HALLOWED KNIGHT, THE

by Stark, Jenn

  Despite myself, I smiled. Love her or hate her, Dixie did have her moments. “I think that’ll definitely help.”

  “Let me bring you right in,” she said. “I’m not technically allowed on-site, but Detective McGeery is being particularly charmin’ about all that. And I do appreciate it so.”

  She prattled on as Brody and I exchanged a look. Even as rookies, homicide detectives were rarely charming.

  When we got to the chapel, however, we had another surprise waiting for us.

  Homicide detectives were rarely staked to the floor either.

  Chapter Nine

  “What the fuck!”

  Brody bolted forward, yelling for the other cops, who were in the secondary chapel where apparently witness interviews were still ongoing. I was right behind him, my third eye flickering open—

  I reared back, sending another of the cops into the wall.

  “Sorry.” I stepped to the side and steadied myself against the plaster as the men and women in uniform thundered by me. It took only a few seconds for them to descend on the rookie. She was out cold but alive, weak heart rate, bleeding heavily from a shoulder wound. I stood off to the side, forcing myself to swallow my bile, and refocused on the room.

  The electrical currents in the place weren’t simply erratic, they were off the charts. Spinning and whirling and flying wild, like a class of third graders set loose with a thousand cans of silly string. These currents vibrated differently than they should, not merely humming along like good little circuits usually did, or hissing angrily like frayed circuits tended to do. But crashing, wailing, moaning, crying, as if all the sins of the world had come home to roost…

  “Dixie,” I murmured to the woman cowering beside me. “What exactly is going on?”

  She stiffened, reluctantly pulling herself off the wall. “Well, as you can imagine, I’d like to know that myself. I don’t even know where the first knife came from, let alone this one. I can assure you, neither of those women brought any such thing with them. Not that we checked for weapons, of course, but something like that, I would’ve noticed.”

  “I’d like to think so.”

  The knife that stuck out of the detective’s shoulder was easily a foot long, the blade wide and not particularly sharp looking below the ornamental hilt. Nevertheless, anything pointed could be a weapon in the right hands. The hilt wasn’t jeweled or made of precious metal from what I could tell, but the leather wrapped around its base was intricately worked, a riot of dyed green-and-brown designs. It didn’t look like a traditional witch’s athame, and while it may not have been razor-sharp, it had more than done the job on the rookie. “Were the women Irish? And where’s the living one, anyway?”

  That seemed to be the question of the hour. A fresh uproar in the interview room revealed that the homicide suspect, one Lenora Drake, was now mysteriously missing, while of course the homicide victim Alison Kay, had already been whisked off to the coroner’s office for further examination.

  “She was sitting there all huddled over, not saying a word, practically rocking in place,” spluttered a beat cop who’d clearly been assigned to watch her. “Then I heard Detective Brody shout, and I looked over. When I looked back, just that quick, she was gone.”

  “Bullshit,” an older detective growled, and I realized this must be the man Brody didn’t like, though I had a hard time blaming the guy for his frustration. It wasn’t normal for women to just disappear on you like that, unless you were Connected. “You left your post.”

  “My eyes did, absolutely,” the man protested. “My feet were right here. And she would have had to go past me to get outside. I mean, her clothes are still there.”

  That made me stiffen, immediately recalling me to the banshee I’d encountered at the festival. What were these women, merely illusions? Wraiths?

  No. Illusions didn’t die. Nor could they stake living people to the ground.

  Right?

  “How’d the bride die exactly?” I asked Dixie abruptly. She didn’t hesitate.

  “Same type blade as that sweet Detective McGeery took, same thrust. I heard a knock on the door, I turned, and one woman, Alison Kay, was on the ground just like that, knife in the heart, while the other one had fainted clean away. I screamed for someone to call the cops, and they came. I got the unharmed woman, Lenora Drake, to come to, and…” She glanced at me. “And I wish I’d had Nikki with me, I’ll tell you that.”

  I felt the slightest twinge of guilt. Before I’d come along, Nikki had been Dixie’s right-hand woman. The two hadn’t been the best of friends the way Nikki and I had become, but they’d been close, and Dixie had relied on Nikki’s unique skills probably more than she’d realized until the day she looked up and Nikki was no longer there. Dixie blamed me for breaking up the band, but she and Nikki weren’t enemies by any stretch. Still, I could understand her missing Nikki. I’d been without the woman for a matter of hours, and I already felt like my arm’d been cut off.

  “You’re no slouch yourself, Dixie,” I said, as graciously as I could manage. “I suspect you held your own.”

  “Well, I can tell you this. Lenora Drake was out of her mind, babbling, frightened. She’d seen something more than her friend getting knifed, like a ghost, a demon…something. By the time the cops got here, she was barely coherent. And smaller too, it almost seemed. Withered.”

  I frowned. “Like she was fading?”

  “Exactly like that.” Dixie nodded. “Only, that doesn’t really make sense, right? Ordinary Connecteds can’t do that.”

  I sharpened my eyes on her. “She was Connected?”

