SPELL TO UNBIND, A

by Laurie, Victoria

  “I was looking for something.”

  “What?”

  “Something that, by rights, didn’t belong to the Russian. Something he swindled away from someone else.”

  “Who?”

  I sighed. There was no point to this conversation. We’d sit here for hours and hours going round and round. Kincaid would ask me a pointed question, I’d deflect and give him a nonsubstantive answer, he would press, I would deflect and on and on until it ate up hours of time and energy, and, while I do enjoy flirting, I just wasn’t that into him.

  So I said, “It doesn’t matter. Now how about you formally charge me so I can call my attorney and you can book me into your city lockup before dawn.”

  Kincaid worked his jaw from side to side. I’d given the magic word, as good as any spell to a mystic working in a mortal’s world: “attorney.” He couldn’t ask me even one more question, and he knew it. The interview was over.

  And yet he continued to sit there and stare at me as if he knew me but couldn’t quite place from where we might’ve encountered each other. I could’ve saved him the time; I would’ve remembered a man who looked like Kincaid. I suspect nearly any woman would. And a fair share of men.

  “I’m not going to charge you,” he said, closing the file and moving it to the side.

  That took me by surprise, but I didn’t want to react or respond until he showed his hand. He had something up his sleeve. I could tell. “Okay,” I said after a long period of silence. “Then I’m free to go?”

  “Nope.”

  “Shocker.”

  “I’m not going to charge you with murder, Esmé. Those four people were dead long before you showed up. At least forty-eight hours according to the ME, but that doesn’t mean that you didn’t have something to do with their murders.”

  I shook my head. “I had nothing to do with it. Like I said, I was there on a fact-finding mission.”

  “Right,” he said, obviously not taking me at my word. “You were there looking for something that belonged to someone else.”

  “Again, Detective, I don’t think I should speak until I’ve consulted my lawyer.”

  Kincaid lifted up my jacket and reached into the pocket like he knew what he was looking for. I stiffened when he pulled out my monocle. Next, he retrieved the patch of scrap metal I’d tried to pass off as the FBI badge. “You know what I find curious?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer. Instead, I worked hard to keep my expression flat and unaffected, even while my heart hammered away.

  “I think it’s curious that you tried to convince me that this,” he said, wiggling the scrap of metal, “was a badge. I told the story to my commander and showed it to him, and do you know what he said?”

  I held very still and gave no answer.

  “He said he was pretty impressed by the fake badge. He said he’d never seen a copy that good before, and then he held it in his hand and inspected it up close. I thought he was pulling my leg until he gave it back to me and asked if I was going to notify the feds about you, because they’d definitely want to know about a badge floating around out there that looked so much like the real deal.”

  I met Kincaid’s gaze. Certainly, he’d known when he handcuffed me in Grigori’s home that I was a mystic, right? But I could tell that he hadn’t. That as he was telling me the story, he’d been shocked by the fact that the bit of scrap metal had had that kind of effect on someone else. And I realized too that he didn’t even understand that when he was telling his commander about me and my magical piece of scrap metal, he’d inadvertently pushed his own essence into the trinket, which was why the other man had fully believed the scrap was a badge.

  Only a mystic could harness a trinket’s power. And this man didn’t seem to fully grasp either what I was or what he was. And that … was stunning.

  Kincaid picked up my monocle and looked through it. “What does this do?” he asked.

  I said nothing, but I could feel myself about to do something desperate. Like slap the shit out of him. But then I realized that unless he looked down at the scrap metal, there was nothing to see through the monocle. So I sat there silently.

  Kincaid waited for me to respond, and when I didn’t, he set down the monocle, pulled the file with my mug shot close again and took out the photo. “You know what else is weird?” he said. “You don’t look a day over thirty, and yet this was taken over a decade ago, when you didn’t look a day over thirty.”

  My gaze slid to the mug shot, then back up to meet his. “You know what I am, right?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I know what Grigori was, but you’re something of a mystery.”

