by Jayne Faith
He nodded, already moving to pack up his tablet.
“I’ve got one more piece of equipment I want to grab from my place. It’s close by, so it’ll only take a second,” Johnny said.
Deb jammed her arms into her coat and grabbed her purse. “Thank you, that would be amazing. She really doesn’t want to report it, but I think she should.”
She hurried toward the door and then turned with her hand on the knob to look back at me. “Okay, I’m going over there in my car. You go with him, and I’ll see you both there.”
I took a couple of steps and opened my mouth to protest her going by herself, but she was already out the door.
With a grumble I strapped on my service belt, and Johnny and I went out to his Mustang and jumped in. He headed toward his North End bungalow-style house, about two miles from my place and roughly on the way to Jen’s.
“Maybe we can help her figure out what happened so she doesn’t have to call the authorities,” I said.
Johnny shook his head. “Sorry, but I agree with Deb on this. She needs to call it in. Only someone with ill intentions would take a scrying mirror. For all you know, Supernatural Crimes could be trying to track someone who’s been stealing these types of items. Letting the authorities do their job is your best chance at catching the person and recovering the mirror. Not to mention the fact that a scrying mirror is on a list of magical items that are required to be reported to SC if stolen. Jennifer is breaking the law by not reporting it.”
“You’ll have to take that argument up with her, I guess,” I said mildly. I really wanted to get a look around before SC took over, and I wasn’t in a hurry to involve any bureaucracy, despite what Johnny said. The more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable it made me to think that my session with Jennifer could be revealed through the mirror.
“Unfortunately, it’s more than just a disagreement,” Johnny said. “I’m a licensed P.I., and I’m a registered Supernatural Crimes contractor. Both of those designations mean I’m required to report this, or I could lose my accreditations.”
Damn.
My jaw tightened. I’d thought it would be a good idea to bring Johnny along. I wasn’t aware of his legal obligation in a situation like this, but it was too late now.
“Can you at least give us a chance to look things over first?” I asked.
He gave a tight nod. We’d reached his place. He parked on the curb, left the motor running, and was in and out in less than a minute. He came back carrying something that looked like a large camera case with a shoulder strap.
“Where are we heading?” he asked.
I hesitated for a split second. “Jennifer lives in Sunshine Valley.”
His brows rose. “The vampire community?”
“Yep.”
A mix of surprise and interest danced in his dark eyes as he shot me a sly smile. “Never a dull moment with you, Ella.”
Chapter 2
JOHNNY TOOK FULL advantage of his Mustang’s MagicBoost engine to get us to Sunshine Valley in fifteen minutes. By the time we turned onto Jennifer’s street, the moon was up. I glanced at my phone to check the time. Nearly eleven.
The vampire witch had left her outside lights on, and the front window of her small house was illuminated as well. I didn’t see any damage to the house from this angle. Johnny parked at the curb.
“Let’s hang back for a sec,” I said. “I don’t want to screw up anything if they’re trying to figure out what went wrong with Jennifer’s wards.”
We got out of the Mustang, and Johnny went around to the trunk and his instruments while I sent Deb a text to let her know we’d arrived. I adjusted my belt around my waist, the familiar weight settling on my hips. A moment later, the front door opened and Deb and Jennifer emerged.
Johnny stepped forward, nodded at Deb, and offered his hand to Jennifer.
“Johnny Beemer,” he said. He’d assumed the focused, business-like air that I recognized from the few occasions when we’d been at the same crime scenes. “Sorry to hear about the break-in.”
She grasped his hand. “Jennifer Kane. Yeah, this is as shitty as it is mysterious.”
Deb patted Jen’s arm sympathetically.
Jen turned to me, pushing her fingers into her bangs and scraping her hair back from her forehead in an agitated gesture. “I’m so sorry about the scrying mirror, Ella. I just never thought anyone could get in so easily and without my knowledge. I probably should have just destroyed the mirror after our—”
She abruptly cut herself off and shot a look at Johnny and then back at me.
