Into the Twilight: a Between the Worlds Novel

by Morgan Daimler

  “Hello?” Allie answered the phone tentatively, only then thinking to wonder who would be calling her on it.

  “Ms. McCarthy?” detective Riordan’s voice sounded strained even over the phone line.

  “Detective Riordan?” Allie said.

  “Can you get over to the clinic?”

  At first she thought she’d misheard him, and then she glanced at the clock. It was a little past one. Riordan’s voice on the phone was anxious now. “Ms. McCarthy? Are you there?”

  “Ummm. Yeah, I’m here,” Allie said, frowning at the worn wooden counter in front of her. “Did you just ask me if I could go to the clinic?”

  “Yes. We have a situation here, and I could really use your help.”

  “My help?” Allie repeated, feeling like an idiot. “What’s going on?”

  “There’s been an assault, and a murder,” Riordan said, his voice tired. “The elves are here but…they aren’t exactly being diplomatic. And the victim isn’t cooperating. I was hoping maybe you could help, because we aren’t getting anywhere right now.”

  “Could you hang on a second detective?” Allie asked, feeling her stomach drop. Then, “Jess?”

  A moment’s hesitation where she resisted the urge to project to him and see for herself what he was doing. “My love? What is wrong?”

  “Nothing. Riordan just called me and asked if I could come out to the clinic to help you question a victim. What is going on?” she knew her mental voice sounded perturbed but she didn’t care. He should have called her himself.

  “Yes there has been an incident, and it is likely our suspect, but there is no need for you to come out here,” he thought back, his anxiety plain.

  “Well Riordan thinks there is.”

  “Do not worry about it my heart. We will take care of it.” Something in his tone made her frown. He didn’t want her to go there and perversely that decided her.

  “I am on my way,” she thought firmly.

  “No Allie, do not…”

  “I’m on my way- I’ll see you soon,” she though then put everything she had into blocking him. Refocusing on the phone she took a second to make sure she was composed and her voice would be calm. “Detective?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “I’m leaving now, I’ll be there in a few minutes,” Allie said, determined to find out why Jess didn’t want her there and to see what she could do to help.

  “Hey Jason,” Allie called to her friend, who was sitting reading a novel in one of the chairs set up on the left hand side of the store. “I have to run out to the clinic to help the police with something. Do you want to run up and visit Bleidd while I’m there?”

  Jason shoved a bookmark in his novel and stood up. “Sure. What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” Allie said, limping up to flip the sign to closed and sending up a prayer that she wouldn’t lose too much business. She locked the door and gestured at Jason. “Let’s go find out.”

  *****************************

  Allie found most of her squad of Elven Guard and the two police detectives outside one of the small private rooms in the emergency room area of the clinic. Jessilaen, Brynneth, and Mariniessa stood in a small cluster to one side and the two human detectives to the other. To Allie’s surprise Sam was also there, although he was walking slowly around the hallway as if he were deep in thought. Everyone turned and stared at her as she approached and she reached down and adjusted the badge clipped to her waist to be sure it was in place. Touching the badge had become like touching a talisman; it gave her confidence in a stressful situation. There was something surreal about the entire thing but at the same time Allie was painfully aware that barely a few months ago she was the victim sitting in the hospital room with the police gathered in the hallway trying to decide how to handle her.

  Riordan looked relieved as she walked over. “Ms. McCarthy, I’m sorry to have called you out here but we’re hoping the victim might be more willing to talk to you.”

  “She won’t talk to you?” Allie said. Of all the reasons they could have needed her to come out this one hadn’t occurred to her, and she was even more puzzled that Jess hadn’t wanted her there. She had just automatically assumed they needed her for her empathy, maybe to help read the victim’s emotions to see if something was being left out of the statement.

  “No,” Brynneth said, his frustration evident. “She will not speak to the Elven Guard at all, nor when we are in the room.”

