What Fate Portends

by Clara Coulson

  She opened and closed her mouth several times before she murmured, “You’re okay with going to the precinct? After what happened…that day?”

  “Not at all. But something about this whole raid scenario feels off to me, and the possibility of ‘funny business’ is way more important than my personal feelings.” I made to move past Saoirse and around the fountain, toward the open gate at the end of the courtyard. No one tried to stop me. “Also, every old-guard cop in the place will be super uncomfortable when they see me, and I take no greater pleasure than rubbing someone’s nose in their own mess.”

  Chapter Six

  The precinct hadn’t changed a whole lot since I left the force. It was the same grungy three-story building on the corner of Bordeo and Planter, an old redbrick structure that had been cracked and stained long before the war broke out. I’d walked the twelve blocks here with Saoirse hanging just behind me, the two of us having left Kennedy and his lackeys to hassle Mo back at the courtyard. Mo would be fine, as long as he really didn’t have drugs stashed in his merchandise somewhere. If he did though, that was on him. Drugs were a nasty trade, and I wouldn’t bail him out if he got caught with a hand in the cocaine jar.

  Saoirse hadn’t said anything to me during the entire trip, but I could feel her eyes boring into my neck as I cut through the side parking lot and headed toward the door that all cops used to enter the building when they first got in for their shifts. Admittedly, I should’ve used the front entrance, like a good little civilian, but I wasn’t in a polite or forgiving mood right now. Not after Kennedy made a grab for me. And not after Saoirse told me about this mysterious evidence package that had been dropped on the precinct’s doorstep at an extremely convenient time.

  When I was a few steps from the door, Saoirse caught up to me and pulled a thin metal plate from her pocket that was fashioned like an ID card. “We have these magic scanners now,” she clarified, “instead of an electronic chip system, because the power grid is still spotty and we don’t have fuel for our generators.” She pressed her card against a section of the brick wall that lined up with the door handle, overtop a black circle that someone had spray painted there. A soft blue glow enveloped the card for a moment, and as it faded, the door unlocked with a series of loud clicks. Saoirse then pulled it open and motioned for me to follow her in. “Evidence room is still in the basement.”

  The interior of the precinct was in a worse state than the exterior. Not a shocker. At one point during the purge, on the night of a full moon, a pack of nine werewolves had broken into the precinct and trashed the place. Four cops on the night shift had been viciously killed, and two more seriously injured. Yet another had been infected by contact with a wolf’s blood and was booted off the force a month later when he himself transformed into a werewolf.

  Most of the attackers had been caught in the ensuing weeks—and likely killed when the purge ramped up in the months before the war—but even so, it seemed the wolves had gotten the last laugh.

  Seven years on, the walls and floor tiles were still scored with claw marks, and while the glass from broken office and door windows had long been swept away, the panes hadn’t been replaced. The holes were covered with what looked to be several layers of butcher paper held in place with gray duct tape. A great deal of the furniture we passed as Saoirse led me to the central staircase was the same stuff that had been there the night of the break-in. The chair cushions were torn. The desks were scuffed. The filing cabinets were dented.

  The Kinsale PD might’ve had an operating budget, but they weren’t running on a surplus.

  To get to the staircase, Saoirse had no choice but to cut through the main room of the first floor, which contained several groupings of desks assigned to various detective teams. When we first walked into view, everyone in the room was either working diligently or pretending to—a couple were obviously reading books tucked inside manila folders. But Saoirse was such a recognizable person, thanks to her hair, that she caught the eyes of several people, who raised their heads to greet her. And that’s when they saw me.

  The resulting series of hushed gasps alerted everyone else.

  Nobody said a word to me. They just gawked. Until Saoirse and I reached the stairwell and slipped inside. As the door was closing behind us, an epidemic of whispers broke out in the room. A dozen veteran detectives wondering if they’d seen a ghost, and worse, if their past actions (or lack thereof) were finally coming back to haunt them.

