Mind Magic

by Eileen Wilks

  They didn’t. While she spoke to her boss, Deputy Savage—God, what a name!—called his boss, then relayed the gist of that conversation to his partner. Lily didn’t catch all of it, but enough to know that the sheriff wasn’t going to make trouble.

  Ruben told Lily to report when she knew more and disconnected. When she put her phone up, Deputy Savage gave her his best thousand-yard stare. “You’re that FBI agent who married that weer,” he informed her.

  That’s what he fixed on? Of all the things she’d done, everything she’d been part of . . . and sure, the press didn’t know everything, but they’d reported on some and speculated about more, like her connection to the return of the dragons. Or to the collapse of a mountain. Or her role at the Humans First massacre at the D.C. Mall, which had also been attended by demon-ridden doppelgängers and an Earth elemental. Next month she was supposed to receive a presidential medal for that. Not that she deserved it, and the vast majority of her fellow citizens had no clue what the Presidential Citizen’s Medal was, but you’d think a cop might.

  Nope. What got Deputy Rick Savage’s attention was the fact that she’d recently gotten married.

  “You are,” he insisted, as if she’d been arguing instead of staring at him. “You married that rich weer.”

  Deputy Orlander sighed. “They went to France for their honeymoon. I’ve always wanted to see France.”

  “It’s lovely,” Lily said dryly. “You want to call them lupi, Deputy. Lupus in the singular, lupi in the plural.”

  “Same difference. Listen, the sheriff says you’ve got the authority to claim the scene, but—”

  “No, it’s not the same. It’s clear you’ve had good training.” Otherwise the idiot would probably have shot her. “Surely that training included a caution against using racial epithets.”

  “It’s not an epithet. It’s just what we call them around here.”

  “José, would you explain to the deputy why ‘weer’ is a derogatory term?”

  “Sure. It’s what we’d been called in most of the shoot-on-sight states before the Supreme Court made them stop. The word has a real bad connotation for us.”

  Savage’s eyes bulged. “Wait a minute. You mean he’s a—”

  “Lupus,” Lily said. “Yes. So are the two wolves I haven’t introduced to you yet. Carson? Did you finish checking out the trail?” A very large gray-and-tan wolf emerged from the brush and shook his head. Lily added to the deputies, “Do not draw your weapons again. That would deeply annoy me.”

  Savage’s hand hovered over his holstered 9mm, but he didn’t draw. His eyes were all bulgy. Carson gave Lily a wolfish grin.

  “Deputies, this is Carson Forrester. Carson, Deputy Savage and Deputy Orlander.” Orlander’s eyes were wide, but she gave Carson a nod. Savage just stared. Lily told Carson to finish checking out the trail, Change as soon as he was able, and report. Then she asked the deputies why they were here.

  Like she’d thought, they’d gotten a tip. The caller—who’d sounded male, young, and shook up—had said “someone got his throat cut out at Whistle Creek Park.” He’d declined to identify himself.

  “He thought he was anonymous.” Orlander snorted her disdain for that assumption. “What do they think—that everyone but us has Caller ID? He used a mobile phone, so it will take a bit longer, but not much.”

  Savage, naturally, wanted to know why Lily was there. She admitted she’d gotten a tip also, and refused to say from whom. “Though I’m 99.9 percent sure it’s not the same as your guy. My source used, ah . . . something similar to precognition.” Then she showed them the picture she’d taken of the body.

  “I don’t recognize him,” Orlander said, “but I bet Wheeler will.”

  “Wheeler?” Lily repeated.

  Orlander looked at Savage. He scowled at Lily as if she’d accused him of something. “There’s some homeless guys camped out over in the Wildlife Area. They’re not supposed to, but—anyway, Wheeler is their leader. He keeps them in line. You’re thinking we ought to roust them out.”

  “No, I’m not.” Though she wondered why they hadn’t. Not the sheriff’s department, maybe, since the wildlife area was state property. But someone. “Is Wheeler his first name or his last name?”

  Savage shrugged.

