The Truth About Night

by Amanda Arista

  “Twenty dollars to the person who called the fuzz.”

  Two of them might as well have raised their hands and shouted ‘I know who’ like goodie-two shoes in a third grade class. Their gazes jumped to the man at the back of the group while his gaze landed on the step before him.

  “I’m not a cop, and for every question you answer articulately, I’ll give you twenty bucks and I don’t even need your name.”

  The man looked up at me with his sallow eyes. A sizzle surged up my back. This is where I needed the Charm. I almost didn’t want to. I almost kept my eyes on my notebook so I couldn’t use magic on another person. How did this make me any different from the thing out there?

  But this was important. I needed to know the truth. We needed to catch who was doing this. This was for Ethan, and my Charm had never hurt anyone in the past, except me. No one else had gotten nosebleeds and headaches. And I would gladly pay that price to find the truth.

  What happened last night?

  The question was written in neon across my brain. The sizzle followed, that was the energy that Piper talked about. The lightning. The thing the fueled the magic covered me. Years of slipping into interrogation mode and it had been magic this whole time.

  Then I looked him in the eye. The man on the stoop was wired, twitchy, but he was open, ready. Once our gazes locked, it was like reaching out and slipping a key into a keyhole and turning it until it locked into place. We were good. He would tell me the truth as long as he was on the tether.

  I just needed to keep eye contact, keep my hand on the key, and ask the right questions. Right? Like I had on hundreds of people and just never took the time to fully realize my own truth because the one that I was seeking always seemed bigger, and, frankly, easier to answer.

  Now for the trigger.

  “Do you know the man you found in there?”

  His head tweaked to the left with every third word. “Name was Beakman. Used to run through here. Knew him by this necklace he used to always flash around.”

  “Used to? Where does he run now?”

  The man raked his nails along his upper arms. Even though it was nearly forty degrees outside, he wasn’t wearing a coat—none of them were. “Southside now. Was surprised to see him again.”

  “You think he came home to overdose?”

  “Nah, Beakman wasn’t a user.”

  “So this for sure was not a drug overdose?”

  The man could only shrug, though it looked more like a full body tremor.

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  One of the other men chimed in, probably to get in on the money being handed out. “At the Memorial Day thing, he came to see Shirley.”

  “Who’s Shirley?” I looked down to scratch out the name. There was the slightest of snaps when I disconnected with him, like breaking a spider’s web that left a feathery residual feeling at my temple. All this time, all these interviews, and it was like this was the first time, noticing things, experiencing it through the lens of magic.

  “Girl he used to go around with.”

  I scratched at my temple and pulled a curl behind my ear. “She still around here?”

  The original man shoved at the second shoulder. “No. She flew about two months ago. Haven’t seen her since.”

  I pointed with my pen toward the store front. “Why’d you bother calling the cops?”

  “Can’t have violence in our neighborhood like that. This is a family place.”

  I didn’t have any more questions they could help me with. I reached for my cash roll in my front pocket. I doled out the money and was about to leave when the third man finally spoke up.

  “Was the shadows that did it.”

  The Charm crawled back up my throat, and I stared down at the man. Our gazes locked. “What did you say?”

  “Like what happened a few weeks back. Devils from hell came to collect him.”

  He wasn’t lying. He couldn’t. My skin tightened into goosebumps despite my pea coat against the winter cold. Devils had come. And I was coming for them.

  The other three nearly pushed him off the stairs. “Don’t believe him, miss. He’s high as a kite.”

  I pulled another twenty out of my pocket and handed it to the man. “Thank you.”

  MacCallan met me halfway between the stoop and the store. He looked worn, sick to his stomach.

  “Magic?” I asked.

  “And more.”

  We didn’t speak until we got back to my car. He took the camera from around his neck and shoved it at me, then started pacing wildly in front of the car, running his fingers through his hair. “Same everything. Same look. Same position. It was the same spell.”

  He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and did a full body shiver.

  “Hey, calm down.” I reached out for him this time. I allowed myself to catch his arm as he paced in front of me. “Rafe, walk me through it.”

  He was on me in an instant. One moment, he was three feet away and a blink later, he was pressing me against the side of my car, his heat suffocating, his lips only an inch away.

  I fought the panic that jumped into my throat and clawed for air. He would never hurt me, but my heart pounded in my ears. I stayed still against the car, watching him, watching the riptide of emotions that crossed his fair features.

  I could feel it, his power, the wolf. The silky feeling of fur against my neck, my side, was rough, sizzling with energy, instead of sweeping across my skin. Was this what he was feeling? This electric bristle raking through him? No wonder he was freaking out.

  He’d just been where his brother was killed. Seen the blood stains on the floor. Felt the proof there was something darker involved in his death. He’d finally seen the proof that lived on the insides of my eyelids. I’d been so concerned with my fears and memories that I’d forgotten that he’d lost his only brother there too.

