Spell Blind

by DAVID B. COE

  And it did. At first, as I was still learning what Namid meant when he spoke of being clear, it could take five or ten minutes. But by now I could call the eagle to mind, and within a minute or two I was centered, my mind focused. As impatient as Namid was with me—as impatient as I often was with myself—I couldn’t deny that I was learning.

  “When you are clear,” the runemyste whispered, “open your eyes again and tell me what you see in the mirror.”

  For a few seconds longer I kept my mind fixed on the vision of the great bird. Opening my eyes at last, I stared at the surface of the glass again. It felt as if I was alone with the mirror, that Namid had vanished, or rather, that I’d left him behind, along with my office, and Jessie Tyler, and everything else.

  The vision began as a thin gray swirl, like a wisp of smoke embedded in the glass. Another appeared, and a third. Soon there were a least a dozen of them chasing one another across the mirror, reminding me of children skating on a frozen pond. The center of the image began to glow, faintly at first, then brighter, until I could make out the oranges and blacks and pale yellows of embers in a dying fire. And then a hand emerged from the cinders. It might have been dark red, the color of blood, but it was silhouetted against that burning glow. It wasn’t taloned or deformed. It appeared to be a normal hand, long-fingered perhaps, but ordinary except for its color. Still, I knew immediately that it was . . . wrong; that it didn’t belong here. For one thing, those wisps of gray smoke acted as though they were afraid of it. They kept as far from the hand as possible; when it moved, they did as well, matching its motion so as to keep their distance.

  This continued for a while, the threads of smoke and the hand gliding over the embers, until suddenly the hand seized the strands of gray, capturing all of them in one lightning quick sweep across the mirror. The hand gripped them, the wisps of smoke appearing to writhe in its grasp. When at last the dark fingers opened again, what was left of the gray strands scattered like ash. And when those remnants touched the embers, they flared so brilliantly that I had to shield my eyes. By the time I looked at the mirror again, the image was gone. All that was left was the inverted reflection of my office.

  The runemyste was watching me.

  “What the hell was that, Namid?”

  “What did you see?”

  “You know perfectly well what I saw. You always know. What did it mean?”

  “What do you think it meant?”

  I shoved the mirror off my lap and stood too quickly; my vision swimming.

  “Damn you, Namid! Can’t you answer a simple question? Just once?”

  “This is as much a part of your training as the summoning of that image. Scrying is more than seeing. Scrying is understanding what you see.”

  I hated it when he was right.

  This was what made scrying so frustrating. The images came to me easily. Even Namid, who was a miser when it came to compliments, had once told me that the visions I summoned from my scrying stone were unusually vivid. Interpreting them, though, was another matter. Scryings were never clear or unambiguous. Rather they were shadows, portents, hints at the future. Frankly, they were a pain in the butt.

  “I don’t know,” I said, beginning to pace the room. “That hand bothered me.”

  “It should.”

  I halted, surprised by the response. This was as close to a hint as he was ever likely to offer.

  “Why, Namid? What does the hand mean?”

  Before he could answer, the phone rang. Neither of us moved, and it rang again.

  I kept my eyes on the runemyste, hoping he’d tell me more. The phone rang a third time.

  “Someone wishes to speak with you.”

  A fourth ring and the machine would pick up. I strode across the office and grabbed the phone.

  “Fearsson,” I said, facing the runemyste.

  “Justis.”

  I would have known that voice anywhere. Kona Shaw. But why would Namid care about a call from Kona? She called all the time.

  “What’s up, partner?”

  “If you have to ask,” she said, “you haven’t read the paper yet.”

  Namid stared at me, those cold, impenetrable eyes locked on mine. I felt my gut begin to tighten again.

  “Tell me.” But even as I said it, my gaze flicked toward the calendar, and I knew. We were two days past the first quarter moon; five days until the full.

  “We’ve found another body.”

  “Where?”

  “South Mountain Park.”

  “Same guy?”

  “Officially, I don’t know yet,” she said. “But yeah, it’s our guy.” I could hear the shudder in her voice. Kona was as tough as any cop I’d ever met. In all our years of working together I’d seen little that fazed her, including having a weremyste as a partner. But the Blind Angel murders would have made Jack the Ripper squeamish.

  “Listen, partner,” Kona said, “we’re going to need your help on this one. Just to make sure it’s him, you know?” Her voice was nearly drowned out by background noise—car engines, shouting, and at least one siren.

  “You still at the scene?” I asked.

  “No, I’m . . . I’m in Paradise Valley.”

  “What?”

  “Read the paper, Justis. Or go online. This’ll all make sense when you do.”

  “You’ve got to give me more than that.”

  No answer, though I could still hear the commotion behind her.

  “Kona?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “This victim isn’t like the others. It’s . . . it’s Claudia Deegan.”

  I would have done just about anything in the world for Kona, and I won’t deny that I still lay awake at night thinking about the Blind Angel murders, even though I hadn’t been on the job for a year and a half. But getting involved in an ongoing police investigation was dangerous enough for an ex-cop; getting involved in one that promised to be a media circus was more than I cared to deal with.

