by Gina LaManna
“How did Peter run his Harmony business?” I asked. “The Herbals dealers out there are terrified of him. Half of them don’t want to be dealing Harmony—they don’t even know how they got sucked into it. By the time they realized what they were selling, it was too late, and they couldn’t tell anyone for fear of being implicated as well.”
“That’s why the plan was genius. Nobody realized it until it was too late, and then they reacted out of fear. His vendors will do anything—including giving Peter a hefty cut of their profits—so they don’t get in trouble. Thereby worsening the spiral and stepping deeper and deeper into trouble.”
“The Bellevue case,” I said. “Related?”
She gave a slim smile. “I’ll give you one guess.”
“I have an idea, but I’m needing a hint to connect the dots.”
“Ellen, the poor elf, was Peter’s ex-girlfriend,” she said dryly. “Peter didn’t like to share that information. Especially not because she went and dumped Peter to go out with her troll—the man she ended up wanting to marry—and Peter never recovered. His ego bruises like a peach.” Lucia practically spat the last word. “I don’t think he ever truly got over her. I was madly in love with him, but he always kept a part of himself detached. He was never fully committed to the relationship, and only after he brought me here as a captive did I find out why.”
“You think he still had feelings for the Bellevue girl?”
“I know it,” she said. “That’s how I caught him in the first place—I might never have noticed this whole Harmony business if Peter had just moved on from Ellen Bellevue like he was supposed to after their break-up.”
I blanched at the bitterness in her voice. Not only had she loved Peter, but it’d been unrequited. A double dose of bitter pills to swallow. “How did you find out?”
“The night Ellen Bellevue and her fiancé announced their engagement, Peter was called out suddenly on a case. The next day, Ellen and her fiancé—the troll—were found dead in their home. Murder-suicide.” Her eyes went dull at the retelling of it. “I didn’t think anything of it right away, except that it was all so tragic.”
“I wondered if the Bellevue family hadn’t set up the whole thing from the inside,” I admitted. “Having Ellen Bellevue fall in love with a troll doesn’t fit well in the family tree.”
“I wondered that too, which is why I started looking deeper into the case,” she said. “Around the same time, Peter started acting strangely. He started withdrawing from our relationship. When we would—” she cleared her throat—“be intimate, he was aggressive. I didn’t like it and told him to stop, and he broke up with me on the spot. The next day, he came back and apologized. He said he was affected by his ex-girlfriend’s death and had lost his temper. I was suspicious, but I loved him. I ignored the red flags, as stupid as that sounds.”
“It doesn’t sound stupid,” I said. “It’s sounds like love. And trust.”
“It didn’t matter, anyway,” she said with a sigh. “I was already suspicious. There were just too many signs impossible to deny,” she said. “He had no alibi for the time of their deaths, which was odd, since he was supposedly out on a work call.”
“Which made you dig deeper.”
“I found some weird records he filed about his informants,” she continued. “I started talking with Herbal vendors and got the feel something big was hitting the streets. The necromancer case came next—but I knew it wasn’t real necromancy. As soon as I uncovered Farmer Marcell and his connection to Peter, I began preparing my evidence and theories to go to Chief Newton. Before I could—”
A door opened noisily in the other room, drawing Lucia’s story to a grim end.
“That’s all for story time, today,” she said dryly. “Any questions, kids?”
“Yep,” I said, adding a layer of sarcasm. “How are we planning to get out of this mess?”
Chapter 24
The fight for our lives began before I was ready.
Peter opened the locked door holding us captive in his swanky apartment, and I set my resolve—I was prepared to die if it meant that Lucia would live. My jaw dropped open when Lucia flicked her wrist and sent a knife flying across the room. She’d pulled it from her side, and before Peter could take a breath, it plunged into his side.
Peter’s eyes went wide with shock first, and then anger. Also reeling from shock, I felt my head do a full swivel as I turned toward Lucia.
“Where’d you get the knife?” I asked. “And why didn’t you tell me you had one?”
