by Joey Ruff
“The roofs?” she scoffed. “Why would we check the roofs?”
“Because there aren’t any footprints.” I motioned my hand across the minefield of intermittent puddles across the lot. “And because if this had been a wolf or some other animal…one, you’re more likely to have four slash marks instead of three, and two, you’d more than likely have at least one bite mark. I didn’t see any of that.”
“So…?”
I didn’t wait around to explain my case further. I looked at Chuck and motioned to the building I’d been eye-balling: a two-story office building at the east end of the parking lot. “You think there’s a fire escape?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“Care to humor me, mate?”
He looked at Stone, and when she didn’t object, he nodded.
We moved quickly to the edge of the building and disappeared into the alley beside it. At the back was a dumpster and above that, sure enough, was a ladder. I glanced at Chuck, and he’d seen it, too. “Give me a lift?”
Chuck helped me up on to the dumpster, and I hoisted him up behind me. We climbed the ladder and walked the rooftop carefully.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
I crossed to the building’s ledge that overlooked the parking lot. People milling about below us, mostly unaware. Just normal people trying to do a normal job of a really fucked-up situation. “I don’t know yet. Just…anything that stands out.”
“Stands out, he says,” Chuck mused to himself. “Right.”
He scanned the roof’s perimeter behind me, and I moved along the edge closest to the crime scene, running a gloveless hand lightly against the stone rail. Supernatural energy is powerful, and memories or sense imprints created by the Midnight or other various entities are strong enough for me to pick up without much concentration. The trick I was doing was the equivalent of a metal detector.
As I neared the North corner of the building and my hand moved over a broken section of the wall, I felt the thrum beneath my fingers. I focused on the energy, and the reading came easily. Usually my gift allowed me to view a scene, a moment stolen from time: hear the sounds, see the sights, of whatever the object experienced. Typically, it’s multimedia.
I didn’t get that on the roof. All I felt was a heavy pressure, a great weight, which would suggest that whatever had been there was very large. I was left with the impression of strength and antiquity.
I slipped my glove back on as Chuck turned to me and said, “You okay? Did you find something?”
“You could say that. You?”
He shrugged. “Does a feather count?”
“What kind of feather?” I asked as I ran my fingers over the chipped section of wall. The marks looked like grooves cut roughly into the top edge of the brick façade. As I took a step back, I considered the way the grooves looked almost like a series of carved valleys. Three marks stood relatively close together, maybe a few inches apart, then maybe two feet away from that sat three more.
“Dunno,” Chuck said. “Parrot, maybe? It’s red and white, little black.”
“How big?”
“Hmm…ya know, like a feather size.” He held it up to me, and I crossed to him. “What, like eight inches or so?”
I didn’t respond.
“Right. You’ve got that whole metric system.”
“I know what a fucking inch is.”
He snickered quietly.
I took the feather from him and held it up to the light.
“What do you think? A macaw, maybe?”
“Maybe,” I said. “If this were Rio. How many tropical birds do you know flying around in Seattle?”
“Okay. So just use your little psychic reading thing on it, and…”
“Doesn’t work like that,” I said. “The feather’s organic. It won’t give a reading.”
“Organic?”
“Living. At least, it was. Hair, toenail clippings…hell, for that matter, potted plants or tree bark, none of that shit works.”
“Right,” he said.
I pointed at the grooves I’d noticed in the railing and said, “What do you make of those?”
“The chips?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a pattern.”
“I noticed.”
“Three and three. Like claw marks?”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Three claw marks. Three slashes in the vic. The feather.” He considered it all. “You’re looking for a bird?”
“Seem to be,” I said.
“What kind of bird could that be? Like a roc? Are those real?”
I shrugged. “Haven’t seen one, but I’ve heard stories. It’s doubtful that’s what this is, though. Rocs are big, like really big, and they’re mostly docile. Plus,” and I held up the feather, red and white with the black markings. “They’re not generally this flashy.”
I slid the feather into my pocket, and as I did, Chuck said, “You can’t take that, Jono. It’s evidence.”
“You think Stone’s really going to go bird hunting?”
A pensive look broke over his features.
“Just tell her we didn’t find anything.”
“Yeah. I can’t do that. Sorry. I have to take the feather.”
“I…”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Just take a picture of it with your phone.”
I gave him a puzzled look. He smiled. “I’ll show you how.”
I handed Chuck the phone and the feather, and it took him about fifteen seconds to take the picture and show me how to pull it up when I needed to look at it. Then he slid the feather into a plastic baggie.
“We good up here?”
I nodded. As we moved to the ladder, I turned my phone over in my hand and said, “There’s one thing that still bothers me.”
“What’s that?”
“Where did you find my number?”
“That piece of paper was clutched in the victim’s hand when we found him.”
“And his phone?”
“Didn’t have one. There’s a pay phone at the corner, though,” Chuck said. “One of the few left. Maybe he was heading for that?”
“Maybe.” I was more concerned with where he got my number, not so much how he planned to use it. I suppose the why was always a valid question. Seven hated me. Getting information from him was like bleeding a stone. Normally, he went out of his way to avoid me. If he’d needed to get a hold of me…it couldn’t have been good.