  “More so than her friend, yes. But after Alison got stuck—”

  “By Lenora,” I put in.

  “Well…” Dixie bit her lip.

  “You were right there,” I said severely. “How did you not see what happened?”

  “Because nothing did happen,” she insisted, her eyes rounding. “I heard the knock, I looked back, and the women were on the ground. One right in front of me, the other several steps away. There was no one here, Sara, I swear it. And they didn’t have knives!”

  “Who was in the room with McGeery?” Brody barked, drawing my attention.

  “No one,” another of the beat cops said, the one we’d shouldered by at the door. “I know that doesn’t make sense, but no one passed us until you did, coming in or coming out. McGeery said she wanted to look at the scene with the room empty, and Detective Robbins was interviewing the witnesses.”

  Brody narrowed his eyes at Robbins. “You were talking to the bride who’s now escaped?”

  “No, I wasn’t,” huffed Robbins. “I was handling other interviews. Not that this is your case.”

  Brody pointed at the strange athame sticking out of McGeery’s shoulder. “That thing makes it my case. Who did talk to her?”

  “Well, McGeery did. She’s a chick, the vic was a chick.”

  I winced at the blatant sexism, but no one in the room seemed to take notice.

  “So you didn’t talk to the bride—what’s her name again?” Brody raked his hand through his hair.

  “Lenora,” Dixie said in her sweet drawl. “Lenora Drake.”

  “You didn’t talk to Miss Drake at all, Robbins?”

  “I hadn’t yet, no. Woman was gibbering like a freak of nature. I couldn’t make any sense of it.” The surly detective closed his notebook and stuffed it in his jacket’s inner pocket.

  “But Detective McGeery could.”

  “I have no idea,” Robbins said gruffly. “But she was talking to her. Then, all I know is McGeery stood up, patted the woman on the shoulder, announced she wanted to check out something else at the scene, and took off. I wasn’t too worried because we had Las Vegas’s finest watching every doorway and window. Little did I realize—”

  “We got that part,” Brody interjected wearily. “Who else did you interview?”

  “There was another couple waiting to get married. They left to, I assume, go get drunk.�
� Robbins rocked back on his heels. “They saw nothing out of the ordinary, nothing coming in or going out. Same story with the receptionist and wedding planner, both of whom are in the lobby. It was fucking Schrödinger’s brides in here.”

  “What about the groom? The guy from Ireland?” As Brody asked the question, his eyes were on Dixie, not the detective. She frowned back.

  “Why?” she answered defensively. “I don’t understand. He wasn’t even here. It’s not like he could have sent a knife through a Skype call.”

  The EMTs chose that minute to arrive, and as they hustled forward, I braved another third-eye peek toward the center of the room. Once again it was a mass of electrical static, but this time, there was a distinct difference. I had a clear shot of Detective McGeery, and I could tell at a glance the damage that had been done to her. I could also tell that she had Connected abilities that were off the charts. And that she was dying. There was no reason for it because the wound from the athame hadn’t hit anything critical, but darkness flowed out from that blade like an insidious wave, darkness that had been continuing to flow out while I’d been chatting with Dixie. Outrage shot through me, and I surged forward even as Dixie squeaked in alarm. Without giving it much thought, I robed myself in the appearance of an EMT, even as the real EMTs were running down the aisle of the chapel. All that mattered was that I reached McGeery first.

  “Miss Wilde.”

  Stuff it.

  I had no interest in playing by the Council’s rules on this one.

  I dropped to my knees by Detective McGeery, taking in her blonde hair and Nordic features. From her name, I’d assumed she was Irish, but this woman looked far more like a Viking than a Celt. She was also taller than I first expected, though lying flat out on the ground with a knife stuck in your shoulder would make anyone look a little puny. Still there was no doubt she was Connected, which wasn’t a bad thing to be for a detective.

  Someone huffed behind me. “Who the hell are—”

  I pressed my hand down on the detective’s sternum and yanked the blade free.

  The psychic flow that followed rocked everyone behind me off their feet, Connected and non-Connected alike. The power held within the crude-looking athame was ancient, far more ancient than the blade itself. I tossed it into the hands of Detective Robbins, who was out cold on the floor next to McGeery. When he came to in a second, though, he’d want to have the blade handy. Cops tended to be big fans of chain of evidence, and I wasn’t about to get Brody into any more trouble from my antics.

  Then I got down to work.

  Unlike when I had attempted to heal Nikki, I wasn’t operating in some sort of magic sinkhole, nor was I injured any longer. So my abilities to reach deep into Detective McGeery’s life essence weren’t hindered in any way. And, truth be told, I was more than a little pissed. There was too much going on that I didn’t understand, and I was tired of being fed the information in dribs and drabs. I jolted McGeery with enough power to raise an elephant from its sickbed, and her eyes flashed open as she drew in a startled, agonized breath. Like Dixie, I missed Nikki in that moment, because knowing what was going through the woman’s mind would have been nice. It would also have to wait.