“Stole it from dinner a few weeks back,” she said, gasping as she stood to move toward him. “We’ll chat later, Detective. We need to get you free.”
It wasn’t a perfect shot, but considering Lucia’s hands were tied, it had hit the mark. The steak knife had lodged itself in Peter’s side, just above his hip—deep enough to slow his movements for a brief second.
I dodged across the room, sliding out from under his bloody grasp as he reached for me. I swiped the keys he still held in his hand—fresh from unlocking the door—and tossed them to Lucia.
“Sorry,” I grunted, as I reached lower and yanked the knife from his side. “Gonna hurt.”
Peter let out a howl and slid down the wall, his hands pressed to the wound in an effort to stem the bleeding. I doubted it would keep him down for long—and when he got up, he’d be wild with angry vigor.
I reached Lucia’s side and quickly ran the knife across the rope looped around her wrists. Meanwhile, she fumbled through Peter’s keys in search of the one that would unlock my handcuffs.
“Sorry I didn’t tell you about the knife,” Lucia said as she continued to flick through the keys. “I figured sooner or later Peter would bring you here, and when that day came, I wanted a way to help you be free. I owed you after everything you taught me. I knew you’d come find me, and I knew I’d owe you my life.”
“Move faster, or we won’t have any lives to worry about,” I said, glancing over my shoulder as Peter rose to his knees and used a Healing Hex to slap basic stitches over his wound. I’d used it before myself, and I knew it wouldn’t work as a permanent fix for the internal damage he’d suffered, but it would heal the superficial wound and act as a patch for now. “Lucia—”
“Listen, Detective. I know you’ve been in a similar position, and I realize that the death of your ex affected you deeply. I promise you it won’t be the same for me.” With that, Lucia inserted the correct key into my cuffs, and we were both free. “Peter’s mine to kill.”
“Lucia—no!”
My cry was too late. She raised her hands, muttering an incantation. As I stepped toward her, she gave me a shove to one side, hard enough that I flew backward and hit the wall with a thud. Pivoting quickly, she raised her hands and conjured a Slasher—a brutal sort of curse that would cause a slow and painful death if left untreated—and sent it toward Peter. It was an illegal form of magic, something I’d only seen at gruesome murder scenes—and I wondered where Lucia had picked it up.
I couldn’t stop the curse without creating some sort of mad bounce-back of magic around the room, but Peter had nothing to lose. He sent back a reversal that had the spells colliding with a boom mid-air, fingers of the Slasher reaching in every direction.
I dove behind a couch as a spiral of green veered my way, but Lucia didn’t react quickly enough. A part of the curse hit her casting arm, and she let loose a guttural yell as blood spurted from the gash. Lucia went down in a hard pile on the floor, making her an easy target.
Peter’s adrenaline had kicked in, along with the murderous gleam in his eye. He rose, bleeding and pained and furious. The wound on his side drenched his white shirt with horrifying amounts of blood, and the Slasher had clipped a bit of his forehead. He looked downright manic.
As he prepared to launch the final illegal Slasher Spell that would end Lucia, I panicked. I couldn’t reverse a spell from behind the target, nor did I have any way to defend the now-helpless Lucia from the ho
micidal maniac who’d once claimed to love her.
“Lucia, roll!” I said, taking a sudden burst of inspiration from Sienna and Juno. I threw an Invisibility Incantation toward Lucia, and with a light pop and a burst of colorful Residuals, she disappeared completely from Peter’s view. I could see the blurry ball of Residuals where Lucia ducked and rolled toward me.
Peter roared with frustration, but he sent down the curse anyway, even as I lunged for him and dislodged one of his feet, sending his spell careening off the wall and shattering into fractured bits.
“Come and get me, asshole,” I said, forcing Lucia out of my mind. I couldn’t tell if she’d been hit again, and I didn’t have time to find out.
Sprinting around the corner, I spotted the agency-issued dual broomstick Peter and I had ridden to get here and grabbed it, tearing through the glam apartment toward the flight balcony. Peter followed close at my heels. There was no way he was letting me off this deck alive. I knew too much... and so did Lucia.
