A lot was different, I realized with a start. The stairs had been rebuilt and the railing along the front replaced and painted. Moreover, a swing now graced the porch—a lovely wicker thing that hung from two solid eye-bolts in the ceiling.
I moved down off the porch and onto the gravel driveway, turned to get a better view of the front of my house. There were flowers—actual living plants—in neat beds on either side of the steps. A pretty little crystal and brass arrangement hung from a corner of the porch, catching the morning sunlight and casting it back out in shards of rainbow. There was even a birdfeeder hanging from the other corner, though I wondered whether any bird would come near the house while demons perched atop it.
I smiled with warm pleasure. My house looked . . . nice.
Eilahn leapt lightly from the roof and smiled at me. “You have your bag. Where are we going?” she asked with an enthusiastic lift in her voice.
“I was hoping to go to Tracy Gordon’s summoning house to check out his library,” I told her. Maybe I could borrow the Camry? That would be better than riding pillion on the motorcycle.
Her face grew hard and more than a little scary. “Tracy Gordon baztakh unk kirlesk.” She spat into the gravel.
I didn’t know what that all meant, but it was simple enough to guess the sentiment, and I certainly couldn’t blame her for it. He’d shot her twice, point blank, and killed her. Fortunately, because it happened on Earth, she made it through to the demon realm and recovered. Once through the void was usually successful. Twice, not so much.
I nodded toward the Camry. “Whose car is that?”
She followed my gaze, then looked back to me and beamed. “Yours!”
I gave her a blank look. “How can it be mine?”
Eilahn ducked through the front door and returned before I had time to process she’d gone. She dangled a set of keys in front of me, displayed the brass fob with Kara’s Kar neatly engraved in script on it. “Because this proclaims that these keys match your vehicle, I have tested them in the ignition, and they fit. Therefore, that,” she said with a nod toward the car, “is your vehicle by the process of a successful trial.”
Kara’s Kar? I rolled my eyes. My house elves were out of control, but right now I wasn’t about to complain. I took the keys from her and smiled. “Well, let’s try it out!”
A note on the dash in Zack’s neat handwriting held clear, concise instructions for operating the automatic gate. Yet another point for the elves.
The house Tracy Gordon had used for summonings and other arcane practices was on the far side of Beaulac, but since it was so early in the morning, and there was little traffic, I went ahead and cut straight through town.
A garbage truck made noisy work of dumpster-emptying behind Beaulac Junior High, while across the street a man in nothing but shorts and sleep-tousled hair ignored his dog’s yappy barking at the din. A few determined souls headed into Magnolia Fitness Center, clutching towels and water bottles. I was probably still a member there, I realized, since my dues were on auto-payment.
“Back when I was a street cop, this was right about the time I’d be heading to the station for shift change,” I told Eilahn. “Whether I was coming on or going off duty, I always liked seeing the world wake up.”
She slanted a disbelieving glance my way. “Liked? You who pulls your pillow over your head if any dares disturb you before mid-morning?” She let out a low snort. “I doubt you woke to your alarm and thought, ‘Oh, what a pleasure it will be to see the world wake up!’ You would have liked to have been in your bed.”
“Okay, so maybe ‘liked’ is a relative term,” I said with a laugh. “But since I had to be up anyway to keep my job, I figured I might as well dig for a silver lining.”
“Ah, yes,” she replied, “because you are always a model of good cheer before you have had your coffee.”
“Are you crazy?” I asked with mock horror. “Who the hell said anything about going to work without coffee? Do you know how many people I’d have shot even before roll call?”
Eilahn gave a musical laugh, then nodded toward Grounds For Arrest, the coffee shop across the street from the PD. “I wonder how he has remained in business with you gone.”
“Now that’s a mystery.”
My mood remained light as we continued on through town. We passed by the Garden Street Industrial Park, and I stuck my tongue out at it since it was from there that I’d finally been summoned to the demon realm. The industrial park had been developed a couple of decades ago with grandiose plans of bringing in high-tech industry. Too grandiose for Beaulac, it turned out. A gate in the chain link fence was closed and locked, and a large sign proclaimed it to be the future home of an “exciting new development in health care” by RiseHigh LLC.
