She yawned, cracking a bleary eye open. “What time is it?”
“Really late or really early. Can I sleep here?”
She brushed a strand of hair out of my face. “Want to talk about it?”
“Not yet.”
Priya pulled the covers back and I crawled in beside her. I expected to stay awake rehashing the night’s events, but my friend was giving off heat like a furnace and her sheets smelled like sunshine and sleep claimed me.
She didn’t push me to talk the next day, for which I was profoundly grateful.
We made coffee in comfortable silence, Priya washing our cups as soon as we’d finished. For all that her shit was strewn everywhere, she was fanatical about staying on top of clean dishes and laundry, whereas I kept things tidy but would happily ignore dishes and laundry until circumstances became dire.
It wasn’t until we’d reached our office on the outskirts of Gastown on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and my triple shot of espresso had kicked in that I was up to the task of sharing everything that I’d gone through last night.
Cohen Investigations was part of a shared space on the second floor of a five-story walk-up heritage building with a ton of vintage charm in its exposed brick, original oak floors, and cool steel cross bracings that ran through the building, allowing it to sway in an earthquake when the Big One hit. It didn’t matter that my office had a view of the alley or that the cockroaches were currently winning our ongoing war, every time I walked in, I smiled.
I was about to tell Priya everything, except who should I find waiting for me in the common reception area? Charlotte Rose.
She slouched on one of the sofas wearing some weird fuzzy cap with bunny ears, but as soon as she saw me, she jumped to her feet. “This is your fault!”
Priya raised her eyebrows at me and I shrugged. “Why don’t you come into my office?”
Without waiting to see if she’d follow, I crossed into the frosted glass office door with my business name stenciled in gold.
Spaghetti western music played in my head as I sat down on my squeaky chair. Every encounter with the damn thing was a high noon showdown. I prayed the Crazy Glue held on the wonky wheel because tipping over sideways was not an experience I relished enduring a third time.
Priya set up her laptop at the IKEA desk next to mine, while Charlotte Rose took one of the moss green wingback chairs set out for clients. I didn’t bother opening my ancient MacBook, snagging a pen out of the ceramic mug that said “Baker Street Boys” in order to take my preferred longhand notes.
“Meryem is missing because of you,” she said. “The House took her.”
A dull pounding danced a samba in my temples, leaving me with no patience for conspiracy theories. “When?”
“Yesterday. We were supposed to meet at midnight and she didn’t show. She always shows. And her phone is off, which isn’t like her.”
“Maybe she couldn’t sneak out like you did,” I said.
C.R.’s lip quivered then became a sneer under those floppy bunny ears. “Forget it.”
“Wait,” I said as she stood up. “Sit down. I’m sorry. I had a crappy night but that’s not your fault. Tell me what happened.”
“Mom contacted House Pacifica last night. It put me on their radar and they took her to get back at me.”
Priya subtly pushed a note across her desk. It was a drawing of the earth revolving around a little Charlotte Rose stick figure. She’d nailed the bunny ears.
I tamped down on a grin. “First of all, what did the House say?”
C.R. bit her lip. “Nothing yet. I don’t think. Mom left a message. But Meryem–”
“Yeah, Meryem may be missing, but that doesn’t make the House responsible. Bad shit happens.”
Damn. Meryem was Nefesh so I couldn’t take this case. Oh, hang on. Hell yes, I could. And I would because those smudges were out there feeding off people. I vowed to do everything possible to ensure she lived to give the finger another day.
“Give me a dollar,” I said.
“Why?” Charlotte Rose said.
I rolled my eyes. Of course she wouldn’t know this. And I should have known better than to entangle myself in this further but– “Just do it.”
She dug around in her pocket then handed me a gold coin. A Canadian one dollar, known as a loonie after the loons depicted on them.
“There.” I placed the coin on my desk. “Now you’ve officially retained me and have client-P.I. privilege.”
