by Tegan Maher
I snapped my fingers, and a couple seconds later, we were standing outside the clinic offices. As soon as we stepped inside, a middle-aged woman in a white lab coat rushed around the desk, shoving a pencil into her salt-and-pepper bun. Her nametag said Dr. Blaise Davison.
“What in the name of Dionysus happened?” Dr. Davison took the cage from me and hustled back to an examination room, placing the carrier gently onto a steel table. “Where did you find a ferret around here? Is he ... Oh no!” she said, sadness washing over her face. “He’s a familiar, isn’t he? He was bonded to that witch they found down at the beach.”
It wasn’t a question, which told me Blake had probably already asked her to take a look at Andromeda. She leaned down so she was eye-level with the carrier door. “What did you do to him?”
“Just a simple sleep spell,” I said. “He was inconsolable. I didn’t want him to hurt himself any worse than he already was, and he kept trying to bite me.”
She nodded, her bun bobbing. “Good, good. That was the right thing to do.” She pivoted her head and looked at me for the first time. “It’ll hold if I open the door?”
I nodded.
He’d bent the bars on the door to the point that the latch had bent. Dr. Davison muttered a spell and the mangled, twisted little bars straightened. She pinched the clip to open the door, then reached in and pulled him out, careful not to jar him any more than necessary.
Her fingers slid along his small body, pausing at different spots to feel more thoroughly. “His shoulder is damaged, though I’m not sure it’s broken, and he has a lump and a small cut on his head. I don’t feel any serious injuries.” She held up his little paws and felt each toe, pinching her lips together. “All good. At least we won’t be dealing with physical injuries on top of the poor little guy’s mental ones.”
She glanced at me. “I need you to release the spell so that I can put him under deeper. It’ll be better for him to sleep for a day or two. Let that bruised shoulder heal some, and maybe his subconscious will heal a little, too.”
I held my palms out. “No problem. I just did the first thing that came to mind to stop him from lunging at me. Even after I put him to sleep, I knew he was still hurting from the way he was breathing.”
“You did fine,” she said, offering me a small smile. “Now, on the count of three, you release yours, and I’ll cast my own. I’d rather he didn’t wake at all.”
We swapped out spells, and he didn’t so much as twitch. Within just a few seconds, though, his breathing leveled out to where his sides were gently rising and falling in a normal rhythm.
“Good job,” she said. “I’ll walk you out. We’ll just let him rest for a while.” Sadness flitted across her face. “The poor guy’s got a tough road ahead of him.”
I sighed as we left the room. “I don’t mean to sound cold, but I have to ask—”
She shook her head before I could finish my sentence. “He’s not going to be any help to you, at least not for the next few days. And probably not then. This is the worst thing a familiar can go through.”
“Are you going to be examining Andromeda?” I asked.
Dr. Davison nodded. “Blake brought her up a little bit ago. I was just getting ready to dive in when you showed up.”
I debated staying to see what she found but decided my time would be better spent going through Andromeda’s room and talking to Cyri and Aiden.
“Will you let me know what you learn? Right now, anything is more than what we have.”
She nodded. “Blake already told me to keep you in the loop. Do you have a card?”
I didn’t, but I scribbled my cell number down on a note pad that was on the counter and handed it to her.
“You can reach me here, and thanks, doc,” I said, leaning against the door to open it. “I appreciate all you do.”
Dr. Davison gave me one last small smile before the door swung shut behind me.
I sent out a little push to the universe that she’d be able to help Sid. He’d been an obnoxious little thing, but no animal deserved to suffer like that.
All people, on the other hand, didn’t get that level of mercy from me.
Chapter 5
“We’re going back to the room?” Tempest asked as soon as the door closed behind us, her voice laced with dread.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m going back to the room. You don’t need to go with me. Go find Blake and tell him what happened. I’ll see if I can pick anything up now that Sid’s out of there, though I’m not holding out much hope. I’ll meet up with you both when I’m done.”
