He shook his head as he stared at everyone in the room but me. “Marisol Holmes’ only crime is that she was naïve. Naïve, like teenagers are—which is what she still is, after all, a teenager. She was naïve and she paid dearly, and I think, will continue to pay for it, long after this trial is over. She doesn’t need to be punished more than she’s already punishing herself.”
He left after speaking those words, moving back into the crowd. Hours later, when the trial was over and my fate decided, I looked for him to thank him. If I hadn’t rushed, I would’ve probably missed him because he was already leaving. He was standing next to one of the Sigil Bearers who would escort a group of visitors and spectators outside of the catacombs.
“Roan.”
He froze at the sound of my voice, his shoulders stiffening. Slowly, he turned around, but it seemed like he didn’t really see me; the warmth in his eyes was missing, replaced by an icy cold that chilled me to the bone.
My jaguar retreated, too, whining as if she’d been physically hurt.
“Thank you.” My voice came out as a whisper.
He didn’t reply for a long time, and when he finally did, his voice sounded hoarse, too, softer and more vulnerable than I had ever remembered it sounding. “I need some time to… To come to terms with what happened.”
Without saying anything else, he turned back around and left me standing there. I couldn’t move, could barely breathe as I felt my heart shatter all over again. Whatever was left of my resolve, of my strength, it all evaporated in that single minute. If my mother hadn’t found me, I would probably still be standing there, in that tunnel under the ground, frozen in place like a statue, a broken doll.
I woke up from the dream at around five thirty a.m. This time, it didn’t surprise me I’d dreamt about Roan. A mind palace and locked rooms worked pretty well during the day—although where Roan was concerned, even during the day my usual focus was often lost—but during the night, all those memories came back to haunt me.
I didn’t want to linger on it any longer, afraid of all the feelings it would stir if I did. Despite my jaguar’s protest, I had to lock my feelings up again and slip back into Sherlock Mode.
Getting up, I shook Indra until she woke up too. “Hmm?” She groaned, still half-asleep.
“Rise and shine, sunshine,” I told her. “Time to go for a run.”
“Do I have to?” she mumbled, but she did roll to the other side and got up. “God, I hate mornings.”
“You and just about everyone else I know.” I put a jacket on and stretched my arms a bit to warm up. “Come on. Yesterday was a bust, but I really hope we see Keira today. Hopefully the whole seeing-a-dead-body thing hasn’t got her spooked.”
“If I got up again at this atrocious time of the day for no reason, then I’m going to go berserk,” Indra warned.
We made our way downstairs, found the front door open again, and went outside. Chilly morning air whipped around our ears, and I shivered in my jacket.
I started jogging, and with a grunt Indra followed me, complaining about how bad exercising at this barbarous time of the day was for a person’s overall health.
We made it to the running path, and she burst into a lengthy monologue about exercise regimes, Pilates classes she’d taken in the past, and how Zumba was a total bust. I had zero experience in the exercise department and even less desire to become knowledgeable about it, so I just jogged and kept my mouth shut.
We’d done two laps when I pointed ahead silently at the girl with the brown ponytail who was running in front of us. Keira Sampson.
I picked up my pace. Indra cursed under her breath but followed suit. Once my pacing matched Keira’s, I fell in step with her.
“Hey,” I said.
Keira indicated she was wearing wireless earbuds. She took them out while running and turned to me. “What did you say?”
“I just said ‘hey.’ My friend and I are new here, just enrolled yesterday. I’m Marisol, and this is Indra.” I didn’t have trouble talking and running simultaneously—at least that part of my shifter nature was working fine—but Indra was obviously struggling. Her skin had turned as red as a tomato, and she couldn’t do more than wave at Keira.
“Oh, hey. I’m Keira.” She gave me a friendly smile. “I don’t usually meet a lot of people on my morning runs.”
“I’m an early bird.” It was a complete lie, but at least I didn’t look a wreck like Indra, so Keira probably didn’t catch on.
“It’ll be nice not to have to run on my own anymore. Or at least to know someone else is doing this track, too, while I am,” Keira said.
