by K. J. Emrick
“No, I was working at my café today and this woman, Donna, came to tell me she found the body. She’s the one who called you.”
“Your café?” he asked, managing to sound impressed.
“Well, yes. I own the Hot Cauldron Café in Shadow Lake.”
“Really? I know that place. Never been in, but I see it whenever I drive through town. Well. I’ll just have to check it out one of these days.”
“There’s always room for a new customer,” she told him, always happy to drum up more business for herself.
“Okay, so where do you come in?”
“Um.” She’d lost the thread of the conversation somewhere. “Excuse me?”
“This Donna person came and told you about the murder, and she called the police.” He rolled a hand in the air. “So you got here… how?”
“I drove her here. Donna, I mean. She was scared, and she didn’t want to be by herself.”
Lucian scratched the side of his face, where Addie noticed prickly blonde stubble beginning to grow, as if he hadn’t had the time to shave in the last two days. “Apparently,” he said after a moment, “your friend Donna was so scared that she didn’t want to stick around and talk to us, either.”
“I guess so.” Addie felt stupid, realizing that now the only one who could verify her story was herself. Especially since… oh, curse her Irish eyes. Donna had used her phone to make the call. Even the police phone logs wouldn’t have a record of this Donna woman she kept mentioning.
Fantastic. Just what she needed, to be caught up in the middle of a police investigation.
Rule number one of the Shadow Lake Coven, the rule that superseded all others for her and her sisters, was keeping what they were secret at all costs. Usually that meant avoiding the police, the newspapers, the census takers… all of that. They didn’t even go near the Girl Scouts when it was cookie season. Now here she was, stepping into a murder case with both feet. Her sisters were not going to be happy about this.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Lucian said to her with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I don’t think you’re involved in this. Other than finding the body for us, of course.”
Somehow, she took that as an insult. “Oh? Is that because men commit murders more often than women? Hmm?”
He laughed when she said it, and Addie felt the tips of her ears turning red.
“So glad,” she grumbled, “that I can amuse you, Detective Knight. Can we maybe get to the part where you find out who killed Esmerelda?”
The smile slipped from his face, and he cleared his throat. “Right. I’ll get to that. I just wanted you to know that I wasn’t suspecting you of anything when I asked my questions.”
“So you’ve said.”
“Second call on this road in two days,” he muttered, more to himself than to Addie. “I never knew Shadow Lake had so many problems.”
“We don’t,” she retorted, but then she realized what he’d just said. “Second call? You don’t mean there was another murder?”
She levelled her gaze at him when she asked the question.
Most people quavered when she did that, tripping over themselves to tell her whatever she wanted to know. Her green eyes were their own sort of weapon, and when she focused a little of her Essence through them they could be deadly. A Cold Stare could get people to reveal almost any truth, except ones they were actively hiding.
Lucian met her stare for stare, and didn’t so much as blink. It was like he was enjoying it.
She leaned into the magic she was creating between them a little harder. Some people were less affected by the effects of magic than others, she reminded herself. That was probably what was happening here. Although, in the back of her mind, this man was beginning to make her wonder. With everything she was sensing from him, Detective Lucian Knight might be more than he appeared.
How interesting.
She repeated her question, laced through with the power of her Life Essence. “I was asking if there had been another murder in Shadow Lake?”
“What? Oh, no. No that’s not it at all.” He tried to shrug away what he’d said but she kept her eyes on his until he added, “There was a motor vehicle accident just up the road from here last night. A bad one, too. We were expecting to find a body in the car, truthfully, but the driver must’ve gotten up and walked away because he’s gone.”
He blinked at himself, for revealing all of that to her, just like that. Addie kept her expression neutral, even as her eyes stung from the force she had put into using Cold Stare on him. Ow. This guy was a rock. Very few people without magical abilities could refuse a Cold Stare at all. It worked better on men than it did on women, and she suspected that had something to do with men finding her so attractive, but not this guy. Lucian had resisted her magic better than any Typic had ever been able to.
She forced herself not to rub her knuckles into her eyes. The Stare always left her eyes feeling like there were grains of sand in them. This time they felt like she’d done a faceplant in the Sahara.
Setting all of that aside, she focused on what Lucian had said. A car crash, just up the road from where they’d found a dead woman today. Esmerelda had obviously not been in a car crash. Even if the ghost hadn’t revealed she’d been choked to death, it was obvious from the perfect dress and the lack of other bruises or cuts that this poor, dead woman had not been in the kind of wreck Lucian Knight was describing. Could the two things be connected?
“Do you think,” she asked him, “that the accident is related to this murder?”
“No.” He was shaking her head before she even finished the question. “I mean, we’ll check on it, sure, but the car was registered to someone from out of state. No ties to anyone in the area that we could find. I was up all night with that one. I’m guessing I’ll be up all night again.”
He turned sad eyes on Esmerelda, still lying there all calm and serene. Addie understood now why Lucian seemed so tired. It was because he was. He had a real dedication to his job. That was obvious. The way he regarded Esmerelda with sympathy and regret, she could tell he really cared.
