The Truth About Night

by Amanda Arista

  He did have a point. I exhaled and looked as deeply as I could into those eyes, nearly pulled myself into them so he could feel the truth behind my words with me. “You, Rafe MacCallan, are the first person I have ever wanted to tell the whole truth to.”

  Rafe nodded and tucked a strand of hair behind my ears.

  “Were you expecting a sonnet? Shall I quote you some pentameter?”

  He leaned in to kiss me again, curling his hand into my hair. I memorized everything. The way he smelled of musk and tomato sauce. The way his beard tickled my chin. How he was so thorough when he kissed that every part of my mouth felt sated before he pulled away.

  “Leave the Shakespeare to me.”

  They’d left the Ping-Pong table to us and frankly the entire entertainment room, like pictures of dead bodies and magical textbooks weren’t the most normal sight first thing in the morning. The children were back in school, most of the others were at work, but I knew that Emily was still pacing the upstairs bedroom and Piper was cleaning up from the seven-course breakfast that she had fixed everyone.

  Rafe and I spread out everything I had on the bodies, the buildings, the books.

  “You were busy in the one day I was gone.” He pointed to the map of the city, highlighted with the Cartwright holdings according to the information that St. Greta had given me. I’d circled the one that Benny had specifically named and the one where we’d found the spell.

  “I have a singular focus when I’m on the hunt.”

  He came around the table and stood next to me. “So I’ve realized that the warehouse you took pictures of is perfectly aligned on a leyline that cuts across Philadelphia.”

  “A leyline?” I asked.

  “Err … like an electric current though the landscape, only magical. And you can plug into them to strengthen your spells. Several of the buildings are along this line. Probably why they look so randomly dispersed.”

  I shuffled the Ultraviolet exposures of the warehouse to the top of the pile and pointed to the scratched sigils in a circle. “And the symbols on the walls?”

  He trailed the outside circle, the white ring of exposed sigils scratched into the energy of the space. “Most definitely a portal spell.”

  “So Demon is already here in Cartwright.”

  “But we can’t track it, stop it, or kill it unless we know which kind of Demon. There are as many kinds of Demons as there are hungers.”

  It was the first time I thought about killing something, that all this research was leading to an execution. My stories had gotten people thrown into jail, run bankrupt, but never dead by my hand. I looked up to Rafe. Had he killed before? He spoke about it with such resolve. “And you think we can kill it?”

  He looked back up at me. “Well, yes. How else do you suppose we stop it?”

  I licked my lips. “I … It’s just not what I usually think when I think of justice.”

  Rafe pointed to the pictures on the table. “There isn’t a prison for things that do this, Merci. There isn’t a rehabilitation program for them. There is only one way to stop something that is all hunger.”

  I’d been thinking of this as something with a deadline. I’d file the story and that would be it, but this was bigger. More final than just seeing my name on a byline. This was the solution that I told Emily I’d fight to find. This was the knife that I had taken up.

  “Stop,” Rafe said simply.

  I looked up at him. “What?”

  Concern was written across his wrinkled brow. “Where ever your head is right now, just stop. This is not about you and your Legacy. This is about Ethan.”

  “But—”

  “No, Merci. I won’t have it.”

  “Right.” I turned back to the work and focused on the dead bodies, a welcomed distraction. I had plenty of time to figure it out. And I would, with Rafe right beside me. One story at a time. “Could sucking people dry be an MO? Maybe it’s just thirsty?” I asked.

  He smiled softly. “It doesn’t work that way. And for all we know, the super-dried bodies are a result of the sacrifice mark, not the Demon’s hunger.”

  I sighed. We had nearly all the puzzle pieces. We had the who, what, and where, but it was the whys that scared me. Why did the Demon want Philadelphia? What was it thinking it could do here? What did we possibly have here that other big cities didn’t have? New York had drugs and gangs, what hunger could it be following to my doorstep?

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Why Philadelphia? What’s a special about The City of Brotherly Love?”

  “Well, I have read that Demons are creatures of habit. When they find a steady source of food, they tend to come back over and over and over.”

  It was like I’d stuck my finger in an electrical socket and the Charm was static and sizzle around me, making connections, making my brain work that much faster than before. “Philadelphia is one of the oldest cities in the country. What if the Demon likes it here because it’s always been inhabited?”

  He frowned. “I think I just said that.”

  “But what if it had always gone to the same family like each time it tried to come back. Like it would stay with a family?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is, if this Demon likes the Cartwrights now, maybe he has use them as hosts before?”

  “Familial hosts would make sense.”

  The Charm flared before the question even hit my lips. It wasn’t even a question yet, but more of a need to know. If this generation of Cartwrights was into bribery and in bed with a Demon and the last generation of Cartwrights was into bribery and possibly also in bed with a Demon and the generation before that and the generation before that.

  I got up, closed my laptop, and unplugged it from the wall. The Internet was horrible out in the country. I needed the newspaper database and Piper was right, this dial-up just wasn’t delivering.

  Rafe rose as fast as he could, broken ribs and all. “Wait.”

