for a deep-voiced girl, or squeaky guy. That narrows it down," I said, rolling my eyes. "What did the day guard say?"

  A tired, ironic smile tightened around his mouth and eyes. "We pulled him in for questioning, but he doesn't remember getting any calls or seeing anyone leave the compound. However, records show that the magic protecting the wall was disabled for five seconds at 6:30 AM, and then brought back up."

  "You think the guard's memories were wiped?"

  "I know he thinks he's telling the truth." Cooper's shoulder twitched with a shrug. "Other than that..."

  "I found something too, but I have no idea what it means." I lined up the photos and reports. "There was a circle of white stuff near the bodies at both the alley and the house. There wasn't one at the apartment though. I think it means something. I want to try and find out what the powder is."