I doubted the new development would be as exciting as promised, but at least something worthwhile would come of the place.
We made it to the house without any issues and, thanks to the early hour, we managed to avoid problems with nosy neighbors. To my relief and dismay, the wards on Tracy’s house remained intact. Good because it meant the contents probably hadn’t been vandalized, and bad because we’d have to get through some serious protections.
It took close to half an hour of us working together to unwind and temporarily neutralize protections, but finally Eilahn and I squeezed through and into the back of the house without causing an explosion or major blood spillage.
“You will acquire his library?” she asked as we gazed at the books and scrolls and papers.
“Yes. I’m claiming it under Article Five, subsection three, paragraph A of the Multidimensional and Interplanar My Goddamn Property Now statute, namely the section titled Right to Have All The Shit of The Guy Who Shot You and Tried to Fuck Me Up.” I nodded firmly. “This is all mine now.”
Her mouth twitched. “I do not argue your right to ownership,” she said. “But I wonder how you will acquire it.” She arched an eyebrow at me. “You recall our difficulty entering this dwelling? It will be similar on the egress.”
My mood took a nose dive. “Well, shit.” Double shit. Because of the complexity of the protections, we hadn’t dismantled most of them, simply eased by. “Mzatal would be able to rip through them like a wet dog through tissue paper, right?”
“The analogy, while odd, seems apt.”
“Fine,” I said, scowling at being thwarted, even if only temporarily. “Then for now, we’ll gather up as much as we can carry of stuff that looks personal to Tracy. Journals, notes, letters, whatever. That man was up to some weird-ass shit, and I don’t think he came up with it on his own.”
“Nor do I,” she replied, expression grave. “Then let us begin.”
Together, we moved toward the bookcases.
Chapter 6
We managed to remove two foot-high stacks of spiral notebooks, loose papers, a few beaten up leather journals, and one raggedy Trapper Keeper without getting badly zapped by any of the wards as we left. Though we ended up leaving the majority of the library behind, what remained looked to be older volumes and reference materials, and I mollified myself with the reminder that the stuff was as safe there as it would be darn near anywhere else.
Both of the Impalas were gone when we returned home. An early morning for the two agents, I noted. Eilahn and I dumped our piles of plunder on the coffee table and then settled in for some nice light reading.
I picked up a battered red leather journal at random, flipped through it casually to see if anything stood out. Annoyingly, there didn’t seem to be any sort of central theme. Accounts of specific summonings jumbled together with diagram sketches, miscellaneous notes, and mundane to-do lists. A dozen or so names filled the margin next to a halfway decent sketch of a zrila. I read through them one by one, murmuring each name to myself. Sara Fillmore. Bryce Thatcher. Robert Finch. Henrietta Sloan. Jose Luis Hernandez. Carla Billings. There were more, but none sparked even a sliver of familiarity. Eilahn denied knowledge of them as well, so I marked the page
for future investigation and moved on. One folder, with a picture of a kitten on the cover, held several pages from a sketch book—all with odd drawings of leaf-less trees. Or at least I thought they were trees. In all of the drawings the tree-thing had a weirdly short central trunk with branches above that divided and spread and divided some more. Yet it also reminded me of pictures I’d seen of arteries and veins and capillaries, the way they all divided into smaller and smaller vessels.
A few of the sketches had snatches of alliterative phrases penciled along the outer edges of the pages, but with no meaning or central theme that I could grasp. Boss-boy begets better brains. Masters make misery manually. Cancer clutched Claire’s comfort. Good games give great gifts. And many others just as bizarre.
I read through the odd phrases several times, turning the papers around as I did so to see if anything clicked from different angles, but finally admitted defeat, replaced all of the sketches in the folder, and moved on to the next item.