“It’s okay, he knows,” I said. “And no apology is necessary, Jen. You took all the precautions you thought were necessary. Besides, whoever took the mirror might not even know what to do with it.”
“I wish I could believe that, but unfortunately, I don’t think it’s the case,” Deb said.
“I’m happy to do whatever I can to help,” Johnny said. “But you should know that due to my profession I’m legally obligated to report knowledge of a stolen Class A magical item.”
I winced as I watched Jennifer’s face pull into a frown.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her. “I didn’t know about that when I told him. I thought he might be able to help you figure out what happened, and it just didn’t occur to me that it would be an issue.”
She made a low noise in the back of her throat, clearly unhappy with this development. “This is gonna expose my witch status. I’ve been so careful to stay under the radar.”
A vampire with magical ability was extremely unusual. Deb had told me that the few she knew of generally kept a very low profile, even in the supernatural community. But Jennifer was making a bid for Lynnette’s newly formed coven, which in itself would raise Jen’s visibility to some extent, and I felt my defenses prickle as I recalled this tidbit.
“Again, I apologize,” I said, swallowing back my irritation.
“Well, it’s done, so let’s try to sort out what we can on our own,” she said.
“I think in the long run it will be better to involve the authorities,” Deb said, trying to console Jennifer. My best friend shivered visibly, and I could almost see her intuition clicking in. “I don’t think this was meant to be just a robbery. Something feels off here.”
I took a breath, ready to ask her to elaborate, but the words stuck in my throat as a tremor rippled through my senses. My gaze rose to the rooftop and the nearby trees.
“You feel that?” I asked Jennifer and Deb. “Minor demons nearby.”
Deb gave me a squinty look. “I don’t sense any demonic energy.”
Jennifer shook her head. “Me either.”
The shadows edging my vision were twisting and dancing like campfire smoke, and they crowded inward, narrowing my field of sight. The tingle passed through me again, like a finger plucking a string deep in my brain.
“It feels . . . odd,” I said. I drifted a few feet down the sidewalk, trying to zero in on where the signal originated. “Jen, can I walk onto your property?”
“Sure, go ahead. We’ve already examined the wards.”
I kept my eyes up, scanning for minor demons. They’d be hard to spot in the dark, but the thumping pulse of the reaper had awoken in the middle of my forehead. I could feel Deb, Johnny, and Jennifer’s attention trained on me, but I turned my focus within.
Moving across Jennifer’s front lawn, my shoes brushed through papery fallen leaves and stirred up the mild scent of leaf decay and cold, moist soil. The tingling hum grew stronger as I approached the gate leading into her back yard.
Three. There were three minor demons somewhere back there. My job as a Demon Patrol officer had put me in proximity to hundreds of minor demons over the past several years, and I knew the feel of them as well as I knew my own face. But this time there was something different, a thrumming quality I’d never experienced before.
As I unlatched the gate and quietly pushed it open with one hand, I started to reach for my stun gun
with the other. But instead of the service weapon, I grabbed my Patrol-issue guided net launcher, realizing I wanted to trap a demon for a closer look.
The back yard was all shadows and dark shapes, with only some weak interior light leaking out from the house. The far end of the fence was vertical metal bars rather than the wood slats that made up the front and sides. Beyond Jennifer’s yard there appeared to be a tree-lined walking path. Sensing the demons were out there, I quickly crossed the grass to the back gate. Wincing at the metallic squeak it made when I opened it, I froze for a few seconds, waiting to see if it scared the demons away.
“If you’re gonna help me, now would be the time,” I whispered, speaking to the presence within me. I suspected it could be a key to further unlocking my powers of necromancy, which included my ability to probe into the minds of hellspawn. I had no idea if the reaper soul understood my actual words, but I hoped it would at least grasp the sentiment.
