by R K Dreaming
I sighed, feeling a tad cheated. I had expected to feel that same feeling again. So buoyant, as if I could have soared away. This lack of anything was a disappointment.
I checked my hands. “All digits still intact,” I muttered. “At least it didn’t take a limb or anything.”
Charming rolled his eyes. “Rarely is it so unsubtle.”
I did my tried and tested method of smacking my hand against the wall. “Ouch!” I cried, but I was not displeased. There had been no shattering of knuckles as fragile as glass.
“Yes!” I whispered.
Even Charming looked relieved.
I couldn’t help but grin. My worst fear was over. “Maybe it took my pimples,” I said cheerily.
“You never had any pimples,” he said.
“Damn. Missed opportunity. If only I had thought about it, I could have not washed my face for a week.”
The banging on the door put an end to our little tête-à-tête.
“Inside please,” I whispered to Charming. “Unless you want him to know I have a magnificent genie in tow?”
“Magnificent, ey?”
“Oh shut it!”
“Just remember that when you’re done, you promised to hide me,” he reminded me, as if the fact that I only had one wish left had not escaped him and was making him nervous.
He vanished into my lamp tattoo before I could answer.
I swung open the door and marched out of the peach bathroom to confront Polliver.
The bedroom was empty, Polliver gone. How odd. Someone had definitely banged.
And yet Polliver not being here made my pulse quicken.
My gaze was drawn to the blood-soaked bed. I knew I should go to it, touch it while I could, see what visions came my way. But the thought sickened me.
I didn’t want to see how Amelie Assisi had died, the poor woman.
And worse, what if I touched it and nothing happened? What if my powers hadn’t been restored?
Someone cleared their voice nearby. Startled, I whirl to face it. A man stepped out from behind the curtains in the window bay. Young. Not Polliver.
“It is you!” he said.
He rushed forward, face angry, axe in his hand.
I stumbled away from him. I bumped onto the bed, almost toppling back onto it. I saved myself by catching hold of the soiled mattress. It was dry now, and yet at the touch of my fingers on it, a powerful stench of iron and fear filled my nose and mouth.
I was choking, crawling on the bed, or trying to because it was so hard to move. Blood was in my mouth. The smell of it filled my nose. I had to get away, but the axe was in the killer’s fist and it arced down, slicing into the flesh of my back. Its blade struck bone. My ribs. I screamed as the killer jerked it out.
Someone seized my arm and dragged me away from the bed. Reeling from the images in my mind, I stared up at the strange young man.
“What did you see?” he demanded hoarsely, his face pale and urgent and clammy, axe dangling loose in one hand, almost as if he was unaware it was there.
“Who are you?” I demanded, jerking my arm out of his grasp.
“She’s dead,” he said, bursting into sobs.
He doubled over to clutch his knees as if he was going to be sick, dropping the axe with a thunk.
I tentatively patted his shoulder. Something was wrong. Why couldn’t I feel the overwhelming rush of his grief drowning me like it always had before? I had seen her death, but I couldn’t feel his grief.
The vision I had seen filled my mind. The overwhelming terror of it had left me disorientated. She was a woman dying and she’d known it. She’d been hunted like a terrified animal in her own home. Is that how my mother had felt? Knowing the end was here and there was nowhere left to run?
Before I could understand it, Polliver charged into the room with none other than the actor Garrett Clooney in his wake.
Garrett threw the sobbing younger man a look of disgust. “There you are, Noah. For heaven’s sake, pull yourself together!”
“You’re trespassing,” snapped Polliver to Noah. “What are you doing in here?”
His eyes flicked suspiciously from Noah to the axe on the floor.
“It’s the murder weapon,” I said quietly.
“Tampering with evidence!” Polliver roared. “If the Conclave of Magic—”
“I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation, chief,” drawled Garrett in his suave voice.
Handsome for a man in his sixties, with that touch of silver in his dark hair, impeccable clothes and shiny shoes, he had a gravitas that made you want to listen to him.
When he said, “You weren’t tampering with it, were you Noah?” Polliver actually nodded along.
“Found it,” Noah said, wavering as if he was about to collapse. “Killed her with it?”
“You killed her with it?” said Polliver in disbelief, as if he couldn’t believe his luck.
“Good heavens, of course not!” said Garrett. “We were in Ireland when Marilyn was killed. Got back day before yesterday, and found her dead. He means The Reaper killed her with it. Anyway, poor fellow is as drunk as a skunk. Doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
“She’s dead, Garrett,” sobbed Noah. “I don’t understand.”
He wobbled over to the bed and looked like he was considering crawling into it.
Garrett grabbed him and pulled him away. “You’d better come back to the guest house. We’re not supposed to be in here.”
“This is a crime scene,” complained Polliver. “You’ve contaminated it. Damn Conclave of Magic is supposed to be keeping an eye on this place.”
I snorted. Yeah right. Polliver wasn’t supposed to be here either and he full well knew it.
Noah grabbed me. I knew by now he had to be the bereaved new husband, young cousin of the famous Garrett Clooney himself according to the newspapers.