We pored through for another hour or so and found lots of interesting factoids and tidbits, such as how to determine the gender of a savik, and that a mature faas has seventy-two teeth, but nothing directly relevant. At around eight thirty a.m. we took a break, Eilahn to the roof for some morning sun, and me to scrounge breakfast and make another pot of coffee. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last one I made this morning.
My phone buzzed with Zack’s number as the pot began its gurgling. “Hey, Zack, what’s up?”
“Beaulac PD just called Ryan and me out to a scene,” he said. “Since you’re a special consultant, it would be righteous if you could make it.”
Special consultant. That still cracked me up. “I can do that,” I said. “Text me the address. What kind of scene?”
His voice turned grim. “Murder.”
“A murder that your team gets called out on,” I said. Shit.
“We haven’t seen pics yet, but they’re saying Symbol Man.”
My eyes narrowed even as a chill crept through me. “The real Symbol Man is long dead. Let’s hope this is just a mundane copycat.”
“I don’t know. I’m not holding my breath on that one.”
“I’m leaving in two minutes.” Shit. The Symbol Man was a serial killer who’d terrorized the Beaulac area for four years around the time I became a cop. He was dubbed thus for the convoluted mark he’d carved into each tortured and murdered victim. After thirteen victims he stopped, and when three years went by with no sign of more victims, most people concluded he’d either died or left the area.
And then a little over a year ago, the marked and mutilated bodies started showing up again.
The Symbol Man case was the first one I worked with Ryan and Zack as part of a serial killer task force. It was also how I first encountered Rhyzkahl. The Symbol Man turned out to be a summoner who sought to call and bind the demonic lord to his will, and during the first attempt Rhyzkahl managed to escape by hijacking a completely unrelated summoning I was performing at the same time. Instead of a fourth-level luhrek, the beautiful and powerful lord appeared instead. And, well, from there events progressed that I still kicked myself over.
I slipped on a dress shirt and khaki trousers, pulled on a shoulder holster and tugged a jacket over it. I exited the front door, then looked up at the roof. “Eilahn,” I called up. “The task force has been called to a murder. Supposedly looks like a Symbol Man victim.”
She dropped to the ground with a leap graceful enough to make an Olympic gymnast weep in envy. Her face lit with exuberance. “A murder scene! This is exciting!” Then she quickly sobered, chagrined. “Perhaps not the choicest response.”
I tried not to laugh, with only partial success. “Perhaps not.” After giving her the details and location I climbed into the Camry and headed out with her following on the motorcycle. I really needed to learn how to ride one of the damn things. A woman on a motorcycle automatically got something like fifty “hot chick” points. Then again, there was no way in hell Eilahn would ever let me risk myself like that. Hmmf.
The Walmart parking lot appeared to be business as usual when we arrived, with no sign of a crime scene. It wasn’t until I continued around to the back that I found the swarm of cops. The majority of the activity appeared to be centered around a parked eighteen-wheeler with an open back. Crime scene tape had been strung between cars to form a sizeable perimeter.
I found a convenient place to park, got out, and adjusted my jacket. Eilahn pulled up behind me and dismounted, removed her helmet, then went into scan-for-threats mode.
I walked up to the deputy who stood with a clipboard by the crime scene tape. “I’m a special consultant for the FBI,” I told him, taking great pleasure in showing my pretty ID. To my annoyance, the deputy barely even glanced at it and failed to show even the slightest bit of awe at my status. Vaguely disgruntled, I signed the crime scene log then headed toward the open back end of the truck and the knot of law enforcement types there. I automatically looked for the familiar sight of Jill among the cops before remembering that the snarky-yet-awesome crime scene tech was eight months pregnant and working in the lab instead of the field.
A heavy set man with greasy black hair stood a few feet from the truck, phone pressed to his ear. Not far from him a much smaller, wiry man sucked on a cigarette as he tucked a notepad into his pocket. Vincent Pellini and Marcel Boudreaux, two of Beaulac PD’s Violent Crimes detectives and all-around royal pains in the ass. Pellini did enough work to get by, but that was about it. He gave the impression of being perpetually miserable and didn’t hesitate to ridicule or belittle anyone or anything whenever the opportunity arose. Boudreaux was cut from the same cloth and exacerbated the general unpleasantness.
