“Can you walk?” Levi crouched down beside me, and when I shook my head, scooped me up in his arms.
“Where are we going?” My voice was a scratchy rasp.
“To talk.” His voice was soft, but I had no doubt that if he didn’t like my answers, I’d be right back in that cell.
Chapter 5
A subdued but otherwise unharmed Miles offered to take me from Levi, but Levi shook his head and carried me into the elevator where Miles pressed seven. We silently glided upward past the first two floors where all police activity was centered and the next four dedicated to House corporate affairs.
I barely had the energy to hang on to Levi, but the brush of his shirt against my cheek and the steady beat of his heart banished all thoughts of the maggot sensation from my mind. Being carried wasn’t the worst hardship.
Levi had a really good chest. He’d showered and changed into a casual sweater and jeans, which lessened his status as big bad Head but broadcast his masculine appeal like it was a neon sign. He wore no cologne, bearing only the faint trace of a shampoo with an earthy lemongrass scent that unknotted some of the tension in my muscles.
I considered letting go of him and bringing back those maggoty heebie jeebies because Levi as a source of comfort was completely unnerving, but he cradled me so firmly but gently against him that it seemed a shame to disturb the equilibrium he’d achieved, so I merely adjusted my arms around his neck, taking advantage of the shift to study his stubbled jaw.
His face was harshly rugged, but that only emphasized the magnificence of those piercing blue eyes and his lush lips.
“You dying?” he murmured.
“You wish.”
The corners of his lips quirked. “Then you’re checking me out?”
“Just finding your jugular in case you get handsy.”
Levi laughed softly.
The elevator slowed to a stop with a soft bing. We turned away from the rest of the now-empty executive offices and strode through heavy glass doors into Levi’s private domain. I may have wondered once or twice what it looked like up here in His Lordship’s castle and it didn’t disappoint.
One side of the long curved space boasted floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the twinkling lights of Vancouver’s skyline with a slice of dark water and North Shore mountains beyond. Pale gold walls boasted a host of original art, which seemed random. I recognized an Escher, and another that had to be Dali, but there was also a snowscape with a figure sitting under what appeared to be lined-up arches until a second glance revealed the play in perspective of the columns. Intriguing.
Levi carried me like I weighed nothing past a long conference room and the unmanned reception desk, his footfalls silent on the richly polished wooden floor planks.
Miles pushed open Levi’s dark office doors and we entered the inner sanctum. While one wall had that same ten-million-dollar view, the opposite one contained a gorgeous mahogany bookshelf packed with books.
The furniture was all wood and leather, with a Persian rug in brilliant reds and blues taking the edge off the masculinity of the room. The sleek monitor on his desk was top of the line.
Comparing my office to his was like asking me to choose between Moriarty and a brand-new Ferrari: no matter how much sentimental value my car had, I’d choose the blinged out, fully functional version in a heartbeat.
Levi set me down on a leather sofa by the fireplace which crackled with actual wood logs which meant it had been grandfathered in, since only gas fireplaces had been allowed in Vancouver for some time. He ordered Miles to get me a juice from the staff kitchen.
While I waited, I studied the large photograph of a road running through a green landscape that hung over the mantel. The ground rose up in the center of the photo to split in half, effectively turning the road into a half-open zipper.
I snapped my fingers. “Illusions.”
“What?” Levi said.
“Your art collection. It’s all about illusions. Like your magic.” Small talk was normal. It was easy. What was neither normal nor easy was thinking about how my magic had just eaten that thing up, how I’d orchestrated it all on instinct.
Miles returned and handed me a bottle of orange juice, lowering himself into a sturdy club chair with surprising grace. “What the hell was it?”
Levi idly set one of those desktop pendulums in motion that was the preferred stupid toy for eight out of ten executives. “Show Miles the tattoo, then start at the beginning and walk us through this.”
I uncapped the bottle and chugged half of the juice back, desperate for the electrolytes. “You believe me now?”
