What did this mean?
“It is time.” The left orc interrupted us as though on cue, and the heavy grinding of metal on metal rang discordantly through my ears, making me bite down on my front teeth with a grimace. “Have you got what you came for, Detective Elle?” he rumbled in the deeply sonorous tones of a mountain orc.
Standing slowly, I looked down at Whiskers’s bowed head. He had his eyes closed and appeared to have fallen asleep. He was clearly done speaking, and so was I.
Sighing, I shoved my fists into my jacket pockets and nodded. “Aye.”
The orc pointed to the door. Chewing on my bottom lip, I wanted to say goodbye to Whiskers, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, because it could quite possibly be the last time I ever said it to him. And I didn’t want that.
I wouldn’t lie—it did not look good for him. Very few attorneys had ever successfully gotten their clients off with the “magick made me do it” defense because it was terribly hard to prove an enchantment after the fact. Unless Whiskers had been captured actively under the spell, witches with that level of magick could quite easily erase any marks of such a curse once the task was completed.
With a heavy heart, I nodded toward the orc and turned to go. Only once I was outside the maximum-security stronghold did I reach out to the PD.
I would have loved to speak with Maddox and figure things out together, as we so often did. He could usually see things that I couldn’t, bringing in a different perspective and helping me to look at a case outside the box.
I needed to speak with someone, though, and I didn’t have enough to badger Bo about any of it just yet.
Swiping my key card through air, I thought not of Grimm PD or even Maddox’s room but Ich’s home. He had the day off, and right now, he was the only one I could think of.
When I stepped out of the travel tunnel, I stood in front of a nondescript brownstone building with a staircase that consisted of seven steps—a lucky number, he’d said, something about integers and sieving process and prime numbers and I didn’t know what. Mathematics was quite beyond me.
The entire block looked the same, rows of brownstones with few, if any, distinctive features to them, with small black wrought iron-fences and uniformly planted maple trees in the sidewalk in front of them.
Ich’s was easy enough to distinguish because of the way the address of his home tilted crookedly down the front of his wall like a metal slide. He wasn’t much for home repair.
I jogged up the steps and knocked once. Ichabod, who’d clearly seen my arrival, opened the door immediately. He was shirtless and wearing a pair of loose dark trousers. His feet were bare, and he had a towel wrapped around his neck as he gently rubbed at his head. His dark hair was still damp from a recent shower, and he smelled of brandy and good, clean soap.
I glanced around his flat looking for any signs of visitors. “Bad timing?”
“Not at all. Come in. I saw you arrive not a second ago. Tea?”
I shook my head. “No, I’m fine. Just a quick question, then I’m back to Neverland.”
He nodded as he walked us back toward his kitchen area. Or at least, it was what I called his kitchen because of the stove. But honestly, Ich lived in a library. He had books everywhere, popping out of every conceivable nook and cranny. He had books on the shelf, in the cabinets, on the floors, all of them bound in leather and looking older than even my father, who was well into his three-hundredth year.
“So is that where you are today?” His intelligent blue eyes roved over my face. “Never thought I’d see the day you willingly went back there.”
I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Long story. But I have a friend in trouble. Big trouble, actually, and I’m following a hunch is all.”
He pursed his lips as he neared his counter and pointed to an opened newspaper. On it, the headline read in big, bold black letters: Dragon Rains Death!
I wrinkled my nose and shoved it away. “Rubbish headline. Nothing more than shock value, that.”
“Whiskers, is it? You knew him?” he asked, reaching for a teacup and pouring out a cupful of steaming water from his still-whistling kettle before dropping a silver ball packed with loose green tea into it.
I nodded. “Once. A long time ago.” Leaning against whatever bit of available open counter space there was, I crossed my legs at the ankles and stared ahead of me without really seeing much.
“Friends with a dragon—you never cease to amaze me. You do know that’s quite rare, no?” He gave me a rakish grin. With his long hair hanging down and the shadow of a beard on his face, he made me think more of a pirate than my usual nerdy companion.
