Before Kat could figure out a new way to broach the topic, they arrived at the bookstore and found someone waiting on the front stoop.
The woman looked to be in her mid- to late thirties. Her dark hair and tan skin hinted at some kind of Hispanic descent. She was dressed professionally, black slacks and a pale-pink blouse, suggesting she’d come straight here after work. The pensive expression she wore spoke of trouble brewing on the horizon.
Liam parked the SUV and cut the engine. “It can’t be. Not after all this time,” he muttered.
“You know her?” Kat asked.
“Gabriella Cortez.” He unbuckled his seatbelt. “We were friends back in the day. She was married to Alberto Perez, one of the other detectives at my precinct.”
“Was?” Kat pressed for clarification.
Liam shook his head slowly, like he was loath to accept the fact that yes, another face from his past had blown onto his doorstep uninvited. “Yeah. It was a shit marriage, and they started divorce proceedings a few months before…” He swallowed. “Before.”
“I see.”
Liam blew out a deep breath. “Also, she’s a shifter.”
Kat leaned forward to get a better look at the woman. The last time Kat had come across a shifter in Salem’s Gate, her very first morning in the city, they had chased her for several blocks until her superhuman speed outmatched them. Kat wondered if this woman was acquainted with that asshole wolf, and if she could perhaps point Kat in their direction. Kat had been itching to give that shifter a piece of her mind.
“I’m guessing you two haven’t been in contact for a while?” Kat said.
“We have not. I lost track of her after I quit the force.”
“Yet she shows up today, right after three shifters are brutally murdered. No way that’s a coincidence.”
“You’re not wrong there. Gabby’s one of the leaders of the local shifter community council.” He finally opened his door, accepting that he would have to interact with the woman on his stoop. “Every time shifters and human law enforcement get entangled, she shows up to mediate the conflict—and make sure no one’s rights are violated.”
Kat chewed on her tongue. “So, ah, what exactly does she shift into?”
The question brought a faint smile to Liam’s lips. “A jaguar,” he answered, and slipped out of the SUV.
Kat blinked. A jaguar shifter? I’ve never even seen a regular jaguar!
Tailing Liam across the street, Kat observed the shifter woman with a keen eye, trying to find any hint of the animal within. But unlike vampires or faeries, shifters had no overt tells. Kat had heard their eyes would sometimes glow with a yellow sheen, if they were angry or agitated or excited, but the woman on the steps seemed exhausted more than anything else.
Years of civil rights’ advocacy in a world plagued by existential terror of the supernatural would do that to a person.
Cortez caught the sound of their approach over the low moan of the winter wind when they were still twenty feet away. She looked up, gaze skipping over Liam to scrutinize Kat, the unknown element in this interaction. She visibly sniffed, an attempt to use what must’ve been a sharp sense of smell to figure out what Kat was.
Kat was fairly skilled at enhancing her own senses, but oftentimes, she didn’t know what details to look for when she was dealing with supernatural elements. Liam had been filling those gaps in her knowledge these past few weeks, and now Kat could distinguish between the “minty freshness” of the fae and the lilac scent of vampires. This woman, clearly, could do the same.
However, Kat didn’t smell like any other supernatural, or so Liam had informed her. She smelled like some amalgam, which was what she was—a Frankenstein’s monster, designed in a laboratory. Bits and pieces of different supernaturals, spliced together to create something entirely new from the varying flavors of old.
Cortez’s brow furrowed in confusion, but Liam started the conversation before she could ask any questions. “Gabby, hey. Long time no see.”
Cortez dragged her attention away from Kat. “Good to see you again, Liam. It’s been far too long. I only wish we were meeting under better circumstances.”
“You’re here about the murders.”
“Franc sent me your way.” She stood up and brushed off the back of her pants. “Said you were working your own angle. Something about a missing man who may or may not be involved?”
Liam dug his keys out of his pocket. “Come on in, and I’ll catch you up to speed. It’s too cold to talk outside.”
Cortez’s eyes flicked toward Kat again. “Hello there. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“I’m Kat,” Kat said awkwardly. “A new friend of Liam’s. Oh, and I also live here right now.”
Cortez raised an eyebrow. “Really? Didn’t know you’d become a landlord, Liam.”
Liam waved off the implication. “She’s running the store for me so I can focus on my PI work.”
“Ah.” Cortez’s lips quirked up at one end. “That makes perfect sense.”
Inside, Kat and Cortez sat down at the kitchen table while Liam rustled up some snacks for them to munch on while they conversed. Bags of popcorn, chips, and pretzels replaced the empty KFC containers on the tabletop, and Liam grabbed a few cans of soda from the fridge to round out the late-night junk food session.
Cortez eyed the Coke can skeptically as Liam handed it to her, and took a quick peek at the fridge as the door was swinging shut. She quickly caught on to the fact that no beer graced the shelves, and while she cracked the can open and took a sip, she subtly scanned the rest of the kitchen, noting the lack of the countertop wine rack that had once sat between the toaster oven and the coffee maker.
Liam picked up on her scrutiny too. “Sorry,” he said, dropping into the chair across from Cortez, “I’m a teetotaler now.”
