by Lyra Evans
There was an unpolished wooden railing down the other side, pillared by wood beams and heavy piping that seemed to run through the house. This was clearly a basement of sorts, though it seemed unfinished and small. The smell of dust and damp reached him. No one was down here much, he could tell. Through the heavy darkness was a grey patch of low light, brightening toward the opposite wall. A few boxes with what seemed like building materials or extra paint cans and décor supplies stood between him and the lit area.
Heart pounding, Niko slid one of the boxes aside with one foot, his gun trained directly ahead of him, about where he’d expect an assailant to jump out. But as he approached the brighter spot, he realized the light was coming from a small window in the foundation of the house. It was open. And cursing beneath it, brushing dust off herself, was Starla.
“Oak, Ash, Pine, and Birch, Starla, I could have fucking shot you,” he said, lowering his gun. Starla shot him an angry look, wiping a smear of mud from her cheek.
“I am not in the mood, Niki, and would you please put that thing away,” she said, nodding to the gun as she tried to collect what seemed to be a set of duffel bags from the ground.
Niko holstered the gun and reached for one of the bags to help her. Cobalt gathered the others from her as she swore to herself and tried to adjust her clearly torn jacket. Niko reached up to the window and closed it behind her, waiting for her rage to subside so he could ask her what the fuck she was doing coming in through a basement window.
“Don’t even start,” she said without prompting, stomping past him and Cobalt up the stairs to the kitchen. “Fucking MCPD.” Niko rushed after her, setting the bags on the counter. “Why the fuck is there a rave going on in here?”
Niko waved a hand at the blinding lights still strobing in the room, and they subsided. “I put warding on the perimeter to alert us, just in case.”
Starla dropped her jacket on the couch, her shoulders slumping. “Oh,” she said. “That’s smart, actually. Good job.” Niko raised his eyebrows. Did she expect any less from him? But before he could ask, he noticed the mud on her face was actually a bruise.
“What the fuck is that?” he asked, reaching for her face to check it. “How did this happen?”
Starla coloured slightly, shoving him off. Her clothing was much more casual now than the cocktail dress she’d left in. She wore jeans and an oversized, slouchy sweater in a mint green. Her hair was done up in a more artfully messy bun, rather than the sleep-tousled one from the previous night. But she was lacking makeup, and if Starla was to go out on the town, she normally applied some at least. There were dark circles under her eyes to rival Niko’s, and they were in full view because of it. He neglected mentioning that.
“It’s not a big deal,” she said, but given her previous comment of ‘fucking MCPD,’ Niko thought it probably was.
“What did they do?” he asked, and who ‘they’ were seemed a foregone conclusion.
Starla eyed him a moment, then sunk into the couch. It didn’t yield much under her weight, but she hardly noticed. He crossed his arms, waiting.
“Get back to my apartment to find officers—ones I don’t recognize—searching the place. I complain loudly, as I would,” she explained, waving off his instinctive reaction, “saying this is an unlawful search and where is their warrant, all the usual stuff. Then this fucking penis with a badge gets all up in my face and spins me into the fucking door, hitting my jaw against the doorframe to pin me there. Twists my arms behind my back and says I’m under arrest!” She flailed her arms at this, as if it was the most unreasonable thing imaginable. Which it was, but given the circumstances, Niko’s immediate reaction was more fear and guilt than anger. He had brought her into this. He had put her in danger. He should have just—“I’m yelling for a lawyer at this point, obviously, and finally Uriah shows up and gets me uncuffed, explaining there’s no cause to arrest me. Blah blah blah, police gibberish. Anyway, this fucking meat puppet with a gun starts off on how he knows I’m involved, he just can’t prove it yet, and Uriah helpfully tells him that’s not how police work is done.” She shakes her head. “So then I’m fucking livid, but Uri tells me they do have to ask me some questions, and that the Chief wants all interrogations to happen at the precinct. I ask if I’m being questioned or interrogated, and he shrugs apologetically. Like, the poor guy clearly wants no part of any of this, but he can’t leave the investigation either with all the shit going on.”