“Why? Is it scary on your own?”
“Sometimes during winter when it’s still really dark. But not because of that. I got used to that last year, after a few days. No, I…” Keira shook her head. “Did you hear about the girl who died?” She didn’t look at me when she asked that.
I was always surprised by how willing some people were to talk about traumatizing things that had happened to them, if you only let them open up about it.
“Elise Felton? Yes, I heard about what happened.”
“Well, I found her,” Keira blurted out. She breathed in deeply and let out a sound resembling a sob. “Sorry, it still tears me up. So horrible, what happened to her. When I found her… I still have nightmares about it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That must’ve been horrible.” Keira’s mentioning of finding Elise’s body brought back memories of Amaranth, and I struggled to keep my feelings in check. Don’t go there, Marisol. Don’t go there…
“It was, in particular because…” Keira sighed. “I keep thinking I could save her, you know. It’s stupid, but I thought I heard voices right before I found her, and I keep thinking that, if only I was faster, I would’ve saved her.”
“Voices?” I looked past Keira, at Indra.
“I shouldn’t be talking about this. Sorry. I don’t know why I’m even telling you this. It’ll ruin your whole day,” Keira said.
“No, no, it’s fine.” I comforted her. “I would be pretty shaken up, too, if I’d seen something like that. Go ahead.” I gave her a reassuring smile.
“All right then. Well, I was running along the track, my earphones in, as usual. Then, I thought I heard voices. But I barely hear anything through the headphones, so it had to be someone yelling. Didn’t sound like a scream, though. I would’ve definitely heard that.”
“So, you heard people yelling?” I wondered if Elise was having an argument with her attacker first, and maybe that was what Keira heard. “And then you found her?”
“Yes. I took my earphones out, but by then I didn’t hear anything else. When I turned the corner and ran up the hill, I saw a silhouette through the bushes, but it vanished in the blink of an eye. I’m not sure if I saw it at all. Next thing I saw, when I finished coming up the hill, was Elise…”
She stopped, her voice choking up. “Sorry, I…I didn’t know her that well, but I liked her. She was in a different class than I am, but sometimes when I went swimming, she was there, too, and we talked every now and then. Can’t believe she’s gone.” Keira swallowed hard. “If I’d been faster, if I’d heard what she yelled, if I’d realized she was in danger, maybe I could’ve saved her.”
Hearing Keira talk like that, I was reminded of how guilty I felt after I heard what Mannix had done. After I heard he’d killed someone. Maybe if I’d been faster, if I had been smarter, I would’ve been able to stop him. That same guilt was reflected in Keira’s testimony.
“Hey, hey.” I put an arm on her shoulder, which was a little difficult considering we were still jogging. From her athletic built and the fact that she ran and swam, I gathered Keira Sampson was the kind of person who didn’t like standing still, even for a second.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “You can’t help what happened. If you’d been there, there’s nothing you could’ve done, and you might even have gotten hurt yourself.”
“I k
now but…” Keira’s bottom lip quivered. “I still feel like I should’ve done something, you know?”
Indra was falling behind, her breathing hard and labored. For once, I was glad for the improved physique that came with being a jaguar.
“I know.” I bit my lip, quiet for a second. “That silhouette you saw… Was it Elise?”
“I don’t know. I just saw it in a glimpse. Maybe it was Elise falling down; maybe it was something else. Could’ve been a bird flying away. I have no idea.”
If Keira saw a glimpse of the person, that memory, that picture, was still locked in her mind somehow. The conscious mind can only process so much information, but the unconscious mind can process a lot more. If I could reach her unconscious mind, I might be able to get a better picture of the person she saw that day.
But to reach her unconscious mind, I had to hypnotize her.
While I technically could hypnotize her—I’d trained myself to be able to, just like Sherlock Holmes himself—I didn’t really like doing it, especially not in this case. Normally, I liked to explain to people what was going to happen and ask their permission before I hypnotized them, especially if the people in question were innocent bystanders like Keira. But now, since no one could know Indra and I were trying to solve Elise’s murder, I had no choice but to go ahead and hypnotize Keira without asking for her consent.
