Rock Paper Sorcery

by L. J. Hayward

  “No,” Erin snapped. “Don’t get cranky. This is what we want. Keep him going, get him talking. Eat something!”

  Unable to risk another glare in Erin’s direction, I settled for smiling at Sean, doing my best to pretend his grunge was everything a classy chick like me could ever want.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that you make me nervous.” Spearing a cherry tomato, I shoved it in Mercy’s mouth.

  Sean grinned and shovelled a forkful of rice into his own.

  Vampires don’t eat solid food. Blood is all they need. As I tried to chew the tomato I realised why. The blasted tomato got stuck on a fang, its juices spilling across a tongue unfamiliar with the acidity. I did my best to get it free while not grimacing at the taste. As spastic as I must have looked, Sean interpreted it as enjoyment, still grinning at me.

  It didn’t help to have the echoes of Erin’s laughter in my ears, either.

  Thankfully, just at that moment, a taxi decided to pull out in front of a car and the resultant horn honks twisted Sean around in his chair to check out the action. I took the chance to spit the offending fruit into the gutter, scraping the dregs off the fang as best I could in the few seconds available.

  Settling back, I noted a child staring at me from a nearby table. She looked from me, to the spat out tomato and back again. Then she picked up a broccoli flower from her own plate and tossed it down. We shared a conspiratorial grin. Then her eyes widened and she stared in growing fright.

  “Fangs!”

  Oh shit. I quickly hid them again.

  Sean turned back to me. “You seem awfully young to be a teacher.”

  It took a moment to work out what he was talking about. “Not really a teacher,” I said. “More a tutor.”

  “Why Polish?”

  “My father’s a Pole. It’s a second language to me.” And I’d be screwed if he asked for an example. “What do you do?”

  He shrugged. “I’m a cleaner. Hardly glamorous but you know, it gets me by. Better than how I used to live, you know. At least this way, I’m not on the streets anymore.”

  I let a sympathetic frown crease Mercy’s perfect brow. “Oh? You were homeless? That’s so sad.”

  “Yeah, I s’pose, but you know, better than staying at home.”

  “It’s good you have a job, then. Where do you work? In the city?”

  “Nah. It’s out west a bit. Takes an hour by train to get there, but you know, I can’t not live in the city.”

  “Totes,” I said and got a sigh from Erin at the same time Sean frowned at me.

  “Totes,” he said, then chuckled. “That’s so retro.”

  Was it? Apparently I was behind the times with my jargon.

  “So,” I said, leaning forward to show off more cleavage, “you, like, clean offices or something?”

  “I wish. There’d be less shit, if I did.” He laughed.

  “Shit?”

  “Yeah. I work at a zoo. Cleaning the cages and stuff.”

  Letting Mercy’s big, brown eyes go wide, I breathed, “Cool. A zoo? Like with lions and giraffes and stuff?”

  “Maybe tone down the dumb blonde routine,” Erin suggested, but there was an approving note in her tone. We were finally getting to the good stuff.

  Sean nodded. “There’s a lion, no giraffes though. I think we’re getting a tiger, soon, too. That’ll be so cool.”

  “My favourites are the monkeys.”

  “We have them.” Though his tone said they weren’t his favourite. “Chimps, too. I hate the chimps.”

  “Oh!” I covered Mercy’s mouth with a small hand, fingers splayed, as if I’d just had a shocking revelation. “Did you hear about those monkeys that escaped from a zoo? That wasn’t your place, was it?”

  All the good forward momentum we’d worked up died in a heartbeat. Sean scowled and slumped back in his chair, reaching for his phone. “Yeah, that was our place.”

  I frowned. “You don’t like talking about it? I’m sorry I mentioned it. Was there a lot of trouble because of it?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” He poked at the phone, then tossed it down again. “I had to talk to the cops about it. They kept bugging me.”

  “The police? Why?”

  “Well, they reckon the monkeys didn’t escape. That they were stolen.”

  “And they thought you did it?”