Cortez tore open the bag of chips with a pop that perfectly expressed her surprise. “Since when?”
“About a month ago.”
“What spurred that change?” Cortez asked, tossing a chip into her mouth.
“Three years of rampant alcoholism.”
Cortez paused with her soda can halfway to her lips. “Oh, Liam, I didn’t realize that you…” Fell apart quite that badly after your wife and child died in a horrible accident, she couldn’t quite bring herself to say.
“The past might be well and done,” Liam said, “but that doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you in the present.”
“More like haunt you,” Kat murmured, flashes of her nightmares about A9 flitting through the back of her mind.
Cortez set her can down and sighed. “Seeing me brought back some memories, didn’t it?” she said softly. “I apologize for that. I didn’t mean to spring such difficult feelings on you. But what happened to the Avery family is a bad portent, and I need to get on top of this before the social tensions rise too high.”
Liam nodded. “I’m not upset with you or anything. It’s just…a lot, speaking with you and Franc back to back in a matter of hours. It’s been a long time since I let myself associate this much with the people I knew before. Besides Yun, I let everyone in my life drift away after the accident, because you all remind me of better days.”
Cortez gave him a sympathetic look. “Some of your better days will live on in the past forever, but some of them dwell in the future, eager to meet you.”
Liam snorted. “Still quoting those self-help books, are you?”
She shrugged. “Everybody needs a pick-me-up from time to time, and some of those books do provide you with useful tools to manage stress and the like. You should try a few. I’ll even let you borrow mine.”
“No thanks.” Liam chuckled, and the air of discomfort that had been hanging over the table dissipated. “I can do without recs for morning yoga and switching to a diet of quinoa and mixed-berry smoothies.”
Cortez stuck out her tongue. “They’re not all li
ke that.”
“Sure, Gabby. Sure.”
Kat’s gaze darted from Cortez to Liam as a touch of old camaraderie rekindled between them. There’s still a good friendship there, she thought. It just needs to be thawed out before Liam has a chance to toss it in the freezer again.
“So, how’s Javier?” Liam poured a few pretzels out of the bag and started munching down. “Still a rambunctious little cuddle monster?”
“Oh, how I wish.” Cortez rolled her eyes. “He turns twelve in March, and he’s already trying to take teen rebellion by the reins.”
“It only gets worse from there.” Liam grinned. “You should’ve seen me at thirteen. I was a right little shit.”
Cortez harrumphed. “You were a right little shit at thirty.”
Liam laughed, louder this time. “I did have that reputation in some circles.”
“You still have that reputation in some circles.” She pointed an accusatory finger at him. “I heard you hassled the little Lord Vanderhall into expending a significant amount of resources for some secret project last month.”
Kat stiffened, and Liam paused with a pretzel pinned between his lips. “Who told you that?” he said, suddenly serious.
“I have my sources.” Cortez leaned back in her chair, examining the unease that had cropped up on two sides of the table. “I’m guessing it’s true?”
Liam’s mirth fell to the wayside. “I need a name, Gabby. I have to plug that leak immediately.”
Her eyes narrowed, and Kat finally saw it, that primal yellow glint atop her irises. “I like to build intelligence networks, Liam, not burn them.”
“Gabby,” he said hoarsely, “I can’t have somebody from Vanderhall’s camp handing out info about that ‘project’ like candy. If it gets back to the wrong person…”
“What’ll happen?” Cortez pressed.
“I’ll end up in a cell again,” Kat said, entering the conversation for the first time since they ventured upstairs.
Cortez started. “What?”
Liam opened his mouth to ward off further questioning, but Kat held up a finger to stop him. The accident was Liam’s story to dwell on or to avoid like the plague. But what A9 had done to Kat was her story to hold near and dear, or to share with people Kat thought that she could trust.
Now, it was true that Kat had only known Gabriella Cortez for roughly fifteen minutes. But in those minutes, the woman had proven that she was smart as a whip. And both her and Liam had implied that she held some significant place of authority in the shifter community, a community that Liam and Kat would probably need to explore at some depth before this case was over.
Since Caoimhe O’Connor and Auguste Vanderhall, two other major leaders of the Salem’s Gate supernatural community, already knew about A9 and Kat’s predicament, Kat thought it would be smart to offer Cortez an olive branch in the form of intel about a group that could one day threaten the shifters.
If Cortez felt somewhat indebted to Liam and Kat for bringing her up to speed on a matter that affected her people, then she would be more partial to letting them peek past the curtain of the shifter community when the clues in this case inevitably led them to some personal and painful places.
So Kat steeled herself and gave Cortez a summary of Advent 9’s activities, and of what they had done to Kat for two whole years.
When she finished, Cortez swore under her breath in Spanish for almost a full minute, before she said, “Good god. I’m so sorry for taking jabs at you, Ms. King. If I had known the predicament that landed you in Salem’s Gate was so awful, I wouldn’t have…”
“No, it’s fine,” Kat replied. “In fact, I think it’s better to joke about it a little bit. Otherwise, it gets really depressing.”