  His eyes fluttered closed and he inhaled deeply. His chest pressed against me as he slid his cheek against mine. For an eternity, everything warred within me. This type of intimacy was too soon, too sudden, but there was something in his being, in the way his muscles calmed, in his beating heart that I could feel pulsing around us, erratic at first, then gaining a steady rhythm. This wasn’t about bodies and breath; this was about something deeper, more intimate than that. That’s what kept me still, kept me from wracking my knee into his manhood and sending him across the sidewalk.

  He exhaled very slowly and pulled away from me, his hands pressed against the car, framing my shoulders. His blue eyes finally drew up and met mine. The feeling of bristles was replaced by the silky caress of his power as it retreated to wherever it went.

  Dark circles still resided under his blue eyes, but the panic was gone.

  I spoke slowly. “What the hell was that?”

  He shivered around me once again, like a dog shaking off the last bit of water from a rain shower. He dropped his arms and took a step away.

  I diverted my gaze down the street as I sucked in a deep, cold lungful of the night air. It wasn’t that a deeply powerful werewolf had invaded my personal space, but that it had also been far too long since I’d been that close to a man who wanted to be that close to me.

  He leaned against the car. I could still smell him, but I wasn’t sure if it was his proximity or a residual scent left on my coat. Either way, I didn’t mind it.

  He started slowly and I listened as I had never listened before. “In the apartment, I didn’t feel anything but a flutter, but in there …” He only briefly flicked his eyes up to the store and then they were quickly back to his loafers. “It’s bad in there. It’s not the smell, it’s the sense of the place. Something evil was done there.”

  “Something evil was done in there.”

  I pressed my lips together to keep from asking what else would rub a wolf the wrong way, but when I saw the creases around his eyes, the furrow in his brow, I knew that metaphysically, not much could. I sighed. “What does that evil have to do
with …” I didn’t have a word for what had happened between us. Nothing seemed as intimate as it felt despite the surprise nature of it.

  He looked up at me. “You are a pond of calm in the middle of all this chaos. I needed to focus on one thing, away from everything, away from what I felt and saw in there. I’m sorry if I scared you.”

  I didn’t know how I could be compared to anything calm. I was usually the cause of the chaos, not the eye of the storm.

  I shook my head and the truth tumbled out, “I imagined you experienced the world differently, but I didn’t realize just how much. I didn’t think about taking you to the place he died. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t know how Ethan dealt with this every day.”

  This was one body in one crime scene. Ethan and I had seen murder-suicides, gang shootings, every piece of evil under the sun and I had never seen him falter. “We did everything together.”

  Rafe looked at me like he had something to say. I knew that I could try again to compel it out of him, get the truth behind those troubled blue eyes, but I didn’t want to. He didn’t need the stress after this evening and, deep down, I wasn’t prepared for the answers he might give.

  I opened the car door and pulled out the memory card from the camera before I tossed it in the front seat, slipping the small data card into the breast pocket of my coat. “I’m going back to the office to find out more information about our new victim, so I can turn in a story this week. You’ve got a spell to research”

  I’d gotten home only twenty minutes before Rafe called to tell me that he was done with classes for the day. When he mentioned we could cover more ground looking for the spell together, I had volunteered my place. What I left out was that I didn’t do tidy, I barely had any furniture, and I wasn’t sure I even had a mug that didn’t reek of whiskey. I was seriously second-guessing my brilliant idea to research at my place.

  I opened the door. “I have to warn you, I didn’t have time to clean.”

  Rafe balanced a stack of books so high I could barely see his eyes.

  “Did you bring your entire library with you?”

  “No. Only what I could find with a reference to spell or theoretical magic.”

  He followed me into the living room/kitchen area. He set the books on the table and I didn’t need any special charm to tell me that he was slightly surprised by the state of the place.

  It made me take a brief glance around. It wasn’t that bad. It just like maybe a college kid lived here with really bad eating habits and no real eye for décor. I had the basics: a desk, table, couch, and chair. My interior designer mother would hate it. I could hear all of her suggestions already in my head, which was why I had never invited her to visit.

  At least he looked impressed by the bookcases. What I lacked in an eye for design I made up for in books. Tons and tons of books. All the classics, all the New York Times best sellers. Most unread, of course, but a girl could dream. Wasn’t my fault that I’d worked an eighty-hour workweek since the day I graduated college.

  Rafe pulled out a few more volumes from his messenger bag. It was so very professorial of him.

  “I have a special one for you.” He pulled one last book from the inside of his jacket. “It’s rare, so you can’t keep it, but I thought you might like to see it.”

  I took the red leather-bound book in my hands. It smelled like rawhide and sandalwood, like Rafe. “What is it?”

  “It’s an Idiot’s Guide to Being a Wanderer.”

  My heart skipped a beat, and I experienced the missed rhythm in the base of my throat. I could barely get the question out through my locked jaw. “What?”

  “It should be a useful guide into the world before you start researching magic. It’s got a really good index in it. Pretty much covers the different breeds of Wanderers and their general characteristics and weaknesses.” He pressed his lips together before he spoke again. “It might help you understand my world a little more.”

