Shattered Spirits

by C. I. Black

  CHAPTER 3

  Ryan sat on the edge of the concrete divider separating the narrow parking lot from the four-lane road running behind the Newgate Medical Examiner’s office, trying to figure out the mess of churning emotions within him. Special Agent Jones had been there, and she was more alluring than ever. Except he’d never expected that she, of all people, would be at the Newgate M.E. office, and he didn’t know if that complicated anything.

  He had hoped he could slip in and sweet-talk Hiro into revealing details about the corpse. That was all. Because while the name the media had released last night wasn’t Pete Matthews, the picture certainly had been his.

  The body on the table had sure looked like Pete as well… or rather his head on that trolley. It wasn’t surprising that the news hadn’t mentioned anything about the victim being decapitated. This was now the second decapitation in less than two weeks. One would make the public nervous. Two would make the public scared, and he suspected the police didn’t want a panic until they had a better idea of what was going on.

  But that was the only thing about this situation that made sense. Top of his list of confusion: how could someone who’d died fifteen years ago now lie in the M.E.’s office, having been beheaded yesterday?

  It had to be a coincidence. The victim was Pete’s double. They—whoever they were—said everyone had a double somewhere in the world. What were the odds that Pete’s double would live in the same city and also be killed in a public way? Not that Ryan was a betting man, but even if he was, he wouldn’t take the bet. Besides, if Pete hadn’t died in that fire, he would have contacted Ryan. They’d been best friends. They’d shared everything.

  Except if Pete had faked his death—for reasons Ryan couldn’t fathom—childhood friendship wouldn’t have meant anything. No matter how much Ryan wanted it to. They might not have really shared anything… if that body was in fact Pete.

  Ryan rubbed his face, trying to focus. There were so many bad memories with Newgate, and his friend’s fiery death had been the first. He was such a fool to return. Even more of a fool to step into the Newgate Medical Examiner’s office and hope no one would notice or ask questions. Those were odds he shouldn’t have bet on.

  Of course, Special Agent Jones knew nothing about him, save that they’d crossed paths again so soon, but she didn’t strike him as the kind to let coincidences go. He didn’t want her to start asking questions and certainly not figure out why he’d ended up as a detective in small-town Elmsville.

  Of all the people he could have run into, why did it have to be her? There was something enticing and mysterious about her. When she found out the truth about him, he didn’t want to see her look at him with the same disappointment everyone else did.

  No, he wanted that ferocious something he sensed coiled within her five-foot-nothing frame staring at him with desire and nothing else. Perhaps it was the strawberry blonde hair that made him think she was ferocious, vivacious. Everyone thought redheads were firecrackers, right? Except there was something else that made her alluring. He just couldn’t figure out what.

  And if he wanted to prove he hadn’t lost his mind and seen the decapitated body of a fifteen-year-old ghost, he needed to stay as far away from Special Agent Jones as possible.

  With luck, Hiro would call, they’d make that dinner date, and he’d learn the truth about the body in her exam room.

  But he hadn’t gotten into his car and driven away. Against all common sense, he waited, pretending not to stare at the back door. Not that Special Agent Jones couldn’t leave by the front, which would make him even more the fool, but the urge to catch just a glimpse of her again was undeniable.

  The door swung open and Melissa Slater, perky reporter and backstabbing bitch, stepped into the lot, stopping when she saw him.

  Just great.

  Her cameraman jerked back before tripping over her, but she didn’t notice. A hint of a smile pulled at her perfectly lip-glossed lips, and she sauntered toward Ryan, her hips moving in an exaggerated sway.

  The day just got better and better. It was insult to injury that his ex would show up while he irrationally waited for Special Agent Jones. If he was smart, he’d get in his car and leave.

  “Ryan.” Melissa slid his name out, her sultry alto an unwanted reminder of their past relationship.

  “Ms. Slater,” he said, doing nothing to hide the chill in his voice.

