“This was the rough news you got?” He wasn’t being diverted by dead bodies. “That you were one of us?”
I watched my words carefully. “I don’t know the truth of it all yet, so I didn’t want to distract us from the real story, from finding the killers.”
With a deep exhale, he stepped away from me and raked his fingers through his hair. “I’ll meet you later.”
I grew colder at his distance. “What? Where are you going?”
He took the camera from around his neck and handed it back to me. “I need to go.”
“No, you need to stay and help me figure out what happened here.”
His expression turned to slate, flat and unreadable. I grew even colder as all of his energy disappeared from the air between us. Had he just put his “shield” up, because I couldn’t feel anything from him.
“I can’t right now, Merci.”
“But Piper said we’re supposed to travel in pairs.”
Even the edict from his Den Mother didn’t help and I watched him walk away, disappearing behind the building. I knew he would be fine. He was powerful enough to be the leader of a pack. Maybe that was why I felt so cold now. He didn’t need me.
I needed him, and now I was really alone in this. The camera became a stone in my hand. I’d spent the past two weeks trying to figure out why Ethan would keep all of this from me, and here I was, keeping it from Rafe.
The Mother had given me one face and I made myself another.
Why couldn’t I just tell him? I wasn’t under Pack Law, no prime directive. Ethan had been. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t be honest with the one person who had always been honest with me? Maybe because I didn’t want to deal with the truth of it myself.
I huffed. I hated when I went to a place and got more questions out of the deal than answers. I couldn’t knock him for feeling betrayed. But I could be just a little pissed that he was putting his own feelings above the story, above the truth. I had dead bodies to deal with and promises to keep.
If only I had a flashlight in this massive bag of mine. But I did have another light source. Ethan had used the flash as a light plenty of times. Not just to test the exposure, but just to light up cars or windows to see in.
I dug into my bag to get the accessories for the large camera. There was something else that Ethan used to do with his flash. Ethan took pictures of everything with different filters. He used to change them out constantly, like shuffling a deck of cards in his long fingers. I never really thought about it, but what if one of them was responsible for capturing me with the red halo? And what if that red halo had been the proof that I was a Wanderer?
Could Ethan have figured out how to capture magic? Is that how he knew? Since apparently even a powerful Primo hadn’t caught on until he was all up in my energy and enhancing me—something Ethan had certainly never done.
I ground my teeth and dropped my bag to the concrete as I put the first filter over the lens. I wasn’t the expert that Ethan had been, but I snapped a few pictures of the cold corner. I did one circle of the whole room, then changed filters. Ethan’s old camera didn’t have the best view screen but the pictures looked similar to what I saw with my naked eyes.
I put the camera to my eye again, focused, and snapped a few more photos of the corner then did another spin around the room. I traded out the filter, trying to keep them in order inside the accessories pouch. I did three turns around the room and was getting a little dizzy.
A glass bottle rolled across the cement floor and the noise of it echoed through the wide space. I paused and listened. There wasn’t any wind coming in from the busted garage door that Rafe and I had come through. Very little trash in the space, despite being abandoned.
In my former life, I would have said it was probably a cat getting out of the cold air, but this was my PM life, post-magic life, and there were so many more things that went bump in the night. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure I wanted to risk investigating. I was, after all, taking pictures with a potentially magical camera lens to capture an image of some sort of spell work.
I finished my circle with the second to the last filter. A door slammed shut and the light in the space grew dim as clouds passed overhead.
I paused. “Hello?”
Perhaps it wasn’t abandoned after all. Or perhaps the same person, or persons, who had mastered a spell large enough to crack a gas main were coming back to make sure no one was hanging around.
And that was that. I was done. I shoved the camera back into my bag and headed as fast as I could toward the bright light of morning.
I passed by the crowds still watching the building burn, like it was better than cable television. The gas company had a few trucks out there now. I noted the time for my story. I had to put something down on the page. Not all of it could be creative nonfiction.
Now off the office to write a fabricated story about a gas explosion and get these pictures downloaded. Then to find out who owned that warehouse.
And all of it without a lingering thought to Rafe’s scent, which still clung to my wool coat.
I’d gone back to the office to write up my fictitious story about the gas explosion and study the Bible-thick batch of blueprints that Greta in City Planning had printed out about the warehouse and the building adjacent. She’d handed me the stack under a bathroom stall in City Hall.
“This spy stuff is exciting, Merci,” she’d whispered.
“I don’t want you getting to use to it. Keep safe and I’ll stop by next month.”
“May Saint Francis watch over you.”
I didn’t know if St. Francis would have anything to do with me. But I did have St. Greta of City Planning and St. Fred of Water and Power and St. Sheila of County Records and I was thankful for those intersessions today.