He propped a hip against his massive wood desk that was turned around so he could watch the skyline as he worked at his large monitor, instead of facing the office door like most CEO’s. I wondered if he daydreamed, staring out at the vast sky, putting aside his empire for a stolen moment or two.
“I don’t know what to believe,” Levi said. “One second, I thought you were attacking Miles, the next you’d speared some blurry black shadow that I hadn’t even seen until your magic touched it. That I’ve never seen before.” His gaze went flat and distant, but he shook himself out of it. “You say you’re not a Rogue, but you sprang into action without hesitation. For all I know, you could have called that thing up in the first place.”
I scrubbed a hand over my face, bone-weary. “It was instinct, not experience or training. I saved your lives tonight and I can prove it, but you’ll have to hear me out.”
Levi and Miles exchanged a long, wordless glance, then Levi nodded.
I told them everything, even coming clean about the Charlotte Rose case and asking for clemency for her. Might as well use my power for good. Levi promised to talk to the in-house counsel about options.
Miles examined the tattoo after I explained the circumstances of its reveal.
“I’m gonna call in Mols,” he said to Levi.
“Who’s that?” I placed the empty orange juice bottle on the floor.
“Tattoo artist friend of ours.”
Levi steepled his finger together. “That okay with you?”
I shrugged. “If she has any insights on it, sure.”
Miles fired off a text while I continued with the story up to the death at Green Thumb.
“Call them and verify it,” I said. “Because whatever killed that guy and jumped into the woman was the same type of thing that flowed out of Miles. If I’d been behind it and wanted Miles dead, I wouldn’t have lifted a finger to stop it and since you couldn’t see it, you’d never have known it was me. Unless you think I had some other nefarious agenda in mind?”
“No,” Levi said after a beat too long.
“Bite me.” Levi’s disbelief was this tangible weight crowding in on me. If a potential client was giving me this bullshit, I’d have been out the door and down the elevator already. I couldn’t do that with a House Head, but I was damned if I didn’t want to follow company policy.
“Find out if there have been any other sudden heart attack deaths.” Levi instructed Miles and motioned for me to continue.
I got to my magic’s appearance at the aquarium, and Miles laughed when he heard about the dildo. “That might be the greatest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “Next time, take photos.”
“There’s not going to be a next time,” Levi said.
Miles winked at me. “You could make serious bank.”
My mouth almost fell open. Miles had a sense of humor? We hadn’t had a lot of direct interactions since our camp days, but he’d always struck me as so serious.
I scrambled to get back on track with my story. “I can’t explain why my powers didn’t manifest earlier or why it’s blood magic since I’m not some weird fetishist.”
While there were many types of magic, they all stemmed from the same basic idea, going back to when magic had first been released in the world in the seventeenth century.
As all Canadian students learned in their magic history
unit in grade eight social studies, ten Jewish men, purported to be descended from each of the Lost Tribes of Israel, had banded together in the 1600s. Ten was a symbol of good luck and power in Judaism. It was the number of commandments, the number of righteous individuals required by God in Sodom to avoid holy wrath, and the number of men (bar mitzvah’d males over the age of thirteen) to form a minyan for traditional Jewish public prayer. Women need not apply.
Being devout practitioners of Kabbalah, these men wanted to become one with the divine, or, in their terms, achieve the fifth and highest plane of the soul, Yechida. They just didn’t want the years of studying it took. Like many a con, it fucked up big-time. Instead of only the ten of them achieving full union with their god, Yahweh, the magic they brought into our world as a whole was rooted in the first level of the soul, Nefesh.
Shoulda sent ten women to do the job.
“In Kabbalistic terms, Nefesh is the animal part of the soul, correct?” I said.
“Right.” Levi pushed on a wooden wall panel to reveal a bar fridge filled with nothing but water bottles. Would it kill him to have Coke on tap? “Similar to Freud’s idea of the Id. Impulses, basic human drives, pleasure principles. Which isn’t surprising since Freud was well-versed in Kabbalistic philosophy.”
