by Amir Lane
“You!” I shouted.
I didn’t know how he managed to move through the crowd that quickly, but he did. I was right behind him, shoving my way past the sweaty bodies toward the same door he was moving to. He got out before I did, of course, but I was right on his heels.
“Toronto Police! Stop and put your hands up!”
Today was clearly not the day that was going to work, either. He didn’t so much as acknowledge I’d said anything. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, pretending he hadn’t heard me, and repeated myself. Still, he didn’t so much as slow down.
“Goddammit.”
This was why I spent so much time on the treadmill. The space between us grew shorter and shorter until I was close enough to hear him laugh when he looked back over his shoulder. Laugh! A sharp pain ran through my side. Not now, not now. I was so close, I couldn’t cramp up now. I watched, horrified, as the distance grew again. He laughed breathlessly. Right, because after all that, I was going to let him get away that easily. I counted my steps in my head, psyching myself up to jump.
My body collided with his, sending us both to the ground. The phoenix swore loudly. I barely had time to realized I’d actually landed on him before he started fighting against me. Pain shot through the centre of my face. When I leaned back instinctively, he took the opportunity to throw me off him. I twisted around, catching my ankles in his before scrambling to my feet. I gripped the back of his jacket as tight as I could.
“Toronto Police. You’re under arrest,” I said breathlessly.
My fingers went to my pocket for cuffs. Cuffs I, of course, didn’t have.
"You can't arrest me! You have nothing to arrest me for. I haven't done anything.”
I raked my brain for anything I could use. Even if I couldn't actually arrest him for anything, I could at least bluff.
"Leaving the scene of a crime," I said. "A murder scene, I might add."
"First of all, I don't think that's actually illegal. Second of all, it was my murder!”
“The fact that it was your murder makes me want to bring you in twice as much.”
The question was, where was I supposed to bring him? I could have taken him down to the nearest precinct and let them deal with him. But what was I supposed to tell them? ‘Hey, this guy is a murder victim who probably knows who murdered him. We have forms for that, right?’ That would work.
I decided to keep bluffing until I thought of what to do. I gave him a slight shove to get him walking, and that was evidently enough. He dug his heels into the pavement and leaned back against me.
“Wait, wait, wait! Listen, I know who you are. You’re the barrier witch. I need your help. I— I can help you! Just please, please don’t bring me in. I don’t want to die again!”
The last words made me stop. After a moment of hesitation, I let go of his jacket. He smoothed it out and turned to face me. Under the streetlight, I could finally get a good look at him. We were the same height, making him just under six feet. His complexion was almost Arab, though not quite right for any region I could think of. If I had to guess, I would have put him as Mediterranean, maybe Italian. His accent sounded Italian. His bright green eyes stood out against his skin tone.
A slight shudder ran through me at the memory of what he looked like without those eyes. I gave no indication it was from anything other than the cold.
“If I don’t arrest you,” I said slowly, as though I actually had the capacity to arrest him right now, “what are you going to do for me?”
He didn’t hesitate.
“I can give you the shade.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Are you out of your mind?” Ariadne hissed.
It was a rhetorical question. We both knew the answer was yes. Why else would I be dragging the phoenix, Angelo, home with us?
“It’s just until I can figure out what else to do with him.”
“Can’t someone else take him?”
My resolve weakened at the little plea in her voice. Still, I had no choice but to shake my head.
“Kieron won’t with Gwen, Rowan wouldn’t even give the hospital his new address, and Indira…” Actually, Indira probably could take him. There was so much space in the King mansion, I doubted anyone would even notice an extra person. But I wanted to keep an eye on him. “Indira’s father will probably try to adopt him.”
“You ladies know I can hear you, right?” Angelo said, leaning forward in the back seat. “And I think I'm a little old to be adopted.”
“Nobody was talking to you,” Ariadne snapped. To me, she said, “I don’t trust him.”
“I don’t either. That’s why I want to be able to watch him myself.”
“That’s fine, I don't trust either of you, either. Hey, investigatrice, would this count as kidnapping?”
I couldn't tell which one of us Ariadne was most annoyed with at this point. The throb in my temples reminded me I was running on only a few hours of sleep and several cups of coffee. All I wanted to do was crash. With the rush of finding the club stamp and then finding the phoenix gone, I could barely keep my eyes open. Why couldn’t this all be over already? Every time I crossed a step off the list, two more got added to the end. What was that story about the snake who kept regrowing heads? It felt like that.
“It’s not kidnapping,” I said. “It’s just for one night, I promise. I’ll keep him in the living room.”
Ariadne sighed, but her grip on the steering wheel loosened. I wanted to believe it was her undying love for me. Realistically, she was probably just as tired as I was. Neither of us wanted a fight right now.
“You have a beautiful wife, investigatrice. How’d you manage to end up with someone so out of your league?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Stop talking.”
Remarkably, he did. He didn’t say another word until we pulled into the driveway. He whistled through his teeth and told Ariadne she had a beautiful home. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to win her over with flattery and flirting, but I felt a smug sense of satisfaction when she didn’t respond.