  “I don’t know, either,” Orlander said. “Thing is, Special Agent, you might want to get Father Don to go with you. He’s got a relationship with those guys. Anyone else shows up, they’re gonna scatter. They don’t trust people much.”

  After that, things fell into the familiar rhythm of most police work. Waiting, in other words. They waited for CSI and for Carson to be able to Change. Lily got contact info for Father Don, aka Donald Perkins, minister at a nondenominational church nearby. She encouraged the deputies to talk—you never knew what might prove useful, and Orlander, at least, was happy enough to chat. Then the sheriff showed up. Sheriff Franklin Boone was the sort of man who fills up a room with the sound of his voice alone. He was just under six feet tall with the shoulders of a fullback, a luxuriant mustache the color of strong tea, and thirty years on the job. He had a firm handshake and no magic. He didn’t like having feds come in and take over. Who would? But he wasn’t actively hostile.

  “We’ll have the identity of our caller soon,” Boone said. “I doubt it’s the perp, but you never know. What kind of magic did you say was involved?”

  “Telekinesis or something similar.”

  “You aren’t sure?”

  “I’m sure magic was used. Not a hundred percent sure what kind it is, but it felt more like TK than anything else. There’s some variation in the way a Gift feels from one individual to the next. It’s sort of like the way different kinds of leather can feel—soft or stiff, smooth or textured.”

  “And this magic felt like—”

  “Warm, mostly smooth, and lively.”

  “Lively.”

  “You ever touched a pane of glass when someone’s cranked the bass up way too high? Kind of like that, only this glass had little bubbles in it.”

  Boone grimaced. “You feeling magic is pretty damned squishy. Subjective. I prefer to deal with facts.”

  “Not all facts can be objectively confirmed. Doesn’t mean they aren’t facts. Take eyewitness reports. If . . .” She stopped, frowned.

  A small, round face peered out at Lily from behind one of the trees. The person it belonged to might have reached Lily’s knee. Her skin was the color of hot chocolate with lots of milk. Her hair was an ash brown that blended with the bark of the tree, cut short except for a single thin braid dangling below her shoulder. Lily couldn’t see her body so didn’t know what she was wearing, but it was undoubtedly brown.

  There was a reason brownies were called brownies.

  “What is it?” The sheriff asked.

  The only non-brown thing about the little woman were her eyes. A brilliant green, they widened as she realized Lily had seen her. She ducked back behind the tree.

  “Wait here a minute,” Lily told the sheriff. She gave José the signal that meant “follow” and headed for the trees.

  The sheriff ignored her instruction and tromped along with her and José. She gave him a look. If it withered his manhood even a tiny bit, she couldn’t tell. It certainly didn’t stop him.

  When they got to the trees, no one was there.

  * * *

  “. . . DIDN’T see her again, so maybe it was a hallucination.”

  “Could be,” Rule said.” You’re sure about the braid?”

  “Positive.”

  The braid—nuli ahm in brownie-speak—meant the brownie was a mother. Without it, Lily wouldn’t have known if the brownie was male or female. Brownies lacked obvious secondary sexual characteristics—beards or breasts, that is; both sexes wore the same clothing; and male and female faces looked equally cute to human eyes. Or lupus eyes, for that matter. Brownie men had skinny little butts while the women’s were subtly rounded, but Lily hadn’t seen the brownie’s body. “Hmm. W
ell, brownies are good at going unseen, even without the dul-dul. With both trees and brush to hide in . . .”

  “Yeah. Maybe I saw her, maybe I didn’t.”

  Rule took another bite of the ham sandwich he’d made so he could eat with Lily. She was four hundred miles away in a hotel room. He was in the Brookses’ guest bedroom. They might not be sharing a table, but they were sharing a meal. Or food, at least. The French dip sandwich she’d picked up before reaching her hotel was supper for her. His sandwich was a snack. “What did the sheriff say about the brownie?”

  “You think I told him I was seeing brownies?”

  Rule smiled. “I take your point.”