  She pursed her lips, and Ryan bit back a nasty barb to add to his acknowledgment of her. He was beyond that. Not that the bitch didn’t deserve it. She’d not only abandoned him when Internal Affairs had begun its investigation of him, she’d turned him into a stepping stone for her TV career.

  “What brings you to town?” she asked.

  Not you. “I’m visiting my sister.”

  Melissa nodded. He could practically see the wheels turning in her head as she tried to figure out what angle she wanted to take.

  “I heard you transferred to Elmsville.”

  The street wavered, like air over sweltering asphalt, even though it was mid-January. A dark hallway, fluctuating and translucent, transposed itself over the parking lot.

  Ryan clenched his jaw and tried to act normal. Now was not the time for a future flash. Not that it really mattered if Melissa thought he was crazy, but he didn’t want to give her more career-advancing material.

  “I heard you moved to KDKA.”

  She said something, but her words were muffled. The vision was too strong. Plain, pale cinder block walls—probably beige—surged into focus.

  He gripped the barrier beneath him, struggling to root himself back into the M.E.’s parking lot. Through the wavering hall, Melissa frowned. She said something else. She expected an answer.

  “Hunh.”

  Her frown deepened. Guess that was the wrong answer.

  Something crashed, making him jump. He dug his nails into the concrete barrier, struggling not to glance in the direction of the imaginary noise.

  From over Melissa’s shoulder, Special Agent Jones rushed into the hall through a metal security door, sidearm held ready. Her pale eyes pierced him as if this vision of her could see him. Blood was smeared across her cheek and stained her shirt at her side. With a growl, she turned and ran into the darkness. A bang sent his heart racing. Then another and a scream. Gunfire. In the direction Jones had gone.

  He jerked to his feet.

  The security door flew open again, and Special Agent Jones stepped back into the hall.

  But the hall darkened and rippled.

  “Detective,” the imaginary Jones said.

  Something within him popped, and the hall disappeared, but Jones remained. The real Special Agent, not the vision. He had no idea if she’d been the one in the vision who’d gotten shot, and he had no idea when the future flash would happen. But she had been injured, and his visions had never not happened.

  “Jeez, Ryan. You can’t even pretend to be happy for me,” Melissa said.

  “What?”

  “I got a promotion last year.”

  “Great.” He couldn’t stop looking at Jones.

  Jones raised an eyebrow and stepped into the light from the shadows of the M.E.’s office.

  He had to warn her about what he’d seen. “Special Agent Jones.”

  “Special Agent?” Melissa swung around and held out her hand. “Melissa Slater.”

  Jones looked at Melissa’s hand, but made no move to shake it.

  “I’m with KDKA, Newgate’s News Specialists. Are you a Special Agent with the FBI?” She glanced at her cameraman, and he lifted his camera to his shoulder.

  Capri rolled her eyes. “Excuse me.” She turned and headed to a black SUV parked a few feet away.

  “Wait. I want to know about the murder victim. That’s two in less than two weeks. Are they connected? Is the FBI on the case?”

  Ryan shoved past Melissa and raced after Jones. For all he knew, she was headed into the situation he’d just seen. “Jones, wait.”

>   She didn’t look back, just got into the SUV.

  Shit.

  “FBI?” Melissa turned to Ryan, her tone sugary sweet.

  If Jones wouldn’t listen here, he had to follow her. Maybe she’d go someplace safe and outdoors. Like a park. He rushed to his car.

  “What’s the FBI doing here?”

  Jones backed out of her spot.

  “I don’t know.” Ryan yanked open his car door.

  “Come on, Ryan.”

  Jones pulled out of the lot. He had to hurry up. “Bye, Melissa.”

  “Ryan—”

  He shut the door on her and squealed out of the lot. It felt good to give the bitch her due. Perhaps things were changing for him. Maybe this time he could save someone.

  CHAPTER 4

  Capri pulled into a lot of churned, muddy snow and parked beside Swipe’s black van. Twenty feet away sat a 19th century three-story factory, with crumbling brown bricks and broken and boarded windows.

