[Twenty-Sided Sorceress 01.0] Justice Calling

by Annie Bellet

  They both break the heart of every woman they meet, pretty much. Not just because they are handsome, smart, and awesome, but because Levi is happily married to a crazy hippie artist and owl shifter named Junebug and Ezee is as gay as Neil Patrick Harris.

  “Someone killed Mom,” Harper blurted out.

  “Frakking-A,” Ezee said. “That why there’s a Justice here?”

  Trust Ezee to have noticed the tall, hot guy and taken in the feather talisman in a glance.

  “What?” Levi said. “Oh, hello.” He tipped his head to Alek.

  Alek nodded back, finally seeming at a loss for words in the face of the twins. I was certain he’d start interrogating them soon enough, however.

  “Where’s Rose? What happened?” Levi asked.

  “Behind you,” I said softly.

  A lot more curse words came from the twins as they looked Rose’s dead body over.

  “I don’t see a wound,” Ezee said finally.

  “We should get an autopsy. That’s what they do on TV.” Harper pulled the sweater tight around herself and stood up.

  “Is your medical examiner shifter also?” Alek asked.

  “No,” Levi said. “He’s with County. We aren’t big enough to have our own.” Levi also was a volunteer firefighter. That kind of multitasking happens when you live as long as shifters do and in a small town like Wylde.

  I ran my hands over Rose’s body, swallowing bile as nausea wormed through me. I was manhandling one of my favorite people in the world. My eyes felt too tight and hot in their sockets and I realized I was about to cry. Shit. I never cry. Not in a couple decades. Not anymore.

  I don’t know much about taxidermy, but I figured there would be seams, staples, something. I felt nothing but her fur, its longer russet hairs rough and the lighter undercoat thick and soft on my fingers. I looked into her creepily realistic glass eyes and wished I could ask her what the hell she’d been doing in fox form and how she’d gotten caught. It was possible whoever had done this had no idea he’d killed and stuffed a person.

  Which didn’t make my desire to hunt him down and stuff him any less rage-filled and immediate.

  “Vivian Lake can do it,” I said. “She’s the local vet. Wolf shifter,” I added, seeing the look on Alek’s face. I took a deep breath as I stepped away from Rose.

  Time to put on my Game Master face and get shit done.

  “Levi, call Steve. Tell him no game tonight, family emergency. Ezee, you take Harper up to my place.” I pulled out my keys and tossed them to him. Harper looked as though she’d protest for a moment but then leaned into Ezee with another sob.

  “Thank you, Jade,” she whispered. “I don’t think I can, I mean…” she trailed off.

  “I know. It’s okay. We’ll figure this out. You have a car?” I said, turning back to Alek.

  Ciaran came down the back stairs from his own apartment with a blanket, holding it out. I gave him a half-smile of thanks, glad he’d foreseen that we would want something to carry her in.

  Before I could, Alek took the blanket and wrapped Rose up with a gentle carefulness that surprised me. As presumptuous as he was, I was kind of glad I didn’t have to touch her again. He looked at me, apparently waiting for me to lead the way out. Another surprise. Maybe he wasn’t always a macho asshole. Or maybe he just wanted to keep me in front of him so he could keep an eye on me. I shoved away those thoughts.

  “Okay, Justice, since I’m betting you’ll want to be there, let’s go see Dr. Lake.”

  Alek didn’t let me drive his truck. Guess the surprises had run out. It wasn’t what Harper and I would joke was a “compensating for it” truck, but a good-sized Ford with scratches and dents and a little dirt around the edges that let you know this guy used his truck for things, not just for driving around. The interior smelled of wet grass, damp earth, and a vanilla-laced musk that I was pretty sure came from Alek himself.

  My whole body, all my senses, was aware of the huge, handsome man only inches away from me. Not a thing that boded well. The last time I’d been this instantly attracted to someone, he’d tried to fatten me up with magic, Hansel and Gretel style, and then eat my heart. I inched my ass as close to the door as possible, putting a bit more gap between us on the bench seat.