Niko’s panic flared. “Did they interrogate you? Did you demand a lawyer? Was there a camera—”
“Relax, Niki,” she said. “I got ‘questioned’ in the Captain’s office. No camera, but I talked to them without a lawyer. I know, I know!” she said quickly, cutting off his alarmed condemnation. “But it made more sense here, just let me finish. So Uri and the Captain are talking to me, asking the usual where was I and all that. They didn’t seem worried, maybe because they don’t really want you caught, I don’t know. But then Chief Banyan—” Here she managed to make the Chief’s name sound like an offensive word. “She comes in like a fucking hurricane and starts railing on me. Questioning every detail of what I say and all my timing and threatening to send me to prison and to tell my employer about my background—which, surprise, bitch, they already know—and then when that doesn’t work, she threatens to have me evicted or something. I don’t know, there were a lot of threats, and finally she just tells me I need to tell her where you are right now or I might get killed.”
“She threatened your life?” Niko asked, dumbstruck.
Cobalt had appeared by them now too, standing like a bodyguard on Starla’s other side. He was stone and anger, his eyes sharp enough to cut. Coral was sitting up now too, leaning over her knees to listen to Starla.
“Sort of,” Starla said. “She didn’t say she’d kill me, just that I could get killed in the crossfire or something if I was involved and didn’t come clean now. Like they’re waging a fucking war against you or something.” Niko felt at once drained of energy and shaking with the need to move, to act, to get to work. He still didn’t understand what was happening, but he damn well was going to figure it out. “Don’t worry, though, Niki. I didn’t tell them shit. When she realized I had nothing to give her and she couldn’t keep holding me without arresting me or something, she finally let me go. Fucking hours in that damn precinct, I don’t know how you work there.” She pressed a hand to her forehead. “Of course, she set a tail on me the moment I left, so that probably took some time to arrange.”
Cobalt moved to the window in an instant, scanning the street beyond. He moved to the windows at the back of the house when he found nothing of interest by the first one.
“They followed you?” Niko asked, ready to bolt from the house. They couldn’t stay there.
“Tried,” Starla said. “That’s why I had to come in the damn basement window. I had to shake the tail.” She exhaled long and low. “Some rookie officer, probably. She didn’t seem too skilled. She was way too close at the start and reacted too abruptly. Like she’d wait until I turned down a street then abruptly make the same turn, cutting other people off. And her head would snap down to her phone or whatever if I ever happened to look back. Nice try, love. Nice try.”
Niko calmed only slightly. “Where did you go?”
Starla gestured in a circle with a finger. “Back to the apartment first, obviously. Collected some inconspicuous stuff, then to work to check in, then around in a big fucking circle. All over the place. I finally dropped her in the pedestrian market at the edge of the shopping district. Shit ton of people out there after work to get holiday gifts and crap, so it wasn’t too hard to disappear. But I took the most roundabout route I could back here, just in case. Also checked all my clothes and hair. Picked up a neutralizer at one of the stores, too, to make sure they didn’t bug me somehow.” She held up a small, empty vial she pulled from a pocket of her torn jacket. It was a seldom used but very helpful potion that cut the magical effects of any spell place
d on you for a period of time. Hard to come by in the usual markets, but clearly Starla knew where to shop.
“I’m so sorry, Star,” Niko said, his gut roiling. The length she went to, the bruise on her face from that asshole—Niko was sure it was Officer Probert Walnut, who had an awful personality to go with his name—and the threats to her life and livelihood were all because of him.
“You’re not the one who should be apologizing,” she said, getting to her feet. “The fucking MCPD need to apologize. To me and you. And whoever else is involved in this shit show.” She moved toward the kitchen counter and began to open the bags she’d brought. “They also owe me for that jacket. I fucking liked that jacket.” Shaking her head, she pulled out her supplies. Food was chief among them, followed by various items of clothing and accessories. She plucked a box from the bag and held it up for Niko. “Here’s your phone. Not the best, but it should do. Sim card is in there. Prepaid, like you said. Got you one too,” she said to Cobalt, picking another box from the bag. Cobalt took it, surprised.