For those intersessions had brought me a name: Cartwright Constructions. The name was like a punch to the gut. It was CEO of Cartwright Constructions, Jeffrey Cartwright, who had been bribing the mayor and was currently under investigation for a dozen other laws broken. It was the story that I should have been working on. Instead I was chasing something darker, deeper because Cartwright owned the building that was now the site of a spell massive enough to crack gas lines and nearly take out a city block. The company owned a lot of buildings all over the city, which struck me as off; the construction district was in a pretty central place, though the addresses were scattered all over.
Filing this new information into my head, I moved on to the next order of business: the camera. Leaning over my desk, I flipped on my computer, and just as I slipped the card into the card reader on my desk, Hayne’s voice echoed out across the floor. “Lanard, get in here.”
My jaw clenched. I didn’t do a single thing wrong this time. I was sure of it. I dragged my feet like a scolded child into his office. “I was about to start working on the gas explosion this morning. What do you want?”
Hayne just snorted. “Sit.”
I took the hot seat. “I really am trying to write up that gas explosion story.”
Hayne sat in his chair behind his desk. “How are you coming with the dead bodies case?” he asked, leaning over his desk and clasping his hands.
“Pretty well, actually. Found a pattern in the killing but can’t link the victims yet.”
“They are killings now?”
I’d said too much. There was still no way that I could actually tell Hayne the whole truth, so I avoided it all together. “Why do you ask?”
“Got a call from upper brass to stop you from investigating further. Said you had contaminated a crime scene?”
I scoffed. “Well, we both know what that means.”
Hayne nodded. I knew the drill. When he got a call from the commissioner’s office, then I was onto something. It usually meant I would hit it harder, keep poking the bear, and everything would roar to light.
“Let’s get the gas explosion story out there.”
“Aye, Aye, Captain.”
/> Hayne waved me out of his office.
I quietly shut the door and the entire newsroom turned to look at me. It was probably the first time I hadn’t slammed the door shut.
I grabbed a terrible cup of coffee from the break room and sat down to write the pretty straightforward gas explosion story that the nice lady on the step of her porch told me.
Once submitted, I wrote down the truth in my notebook, put a big, fat red square around it as fact, and shoved it down into my messenger bag.
Now, it was time to get back to the real investigation. I opened the files from the camera’s memory card and started to scroll through them on my massive monitor. Warehouse, warehouse, warehouse, window, warehouse. Then the lighting changed and it was warehouse, warehouse, warehouse, warehouse, window, warehouse. Then the lighting changed again. And it was warehouse, warehouse, warehouse, window, warehouse. And then it was a horror movie on my screen come to life.
Two images were open next to one another on the screen. One was normal picture of the warehouse in the bright light of early morning, and the other was like someone had flipped the exposure to full contrast. In the corner where I’d felt the cold was a black circle surrounded by a ring of white sigils scratched into the cement. The roughhewn edges were like claw marks against the black of the wall.
The newsroom seemed to drop a few degrees as I studied it. I leaned closer to the screen. I couldn’t decipher the exact shapes, but I was sure it wasn’t your run-of-the-mill, invisible-to-the-naked eye graffiti. It had to be Old Speak. The glyphs radiated out from the central spot as if someone had thrown an ink bomb in the center. So black, it seemed to absorb the light from the flash. I clicked through the next picture and it was the same thing. Old Speak layered in concentric circles with a void in the center. The next one as well, the sigils fanning out across the walls not even connected to the dark corner. On the fourth, I could make out something above a window, something similar to the circle Rafe had carved into my window frames. Then back to the rabbit hole that. Something had to have crawled out of that. Something big.
I sat up and scrolled back through the pictures. I’d taken five pictures with each lens, which meant that the one that revealed the true nature of the dark corner was the fourth filter. I reached down to the accessory bag and flipped through the slim cases. “Deep Ultraviolet,” the case read. I pulled out the lens and held it up to the light. To my extremely untrained eye, it was just a camera lens. Like all the others that I’d seen him flip through.
Ethan had found a way to capture magic. He’d probably taken thousands of pictures around the city with this lens, making sure nothing nefarious was happening. Pictures Emily had to have seen, if not while he was investigating, then afterwards when she took the laptop. Pictures that included several of me with a red, magical-looking halo.
This lens was a weapon against what truly skulked around in the darkness.
And Emily had given it to me. Like she knew I was supposed to be fighting the things that went bump in the night.
I wasn’t going to say that I was drunk, but I was halfway through the bottle I’d picked up on the way home and I couldn’t feel my nose. It had taken nearly an hour and five shots for me to stop wondering if Emily knew, or at least stop caring. A few more to convince myself that I wasn’t a fighter. I was more like a smoke alarm that just told the real fighters were the fire was. Sure it saved people’s lives, but I wasn’t the one who had to follow through until the smoke was gone.
As I relaxed into my couch, glass in one hand, bottle in the other, I left my brain to float around to the million other questions that were more important than me in this manhunt.
If it even was a man. The circle had haunted the space behind my eyelids, and each time I blinked it was like a spinning hypnotist’s wheel of scratch marks and monsters. But with every drink, the spinning was slowing down and the images were getting less gruesome. Almost to the point that I could look at them again, maybe find them in the books Rafe had left here, but not yet.