  The drive to Dr. Lake’s should have taken about five minutes, but we hit the single stop light on Main and it was red. An old woman, someone I didn’t recognize—which meant she was not a nerd and probably part of the human half of Wylde—inched her way across the crosswalk.

  “Where are you staying?” I asked, more out of a need to fill the silence and not think about what was inside the hand-sewn quilt on my lap. There were two tiny motels in town, mostly catering to the college for visiting family, and the summer tourists.

  “I have a house trailer,” he said. “It’s at the Mikhail and Sons RV Park, you know it?”

  Of course I knew it. Mikhail and his two sons were bear shifters. Vasili, the younger son, had a thing for Magic the Gathering cards. His purchases paid my building rent every time a new expansion came out. They were good people. I could just imagine how they’d bent over backward to accommodate a Justice. I bet they hadn’t charged him. I wasn’t going to ask that aloud. I was more curious about this whole vision thing of his.

  “So how’s that Justice thing work? Do you just get visions and know where to show up? And why didn’t you see Rose in danger?” I hadn’t meant that last part to sound so accusatory, but fuck it. What’s the point of a supernatural system of law if they can’t help people before someone gets killed?

  “Is like a compass,” he said, turning his head to look at me. His eyes were no longer ice chips but deep pools, and there was something sad in his gaze. “I know where to go; I know that I will be needed. The visions are what the Nine know, what they share with me in my dreams. I only know what they know. Is not my power, but theirs.”

  I noticed his accent got stronger, and wondered if I’d upset him. It was hard to tell since his chiseled face gave away little.

  “From what Harper has told me, the Nine are like gods. Can’t they do a little better than vague visions?”

  “They are not gods,” Alek said. “And there is much in the world we cannot control.” His tone and the sudden tightness in his jaw and shoulders warned me this was a dangerous subject.

  “Hey, green light,” I said, too brightly. The car behind us, clearly someone important and in a hurry, honked.

  We rode the last couple minutes in silence. I wanted to ask him more about the vision of me, about me being somehow the crossroads between people living and dying. He seemed to think that meant I was killing people, but the most likely explanation was a lot scarier than that. If Samir, my ex, had found me, everyone I knew was in danger. Maybe his vision had nothing to do with whoever had killed Rose.

  I took a deep breath and hugged the bundle, my eyes hot again with unshed tears.

  “Left, into that parking lot,” I said, pointing to Dr. Lake’s practice. It was in a Victorian-style house—like a lot of us business owners in Wylde, Dr. Lake lived on the floor above her practice.

  Alek came around and opened my door, taking Rose from me. I led the way into the office. Christie, a young wolf shifter who does reception for Dr. Lake, was the only one inside and I sighed with relief.

  “Hey Christie, the doc in?” I asked.

  “Yeah, she’s doing paperwork,” Christie said, eyeing the large bundle Alek carried. Or perhaps she was just eyeing Alek.

  “Get her, and tell her we’ll be in the surgery room. Then you might want to close early. Just trust me, okay?” I really didn’t want to show the body to Christie. She was barely out of her teens.

  “Uh, okay.” She didn’t like it, but she got up and ran down the hall to Dr. Lake’s office.

  I led the way to the surgery room. The smell of alcohol tinged with an undertone of old blood make my skin goosebump. I knew the vet pretty well, since Harper was always rescuing hurt animals a sideswipe away
from roadkill and begging me to take them to the vet for her. She couldn’t stomach the times there was nothing to be done but easing the little critters into death, so I got the fun task of hearing Dr. Lake say there was nothing to do but help them cross over.

  Dr. Lake came in directly after us. She was a tiny wolf shifter, short enough she would have legally needed a booster seat in the state of California, with a wiry, compact energy about her. She halted and tipped her chin up, her nostrils flaring as she sniffed the air. If I didn’t hang out with shifters practically twenty-four-seven, it would have been creepy, but you get used to shifters sniffing people to recognize them or learn their mood or whatever.

  “Another of Harper’s creatures?” she asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said. I took the bundle from Alek and set Rose on the stainless steel table, unfolding the blanket.

  “That animal is dead,” Dr. Lake said. “And has been stuffed. There’s nothing I can do here.”

