The NightShade Forensic Files: Echo and Ember (Book 4)

by A. J. Scudiere

  Donovan turned from the trash can and looked at her as though waiting.

  “That’s it. These are all variations on a theme. As weird as that was—the fire around him that didn’t touch him, and the non-existent cause of death—it took four deaths to link them because they aren’t all quite the same. We have all the deaths with the odd fires. Well, we think we do, but we have to look beyond that. He didn’t always use fire.”

  Donovan settled into the couch next to her. “The fire is weird, too. Not just that it burns around the victim and never touches him. It’s weird in itself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He pulled out pictures from the printed files they were carrying with them. The FBI hadn’t just made copies of local police files. When they’d taken this case, they’d taken all the paper and the bodies and the evidence. Now, it was in the hands of NightShade agents. By definition, it was weird, but Eleri still didn’t understand what Donovan meant.

  “There’s no trace accelerant.” He laid the pictures side by side.

  “Matches.” Eleri supplied. “Not every fire has an accelerant.”

  He pointed to the picture of the body, drenched from the firemen’s hoses, putting out what had been a fully engaged house fire that somehow didn’t touch the body—not even smoke stains.

  “Look at the floor after the fire is out.” He pointed again. First, he pointed at the flooring around the body, then he pointed to other rooms in the house where photos had recorded the aftermath and the damage. “See the alligatoring?”

  He was referring to the cracks and crevices formed in the wood surface when fire burned it. The direction of the long lines indicated the direction of the burn. She didn’t see anything odd until he showed her the floor around the body.

  DONOVAN HAD HOPED to get away from everyone for breakfast. It didn’t work. He shouldn’t have tried to get away from Eleri, because something worse had showed up.

  “Morning.” Christina Pines sat down opposite him.

  Donovan blinked as he took a moment to place her. He’d recognized her by smell as he walked past. He hadn’t thought anything of it, just headed to the small continental breakfast and fixed himself a waffle at the breakfast bar. He’d grabbed a set of plastic “silverware” that was way too flimsy to use on almost any real food, but by God he was going to try. Peanut butter and syrup were the perfect things to eat on a waffle. Alone. Anyone else would think he was five years old.

  So when Agent Pines picked up her plate and drink and walked over to sit with him, Donovan resigned himself to the company. “Morning.”

  He tried to speak the word with kindness, with welcome, with a smile he didn’t feel. Pines looked very different this morning. In yoga pants and a long tee, she’d also not tied her hair back. The long straight locks revealed streaks of pink he didn’t think he’d ever seen on an FBI agent. She’d looked professional enough yesterday, in her suit and bun.

  “I know you and Eames didn’t quite understand the wording in my file. Honestly, I didn’t understand Eames’ much either, though I have met a few like you.” Pines took another bite of her toast. “I guess Eames just has hunches and they’re real. Right?”

  He nodded, but didn’t speak. It sounded like she’d met more of “his kind” than he had.

  “I figured it would be easier just to show you what I do,” she volunteered, speaking more than she had the entire day before.

  “Here? At breakfast?” He asked, eyebrows climbing.

  “Actually, I already did it.”

  He was not impressed. She hadn’t done anything. Donovan tried for tact. It was not his strong suit. “Is that all you’re eating for breakfast?” He motioned to the toast she was just finishing. “Dana’s got a big day lined up for us.”

  “No. I’m having oatmeal, too. I really like it with strawberries and brown sugar and walnuts, just like they have here.” She smiled at him.

  Donovan smiled back, wondering what in hell she was smiling about. He’d thought Eleri was weird when he first met her, but Christina Pines took the cake. “Are you going to go make it?”

  “Donovan, look at your plate.”

  He looked down. A Styrofoam bowl of oatmeal sat in front of him. It was piled high with brown sugar, walnuts, and strawberries. A single plastic spoon poked from the lump he would never in a thousand years consider eating. Startled words fell from his mouth. “I made a waffle.”

