His expression sobering, Aaron nodded. “When we looked at the posting before, she was recently listed as missing with suspected mythic involvement. Like I said then, we aren’t set up for missing human investigations and had to leave it for another guild.”
“No other guild took the job?”
“At that point, it wasn’t a job. It was a Wanted Ad—a listing of suspicious activity that anyone can investigate in hopes of getting a bonus afterward. In this case, some mythics looked into it, and the results aren’t good.”
Kai pulled out his phone, tapped the screen, then held it out to me. On it was another photo of the girl. This time, a beaming old couple was hugging her from either side. The man, thin on top and thick in the middle, had one arm around his wife, a skinny lady with crow’s-feet around her eyes. A loving family photo. Maybe I was imagining it, but the girl’s smile seemed empty, her blue eyes as hollow as in the other photo.
“Her name is Nadine River,” Kai said. “These are her parents. Last week, they contacted the guild.”
“But … aren’t they human?” I asked in confusion. Aside from my fluke arrival, humans and guilds didn’t mix.
He slipped his phone back into his pocket. “They are, but they asked enough questions and pestered enough people about their missing daughter that someone eventually put them in contact with us. As far as they know, we’re private investigators.”
“That got us looking at the girl’s listing again,” Aaron said, pushing the laptop toward me. “Check out the notes.”
Beneath the brief listing with Nadine’s photo and the details of her disappearance were dated notes. A mythic had shared a copy of the missing person report from the police. A few days later someone else posted that they’d checked out her home for evidence of mythic involvement. A psychic did a reading and suggested personal tragedy as a factor to consider. Another mythic shared an update about the girl’s school, no suspicious activity detected.
The updates continued, a new one every few days, as different mythics took up a piece of the investigation and shared it with the others who wanted to bring this girl, a total stranger, home safely. I swallowed hard, scrolling down as the mythics determined that Nadine had run away from home, turned up at a homeless shelter, then … vanished. The last update was dated three weeks ago.
“‘Confirmed,’” I read aloud. “‘Nadine’s last known interaction was with the Ghost. Ceasing investigation.’ Who is the Ghost?”
Aaron reached across the laptop and switched to a different tab. A new webpage in MPD’s hideously outdated white layout appeared. The photo square was blank, but the page was full of text: crime after criminal charge after suspected illegal activity after crime. In place of a name, it said, “The Hungry Ghost.”
Kai stared broodily at the screen. “He’s named after a Chinese myth about dead souls guilty of the sin of greed, condemned to suffer eternal hunger and tirelessly devour other lost souls. All anyone knows is he’s a rogue who ‘collects’ stranded and vulnerable mythics. Anyone who disappears around him is never seen again.”
Gooseflesh rose over my arms. I took a half-hearted sip of my daiquiri, and as the sweetness coated my tongue, it chased away the shivery shadow the rogue’s description had awakened. “This Ghost person took Nadine? If we know who has her, why did everyone stop investigating?”
“No one can catch the Ghost,” Ezra murmured. “We don’t know what class he is, what he looks like, how he operates … nothing. No one has seen his face. No one knows his name.”
“It’s a dead end.” Kai stirred his rum and coke with his straw. “The mythics searching for Nadine ceased the investigation because, even if they could find the Ghost, they’re afraid to cross him.”
“So … that’s it?” I looked between them incredulously. “Everyone is giving up? Just abandoning Nadine to the Ghost?”
“Everyone else,” Aaron corrected. “You didn’t think we were showing you this just to be depressing, did you?”
“But you said it’s a dead end. No one’s ever caught the Ghost.”
“No one has ever caught him … yet. The bounty on this guy is insane. Even splitting it across a team, it should be enough to cover your rent for, oh … how much is your rent?”
“Uh.” I squinted at Aaron. “My rent?”
“You don’t have to use it for rent. You can spend the money however you’d like.” When I stared at him blankly, he added, “Assuming you want to help.”
Right. That’s how we’d started this conversation, wasn’t it? “How can I possibly help?”