I started to move my awareness out toward the creatures, intending to connect with one of their minds.
I stiffened as my sight suddenly blanked to black. A bolt of cold panic shot through me. The darkness began to clear almost immediately, resolving into the yellow and blue tones I knew from my visions. My pulse quickened. My necro-vision had kicked in.
Perhaps the reaper had decided to assist.
I swayed in the dizzy sensation of having my visual perspective shift so abruptly. I was no longer looking away from Jennifer’s back fence, but down from above. Down at myself. I blinked several times, trying to breathe through the disorientation.
Blindly gripping the net launcher I still held, I started to raise it, but then stopped. How could I aim it accurately when I was looking down at myself from my target?
A sharp pain drilled into my right eye, and I squeezed my lids closed, groaning softly through clenched teeth. When I opened them, I pitched back a couple of steps, nearly crashing into the iron fence. My head swung wildly as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. My sight seemed to be bouncing between my normal eyesight and the necro-vision that was sighting through the demon’s eyes. But then it hit me. I had necro-vision through my right eye and regular sight through my left.
A grin tugged at the corners of my lips as I steadied myself. “Nice trick.”
I checked the demon’s position one last time with the necro-vision and then lowered my right eyelid and raised the net launcher.
Just as I was about to let the magically charmed net fly, my target and his two buddies bolted.
Cursing under my breath, I lowered the net launcher and sprang into a sprint. Quickly accelerating into a swift rhythm of pumping elbows and legs, I sped down the walkway after the creatures. They were following the line of trees along the path, probably trying to use them as cover.
Honing in on the thin tether of awareness between me and them, I could sense their positions as easily as if I saw them. I reached out more strongly, trying to be careful so I didn’t lose them. I wasn’t entirely sure if these demons were different than the ones I usually encountered or if the growing presence of the reaper was giving me a new sensitivity to them. Whatever it was, they seemed more like feral neighborhood cats than spawn of hell. They’d stopped fleeing and had taken refuge in another tree.
Mentally feeling along the strand of awareness to one of the demons, I realized it was too far away for me to use any of my limited elemental magic on it. Instead, I focused on our connection, forcing it wider until I could sense the creature’s mind. A shiver ran over my scalp and down my back.
I’d tried this before on the job. My partner Damien had held demons with his magic while I attempted to use my necromancy to take control of them. It took a few tries, but in the past few weeks I’d succeeded in penetrating the minds of several minor demons. Once I got better at locking into a connection, I tried things like looking through their eyes and trying to direct their movements. Most of the time I couldn’t hold on for more than a minute or so. After, I always felt as if my insides had been coated with dark, cold slime. Unpleasant, but it mostly faded away after a few hours.
Now, all I had to do was get this demon to stay where it was for just a few seconds. I felt the mental click, like a deadbolt sliding into place, that told me I’d touched its mind. I gripped it lightly, not needing to command it but only keep it where it was, and I felt the creature give in to my control. On stealthy feet, I moved closer to the tree where it hid.
One bough suddenly bobbed, sending down a shower of crisp autumn leaves, as the other two demons flapped away. But the third remained.
“Gotcha,” I whispered under my breath.
Aiming at the shadow-shrouded spot low in the elm to my left where I knew one of the demons was perched, I pulled the trigger on the net launcher. With a springy recoil of the gun and a soft whir, the net shot upward, a faint glowing blur in the night. Its sensors locked onto the demon, activating the net to yawn wide and wrap around the creature. It all happened in a blink.
Amid high-pitched screeches and thrashing noises through the dry branches and leaves, the glowing white net tumbled to the ground. It writhed around as the pissed-off demon tried to escape. If I’d had more magical juice, I would have trapped all three demons in bubbles of earth magic like I’d seen my partner Damien do. But I was only a weak Level I on the Magical Aptitude Scale, and it was way beyond my ability. One demon would have to do.