  My brow furrowed. If he’d known that Grigori was a mystic, why was he surprised to discover someone like me?

  Kincaid glanced at the two-way mirror across the room. “No one’s watching us, Esmé,” he said. “It’s just you and me.”

  I arched an eyebrow. I didn’t believe him.

  The corner of his mouth quirked. “Yeah,” he said. “I’d think I was full of shit too, but it’s the truth. You and I are having a private chat right now.”

  I glanced up at the camera in the corner of the room. “Right. Private chat. I’ll look for it on YouTube.”

  It was Kincaid’s turn to sigh. Getting up from his chair, he reached again into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. After unlocking my handcuffs, he took me by the elbow and said, “Come with me.”

  We exited the interrogation room and made our way to the stairs. It was very late by now, and there weren’t many cops around. No one seemed to take notice of us.

  As we headed down two floors, I thought about pulling out of the detective’s grasp and making a run for it, but then what? Would he shoot me in the back? I hadn’t been charged, but I knew I was still a suspect in custody, so I thought he might technically be able to shoot me if provoked. Playing along, at least for the moment, seemed like the better option.

  We reached the street, and Kincaid motioned me over to a black SUV.

  “In,” he ordered, after unlocking the doors.

  I did as he asked, and he got in on the other side, started the engine and turned up the heat. “Nobody’s listening,” he said at last. “It’s just me and you.”

  “Okay,” I said, not at all assured. “Now what?”

  “Now I tell you that you need to cooperate with me.”

  “I thought I was cooperating with you.” I was playing coy, but Kincaid had yet to reveal what he was really after, and that was making me increasingly nervous. I didn’t have time for this shit.

  “No,” he said, his voice going soft. “You’re not telling me anything. You’re ready to call your lawyer and clam up, while whoever did that to my friend goes free.”

  “Wait, what?” I said. “Your friend?”

  Kincaid nodded.

  I stared at him in shock. “You’re trying to tell me that Grigori Rasputin was your friend?”

  “Yeah.”

  I studied Kincaid. There was no hint of a lie in either his voice or his expression. In fact, there was now something about him, something sad that tugged at me. “I think I need more information.”

  Kincaid shook his head and looked out the windshield. “As you’ve already figured out, I’m bound,” he began.

  “You’re a mystic,” I corrected.

  Kincaid’s expression darkened, as if he didn’t like the term, but he acknowledged it by giving a slight nod. “I’ve never been mentored,” he confessed. “Grigori had agreed to become my mentor.”

  His confession further stunned me. He didn’t look like a newbie. He looked like someone who’d been bound for a while. Don’t ask me how I can tell; it’s a subtle shift, a tingling in the atmosphere. Mystics who’ve been bound the longest give off a powerful energy. Elric, for example, could silence a room on the top floor of his headquarters just by entering the building. The man sitting next to me in the car gave off more power than any newbie should.

  “How long
have you been bound?” I asked.

  He considered me. It’s no secret among our kind that knowing how someone is bound is the ace in the deck to be used against them. The details of our bindings are the ultimate details we all work very hard to keep secret, because if someone knows the spell by which you’re bound, you can easily become their slave. In some ways, Tic was mine. And I’ve got a few others. No secret here; I’m always looking to add a few more. Creating a group—and ultimately, a small army—of allies is how we survive against each other. It’s how less-powerful mystics live in a world with the likes of Elric, Petra, and the rest of the Seven who make up the most powerful mystics on the planet.

  “I’ve been bound long enough to know not to share any of the details about it with you,” Kincaid said.

  Okay, so he wasn’t a newbie, and he hadn’t been mentored, but he’d clearly been made aware of how the game was played.

  In truth, I could see why he hadn’t been mentored. As a whole, we mystics are a pretty unscrupulous lot; we’re careful to avoid the notice of mortals so that we can continue to take advantage of them. A mystic cop, on the other hand, would live and work immersed in their world, and if he truly had a sense of justice—as this guy seemed to—then he’d be a dangerous man to have around. No way would your average mystic sign up to mentor someone like him.

