by J. L. Ray
She slid out behind him, but stumbled against the curb, and he caught her by the waist, propping her up against the car while she got her feet back under her. They were almost eye-to-eye, Tony just a few inches shorter. Phil’s eyelids dropped down and he looked at her mouth. Tony’s breathing got shallow and her heart was racing, but with the last of her strength she said,”I think I’m okay now. Thanks for the catch.”
Phil just stood there, looking like he wanted to push her backward into the limo onto one of its nice wide seats. Tony shut that picture and its sequel down and told him, “I need to go in. Now. I’m really tired. I need to sleep. Like my dad said,” she added.
Phil nodded, still as intense, but he stepped away from her. “Sleep well and dream sweetly,” he told her.
She walked to the door, feeling his eyes on her every step of the way. “Sweetly?” she thought. “Maybe if the dream includes whipped cream in strategic anatomic places.” And she held up her f-light to passcode herself into the building, sighing her relief when the door’s lock clicked loudly behind her, locking her in and locking out temptation.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was almost nine a.m. when Tony got to her apartment. Her family had been at the hospital with the Kellys during most of the time she had spent in Fairie. She figured her folks and Cal’s would all be at the hospital a least few more hours. When she checked her messages, she found that the Lieutenant had left her an f-light message telling her to sleep at least five or six hours before showing back up at the station. He told her planned to do that himself. From what Phil had said, however, it sounded like the Lieutenant was back on the case, and she felt guilty about coming back to her apartment, even though she knew she was useless and stupidly sleepy at this point. Hey, she’d almost jumped a demon in the back of a limo. ‘Nuff said.
As tired as she was, even after a hot shower, she laid down and found her mind wouldn’t quit racing. While she had learned quite a bit on the trip about Lilith’s past history, and frankly, Lilith’s past history was more like past histories, enough to fill several volumes, unfortunately, Tony just couldn’t see the connection yet. How did any of what they had learned get Lilith on the top of the hit list for someone in control of a vampire? She thought about the new victim, a swan-matron from a stretch of the Potomac River near Georgetown. How were the two Beings connected? There had to be something. Just when she thought she had it, sleep claimed her.
Four hours later she woke up saying, “Monster-Mate, dammit!” She rolled over from one side of her queen bed to the side where her f-light was set to go off in another hour. She grabbed it and called Phil.
“Hey, you awake?”
She heard silence for a moment, then he told her in a voice foggy with sleep, “I think, perhaps, that you may need another few hours yourself to fully reinstate your powers of deduction.”
“What?”
“I am speaking to you; therefore, I must be awake. I do not want to be, but I must be.”
“Asshat. Look, I’m calling about the second victim, Signa Engstrom. We know she wasn’t a Monster-Mate client, but what about family? Husband? Friends? What if she had a Monster-Mate client connected to her?”
There was a pause. Then, “Damn it,” he hissed. “I’m checking now. Hold on.”
She sat, the f-light in her hand, until it flared to indicate he was back on the line.
“I ran a general search for her name in the database. She wasn’t on the client list when I checked that, but she shows up mentioned by name once in a profile written by her sister, Haldis Holstrom, who is a client,” he told her. Then he added grimly, “No, she was a client. She dropped her listing about two weeks ago after five years on the service list.”
“We may be coming at this from the wrong angle,” Tony told him. “I’m beginning to think Monster-Mate, or you, or both are the target. The murders are to get your attention.”
“Whoever is doing this is doing a really bad job of that if this just now occurs to us.”
“Maybe not such a bad job. You risked death to go to Fairie.”
“That is weak reasoning, my dear. I went because you were the detective sent and because Cal’s wife needed him here and because the Bureau had many other pending cases. That holds far too many coincidences that would need far too many inside contacts to plan.”
“Okay, maybe that’s all icing on the cake for the murderer. Maybe it’s someone who doesn’t want Supers to find love,” Tony guessed.