  “And all she’ll tell us is that we have enough physical evidence that we don’t need her statement,” Smythe said, sounding as puzzled as Allie felt. “She won’t even give us her name. She’s in here as a Jane Doe.”

  “Okay,” Allie said slowly. “Why is she here? I mean, what happened? You said there was a murder and an assault?”

  Riordan made a face, reaching up and rubbing his temple as if his head hurt. “Right. We got a call about a disturbance at Lincoln Park, it’s one of those little pocket parks off River Street...”

  “Yeah,” Allie interjected, thinking It’s not that far from my store actually. ”I know where it is, I’ve been there a couple times.”

  Jess looked concerned, but she tried to ignore him to focus on Riordan who had resumed his story. “Right, well we get out there and find this guy Skip Penney, he’s a musician who plays guitar around town, I’m sure you know him, everybody knows him, we find him laid out dead in the grass. I guess he was still hanging on when the first patrol got there and the medics but there was nothing they could do for him. I’ll spare you the details, it was pretty gory. And the patrol officer tells us he called because there was also a female victim, mixed Fairy blood, raped and stabbed, and she ID’ed our suspect in the other cases before the ambulance took her. Best guess at the scene was that Penney showed up and interrupted the assault before Standish could finish the victim off.”

  Allie nodded slowly, feeling the disgust and anger rolling off of the two human detectives as they remembered what they had seen at the crime scene. She tried to push the feelings away, but it was like trying to hold back water. Without thinking she gravitated towards Jess, wishing she could drop her attempt at a professional appearance and touch him to help ground herself. Looking away from the cluster of human and elven police she noticed Sam peering intently at her, and had the uncomfortable thought that he knew exactly what she was struggling with. Bracing herself she pushed through the feelings with sheer willpower. “Okay. So we know it was the same killer, but this victim survived.”

  “Right,” Smythe said. “But we need to know from the victim what happened. If we’re going to catch this guy we need to know the details. It’s possible some little thing she saw or something he did will give us the key to finally get a step ahead of him.”

  “Except she won’t tell us anything,” Riordan finished.

  “Detective Riordan called us to alert us of the additional victims,” Jess said, breaking his silence. “And in the hopes that we could compel her to break her silence but she is even less willing to speak to us than she is to speak to them.”

  “Okay, but ummm. What exactly am I supposed to do to help?”

  Riordan sighed, “I’ll be blunt. You’re the survivor of an assault yourself, or at least an attempted one. You’re mixed too, like she is. You’re female. We’re hoping that she’ll be willing to open up to you.”

  Allie looked down to hide her reaction, her automatic rebellion at the mere idea of opening up in any way to a stranger about what she’d been through. And that’s probably exactly how she feels too she thought unhappily. “Doesn’t the department have an expert for this kind of thing?”

  “There’s a psychologist with the state police that we call in when we need to,” Riordan said reluctantly. “But she feels that we should wait and not pressure this victim to talk if she isn’t ready to.”

  “You disagree?” Allie said, looking not at Riordan but at Brynneth, who frowned.

  “We feel that we have no time to
waste,” Riordan said.

  Allie nodded, then thought to Jess “Last time I checked Mariniessa was female. Can’t she go in there and talk to this woman?”

  Under different circumstances she might have laughed at the way his face twitched as he tried not to show a reaction. “My heart, Mariniessa may be female but a hedgehog has fewer sharp edges. If I send her in there alone she’s likely to end up in a fist fight with the victim.”

  “True,” Allie thought back, repressing an unexpected surge of jealousy as she remembered that Bleidd had found the elven mage enticing enough to have a one night stand with, sharp edges or not. She tried to shove the thought away knowing it was ridiculous, since one night stands were the typical elven approach to sexual relationships. And that she had flat out told him to do it, when he had offered not to for her sake, because she was with Jess and wouldn’t adopt the elves’ polyamorous attitude. Ugh I can’t keep disliking her because she slept with someone I’m in love with, when I’m the one who is choosing not to be with him for someone else’s sake. That’s not fair, Allie thought, but she had to fight not to shoot a glare at the other woman. Allie forced herself to stop that train of thought and refocus on the task at hand.