  I would have told Kona as much, but abruptly I wasn’t paying attention to our conversation. Namid had crossed the room to where I stood, and was staring at me. His color had changed. He had been translucent, his waters as clear as a quiet stream. But now he was clouded, roiled, like a river after a hard rain. His eyes were the same, though: intense and bright. He’d never shown much interest in any of my cases, but it seemed this one had caught his attention.

  I put my hand over the mouthpiece. “What is it?” I asked.

  He said nothing.

  “Damn you, Namid! Would you tell me?”

  He turned with deliberate grace and stared down at the mirror that still lay on my floor. After a moment he faced me again.

  It wasn’t much, but as I say, Namid wasn’t one for giving hints. This was more than the runemyste had ever done before.

  “Justis?” Kona said.

  I removed my hand from the phone. “I’m here.”

  “I’m going to be tied up here for a while longer, and Margarite’s got my car today. Can you meet me at the Deegan place? We can go downtown from there.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Great. One hour.”

  I hung up and glared back at the runemyste, who was still watching me.

  “Would you please tell me what this is about?”

  You’d think by now I’d know better than to expect an answer.

  Namid began to fade from view. “Tread like the fox, Ohanko. Be wary.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, watching as he vanished. “Damn ghost!”

  But he was gone.

  I went to my desk and retrieved this morning’s paper, which was folded beneath the day’s mail. The story was right there on the front page. Top headline.

  “Claudia Deegan Found Dead. Senator’s daughter may be latest ‘Angel’ Victim.”

  I almost called Kona back then and there. I had just gotten through tracking down a runaway and dealing with the life crises of the rich and famous. Involving myself with the Deegans would be ten tim
es worse. I didn’t want any part of this case.

  Or did I?

  The PPD had been trying to solve the so-called Blind Angel murders for just shy of three years now. So had the Feds. The FBI came in with a lot of fanfare and press after the third or fourth murder and did their best to take over the investigation. After a while, though—after months stretching to years of being unable to find the killer—they began to lose interest. They cut the size of their task force in half, and then did so again and a third time, until they had basically ceded the investigation back to the Phoenix police.

  If Claudia Deegan was this wack-job’s latest victim, she would be number thirty-one, that we knew of. I had worked the case when I was on the job, and Kona and her new partner, Kevin Glass, were still part of the investigative team. Being a weremyste, I had realized from the very beginning that magic was involved: I could see the residue of power on the bodies. And it didn’t take me long to figure out that every killing occurred around the same time in the moon cycle. I was convinced that our killer had taken a life every month for the last three years at least, and that there were still bodies out there as yet unfound.

  Of all the cases I’d been working at the time I left the force, this was the one I most regretted not seeing through to the end. The idea of having another crack at it had definite appeal. On the other hand, as much as I missed being a cop, I didn’t miss the jerks who had forced me off the job, who had assumed that my descents into psychosis each month were signs that I was a drunk, or an addict, or both. Even now, there were people in the department—men and women in positions of power—who would have loved to humiliate me all over again, to pay me back for disgracing the force.

  In the end, I think that if Namid hadn’t shown so much interest in my conversation with Kona, I might have called her back and told her I wasn’t coming. As much as I wanted to find the Blind Angel Killer, I didn’t need the kind of heat this case was going to generate. But for whatever reason, the runemyste had made it clear that this was a job I had to take. I remembered my scrying, and that evil red hand. Namid seemed to think it was all related, and who was I to argue?

  Yes, I had been a cop, and that would always be in my blood. But I’m still a weremyste, and I will be until the day I die. And for better or worse this was where my magic was leading me. I could tell that much from one glance in a mirror, be it a looking glass or a scrying surface.

  CHAPTER 3

  I read the rest of the article about Claudia Deegan, my insides winding themselves into knots as the details of the “Angel Murders” investigation flooded back into my mind.

  Murder cases are never a picnic, but trying to chase down a serial murderer is about the worst part of a homicide detective’s job. You feel that the killer is mocking you with every clue he leaves behind, and you feel responsible for each new murder he commits after you’ve taken on the investigation. But bad as that is, the worst part is the time in between killings, when you know another one is coming and that there isn’t a damn thing you can do to stop it. It’s no wonder that cops who investigate serial killings become obsessed with their victims and suspects, and that they’re even more prone to drinking, drug use and emotional problems than their colleagues.

  Kona and I worked the case from the beginning. We were the first detectives on the scene when Gracia Rosado was found in Red Mountain Park three years ago. It didn’t take either of us long to realize that this murder was unlike any we had seen before. Gracia herself was all too typical of murder victims in the Phoenix area. Young, pretty, poor, Latino. She’d been involved with drugs for a couple of years and in the months leading up to her murder had started turning tricks to pay for her habit.

  But in every other way, Gracia’s killing was chillingly unique. Her body was found by a jogger in a small ravine deep in the park. She was fully clothed and there was no sign that she’d been sexually assaulted, which is pretty much the first thing you check for in a case like this. There were bruises on her neck, but I knew right away that her killer hadn’t strangled her to death. Red magic shone like fresh blood on her face and chest, though I was the only cop working the scene who could see it. On the other hand, every cop and reporter there could see that her eyes had been burned out of her skull.