“Possible, but how would killing two clients affect that?”
“Maybe it would scare other clients away?”
“One Mundane vampire wouldn’t scare the average Super, once it is aware of the existence of the vampire. Its magic is not strong enough to affect a Super who knows with what she is dealing.”
“But no one would know how the murders happened because the vampire angle hasn’t been in the publicity announcements yet.”
“Ah. Well, then. That is one remote possibility.”
“Maybe it’s someone who has a hard on for you?”
“I am sorry, a what?”
“Uhm...someone who is out to get you?”
“Sexually?”
“Someone who wants to hurt you?”
“Sexually?”
“You’re just doing that on purpose, now.”
A pause. “Perhaps. You squeak ever time I say the word.”
Another pause. “Move on. We need to figure this out. Enemies?”
Phil snorted, “My dear detective, you have only a few more days, not a few centuries.” He sighed. “My enemies are legion, if you will pardon me the theatricality. I have been making deals with Naturals and Supernaturals in various Realms for over three thousand years. Only in the last thirty of those years have the deals in Mundania been completely,” he paused as he pondered which word to employ there, then shrugged and admitted, “well, fair, and those only because of the threat of the Geas. I doubt we could even finish a list of my enemies in the days we have left. We certainly couldn’t question them all, even given that most of the human clients are now long dead.”
A weighted silence on Tony’s end led to Phil’s comment, “You don’t like to think about how old I am, do you?”
“We don’t have time,” she ground out between her teeth, “to discuss all the things I don’t like to think about when I think about you. Not until we solve this case. But when it’s over, we are so going to talk.”
“Have you called Lt. Azeem?” Phil asked her.
Tony blinked and looked at her f-light, suddenly appalled that instead of calling her supervisor or her partner, she’d called Phil. What was she thinking? And at this point she’d known this Being for what? About five minutes, give or take a century? Damn.
“I wanted to check with you first in case I could give him confirmation that Ms. Engstrom had some kind of connection to the business or to a client,” Tony lied glibly, glad it was a reasonably good excuse but really sorry she needed one that good. “Look, I need to get back into this. Go back to sleep. I’m sure we’ll be by Monster-Mate later.” She looked at her f-light, “It’s 1 p.m. Are you there? Can you get there?”
She could hear Phil laughing as he answered, “I can meet you there as soon as you want me.”
She heard the emphasis on “you want me” and pointedly told him, “The Lieutenant and I will meet you there, say, in an hour?”
Hearing her emphasis on “The Lieutenant and I”, he sighed, “Very well.”
Unfortunately for Tony, the Lieutenant was following up on other leads, and he sent her to Phil on her own. She met Windle in the lobby of the building an hour later, where he sat working the front desk. Heraphina was off duty until that evening, for which Tony was grateful. While she didn’t have the knee jerk reaction to witches that Cal did, she did have a healthy respect for their ability to be as vicious as they could be without invoking the response of the Great Curse. The Geas couldn’t react to every petty villainy or else any Super having a bad
day would get zapped. And while witches weren’t all bad, no matter what Cal said, it did appear that they were all related, and many of them, at best, had anger management issues, and at worst, were total headcases.
“Except for the workmen, we’re pretty quiet in here. Normally, there’s a singles’ do going on in the party rooms whenever we’re open,” Windle told her as they moved through the lobby, “but with all these bloody renovations, we cancelled the usual events for a week or so.”
“That’s got to hurt business a bit,” Tony commented.
“Oh, yes and no. We’re missing out on some physical traffic flow, mind ye, but the virtual flow coming over the Mageline has nigh tripled since Mephistopheles took over. A genius, he is,” Windle, who seemed so taciturn, his former rhyming aside, almost gushed. “Really knows how to market to people. He’s sussed out at least ten new angles that have brought in a butt-load of new customers. We’re rolling ‘em into the system like a new shipment of wine.”