“Can you stand still for a moment? Something in my shoe,” I lied quickly.
Keira blinked at me, a little surprised, but stopped anyway. I bent down to untie my shoelaces and waited for Indra to catch up with us.
“You all right?” Keira asked as Indra, huffing and panting, made it toward us. She looked just about ready to collapse on the floor, her cheeks puffy.
“I’m so out of shape it’s not even funny,” she said.
As Keira turned back toward me, I stood up, lightning-fast, grabbed her arm, and looked her straight in the eyes.
“Listen to my voice,” I said in a calm, soothing tone. “You’re calm and relaxed. Nothing can hurt you here. The past is the past. No harm will come to you.”
Keira blinked slowly at me.
“You’ll enter a trance. As you do so, you’ll remember the morning you found Elise Felton.”
Her left arm spasmed, but I continued in the same monotone voice. “Your eyes feel heavy, and you want to close them. Listen to my voice and let me guide you back… Focus on breathing deeply, filling your chest and lungs.” I waited for a few seconds. “We’re going down a staircase now, Keira. You’re at the top of this long staircase in a warm, quiet room. As you step down, you feel yourself sinking deeper and deeper into your subconscious. Are you ready to go down?”
“Yes,” Keira replied, her voice already sounding as if in a trance.
Indra glared daggers at me. She put her hands on her hips and looked exasperated, but she didn’t protest as I continued hypnotizing Keira.
“Good. Let’s take the first step down. You feel yourself sinking deeper. Each step is a step farther into your subconscious. Now, take the second step. You’re getting calmer and calmer…”
Her breathing became more and more relaxed, and she drifted off in a trance.
“Now, we’re going to take the final step, and then you’ll be back to the morning where you found Elise Felton’s body. Are you ready? Let’s take the final step…” I waited for a few seconds, giving her time to go down the mental staircase in her mind. “Are you there?”
“I am,” Keira replied, her voice low.
“Are you on the path leading to the clearing where you found Elise?”
“Yes. I’m running. I…I hear yelling.”
“Good, good,” I soothed. “Do you see something?”
“I’m running toward it. I see… I see someone. A silhouette. It’s a… I don’t know who it is.”
“Can you make out some features? Anything?” Excitement rushed through me, enthralling and addicting, like adrenaline. If Keira got a glimpse of Elise’s attacker, then we were on the verge of catching the murderer.
“No, but the shape looks familiar. I can only make out the shape. I’m too far…”
“Is it a woman or a man?”
“A woman. Brown hair. Is it Elise? I think it’s Elise, but… No, it can’t be. She’s running away.”
“What direction did she go?”
“I don’t…”
“This is very important, Keira,” I said. “What direction did she run off into?”
“Farther down the clearing, away from the path. There’s nothing but bushes there, and it’s tough to run through them… She’s gone. I saw her head one moment; the next she just vanished. I don’t… Where is she?”
Keira grew agitated, twisting her head from left to right. “Where did she go? I just saw her, and then she disappeared…”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said in the same consoling voice, hiding my disappointment. “Keira, I’m going to count from one to five, and at the count of five, you’ll feel wide awake, fully alert, and refreshed, and you won’t remember this, okay? What you will remember is that what happened to Elise wasn’t your fault, and that you could do nothing to prevent it. All right? Now, I’ll start counting. One. Two.” I paused, slowly listing the other numbers. “Five.”
Keira blinked a few times, waking up from the trance. “Did you get it out? The stone?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, shaking my foot from side to side. “Good as new. But we should be heading back to school. I think Indra here is exhausted already.”
“Oh, sure. I’m going to run one more track and then head back, too.” Keira smiled brightly from ear to ear. “Nice meeting you both!” She gave a little wave and ran off, leaving Indra and me standing in the middle of the path.
“You could’ve given me a little warning before you started hypnotizing that girl,” Indra said. “Also, you shouldn’t hypnotize people without their permission.”