  “No. You only think you did.” She looked a little more solemn now. “I didn’t want to waste food, so you made my oatmeal.”

  “While I thought I made my waffle?” His heart was thudding. He’d picked up two tiny tubs of peanut butter. But they weren’t here. He remembered doing it. He’d grabbed two of the syrup packs—not the artificial sweetener either. High fructose corn syrup all the way. He remembered rifling through the bowl to be sure he picked the right ones. He didn’t even have the plastic fork and knife he’d played with while the waffle cooked.

  But there was no waffle. No smell of it. Had there ever been?

  “You wanted to know what I bring to the team. This is it.” She reached over and pulled the oatmeal toward her, even as Donovan still blinked. “Don’t worry. I won’t do it to you again. I just figured it was better if you knew what it was before you saw it in action. We all need to know what we’re dealing with.” She dug in the spoon and took a bite. “You should go make your own breakfast now.”

  Woodenly, he stood up and headed back to the counter. Only this time, he questioned if he was actually doing what he thought he was doing. Or was Christina Pines playing him again? His thoughts bounced around in his head.

  She could make people think what she wanted them to? He reached out to the waffle iron, getting close enough to feel the heat and wondering if it was worth the burn to know it was real. He decided against it but kept the thought in his back pocket for later despite the fact that he didn’t know if it would work.

  Back at the table, he plunked down opposite her, not moving with ease given the simultaneous directions of his thoughts. He was still staring at his food when she spoke.

  “It’s a real waffle this time, and it’s getting cold.” After a pause, she continued. “It’s my understanding that any illusion I give you is lacking. Unless I work at it, you may not have the right sensations for what you’re touching. You may not smell the waffle cooking. That kind of thing. Also, if you pay attention you can feel a slight buzz in your brain.”

  Donovan was chewing his first bite—which tasted exactly like waffle with peanut butter and syrup, though he was still suspicious of its reality. He did have a buzz at the back of his head. He frowned.

  Christina was looking down at her empty bowl before she spoke again. “I know most of us NightShade agents didn’t have the most fun time growing up. It’s not easy being a freak. But I was the most popular girl in school.”

  “Yay for you.” Donovan let the words roll off his tongue with so little inflection that they may have sucked some air out of the room.

  “I was prom queen. Dated the hottest guy in school who was also the quarterback.” She paused. “He didn’t earn it. I made the coach promote him over Shawn Measer—who actually deserved the spot. But I wanted my boyfriend to have everything he wanted.”

  “Let me guess. You made him quarterback and he dumped you.” Donovan took another bite so he didn’t mock her sob story outright. She didn’t know anything. Eleri’s sister. His father. That was some real shit. She’d been prom queen? Christina Pines could suck a bag of dicks.

  “No. He couldn’t dump me.” She looked up now, her stare making it clear that he hadn’t put two and two together. “He never really wanted to ask me out in the first place. But by the time I left him behind for college, he believed he was going to marry me. No one actually wanted me to be prom queen. No one even wanted to be my friend. It was exhausting.”

  “Poor you.” His sympathy was about as low as his belief that he was actually eating his damn breakfast.

 
; “No. I was awful. And I know it. But what I didn’t know, was that I was sharpening my skills. I’m damn good at it now.” This time she punctuated her sentence by standing. She finally left him to eat his breakfast alone, just as he’d hoped to in the first place.

  Too late, Donovan turned to ask her a question. He wondered if he should warn Eleri or if it was already too late.

  4

  When Donovan returned to the suite, Eleri was gone. She hadn’t left a note nor contacted him. So he didn’t know if she was out getting her own breakfast or if she was getting Christina Pines’ breakfast and the same treatment he’d gotten.

  Shit.

  Donovan texted her.

  —Pines has some weird mind control thing.