“Did you get anything suitable for disguising us?” Cobalt asked.
“I’m getting there,” she said, shoving bottles of spring water at him and an empty bottle. “This is for you to purify water on the go, if you need it,” she said, indicating the bottle. “Can’t have you nearly dying again.” She tossed one to Coral as well, who caught it without moving. “You too, love.”
Coral cocked an eyebrow but studied the bottle. “Thoughtful.”
“I try,” Starla said with a winning smile.
Niko was busy setting up the phone. The battery was half charged, which wasn’t unusual for new electronics, so he set it to charge immediately before checking the number and committing it to memory. “Program this into your phone,” he said to both Starla and Cobalt. He called out the number to them. Cobalt did as instructed, but he seemed perplexed as he did.
“If I’m with Niko, why should I need my own cellphone?” he asked.
“Might be nice to be able to contact you should you have to leave for any reason,” Starla said, eyeing him pointedly. “Don’t you think?”
Cobalt’s jaw twitched. “Best to be prepared,” he muttered, setting his own phone to charge next to Niko’s.
Starla pulled out some other items that seemed—less logical. There was a set of tiny hair clips fitted with tiny aquamarine stones. Aquamarine were stones used by Witches and Wizards for sustained magic and projection spells, if Niko was correct. Studying them closely, he noticed tiny runes inscribed into the surface of the stones.
“Hair dye is hard to come by in Maeve’s Court,” Starla said, addressing Cobalt. “Fae don’t really need it. We can just,” she said, waving a hand over a lock of her hair, changing it instantly from the peachy pink shade to dark purple. “But trading hair colour effectively takes time, energy, and usually a mirror,” she said, swiping a hand back down over the lock of hair. Plus, you obviously can’t just magic your own hair a different colour. So I picked up these clips. They’re from Nimueh’s Court,” she said, which Niko had already deduced. “You just clip a couple discreetly into your hair, and it does the work for you. Entirely temporary.” She took two clips and demonstrated, pinning them just behind her ears. Instantly, her pink hair turned blond. “They just don’t have as much variety of colour.”
She took them out and handed them back to Niko. He picked up a woolen hat with strange fibers sewn into the rim of it. Placing it on his head, he found his hair was suddenly down to his shoulders, though still the midnight blue it usually was.
“Ah, yeah,” Starla said. “Thought those might be useful too. For more options.” She handed a baseball cap with a diamond embroidered on the front of it to Cobalt. He took it and placed it on his head. Immediately, his strangely fluid, silver-white hair fell around his eyes and ears in thick ropes. The dreadlocks suited him, but the sudden change was jarring for Niko.
Cobalt seemed to agree and removed it. “It’s certainly effective,” he said, placing the hat back down on the counter. Starla dropped a handful of metal objects onto the counter. The clinking sound reminded Niko of chain, but only some of these items were connected. He picked one up and gave Starla a questioning look.
“After hair, nothing changes appearance like some well-placed piercings,” she said. “A nose ring can change your whole face.” Niko frowned. He wasn’t sure he believed that, but the more options to distract from his identity, the better. “I also got you these.” She pulled out a set of handcuffs. They were the highest grade cuffs you could buy as a civilian, which surprised Niko. Despite the amused snort from Coral behind them, Niko realized this was Starla’s way of giving Niko back some of his police identity. “You’ll need them when you find the killer, right?”
Something caught in Niko’s throat. He nodded slowly. “Thanks.” It was all he could manage, picking them up to hook onto his belt. “But I won’t be finding anyone if I can’t figure out a way to get a second look at the crime scene.”
Starla leaned back against the back counter, picking up a protein bar from the pack she’d just unbagged. “Why don’t you just manifest it?”
Niko stared at her. Cobalt was toying with one of the piercings, confused. “What do you mean?”