“The Ghost shows up for a few reasons,” Kai said. “Mainly, dealing in illegal potions and artifacts, obliterating anyone who crosses him, and abducting mythics. Short of immersing ourselves in the local black market, we can’t catch him at the first one. We don’t want to tempt him to kill us with the second one. So that leaves the third option.”
Ezra nodded. “He targets vulnerable, exposed mythics—runaways like Nadine, homeless rogues, children of mythics who—”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “Nadine is human.”
“That’s what everyone thought,” Ezra said. “It’s what Nadine thinks. But we did some digging and it looks like Nadine is adopted. If the Ghost took her, chances are she has mythic blood and doesn’t know it.”
“The Ghost has a thing for young, down-on-their-luck mythics with nowhere to go.” Aaron took a swig of his drink. “The bastard is careful, though. He has contacts on the streets who watch for likely victims. We could target his contacts—MagiPol has picked up almost a dozen over the years—but they never have any useful information. And the Ghost won’t so much as look at a runaway with any kind of guild association. Too risky.”
“That’s where you come in,” Kai said.
“Me?”
“You’re invisible to the system,” Aaron explained. “You aren’t registered, you aren’t guilded, and as far as MPD records are concerned, you don’t exist. On paper, you have no ties to guilds or mythics.”
“Yeah, that’s because I’m not a mythic.”
“That we can fake long enough to lure the Ghost out.” Kai tapped his laptop. “We’ve identified the last person Nadine talked to—a worker at the youth shelter she stayed at—and we think he’s one of the Ghost’s contacts. If me, Aaron, or Ezra approach him, he could bolt or tip off the Ghost. Even if we tag him, we doubt the Ghost is dumb enough to reveal his whereabouts to anyone.”
“Let me guess.” I propped my chin on my palm. “You want me to pretend to be a vulnerable, destitute mythic and wander around the shelter until this guy points me toward the Ghost. Or points the Ghost toward me.”
“Exactly.” Aaron gave me a winning smile. “So, are you in?”
“Am I allowed to? I work for the guild, but I’m not a member. And people will notice me helping you guys—so don’t tell me we’re just following the ‘second rule.’” I added air quotes for the last two words.
“Not the second rule.” Aaron smirked. “The third.”
The third rule? I’d never heard of a third one before. I only knew two guild rules: One, don’t hit first, but always hit back, and two, don’t get caught. All things considered, their rules didn’t inspire much confidence.
Before I could ask about the third, Ezra said, “If the contact sends you to meet the Ghost, you’ll need to follow through so the Ghost shows himself. But that’s all you have to do. We’ll take over from that point.”
“Is that it?” I pulled a disbelieving face. “I get a cut of the bounty just for that?”
“Think of it as hazard pay,” Kai advised, surprisingly somber. “We’ll do everything we can to ensure your safety, but the Ghost is unpredictable and no one in the Crow and Hammer has ever gone up against him before. It’ll be dangerous.”
“Not that dangerous,” Aaron countered hastily. “We’ll be right there.”
Frowning, I pulled Kai’s laptop closer and clicked through the tabs until I found the Ghost’s listing. He wa
s associated with a chilling number of crimes, from selling illicit substances to murder.
I switched to Nadine’s page and studied her photo, her empty expression, her vacant eyes. I knew those eyes—hollow, hopeless, unhappy. I’d seen them a hundred times before, staring back at me from the mirror when I was her age. I’d waited and waited and waited for someone to save me. Eventually, my brother had rescued me from my alcoholic piece-of-shit father, but for so long, I’d been convinced I was trapped.
Was Nadine trapped? Had she given up hope that anyone would save her? Did she believe, like I had, that no one cared and no one ever would?
I looked from her photo to the three mages sitting across from me. “I’ll do it. When do we start?”
Aaron grinned, unsurprised by my agreement. “Whenever you’re ready.”
The very next morning, I was standing in the middle of a thrift store, my nose wrinkled as I tried to block out the musty odor of old clothes. We were here to pick out my disguise, and it was serious business. Nadine’s life depended on our efforts, and the first step was making sure I could pass for a teenager.