  We already knew the police had dismissed Sean from their investigation, but the zoo owner didn’t. Hence why Sol Investigations had been hired to check Sean out. Also hence why Mercy and I had been brought in by Erin. Savvy PI that she is, Erin knew Sean wouldn’t respond to questioning by a thirty-something woman, so she’d sought out a younger, less suspicious bit of bait.

  Heart-faced, sexy as hell Mercy with a head of bouncy black curls fit the requirements perfectly, except for the vampire part. Sure, she wasn’t a raving, blood-crazed psychopath like your average wild vampire, but Mercy still wasn’t capable of handling a situation like this. She had no compulsion to hide her vampirism and no real understanding of how to behave in public, let alone in a delicate operation.

  So, here I was, my psyche absent from my own body, riding in Mercy’s. It was all thanks to the strong psychic link we shared. My body was currently lying beside Erin in the room in the building opposite. When Erin spoke, my physical ears could hear her, and it was translated to Mercy through the link. No potentially noticeable ear piece. Although, I did have an open phone line to Erin, so she could hear what we were saying. It was, all in all, a sweet set up. If only I hadn’t let Mercy dress herself before taking over.

  “They questioned everyone,” Sean muttered.

  “So, you’re not a suspect anymore?”

  He shrugged. I was losing him.

  “Well, I wish you had stolen them,” I announced brightly. “Then you could have given me one. I love those black monkeys with the white face. Like Ross had in ‘Friends’.”

  Sean scowled. “Capuchin.”

  “Bless you!”

  “No. Ross’ monkey,” he all but snarled. “It was a capuchin. Why does everyone carry on about that stupid monkey? It was a stupid show.”

  Shrugging, I said, “I guess it’s just what everyone knows, right?”

  “I guess. We don’t have any of them, anyway. Even before they were stolen.”

  I gasped theatrically, then looked around to make sure no one was close enough to hear. Leaning forward, I whispered, “So they were stolen.”

  Sean sat back, startled. “I didn’t say that.”

  Except he had and he knew it.

  I smiled enticingly. “It’s okay. I think it’s cool if you did take them.”

  He blinked several times, judging me. I kept eye contact, kept Mercy’s face in an expression of quiet excitement.

  “All right,” Sean murmured, leaning toward me again. “Let’s say I did take them. Why do you reckon I did?”

  “Um. Because zoos are cruel and you wanted to liberate them?”

  “Nah. My zoo’s pretty good, actually. No cruelty.”

  “Okay.” I pretended to think about it. Erin had several theories about where the monkeys may have ended up, so we needed to confirm it. “You sold them to another zoo?”

  Sean shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “But you did sell them.”

  He waved his hand at the bistro. “How else would I afford such fine dining?”

  I laughed because it was expected of me. He was confirming Erin’s hypothesis. Now, I just had to find out who he sold them too.

  “Hmm. Okay. Not another zoo.” I gasped again, in mock horror this time. “Not a research lab?”

  “No! Of course not.” Sean glared at me. Thieves had their standards, apparently.

  I unleashed the unstoppable force of Mercy’s mega-pout on him. “Just tell me then. I promise I won’t tell anyone else. I really do think it’s cool.”

  He considered me from under a fringe of boy-band hair. “All right. If you promise not to t
ell.”

  I put Mercy’s right hand over her heart. “I swear.”

  This was it. All the preparation and discomfort was about to be paid off. I couldn’t wait. The only thing better than being paid for a job was being paid a consulting fee for Sol Investigations. I mean, damn, Erin charged like a wounded bull. Through the link, I could sense Erin’s anticipation as well.

  “Okay,” he said conspiratorially. “There’s this guy—”

  Sean’s head exploded.

  Chapter 4

  The shock propelled me out of Mercy’s body. The last sight I had through her eyes was of blood and gore as Sean’s head simply seemed to be vaporised. Then I was crashing back into my prone body on the hard floor of the stakeout room. The screams of the other customers echoed in my ears. Through it, I could hear Erin’s frantic shouts.

  “Matt? Hawkins? Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” I croaked, rolling over. My body felt cold and numb, too heavy after Mercy’s slender frame, too big. Lifting my head, I blinked my eyes into focus.