Dad used to drink. Mom used it as an excuse to fight with him most of the time, but I’d understood now why he did. Just like Rafe was always radiating, Pipers house always smelled like home, the Charm didn’t stop, but the journalist needed to. The magic didn’t care about emotional scars or sleep or food. It just cared about the truth. Whiskey dampened the storm for a while, dialed it down a little bit, but it was never really gone.
I’d seen AA meetings scheduled in his journals but most were crossed off as he chased a lead. Lucky for him, I was never involved in dance or sports—there was rarely anything for him to miss. He did miss a school board meeting where I was protesting the decreasing funds for the journalism program. God, even in my youth I was stubborn and persistent.
I wondered what story he was working on then. What was more important than his daughter’s big moment? And I could find out. I had his journals. I stumbled upstairs and sat down in my closet. I opened the trunk and ran my fingers across the journals’ covers. I found one marked Fall 2004. It was dangerously close to the last: Spring 2005. I looked at it and the Charm roared to life, like someone gunning the motor of a chain saw. What had he been working on when he died?
I found my glass and gulped down the rest. I didn’t need the chainsaw right now. One truth at a time.
His notes were a fine art at this point in his career. Questions on the left, answers and facts in the center. And Dad had written the lead-in to the article about his daughter challenging the school board.
Merci Lanard, 15, took on the school board today at an open forum about school funding. The sophomore at EB White High accused the school board of dumbing down the curriculum to accommodate a growing sports program, as evidenced by testing scores and trial budgets that she had in hand. Miss Lanard was promptly removed from the meeting and her mother escorted her home.
I ran my fingers across his swirling script. I’d never understood how he could write so fast and still manage to dot every I and cross every T. And I had no idea how he knew about the test scores—he hadn’t even been there. Mom had taken care of settling down the school board by herself and I was hardly even punished for the stunt.
I flipped a few more pages to see what story had been more important than his daughter’s first expose.
Cartwright Construction.
Why was Dad investigation Cartwright Construction?
The Charm washed over me in a cool river. The heat from the alcohol was gone and my laser focus was back. He’d been investigating Cartwright Construction. Twenty years before his daughter had caught their scent. What a way to be scooped.
Whispers of bribes. God, it was like reading my own journal. I searched for the facts Dad had drawn boxes around. Just the facts. The company started about a hundred years ago. Got a city contract immediately. Got another, then another, even though they were underbid by several companies. Started acquiring storage facilities all over the city.
Then, the bribes started. Bribes to city officials, county records, hell, even a few cops to keep the business fronts safe. On paper, nothing sounded strange about them except the fact that twenty years later, I had busted the family for that very thing. Like this Cartwright had just done the same thing that the generation before had done.
But nothing screamed magical portal spell in one of their warehouses. Of course, nothing about me screamed Wanderer and yet here I was, sitting in my closet just drinking alone to make the magic stop.
I’d made it in for seven a.m. pitch. I was showered, rested, even managed a bagel and coffee from the place around the corner, and yet I was still getting hauled into Hayne’s office by a yell across the newsroom floor.
Hayne closed the door behind me.
I took the hot seat. This was our dance. I knew the steps.
Hayne sat in his chair behind his desk, leaning over his desk and clasping his hands.
I waited for the tirade about staying out of trouble, or stealing camera memory cards when all I had to do was fill
out a form, or any number of things.
That was what I was perfectly prepared for until something cracked under Hayne’s façade. It was a glance, a shard of a different color in his tired eyes, but I knew this man. Something was wrong. I didn’t know what it was, but it unnerved me, scared me to the point that the Charm crept up my back and wrap around my shoulders like a protective blanket. I scooted to the front of the seat and planted my feet on the floor to brace myself. “What is it, Hayne?”
“It’s Dot.”
My mouth ran dry, and I clasped the arms of the chair for support at the mention of his daughter. “Dot?”
“She got attacked last night at some party. Cut up. She’s at Hahnemann with her mom.”
The news pressed against my sternum as if my entire body was fighting the news of Dot in pain. I’d been watching Dot grow up in the pictures over Hayne’s shoulder for forever. When she was old enough, she even went on a stakeout with Ethan and me a few times.
I knew this wasn’t a pity party. Hayne and I were cut from the same cloth—a cloth that didn’t do pity parties. He didn’t need a shoulder to cry on, he needed answers. “Are you giving me an assignment?”
“I need my best on this, but I need to know you’re back, Merci. That you’ll put everything into it.”
I hesitated. For the first time in my career, I paused. Could I investigate this? I had three dead bodies, a spell big enough to crack open gas lines, and a werewolf in my life. It was a lot on a very little plate.
But when I looked at Hayne, the man who had saved my ass so many times I’d lost count, watching him crack before my eyes, I couldn’t stand it. Frankly, I couldn’t think of a single person at this paper but Hayne himself who could actually get the truth behind what had happened to Dot.
The Truth About Night Page 17