“This! It’s perfect!”
With a cackling laugh, Aaron held up a t-shirt, the front emblazoned with an ostrich head shooting laser beams from its eyes.
I sighed. It was supposed to be serious.
“No, no,” Ezra exclaimed, popping out from another aisle. “This is better!”
He triumphantly displayed a fluffy, adult-sized onesie with dalmatian spots and floppy dog ears on the hood.
Aaron snorted so loudly a nearby shopper looked around in alarm. “I would pay money to see Tori wear that.”
“Sure thing,” I said. “Bidding starts at a hundred grand.”
“You do realize I can afford that, right?”
“Then why is your car so lame?”
He gasped. “What do you mean, lame? My car is awesome!”
“Can we focus?” Kai snapped. He hovered behind me, hands in his pockets like he intended to touch absolutely nothing. “We don’t have all day.”
Technically, we did. I’d finished my summer term classes last week and swapped today’s shift with Cooper, who normally covered Sundays and Mondays. But seeing as I wanted to get this over with too, I kept quiet.
With a fond look at the dog onesie, Ezra vanished down an aisle to replace it.
Aaron dropped the atrocious ostrich shirt onto a rack. “What are we here for again?”
“Clothes that will make me look several years younger.”
He scanned the nearest items and selected one at random—a pair of cut-off jean shorts with a waist so high I’d be belting them around my ears. “What about these?”
“Do I look like an XXL to you?”
He returned them to the rack. “I’ve gotta be honest here. I have no clue what teen girls wear.”
Kai, positioned behind me like we were locked in orbit, muttered his agreement, and I wondered if my choice of store was throwing them off as much as their lack of teen fashion sense. Considering Aaron’s parents were super-rich, renowned mage instructors, and Kai’s family—not that he’d ever mentioned his family—had paid to put him through said extra-exclusive academy, I doubted either guy had set foot in a thrift store before, never mind shopped at one.
Ezra, on the other hand … with him, I could never be sure. He was browsing a rack of women’s shirts, as relaxed as always.
“We need casual clothes that don’t look brand new. I’m supposed to be a teenager who’s recently run away from home, right? I need something like …” I ran my hand along the rack and pulled out a pair of skinny jeans with artfully ripped thighs. “These might work. And these ones here too.”
As I flipped the two pairs over my shoulder, Aaron rifled through more hangers. Choking on a laugh, he pulled out something that vaguely resembled paisley drapes in the shape of parachute pants. “Wow. I think MC Hammer just rolled over in his grave.”
“MC Hammer isn’t dead,” Kai told him.
“He would be if he ever laid eyes on these pants.”
I pushed my bangs out of my face. “Aaron, why don’t you go check for backpacks? I’ll need one.”
Grinning at my obvious attempt to get rid of him, he replaced the eyeball-assaulting pants and sauntered off. Normally I’d be cracking jokes right along with him, but I didn’t enjoy thrift shops. They reminded me of my childhood—not just the hours spent in search of clothes the kids at school wouldn’t laugh at, but also the ugly reasons I’d been shopping by myself with scrounged pocket change.
Kai followed me down the aisle, and as I perused the garments for anything my tasteless teen self would’ve loved to wear, I asked, “What do we know about this Ghost guy besides him being a murdering psycho who abducts teenage girls?”
“He first came to MPD’s attention eight years ago.” Kai kept his voice low as a heavyset woman with an armload of shirts passed us in the next aisle. “He’s grown more active over the years. He’s especially involved in the black market—buying and selling anything that could be considered dark arts. Potions, poisons, artifacts, weapons. The items he buys are usually much nastier than what he sells.”
“So he’s probably built up a nice stockpile.” I added a black denim jacket with silver buttons to my collection. “Fantastic.”
Kai paused to squint at a sunhat with a giant yellow bow. “Based on that, most people assume he’s an Arcana mythic, but others insist he’s a mage.”
“Anyone can collect and use Arcana artifacts though, right?” Prime example: me with my Queen of Spades card.
“That’s why there’s so much uncertainty. Our working theory is he’s a di-mythic.”