Starla chewed on her bite of protein bar. “It’s an old police trick, isn’t it?” she asked Niko, who suddenly felt very stupid. “Read about it in my intro to ‘detecting’ book when I got the job at the agency. Cops in Nimueh’s Court still use it sometimes, but I guess it’s easier for Witches and whatnot than Fae. Takes more prep and time for us. But you can still do it, right?”
Niko didn’t answer immediately. He hadn’t done what she was asking since training in the police academy. It had been years. The process was intensive and draining. Photographs and a physical scene were always easier to work with, but it helped when neither of those were an option, or when weather or other factors damaged the integrity of a scene. But the drawback, beyond the difficulty, was the bias of the manifestation.
Mostly, though, Niko was angry with himself for not coming up with the idea.
“What does it do, exactly?” Cobalt asked.
“Manifest the scene,” Starla said again. When Cobalt gave her a flat look, she rolled her eyes. “Like, he’s going to magically make the scene appear around him so we can all see it. Walk through it. Look at the evidence. It pulls everything from his memory because he was actually present there. The mind takes in massive amounts of data and detail that we don’t think about, so this is a way of actually seeing the detail we’ve stored. The magic facilitates everything.”
That was mostly accurate, and Niko was impressed. The agency he’d set her up with really was legit. And when he remembered the threat to her job he’d caused, Niko felt all the worse.
“Sounds like the perfect solution,” Coral said. “Funny you didn’t think of it, copper.”
Niko eyed her sidelong. “It’s an antiquated technique,” he said by way of defense. “And it’s not perfect. The recollection is biased by my memory and experience of the scene. That’s one of the main reasons the MCPD stopped using it in Court cases. But as we can’t go to the actual scene, it’s the best we’ve got.” He nodded to Starla.
“So what do you need?” Cobalt asked.
Niko turned to look around the room. “Space,” he said. “A lot of space.”
Chapter 8
Niko stood in the centre of the now empty living room. Even with the furniture moved out of the way, the room was small. In the old days of the MCPD, officers would retreat to gymnasium-sized rooms to recreate crime scenes with this technique. The Wizards and Witches of Nimueh’s Court Police had the advantage of being able to manifest a scene at different ratios, resizing it to see from any angle. But Fae didn’t have that kind of control for the experiment. They’d adjusted the magic of the technique for Fae abilities, but lost some of the flexibility in the process. So the small living room with attached kitchen would have to do.
Breathi
ng deeply, eyes closed, Niko tried to center himself. He brought up the memory of the warehouse in his mind, devoting every inch of his focus to that and nothing else. So few officers mastered this technique, even at the academy, but it was required as a kind of weeding exercise to pluck out only the strongest candidates for the detective path. Analysing a scene was so crucial to the job, every detective hopeful needed all the weapons in their arsenal they could get.
“Is it manifested yet?” Coral asked, voice flat.
Cobalt hushed her. “Let him concentrate.”
“This is a demanding process,” Starla explained in a loud whisper. “It’s not unusual for it to take time. This shit is hard.”
Niko ground his teeth together. “Harder when people keep distracting you with their whispering,” he shot.
The three of them made some vaguely apologetic noises, then the sound of them faded from Niko’s consciousness. He threw himself into the memory, searching for the feeling of the damp air, the smell of earth and asphalt and iron in his lungs as he stood before the warehouse door. He reached out in front of him, feeling the cold metal and rough handle under his fingers. The screech of the rail as he pulled the door open, the spike of fear as he worried he’d alerted Sade, the mix of concern and relief when he realized there was no one coming—Niko felt his body surge with all those experiences again. He felt his hair move in the cool night wind. His foot crunched down on the gravel.
And as Niko pulled the door of the warehouse open in his mind, he pushed a surge of magic through his veins, into his hand, making a trade. Another. And another. Numberless trades rushed along his fingertips, swapping out the empty air before him with something. These trades were brutally difficult to pull off because they were offering nothing for something. The theory was technical and too much in the philosophical for Niko. It was about ‘nothing’ actually, technically, being ‘something.’ But he didn’t waste energy thinking it over.