  She did not want to go in to that hospital room and face someone whose situation was so similar to one she had gone through and gone to great pains to forget. She was afraid to ask how badly the woman had been hurt or any other details of the assault. The truth was she didn’t want to know. But she did want to help if she could and she knew at some point she had to stop avoiding her own past. She had enough healing and perspective at this point to know that it was unhealthy to keep insisting that nothing had happened.

  “Okay,” Allie said unhappily. “Okay. I’ll try to talk to her, but I wouldn’t count on her being any more willing to say anything to me than she is to you.”

  Riordan visibly relaxed. “Thank you Ms. McCarthy. I know this is out of your purview and that it’s asking a lot of you. If I – we – thought there was any other way we’d go with that, but nothing is working.”

  “Right,” Allie said hoping her voice didn’t sound as bitter as she was feeling. “So what am I supposed to be asking her?”

  “Just try to find out what happened,” Smythe said.

  Jess was frowning and Allie looked at him, worried by the feelings of indecision she felt from him. “Mariniessa go in with her, but say nothing. I mean absolutely nothing, under any circumstances. Do anything you can to disappear so that the young woman forgets you are there, but you can be a witness to her words.”

  Allie was sure her face must have shown her shock, after Jess had said, privately anyway, that Mariniessa was the worst person to send in there she couldn’t believe that he was doing exactly that. The elven mage looked very serious though, and Allie felt a grim determination from her that she hadn’t expected. Maybe this would still work out.

  Allie started to step towards the door of the room but Jess stopped her. With an apologetic look he reached up and pushed her hair back behind her ears. Allie bit her lip and fought the urge to put it back. Her ears – neither the delicate, upswept point of elven ears nor the gentle rounded curve of human ones – were a source of embarrassment for her. She usually went to great effort to hide them, but she understood his logic. If this woman was hostile to the elves and mistrusted humans she might feel some kinship with another person of obviously mixed ancestry.

  Bracing herself, and with Mariniessa a silent shadow behind her, Allie slipped into the small room. It was much the same as the one she had been in after the Dark court elf had attacked her in her store, not surprising really. She assumed most of the rooms in this section of the clinic were probably mirror images of each other. Nonetheless it made her stomach clench to walk in and see the small figure huddled on the wooden hospital bed, much as she herself must have looked not that long ago. It sent a stab of unexpected sympathy through her, not just for the woman’s situation in general but for the woman herself in a very personal way. She felt an immediate kinship with this stranger.

  The woman looked very small and young but Allie quickly revised her initial assessment when she realized the woman was part brownie. Brownies tended to be short and petite, but were very strong for their size, and like all Fey could be quite old without looking it. Her brown skin and hair stood out in stark contrast against the shocking white of the hospital pillow and sheet. The left side of her face was covered in a bulky bandage, and another similar larger bandage was visible beneath the hospital gown covering her left shoulder. She wore a nasal cannula, the plastic tube snaking under her nose, the hiss of the oxygen filling the quiet room. The slow beeping of a heart monitor was the only other sound, and after a moment Allie could pick out the wires for the monitor against the pillow, disappearing in a cluster of bright colors into the sleeve of the hospital gown.

  Mariniessa faded into the back corner as Allie stepped forward towards the bed. The woman watched her, her expression hostile at first as she took in the badge, but fading to a dull confusion as Allie’s jeans and t-shirt destroyed the impression of an Elven Guard. Allie repressed a nervous laugh, knowing that no Elven Guard would be caught dead working in anything as grubby as the worn jeans and faded t-shirt she was currently wearing. Well if I’d known I was going to get drafted today to play Guard I’d have worn my nice jeans and fancy t-shirt Allie thought irrelevantly. When the woman spoke her voice was stronger than Allie had expected and she spoke in English. “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Allie,” she said, stumbling over how to properly introduce herself. “Allie McCarthy. I own a bookstore here in town and I, umm, sometimes help the Guard out. I’ve been helping them try to track down the guy who hurt you today.”