Tony snorted then asked, “So Mephistopheles is completely changing the marketing as well as the decor?”
“You saw what the foyer looked like before. Undignified, that was, having Miss Serena lying about half-naked to greet customers. She’s got a rose quartz desk now and business suits and that.”
He got a sappy look on his face that suddenly reminded Tony of something else that had changed. She asked him, “So, what happened to the involuntary rhymage? How did you turn it off?”
He dropped sappy and gave her a glare that could have taken paint off a car. “Naff off. I don’t want to talk about it.” He gestured to the elevator. “In.”
She started to apologize, but he turned his back to her, and they rode down to the Monster-Mate offices in heavy silence.
The reason for his reaction became apparent when they walked through the elevator doors and were welcomed by Dindle.
“Greetings to you, though you are few! The boss is here, and he wants Tony near. I have to say, he gets his way. Detective Tony of the beautiful eyes, take care of your heart, beware of lies and the liar’s art.”
Windle harrumped. “You’re a fine one to be talking about lies, when you stole me girl. I brought the detective down. Now I’m going home, alone. You can sleep here, you traitor.” Windle turned around and told the manitcore, “Up to the lobby, Kit.” And away he went.
Dindle shook his head as he watched his brother leave. “Perhaps I should have resisted,” he mused, then grinned. “But then I really would have missed it.”
Tony could hear the muffled sounds of construction coming from the door to the right of the elevator. “What’s going on down there?”
“Workmen of great merit, whose efforts will soon be apparent, changing Adonis’s tasteless decor, and giving the party rooms a real what for!” Dindle told her with gusto. Then he gestured for Tony to follow him to the formerly red door which was now simply a dark cherry wood. “Walk through the door, if you wish to know more. Dark days await, for the Geas holds our fate. Good luck to you then, for we count you our friend.”
Tony didn’t know if she should thank him or do her best to forget the doggerel verse. She did make a mental note to never screw around with the guy version of a nymph. What the hell, the girl version, either, for that matter. Just in case her tastes ever changed. Yikes.
She opened the door and found Phil parked in front of his desk, paging through a display just above its surface. His viewer seemed to be rolling the file for Haldis Holstrom, the swan maiden sister of the last victim,Signa Engstrom, who had died about the time they were interviewing Naamah.
“What have you got?” she asked him, and he looked up at her grimly.
“Damned little that seems helpful, detective dear, “ he told her. “I have been going through the dating files for both Ms. Holstrom and Lilith, in hopes that their dating history might hold some answers to who has control of the vampire. I thought that perhaps it is someone looking for Beings to victimize.”
“And?” Tony prompted him when he stopped talking.
“If there is a pattern, I can’t see it. They haven’t dated the same Being, so it can’t be that,” he told her, rubbing his hand over his face.
“May I look?” she asked. “I don’t have a warrant.”
“You may look. We put a clause in the standard contract that Beings sign in order to have a profile on M and M. If something occurs that invokes the Geas, they have to let the authorities have access to their files.”
“M and M?”
Phil laughed, “I started calling Monster-Mate that. A bit silly, really, but I’m not fond of the term Monster for us, even when it’s accurate.”
“It isn’t accurate, not really,” Tony agreed, thinking of Cal, but Phil blew her a kiss from his fingers and she rolled her eyes. “Okay, maybe it is just for you. Not for, oh, say, Dr. Caligari.”
“Caligari is a client? Oh my Word!” Phil paged through and looked at his profile. “Indeed, he is. How do you know Roger?”
“Dr. C. works for D.C. as the Super Bureau’s chief examiner. He’s a pathologist.”
“How appropriate. He chose to work for the city--he wasn’t forced to by the Geas. He has always fit the light fae profile, though as a goblin, he falls by birth under the dark. Unfortunately, his early work in Mundane medicine brought him very negative attention.”
“What, that old movie?”
“Yes,” Phil shook his head, “And though Roger is here and could set the record straight, he has never bothered.”