“Come here,” he said to her unexpectedly. He moved a few steps closer to the victim, motioning her to follow with a tip of his head.
“Uh, I don’t really want to get too close to a dead person,” she said by way of excuse. He’d already seen her kneeling close to the body, though.
“Now, see, we both know that’s not true.” Bending down on his one knee, he pointed to an area of the path with a circular motion. “You’re stronger than you look.”
“Gee,” she said sarcastically, “thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Here, see this? These are sneaker prints. From your sneakers, to be exact. They’re the same as the ones from where you’re standing over there. They go from here right up to the body, and back again. So, I know you got close. You already told me you didn’t touch or disturb anything, so I’m good with that.”
Addie bit the inside of her cheek. Such a simple little mistake, but he’d picked up on it right away. “Um. Yes. I wanted to have a closer look. You know. To make sure Esmerelda was really… gone.”
“Sure,” he said, although he didn’t sound completely convinced. “What I’m really concerned about, though, is those prints over here. Those are bigger than yours. I’d say they were a man’s, if I wasn’t worried about you thinking I was sexist again.”
There was that little smile of his, playing around the corner of his mouth. If they weren’t having this conversation at the scene of a homicide, she’d think he was trying to be cute.
She looked down to where he was pointing and saw that he was right. There were footprints—boot prints, more precisely—in the softer ground of the trail. They led away from the body, and then disappeared into the grass. Bigger than hers by a few sizes at least. She was five-foot-nine, with a size nine shoe, maybe taller than average for a woman.
All kidding about the equality of the sexes aside, she saw that Lucian was right. It fit in
to what she had learned from the ghost too, about the way she was killed. Those bruises on her neck were left by large, strong hands. No offense to the women weightlifters that she knew, but that kind of strength almost certainly meant the killer was a man.
Or a monster of some kind, she had to add. She’d seen plenty of those as well, and plenty of magic users who had no problem killing Typics.
Could it be a magical creature of some kind? A magic user like a witch? Maybe. Most magical creatures didn’t wear boots. There were plenty of male magic users around. Warlocks, demon hunters, and the like. But why would any of them want to kill Esmerelda, and then leave her like this?
Everything seemed to point to the killer being a man, a regular Typic man, just like Lucian thought.
“So,” she said to him, “I guess that means I’m really not the murderer.”
“Well, that’s what I thought right from the first,” he answered, standing up and brushing off the soft dirt from his knees. “I mean, you probably wouldn’t bring me out here to this spot, to the body, if you’d done the murder in the first place. But now, I’m not so sure.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
He took her by the hand and led her a little further away up the trail. “You’ve been calling her by her first name. Esmerelda. How is it that you know her name, if you had nothing to do with her death?”
Addie was dumbstruck by that. She’d slipped and called the woman by her name, and this detective who was a lot smarter than he looked had heard her, and realized something didn’t add up.
In the few seconds she had before she was expected to give some kind of answer, Addie decided one lie on top of another lie couldn’t hurt. “Her family lives in Shadow Lake. The Norris family.” Now she was glad she’d found out that much from her ghost. “They live on Kendrick Street. You take Main Street to the second intersection and turn left, then it’s just—”
“I know where Kendrick is,” he interrupted. “My mother lived here until I was five. We left for the big city life and I didn’t come back until I started working or the police department in Birch Hollow. I haven’t regretted a day of it.”
“Even on a day like this, when there’s murder in the air?”
Phone still in his hand, he reached into his other back pocket and produced his wallet. “I like the way you put that. ‘Murder in the air.’ That’s almost poetic. Well, I guess that explains it. We’re going to need to take your statement, about finding the body and this… Donna woman you say led you here. For now, why don’t you go back home, and I’ll call you later to set up a time for an interview.” Fumbling wallet and phone in his hands, he slid out a white card with his name and cell phone number printed on the one side. “My card. If I can get your phone number from you as well, Adair?”
“Um. Sure.” She knew there wouldn’t be any acceptable reason she could give for not telling him her number. Still, she doubted her sisters would appreciate their home phone number being given out to the police. She decided to give him her cell number instead.
It felt odd, watching him put her name and number into his contacts. The last time a guy had done that, they’d ended up in a very torrid romance that had lasted all of three days. The ending had been one spectacular disaster.
That probably wasn’t going to happen here. Lucian Knight was a very singular kind of man. She could tell that from the few minutes they’d spent together. Still, like she’d said before, she wasn’t likely to run into this guy again.
She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
“Adair Kilorian,” he spoke out loud as his thumbs typed in her information. “Got it.”
“Addie,” she said on a whim. “Call me Addie.”
“Then I’ll call you later today, probably. Addie,” he added, with a very gallant nod of his head. “Why don’t you head out now. Thanks, for your help.”
And that was it. She was on her way back up the trail, thinking not of the cute police detective that had crossed her path, but of the dead woman with ties to her town. The town she and her sisters had sworn to protect from even mundane things like the murder of one perfectly normal person by another.