I shrugged and gave him a small ghost of a grin. “So I’ve heard.”
“But…” He stirred his tea before taking a small sip. “I get the impression we are not here to exchange pleasantries, so tell me, Detective, what it is that has actually brought you here.”
Astute observer as always, he was right, of course, so I agreed with a nod.
“You’ve been the one collecting the samples of grains from the crime scenes, no.” It wasn’t a question because I already knew he was.
“Indeed, I have. Why do you ask?” He took a large swig of tea before giving a deep sigh. I smelled hints of lemon rind waft up from the steam. He reached behind a stack of books and pulled out an amber-colored bottle, uncorked it with his teeth, and poured a generous serving of brandy into his mug. This time when he took a sip, he grinned.
I shook my head. “I was just interrogating Whiskers, and he mentioned seeing them. And the other night when Maddox and I were on mission at Midas’s gala, I saw some then too. In fact, in reviewing many of the case reports, the grains seem to be the one constant tying what on the surface look like completely unrelated scenes together. I was hoping that maybe you could elucidate on the matter and, further, tell me what you learned from my contact the other night,”
He snorted and chuckled. “I have rubbed off on you, siren. Haven’t I? You, looking at the small, almost insignificant parts of the scene rather than just tearing off after the obvious clues.”
“Well, I did have a very good teacher for many years who taught me to look beyond the discernable.”
He tipped his head before setting his mug down. “To answer your question, yes, I think the grains of sands are significant. And your contact was absolutely useless. He never showed.”
I thinned my lips. The next time I saw Hector, the one legged ghoul, I’d be giving him a piece of my mind. That bastard had played me for a fool. I shook my head and sighed. “I am sorry about that. Trusting a ghoul to actually show up might have been a bit naïve on my part, but I hoped after what I’d done for him, he’d do the right thing at least once in his long, undead life. Anyway…” I flicked my wrist. “So we are definitely certain now that the grains are indeed sand?”
“Mm. ”
I didn’t fail to note the noncommittal answer.
Then he was rushing off, marching with a briskness that told me the nerd in him had grown excited with discovery. I grinned as I followed his mad dash toward his bedroom.
And I knew this because this wasn’t my first time at Ich’s place. But just as with the kitchen and living quarters, his bedroom, too, was a floor-to-ceiling maze of leather-bound books and journals. He had a desk with a few vials full of powders and other odd bits, an ancient microscope, and a Bunsen burner on it, no doubt to perform his experiments on. It was the only area of his room that was somewhat neat and tidy. His bed was covered in books, and there was a ratty couch sitting catty-cornered with a blanket tossed haphazardly over its back—clearly where he really slept. Even so, I counted no fewer than ten books scattered across its cushions.
He walked toward a shelf that a mound of books had hidden from my sight and ushered me toward him. I moved to stand beside him, then my forehead wrinkled when I studied ten clear bottles full of tan sugary sand.
“Are those— ”
“The sands from the crime
scenes?” he finished. “Yes. Yes, they are.” He clasped his hands behind his back and lifted high up on his toes. I knew Ich well enough to know that for reasons quite beyond me, he was excited about something. And it all had to do with the sand.
“And have you tested their properties? Anything unusual about it? Spelled? Anything?” I asked, running my fingers along the cool glass.
“Mm. All the same. Just sand. Nothing but sand. It’s all it is.”
I frowned, thinning my eyes, because he sounded far too excited for it to just be sand. Planting my hands on my hips, I shook my head and glanced at him. “Then why do you sound so happy about that?”
He lifted a finger and practically skipped back toward his desk. I followed, wearing a confused grin. It was always a pleasure to watch his eccentric mind at work, even if more often than not I was completely lost.