“I don’t have a lot to pay you, but I can give you my babysitting money.”
“How about we worry about that after we find Meryem? Tell me everything you know about her.”
An hour later, I had all the details about their nauseatingly cute courtship and very little useful information. Meryem didn’t like to talk about her family, but C.R. confirmed she wasn’t living with them. She’d been living in a youth shelter or crashing with friends.
Young, magic, and alone. A tasty meal for the modern smudge-about-town.
“Why do you think the House is experimenting on people?” I said.
“This kid at my school? His brother’s friend’s boyfriend was at his dealer’s place when these guys showed up and took him.”
Nothing like a trusted source. “What was his magic?”
Charlotte Rose frowned. “He wasn’t Nefesh.”
“Then why would the House want him?”
“Because they experiment on Mundanes, too.”
“The boyfriend said this?”
“No. The boyfriend was found dead.” She gave me one of those scathing “keep up” eye rolls.
“Of what?” I rooted around in my desk drawer for some Tylenol and dry swallowed a couple.
“Heroin overdose. But see, that’s the proof. Because he only ever smoked pot.” She lowered her voice to a dramatic whisper. “It was a cover up.”
I nodded sagely, pretending to write a note on my pad while really drawing a hangman.
“Who else except the House has that kind of power?” C.R. said.
That was the million-dollar question. I sighed. “I don’t know, but we’ll find out.”
The interview wrapped up soon after.
“Did I give you enough information to find her?” C.R. turned big, worried eyes on me as I escorted her to the office door.
“Yeah. You did great.” I patted her shoulder. “I’ll keep you posted, okay?”
The second the door shut, I turned to Priya. “Whatcha got?”
“Meryem Orfali.” Priya turned her laptop to show a school photo that was maybe a couple of years old of a girl with a shy smile wearing a headscarf. “Turkish. She came over with the other magic refugees in the big purge five years ago.”
The men who had released magic into the world may have been Jewish, but they had come from countries as diverse as China, Afghanistan, France, and Russia, because by that point, the bloodlines of the original Ten Lost Tribes flowed through every race and religion. As a result, so too, did the magic.
Nowadays, magic, found in about ten percent of the global population, was pretty much everywhere with a fairly even divide between men and women.
I used the stack of unpaid bills on my desk as an elbow rest. “So what happened between then and now? Because the girl I met wasn’t playing dress up. Or down, as the case may be.”
Priya’s fingers flew over the keyboard, her gold rings catching the light. “Give me a bit. I need to suss out multiple sources.”
During the forty-five minutes that it took Priya to amass a more detailed profile, I sent three reminder emails for payments, ate two packages of discount ramen noodles in the shared kitchen, i.e. breakfast and lunch, and disappointed Bryan, the insurance agent who rented one of the other offices, when I failed to have satisfactory answers about how Priya’s aunt’s dog’s kneecap surgery had gone.
A rabid dog lover, Bryan looked so anxious about the animal’s condition that I trudged back into my office. “How’s Reeses Puppycups?”
Priya glanced up with a wide smile. “Is Bryan asking? The vet had hoped that she could fix it by loosening the tissue on the inside of the patella, but they also had to stabilize the tibial tuberosity with pins.”
I stared at her hard, then turned back to Bryan, hovering in the reception area. “The dog is fine.”
He threw me a thumbs up and retreated into his office.
Priya was snickering when I came back in so I blew a raspberry at her.
“If you’re quite finished demeaning the help?” she said. “According to Meryem’s immigration records, she was shipped here to live with her maternal aunt and uncle, both Mundanes, when she was eleven. Aunt died about a year ago.”
“Any priors on the uncle? Reports of abuse?” I sat down, dancing C.R.’s coin over my knuckles.
Priya shook her head. “No. But there is a donation record in his name to the Untainted Party.”
“Fuck. I’d have gotten out of there, too.” Poor girl. Even if her immediate family was still alive back in Turkey, she couldn’t return home. She’d escaped a country that was fanatical against Nefesh and then lost the one person here looking out for her well-being. “What’s her magic rank?”