  Erin was still crouched by the window, peering down at the street, but she jerked when my voice came from behind her. Dropping the binoculars, she spun around.

  “What the hell?” she demanded very eloquently.

  “I don’t know. What did you see?” I pushed myself up to my knees, feeling like I had the flu.

  “Nothing.” Erin turned back to the window. “Maybe something. I’m not sure. What did you see?”

  “Something that’s going to give me nightmares for a long time.” Even now, the image of skin and bone just disintegrating right in front of me made my stomach churn. “What’s happening down there?”

  “A lot of panic,” she reported, shoving a strand of her long, auburn hair back behind her ear. There was a glistening of sweat on her brow, probably a combination of the lovely humidity of Brisbane in summer and shock. “Sean’s on the ground, everyone else is running. So much blood,” she breathed, then pulled back suddenly, hand pressed to her mouth.

  I let Erin scramble away from the window, her shoulders heaving, and took her place. She was right. A lot of panic but it was quickly dispersing as people scattered. It seemed once they got a bit of distance between themselves and the horrifically mangled body, they got some sense back and stopped. A wide empty space had opened up around Sean. The waitress who’d asked us about our meals was paralysed in the door to the bistro, staring in complete shock. A man hustled her out of the way and came out. He rushed toward the body, then stopped half way, as if realising he didn’t need to check for a pulse.

  “Call the cops,” he called to no one in particular but it didn’t matter. A dozen people were already on their mobiles, at least half of them to the police, surely. The rest were probably feeding live footage to YouTube or something.

  I scanned the crowd. “Mercy’s not there.” A fist of ice formed in my gut.

  Mercy had been in my life almost three years now. Two of which we’d worked together as Night Call, helping the residents of Brisbane with their supernatural problems. Trolls, werewolves, demons, wild vampires, ghouls, whatever Old World—or otherworld—nasty reared its ugly mug and made a nuisance of itself. As a competent partner in our odd little team, Mercy was the bee’s absolute knees. As a lone entity, she was scary. Without my humanity to hold down her vampiric side, she was a wild card. Unpredictable and, naturally, hungry for human blood.

  Erin pushed back in beside me. “Where is she?” There was a very understandable tremor in Erin’s voice. She’d been on the wrong side of Mercy’s nature a time or two and, like any rationally thinking person, didn’t want to be there again. Or want anyone else there.

  I closed my eyes and reached for Mercy. Our link was only growing stronger the longer we were together, and the more things we did with it. It was hardly an effort to find her at the end of it.

  She was already three blocks away and still running. Her mind was a twisted mess of anger and shock and freak-out. She’d agreed to my hijacking of her body but like any mentally-challenged person, I don’t think she fully understood what I’d been proposing. Now I was gone and she was back in the driver’s seat, she was seething, and yeah, all of that vampire powered angst was directed at me.

  Sensing my touch, Mercy snarled internally, snapping at me down the link until I backed off.

  “Go home,” I commanded, then pulled away.

  Coming back to my body, I resigned myself to days, if not weeks, of temper tantrums and sulking. At least she’d fed sufficiently before we’d come out. No one was going to find a cute, pint-sized leech attached to their neck.

  “She’s okay,” I said to Erin. “Freaked, but heading home.”

  Erin considered me for a moment, as if questioning the certainty of my tone.

  “She is,” I repeated, more firmly.

  Keeping her opinion to herself, Erin leaned on the windowsill, looking morosely down at our dead thief. “He was about to tell us everything. A couple more seconds and we would have had the name of the buyer. What am I going to tell my client?”

  “Clearly, someone didn’t want Sean talking.” I frowned. “Seems awfully extreme for a bunch of monkeys. What do you think? Sniper?”

  “No sniper rifle would cause that much damage,” Erin said. “And the monkeys were valuable to the zoo. Part of an inter-zoo breeding program.” She stood and gathered up her surveillance equipment, which didn’t include any form of junk food, sadly. “Let’s go down, see if we can pick anything up from crowd chatter.”