“A what?”
“A di-mythic is—”
“Guys!”
Aaron bounded out from between shelves—or I assumed it was Aaron. A giant rubber crow head covered his face, and I recoiled so violently I stumbled into Kai.
“What the hell is—”
“Isn’t it awesome?” Aaron demanded, the mask thing muffling his voice. The crow’s blank plastic eyes stared in opposite directions.
“I can’t believe you put that on your head.” I wrinkled my nose. “Who knows where it’s been?”
He pulled it off. “Maybe we should call ourselves crows instead of hammers.”
“Did you find any backpacks?” I asked.
“Umm. I didn’t see any.”
Ezra wandered out from between two tall shelves, a faded orange backpack in one hand. “How’s this?”
“Perfect. Thanks, Ezra.” I added it to my pile. “This should do it. Let’s go pay.”
We headed to the front of the store and got in line. While the cashier slowly sorted through a customer’s giant stack of disintegrating romance novels, I checked that no one was close enough to eavesdrop, then turned to Kai. “You mentioned ‘di-mythic.’ What’s that?”
“A mythic who’s gifted in—and trained in—two classes,” he explained. “A mage with psychic abilities, a sorcerer with a demon contract, and so on. It’s rare. We’re hypothesizing that the Ghost is an Arcana di-mythic with abilities in another class.”
“We just don’t know which other class,” Aaron added. “Based on power alone, I’d say Elementaria.”
“A mage-sorcerer sounds terrifying,” I said with a shudder. The two most powerful magics combined in one super-evil bad guy.
“Yeah. The sooner we take him down, the better.”
Something about Aaron’s tone gave me pause. I looked across the three mages and lowered my voice to a whisper. “What’s the plan, exactly? Capture him?”
Aaron twisted his mouth. “His bounty is DOA.”
I went still. DOA. Dead or alive.
“We want to take him alive,” Kai murmured. “But we can’t be too cautious or he’ll use that to his advantage. He won’t hold back.”
Did I want to participate in this plan, knowing a man might die? I thought for a moment. If the man was a teen-kidnapping, murdering
sleazebag, then yeah, I was cool with it. But I wasn’t so keen on Aaron, Kai, and Ezra going up against him.
“If no one has ever gotten a decent shot at catching the Ghost,” I said, “what if he’s too much for you three?”
Ezra smiled, his contagious calm seeping through me. “We aren’t taking chances. If we can lure out the Ghost, we’ll have the best backup from our guild waiting to jump in.”
“Oh.” That was smart. Probably Kai’s idea. “I guess we can share the bounty with them.”
Aaron slid his arm around my waist, steering me to the front counter as the book buyer carted her bags off. “You don’t have to split your cut with anyone. We’ll divvy up the payout based on each person’s role.”
I frowned but he gave me a squeeze.
“You’re earning your share, don’t worry. Playing the bait isn’t the safest job.”
“But we’ll have your back,” Ezra added reassuringly.
I nodded, distracted by Aaron’s warm arm around my waist. This was probably a bad idea. I was just a human. Why was I getting tangled up in a scheme to capture the baddest rogue in the city?
Nadine’s photo formed in my mind’s eye. Right. That’s why.
As far as she knew, she was just a human like me. Whatever magic she had, she didn’t know how to use it. Nor did she have three powerful mages ready to defend her. If I could help get her home safely, I would take on the risks of playing bait—and a lot more.
As I piled my “new” clothes on the counter, I noticed a dark shape tucked under Aaron’s other arm. “You forgot to put the crow mask back.”
The corner of his mouth quirked up. “I’m buying it. I think it’ll look great above Tabitha’s desk, watching her while she works.”
“Umm, yeah, I don’t think she’ll like that.”
His smile widened, a wicked gleam in his blue eyes. “Maybe not, but Sin has a recipe for an adhesive that makes superglue look like sticky tack.”
Grinning, I took the crow head and added it to the pile.
Chapter Four
Dark Arts and a Daiquiri (The Guild Codex: Spellbound Book 2) Page 3
