Besides which, I had zero desire to keep my abilities secret. I had a world of Nefesh mysteries to tackle.
White Rabbit Man smiled thinly. “I’m sure you can persuade Mr. Montefiore otherwise.”
Ignoring his implication, I noted that his shoulders were tense and his words clipped. He, or rather the Queen, wanted me specifically for some reason beyond the stated one. Normally, I’d have walked out the door at the very real possibility I was being used, but her knowledge of my blood magic hung over me like an executioner’s sword.
I cut a sideways glance at White Rabbit Man’s razor-sharp blade. Death wasn’t the worst fate. A betrayal that left you bleeding out on the sidewalk and never fully healed was far worse. Until I’d removed the Queen’s ability to blackmail or out me in a way not of my choosing, I was caught in this game.
I crouched down by the body.
A little knowledge was a dangerous thing. Especially in the hands of Her Highness. But everyone had secrets. She had mine, I’d get hers.
Meantime, I had a murder to solve.
Were Omar’s features not frozen in an expression of agony, he would have been a handsome man. He was probably around my age of twenty-eight, with deep, soulful brown eyes, dark curly hair, and aristocratic features–other than the bloated tongue lolling out of his mouth.
“What’s in this for the Queen?” I said.
“The wedding was supposed to occur in Hedon.”
“In the matchmaking business, is she?” A closer inspection revealed no gunshots or stab wounds.
“She is the Queen of Hearts.” White Rabbit Man stepped into the bedroom, his sword now magically gone, and smoothed out an edge of the area rug that had flipped up.
I examined Omar’s hands. His skin wasn’t scratched and his fingernails weren’t broken, both of which would have indicated he’d fought off his attacker. Either he couldn’t fight back or it was over too quickly for him to defend himself. “Could this be a veiled attack against the Queen? Why not strike in Hedon?”
White Rabbit Man laughed, then saw my puzzled expression. “Oh. You’re serious. No one wishes to run afoul of the Black Heart Rule.”
“Is that what you call the Queen’s guards?”
“No. The guards police Hedon as a whole, but the Black Heart Rule is specific to the Queen or anyone she has placed under her personal protection. Any attack on those individuals results in swift and dire consequences. It’s a very effective deterrent. While this attack wasn’t directed against Her Majesty, she wishes to maintain the good relationships that she’s developed with these people, and if there isn’t going to be a wedding, then it’s imperative to her to give the poor bride and groom’s families closure.”
I snicked a hand across my throat. “That kind of closure?”
White Rabbit Man remained poker-faced.
“Plausible deniability. Got it.” I checked for bloodstains but found none. “If you want me to prevent Levi from alerting authorities, Nefesh or Mundane, that’s a separate fee.”
“Keeping the police away is part of the job you’ve been hired by the Tannous family to do,” White Rabbit Man said.
It wasn’t his completely reasonable tone that made me nod in agreement so much as the dark flash of anger he couldn’t quite hide.
“Can’t blame a person for trying,” I muttered, and took a few more photos of the body from various angles.
From downstairs, Husani demanded to know what we’d found.
“Ah, the dulcet tones of the belligerent male,” White Rabbit Man said.
“Hope your pay grade makes it worth it.” I stuffed my phone in my back pocket.
“Not everything is about money, Ashira. Excuse me a moment while I parlay with Mr. Tannous.”
“You do that. Me and Omar will hang out here.” I shooed him away.
White Rabbit Man stepped into the corridor and shut the bedroom door behind him.
I moved around to the opposite side of the room to consider the crime scene from a different angle.
The two families had been staying together to get better acquainted in the run-up to the big day. Sometime around 4AM this morning, the crash of the skylight woke everyone up and they’d come running, guns and magic blazing. The angel, with robes and wings as white as a Hollywood cliché, had startled and flown the coop. I shook my head. If we were dealing with a real Angel of Death, everyone should have been obliterated.
Not that angels existed.