  “It’s Rose Macnulty,” I said softly. “We need to figure out how she died.”

  Dr. Lake’s eyes widened and she took a half-step back, looking from Rose to me and finally to Alek. “Ah, Justice. This is a Council issue?”

  “Shifter getting murdered is always a Council issue.”

  “Can you do an autopsy?” I asked. It wasn’t really a question, since I bet she’d do whatever the big old Justice here told her to do, but no reason to ruffle more fur than Alek already was just by being himself.

  Dr. Lake stepped up to the table and ran her hands expertly over Rose’s body. She peeled back the fox’s lips, felt along her belly, examined her paws. With a grunt she nodded.

  “I have no idea how they did it, but I’ll open her and see if I can find out from the inside. No seams, no bullet wounds. It’s an expert job.” She shook her head. “Let me glove up. Get her on the table proper; no point getting that quilt icky.”

  I lifted Rose up so Alek could pull the blanket out. Nausea swept through me again, along with an electric tingle along my skin.

  And I knew, with lightning clarity, where I’d felt that before.

  It wasn’t just revulsion at the body, I was touching foreign magic. There are lots of kinds of magic and lots of ways to draw power. I drew my power from myself, from something like a well inside of myself. It’s unique to me. Any other kind of power—be it from a witch’s ritual drawing on ley lines or natural forces, or another sorcerer—feels alien and weird to me. I can’t use it or understand it, only sense it. Like being a native English speaker and finding all the books in your house suddenly written in Chinese. You know it says something, but the hell if you could tell anyone what that was.

  “Wait,” I said. I closed my eyes, reaching for a thread of my own power. I gritted my teeth and ran my hands along Rose’s side. The wrongness resolved into a more solid impression. Black lines, dark on dark behind my eyelids, wrapped all around her body just beneath the skin before terminating in a complex knot in her chest.

  And below that, the faint bump-bump of a heartbeat.

  “Shit,” I said, stumbling backward. “Don’t cut. She’s not dead. She’s got a heartbeat.”

  “What?” Alek and Dr. Lake asked at the same time.

  “It’s magic. She’s not dead. She’s frozen somehow. Like stasis.” I shivered. Dead might have been better. I couldn’t imagine being frozen, unable to move or speak. Cut off from my human form.

  “Can you do something about it?” Alek asked me. I didn’t like the speculative way he was looking at me.

  “No,” I said. The truth, more or less. “This is way above my pay grade,” which was kind of a lie, but I hoped not enough of one that his apparent lie-detection abilities would notice. “It’s not a kind of magic I can use. Whoever cast the spell has to undo it. If that’s even possible.” All that was the truth. Great universe, I hoped it was possible. If it wasn’t, Rose would be trapped like this until the spell degraded enough to stop keeping her alive—and that could be years or even centuries, depending on how exactly this magic worked.

  “So I find who did this and make them undo it before I kill them. Good.” Alek turned toward the door.

  “Hold up there, Rambo. I need a ride back to my store.” Not that I was looking forward to telling Harper what we’d found. I didn’t know if not-quite-dead was worse. We had no answers, just more questions.

  “I will keep Rose here, if you want, and see if I can figure out a way to monitor her vitals,” Dr. Lake said, talking to Alek as much as to me. “If anything changes, I’ll call you, Jade.”

  The light stayed green on the way back through town and this time we didn’t talk at all.

  Ezee, Levi, and Harper were waiting for us in my apartment over the store. I led Alek up the back steps. Three red-eyed faces greeted us as we came into my small living room. The apartment is a long, narrow one-bedroom unit, with a single bathroom. The living area is dominated by my purple velvet couch and a fifty-five-inch LED TV with about every console you can name set up under it. I mostly use my Xbox360, but some days nothing will do but to kill my thumbs playing Armada on my Sega Dreamcast.

  A girl needs options. To me, video games are like shoes. But with more pixels and a plot.

  Ezee and Levi had Harper, still bundled in Ciaran’s red sweater, between them. As we came in, they each took one of her hands and turned their faces to us, expectant.

  “So,” I said with a weak smile. “You want the good news or the bad news?”