  That was it. Anything more and he’d sound too strange even to himself. The man who’d spent his childhood watching his father change form into a wolf and had even seen his father murder another man that way, thought Christina Pines was too far out for words. Eleri and her odd gifts had taken some getting used to. Pines was creepy though. She made him question what he knew and he didn’t like the feeling or the way it continued to crawl under his skin.

  —Thank you. I read that.

  Sure, she’d read the files same as him. It wasn’t the whole story.

  —She’ll make you see things that aren’t there. Think you are doing things you aren’t.

  —Thanks. I’ll steer clear until I talk to you.

  If you can, he thought. How would she even know if she ran into Pines and the woman made her forget it even happened? He fought the shudder that threatened to overtake him, but didn’t win.

  He wondered when Eleri would be back, but didn’t want to talk more—even a few texts often pushed his limits for contact. He often maxed out given his close operations with Eleri, interviewing suspects and dealing with people involved in the crimes. He remained perilously close to overload a lot of the time. With very little downtime between this case and the last one and with the full team rather than the two of them, he was afraid he might explode.

  He sat at the small table and pulled out his computer and his tablet and his phone. Only once he had all his screens lined up did he start working on what Eleri had suggested.

  Unexplained deaths in . . . anywhere. With anyone.

  Unusual strangulations. Unprovoked heart attacks. Spontaneous combustion—which wouldn’t turn up in the same search as arson or firesetting deaths.

  He put his head in his hands. Each search turned up pages of links to files that he couldn’t begin to sort through.

  Donovan weeded out the ones with multiple or linked deaths. He didn’t think that was what the missing pieces would be. They would look like one-offs that didn’t get connected to anything else. Then he keyworded in “weird.”

  That finally narrowed it down and Donovan started looking at the files in earnest. An hour later, when Eleri walked in the door, he had twenty-two flagged as possible related cases.

  “Hi, El.” He looked up, welcoming the break and finding he needed to rub bleary eyes. It was barely nine-thirty in the morning.

  “Hey. I had to get out of the room to make my brain work while I sorted files.” Eleri walked in with actual folders in her grasp. “What was that about Pines? I know she has some ability to make you change your mind.”

  “No,” Donovan countered. “It’s much bigger than that. I thought I was getting myself a waffle—cooking it at that little iron they have at the continental breakfast—and I was actually getting a bowl of oatmeal.”

  Eleri blinked at him.

  “The whole nine yards. Not just one thing. I thought I was picking out syrup and getting the right plastic forks and what I was doing was all different. It’s not small. She could make you murder someone and not know it.” That. That was what he hadn’t even thought to himself, what freaked him out so badly about Pines. Eleri was odd. Donovan was strong, strange. Pines was dangerous.

  Eleri plopped down into the chair across from him, thinking for a moment before she finally spoke. “We can’t judge her based on her ability. We have to judge her based on her use of it.”

  She set the stack of folders down, looking nowhere near as concerned about their new partner as he was. “I spent the morning in the local branch office. I pulled and copied files. . . . Well, I pulled them and made a clerk copy them.”

  “I went onto the server. Same thing.”

  They spent the next half hour checking files against each other and winding up with only two that both of them had flagged. Eleri looked at her phone. “We have to head out.”

  Making sure all his cases were marked accordingly, Donovan watched from the corner of his eye as Eleri gathered her papers, carefully stacking folders and pictures. She often used tablets and such, but sometimes she said she just liked to line up actual pictures. Made her think better.

  They hit the elevators with Eleri holding on to her pages and Donovan wondering if he was really in an elevator with his partner or if he just thought he was.

  Dana had reserved them a conference room in the hotel, claiming that the likelihood anyone here knew how to bug the place was incredibly low. Beyond that, no one would have the time or the knowledge to do it even if they could. She met them in the hallway, her arms full of folders, too, and she eyed Eleri’s stack as though assessing her more highly because of it. Donovan sighed.

  Christina Pines followed along, her usual reticent self again.