  The building looked deserted. Except the mess in the parking lot indicated someone—likely many someones—had stopped here recently. It was probably the local teen hangout. On the outskirts of town, settled between two hills without another building in sight, it made a great spot for an illicit party.

  Swipe and Gig stood by a battered open door with Diablo, their team’s contact with the Asar Nergal—the organization assigned to eliminate human mages. Mages hadn’t been so much of a problem that her Clean Team had needed to be brought in to work with the Asar Nergal since early in the 1600s. Usually the Asar Nergal were the sole hunters of those humans who’d shared a body with a dragon and had their connection to the earth’s magic activated. She imagined, given that most drakes valued their lives, the Asar Nergal had been bored for over four hundred years.

  Diablo glanced at her. Yep, must have been bored. He’d grown his hair out, again. Braided back, the black strands brushed his waist, making his body’s Native American heritage clear. Not that the bronze drake knew anything about the Navajo people. It was just luck of the draw his body had come from this continent the last time he’d been reborn into an empty vessel.

  She got out, her low-heeled boots crunching in the gravel and snow.

  Gig, the youngest member of her team, waved vigorously, the motion making his shaggy locks bounce around his head. Swipe ignored him, while Diablo glared.

  “Well, hello to you, too,” Capri said.

  Diablo’s glare deepened. She hadn’t thought it was possible to look so sour.

  “The site’s all yours.” With a whoosh, he used his earth magic to form a gate—a black vortex appearing under his feet—and disappeared.

  Ah, ever the man of many words. Obviously he hadn’t found the human mages and needed to regroup in private. He didn’t take failure well, and from what she’d heard, the last of these mages were proving more challenging to apprehend than anticipated.

  She turned to Swipe and raised an eyebrow, trying not to laugh. “Someone’s in a good mood.”

  “He was still swearing when we showed up,” Gig said.

  Capri bit back a chuckle. As much as it was bad that the mages were still out there, it was kind of amusing to see Diablo struggle. Mr. Perfect wasn’t quite so perfect. As well, it meant more of a distraction. Maybe if she was too busy working, she wouldn’t be thinking about Eric or Detective Miller.

  She shook away her thoughts and stepped into the warehouse. “Let’s see what we’ve got here, shall we?”

  The first ten feet of the inside were clear, just debris and garbage piled on the floor. Beyond lay a maze of machinery and shelves and a lot more garbage. Dust danced in the sunbeams cutting through the slats over the windows, and the reek of a sewer permeated the area, overlaid with the more expected smell of age and mold. She could just imagine what the second and third stories looked and smelled like.

  This was going to take some time. The bigger the location, the longer the spell’s duration and the more energy it would take for Swipe to use his magic to remove all traces that dragons—and in this case, human mages as well—existed.

  Turning back to the parking lot, she let the weak winter sun warm her face. With no one around, and therefore no one to use her magic on, this was going to be one big hurry up and wait kind of assignment. Normally she wouldn’t mind. It gave her time to think, but thinking was the last thing she wanted to do right now.

  She resisted the urge to sigh—it wouldn’t do for her teammates to think something was wrong—and looked at Gig. “Anything for you here?”

  The silver drake’s gaze grew unfocused. His earth magic ability to communicate with technology never ceased to amaze her. She couldn’t begin to imagine how it worked. He didn’t even have to be touching the device. Although perhaps it worked a little like how she reached into a human’s mind and changed his or her memories.

  Gig sucked in a slow breath, held it, and dug his toe into the ground. With a burst, he let the breath out and flashed her a wild grin. “There’s a cell phone in there. Want to see what’s on it and see if it gives us a lead on the mages? See if Diablo missed something?”

  “Absolutely.” There was no guarantee it had anything to do with the human mages, but the thought of one-upping Diablo with new information was the best thing that had happened all day.

  She turned to Swipe, always handsome in his black tailored winter coat, short-cropped blond hair, and square jaw. “How much time are you going to need?”