With that, I snapped my fingers and cringed when I landed back in the room. Digging through emotion-drenched visions was exhausting, but at that point, it was all we had, and I owed it to Andromeda—and Aiden—to suck it up and do what I could.
As I’d suspected, I couldn’t pick up anything at all from Andromeda’s suite with my senses. After a quick psychic peek, I closed that mental door and decided to do it the old-fashioned way: look around and see if I could find notes, a planner, or anything else that might scream, “Hey! I have a meeting with so-and-so and he/she might kill me.” For that matter, I’d have settled for something with her last name on it.
As I was rifling through her fine washables in search of some secret clue, I had a realization. If she’d been traveling as Pietra, why had she introduced herself to me as Andromeda? I thought about that for a second, then realized she hadn’t. That’s just what Sid had called her. Since she hadn’t corrected him, it only made sense that was her real name, though.
“Andromeda, what were you doing here, and why were you using some witchy vamp’s ID?” I muttered to myself as I pushed her undies drawer closed and opened the one under it. Tank tops, tee shirts, shorts, and a couple pair of nice capris that would have been acceptable at our beachy-chic restaurants. We didn’t really have anything that required fancy dress, so those were close enough.
Under the stack of tank tops, I hit pay dirt. It was a black 5x9 canvas envelope folder, and when I slid the elastic from around it and opened it, I found half a dozen different IDs and matching passports. After digging through, I found what I guessed was her real identification. Andromeda Montgomery, Arlington Virginia. The picture on the driver’s license matched, and so did the one on the passport. At least now we had our victim.
Now to figure out why was she murdered. The obvious answer was that Pietra or her family had discovered the ruse and took care of it permanently. That wouldn’t have been out of character for either a high priestess or a kingpin vampire. The Romanian crews were famous for their harsh, barbaric tactics even among Americans. The leaders of both covens were hundreds of years old and still did things old-school.
It would be handy if Adrien Balan turned out to match the guy I’d seen at her door. Well, handy for the investigation. Not so handy for Blake, since he’d be the one who’d have to deal with the guy, but I had faith in him. And I had his back. Despite my fun-loving, laid-back nature, I could be one wicked witch when I needed to be.
I pilfered through the rest of the drawers just in case, but all I found was a small black-velvet bag heavy with several pieces of what looked like seriously spendy jewelry, which I left there. I shoved the IDs and passports back into the folder and slipped the elastic back around it to secure it, then focused on Tempest’s location and snapped my fingers. I couldn’t do that with anyone else, though it would have been nice. I was pleasantly surprised to find her lying on the pedestal at the base of a giant sphinx who stood guard at the front of the resort.
“Hey,” I said, and a little bit of dust rained down on me when the giant stone creature shuddered a little and tilted her head.
“You startled me,” Margo, the sphinx, said, her generous stone lips turning up in a smile. “Not many people manage that. I must be getting old.”
I brushed the sand off my shoulders and smiled back. “Hardly, you’re not a day over what—twenty-five?” I winked up at her and pat
ted her paw. “How are you? I haven’t talked to you in a week or so.”
She gave me a wry smile. “Tack two thousand years onto that, and you’ll be getting close. I’m doing well. Kasey, one of the cleaning girls, has been keeping me company. She has a lovely husband who works in maintenance, but they’ve had a bit of a stumble in their marriage lately, what with all the extra hours they’ve been working to get the new additions ready.”
She bent her head down a little more. “On the juicier side, though, did you know Miguel, the bear-shifter chef at Marco’s, is dating Sabrina, that cute little witch who runs the blackjack table? Minnie in housekeeping is having a fit because she’s had her eye on him for months. I told Sabrina not to worry about it. Minnie’s a gossipy bubblehead.”
“Margo!” I exclaimed, smiling at the irony dripping off that statement. “Look at you, all up in everybody’s business.”