“Yes, you’re right, of course. Why am I happy about that? Well, until today, I wasn’t at all. I couldn’t understand why in the devil we kept finding piles of sand at each crime scene. Was it simply debris left behind by the Slashers? But really, that made no sense, either, because they’re far too intelligent to be so damned clumsy. It’s why they continue to evade capture as they do. But the sand is significant. It has to be, right? It’s a”—he rolled his wrist—“calling card, if you will. A way to let us know that not only are they aware we’re watching, they don’t give a rats arse about it, either. Because no matter what we do, we can’t stop them. Hubris, of course, but hubris can be defeated.”
Then he reached toward his desk and pulled out the drawer, and a tiny vial of yet more sand rolled with a plink against the wood. But this sand was obviously different. This sand glimmered like freshly minted gold by candlelight—the exact same shade as the stuff Maddox and I had seen scattered around the gala.
He picked it up with obvious reverence and tilted his hand toward me. “Now, guess what this is, Elle.”
“Sand?” I shrugged. “Golden sand,” I said to be more specific.
His eyes sparkled. “By all appearances, you’d think so. Now, this sand was found at the last crime scene. The gala, in fact. And just like all the rest, it was found in neat and tidy piles. But it’s not beige. Why is that?”
I could feel his excited tension, and I knew that he suspected he might be on to something significant. But I still hadn’t a clue what that could be. It wasn’t uncommon for both Ich and Maddox to be ten, sometimes even twelve, paces ahead of me. I was by no means stupid, but they solved crimes as they played chess—it was a fascinating process to behold.
“Because Midas accidentally touched some?”
He moved briskly over to his desk and yanked open yet another drawer and pulled out a small glass slide, which he set inside his microscope and powered it on then stepped back.
“Mm. Maybe. But that’s not what’s got me so excited. Because, you see, this sand is very, very different. And it has nothing at all to do with Midas touching it or not touching it.”
He waggled his eyebrows, and I harrumphed. “Ich, get to the point already, please.”
Taking a step back, he pointed toward the microscope. “Look for yourself then. Maybe you’ll see what I did.”
Frowning and even a little excited by the mystery, I leaned over and stared into the eyepiece.
Being a siren, I was very attuned to the terrain of the underwater worlds. Some sands were red because they were so rich in iron. Others were green, connoting a rich deposit of olivine close by. And based on the colors, I could generally approximate within a few meters where the sand had been picked up.
There was only one problem. Nowhere in Grimm—that I was aware of—were there golden beaches. And as I stared at the slide, I grew more and more confused. Because this was most definitely not sand.
Sand had an unpolished and gemlike quality to it beneath a microscope. That should have looked more like yellow-tinted glass beads. Instead, it was deeply metallic and shaped quite like actual gold. Leaning back, I looked at him with an obvious question mark on my face.
He nodded.
“That’s not sand.”
He snapped his fingers. “No, it is not. Yet it is.”
“No, Ich, I know sand. That is not sand. That is gold dust.”
Shrugging, he said with a grin, “Or is it, Elle?”
I was about to school him on the facts, when he unstoppered the vial of gold he still gripped in his hand. He turned it over in his palm and slid out just a few grains, leaving most of it still in the vial. Carefully, he replaced the stopper and set it down on his desk. Then turning to me, he held up his hand and with a mile-long grin, whispered, “Elle, bring me my tea.”
I snorted. You can get your own damned tea. I thought the words. I did not say them. They rested heavily on the tip of my tongue. Yet I felt confused of a sudden, my brain in a fog. And when I looked down, in my hand, I held the mug of tea he’d made for himself back in the kitchen.
I blinked then blinked again, hand shaking a little and causing the tepid contents to slosh over onto it.
“What? When… did you place this mug in my hand?”
I was standing right beside him. I’d not walked away. In fact, I hadn’t moved an inch, but he was smiling like a cocky peacock back at me.
“I didn’t put that in your hand. You walked into the kitchen and grabbed it for me.”
“Like hells I did. I never moved.”
“Oh, I assure you, Elle, that you did.” Then he twisted on his heel and quickly jogged toward a surveillance monitor sitting on a thick stack of old newspapers. His fingers ran like a blur over a keyboard, then he stepped back and pointed.