  I nodded and held the book to my chest. It was still warm from being tucked away in his winter coat. I took a moment to let the warmth sit against me while he unpacked his books and put them into some sort of order I couldn’t begin to understand.

  “Right, we’ve got enough to keep us reading for the rest of the night. Should I put a kettle on?”

  I snorted. “If you can find one.”

  I looked down at the red book with the red leather cover. The fancy emblem winked up at me. He’d said “my world,” but my life was in this book too. It seemed fitting somehow that it would be as I surveyed my sparse apartment covered in books. It could confirm what I’d been feeling, experiencing, dealing with, and as a journalist, I still really liked to have hard evidence.

  I flipped to the first chapter. The scent on the pages was something I hadn’t smelled in years—the smell of my favorite library book.

  Chapter One: Genesis

  When the world was first created, magic was in everyone and everything. The creative energy, The Mother, made beings and creatures that walked on two legs and ran on four. The magics flowed through the Wanderers who were so in touch with their mother earth, there was nothing to stop them from becoming part of nature in the form of a wolf or dancing with the wind. Each possessed a special skill that helped their fellow Wanderer or served the Mother in some way. They spoke the language of the earth and were able to converse with all manner of creation. They lived so peacefully with nature that they needed no home and were free to wander the path the earth set out for them.

  When the world was no longer new, creatures called humans began to live among those who wandered among the world. They were small and frail and couldn’t weave water or talk to trees, but they were passionate and artistic and resourceful. To make shelter, humans used trees to protect themselves from the elements. To feed and shod their children, they fashioned weapons to hunt animals. To drink, they damned rivers and created havoc on the precious balance of the earth.

  As the humans settled into places across the earth, the Wanderers became divided. Seeing how humans were threatening the land the Wanderers were so vitally connected with, some believed humans needed to be stopped, controlled, and still some believed that only total annihilation would save their earth. Others saw humans as creatures of the Mother to live in harmony with, to learn from, to teach.

  Blah. Blah. Blah. There had to be a Table of Contents in this thing. I flipped back a few pages. And yep. Table of Contents. I ran my finger down the list of terms. Avion. Cause, The. Demons. Elementals. Fey. Grifters. Guardians. Order, The. Seer. Shifters.

  But what about me? None of the terms in the table of contents said anything about truth or psychic powers or anything useful. What I could do didn’t really help a fellow Wanderer or serve the Mother in any way that I could think of.

  Rafe distracted me from my book with a coffee.

  I stared at the steaming mug before me in disbelief. Is there was such a thing as kitchen magic? “I’m not really used to such service.”

  “Ever think about that?” he asked as he walked back over to his spot at the opposite end.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. Then I took a sip. It was perfect. My mind raced trying to figure out why. At the theater, he’d already had two creamers and two sugars waiting for me there too. That first night at Sam’s. I’d had coffee then. Why would he remember that from so long ago?

  “Nothing,” he said taking off his jacket, rolling up his sleeves. He slid a huge volume off a tall stack and it made a loud thud as it jostled the table.

  “Avoiding conflict. Is that a British thing?” I asked as I started turning through the chapters of a red leather Wandering book.

  “More of a self-preservation thing.” He flipped through a few pages and scanned the text.

  “From what Piper says, you shouldn’t have a problem defending yourself.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Good. Ethan always said I didn’t have it in me to play safe.”

  “I
appreciate the warning, but you don’t have to be nosy.”

  “You’re the one with the great sense of smell.”

  He looked up from his books, and even at this safe distance, I could see the twinkle in his eye. “Good one, Miss Lanard. Would you happen to have any white paint?

  “Why?” I asked as I got up and walked over to the table.

  “If we are going to bed down here, I want it to be protected.” He pointed to a scribbly looking circle thing on the worn page. “I want to put up a protection sigil above your doors and windows.”

  I lifted myself on my seat to see the pages from my side of the table. “And you think a hieroglyph is going to do that?”

  He only grinned. “These are not hieroglyphs. This is Old Speak magic.”

  I gaffed. “You are not doing a spell in my house.”

  “We need to make sure this place is safe, in case whoever’s behind this wants to finish the job they started that night.”

  I gulped and held my arm to my stomach.

  “I could carve this into your walls, but landlords tend to frown on that.”

  “Why do you assume I rent?” I sighed. “Let me see. I think I might have something up in my closet.”

  I dug around in my closet and had to move the trunk of my dad’s journals to find paint supplies I’d bought with the last boyfriend when we’d thought about renovating the place, but only found the supplies. Neither the boyfriend nor the idea had lasted long enough to apparently decide on a paint color.

  But I still had my dad’s journals. The dad who was apparently magical enough to pass it down to his daughter and leave her with a mind full of questions, a head full of thunderstorms.

  I cracked open the leather travel case and there they were; the journals that my father wrote in every day of his life. They were story notebooks I had just barely saved when my mother was throwing away everything that reminded her of him. I’d dragged them from home to college and then up the stairs and here they sat. As I stared at them, it dawned on me that they too could possible hold the answers about who I was.