  If I’d wanted to rattle them even more, I could’ve told them that it wouldn’t be me who exacted vengeance on them for their old misdeeds, were the truth about that matter ever to leak to the general public. But I decided to be the better person and keep them in the dark. Even if that was a kindness they didn’t deserve.

  (I prided myself on not being quite as vindictive as my full-blooded faerie relatives.)

  The evidence room hadn’t changed a great deal either. The barred window that separated the large room full of cardboard boxes from the waiting area now had a few wards drawn onto it in what appeared to be black permanent marker, but I couldn’t tell how much juice they had without stripping away my third glamour. Saoirse sauntered right up to the window, rapped on it, and didn’t get blasted across the room though, so I figured they weren’t too dangerous. Probably just a few defensive measures to prevent theft.

  Another old face walked up to the window. Larry Bates, who’d been working the evidence room even when I was a young beat cop. He smiled at Saoirse and opened his mouth to say hello, then he spotted me standing behind her and went white as a sheet. Larry hadn’t been involved in the festivities of that fateful day I left the force, but he had been on duty, which meant he heard about it, possibly as it was happening, and had kept his head down so he didn’t get the shaft. I didn’t entirely blame him for that, but I didn’t entirely not blame him either.

  I tipped up my chin. “What’s happening, Larry? How you been?”

  Larry’s lips pulled a solid impression of a fish for a few seconds before he found his voice. “Not too bad compared to most, Vince. Wife and kids are okay. Still living in the same house.”

  “Good to hear. Send Julia my regards.”

  He put up a smile that so poorly hid his discomfort I was surprised he didn’t burst into tears at the effort. “I’ll do that.”

  “Sure you will.”

  Somehow, Larry paled even more.

  Saoirse held one hand behind her back and signaled for me to cut it out, something she’d done in the old days when my mouth ran a bit too fast. She had no authority over me anymore, but I stopped talking anyway, because if I pushed Larry too hard, the resulting breakdown might prevent him from retrieving the papers I needed to examine. And I didn’t want this detour to a place filled with my most painful memories to end up a bust. It was already taking every ounce of effort I had not to have a repeat of this morning’s bathroom mirror fiasco.

  “Larry,” Saoirse said, “we need the package on Mo Nielson that came in this morning.”

  Larry jumped at the sound of her voice. “Y-Yeah, I’ll go grab it.” He raced away from the window at a speed I was surprised he could reach, and shortly after, the sounds of moving boxes filtered through the gap at the bottom of the window. Larry returned about four minutes later with a box that had NIELSON PACK / ANON written on it, followed by today’s date. Larry grabbed the clipboard on the countertop and slid it through the gap. “Just sign for it first, Lieutenant.”

  Saoirse slipped the pen from under the clip and scrawled her signature. Larry handed over the box and reclaimed his clipboard, watching anxiously as Saoirse and I moved to a small table in the corner of the room. Saoirse sat the box on the table and yanked the top off, revealing a large yellow envelope stuffed with papers. She lifted it from the box and flipped the flap up, then slid the entire stack of papers out, holding them so we could both view the contents.

  “These came in via courier this morning,” she said. “Mo Nielson’s sales records for coc
aine and heroin dating back four months, plus several photos of him buying drugs from a known distributor. We’ve been trying to link him to the drug ring operated by King Keller for six months but had yet to catch him in the act of moving product or obtain definitive evidence that drugs are a part of his bottom line. Until today.”

  I took the papers from her and leafed through them, skimming for info using a study method Saoirse had taught me during my first year as a detective. The evidence here was pretty damning—I took it back; Mo wouldn’t be fine—particularly the pictures, which had been taken with a 35mm camera, using actual film developed the old-fashioned way. (Amazing how outdated technology suddenly became relevant again when you had no functioning power grid.) Someone had been keeping tabs on Mo for months, probably one of the organized crime rings he was involved with, in order to build a portfolio of evidence to be used against him if he ever needed to be removed from the game board.