“But you’re the oracle,” he slurred. “You saw what happened. I know you did. Tell me.”
Garrett raised a dark brow in curiosity. “You saw? What did you see?”
He looked me up and down with greater interest now, as if I was suddenly worthy of his notice.
I gestured to the bed. “I saw Marilyn there. Someone was hacking her with an axe. She was terrified.”
It felt like a stupid thing to say. What person wasn’t terrified when they were dying.
“You saw The Reaper’s face?” said Garrett urgently.
I shook my head. “No, unfortunately not.”
“Good for you,” said Garrett. “People who see his face end up dead.”
That struck me as an odd thing to say. I frowned at Garrett. Had he known that Marilyn had once been the runaway Amelie Assisi? But Garrett looked innocent, as if he hadn’t a clue.
“Where did you find the axe?” I asked Noah.
“There.” He pointed to the floor near the bed, where a patch of dark blood stained the dust ruffle.
“You shouldn’t have taken it,” I said to him. “It’s evidence.”
It was evidence that someone other than the Reaper had killed Marilyn I thought heavily, turning back to The Reaper’s mark — the bloody clawed pawprint left on the wall by the door.
Looking at it, I felt my chance at catching The Reaper slipping away. I had realised now what had been niggling me the first moment I saw it.
The mark was fake. Whoever had murdered Marilyn, it wasn’t The Reaper.
Chapter 6
SIGOURNEY
As if my realisation that this murder had not been committed by The Reaper wasn’t bad enough, I then had to suffer being driven across town by Polliver to an abandoned warehouse in the outskirts of Brimstone Bay.
Here was where Troy Mockingbird, ruthless criminal mastermind, had been murdered.
“He was killed on Wednesday,” said Polliver stalking around the dusty old warehouse, pointing out three large spots of dried blood on the chairs around an old trestle table. “We found three bodies, all men, one of them Mockingbird.”
Now it was the early hours of Sunday morning. I was surprised they had managed to keep this quiet for so long, but I supposed the much higher profile and gruesome murder of a famous actress later that same day had been more than enough to occupy the press.
It looked like the three men had been living in this warehouse for some weeks. The smell of smoke and a sharp and musky tang, almost herbal, hung in the air. There were a couple of bunks in which they must have taken turns sleeping, a trestle table covered with trash — mostly the remnants of fast food meals that they had eaten. There were still fries and half-eaten burgers at the table, and an ashtray full of cigarette stubs.
“We think they were holed up here doing a local deal,” said Polliver. “The question is, who killed them? A rival gang taking over their business. It has to be. But it was a clean hit. Professional. Killers left no evidence behind. I want to find the bastards. I’m going to bring them down. Me!”
“Will you be quiet for just one minute?” I said to him impatiently.
With him going on, I couldn’t think. I was pacing, trying to tap into my psychic music, that remarkable resonance of psychic energy of mine that used to bounce off the world, bringing me feelings and an instinct for things that were happening or had happened that I had no way to put into words, but which I had been able to interpret to get a sense of what was going on.
But I felt nothing.
It was just like after I had made the first wish. Where my psychic music had used to be, thrumming quietly in the background of my consciousness, there was just a void.
I felt panicked by its absence. I had wished for it back. Why wasn’t it here?
I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, steadying my heartbeat, trying to seek it out in the silence.
“Well?” snapped Polliver. “I didn’t bring you here to meditate!”
“Wait outside!” I said to him tersely.
“What did you say to me?” he blustered.
“You’re distracting me. I can’t think with you in here. Wait outside.”
Muttering under his breath, he stomped out, a certain sign that he was desperate for me to solve this case for him.
I knew I was being rude to him but I couldn’t help it. It was him who was forcing me to work with him, when I would have been perfectly happy to never see him and his ilk again in my life.
After several more minutes of trying desperately to tap into my non-existent psychic music, I gave up. I wanted to summon Charming and demand to know what the heck was happening, but I daren’t do it here. The echoey cavernous space was one in which sound would carry, and Polliver had only retreated to outside this large room. I could hear him shuffling about impatiently outside.
Speaking of echoey spaces, how the heck had the killer got to the table at the centre of this space to kill the men without being seen? I felt certain it had to be a magical killer.
Another thing I was certain of was that if I didn’t give him something useful, he would put me in prison out of sheer spite.
So I did the only thing left to me. I crouched down and touched each of the patches of blood on the chairs in turn.
Nothing happened. No visions. No sense of anything. Certainly not the overwhelming rush of images and fear I had felt when I had fallen onto Amelie’s bed. That had been like being inside her own body, experiencing it all through her eyes.
Disappointed, I turned my attention to the men’s belongings. I rifled through the clothes discarded on the bed, the couple of holdalls of belongings, the trash from the food on the table. The cards they had played to pass the time.
They had been sitting there eating when someone had approached them and killed them all in some bloody manner that wasn’t clear to me. How had this killer done it without any of the men getting up from their meals and putting up a fight? There had to be three killers was how. It was the only thing that made sense.
The knowledge I’d gleaned so far wasn’t going to be enough. Polliver and his people had to know that much already if they had done their jobs properly.