“What was your assessment of her abilities?”
“Hmm.” I considered opening the bills littering my desk. For about a second. Running my own business was no easy matter. Some days the actual casework took up the smallest fraction of my time, while the rest was a precarious balancing act to stay afloat. I didn’t have the energy to navigate that today. “Coming from a country known for its persecution of Nefesh, Meryem wouldn’t have been trained in her powers. And I doubt any training happened after she arrived. Not with that uncle. She did generate a good blast of wind but there was no finesse to it. More like she threw everything at the wall.”
“So to speak,” Priya said.
“And she didn’t try again. Even factoring in the sonic weapon, a well-trained elemental could have attacked again. Two out of five. Maybe three but that would be pushing it.”
“Good guess. Two.” Priya closed her laptop and folded her hands. “Tell me what happened last night?”
I grabbed a handful of darts from the mounted holder and planted myself in front of the dartboard hanging on one wall. Other than a framed photo on my desk of Priya and myself in our university graduation caps and gowns, it was the only personal item in here. “We should come up with a plan for Meryem.”
“We will, but you need to talk this out.”
I threw my first dart and launched into my tale, picking up from when she’d dropped me off at home and taking her through the events of last night. “Essentially I have blood magic because a powerful ward on my head designed to suppress it was destroyed.”
She shrugged.
“That’s all I get? How about a gasp that I have magic at all? Or some pearl-clutching at it being blood magic?”
“Eh. Name one part of your history that isn’t fucked up.”
I blinked twice, then laughed. “Trust you to put it all into focus. Je t’adore, Adler.”
Priya tossed her hair. “Mais bien sûr, Holmes. I’m extremely loveable.” She grew serious. “How are you going to determine who’s behind the ward?”
A couple of bills toppled off the desk and I lunged to grab them. I wasn’t enough of an asshole to take C.R.’s babysitting money, but that didn’t mean my grown-up responsibilities could be pushed off forever.
People viewed the world through one of two filters: trust or certainty. Trust was a shell game. That’s where I came in. Life was messy and complicated and full of mysteries, large and small. Is my husband cheating? What did she do with my grandmother’s ring? Is that leg cast for real? I got answers so that clients in the “Fool Me Once” category wouldn’t get fooled again and shut down those trying to pull a fast one: be it on an insurance company or a loved one.
And yes, sometimes, the truth was hard to hear, but it was always better to know. Answers, no matter how upsetting, trumped unanswered questions because they brought closure. Answers equaled certainty.
Answers equaled control.
It wasn’t altruism. Humanity sucked, but not everyone deserved what they got. I loved sniffing out clues and methodically putting the pieces together until the full picture was revealed, and if my skills eased someone’s anxiety, then win-win.
Speaking of, if I didn’t ease some well-paying anxiety soon, I was hooped.
Sighing, I sat down at my desk and straightened the pile. “First let’s focus on Meryem. We’ll take a two-pronged approach. If you–”
The office door opened and Levi strode through like he owned the place, wearing an exquisitely tailored wool coat, a leather briefcase in one hand and a dry cleaning bag dangling from the fingertips of his other.
I bristled. “We’re closed.”
“Good.” He sat down across from me. “We won’t be disturbed. Hey, Priya.”
“Levi,” she said coolly.
He grinned at her, his blue eyes sparkling with mischief as he shrugged out of his coat. “Should I expect payback for arresting Ash?”
“When you least expect it. Yes.”
“Duly noted.” Levi handed me the bag. “You left this behind at the Aquarium and as they aren’t in the secondhand clothing business, I took it upon myself to retrieve it. You’re welcome.”
I smoothed out the plastic-wrapped wool trench coat and hung it off my chair. “Thank you, Mr. Montefiore, for your overwhelming benevolence. Now if that’s everything?”