She lifted her muscular shoulder. “I have to do something to pass the time. Things have been slow in the security department. Besides, I have a couple millennia of experience. I’ve seen a thing or two. Did you know Cleopatra didn’t actually like either Julius Caesar or Mark Antony?” She nodded. “It’s true. She was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a love-struck fool. I’m not even sure she had a heart, and if you ask me, the snake that killed her was probably meant for one romantic rival or another. She liked the men—and women—but she liked power more. Helen of Troy, though. That woman was a romantic.” She shook her head. “She felt really bad about starting that war. She was a good-hearted girl.”
I had no doubt that was the truth, but I needed to get down to business.
“Did you hear about the murder down by the beach?”
She pinched her lips together and shook her head. “Sad business, that. She passed here this morning on her way to the tiki bar. She put off odd vibes.”
“Odd how?” Tempest asked. “Because there was a whole lotta odd about her.”
Margo furrowed her brow, and a little more sand rained down. “She seemed sad somehow, deep in her heart. Or lonely, maybe. There was deception there, but no intent to do harm.” She paused, her expression thoughtful. “I was debating contacting Blake, but I wanted to get another take of her first. There was no emergency. I didn’t get the sense she was going to hurt anybody, but there was definitely something going on with her.”
“That’s not surprising,” I said, leaning my hip against her pedestal and looking out at the ocean in the distance. She had the best view on the whole resort, which is how we’d met. When I was dating Blake, I’d wait with her for him to get off. We’d have long conversations and sometimes just sit quietly and watch the sunset together.
“No?” she asked. “Why not?”
I explained the circumstances, then shook my head. “I don’t know what her game was, but I’m afraid it got her killed.”
She shifted her weight so that she was looking out at the water, too. “People keep secrets for many reasons. Maybe she wasn’t happy with who she was, so she pretended to be somebody else for a while.”
Rather than returning her gaze to me, she continued to watch the horizon, and I wondered what she was thinking. Her life couldn’t be easy. She never left her post and had basically stood sentinel while life happened around her. Maybe she was speaking from experience.
“Maybe so,” was all I said. That was a conversation I’d like to have with her, but not today. “Have you seen Cyri and Aiden?”
“They passed a little while ago,” she replied. “Cyri said they were going to the beach.”
“Did anything seem weird to you?” Tempest asked, standing up from her place on the pedestal and stretching.
“Now that you mention it, something did stand out,” she said. “They weren’t laughing like they usually do and their hearts weren’t as light as usual. That was, as you’d say, a bit of a bummer. Faeries usually give me a nice little happy buzz when they pass.”
I knew what she was talking about because Cyri had that effect on me, too. As soon as she walked into a room, everything seemed a little brighter. My mind drifted back to that morning. She’d sworn she and Andromeda had met, but the witch had been adamant that they hadn’t. I had a feeling there was much more to that than a simple case of having one of those faces.
“You comin’, Tempest?” I asked, moving toward the steps that led to the path to the tiki.
“Yeah,” she said hopping from the pedestal and following me. “Bye, Margo. It was nice hangin’ out with you.”
“Bye, Tempest. Bye, Destiny. Come back and see me,” she called after us.
“Later, Margo,” I called over my shoulder. Thinking back to the whole loneliness thing, I vowed to come back as soon as this was over and spend a sunset with her.
Chapter 6
“Hey, Bob,” I said as I popped around the corner of the tiki. He was sitting at the bar counting the drawer and doing his shift paperwork.
“Hey, Des,” he said, licking the tip of the pencil he was using to write down the numbers.
“You’re gonna get lead poisoning doin’ that,” I said. “And you know licking it doesn’t do anything other than make it harder to write with, right?”
“I’ve told him the exact same thing,” Dimitri, our other bartender, said as he shoved a glass of citrus water across the bar to me.
Bob scowled at both of us. “Shows what you two knuckleheads know. There’s no lead in it. Never has been. And it makes it write darker.”