  I turned up my palms to show him I’d meant no harm and no foul in the asking, even though we both knew I had. “Sorry,” I said. “You were saying that Grigori had agreed to mentor you, and you’ve clearly been bound for a while, so may I ask: Why now? Why didn’t you seek out a mentor earlier?”

  Kincaid turned his face away from me to stare out the windshield again. “Let’s just say it hasn’t been my choice to stay out of the mystic world. I’ve been kept out. I’ve tried to find a mentor for decades and couldn’t until Grigori agreed to take me under his wing.”

  That gave me pause. Only someone immensely powerful could command other mystics not to take on a protégé. Like I said, we’re all looking to gather underlings who can help us stay alive, and in this town, the only two mystics who could’ve given that kind of directive were Elric and Petra. I couldn’t imagine anyone crossing either of them if they’d been the ones to issue the order. It’d be a death sentence.

  And maybe it was.

  “Your kind—” Kincaid continued.

  “Our kind,” I corrected.

  He rolled his eyes. “That’s one I won’t give you, Esmé. I’m not a thief or a power-hungry mystic, but I am sick and tired of watching the likes of Elric and Petra use their powers against the people in this town for their own personal gain. The more powerful they get, the more mystics come here to ride their coattails, and they use whatever trinkets they’ve collected to swindle, steal, manipulate, and corrupt the regular citizens of this city that I call home. Somebody needs to stand up against that. And I can’t do it if I’m continually kept on the outside.”

  Goosebumps erupted along my arms. Kincaid didn’t understand how dangerous his little speech was. Talk like that was sure to get him killed. Hell, I could be killed for simply listening to it.

  “So, you’ve got a death wish,” I said.

  He adopted a crooked smile. “Maybe. Or maybe I’m the kind of newly mentored plebian that nobody’ll even notice until I cut off the head the snake.”

  “You’ll never get close enough to do that,” I warned. I held no real allegiance to Elric. He was a means to an end for me, but Kincaid was dangerously naive to assume he even had a chance against the likes of Elric or Petra.

  “We’ll see,” he insisted.

  I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t help it. This was a stupid conversation that was going to lead to somebody being made into dragon kibble.

  Probably me.

  Definitely Kincaid.

  “Detective, how much of a real threat to Elric and Petra could you be?” I scoffed. “You have unharnessed power that you have no idea how to use. You also appear to have been totally unsuccessful in teaching yourself how to use it for all of the time since you’ve been bound. Other than knowing the two biggest names in the mystic world, I’m guessing you know next to nothing, and now, you don’t even have anyone willing to mentor you.”

  Kincaid turned his head slowly back to me, and that crooked smile widened. “Don’t I?”

  He had to be kidding. “And here I was willing to believe you didn’t have a sense of humor.”

  “Do you feel like laughing?”

  “Nope. And something I feel even less like doing is mentoring you, Detective Kincaid-just-Kincaid.” There was no way in hell I was going to even consider mentoring a mystic cop. It’d be the end. Of my career. Of my life. You pick, because you’d be right both ways.

  “Well then, I guess today really ain’t your day, Esmé, because you either mentor me and help me solve Grigori’s murder or—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Nobody said anything about helping you solve a murder.”

  Kincaid tapped his chin. “Didn’t I mention that just now?”

  I shook my head in disbelief. This guy wasn’t just arrogant; he was fucking crazy. “I am so outta here,” I said, reaching for the door. Before I could even pull on the handle, I felt something metallic slap across my left wrist and then the sound of a sharp click.

  I didn’t even need to look over my shoulder to know that Kincaid had just put the cuffs on me.

  Again.

  The bastard.

  “Esmé Bellerose, you are under arrest for the murders of Grigori Rasputin, his girlfriend, Rachel McQueen, and Sara and Rob Murphy,” said bastard proclaimed.

  I turned my head to glare at him and yanked hard on the cuff, but Kincaid held tight.