“Are you the moral police?” I frowned at her. “I didn’t really want to do it, but sometimes forensic hypnosis works; it helps people remember things they wouldn’t otherwise remember. Besides, I helped her. I told her it wasn’t her fault.”
Indra scoffed. “Yeah, but still…I would’ve appreciated a warning. And you do know I’m a snake, right?” she added as she kicked her left leg back, stretching it. “I mean, sometimes you like to rub it in, but sometimes you seem completely oblivious to it.”
I narrowed my eyes at her.
She rolled her eyes in response. “I’m a snake, a cobra to be more specific. We can hypnotize people extremely easily, you know? I usually don’t do it out of moral concerns, but hey, if you’re going to hypnotize people either way, why not ask the person who’s an expert at it?”
“Hmmm…” A thought popped up into my head, but I didn’t want to voice it out loud just yet. “Well, expert, we’re not going back to school just yet. We’re heading in the direction our murderer ran off in.”
“You mean, the direction where our murderer ‘disappeared’ in?” Indra asked. She followed me back to the clearing, to the crime-scene-taped area. From there, we turned right, through the bushes.
“I don’t think she disappeared,” I told Indra. “I think she shifted. One moment she was human, standing up, the next she shifted, and that’s when Keira lost sight of her.”
“What exactly are we doing here, looking through the shrubs then? It’s not like you can see any tracks in this undergrowth. Most I see are a few crunched-up leaves here.”
“Keep your nose to the ground. Yesterday, I saw a tan mark on Elise’s wrist. She often wore a bracelet, charm, or watch, but it wasn’t on her body when she was killed. I think maybe the killer grabbed it.”
“Why would she do that? And are we going to assume now the killer is a woman based on what Keira said, or are we still debating that?”
“Keira was pretty sure about it, so let’s assume the killer is a she for right now,” I said as I bent down to look under an overgrown bush. The though
t of a woman being the killer actually made me feel slightly relieved—at least that would mean that Mannix couldn’t be the murderer. “If the killer heard Keira approaching, which is highly likely considering she’s a shifter and most animals have better hearing than humans, she was probably spooked and panicking to get away from the crime scene. So she ran, and in her hurry, she could’ve dropped the bracelet, charm, watch—whatever—that she’d first intended to take as a memento. Maybe, when she shifted, she couldn’t carry it anymore, and she dropped it.”
“Why would she take it in the first place? Who’s to say Elise didn’t just leave it on her nightstand or in her closet somewhere?”
“Because in all the pictures we have of her in our records, she was wearing it. I was too small to see what exactly it was, but I did notice she wore it in all of them. Whatever it was, it meant something to her.”
“And the murderer took it, why?” Indra groaned as she got back up from scouring the ground.
“I don’t know yet. Maybe to remember the kill. Some killers are messed up enough to do that. Maybe because it means something to the murderer, too. Maybe because it will lead us straight to whoever killed Elise.” I pushed a branch away, ducking to search the bottom of a tree, which seemed like a suitable place for a person on the run to pause for a second.
Something glittered underneath the leaves. I bent my knees and shoved the leaves away, revealing a bracelet underneath.
A friendship bracelet with two ropes in the colors black and green, entwined. It had a golden emblem on the front with the initials 2X F, BFFL.
“I found it.” I held up the trinket, which dangled in the wind.
Indra hurried over and paused in front of me, staring at the bracelet. “Two times F… Maybe the F could stand for Felton? One F could be Elise Felton, and the other…”
A thought clicked into place, an Eureka-moment that made me nearly as thrilled as Archimedes when he’d first shouted the word, running naked through the streets of Syracuse after he discovered his famous Archimedes’ principle while sitting in his bathtub.
“Aria Forbes. The second F is for Forbes,” I finished for her. “Everyone says how shaken up Aria is about Elise’s death. Wyatt told me the two of them have been best friends for years. And Aria has the same bracelet. I spotted it on her arm yesterday in the bathroom.”
A Study In Shifters Page 17