  I pushed the laptop in my bag. “The Demon might have tried to come through before. I can search for another rash of bodies through the archives.”

  “Hold on.”

  I was already in the doorway as I glanced back to Rafe. He was still in pajamas.

  “I have to go, Rafe. I’m burning daylight.”

  “Is this how it works? Is your power always so tangential?”

  I stopped. Less than a month and he understood me. It had taken Ethan nearly a year to realize what happened when a question took hold, how deeply it was rooted. “You don’t want to see me when I’m not allowed to chase a story. It’s not pretty.”

  “I’ll go with you.” He started gathering up the books and the maps.

  “You’re still under lockdown.”

  “You need a partner.” He chuckled after he realized what he said. “You need someone with you. Piper’s orders go for you too now.”

  I had to smile. “Aren’t we cute with our little partner thing?”

  Rafe wasn’t smiling when he looked back up at me. “Give me ten minutes with Piper, and I will meet you outside.”

  “Ten minutes.”

  After I unlocked the door to my place, we fell into a strange pattern. He put his books on the dining room table and went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. I dropped my bag into a chair and went to take a shower.

  When I came out, I was ready. Relaxed. Focused. Ready to ask the question again.

  “Has the Demon tried to come through before?”

  I shivered as the Charm covered my skin and sank in to help me do my work. It really was like a hit of Ritalin some days, like life through a magnifying glass, focused and clear. I knew exactly where I needed to start looking first. My friend, county records.

  Rafe and I sat across from each other as we searched. I clicked and he flipped and we would sort of bounce an idea off the other and then go back to work. It was a familiar process.

  After an hour, I pushed back from my computer screen and rubbed m
y eyes.

  “Something wrong?”

  I ran my fingers through my hair. “Do you know how many serial murders there have been in Philly? Like, a million. I’ve got stranglers, and stabbers, and smotherers, oh my.”

  I rested my head on my hands and closed my eyes. “The Cartwright family goes back to the founding of the city with fingers in everything: construction, railroad, politics. There are probably hundreds with the same blood but different surnames across the metroplex and we don’t have enough time to make a family tree.”

  Rafe sipped his coffee. “So no pattern to help determine the kind of Demon?”

  I looked at my gruesome notes. “There are no other news articles in the archives that link Cartwrights to dead bodies.”

  The moment I said it, I knew. Like a gong had been struck and my entire body vibrate with the truth. The answers wouldn’t be in the archives if the story never got published. But I knew who had been investigating the Cartwrights thirteen years ago. And I knew where he kept his notes.

  I needed my father’s last journal.

  I was in the bedroom before I knew it, staring down at the old trunk, breathing in that whiskey and pipe smell from the leather. I knelt down and opened it up. My hand paused over the last book. Spring 2005. The last story Dad had worked on. The last story he’d been hunting before he died.

  Rafe had followed me upstairs. His reassuring heat pressed at my back. Urging me forward. “What are you doing?”

  I rocked back and sat on my heels. “My dad was a journalist. Did you know that?”

  “You don’t talk about yourself much.”

  “Welcome to my biggest flaw.”

  I cocked my head. The questions were beginning to swirl again, the hum of the hive filled my ears. “He died when I was in high school. Right about the time my Charm kicked in.”

  Rafe furrowed and knelt beside me. “Your father never said anything about it?”

  I shook my head. “We never talked about it.”

  “Would you like to tell me what happened?” He curled his hand into mine.

  It was so strange. Just putting my hand in his calmed the butterflies that would have prevented me from thinking about Dad, prevented me from thinking about myself at all and made me focus someone else’s problems. But with him there, I could finally face this one truth.

  “He was working at all hours. He and mom got in this huge fight that night. I snuck out the window and went to a friend’s house. Back when I still had friends. When I got home, the police were already there. He’d gotten hit by a train at a station. They said alcohol was involved.”

  “Could he have been drunk?”

  “No. Alcohol is part of the thing, the job, the Charm. He drank because it’s the only thing that stops the questions, but I never saw him drunk.”

  The Charm flared before the question even hit my lips. I needed to find out. It burned through me. “He’d been investigating the Cartwrights for bribes twenty years before I nailed them for it.”

  “Talk about a legacy,” Rafe said.

  I looked at the trunk again. I could do this.

  Why had he been at the train station that night?

  Rafe rose to hover in the doorway of my closet with a cup of coffee. “You need any help?”

  “To fuel my delusion that I’m going to find the key to the history of the city in my closet? No, Mr. Tumnus. Go research spells.”

  He set the coffee down on the dresser just outside the door and then left. A man who respected my process. And a man I was quickly realizing might finally be enough to handle the hailstorm named Merci Lanard.

  I reached in to slide out the last notebook, Spring 2005. I needed the last story, what hadn’t been published. The last few days before he was found at the train station.

  Starting at page one, I skimmed through his notes and my eyes landed on the name that confirmed my fears.

  “Cartwright,” I muttered.

  Bingo. Dad had been investigating a series of fatalities associated with Cartwright Construction. But the end of the story never came, he’d never written an intro paragraph for it.