“So…what is he?” Chuck asked.
“Who?”
“The vic. What’d you say his name was, Seven?”
“Yeah, Seven.”
“Have a last name?”
“If he did, I never knew it.”
“Right.”
“He was Korrigan.”
“And what is that?”
“You go to Sunday School?”
“Sure,” he said.
We were at the ladder. I descended, landed on the dumpster lid, and as Chuck descended, I said, “They teach you the story about the devil leading a war in Heaven against the Man upstairs?”
He landed on the dumpster next to me. “Of course.”
“Did they tell you what happened to the angels that didn’t choose sides in the war, didn’t fight?”
I hopped off the dumpster into the alley, and Chuck landed beside me. “There were Swiss angels?” he asked.
I smiled. “Something like that. When the war was over, when the rebels were cast out and the doors were shut, these angels on the fence were ignored.”
“So, they’re like free agents?”
“That’s one way of looking at it. But they were, well, demoted, stripped of much of their power and left to fend for themselves.”
“Okay.”
“Ancient Celts called them the Sidhe.”
“She, what?”
“No, the Sidhe.” I spelled it for him. “The Faye. Fairies.”
He gave me a blank look.
>
“I know how it sounds. But it’s true, and the Faye, according to the priest who explained it to me, having refused to choose sides before tend to polarize now, trying to earn their way into the Grace of one camp or another.”
“Why?” he asked. “Why bother?”
“Because the war’s not over,” I said. “Nearly every major religion on the planet predicts one final battle of good versus evil: Armageddon, Ragnarok.”
“The End of Days.”
I nodded. “The Faye. The good ones are called Seelie, meaning Holy. The more sinister ones are the Korrigan.”
“And the vic is one of them. That’s the purple blood?”
“I didn’t know him well, but I’ve heard he’s at least a quarter goblin…on his mum’s side. The other three quarters can be rat terrier for all I care.”
“Right,” Chuck said. “But what did he want with you?”
“Don’t know. But from the look of things, it was important, and someone didn’t want him to talk.”
5
I sat in my car and pulled up the picture of the feather on my phone.
There were plenty of things that the feather could have come from: roc, gryphon, cockatrice, a plumed serpent… With the savagery of the attack, however, there was one more likely suspect. A harpy. They were the saber-toothed ninjas of the skies: quick, fierce, and deadly. What’s more, you’d never see them coming. I’d crossed paths with a few harpies in my day. The only reason I was around to tell about it was because I stayed on their good side. The prospect of having to hunt one didn’t exactly make me all warm and fucking fuzzy inside. If it really was a harpy, the only chance I had was to hit her before she saw it coming.
Before I could do that, I needed more information. I was only speculating, at this point. It seemed likely that Seven might have known what was coming for him, and if he didn’t, there was at least a chance he knew why. He was running…to me…which meant that he knew something. It also meant he was scared shitless with nowhere else to turn.
The only hope I really had was in figuring out who’d given him my number. The list of people we both knew wasn’t exactly extensive, and it was even smaller when I took away all the people who didn’t have my number. In fact, there was only one name that made sense.
Lorelei.
Maybe I was just tired, or too emotional from Anna. I didn’t know if she was the logical choice or if I was just looking for a reason to see her. Either way, that’s where I went.
If you took the highway north out of town after dark, you’d see the lights of a strip club called the Siren’s Song. Lorelei was its owner. We had a rather, well, pornographic history together. The last time I saw her, however, she tried to feed on me, which made things a little weird between us. I think she was just embarrassed.
Lorelei was a Siren, and when I say she tried to feed, I mean she tore off her clothes and tried to drain my bodily fluids in a not-very-sexy kind of way. Her kind fed upon Cerebral Spinal Fluid, and they used their inherent ability of stimulating certain emotions to compel their victims into docility and compliance. For reasons only guessed at, Sirens had no hold over me, and that, I think, was the main reason for the initial attraction; I intrigued her.
The good news was if Lori couldn’t answer my questions about Seven, she might shed some light on the harpy theory. They were kin, after all.
I pulled away from the curb and headed north. It wasn’t long before I saw the bright, neon mermaid on the Song’s façade wagging its tail back and forth in greeting. The sirens in stories and Starbucks’ logos were often featured as half-women, half-fish creatures that perched on rocks and sang to passing sailors. The Song’s girls had nothing to do with the sea, but Lorelei catered to the image the public bore, not only in her sign, but in her interior decorating as the soft, neptunal hues and bubble machines made the place look more like a fancy “under the sea”-themed prom than your average titty bar. She said the idea the public held of sirens was more friendly and welcoming than the real thing, and it was all about image, after all. I just thought the Little Mermaid was hot.
I parked and couldn’t help but notice that the club was busy. I don’t know what I expected, though. It was after midnight: peak hours for its typical patrons.
I walked up to the door, expecting to be denied entrance by the usual body guard, Victor. Nobody stood there, however, and I walked inside.