“You’re staying down here with him tonight,” she said.
When she looked up at me, all I saw in her eyes was exhaustion. There wasn’t even an ounce of anger. She knew, more than anyone else in the world, what this case meant to me and what I had sacrificed for it.
“Of course. I’ll keep him here.”
“Good.” She turned her attention to Angelo. “If you even try hurting her, I’ll kill you myself.”
Even though she was several inches shorter than him, I believed it.
I rarely set up barriers in an entire room, mostly because of the amount of energy it would need, especially if I planned on putting it up all night. Really, I wouldn’t need it all night, just long enough to make Angelo think it would be. It wasn’t like he would stay awake the whole time. He would fall asleep, and I would be able to take it down. Was it sneaky? Yes. Was it morally wrong? Probably. Did I care?
Not as much as I should have.
We had some playground chalk in the basement, the thick kind kids used to draw on pavement. The box was covered in dust, and I couldn’t quite remember when or why we got it. I had a vague recollection of Kieron’s daughter using it to draw a hopscotch grid on the driveway while Kieron yelled at her to keep out of traffic. There was enough chalk in the box, I didn’t think anyone would miss one piece, especially since I wasn’t planning on using much of it. With Angelo watching me, I traced the perimeter of the room. The faint marks on the laminate flooring would come off easily enough. It was partly to help me focus on how far I wanted the barrier to extend, and mostly for show. I wanted to look more powerful than I was, or at least make the barrier look more powerful than it was.
Angelo watched me curiously as I settled into the leather loveseat, forcing him to take the matching couch. From my spot, I could see both him, the entrance to the living room, and the front door. Nobody would be able to sneak up on me, but Ariadne would be able to s
neak up on him if it came to that. I didn’t think it would, and I certainly hoped it wouldn’t. The low back of the loveseat meant I could be in constant contact with the wall without being forced into an uncomfortable position.
Most barriers I set up were spur-of-the-moment, impulsive necessities I put up without thinking about it. Now that I was thinking, I almost forgot what to do.
Come on, you do this all the time. Just breathe, focus. You literally have the lines to guide you.
I let out a slow exhale, focusing on the familiar pattern being traced across my lower back. The thread of power moving through me made the lettering visible. I breathed in and held the air in my lungs for a moment. The purple shimmer spread as I breathed out again, starting at the spot where my shoulder met the wall and stretched out like a drop of ink on a page. By the time the shimmering purple edges met, it was translucent enough that it was barely visible. Maybe Angelo wouldn’t notice if — when — it faded away completely.
“Pretty,” he said.
I forced a tight smile. It was only pretty now after nearly a lifetime of practice. Still, the exertion made sweat pool in the hollow of my lower back, and it took more effort to keep upright than I cared to admit. It wasn’t painful, exactly, but a feeling not unlike treading water. Strength wasn’t much of a requirement, only stamina. My breathing held much of the same pattern as it did when I swam.
One, two, three, breathe. One, two, three, breathe.
“So can everyone in your family do that?” Angelo asked.
“Who is the shade?” I asked back, ignoring him.
That charming, crooked smile was starting to get on my nerves. Now that I could see him properly, I decided he wasn’t unattractive. Even I could tell when a guy had a nice face. At the same time, there wasn’t really anything special about him. He was the sort of guy I wouldn’t look at twice if I passed him in the street. The only remarkable thing about him were his eyes. They were a deep green with a dark ring around the iris. On someone else they might not have stood out, but the colours were unexpected with his olive complexion and dark hair.
He scratched his beard. “I know you can’t arrest me, and you don’t seem the type to beat someone up just for the hell of it, investigatrice. You need me just as much as I need you. So how about a bit of trust here?”
He was right. I had no angle. If Ariadne hadn’t showed up, he might have been able to overpower me and escape if he really wanted to. Even with Ariadne, he might have been able to. I wasn’t exactly in my best fighting shape. My exhaustion-hazy mind tried to figure out what the angle was on his question. What could he do with the knowledge that aside from my paternal grandmother, I was the only witch in my family? My powers skipped a generation and apparently tended to favour people with ovaries.
He could hurt them. Or somebody else could.
“I’m sure you don’t want to tell me about your family,” he continued, correctly guessing the reason for my hesitation. “I wouldn’t want to. Have you always been able to create barriers?”
“Since I was a teenager.” I didn’t add the rest of the story, that I was walking to school with my cousin Imaan when we were eleven. I had thrown myself over her to protect her from a car bomb, and while our screams were drowned by the explosion, the barrier had come over us. He didn’t need to know the cedar tree on my shoulder covered a scar from the single piece of shrapnel that had struck the barrier hard enough to tear my skin open through it. “Who is the shade?”
Angelo shook his head. “He calls himself Rutherford Bromley, but I don’t know if that’s his real name.”
“How do I stop him?”
One of those dark eyebrows went up, and he leaned forward. “Do you know what a shade is? What they really are?”