Our world ran on power. Mundanes hungered to wield it over Nefesh and Nefesh over each other. We lived in a reality where magic was out in the open, and if there were supernatural beings of the undead, shifting, or celestial variety, then at some point in the past few hundred years, they would have boldly stepped forward and declared themselves top of the food chain. As none had, I took it as pretty concrete fucking evidence that there weren’t any.
However, I was a professional. Sherlock Holmes was a man of many theories, but he started each case with a blank mind. I had a room full of witnesses claiming to see an Angel of Death. Therefore, I would methodically pursue that line until I could, without any hesitation, cross it off.
Think an angel would respond to a pair of wings projected like the Bat-Signal? I snickered and eyed the body. “Okay, buddy, give me something to work with.”
Having ruled out the other obvious means of death, poison was the most likely culprit. Gently, I turned Omar’s neck, looking for any needle prick indicating an administered toxin or a point of origin if it was magic-based.
His neck was stiff and his skin cold. There was no pulse, not that I’d expected there to be.
When I turned his neck the other way, the motion caused his tongue to shift, revealing a white tip at the back of his throat.
“What have we here?” I murmured, worming my fingers into the gap between his locked upper and lower jaws. The item was slippery and the angle wasn’t ideal. I tugged on it, but the damn thing was jammed fast down the poor guy’s throat.
The scent of a hot sandstorm teased my senses, a delicate sensation of arid nights and dread. One more firm pull and I found myself holding a white feather that was a good eight inches–in ruler length, not man measurements. An ancient magic raised the hairs on the back of my neck. No, that couldn’t be right. This feather felt like it had existed for millennia, like it was older than time. But magic, the kind of magic that we knew of at least, was barely four hundred years old, having been unleashed on the world in the 1600s.
These were facts. The feather was old. Magic itself was not. And yet, here I was, holding a giant fluffy contradiction, still pristine even though it had been jammed down Omar’s esophageal tract.
I forced my shoulders down from my ears and, setting the feather on the ground, moved Omar’s head to see if there was anything else in his mouth.
That’s when his eyes blinked open and a perfectly nice murder got a lot more complicated.
Chapter 2
I jerked back. “Fuck balls!”
Omar’s eyes bore into me with a terrified pleading look.
The feather had paralyzed him, entombed him in a death-like state, but with it out of his body, its hold had loosened enough to feel the magic that wrapped around and through him like a spiderweb on a fly. It rolled off him in waves and I didn’t have to get close to know that, left like this, that magic would slowly and painfully kill him.
My one-of-a-kind blood powers allowed me to strip away magic and destroy it. I could save Omar.
I could also stick my hand in a dark hole and hope it didn’t get bitten off. If this feather was a weapon, engaging with its magic might make me the next victim, and who would come to my aid? I wouldn’t even be the second Jew known for a resurrection. I’d just be–I looked down at Omar–that.
He’d upgraded from Mostly Dead to only Somewhat Dead, given the ongoing bloating, mottling, and corpse-like paralysis, and while this was an improvement, it would still put a major crimp in the wedding photos. Even if I took action, the jur
y was out on whether he’d make it back fully to the land of the living. His breathing was shallow and slow. He didn’t stand a chance without me, but saving him could cost me my life.
I was very fond of my life, such as it was.
Omar’s blinks might as well have been Morse code tapping out “help me.”
I put my hands on my hips and shook my head at the utter disaster before me. That’s it. I was changing my business name from Cohen Investigations to Clusterfucks ‘R’ Us.
“You’ll be pleased to know I’ve secured your crime scene,” White Rabbit Man said, striding into the room, “and the families downstairs agreed not to disturb–”
Omar made a strangled noise.
“Okhuyet!” White Rabbit Man swore, his sword now in hand.
I silently repeated the word a couple of times to commit it to memory, intending to find out what it meant and where it originated. That might give me a clue as to White Rabbit Man’s background, since nothing had shown up. People tended to show their linguistic origins under stress, large quantities of drugs or alcohol, or anesthetic. I’d use anything to get intel on the Queen.