Tony nodded, “That sounds like Dr. C. He’s a class act. He was the one who found the card on Lilith and told us about Monster-Mate. We should talk to him,” Tony stopped herself. There she went treating Phil like her partner again instead of a damn suspect. “I should talk to him about the second victim, see if he can tell us more about it than that it’s another vamp attack.” Phil had noticed her slip but he managed not to let her see that as she kept talking, hoping to cover herself. “Apparently, the Lieutenant had to do the GOOEN interview this time. The desk sergeant said his tail is still twitching.”
“I have not had to interact with the Order very often. They existed before the Geas was invoked, of course. In fact, rumor has it that they helped the Powers That Be build the spell that became the Geas.”
Tony raised her brows and nodded. “It’s a bad idea to piss them off, but it sure is easy to do. Of course, if they helped build the Geas, then they must know how closely they can sail to the edge before they go over.” She shook her head.
“Come here,” Phil told her.
Startled, she just glared at him for a moment. He shook his head and added, “Come look at the data that I have here.”
“Oh. Of course,” Tony said. She went around the desk and stood next to Phil.
“Would you like the chair?” he offered innocently.
She looked at it, padded black leather with thick arms and a high back. “That’s okay. I’ll stand.”
Phil stood up and turned to her, suddenly very much in her space. “No, I insist. As you know, I am a little old-fashioned. I would feel terrible if I had this comfortable chair and you were left standing.”
Tony arched a disbelieving brow, “If memory serves me correctly, women weren’t usually allowed to sit with the men when you were a sweet young thing, right? So can the bullshit already.”
“Ah, but I have become far more civilized over the centuries,” and he gestured to the chair. “Please, take it.”
She had an inkling that this was a bad idea, but she was still pretty tired, so she sat. The chair was so soft that she felt like it was hugging her. She almost groaned out loud.
Phil, who was dressed down in $300 dollar designer jeans and an artfully ripped and sewn t-shirt that probably cost as much as the chair, leaned across her to open the file on the displayer for her. Suddenly, she saw her tactical mistake. Phil loomed over her, invading her physical space with his ridiculously enticing scent. She sat back as far as she could while he leaned over her
and pulled up a double view of the two women’s records. When the two views appeared before them, he leaned back and rested one hand on the back of the chair and the other on the desk, all of which kept him in her space, corralling her into the chair on one side. He turned to her and spoke, so close to her face that his breath tickled her skin.
“As you can see,” he murmured smoothly, “both Beings have been on several dates since registering.”
Doing her best to focus on something other than Phil, Tony stared at the views, “Holstrom has been on more than several dates! That’s an impressive record for just five years.”
Phil looked again. “She averaged five different relationships a year. I suppose that could be considered impressive.”
Tony looked at him, “If you’re about to share, save it for, like, never. Okay?”
Phil grinned at her, his thin, dark face all angles and planes in the light from the viewer, and she tried very hard to think, “Older than dirt, older than dirt, seriously, older than dirt.” Sadly, it wasn’t stopping her from yet another wave of lust. She turned back to the screen just to stop the internal rant.
“You’re ex’s record is a bit more sketchy. Whoa--she definitely swung more than two ways, huh?” Tony muttered with admiration as she looked at the shorter, yet more eclectic list of Lilith’s dates. She pointed to one profile on Lilith’s list. “That particular type of nymph is a hermaphrodite, yeah?”
“I believe so. Again, remember that with some of the older beings, there would be more...variation in taste,” Phil reminded her diplomatically.
This time Tony grinned, realizing that Phil thought she was prejudiced. “Well, anything would be better than losing interest altogether, like old Aggie mentioned yesterday.”
Phil gave her a confused look.
“Agrat Bat Mahlat?”
He gave a shout of laughter, then shook his finger at her, “Never call her that to her face. In fact, never let her see your face,” and that time he looked serious.
“She that bad?” “You have no idea.”