Pellini gave me a nod and, to my surprise, sent what might have almost been something vaguely resembling a smile in my direction. He ended his call as I approached.
“Hey, Pellini,” I said. I even gave him a smile in return. What the hell. I was feeling generous.
His gaze swept over me, easily noting the gun under my jacket to judge by the way his eyes stopped at the slight bulge before continuing on. “Damn, Gillian,” he said with a little scowl that was oddly lacking in malice. “Never thought you’d go Fed on us.”
“I didn’t,” I replied. “It’s worse. I’m a civilian consultant.”
Pellini shuddered. “Well, we’ll get you started on a good case.”
“What’s the deal?” I looked over at the dark maw of the semi-trailer. “I heard it looked like a Symbol Man victim.” My eyes went back to his. “But the Symbol Man’s dead.” I stopped short of saying, I saw him die. I saw the demonic lord rip his head off for daring to attempt to summon and bind him. Probably best not to go there.
“Looks like somebody doing a copycat but making it their own,” he replied, shrugging. “It’s a lot cleaner, and there’s no doubt they wanted us to find the body.”
“You got an anonymous tip?”
Pellini’s mouth twisted beneath his thick black moustache. “You could say that.” He dug a photo out of the folder in his hand and passed it to me. It was an aerial shot of the parking lot with the semi in clear view. Dead Body Inside had been painted in huge letters on top of the truck.
“Yeah, that would be a Clue,” I agreed.
“Hey, Pellini!” The crime scene tech called over. “Pics are done.”
Pellini gave the tech a nod before returning his attention to me. “The Beaulac airport is just a couple miles that way,” he continued as he hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “This is right under the approach. Anyone flying in or out would see the message.”
Great. A killer who wanted to show off. I jerked my head toward the semi. “Mind if I go take a look?”
“Sure thing. Garner and Kristoff are already in,” he told me. “Vic’s female, young twenties, I’d say. No ID yet. And she wasn’t killed here.”
I thanked him and headed to the truck, more than a little weirded out that I’d had a normal and not unpleasant c
onversation with Pellini. As I climbed up into the truck, I shifted into othersight. Zack stood by the doors, phone to his ear, and gave me a smile.
“Ah, shit,” I breathed as I took in the scene. This was no mundane copycat. Arcane residue flickered like pale blue fire over the body, clearly visible even though I was still a good twenty feet away.
Ryan looked back at me from where he stood, a few feet from the body. “Yeah, that about sums it up.”
I approached and stopped beside him, swallowed back nausea. She lay naked on her back, arms stretched out to the sides and legs spread to shoulder width. A perfectly symmetrical red chalked circle surrounded her, but it was her skin that drew my gaze, held it. Her murderer had carved patterns into her flesh, sigils that, in any other scenario, would be beautiful, but on this canvas were horrors. The pale blue of the arcane flames shifted to red, flaring and subsiding in a rhythm eerily reminiscent of breathing. My own sigil scars itched, and I took a step back, cold sweat breaking. I dimly heard Ryan mutter a curse under his breath right before he turned and moved to me.
“You don’t need to stay in here,” he told me, voice low. I tore my gaze from the body, met his green-gold eyes.
“No.” I breathed deeply, took a few seconds to find my way back to a reasonably calm center. “No, I can handle it.” I released othersight and looked back at the body, this time focusing on the person and not the arcane trash suffusing her. Her face held a deceptively peaceful expression, though I knew there’d been nothing peaceful about her death. Her body had been thoroughly washed, her long black hair blow-dried and laid artistically over her shoulders with no trace of blood matting it. I saw now why Pellini had been so certain she hadn’t been killed here.
“She’s not someone off the streets,” I noted. The Symbol Man’s victims had been the sort of people who could disappear and wouldn’t be missed. This woman was in good physical condition, nails neat and short with a coating of pale polish, brows waxed, and with faint tan lines from a bikini.
Fury of the Demon (Kara Gillian) Page 7