“This thing–” I pointed at the feather, “has mad magic, so unless you want me to shove it back where I found it and finish Omar off for good, you’ll agree to my terms. Give me the vials.”
A recent case had involved finding out who was creating smudgy shadows killing members of the Nefesh community. The shadows were actually magic that had been ripped from their hosts–that I’d nicknamed third-party smudges–and, now dying, were desperately looking for a new body to stay alive. I’d destroyed the two rampaging through Vancouver, but had discovered a lab with fourteen other vials containing smudges intended for sale to the highest bidder.
Selling stoppered-up promises of magic was a hell of a con. There was no acquiring powers. They might skip a generation or two but you were either born with them or you weren’t.
Unless you were me.
Unfortunately, the Queen had taken possession of the vials and while she swore she wasn’t interested in selling them, those things had to be destroyed for good.
Part of me hoped White Rabbit Man would say that the smudges had already bit it.
The skin around his eyes pinched tight. “Agreed. As your fee for solving the case and healing Omar.”
My bank account wouldn’t benefit from this job but the world would. Ah, well. There might be a way to leverage this into a payout.
“Fail and your payment will take a very different form,” he added, tapping the flat of his blade.
“I respect your clarity and intensity.” I wasn’t in beheading range–yet–and I’d prefer White Rabbit Man not get twitchy and change that. “This is a delicate operation so could you leave or lose Excalibur’s sharper cousin there?”
He planted himself in the doorway with a stance that dynamite couldn’t shift.
Fuck it. I excelled under pressure.
Since I wasn’t trying to get at Omar’s inherent magic, as he was a Mundane and didn’t have any, I didn’t require his blood. I did, however, require mine. My magic stemmed from and was fueled by it.
I gripped Omar’s bare forearms. My powers swam to the surface of my palms in a silky red ribbon which I sent in through his skin.
Previously, when I’d come into contact with third-party smudges, there had been this horrible maggoty sensation that made my skin crawl because that magic was dying. This power was just as invasive but it was incredibly alive. It was like plunging my hands into stardust: the whole history of humankind written in a dancing supernova, a galaxy bursting in a rainbow of color that beckoned me in.
My body tingled and my eyes rolled back into my head. I exhaled, lost to the greatest exhilaration, a rush that packed the punch of a rocket blast. I glutted myself, the taste of the cosmos on my lips.
I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t want to.
Deeper and deeper, I fell into that magic, until I threatened to be lost to it entirely. What had been intoxicating became terrifying. Helpless against its onslaught, buffeted by the hot scent and gritty sensation of a sandstorm, I fought back hard, managing to tease the magic out of Omar.
It flowed out in a stream of golden motes and even as I battled it for my life, I craved another taste.
My blood powers morphed into a kaleidoscope of forked red branches, but they didn’t anchor this magic in place so that I could destroy it like I always did.
They snapped like the thinnest of twigs.
My mind screamed that I couldn’t do this, that I needed to get out of this now or else risk losing everything that I was to that all-consuming sandstorm. Giving in would be so easy. Except discord and danger peeked out from under that crooning lullaby, and my soul iced over.
I was a fighter. A survivor. I’d survive this, too.
Gritting my teeth and ignoring its lure, I redoubled my efforts, finding the shape of the magic strangling Omar. I gathered it close until I had trapped all that unimaginable power in my red magic branches. Thousands of white clusters bloomed along my thicket and ate the invasive magic up.
If I subscribed to the theory that magic was like a disease, then I was the ultimate white blood cell, fighting off these foreign invaders. It wasn’t even a stretch: these white clusters that ate up the magic moved like white blood cells did in all the science videos I’d seen.
It gave “blood magic” new meaning.
I blinked the world back into focus, spent, sweat-drenched, and half-sprawled over Omar, who had mercifully fainted but at least had a steady pulse. His skin was light brown now, with no sign of the purple and black mottling.