  “Mom’s dead. There is no good news. Unless on the way to the vet you ran over the guy responsible.” Harper glared at me, her green eyes puffy and glittering with tears.

  “Actually, she isn’t dead. That’s the good news. And kind of the bad news, too.” I grimaced. That hadn’t come out in the sympathetic, gentle way I’d rehearsed in my head.

  “She’s not dead? But I saw her. She was… how?” I could almost see the hope like will-o-the-wisp lights turning on in Harper’s eyes. I just prayed it wasn’t a false hope I was giving her. How much worse would this get if Alek couldn’t find the magic user who did this and make him or her undo it?

  “Magic,” I said. “She’s under some kind of spell holding her in her animal form and keeping her frozen like that.”

  “Why the hell would someone do that?” Levi said.

  “Good fucking question.” I shook my head and looked at Alek. He had come to loom beside me, standing too damn close for my comfort, but I wasn’t about to inch away. It would have looked pretty obvious.

  “I will ask when I find him,” Alek said with a tiny smile that made me think about screaming rabbits and blood spraying on white walls. Not a nice smile, really.

  “I don’t care why,” Harper yelled. “Just find him and make him undo it.”

  Ciaran knocked at the back door before entering the tense, now-quiet room. He was out of breath and excited. “I have the paperwork. Here.” He held out a manila folder.

  I took it and spread it open on the narrow black coffee table after clearing away the remotes and controllers. The photocopy of the ID said the guy who sold Rose was named Caleb Greer, age thirty-two, with an address in Boise, Idaho. Brown hair, brown eyes, five-foot-eight, one hundred and fifty pounds.

  “He was thinner than that photo. If his ID hadn’t put him at over thirty, I would have thought he was a college student,” Ciaran said.

  “He probably is,” Ezee said. He leaned forward, looking at the paperwork upside-down. “I mean, how likely is it that some middle-aged dude from Boise drove all the way out here to sell a stuffed fox? It’s more likely a fake or stolen ID.”

  “I have his signature on the sale, and his fingerprints, there, see? I do everything above board,” Ciaran said. He folded his arms and pressed his lips into a line, muttering in Irish about idiot dogs.

  “So, what, we just go start knocking on dorm room doors until Ciaran recognizes someone?” Levi asked.

  “If that’s what it takes,” Harper said. The hope in her eyes had turned in
to anger.

  I resisted making a comment about anger leading to hate and hate leading to the dark side, but the tension and level of predatory desire to kill was pretty palpable in the room. While it made a lot of sense in a “someone did something awful to someone I love” way, unleashing the hounds, so to speak, on the mostly normals population of Juniper College seemed like a pretty bad plan in actuality. For all we knew, some kid had found the be-spelled Rose on the side of the road with a “free” sign on her and figured they could score a little extra cash.

  “There’s a better way,” I said, mentally kicking myself even as my mouth kept moving. I shouldn’t do magic. I shouldn’t get involved. I felt like Sarah in Labyrinth when she falls down into the chute full of hands and chooses to keep going down. Too late now.

  “I can do a spell,” I continued. “There’s enough with the signature and fingerprint that I can probably design a tracking thingy. If he or she is within twenty miles, it’ll point right at them.” There, that was more or less the truth. I carefully didn’t look at Alek, though I could feel him looking intently at me. He didn’t trust me anyway, so fuck him.

  Hmm. Fucking Alek.

  My brain hung up on that idea for a moment and I had to ask Harper to repeat herself once I realized she’d asked me something.

  “What do you need?”

  Technically, I didn’t need anything. But I wasn’t about to go along. This was clearly Justice business. If the kid was involved, nothing I could do would stop the death sentence on his head for messing with shifters. Justices were judge, jury, and executioners. In most of the world outside the shifter-dense population of Wylde, shifters hid, maintaining a careful line between themselves and normals. Anyone stepping over the line risked humans finding out about the things that go bump in the night on a larger scale, and nobody wanted that. The Inquisition? The Nazis? Not just about persecuting humans. A lot of shifters, warlocks, and witches had gotten caught up in human madness over the centuries.