Cortez closed her eyes tightly, trying to process the terrible things that Kat had told her. But when she opened them again, her composure had returned, her shock and horror tucked away in a neatly compartmentalized box, which she would work through at a more appropriate time.
Gosh, Kat thought, I wish I was that good at managing my emotions.
“I’ll tell my source to zip his lips,” Cortez said to Liam. “You’re absolutely right. We can’t afford for that information to reach the wrong ears. If that A9 group comes barging back into town, especially after what happened tonight, there will be bloodshed on a scale that hasn’t been seen in ten years.”
Liam dipped his chin. “I appreciate your discretion.”
“Well then, I guess we should circle back to the point of this meeting.” Cortez chugged the rest of her soda down, like the admission of the poor social relations between sups and not-sups had sucked all the moisture from her throat. “The Avery murders. What have you learned so far?”
Liam gave her an overview of Cunningham’s missing persons case and his tenuous connection to the triple homicide. “But before we denounce this guy as some shifter killer,” he pointed out, “we need to learn a lot more about him, and why he up and vanished a few days back. I think there’s a lot more to his disappearance than a middle-aged ad man snapping from years of corporate monotony and deciding to go on a rampage.
“A high-level magic user was near or in that house at the time the murders occurred, and we need to ferret out that person’s identity just as much as we need to find Cunningham. There’s a bigger picture here, and so far, we’ve only gathered a handful of pieces.”
Cortez tapped her manicured fingernail on the tabletop. “In essence, you’re saying we should call this Cunningham a ‘person of interest’ for the time being, as opposed to outright labeling him a suspect. Because it could be that he was coerced into helping the real perpetrator, or that some other similar tragedy befell him.”
“Right.” Liam finished off his own soda. “There’s definitely some sort of sup involvement in this case. According to Cunningham’s wife, he never even dipped a toe in the sup community.”
“He could’ve been keeping secrets,” Kat offered, “involving himself in the sup community on the down low.”
“I agree with you,” he replied. “But the question is how. The cops already went over all his financials, his social media, his emails, and they came up with bupkis. So either this guy is a lot more technologically savvy than the average middle-aged man with a marketing degree from the nineties, or all of his involvement with the sup community took place entirely off the electronic radar.
“That’s a rarity these days, even in most sup circles. Hell, the fae use modern technology, and they spend most of their time living in another dimension.”
“There are certain circles where modern tech is verboten.” Cortez tossed her empty soda can into the trashcan with flawless aim. “Circles where people indulge in vices that are borderline or outright illegal. Drugs. Gambling. Prostitution.”
“And some sup groups do run in those circles,” Liam admitted. “He could have come into contact with a criminal sup element in such a setting, and gotten himself in over his head in some fashion.”
“But that’s just speculation.” Kat grabbed a handful of chips and spoke between bites. “We can’t investigate every ‘criminal sup element’ in town and hope we get a hit. The city’s simply too big. It would take us forever, even if we tap the cops for help. We need to narrow down the scope of the investigation somehow.”
“I know.” Liam sighed. “What we really need is to locate the man himself and interview him. But if I can’t scry him directly due to the magic user’s interference, then…” His head cocked to the left, the way it always did when a bright idea took hold.
Cortez apparently remembered this habit, as she asked, “Want to share your amazing revelation with the class?”
A smug grin tugged at Liam’s lips. “I can’t scry Cunningham’s spiritual signature because the magic user he’s with is on the lookout for spells that seek out his signature. But I’d bet good money that they’re not on the lookout for people scrying the s
piritual signatures of the Avery victims.”
Kat drew her brows together. “I don’t quite follow.”
But Cortez did. “Blood. The reports I received said that a great deal of blood was spilled at the scene. So much that whoever was in the room where the victims were killed must have been covered with it.”
Kat began to understand. “And blood carries spiritual signatures, just like objects do?”
“Exactly.” Liam snapped his fingers several times, excited. “I can use a scrying spell on a blood sample from one of the victims to locate other concentrations of that blood, because they carry the same spiritual signature.
“It’s only been, what, two hours since the murders? All the blood will be pretty fresh, so the spiritual signatures will still be strong. If there’s any blood left clinging to Cunningham, or the magic user, or whoever else might’ve been in the house, we can pinpoint any of their locations.”
Kat hummed. “So you can locate more than one target with a scrying spell?”
“If you structure it correctly, yes,” Liam answered. “All you need to do is add a few extra lines to the incantation. The spells I used before were meant to home in on the highest concentration of a person’s magic signature, that is, the person themselves. But with some minor modifications, you can have scrying spells seek out numerous instances of a signature, and use a larger mirror to display the locations of all of them at once.”
“Does seeking out multiple instances require more magic energy than seeking out one?” Kat asked, feigning innocence.
Liam’s enthusiasm waned. “Actually, yeah, it does.”
It was Kat’s turn to throw up a smug smile. “Then maybe it’s finally time for me to try my hand at scrying.”
Liam opened his mouth to argue with her, but at her sharp look, daring him to try and claim he had enough magic juice to perform a spell even more taxing than the one that had nearly made him faint in Cunningham’s office, he let his shoulders droop and said, “All right. Fine. I’ll let you try it.”
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