Ugh. Levi was smarter than I generally gave him credit for. “Then correct me if I’m wrong.” I caught the bottle of water that he tossed at me. “Boiled down, magic, like these impulses, stems from our attempt to find whatever is pleasurable and avoid that which is painful, developing through childhood. It’s the instant gratification of our wants and needs, be they food, safety, love, or whatever, and it manifests in a fuckton of ways.”
“Exactly,” Levi said. “Though people’s abilities vary according to how much they train and develop them.”
“Regardless, I’m not jonsing for blood,” I said. “I don’t even like vampire stories.” Keep your blood-sucking fiends with melanin issues; my fictional love was and always would be Holmes.
Reason, intelligence, deduction.
“Maybe not consciously,” Levi said. “But did you end up having a bunch of blood transfusions back when…” He cleared his throat.
“When in my rage that Daddy Dearest had abandoned us, I went joyriding in my mom’s car and totaled it? Why yes, Levi. I did have a bunch of transfusions then.” I uncapped my water and took a sip to clear the bitter taste in my mouth.
“Blood would have meant life. Pretty strong desire,” Levi said.
“But I was already thirteen and the magic would have taken form much earlier than that,” I replied. “Not to mention, oh yeah, I didn’t have any of it before yesterday.”
“There are rare cases where extreme trauma influenced the magic. Changed the nature of it.”
“You’re not listening to me. There. Was. Zero. Magic.” I squeezed the bottle so hard that water splashed out over my fingers. “Besides, other people have been in accidents. Why aren’t there any other cases of blood magic?”
“Coincidence that you know that or covering something up?” Miles said.
I dried off my hand. “Professional curiosity. I’m interested in noteworthy crimes. Back in the 1980s, there was a case in London where a serial killer claimed to have blood magic. Freaked the cops right out, because they were imagining evil wizard movie crap. It turned out he didn’t and he was just a sick fuck, but the press had gotten so frenzied that Nefesh historians had to squash the panic, stating there were no recorded or anecdotal cases of blood magic. Ever.”
Levi slammed his hand down on his desk. The sound cracked like gunfire and I jumped. “It’s magic. There aren’t exceptions to how it works. You had to have been born with it. You somehow hid it and the accident changed it.”
He sank into his desk chair, swiveling around to present its high back. Poor guy really wanted this in a nice package, tied up neatly with a bow.
I gentled my voice. “Think logically about this, Levi. If there are no exceptions, how come I was the only one who saw the smudge initially shoot out of Miles? It wasn’t visible to either of you until my magic revealed it. I was the exception initially. There’s also no way I hid magic from you all this time. I didn’t conjure that thing up and you know it. Something happened in the last twenty-four hours that made me magic. I just don’t know what yet.”
Levi swiveled back around, swearing under his breath in Italian. I tended to forget he’d moved here from Rome as a child, since he’d lost his accent. “Was this the same thing that killed that other man?”
“Same type. Exact same entity?” I shrugged.
A petite black woman in her forties with a giant red mohawk poked her head in the door.
“Mols,” Levi smiled warmly. “Come in.”
Miles stood up and hugged her. Their size disparity was so huge, she all but disappeared in his embrace. Huh. I wouldn’t have pegged Miles for a hugger but this wasn’t sexual either. More like hugging a favored aunt.
“Hi, Mols.” I said. “I’m Ash.”
We shook hands. She wore long sleeves, long pants, and thin gloves. A Van Gogh.
“Can I see the tattoo?” she said. Once more, I pulled up my hair to show the Star of David and she ran her gloved finger over it, poking and prodding. “Huh.”
“Is that the technical term for your findings or…” I drifted off as Mols sat down and took my hands in hers. “Why do I feel like I’m about to get a terminal diagnosis?”
“I’m a Van Gogh,” she said.