I stood in the back of the room for a moment, trying to take everything in. The tables were crowded, nearly every one occupied, and others lined the bar or stood gawking around the stage that jutted out erectly from the black, billowy curtains on the back wall. On the head of the stage, two topless women danced in tandem around the pole, locking legs and suspending both belief and gravity as they twirled, their long hair flowing, their glistening, glittery breasts heaving and pert.
Nobody saw me enter. I cast a glance towards the bar, saw a girl with long, dark hair in a skimpy outfit pouring drinks, and headed to the right side of the room. Past the tables, a dozen circular tents stood, suspended from the ceiling by cables, like some kind of Arabian desert village. They were reserved for the private dances, and each bore a half-circle sofa. I didn’t want the tents, but beyond those was a hallway with a dozen rooms reserved for the more elite, expensive services the club offered. I knew from experience one of them had a hot tub, and I also knew from experience that a couple of them were cold, sterile operating rooms where the bitches strapped their victims naked to a table and sucked the CSF from their spinal cords with a beak like a hummingbird’s that retracted from the back of their throats. Trust me, some images stick with you.
Lorelei’s office wasn’t far down the hallway, and the door stood open. I didn’t see her at first, just two people standing in front of her desk.
The first I recognized, at nearly seven feet tall, as Victor the doorman. Victor was a Gorgon, which meant one thing, really: he was a lummox. Big, strong, and stupid, he was built like a cartoon bulldog with a round head, huge arms, an overinflated torso, and small legs. He was bald and the lack of hair made his ears look bigger. He had piercings and a big thick mustache that went all the way down to his jawline. The mustache was a recent addition, replacing the goatee he’d previously sported, and it made him look like a walrus. He wore small sunglasses with round, opaque lenses, black jeans, combat boots, and a black t-shirt that stretched so tight over his muscles it could have been painted on.
The other I didn’t recognize, but it was a woman, a dancer probably, with long, wavy black hair. She wore tight, red leather: pants that laced up the sides and a shirt that had no sleeves or back, just a series of straps that held it in place. I couldn’t see her front, but she appeared to have all the right curves in all the right places and a very trim, athletic build. Even in her four-inch heels, she only came up to Victor’s shoulder.
I rapped on the door frame, and Victor turned to me first. His eyes lit with fury as he saw me, and he stepped forward hastily, turning sideways to squeeze through the doorframe. I took a few steps back, and he didn’t say anything through the frothing at his lips, but he stretched a massive hand towards me.
Before he could latch on, a woman’s voice said, “Victor. Stop.” The voice wasn’t angry; it wasn’t particularly forceful, but it bore an authority few could deny.
He lowered his hand, turned back to the voice, and said, “He shouldn’t be here.”
“Yet here he stands,” she said firmly. “Perhaps if you had been at your post you would have had more control of that.”
He turned to me and his eyes shot icy daggers through me, and then he spun quickly and stalked out into the main room.
Once he’d gone, I stepped to the office door and met Lorelei’s gaze. She stood behind her desk, looking every bit the vision that I remembered. She had soft, red hair and large, dark eyes that you needed a compass to navigate out of. A strapless black evening gown hugged her body down to her mid-thigh where it left her gorgeous, pale legs exposed. She wore heels as
well, which made her an inch taller than the dark-haired woman.
She might have been going for the sexy sea-creature look, but she was more Jessica Rabbit than Little Mermaid.
She smiled when she saw me, and I felt warmth spread over me from head to toe. She was like the sunrise. “Jono,” she purred.
“I came to see you,” I said with a wicked little grin. I stood in the doorway and watched her. She wore the beauty of legends, and despite being the madam of a glorified whorehouse, she was the classiest lady I’d ever known – despite not actually being, ya know, human. Ironic, I know.
“Careful,” she said. “The last time you did that, it had…less than desirable results and I didn’t see you for eight months.”
“Well, I don’t think that’ll happen this time, love. I only have a few innocent questions. I won’t ruffle any feathers...” I stopped myself before I said, “Unless you want me to.”
Lorelei turned to the other woman.
“Oh, please,” the dark-haired woman said. “Don’t let me interrupt anything.”
Lorelei cast a dark look at the woman, but the other paid her no mind. Instead, she turned and looked at me. “So this is Jono?”
I met her eyes and really saw her for the first time. If Lorelei’s beauty was fiery, this woman’s was mysterious. Her eyes were smaller than Lorelei’s and a deep, warm blue that seemed, somehow, frosty. She smiled at me, and her cheeks looked sculpted. Her face shape was more oval than Lorelei’s, her chin slightly more pointed. Her shirt, now that I could see it properly from the front, descended from an almost dog-like collar down the sides, leaving the top of her chest and cleavage exposed, to the sculpted cups of her firm breasts, covered the top of her stomach with the same woven pattern that trailed up the sides of her legs, and came to a point above her navel in a way that reminded me of an umpire’s pad and exposed a little midriff.
She wasn’t as elegant as Lorelei, but she was no less breathtaking, and while there were no physical traits that they shared, I had the sense that they were connected somehow.
“Jono,” Lorelei said, and I suddenly hoped I hadn’t been gawking. “This is Kinnara, my sister.”