  Everyone knew that brownies never left their reservations. Everyone was wrong, but that’s how the brownies liked it. They called their ability to go unseen dul-dul. Dul-dul blocked scent as well as sight, but not hearing. This bugged Lily, he knew. She’d asked the brownie who liaised with the Shadows why it worked on scent but not hearing. Harry had rolled his big green eyes and said, “Because we need it to work on scent, of course. We can learn to move silently, but we can’t learn how to not smell.”

  Brownie logic did not precisely align with the usual kind.

  Dul-dul didn’t work on Lily, so maybe she really had seen a little brownie peering at her. Or maybe she’d hallucinated three bloody damn times today. Rule did not want that to be true. “Their reservation isn’t far from Whistle. She was probably just wandering.”

  “Maybe, but nothing’s missing. I’ve still got my ring, wallet, watch, badge—everything I had with me. That suggests it was a hallucination, doesn’t it?”

  “They only play ‘the game’ in a space you claim as yours. A park wouldn’t count.”

  “Are you sure? Because I claimed that damn crime scene. If that little puddle of cute took anything from it—”

  “If she hasn’t asked for a forfeit, she didn’t take anything. Did you find out who called the tip in?”

  “Yes. Talked to them, too.”

  “Learn anything useful?” he asked.

  A small sigh. “Yes and no. There were two of them, both boys, both sixteen. I’m pretty sure they’re just what they seem—a couple of kids who were planning to do things their parents wouldn’t like out at the park. Weed, most likely. José smelled it on them.”

  “That’s the ‘no’ part of the answer, I assume. What’s the ‘yes’ part?”

  “The bit that’s useful but puzzling. Carson had already found their scents on the trail. The thing is, those were the only recent scents he found anywhere near the body, aside from ours.”

  Rule frowned, trying to make sense of that. “Doesn’t someone using TK have to be close to the object they manipulate?”

  “That’s my understanding. I tried calling the contact Ruben gave me—a guy with a strong TK Gift—but he’s getting some kind of medical procedure done. His wife didn’t say what, but she said I could call back tomorrow. I think you have to be able to see what you’re manipulating with TK, though. That’s what someone else with that Gift told me once. I haven’t figured out how anyone could have seen the victim without leaving any scent near the body. Not unless they were also able to levitate.”

  “I’ve never heard of a levitation Gift. There’s nowhere nearby they could have attained enough height to see over the grasses in that field?”

  “There’s some trees, but none of them give a clear view of where the victim was killed. José didn’t find any scent up in the trees, either. Admittedly, he was two-legged at the time—wolves don’t climb trees well—but still, if someone had been up there today, he should have smelled them.”

  “Hmm.” He took a last bite of his snack, chewed, and switched the subject. “I wonder if the Lady sent Charles with you so he could find the body.”

  “I wondered about that, too, but it doesn’t add up. If Charles hadn’t been there, someone still would’ve found the body. Maybe it would’ve been the deputies instead of me, but I’d have claimed the scene anyway. I don’t see that it would have made much difference.”

  “Unless it mattered who found the body.”

  “I don’t see it. Say the deputies show up and I’m still wandering around, wondering why I’m there. They’d check me out, same as they did. Once we’d all shared ID, I’d have learned why they were there and probably would have sent Carson looking for the body. Even if I didn’t, I would have looked with them. It all would’ve ended up about the same way it did.” She hesitated. “There’s something I need to ask you, but he’s right here.”

  “Charles?”

  “Yeah. He decided there was room for him on one side of the bed, and I can’t figure out how to tell him to go find his own damn bed. Good thing it’s king-size.”

  Rule grinned. Charles was milking his status for all it was worth. “I take it this is something you don’t want him to hear.”

  “No, but he’s asleep.” She lowered her voice anyway. “Is there anything I should know about . . . you know. What I should do.”

  “There’s little you can or should do,” he assured her. “Charles passed into his waiting time six days ago. There’s no saying how much longer he has, but generally, an elder doesn’t suffer much, even at the very end. He’ll grow tired easily and sleep more than usual. He may have bursts of energy when he seems normal. He may have periods of confusion. Ah . . . humans sometimes treat their dying differently than we do. Charles will make his own decisions about what he eats and when and whether he feels well enough to go for a run.”