“Yes, I deduced that. How is that relevant?” I looked at Miles and Levi but they appeared as confused as I was.
“You understand that I’m well-versed in creating magic art?”
Van Goghs were remarkable artists who tended to dominate whichever visual field they were in, but at the price of creating art that tortured them. Their magic, their passion, was a subset of fire magic, and the more they lost themselves in their work and created greatness, the higher the chance of them bursting into flame. Given the long sleeves and gloves, Mols had already experienced some burns. They healed faster than non-magic people, but the scars never completely left them.
I wasn’t sure the cost of their magic was worth it, but they certainly produced beautiful art.
“I do,” I assured her. “Why?”
“That Star of David isn’t just a tattoo,” she said. “And those black lines aren’t ink. This star was magically burned into your skin as a ward. An incredibly powerful one. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Ward? Oh. One piece slotted into this puzzle. It would have had to be powerful if it had suppressed my magic. That was the only explanation that fit. I touched the tattoo. There was no scarring and everyone believed it was ink. The Van Gogh who’d done this to me must have had unrivaled precision and control.
If I’d gotten the ward as a baby that could be why I had no memory of magic, but what prompted it? Did my parents see that I had blood magic and get scared? No, I couldn’t see my parents being freaked out by this. My father finding a way to use it, on the other hand? You bet.
“How old is the tattoo?” I said.
“It’s hard to pinpoint because it was under your hair,” Mols said. “Could have been ten years, could be thirty.”
What if I’d gotten it at some later point? Where had my magic been up until then? Every new piece of information only deepened the mystery, and instead of saying something that properly summed up my curiosity, all my exhausted brain could come up with was, “I’m only twenty-eight.”
Because that was the salient fact here.
“Okay.” Mols held up her gloved hand. “Could be twenty-eight years. But the ward was broken recently, wasn’t it? There’s a fresh scab slashed through it.”
“I hit my head.” And then magic filled my world.
Growing up, I’d envied kids with magic. Though I wouldn’t have admitted it on pain of death. Their lives seemed filled with a promise that mine had lacked. Now it turned out that I could have had that advent
ure and I’d been robbed.
Where might I be now if I’d had magic all this time? Who might I be? A master Nefesh detective solving fascinating puzzles?
What kind of special douchecanoe took it upon themselves to deprive a kid of their future?
I jumped to my feet. “Get it off me.”
Mols looked at Levi.
“It’s not his body,” I said. “It’s mine and I want this fucking ward off me. Now!”
“You heard her,” Levi said.
Sometimes the moments that changed our lives hit us with the force of a speeding car, other times they were the gentlest of tugs. Removing the tattoo took Mols mere seconds. A violent shiver rolled through me and my insides rearranged themselves like they’d been slightly off-kilter all these years.
The ward was gone and for the first time in my life, I was truly and fully myself.
“How do I find who did this?” I gripped the top of the sofa.
“I have no idea,” Mols said. “I’ve worked with tattoos and magic for years and I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“You were telling the truth.” Levi stood up stiffly. “As Head of House Pacifica, may I extend my apologies? Any charges about you being Rogue will, of course, be dropped and–”
I winged my water bottle at his chest. “Fuck your charges. Fuck your House. And most importantly, fuck you.” I grabbed my shoes and bag that Miles had brought with us.
Miles stepped sideways into my path.
I pivoted sharply to face Levi, my hands balled into fists and my breath coming out in harsh rasps.
His eyes darted between Miles and me for a long moment. “She’s been through enough. Let her go.”
Chapter 6
Throwing the money that Talia had given me for cab fare at the bewildered taxi driver, I sprinted up the stairs to my apartment and tore the ruined dress off, kicking it into a corner before showering and slipping into my coziest fleece pajamas.
“Pri?” I whispered, pushing her door open. Careful not to trip on the dark lumps on her floor that were probably shoes, I sat down her bed.
Blood & Ash: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Detective Series (The Jezebel Files Book 1) Page 6