  And they chose today, of all days, to cut him loose?

  Yeah, no. Coincidences like that didn’t happen in the age of magic.

  “Okay,” Saoirse said, “I’ve been quiet for long enough. What’s all this about, Vince? You think something smells with this package?”

  “The package itself? No.” I fingered the charm for my third glamour through the fabric of my shirt and quickly whispered the words to dispel it. My magic rose to the surface, a subtle vibration underneath my skin. “The timing of the delivery, yes. I think someone was trying to stop me from talking to Mo, because he’s my only contact in the mob world.”

  Saoirse frowned. “Why do you need a mob contact?”

  “New job came in. A little different from my usual fare.” I focused intently on the stack of papers and directed a few wisps of my energy into the pages, seeking out any traces of someone else’s magic touch. Something in the middle of the stack, a bundle of latent spells, roughly pushed back against the intrusion of my power. I built a little ward wall around it, stifling its ability to counteract me, making sure it didn’t follow the trails of my energy as I wove them through all the pages and photos. “I’m guessing somebody followed my new client to my shop and realized they needed to preempt my search for the item I’ve been charged to find.”

  My theory was that the auction organizers had told their bosses about Tom’s attempt to bribe a look at the buyer list, and said bosses put a tail on him to make sure he didn’t keep pushing—or rectify the situation if he did. Of course, he kept on trucking, and now Mo had gotten swept into the consequences of Tom’s obsession to find his aunt’s long-lost harp of sentimental doom. Mo would be doing time, thanks to this abundance of evidence, and there wasn’t much I could do for the whiny weasel, other than flip off the people who’d built a blackmail package to hang around his neck.

  Looks like I need to befriend a new mob contact.

  Oh, well.

  I didn’t find any other signs of foreign magic energy, so I rifled through the stack until I reached the page with the spell bundle embedded in it. I slipped that page out and sat it on the corner of the table farthest away from Saoirse and me, which required me to bend over at an awkward angle, ass sticking straight up in the air. My old partner looked at me like she wasn’t sure I was a hundred percent sane. Now, I wasn’t a hundred percent sane, but no one was these days. So she didn’t get to judge.

  “You’ll see why I did that in a minute,” I promised.

  Next, I placed the palm of my right hand flat against the top paper on the stack and closed my eyes. Using the threads I’d placed throughout the pages, I encapsulated the entire stack in a spell matrix with a mental push. Then I started speaking. The spell was a long string of complicated words in a language that didn’t exist on Earth, and I’m sure it seemed to Saoirse and Larry that I was speaking in tongues. But the instant the last syllable of the last word ghosted over my lips, the trace spell activated with a rush of cold air that billowed out from the stack of papers.

  And I was away.

  Like an astral projection, I “followed” the papers on their trip to the precinct—in reverse—catching glimpses of buildings and street signs the courier holding the envelope had passed on his way here. Eventually, the regular office buildings and townhouses morphed into warehouses and factories and lots filled with rusting construction equipment. Until the courier walked backward into a particular warehouse, whose main room was totally empty, and then into a small office off that main room. In that office, seated at a desk, was a person—

  “Jesus Christ!” Saoirse shouted.

  The trace spell collapsed along with my concentration as my eyes popped open to the sight of an aggressively spreading fire on the table in front of me. The spell bundle inside the paper I’d removed from the stack had wormed its way around my stopgap wards and activated upon sensing that someone was using magic on the rest of the pages. It had ignited into a tall flame that was now licking at the ceiling, threatening to catch the entire building on fire.

  I tossed the stack of papers back into the cardboard box and held out both my hands toward the billowing fire. I tapped into my magic again, and it was more than happy to comply, as fire was its natural enemy and it wanted to snuff out all the heat in this world. A cold jet of air blasted out of the space between my palms and wrapped around the fire, forming a vortex that siphoned all the oxygen from its center.