  He’d been investigating the same story I had been. Following missing people and missing money, but twenty years ago it all seemed to revolve around train tracks instead of city hall. I sat in the middle of my closet and read through his notes slowly, trying to use everything I knew about him, his death, and our power, to fill in the blanks.

  One side of his notes was dedicated to figures and truck designations and the other contained lists of dead bodies, like he was chasing two stories at once. The dead bodies were warehouse attendants, sex workers in the area, and a construction owner’s son—all found in different holdings across the city. As I flipped through the pages, iron seemed to be the common factor in his story, the link that connected all his missing pieces. Triple orders of iron coming into the city and it was all being stored at a warehouse. At a warehouse that, thirteen years later, would be covered in Old Speak and serve as the location to pull a Demon across dimensions and into the heart of the city.

  I zipped downstairs with my coffee and my journal, nearly spilling one on the other.

  “Is iron special in the magical world?” I asked Rafe, breathless.

  Rafe laughed at my entrance. “It has several magical properties. It’s elemental, so it’s easy to enchant, and it’s wicked strong for fairy magic. Why?”

  “While investigating missing people, Dad discovered the Cartwrights had been using iron to construct train tracks and bribing inspectors to ignore it.”

  Rafe exhaled. “Train tracks are usually made out of steel.”

  “What would happen if they were made out of iron?”

  I knew it, when the idea hit him. I didn’t know why. That wasn’t part of my power. So it had to be part of the strange us-ness that had settled in between.

  “The city would be crisscrossed by iron tracks, by a mode of magic.” Rafe’s nibble fingers were typing away at my laptop. He pulled up a map of the city. “What’s at Jefferson Station?” he asked.

  Ice covered my skin as I looked up at him. I gulped. “That’s where they found him. It was Market East then.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair, his thick mane sticking up in shock.

  “If they were replacing iron for the steel tracks, Jefferson Station would have been the epicenter. It would have been a perfect place to conduct magic.”

  It was all fitting together too perfectly. Except for one question. “Did Dad know it was magic?”

  “Is there nothing about it in his notes?”

  To me they were my dad’s notes, the books he always had on him, the books he used to flip through over the dinner table, scribble in during every phone call. I knew I wasn’t looking at this as a reporter, I was looking at it as a daughter.

  It took everything I had to hand the Moleskine to Rafe. If it contained any hint of magic, he could read it better than I could. Find magic where I only saw memories.

  He crossed the room and sat next to me before taking the notebook and scanning through the notes. I could tell he was just about to say something as he flipped through the pages when storm clouds covered his face. His eyes lighted on something that had him across the room by the time I caught the journal, which he’d tossed back to me.

  “What?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer, only flipped furiously through the biggest and most dangerous looking book on my kitchen table.

  I looked down at my Dad’s journal and flipped the worn pages back open, remembering the scent I had always associated with reporters and the newsroom, to find what Rafe had possibly seen.

  Dad had made a drawing, with four names and numbers and then sketched lines between the names. A web of dead bodies creating something that resembled the design on the back of a black widow spider, an angled infinity rune across the train tracks of Philly. Four corners and a big X in the center.

  Everything slowed down as I looked at the drawing and substituted the name
s of our dead bodies. John Mitchell, Tay-Tay, Beakman, and Benny. The four boroughs in four different corners of Philly.

  The Demon was doing this all over again. And, if Dad’s drawing was to be believed, he only needed one more sacrifice.

  But beyond that, did my father know it was a Demon, or was he just trying to see the pattern of it? Had he known about this whole world and never once told me about any of it?

  The Charm sizzled down my spine as my anger flared.

  I searched to see if my dad had known it was a Demon, looked for sigils or weird names or anything in those square boxes that clearly stated “Magic was real”, but there were no additional names, just the drawing of the bodies and the initials JR next to a phone number so old it didn’t have an area code.

  “It’s called a Gia’r DLoom.”

  My skin tightened and tingled when I heard Rafe’s voice pronounce the Old Speak.

  “I should have looked earlier. This Demon likes his magic ancient, like the Lux Stelen, the light stealing spell.”

  He slammed his hand down on the volume, loosing dust and who knew what else all over my kitchen table.

  “Fairies use it to protect their homes from evil magic. You plant stones charged with your energy around your home so the ground has a piece of you in it, and then charge a center stone under your house to activate and fuel the spell. Like an electric fence to keep the bad guys out.

  “This Demon is twisting the ritual. He’s setting up death spots, using the sacrifice sigil to create spots devoid of any energy at all strategically located around the city.”

  “What would that do?”

  Rafe exhaled and ran both hands through his hair. “Well, once he activates the center of the spell, it would create a lock on the city. Instead of keeping bad energies away, it would draw good energies to him.”

  “You mean like suck the life out of everyone?”

  Rafe nodded slowly. “Every human here would be his. He could feed at will.”

  And he wanted to do that in my body? Kill all those people wearing my face.

  I’d stopped breathing and had to suck in a gasp of air. The oxygen hit my brain and the Charm seemed to explode into a million pieces before drifting down around me like dandelion seeds.