  “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a new freak to track down,” Kona said at the time, staring down at Gracia’s body and shaking her head. “Just what Phoenix needs at the start of the damn summer.”

  “It’s worse than you know,” I said, keeping my voice low.

  “What do you mean—?” She stopped and stared at me. “Oh, don’t tell me, Justis, because I don’t want to hear it.”

  Kona was the only person on the force who knew I was a weremyste. I’d told her early on, following number seven of my father’s ten rules for being a successful cop: “Never keep secrets from your partner.”

  She hadn’t believed me at first, but it hadn’t taken more than a spell or two to convince her. And after my magical abilities helped us clear a couple of cases, she began to think of it as a good thing, even if it did render me useless three nights out of each month.

  But on that morning in June, standing over what turned out to be the first of at least thirty murder victims—thirty-one, if the papers were right about Claudia Deegan—she wasn’t amused at all.

  “Talk to me, Justis,” she said. She and my father were the only people who called me Justis rather than Jay. “What are you seeing?”

  “There’s red magic on her face and chest. Powerful magic—it’s already starting to fade.”

  “If it’s already starting to fade—”

  “The faster the residue fades, the more powerful the sorcerer,” I told her for what had to have been the twentieth time.

  She nodded. “Right. I always get that backwards. So you’re saying she was killed by magic. For sure.”

  “For sure.”

  “Well, that’s just great. What do your magic senses tell you about that shit her killer did with her eyes?”

  I shook my head. A white sheet lay over Gracia’s body, but I could still see her ravaged face in my mind. In fact, I still can see it to this day. “I have no idea,” I told her at the time.

  The second body was discovered about a month later. Also a young woman, also killed by magic, her face mutilated in the same way. Others followed, some of them men, though most of the victims were women. All of them were young, and all of them died the same way. And, it turned out, all of the killings took place about a week before the full moon. Sometimes it took longer to find the bodies, but always the coroner put the time of death around the first quarter moon. I still have no idea what this means, but I know it’s important.

  Each body had been found in either Red Mountain Park, east of Mesa, or in South Mountain Park, on the west side of Tempe, so those of us working the case referred to our perp as the East Side Parks Killer. But the media fixated on the ritual aspect of the killings—the facial mutilation—and dubbed the killings the Blind Angel murders.

  There had been no shortage of media coverage of the killings, but now that Claudia Deegan had been murdered it was likely to turn into a frenzy. Randolph Deegan, Claudia’s father, was Arizona’s most powerful and popular politician. Word was that he was running for governor this year, and that a presidential run might be in his future. Everything the Deegans did was news. Claudia’s death would be on the front page of every paper in the country; the Arizona papers wouldn’t be covering anything else.

  Reading the article left little doubt in my mind that the Deegan girl had been murdered by the Parks Killer. The medical examiner claimed that she’d died two nights ago—the night of the quarter moon. Her body had been found yesterday in South Mountain Park. The article also mentioned that like so many of the other victims, Claudia Deegan had drugs in her blood and on her person at the time she died. Spark to be specific, which in addition to being addictive and expensive, also happened to be one of the drugs some weremystes used to suppress the effects of t
he phasings. As to the rest, the paper dealt with the details as delicately as it could.

  A spokesperson for Senator Deegan’s family refused to comment on the condition of Miss Deegan’s body. However, sources within the police department confirmed that her face had been disfigured in a manner consistent with past Blind Angel killings.

  The paper said nothing about magic, of course. It never did. No one at the scene would be able to confirm that magic had killed the Deegans’ daughter. That was why Kona needed me.

  For the second time that day, I drove back toward Scottsdale, this time heading into the foothills near the city. Traffic was starting to build again, but aside from the stop-and-go, the drive from my place in Chandler to the Deegan estate wasn’t a difficult one. Still, judging from the difference between the neighborhood where I have my office, and the community in which the senator and his family live, you might have thought I’d entered another country.

  The estate was located on a twisting road with more million-dollar houses than you could shake a stick at, all of them gated, all of them with clear views of Camelback Mountain.

  As I rounded the last turn before the Deegan house I found the road half-blocked by a huge mob of reporters and cops. More than a dozen news vans lined the road; state patrol cruisers had been parked strategically to control traffic in both directions. There were sound booms and cameras everywhere—still and video. I slowed the Z-ster and crept past it all. As I did, the media people peered into the car, hoping to recognize someone famous. They all looked vaguely disappointed when all they saw was some guy in an old bomber jacket with wild hair and a three-day beard.

  A uniformed cop stopped me and signaled for me to lower my window.

  “You live up here?” he asked.

  I almost laughed. “No. I’m a PI. I’m on my way to the Deegan place. Kona Shaw asked me to come. You can call ahead and check with her if you want.”

  He shook his head, straightened, and waved me on.

  The Deegans’ driveway was maybe thirty yards beyond the mob scene; nice for them, but I doubt their neighbors were thrilled with the arrangement. I guess it paid to be the most powerful man in Arizona.