  “I get that,” she said. “I don’t make his choices for him just because he’s dying. But I’m not sure about . . . well, he might die while he’s with me.”

  “You’re not sure what to expect? Sometimes an elder’s heart simply stops. He’s here with one breath and gone with the next. Sometimes there’s a period of respiratory distress as his body shuts down more gradually. Though it doesn’t last more than two or three hours, it can be difficult for those who wait with them.”

  Lily huffed out an impatient breath. “His body, Rule. That’s what I’m talking about. If he dies while he’s with me, what am I supposed to do with his body? I don’t think a regular mortuary will take him when he’s in wolf-form—”

  “For God’s sake, no embalming.”

  “I know you don’t usually do that, but how am I supposed to get him back to Ruben? Or to Wythe Clanhome, if that’s where he’s supposed to go.”

  “Lily.” He paused, trying to understand why this bothered her. “You’re talking about a body, not about Charles. You know we don’t have the same reverence for empty flesh that humans do.”

  “But you do bury your dead! And surely someone’s going to want Charles’s body.”

  “Charles didn’t have any children, and I don’t see how possessing his body would comfort those who grieve for him. If Charles dies before you finish this investigation, José will see that his body is taken care of.”

  “He’ll dispose of it somewhere, you mean.”

  “Of course. That’s what burial is.”

  “It’s not the same. Sneaking his body into an unmarked grave somewhere is just—shit.”

  “What?”

  “He’s laughing at me,” she said darkly. “He wasn’t asleep after all, and now he’s grinning like he thinks I’m funny.”

  Rule carefully kept his own amusement out of his voice. “We do find human attitudes about empty flesh rather odd.”

  “All right, all right, I get it. I’m the only one who doesn’t like the idea of just dumping his body somewhere, so I can just get over it.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “You don’t have to. What’s on your schedule tomorrow?”

  “Quarterly taxes,” he said dryly. “I suspect you’ll have a more interesting day. I’ll also want to talk with Ruben and see if he’s made a decision.”

  “About what?”

  “He’s considering heading up to Maine to see his healer.”

 
He could almost hear the wheels turning in her head as she deciphered that. Ruben had been treated by a reclusive healer at one time, which had come in handy when he needed to explain his current robust health. The healer was also a convenient excuse for going to Wythe Clanhome in Maine—supposedly he needed ongoing treatments. “That’s probably a good idea.”

  “He told me I was welcome to stay here if he leaves, but I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “You don’t?”

  “It’s just a feeling I’ve got.”

  Silence. Then: “He’s not having any particular problems, is he?”

  Was she asking if Ruben had had a hunch? “Nothing specific.” Some might think it a surfeit of caution to speak so obliquely on the remote chance someone was eavesdropping, but he considered paranoia a healthy survival trait.

  “If you—huh. Either nature’s calling, or someone else is.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Charles just headed for the door.” Faintly he heard a knock. “Not nature. Someone’s here.”

  “Let José check it out before—”

  “I’m betting the two guards in the hall have already checked them out, Rule. I’d better go.”

  “Be careful. I love you.”

  She told him she loved him and disconnected. He sat on the big, comfortable bed, his phone in his hand, and missed her. Worried for her.

  Someone needed to. She didn’t worry about herself. But it probably wasn’t helpful to feel half-sick with anxiety for no reason whatsoever . . . save that she wasn’t with him.

  He sighed and put the phone down and started stripping. “Mike,” he said to the guard on the other side of the door. “I’m going for a run. You’ll want to Change if you’re going to keep up with me.”

  FOURTEEN

  LILY grabbed her weapon from where she’d set it on the nightstand. Another knock. “Coming,” she called. But when she reached the door, she didn’t open it. “Who are you?”

  “We’d prefer to identify ourselves after we’re inside, Special Agent.”

  Another voice spoke, but the words were muffled by the door. It sounded like Carson. “Human ears here,” she reminded him.