I was counting on Peter tailing me through the skies—it was the only way to save Lucia’s life. If I got away on my own, he’d kill her first before coming after me. I mounted the broomstick and lifted into the air—hovering over the edge of the building, taunting him. His broomstick sat on a ledge next to the flight deck, but instead of reaching for it, he didn’t stop running. By the time I realized his plan, it was too late.
With a flying leap, he managed to grasp the back of my broomstick even as I twitched it upward and out of his grasp. He was strong, and the adrenaline gave him an extra burst of strength. Swinging himself onto the backseat of my broomstick, he lunged for me, and I had no choice but to take off—aiming for the ground in a steep nosedive.
The descent was fast and brutal. My ears popped and frigid winds whipped past my cheeks, but there was no way a fight from four hundred and seven stories in the air would end well for either of us. If possible, I wanted to keep Peter alive.
I wanted him to face his crimes, to pay for what he’d done. I wanted him to see the disappointment on Nash’s face. I hadn’t found closure with Trenton, but Lucia and Nash deserved that from Peter.
Glancing over my shoulder, I caught sight of Peter preparing a deadly curse. A bright, vicious ball of light grew on his hand, pulsing with energy meant to kill. We were flying much too fast for me to take my hands from the broom and fashion a counter-curse, so instead, I went with a more primal defense and sent my foot smashing backward, twisting my leg at an angle to hit his face.
Blood spurted from his nose as the ball of light sizzled and died with Peter’s roar of frustration. We swooped past the building windows, a blurry wash of colors to anyone who might happen to glance out. Flecks of blood spattered over my skin and Peter’s face was streaked with it. He began shouting another incantation—one that would leave me paralyzed—so I jerked the broom upward with a brutal change of direction that sent Peter scrambling to grab hold.
“You’re dead, Detective,” Peter said with a hiss. “Say goodbye...”
Then Peter finished off the paralysis spell and sent a lightning bolt of energy toward me. I was able to dodge most of it, but a chunk hit my arm—causing me to lose feeling from my elbow on down. My hand fell limply to the side of the broomstick, sending my heart racing as I latched on tighter with my only functioning arm. I felt utterly defenseless as Peter continued to shout the incantation—if he launched a second attack and hit my other arm...I’d fall to my death.
We raced together over the rooftops of Wicked, weaving between buildings as I fought to keep Peter off balance. A second’s hesitation on my part, and the chase would be over. He would win, and I would be dead.
With a grim set to my jaw, I began to see that with one bum arm, I had limited options. Magic was out, and I couldn’t keep whisking Peter around blood-curling corners forever. With a wry smile, I spotted the NYPD building ahead and realized I’d subconsciously been weaving my way toward it.
I just couldn’t stay away, I thought with a dry, throaty chuckle. If I could just manage to land us on the flight deck, there’d be help. Other officers would swarm Peter and lock him away.
My plan must have dawned on Peter because just before we landed on the flight deck of the Sixth Precinct headquarters, he leaned back and sent the broom careening sideways. We hit the side of the building with a sickening thud. My good elbow cracked against the wall, and I felt something break.
Peter, however, took the brunt of the collision. His head smacked against the brick wall and his eyes glazed over. Even as I turned, struggling to reach for his bloody fingers, I could see it was useless. With two bum arms, I could barely control the broomstick, let alone hold onto a full-grown man. I watched as Peter’s limp body slid from the broom and began a freefall toward the ground.
The broomstick bucked and recoiled with the loss of a passenger, malfunctioning after its impact with the wall. I barely managed to hold on as it dragged me along the exterior of the brick building and struggled to return home—its natural default charm for times of emergency.
The broom succeeded in barreling through the largest glass window in the building—a conference room that happened to be in use despite the late hour of the night. I mercifully let go and landed on my back in the middle of a conference room table while the broom whizzed away toward the flight deck where it belonged.