  “You’re an asshole!” I spat.

  “The choice is yours,” he said calmly, reaching forward with his free hand to palm my left hand. As he grasped it, I felt our energies intertwine. “Mystic to mystic, you can either agree to mentor me and help solve this case, or I can book you on four counts of murder and two counts of B&E. I can also haul both Petra and Elric down here to interview them about why one of their employees was found at the scene of a murder with sticky connections leading back to them. I’m not sure which one you work for, but I know you’re employed by one of them.”

  My breath caught. Was he serious?! Hauling either of those two downtown for questioning would definitely end in disaster. It wasn’t just me who’d be fed to the dragons; it’d be the whole city block.

  Looking into Kincaid’s eyes, however, I could see that he was, in fact, serious. No fucking wonder he’d been left completely out of the mystic loop. It went beyond all logic that Grigori had even considered mentoring someone so obviously nutso. “You. Are. So. Stupid!” I yelled. “You don’t know anything about what you’re getting yourself into!”

  “True,” he said. “Which is why I need you.”

  I shook my head; no way was I going to help him. No. Way. And if he forced me to agree to help him, then I’d lie just to get out of the cuffs and disappear. If I didn’t want to be found, no way was Kincaid going to find me.

  But the detective seemed to read my mind because he squinted at me slightly before withdrawing my monocle. Holding it delicately between his thumb and index finger, he lifted it to eye level and asked, “What’s the code among thieves like you, Esmé? Finders keepers?”

  My blood boiled. I’d as soon kill him as allow him to keep that trinket, but something told me that getting rid of the stubborn lawman was going to be a whole lotta effort and a whole lotta time which, at present, I didn’t have. Even if I managed to disappear from Kincaid and Elric, without the monocle, I’d be dead in the water. No way could I return to thieving without it, and I doubted highly that I’d ever be able to find Grigori’s egg without it too. Plus, with the monocle out of my control, it would always represent a very real threat to Ember, and I simply couldn’t have that.

  So I sat back in the seat and turned my head away from the detective for a minute. I needed to t
hink of a way out of this mess. But I couldn’t come up with a single angle to try to get him to see reason. Well, other than the truth. “Listen,” I said. “You don’t get it, okay? If someone in my position were to agree to mentor someone like you in your position, it’d get me killed. My boss wouldn’t stand for it, and by that, I mean, he’d kill me without a moment’s hesitation.”

  Kincaid rolled his eyes. He wasn’t buying it. “I’m guessing by your use of pronoun that Elric is your boss.”

  Shit. I’d said that without thinking. Still, I didn’t confirm or deny it. “I’m serious, Kincaid.”

  “Me too. And when I look at you, this leggy, green-eyed beauty, who looks like she just walked off a photo shoot for Victoria’s Secret, I gotta believe that Elric Ostergaard—who’s never seen in this town without a solid ten on his arm—isn’t about to feed you to the dragons no matter who your friends are. Of course, if you’d hinted that you worked for Petra, then maybe I could’ve believed you.”

  My jaw dropped. He was so clueless it was shocking. “You have no idea what Elric’s capable of,” I said.

  “And you have no idea what I’m capable of, Esmé.”

  I turned my head away again because I couldn’t look at him and resist the urge to punch him in the face, and that wasn’t likely to get the cuffs off no matter how hard I hit him. Plus, he still had my monocle. And, he was also still holding tight to my hand, which meant that he obviously knew enough about mystics to understand that by doing so, he was intertwining our energies, which bound me to him until he let go.

  As long as he palmed my fist and intertwined our energies, I couldn’t say I’d mentor Kincaid and then not do it. The joining of our energies would activate the compulsive part of my personality, which would demand that I fulfill the obligation, and I’d be trapped by my own will.

  The flipside was to turn his offer down, get tossed into jail, and brace myself for the wrath of either Elric or Petra. Briefly I wondered who’d be worse, but then I considered that I might never live long enough to even know which one ultimately dealt with pesky, little me.