  The fire fought back, lashing out at me. But the spell bundle had been nothing but a one-off attack with a multistage activation sequence, and its magic energy was limited to what had been stuffed inside the paper. So I kept pushing, strangling it more and more, until it finally gave up the ghost and fizzled out with a bright flash.

  A moment later, Saoirse stumbled to a halt beside me, a fire extinguisher in her hand. She stared at the blackened surface of the table, curls of smoke still rising from the char. Then she lowered the extinguisher to her side and sighed. “Way to show me up in my own precinct.”

  “Your lack of gratefulness implies I should let the evidence room burn down next time.”

  Her head snapped toward me. “Is there going to be a next time?”

  “Not from this stuff.” I tapped the rim of the box. “The page I removed a minute ago had a small bundle of ‘tripwire’ spells embedded in it, so that if anyone tried to use magic to find out who sent the package, it would destroy everything in a big burst of fire, leaving no anchor, which is required for trace spells.”

  “Is that what you did, a trace spell?”

  I nodded.

  “Did it work?”

  “To a degree.” I ran my finger across the burned surface, leaving a smudge of soot. “I know where it came from, but I only got an incomplete glimpse of the actual sender.”

  “Where’d it come from?” Saoirse sat the extinguisher on the floor and reclaimed the evidence box, slipping the top back on and tucking it under her arm so it wasn’t sitting anywhere near the damaged half of the table. Like she was worried the flame might reignite. “Some mob boss’s house?”

  “Is that really a question you want to know the answer to?” I flicked the top of the box. “You have a good case against Mo here, and sending him to jail will take a dealer who targets the vulnerable off the street. But if you start asking too many questions about where that evidence package came from, you’re going to open a can of worms that could sabotage all the work you’ve done to clean up this drug ring.”

  Saoirse shifted her weight from foot to foot, pensive. “You’re right, but I feel dirty accepting ‘help’ from a crime org, particularly when it’s a setup to hurt somebody I know and the benefit to the police is just a side effect.”

  “You got to take the advantages where they come. Because there aren’t many these days.” I shook my head. “And you don’t need to worry about me. I’m going to poke around a bit more and try to figure out why somebody is so hellbent on keeping a damn musical instrument out of its rightful owner’s grasp. But if this job gets too dicey, I’ll bail. The money is good on this one, but it’s
not worth my head.”

  “Wait.” Saoirse scrunched her nose in an endearing way that highlighted her freckles. “Did you say ‘musical instrument’? This”—she shook the evidence box—“revolves around a musical instrument?”

  “Yep. A harp.” I couldn’t help but smile at her perplexed expression. “Scavengers snatched it. Auctioneers sold it. Rightful owner wants it back. I’m supposed to track the buyer down.”

  “I don’t get it.” She wound one of her springy red curls around her finger, something she’d always done when trying to unravel a tangle of clues. “Why go through so much effort to obscure the details of a single auction purchase? Are they that anal about the privacy of their buyers, or is there something more to this harp?”

  “Well, it’s worth a shit ton of money. But beyond that, who knows?”

  Angry yells faintly filtered down the stairs from the ground floor. Kennedy had returned.

  “Anyway,” I added, “I think I’ll take the service stairs out. Unless you want me to really embarrass that hothead.”

  Saoirse rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry about him. He was part of a donation package. Got fired from his old job in Florida for police brutality, during the purge.”

  “Sounds like a bomb waiting to go off. I’d sleep with one eye open, if I were you.”

  “I’ve been doing that since I met him.”

  I started to lift my hand toward Saoirse’s shoulder, but couldn’t quite push myself to actually touch her in a compassionate manner. It was like there was a wall between us. A wall made of acidic memories, threatening to burn us away if we dared to try and climb it. I could tell that Saoirse felt it too, with the way she glanced at my hovering hand and quickly looked the other way, her hair partially obscuring a grimace, her jaw tensing as she bit her tongue to stop herself from saying something she’d regret.

  The stairwell door on the first floor banged open, and somebody came stomping down like a horse.