  “I think this is it.” Dana pushed open the wide door to find Wade sitting in one of the large, cushy conference seats with a bag of Cheetos busted open and a can of diet coke sitting near his hand. He looked up as they entered and clicked off what looked like a cheap video game on his phone.

  “Are you ready?” Dana questioned him, her eyebrows crooking with borderline disapproval. They’d been tasked with spending their mornings separately trying to find other cases that fit the profile—what little there was of it.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Wade seemed to think nothing of her concern, or else he missed her tone. Donovan guessed it was the second one. But it was Eleri who came to their friend’s defense.

  “He broke his key off in the ignition of his car two months ago. Even the dealer had never heard of that. He thinks Cheetos dust defies Einstein’s laws, and he may turn up wearing the same plaid shirt three days in a row. But Wade can look at a scene and tell you who the shooter was by the trajectory of a bullet. He’s saved at least five men from jail or execution by proving they couldn’t have committed the crime they were accused of even though all the evidence pointed their way. And I’ll bet he has a wadded-up paper in his back pocket with a list of the people whose files he pulled because he can’t remember their names, but he’ll be able to rattle off all the stats of each case by memory. He’s ready.”

  As she smiled, Wade sheepishly pulled a crumpled piece of high school notebook paper from his pocket. A list of names was scrawled on the blue lines, probably with the mechanical pencil that peeked from his shirt pocket.

  Donovan grinned. Maybe he would come around to Dana Brantley. Probably not Christina Pines. But he was realizing he loved Eleri. She’d become family—something he’d never known before, not really—and she would have his back, the same way she had Wade’s, should he ever need it.

  Donovan’s heart bounced between the epiphany of having real friends in Wade and Eleri, and the constant state of the willies caused by having Christina Pines anywhere near him.

  Dana was opening her mouth, but Donovan beat her to it. Turning to Christina, he asked, “Did you show Eleri and Wade what you can do? Because they should know.”

  “Not yet.” She remained blank-faced despite his obvious irritation at her.

  It was Dana who spoke softly to her partner. “You probably should. Get it out of the way.” Then she looked up at the other three of them. “We don’t work with other partners often. I think Christina’s skill can be . . . disconcerting.”

  Donovan couldn’t help the horse-like snort he let o
ut. Disconcerting, his ass. Dana merely nodded slowly. “It’s best that you know, because if she has to use it, you should know what you’re dealing with. Go ahead, Christina.”

  Pines nodded at her boss and said, “It’s a beautiful day.”

  Donovan frowned at her. Maybe Eleri had been out, maybe Christina had been out, but with the pile of homework they had, how was he to know—

  He looked at Eleri, who was scanning the room with unseeing eyes. His heart thumped. “El.”

  Christina shook her head at him. He couldn’t even talk to her?

  “Donovan, where are you? I don’t see you.” She was looking directly at him, if she leaned any closer she’d feel his body heat, or at least his breath. But she clearly didn’t. “Donovan?”

  He held his tongue, though he didn’t want to. His teeth clenched.

  Christina spoke again. “Here’s a file.”

  Both Eleri and Wade reached out to the table in front of them. Eleri managed to pick up one of the files in front of her, but the way she did it, the focus of her eyes, made it look as though someone had handed it to her. Wade picked up air. Just air. Unless he was a trained mime from France, he actually believed he was holding something.

  “What does your file say, Eleri?” Dana asked this time.

  Eleri began reading the name and information. Donovan didn’t pay any attention other than to see that she was really reading what was on the page. Though when Christina asked the same of Wade, he began reading the air. Donovan almost vomited.

  “You can’t see the other agents but we’re here,” Christina told them. “Tell us what you do see.”

  Eleri looked confused. Then she began speaking as though they were idiots. “It’s a forest. There are elm trees and low scrub brush. There’s a trail. . .”

  She went on about an animal track she saw. Wade mentioned the height of the trees, the number of ants in a typical colony like the one he was looking at. He commented on the sunlight through the canopy and the approximate temperature. Donovan had enough.