I skidded a few feet down the long table, recognizing a few faces in my pain-streaked haze. The chief, Matthew, and Nash were among those at the meeting, their expressions a mixture of concern and horror and confusion at the intrusion.
I came to a stop at the far end of the table in a pile of doughnuts. To my great surprise, I found myself face to face with none other than Matthew’s sworn enemy. Oddly enough, Grey looked mildly amused at the entire situation... until his eyes flicked downward and he spotted the blood. His face went slack with fury.
I was still struggling to determine whether I was hallucinating. There was no good reason I could come up with as to why he’d be sitting around a table at the Sixth Precinct surrounded by cops. I shook my head, gave a bleary, bloodied grimace.
“Hey, you guys,” I gasped. “Good evening.”
“Dani?” Nash murmured. “What—”
“There’s an invisible man in Interview Room 4B,” I said. “Lucia’s in the new penthouse on Floor 407, and Peter... he’s dead. Outside.”
“Danielle—” Matthew lunged to his feet and reached for me.
“Goodnight,” I said, and then slumped into blackness.
Chapter 25
The chill in the air swept over the long, whispering grasses, surrounding me with suffocating vengeance. It’d been months since I’d stepped foot into the Dead Lands, and the last time, I hadn’t been alone.
Fog swirled around my ankles, climbed my legs, wrapped around my arms. It was thick with humidity, driving the cool dampness straight through my leather jacket and deep into my skin. I cinched my arm closer to me, cradling the sling to my body as the cold sent jolts of pain ricocheting through my body.
When I’d gained consciousness early this morning, I’d been splayed in the middle of the conference table with five sets of eyes staring down at me. Aside from a broken arm, some bangs and bruises, and the sheer embarrassment at ending up face down in a pile of jelly doughnuts during an emergency NYPD staff meeting, I was fine.
Peter, however, was not.
They’d recovered his body from the pavement while I’d been carted off to Nurse Anita. She’d efficiently patched me up and sent me on my way without argument. The hospital would be busy today. All the Wicked citizens who’d been unwillingly sucked into the Harmony debacle were being notified and sent to the hospital for recovery.
“They were over there,” a familiar male voice said, causing me to flinch in surprise. “I’m assuming you are here because you wanted to see where Peter hid the bodies?”
“What are you doing here, Nash?” I swiveled to face my older brother. “I thought you were—”
“We’ve done as much as we can on the knowledge we have,” Nash said. “One hundred and three Wicked citizens have been notified that their Herbals were laced—there might be more. The hospital has called in extra staff to deal with the detox procedures.”
I shook my head. “How could he? How could Peter have been double-crossing us—everyone—this whole time?”
Nash’s jaw clenched. “I should have seen it. I was partnered with him for years.”
“You couldn’t have known. We all fell for it,” I said. “The chief included. Peter was a crooked cop. He was a good cop... when he was on the right side. It’s not your fault, Nash.”
He merely shook his head. “Except it was my responsibility to keep an eye on my partner. There were signs, now that I look back.”
“There always are,” I murmured. “Hindsight.”
“There were a few times he said things... things I thought were jokes. I’d always written it off as dark humor. Now that I know more, I think he was trying to test the waters—to see if he could recruit me as a business partner.”
“Nash—”
He raised a hand. “They uncovered the bodies this afternoon while the chief was taking your statement. They were all there. Sienna ran her tests on them this afternoon—all the missing corpses had signs of Harmony in their systems.”
I stared at the freshly turned piles of dirt. “What a waste.”
Nash kicked at the ground.
“You couldn’t have done anything about it. Trust me,” I said. “You’re not alone in feeling like you should have noticed. We’ve all been fooled.”
“I’m not here to talk about my feelings, Detective,” Nash said sharply. “I came to find you with a message.”
“From who?”
“Eloisa Brimstone.”
The name hit me like a rock straight to the gut. The air whooshed out of my lungs at the name of Trenton’s mother spoken so matter-of-factly.
“What did she want?” I whispered, remembering her pale, shrunken face at the bread vendor in the marketplace.