I let out a breath and strode forward to retrieve the net. The contraption was made of a very fine mesh that wouldn’t allow the creature’s talons to pierce through, but I still carried it well away from my body as the demon continued to struggle. The interior of the net was charmed with a sedation spell, which would take effect any second.
When I’d pulled the net launcher instead of my stun gun, I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d intended with the trapped creature, but now I knew—I was going to use this demon to try to try to gain some information. If it had been here when the robbery took place and I could access its memory, I might be able to tell Jennifer who’d taken her things.
I jogged back to her place. As I reached for the iron gate, I glanced into Jennifer’s yard and froze.
Blurs of magic the dark black-red of blood wound around the side of the house, streaked the patio, and smeared over parts of the back door. It shimmered in my perception, and I realized I was sighting it strongly with my necro-vision and more faintly with my regular sight. I’d become somewhat accustomed to the yellow and blue tones of the necro-vision, and this new color felt oddly foreign. I closed my left eye, and the bloody energy came into focus. In fact, everything through the necro-vision seemed more crisp than ever before.
Maroon-colored magic? I’d never heard of such a thing, let alone seen it. It was a color distinct from the flaming orange-red of fire magic, nothing like the green of earth, blue of water, or yellow of air energies. My eyes traveled upward as I realized I could also see the faintly glowing magenta sphere of the ward Jennifer had cast around her house, made of a brand of magical energy unique to vampire witches. Only the top half of the sphere was visible, as the rest extended underground to complete the bubble. The widest circumference of it was a slightly brighter magenta line that traced the arc of a ring along the ground.
I squinted as I realized there was fainter blood-red magic trailing across the grass, to the back gate, and—
I sucked in a breath as I looked down and realized I was standing in a pool of it. I raised one hand and watched open-mouthed as a maroon aura gently pulsed around my fingers.
I sidestepped and watched with alarm as my movement left a trail of maroon. It wasn’t as distinct as the magic clinging to the patio and back door, but it was unmistakably the same type of magical energy.
My mind spun. What did it mean?
“Ella?” Deb’s voice floated from the side of the house, and a second later her petite shadowed form came into view. “Is everything okay back here?”
I swallowed, trying to work some moisture back into my d
ry throat. “Yeah. I found the demons.” I started back across the yard, retracing my trail of maroon. “I trapped one of them, but the other two got away.”
The creature’s struggles had subsided to weak twitches as the sedative took effect.
Jennifer and Johnny came around from the front, too, and the four of us congregated on the patio. In spite of her down jacket, Deb had her arms wrapped tightly around her middle, and her shoulders hunched forward. Jennifer was eyeing my netted trophy, and Johnny carried an instrument the size of a milk carton that was emitting soft beeps. There was a bulky black bag slung across his body.
My eyes kept drifting back to the maroon-smeared door, and I was waiting for Deb or Jen to notice it.
“See anything strange back here?” I asked.
“I see that my damn ward is still in place,” Jennifer said with obvious annoyance. “I just don’t understand it. I should have sensed something. Not to sound full of myself or anything, but my wards aren’t like standard elemental wards. Being a vampire gives me the ability to use our pink magic, and if anything, my ward should have been more difficult to sneak past.” She planted her hands on her wide hips and hissed through clenched teeth.
My vision seemed to be resolving, the necro-vision fading away. But I could still see the maroon smears. As my eyes traveled from Jennifer to Deb, it finally dawned on me that neither of them could see the blood-red trails.
“I can see another type of magic, too, but it’s not Jennifer’s hot-pink vamp magic,” I said. I pointed toward the door. “It’s all over the patio and smeared up to the doorknob.”
The three of them whipped around.
Jennifer walked toward the door and bent over to peer at the knob but then straightened and turned to me. “What does it look like?”
“It’s the color of blood,” I said. I licked my lips. “And there’s something else. It appears I’m leaking the same variety of magical energy.”
Their heads swiveled again to stare at me, almost comical as their movements happened in unison.