Happy as I was that he was all right, the other ninety-nine percent of my brain was obsessed with getting another hit of that feather’s magic. Even knowing down to my bones that this was a bad idea, my heart still sank when White Rabbit Man held it up to the light out of my reach.
“Gimme,” I croaked.
He snicked his deadly blade through the air, stopping barely shy of my throat. “It’s mine now.”
Huh? He couldn’t taste magic and holding the feather didn’t do squat.
I broke into a full-body spiky blood armor, tore his sword from his grip with my enhanced strength, and jumped him.
White Rabbit Man hit the ground on his back, the sword magically back in his hand. He stabbed at me, but it didn’t penetrate my armor.
I tossed the sword away and wrestled him for the feather. That got me nowhere so I kicked him in the balls. He twisted at the last second, mitigating most of the damage, and knocked me back into the dresser with a blast of electricity, his actual magic power.
The edge of the furniture smashed into the small of my back, but I barely registered the blow. This armor rocked. “Ha! What else you got, Bunny Boy?”
Balls of electricity shot forward like a baseball pitching machine set to high. My body armor crackled and sparked as I threw myself sideways.
Strikes peppered the wall above my head, leaving scorch marks. Cracked plaster drifted into my eyes and one of the creepy bird paintings hit the ground, tearing as it knocked free of the frame.
Rachel was going to kill us.
The damn sword once more appeared in his hand, the perfect accoutrement to the manic glint in his eyes.
Grabbing the closest thing at hand, I chucked a small bedside table at him, winging him in the shoulder.
White Rabbit Man dropped the feather.
We both dove for it. I dogpiled him and, employing some recently learned fighting tips, I aligned my first two knuckles to be the point of impact, taking care with my follow-through. There was a satisfying crunch of nose cartilage and the sword clattered to the floor.
Tears leaked down his face, courtesy of the nose being connected to the eyes via tear ducts, and inflicted a momentary loss of vision.
Taking advantage of his temporary disorientation, I hooked my magic into his. It tasted like that metallic bite in cool air before a rainstorm, but even though it was a wa
tered-down snack compared to the juicy richness of the ancient magic, I ached for it.
That was a bad idea for many reasons, including that ripping his magic away would break him and I refused to let my dark nature out unless it was a matter of life and death. Even then.
“Stand down or lose your powers.” I tugged gently on his magic. Gawd, it would slide free like butter and–No.
Luckily, White Rabbit Man took me at my word. He nodded and I rolled off him, the feather mine at last. As I scooped it up, I glimpsed myself in the mirror above the dresser, huddled over my prize. I wore the same desperate look as White Rabbit Man. Add in a “my precious” and I’d officially hit Gollum rock bottom.
If it meant tasting that feather’s magic directly from the source, pure and at full strength instead of the diluted version I’d sampled in Omar, I didn’t care how I looked. And that was enough to shock a sliver of sanity back into me. I unpried my fingers, shrugged out of my leather jacket, and wrapped the artifact up, but it required all my willpower not to suck the feather’s magic out of it like marrow from a bone.
Ever since I’d first tasted magic a couple weeks ago, the desire for more had lodged in my brain like a splinter. I could no longer deny the constant longing, a song stuck in my brain tuned to low.
Levi believed there was a way to stave off the cravings, as otherwise rumors of people taking magic would have surfaced over the years. I hoped he was right. If this hum grew to a deafening roar, I’d no longer be able to curb my desire through willpower and self-disgust.
Denied my fix now, I wanted to curl up into the fetal position until the muscle spasms and stomach cramps subsided. That wasn’t in the cards because White Rabbit Man was a predator; he’d sense weakness like a shark with blood in the water.
Speaking of blood… Chest heaving, I grabbed a sheet off the bed and tossed it over to White Rabbit Man so that he could stem the downpour from his nose.
Death & Desire: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Detective Series (The Jezebel Files Book 2) Page 2