  Muscles slowly warming up, I followed Erin out of the room and down the stairs. We were in an office building, most of the businesses closed for the night. The office we’d been in was one kept by Sol Investigations for just these purposes. Over the past couple of months I’d learned a lot about being a private eye, but Erin assured me not every PI had the resources she did. Sol, her boss, was some sort of international super-sleuth who’d opened officers all over the world. Erin’s budget for individual cases was enough to keep me and Mercy in house and food for months. Of course, the invoices she handed over to her clients more than compensated for it, but still, business was booming.

  I watched Erin skipping down the stairs ahead of me, appreciating the fit of her jeans and reminding myself she was off bounds. Married, but also, pretty honest in admitting that while she liked me as a friend—now, and it had been a tough road to get that far—that was it. We had a professional relationship. She helped me with some of my jobs and I ‘consulted’ for her occasionally. Very occasionally. Ever since that little fiasco with a Demon Lord a couple months back, Erin had been wary about taking cases that might impinge on my area of expertise. I got a few referrals out of it, so it wasn’t all that bad. Erin didn’t even charge a percentage of my fee for the referrals.

  Erin keyed us out of the building, we crossed the road and mingled in the growing crowd around the bistro. Ever the investigator, Erin moved amongst the people, asking awed and stunned questions as she went. I didn’t. There was something about me that just didn’t inspire casual chatting in a lot of people. Whether it was the hint of my dark side—a berserker rage that could overwhelm me in times of great stress—a touch of otherness—partner with a vampire, remember—or just my own reluctance to be in a crowd—I didn’t like big mobs of people, don’t ask why, just accept it and move on—most people tended to get out of my way pretty quick and not meet my gaze.

  So while Erin gathered stories, I sauntered as close to the scene of the crime as I could. Sirens were blaring in the near distance, getting closer. The bistro staff had begun to take charge, keeping people back and asking for witnesses. I pushed through to the front of the crowd and studied the sight.

  Our table had been on the edge of the footpath, next to the barrier advertising the bistro’s coffee brand. It was knocked over, Sean’s body sprawled across it. If it had still been there, his head would have been in the gutter. As it was, it was splattered across the table and ground. Despite the protests from my di
nner, I studied the body. Yup. Head completely gone, just a ragged stump of bloody neck, a few chunky hunks of hairy skull dangling from ragged skin still attached.

  Looking a bit further afield, I found a lump of stone or concrete resting in the gutter. It was about the size of my two fists together, and painted in dark red splashes and little gobbets of what could only be brains. Just beyond it, another hunk, smaller and also bloody. This one looked like a face, though. A portion of a head, a cheek and huge eye, corner of a wide mouth and ear.

  “Hey, did you see what happened?”

  I focused on the woman in front of me. It was the waitress who’d spoken to us. Well, to Mercy and Sean.

  “No. What happened?” I asked with appropriate amounts of morbid curiosity. “Was he shot?”

  The young woman shivered, arms wrapped around herself in spite of the warm night air. “No. Something fell on him. A brick or something. I saw it fall, then…” She swallowed hard. “Poor man. I think he was on a date. Have you seen her? They’ll need to talk to her, I reckon. Small, black curls? Very pale.”

  I shook my head and peered upward. The building the bistro was in was a fairly stock-standard affair for inner-city Brisbane. Four storeys, brick, utilitarian, unmarked but for a few adverts hanging under windows. Nothing looked damaged on the facade, no missing bricks, no cracked stone-work around the windows or roof. But then, I didn’t think it was a brick that had killed Sean.

  The police arrived with a blurt of sirens and lights to get through the cars slowing on the street for a stickybeak. There was an ambulance behind the two patrol cars and a fire-truck came up from the opposite direction.

  The bistro owner called the waitress over and I slipped back through the crowd, not wanting to be seen by the cops. I mean, it wasn’t like I was known to every cop in the city, but I’d been in a few scrapes and altercations in my time. It was best I not be seen around this one if I could manage it.

  Erin had the same idea, meeting up with me on the outskirts of the fracas. We fell into step side by side, just folks on their way home, nothing to see here.

  “Find anything out?” I asked, hands shoved in my jeans pockets.