I was about to reluctantly call Polliver back in when, over by a back of shelving, a shiny glint on the floor caught my eyes. I bent to pick up a small earring that had fallen into a crack between floor boards.
Holding it close to my eyes, I examined it. It was nothing special, just a plain silver stud, not valuable, and the kind that could have been worn by either a woman or a man. There was blood in it, as if it had been torn off an ear.
Could it have belonged to a killer?
I touched the blood with my pinkie and inhaled sharply as my mind flooded with images so vivid that I dropped to the floor, gasping.
I was crawling on my hands and knees as quietly as I could away from the bloodshed happening behind me. My heart was pounding so hard with terror that it was all I could hear. I barely felt the sting as my earring caught on a metal shelf and was torn out. And then I had made it to the door. Then I was outside the warehouse, running, terrified sobs welling up in my throat.
And the vision faded.
Someone else had been here and escaped. There was a witness to Troy Mockingbird’s murder.
I called Polliver back in. “Tell me what happened here,” I said to him.
He crossed his arms over his chest and glowered at me. “You tell me what happened,” he spat out. “That’s what you’re here for.”
“I know what I saw,” I said to him, letting a smug smile play on my mouth. “But I’m not about to tell you mine, until you tell me yours. After all, it’s not beyond you to claim you already knew anything I saw, is it?”
Scowling, he growled, “The bodies were found here. It seemed Troy Mocking bird had teamed up with old rivals from his past and gone underground to build his trafficking business. The two other men were from a rival gang. We were surprised.”
“What else?”
“Nothing else,” he snapped.
“How were they killed?” I said.
Polliver’s eyes narrowed as if I was trying to cheat him. “You full well must know that. They had their throats cut. Quick, clean, professional.”
“How many people were in here?”
“I already told you that. The three men.”
“What sort of deal do you think Mockingbird and his men were in town for?” I asked, wondering if the person I’d seen escape had been one of Troy’s gang or an innocent.
He shrugged. “Grabbing local magical girls, we suspect. We were aware of a ring organising that sort of thing, but we’d never been able to pin down who was behind it. Never thought it might be Mockingbird. In the past he just used to do goods smuggling, illegal potions, magical drugs, that sort of thing. But then he disappeared all of a sudden. Didn’t realise he’d gone underground to expand his criminal empire. Just thought he’d met a sticky end or run off with his ill-gotten gains into the sun somewhere.”
“Mockingbird was an incubus, wasn’t he?” I said, thinking back to what little I had known about the man. Could it have been a woman who had fled the crime scene?
“Yes, so?”
“And he was a ladies’ man?”
“What about it?” Polliver snapped.
“Did he have any particular lady in his life, I wonder? Didn’t he have a wife at one point?”
“Yeah, some bird. Mockingbird had a habit of ‘losing’ his women to tragedies, if you know what I mean. Could never prove he killed them when he was done with them though. He liked to say they died of broken hearts. Made it look like they killed themselves.”
“Creep,” I muttered. “Had a reputation as a Casanova, didn’t he? Claimed he was irresistible, and that women couldn’t get enough of him.”
“I didn’t come here to talk about him being Romeo. I’ve told you what I know. Now did you see something, or are you wasting my time?”
“I did see something,” I said with a pert smile. “And I’ll tell you exactly what it is right after you’ve drawn up that paperwork giving me immunity.”
“You w
hat?” he blustered.
My cold smile faded and I let him see my anger. “You’ve proven that you’re nothing but a manipulative sneak. Only a fool would trust you, and I’m done with being a fool. Come find me when you’ve got what I want.”
Not giving him a chance to retort, I stalked out.
Chapter 7
SIGOURNEY
“It wasn’t The Reaper who killed Amelie,” I said quietly to Charming once we were back home in the house I had rented.
He looked as stunned as I had felt when I had first realised it. He shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe that what I had told him was true.
“I knew there was something wrong when I first looked at it,” I said. “I just couldn’t put my finger on it. But there were no gouge marks in the mark that he left behind. Every other time, there have been gouge marks.”
Charming’s stunned expression cleared a little. “You mean that it wasn’t your Sight that told you it wasn’t him?” he said.
I nodded. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. My gift isn’t the same now. I can’t hear my psychic music anymore.”
I explained to him that often the most valuable part of my oracle’s Sight had been the psychic music that had guided me towards right and wrong, and that it had been far more powerful than the visions and dreams that I had used to see.
“But now, the vision that I had of Amelie being attacked was just horrific. It was so powerful, not like before. It was like I was her. I was in her body. It didn’t used to be like that.”
My voice trailed off. Was this the price? Had my gift been restored, but not like it used to be?
My voice rose sharply in accusation. “Why isn’t it the same?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “The wish-maker makes the wish, and the magic does the rest. I didn’t decide what it would restore, and what it wouldn’t.”
I kicked my couch angrily. The revelation that it was not The Reaper who had killed Amelie had left me feeling dejected. To not have my gifts the way they used to be, for them to be a stranger to me, was an added burden I did not need. Especially when I needed my gifts more than ever to find The Reaper now.