I saw myself walking away and heading into the kitchen. I returned not a second later, holding his mug in my hand. I saw myself on the screen and knew it was true, but I had no memories of it. It was as if that period was completely erased from my mind.
“Bloody hells!” I snapped. “This is the proof then. This is what was done to Whiskers, isn’t it?”
Ichabod nodded and ran his fingers through the grains, which were golden no more but beige, as the other vials had been. “I believe so. The only problem is, this sand was found not in Neverland, as I said, but in Hel. Unfortunately, M.I.C.E. hasn’t been able to find any sands at Whiskers’s nest or even in Neverland at all. But if we can find some and I can tie it to this same type of sand, then we could potentially get Whiskers off. But only Bo knows of this right now. Please tell no one of my findings. If the press catches wind of this, we could lose the only element of surprise we’ve got left. This could very well be the first misstep the gang has made and the very key to cracking this most perplexing of riddles.”
I shook my head. “Of course, though I must tell Maddox.”
“Understandable. But speak in whispers. There is something about this case, Elle, that makes me very, very uneasy.”
“On that, we agree.” I gazed at the beige particles in his hand. Setting the mug down on the desk, I pointed with my chin toward the grains. “Put those on a slide, Ichabod, if you’d be so kind.”
“You wish to see it for yourself. That is fine. I, too, didn’t quite believe it the first time it happened to me. I did not have the benefit of another soul around when I inadvertently activated the grains the first time. It took several hours before I lost the tail. It’s always why I’ve set up cameras in my home.”
“Do I want to know what you’re talking about?”
He shuddered. “Probably not, no. It was truly the stuff of nightmares. But as they say, seeing is believing.” Quickly, he set up a new slide for me then replaced the previous one with the new one and stepped back.
A quick glance told me all I needed to know. What I was looking at wasn’t gold at all but unpolished gems. I licked my front teeth and turned slowly to look back at him. “The gold is the spell. And once used up, it returns to its true form. Sand.”
“Indeed, it is sand. But from where and why? I still don’t know.”
Chicken skin peb
bled my body, and a sense of slinking unease began to wind its way through my gut. Now that the excitement of discovery was wearing off, I was coming to a very uncomfortable realization.
“Ichabod…” I said his name slowly, but as he’d done to me so many other times before, he nodded, already anticipating my words.
“Yes. This would have been cast by a very high-level witch indeed. The enchantment is quite sophisticated and nearly untraceable. The perfect crime. Except that someone serendipitously dropped unused sand, and now we can hopefully start to unravel this very peculiar mystery.”
“Hm, ” I mumbled, staring back at the slide with a heavy frown. “Peculiar, indeed. All righty then. Keep me apprised, if you could. I’ll go now.”
He gave me a curious look. “To where? I heard Maddox is still laid up. Would you care for company?”
“It’s your day off.”
He shrugged. “I’d rather be working. You know that. Besides…” He reached over and trailed a hot finger down the back of my hand and stepped in closer toward me.
He didn’t finish the thought, but I could feel the rising thrum of awareness prickle through me at the unspoken invitation. I shivered, reaching out and placing my open palm on his naked chest, savoring the warmth of his body heat.
It would be all too easy to give in. With Ichabod, sex was never a complicated matter. I closed my eyes, voice scratchy as I whispered, “You have no idea how much I’m tempted. But…”
I stepped back and dropped my hand. My life was far too complicated for any of what was happening. Even no-strings-attached sex. Especially that.
There was a hint of disappointment in his intelligent eyes, but he smirked and dipped his head. “Of course, Detective. And you know, on second thought, I still have much work to do here. Let me know if you should find anything at all pertinent to the sands.”
Blowing out a heavy, frustrated breath, I nodded. “Of course.” Gods, why did relationships have to be such stupidly complicated matters?
I turned on my heel, swiped my key card, and returned to Neverland. I had one last stop to make before I could return to Grimm.
The Grimm Files Collection Boxed Set Page 39