“Okay then,” I replied, taking a sip of water. “Lick away if it makes you happy.”
“What would make me happy,” he replied, “is if these numbers would match up. I’ve counted three times, and I’m still of by twenty bucks.”
“Lemme see,” I said, leaning over and glancing at the numbers. There it was—a twenty-dollar difference between what he started with and what he ended with after he matched up the day’s numbers.
“Right there.” I pointed to a math error where he’d added instead of subtracted. “You all right?” It wasn’t like him to mess up the math; that was more my thing.
He sighed as he erased the numbers and made the correction. “Not really. I’m worried about this whole murder thing.”
I tilted my head at him as I took a sip of water. “What about it? Something in particular or just the whole deal in general?”
He was quiet for a minute, then glanced around to make sure there was nobody around. Lowering his voice, he leaned closer to me. “I overheard Cyri and Aiden talking about her earlier, right after you left.”
That caught my attention. “What did you hear?”
Bob shook his head and reached up to twirl one end of his mustache, something he did when he was thinking. Dimitri leaned closer so he could hear, too. I arched a brow at him.
“What?” he asked, tilting his head and arching one delicate brow back at me. “Girl, I’m a faerie. You know I can listen from here or eavesdrop from over there.”
It was true. Faeries had insanely good hearing. Better, even, than werewolves. Even Tempest couldn’t hold a candle to him.
“Fine,” I huffed. “But what you hear stays right here, got it?”
Dimitri rolled his turquoise eyes. “You know better than to even tell me that.”
I nodded. He was a lot of things, but a blabbermouth wasn’t one of them. At least when it came to the important stuff. Gossip was an entirely different matter. He was a pro at that and knew more than probably anybody else on the resort when it came to personal business.
Bob glanced back and forth between us. “All I really heard was them referring to Andromeda. They were talking about some cruise, but after a couple minutes, they started arguing.”
“That’s not like them at all,” Dimitri said. “They never argue.”
“No, they don’t,” I said, my mind spinning. They were the most compatible couple I’d ever met, in fact. “Did you hear what they were arguing about?”
Bob shook his head. “Not really. Only that Aiden want
ed to confront somebody—I assume Andromeda—but Cyri didn’t want him to. I have no idea what he wanted to confront her about.”
I rubbed my temples, disappointed that my worries were confirmed rather than laid to rest. “Where are they?”
“Down at the beach,” Dimitri replied. “They came up a few minutes ago and got drinks.”
“Were they still snipin’ at each other or were they back to their normal, gushy, disgusting selves?” Tempest asked, jumping up on the bar and snatching an orange wedge out of the drink caddy.
Dimitri gave a half-hearted swat at her. “They weren’t exactly back to that, but they weren’t bickering.”
I pushed off my stool and grabbed my water. “I guess I’d better go find out what they were arguing about then.” It wasn’t a conversation I was looking forward to, but the sooner I talked to them, the sooner I could clear him of her murder.
“I’m staying here,” Tempest said, tossing her orange peel onto a napkin and hopping from the bar to a stool to the ground. “It’s been a long day, and I need a nap.”
I felt her pain there. We’d gotten up early to start the interviews, then Blake had interrupted our usual nap time with the murder. It was pushing close to five o’clock and I felt like my batteries were dying, too. It didn’t help that it was unusually hot, either. My clothes were sticking to me and I felt like I was covered in a layer of salt.
“I’ll see you in a bit, then,” I said, heading toward where Cyri and Aiden were sitting on a blanket down on the beach.
I was glad they’d chosen a spot a little farther down because I needed to figure out how to approach the situation. By the time I got there, I’d decided to just lay it out and hear what he had to say. They weren’t strangers that I needed to tiptoe around. They were friends I was trying to help.
“Hey, Des,” Cyri said, smiling up at me from her spot on a yellow beach blanket.
I smiled, taking a second to feel out the vibe. I sensed tension.