“Not by a long shot.” He opened the briefcase and handed me a manila envelope. “Papers. Sign them.”
“Is our divorce final? At last.” I pulled the documents out and scanned them. “Registration forms,” I said in a flat voice.
Levi chucked me a Montblanc pen. It hit me in the chest and bounced onto my desk. “Brilliant powers of deduction.”
I scribbled my signature on the damn documents because legally I had no choice in becoming part of House Pacifica, then thrust them back at him, along with his rich dude cliché pen. Levi may have thought he was bringing me under his control, but he’d just ensured that any Nefesh case was mine for the taking. I almost threw a victory sign. “We done?”
“No. I want to hire you.”
Fat gold dollar signs danced around his head, but I kept my cool and leaned back in my chair, which creaked disturbingly. “Hire one of your lackeys.”
“This is a sensitive job.”
“And you trust me with it?” If my eyebrows shot any higher they’d have liftoff.
“Least of all. But your skill set makes you uniquely qualified.”
Ah. He wanted me to investigate the smudge. This could be huge. Except he was going about it in his typical high-handed way. Let him work for it.
“Give me another backhanded compliment, baby. I get all shivery.”
Levi removed a small white bakery box from the briefcase and slid it across my desk. “A peace offering.”
I opened the lid. A jelly doughnut.
“Only one?” Priya said.
“I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“Uh-huh,” she said snippily and left the room.
Ooh, Levi was going to pay so badly. Even he looked concerned.
“You think a jelly doughnut is going to smooth things over?” I said.
“They’re your favorite.”
“Says who?” I mean, yeah, they totally were, but how did he know that? Was he stalking me?
He held out his hand to show me the tiny silver scar at the base of his thumb. “The fact you stabbed me with a fork when we were sixteen to get the last one.”
“Youthful exuberance. That still does nothing to convince me I should work for you. Or what this case even is.”
“Destroy those smudges and find whatever or whoever is causing them.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the only one who can see them.” Called
it. “I don’t want to cause mass panic by asking around if anyone else can. The situation is delicate and I don’t want knowledge of smudges going beyond you, me, and Miles, for now. And Priya, obviously.”
“Took you long enough to believe me.”
“I believe you aren’t responsible for those things. Hence why I’m here.” He loosened his death grip on his briefcase.
“You hate this, don’t you? All your Nefesh cops and security and you need me.” I couldn’t have stopped my smirk for all the money in the world.
He flexed his hands against my desk. “Yes or no?”
I grinned at him. “Say ‘I need you, Ash. Your investigative skills are unparalleled and your magic puts mine to shame.’”
“This is the opportunity of your lifetime.”
True, but by his own admission, there was no one else he could turn to. If Levi wanted my skills, he could admit my competence instead of acting like I was doing him a favor with my magic party trick. “I’m full up. Too bad. So sad.”
Levi stuffed the documents in his briefcase. “This is all a game, isn’t it? All about how clever you are to solve your cases. Well, this isn’t about puzzles, it’s about people and the fact that something out there is preying on them. But I guess you’d have to respect and care about them to understand that.”
“You are so out of line.” I toyed with one of my darts, resisting the urge to nail him with it. “I care about people enough to do everything to give them the truth. To give all people answers and closure and assistance, where your so-called caring only exists for Nefesh. And if you want to talk about respect, I haven’t seen a whole hell of a lot from you over the years. Don’t know if it’s ’cause you pegged me as the weird fucked-up kid and never got past that or I was Mundane or what. But you’ve judged me at every turn.”
I threw the dart across the room. It bullseyed into the board with a satisfying thunk. “You want respect from me? Earn it.”
Our silence was charged with a tension so thick, the air practically crackled with it.
I took a breath.
And then three more.
Levi was insufferable, but I couldn’t fault him for caring about his people. Maybe he’d come to the same conclusion about me.
Blood & Ash: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Detective Series (The Jezebel Files Book 1) Page 7