Esmerelda Norris, murdered by someone—a man, most likely—and laid to rest in gentle repose in the woods along Luna Moth Trail. Sounded like the start to one of those cozy mystery books that her sister Willow liked to read. Only, this was real. There was no fantasy novel spinning around her here.
If there was, then there wouldn’t be so many unanswered questions.
Addie wondered who had killed Esmerelda, and why. The how was plain enough. Strangulation. That was only half an answer, to a much bigger question.
And what about Donna? Where had she come from, and where did she go? People often got scared around scenes of death, and she was willing to chalk the woman’s actions up to a healthy and perfectly normal case of fright. After all, she hadn’t done anything except find the body.
After making her way to the parking area again and climbing back into her Jeep, Addie was no closer to real answers than she had been after talking to Esmerelda’s ghost. What she needed to do was talk to her sisters, and consult the magics. It was what the Kilorian sisters did best, after all.
Putting her car into drive, she headed back toward town.
Chapter 4
Stonecrest was an imposing structure.
The house was an old Victorian style home, three stories tall with a square tower at the front right corner that went up yet another level higher. The cedar shingle siding was in need of a fresh coat of paint. The blue had been so vibrant when the three of them had gotten out ladders and rollers and overalls just a few… wow. Had it been five years already? She’d just been so busy with the café and her duties to the coven that she hadn’t really noticed how the color had faded. Well. She’d add that to the list of things their handyman Kyle could take care of for them. They had almost all of their housework done by Kyle these days. It was hard to get all three of the sisters’ schedules to match up anymore.
Except once a week on Thursdays, like today, for family time. Even now, their time together would be devoted to the business of guarding Shadow Lake and its secrets. If they were very lucky, they would end the night with a game of cards or a movie. It had been ages since she’d sat down for a good romantic comedy.
The actual building itself was less than a hundred years old. That’s because her great, great, and so forth grandfather Angus Kilorian had burned the original manor to the ground. The house that stood here now was the one that had been rebuilt on the same plot of land.
Officially, Angus had been trying to exorcise a demonic entity from the house after it was released from a sealed mason jar left on the doorstep by an enemy of the family.
Unofficially, Addie had heard something about a severe case of arachnophobia, a wolf spider, and a blowtorch.
Not that it mattered how old the house was. It made no difference to the Kilorian sisters if their house dated back to Colonial times or if it was just a single century old. It wouldn’t matter if it had been a new modular home put on a slab foundation just this week. Although, that wouldn’t have been anywhere near as fun as growing up here, in Stonecrest.
The real power of any place came from the land itself. This parcel had been in her family since before Christopher Columbus set sail for the East Indies and gotten himself completely lost. The power that was contained here within every rock, within every grain of soil, was something that resonated in Addie’s bones whenever she crossed the magical threshold of the barrier around the property. Anyone who was sensitive to magic could feel it pulsing, and throbbing, and waiting to be tapped.
There were people who would kill to get at what the Kilorian sisters were protecting here. That’s why they kept a barrier in place around their land and their home. It kept away creatures of magic that would otherwise have been drawn right to them. It kept away witches and warlocks who would use magic for evil. It kept them safe.
Addie didn’t mind the str
ay Butterfly Nymph drifting through the yard every once in a while, she did not want to wake up at three in the morning to find a werebeast looming over her bed. Or a vampire. Or a freaking leprechaun… perverts.
There were other places of power, like Stonecrest, scattered around the world. Addie had been to a few, but she much preferred being here. The town of Shadow Lake had actually grown up around this spot, and here the Sisters Three of the Kilorian Coven would stay, protecting their home and all the other good people who lived here. It was a lonely existence, maybe, but it was worth it to stand against the darkness like they did.
In the driveway, she saw her sisters’ cars. Kiera’s solid Buick and Willow’s sexy Mazda Miata, as well as one other vehicle. That flashy two-door convertible would belong to Willow’s boyfriend. He shouldn’t be here on family night but Willow had been glued to his hip recently… and with those two that was barely a metaphor. Addie frowned to herself.
Well, at least her own existence was lonely, she corrected her earlier thought. Willow hadn’t been without a man to warm her bed since graduating high school three years ago.
“I’m home!” she shouted out as soon as she was through the front doors.
The entrance hall led all the way back to the first set of winding stairs heading up from this floor to the next, with rooms branching off to either side. The walls were hung with photographs, mostly of her and her sisters, with other family and friends mixed in. Several of them had been taken by their parents on trips around the country, and around the world. Addie used to stand and stare at them for hours, hoping someday to be at the edge of the Grand Canyon, or in Peru at the Nasca Lines, or in Yemen to see the Dragon’s Blood Trees.
She glanced at a couple of them now, and then looked quickly away. It wasn’t likely that her dream of being a world traveler like her parents would ever come true. She’d barely ever been out of this state. Her life was right here, in Shadow Lake—
A swift ball of fur came tearing around the corner of the doorway that lead to the dining room. Doyle, with his off-colored ears laid back flat against his head, sank his claws into the deep carpet with each charging step and then launched himself through the air and into her arms.