  “A while.” The Texan accent he’d been working on last week was gone. Guess he’d gotten sick of struggling with it. “The mages were here for over a day, and that leaves a lot of stuff.” Stuff being DNA evidence, fingerprints, hair, footprints, anything that might be traced. Anything that wasn’t technology. Swipe could remove the DNA and fingerprints from the phone, but not the contents within it.

  “Well, have fun. Gig and I are going to look for a cell phone.”

  “In that mess? I think I should be telling you to have fun. At least I don’t have to touch anything.” Swipe flashed her a hint of teeth and trudged through the snow along the side of the building, already working on setting up a magical perimeter for his spell. With so much evidence in such a large space, setting the perimeter would help focus his magic and hopefully shorten the duration required to remove all traces.

  Capri turned to Gig. “All right, lead the way.”

  He clicked his tongue, and his gaze grew unfocused again. He couldn’t have looked any more different from Swipe in his baggy, worn-down clothes and hair in desperate need of a cut. He’d unzipped his jacket and underneath was a comic T-shirt reading, “Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.” He tilted his head left then right, then back to left. “It’s this way…and up.”

  She nodded. She’d learned a while ago that if she said anything, he wouldn’t respond, not without her raising her voice and giving him a good shake, and that would break his connection, and he’d have to refocus.

  He shuffled along the wall through the open area to a narrow hall created between towering shelves and looming machinery. More weak bands of sunlight shot through holes in the grimy windows, making it too bright for her night vision to kick in and yet dark enough to soften the details of the garbage piled on the floor.

  At the back of the factory, they found a set of rickety wooden stairs, and followed them up to the second floor into a dark hall lined with doorways, some with doors, some without. Her night vision wavered in and out, showing glimpses of broken doors and furniture crowding the walls and moldy fast-food packaging.

  “It’s really close. In here.” Gig stepped through a doorway a few feet down.

  Inside, shelves had been cleared to the right wall, and a rat-eaten couch sat in the middle of the room, facing two large windows with most of the panes broken or missing. Ice and coarse snow slicked the floor.

  To the left stood an open doorway, the door lying on its side against the wall. Empty beer cans and liquor bottles
and more rotting take-out bags and pizza boxes were strewn about. Wonderful. This was going to take forever. Somewhere in this mess was a phone.

  * * *

  Ryan entered the abandoned factory and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. When he’d driven past, Jones had been standing in the doorway with two men. He hadn’t gotten a good look at them and by the time he’d pulled a U-turn out of sight down the road, they were gone. Jones’s SUV and a van, however, remained, and Ryan could only assume everyone was inside. From the look of the place, he didn’t think this was where his future flash would happen, but he couldn’t be sure. Besides, even if it wasn’t, he still needed to tell her.

  But tell her what? That he’d seen the future, and she was going to get shot… maybe? She was going to think he was crazy. Hell, there were days when he wondered if he was crazy.

  Yet he couldn’t stop if he’d wanted to. If there was a chance, any chance, that he could save her, he had to take it. And it had nothing to do with his attraction to her. Really. Honestly. Besides, trying to warn her would probably ruin all hope of anything happening between them.

  He knelt and examined the footprints on the muddy floor. There were a jumble of them, all different shapes and sizes, confirming his suspicion that this was a local hangout for the neighborhood youth. It didn’t, however, explain why the FBI was here. If he was lucky, it would have something to do with the decapitated body in the M.E.’s examination room. And if he was really lucky, he’d be able to get some details from Special Agent Jones.

  Yeah, right. If looks could kill, she would have killed him back at Hiro’s office. She hadn’t looked happy to see him, and he doubted she’d be even more impressed to learn he’d followed her here.

  Two sets of fresh tracks, still damp from the snow, led along the left wall to the back of the building: one small enough to be a petite woman’s, and the other most likely a man’s. It looked like the second man had stayed outside.

  A bang exploded above and to his left. Then another.