  Her face gave away nothing, her voice challenging. “So why are you here?”

  “Just to talk,” Allie said, feeling her way carefully around the painful tangle of the woman’s emotions, which were twisted and sharp like jagged metal.

  “I don’t want to talk,” she said flatly.

  Allie sighed, not too surprised that the woman didn’t offer her own name in exchange for Allie’s. It was extremely rude, by Fey standards, but if anyone deserved a little leeway she supposed this woman did. She was also starting to suspect that mixed-blooded or not the woman might not know that much about Fey culture. It was only a hunch but the way she defaulted to English and the way she acted…she was either taking a huge risk by being rude to someone of higher rank or she didn’t have a clue about how that all worked. It was a possible explanation for why she feared the Elven Guard so much too, since their reputation tended to be even more extreme among the humans of Ashwood than among the Fey population.

  Allie moved slowly over next to the bed sitting down carefully in the chair that had been left there. “I hope you don’t mind if I sit down, my ankle’s bothering me today. I need to rest it for a bit. And I don’t blame you for not wanting to talk. If I were you I wouldn’t either.”

  That caught the woman off guard and Allie could tell she wasn’t sure how to respond. She was probably expecting a typically elven attitude, Allie thought, or maybe that I’d order her to start cooperating. Because the elves really can be pricks when it’s expedient and they just expect the Lesser Fey to toe the line, even when those Fey are crime victims. Well, I’ll sit here in silence if that’s what she wants until I think I can get away with leaving, but even with the healing Brynneth gave me and the healing I guess I gave myself with Jess’s help my ankle is still sore today and I’m not going to stand the whole time.

  She stared hard at Allie for a full minute, the hands on the bland hospital clock ticking slowly around. Then possibly deciding to try to provoke Allie with rudeness into leaving by throwing etiquette out the window, if she was aware of it, or perhaps just in a lot of pain, the woman asked bluntly. “What’s wrong with your ankle?”

  “Well, I’m not sure you really want to hear that story,” Allie said, not really wanting to tell it, but when the woma
n’s eyes narrowed and she felt the hostility returning, she gave up. There didn’t seem to be any way not to get into her own personal pain, and she guessed that was as good a segue as any. Now to give her the version of events that stuck to total truth but edited out the Dark court’s quest for her grandmother’s spellbook. “Okay. Well. A couple months ago I got hit on by an elf and I told him to go look for a bedmate at the Fey groupie club downtown. He didn’t take it well.”

  The half-brownie’s eyes widened and Allie felt her interest focus entirely on what the she was saying. Allie stopped and swallowed hard. The other woman spoke into the background hum of hospital machinery, but now her voice was softer, less hostile. “You’re…half elven?”

  “Yeah,” Allie said simply, not sure what else to add to that.

  “What happened?”

  Allie felt her mouth stretching into a grim smile against her will as that damn inappropriate laughter tried to bubble up. “He didn’t take it well. Said I should be honored that he’d even consider bedding someone like me. Needless to say I didn’t share his opinion, but…getting into a physical fight with someone who’s a lot stronger than I am wasn’t a great idea. It didn’t end well for me.”

  The other woman wasn’t bothering to hide her interest now, leaning forward slightly in the bed so that the mattress crinkled underneath her. “He broke your leg?”

  Allie swallowed hard again, waiting for the usual upwelling of panic that came when she thought about the things she’d been through. Instead she felt a deep sadness, looking at the tiny woman in the hospital bed and thinking of her going through a similar ordeal. She took a deep breath aware of the woman’s eyes trying to meet hers. Instead she looked down at her hands. “It’s a long story. We got into a fist fight which I lost, badly. He broke my nose, I ended up with a concussion and a bruised throat and he…he tried to rape me” she forced the word out with a physical effort, hating the sound of it.