I opened my mouth to tell him I did, and paused. All I knew was that they were — what had Ariadne said? — when necromancers went too far, when they became… part spirit. My muscles clenched to stop the shudder that threatened to run through me. Knowing the basic dictionary definition wouldn’t help. If Angelo knew more, well, wasn’t that why I had him here? I crossed my legs and held one of my ankles, my shoulder still brushing the wall beside me.
“Pretend I don’t,” I said.
“To understand a shade, you have to understand necromancers. Most people don’t, not really. Spirits, whether they’re fragments of souls or something else entirely, have power. Maybe it’s the same power that gives you the ability to—” He motioned around the room, presumably to the barrier. “Some people aren’t born with that ability. In my time, very few people were. Or maybe just few advertised it, I don’t know. Necromancers harness that power for themselves. Whether they have a way of extracting the powers from a spirit or if they simply command it seems to be a factor of time or place. I’ve seen both.”
As he spoke, I realized it wasn’t the colour of his eyes that were out of place on his face, it was the age in them. He had the face of a young man, but the eyes of someone who had been alive longer than anyone else in the world.
We all had different lifespans. Therianthropes — werewolves and such — had some of the shortest. Dryads had the longest. Human witches generally lived longer than non-magic humans. Everyone else was somewhere in between. Except the phoenix, who was the outlier of outliers.
How lonely.
I nodded in understanding, silently urging him to continue.
“Power is addictive. People who have it want more. Even if they don’t need it in any practical sense, they crave it. Pursuit of power is a dangerous thing.”
“The shade wants power,” I said more to myself than to him.
“The shade wants a lot of things. Life is a sort of power. Control over it… control over death. When you have that, you have everything. There are only a few species that are truly immortal: lobsters, jellyfish, phoenixes. The difference is that lobsters and jellyfish can be killed. I can’t. There’s no real reason for it. You know what people always say they would do if they got their hands on a phoenix? They would try to find the cure for mortality. I’ve been poked and prodded and experimented on since before even I can remember, but nobody can explain it.”
Something cold ran through my veins and forced me to swallow. I shifted to hide my discomfort. Angelo wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking past me at one of the paintings Ariadne liked, though there was a vacant expression in those ageless eyes that made me doubt he was seeing it.
“Where does the shade fit in?” I asked.
Angelo tore his gaze from the air and turned his attention back to me. A bitter smile found its way onto his lips.
“The shade is smarter than anyone else,” he said, not without a hint of sarcasm. “Spirits are stronger than people. They always are. But what he realized is that if he uses stronger parts, they won’t be able to overpower him.”
“Stronger parts?” I repeated. “What does that mean? What—”
Oh.
Stronger parts. Non-human parts.
“He isn’t trafficking organs,” I whispered. “He’s using them for himself.”
“These days, he works with gangs. They help each other kill victims, he takes what he needs, and they take the rest. According to the stories, he’s been doing it since he came over on a boat back at the turn of the 19th century.”
I translated in the back of my mind without conscious thought. The turn of the 19th century meant late 1700s. He had been stealing body parts for over 200 years.
“Does that make him older or younger than you?” I asked.
It didn’t matter, but the curiosity was killing me.
“That depends how long he was alive before that. I died in the 16th century, I think. That's when the Internet says the Italian witch trials were. They said I used my evil, Satan powers to seduce a priest, which is just ridiculous. I would never seduce a priest, I'm Catholic.” He paused, before adding, “If anything, he seduced me.”
I mostly tuned out everything after ‘witch trials.’
So Kier
on was right.
Good God. I couldn’t even understand what it meant to have lived for so long. If I dwelled on it, I would only give myself a headache.
“So he killed you for… parts.” It felt wrong just to say.
“He has been for a while. If he has nothing else to use… I don’t know how long, exactly, but…” He touched the tattoo with a sad smile. “He owns me, bella.”
I was quiet for a moment. There was a heavy implication in his words that I wasn’t entirely sure I wasn’t imagining. It took me a few tries to get the words out.
“Were you— You were finding people for him.”
“Parahuman organs are better for him than human ones.” His lips trembled and his eyes watered with the threat of tears. He swallowed with a small, forced smile. “I tried to get away from him. He didn’t even need my eyes, he was just making a point.”
“Where did you go? Why didn’t you stay? I could have helped you.”
Angelo sighed and hung his head. His hair fell over his face. He looked as tired as I felt.
“I can’t really control where I come back. Even if I could, I couldn’t know if he was still around. I couldn’t know if you were one of his.”
I understood that. There was something I didn’t understand, though.
“Why did you stay in town? You could have gone anywhere.”
“I couldn’t, actually. But if I could, it would be the same reason anyone does anything: love.” When I frowned, he continued. “He killed someone I love.”
An irrational fear for Rowan tightened my ribs around my chest. As far as I could prove, Rowan still had nothing to do with this but when I closed my eyes, I could still see the bruises around his neck. How could an attack like that not be related?
“He wouldn’t happen to be a dryad, would he?” I asked. “A dryad named Rowan Oak?”
Angelo frowned. “I don't know that name, so no. Not him. His name is Wes Cohn. We were going to kill Bromley together, but he…” His voice trembled. “You can help me get revenge.”