  “Don’t let them sedate you until you talk to Brody,” I murmured, and her eyes flared even wider at the implied threat, but there was nothing I could do about that. I released my hold on time and let one of the other EMTs push me aside, then moved among the crowd, switching outfits with each step. First EMT, then cop, then detective, then EMT again, then finally, Sara Wilde.

  “We are going to have a nice long chat about scene protocol one day very soon,” Brody muttered under his breath, keeping in lockstep beside me through every change.

  “She was going down faster than anybody realized,” I mumbled back. “I had to do something.”

  “Understood. And in this case, it’s not a problem.”

  “Brody?” Dixie’s voice reached us from the top of the room, distracting us from the buzz of EMTs around McGeery. Her cell phone was in her hand, and she looked fiercely at us as she stepped back into the hallway.

  Without hesitating, Brody and I headed up the aisle of the chapel and followed Dixie down the hallway to her office. Leaving the door open, we stepped inside after her, with Brody in position at the doorway. “What is it?” he demanded tersely.

  “After the drugs were found in my office—drugs I did not put there,” Dixie said, eyeing me in particular, “I worked with Simon to create a better surveillance system for the chapel.”

  The Fool of the Arcana Council helping Dixie? That surprised me. She wasn’t exactly running in the right circles to wrangle a favor from any Council member. So why were they so eager to assist?

  If I seemed a little distrustful of the Council, well…it’s only because I was.

  “I already showed the primary surveillance footage to the police, of course. There’s nothing on it, not even a twitch until a bright light flashes and I start screaming. Nobody could explain where the bright light came from, or the knife—knives—but that’s beside the point now. I just got the feed from the system that Simon set up streamed to my cell phone. I didn’t want it on any hardwired equipment here in case the police confiscated it.” There was such an uncharacteristic flatness to her tone that, for the first time, a chill skated down my spine.

  “You think they won’t confiscate your phone?” Brody asked dryly.

  “Why, of course. Which is why this is a burner,” she retorted. She flipped it around and handed it to Brody. “Look at it. Both of you.”

  We did. The scene was in the chapel, with Dixie standing off to the side as the two women adjusted their tiaras. They were wearing actual wedding gowns and emerald-green velvet cloaks overtop, despite the fact that it’d been a warm day in Las Vegas. Either of them could’ve been hiding the knife in the folds of their skirts, so that explained that.

  I realized with a start that I recognized them. They were the same two women I’d seen at the psychic fair, tiaras and all.

  Then Dixie pushed a high-tech stand into position between them, where she had placed a tablet on a small tripod. She’d just hit Play and turned to the women, all smiles, when a bluff, attractive face appeared on the screen.

  I leaned forward. “This is the Green Knight? Conal McCarthy?”

  “Well, they didn’t call him either of those things. They both had different names for him…Kerry and Kent, I think.” Dixie said. “Here we’re splicing back out to a wide angle of the room.”

  The view changed as the man on the iPad began to speak. I didn’t know the language exactly, but I could understand it just the same. More than that, it was a language I’d already heard once today.

  “Welcome, masters of the deep, the dark, and the unknown,” the Green Knight intoned. “Your brides await you. A gift to bring life to your souls.”

  I blinked as the faintest outline of a rectangle flared to life at the far end of the room. “What the heck is—”

  “Shh,” Brody growled. Suddenly, the rectangle flash of light disappeared, and the room was filled with huge, dark figures, long-limbed giants with ruined faces.

  “What the hell is this?” Brody muttered.

  “According to Simon’s analysis, they’re something called the Fomorians, the mythological enemies of the ancient Irish,” Dixie supplied, her voice barely a whisper. “But watch what happens next.”

  Chapter Ten

  What happened next made no sense at all. There was a loud sound in the front of the room. Dixie looked up. The woman on the right, Lenora Drake, turned to the woman on the left, Alison Kay, then lifted her hand and knifed the poor girl in the chest. She hadn’t even pulled an athame out of her gown—it’d simply appeared in her hand.

  The creatures around them erupted in movement, rushing for both women. Their combined force pushed Drake away from her victim, where she immediately collapsed, mouth stretching wide. In the blink of an eye, all the creatures turned to mist and plunged down her
throat.

  “Jesus,” Brody muttered.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, staring in horror. These were the creatures that a much younger Seamus had unwittingly called out of the ether, when he’d gone dialing for the Tuatha dé Danann? Talk about a wrong number.

  And now Conal was stirring them up, hoping to wake the Tuatha dé Danann from their long slumber? This case just kept getting better and better.

  The moment passed, and the on-screen Dixie shook herself hard, looking in confusion at the woman on the floor and then swinging her head wildly to locate Lenora. But that wasn’t the end of it. After her meal of a roomful of Fomorians, Lenora shuddered and split into two. Then one of her turned and ran up the aisle as Dixie opened her mouth to scream. The sound had barely emerged from Dixie’s throat before the woman was gone.

  “I never saw that—her leaving,” Dixie said. “I never saw two of her until just now.”

  “Son of a bitch,” growled Brody again, his eyes pinned to the screen. “She was never here in the first place. No wonder that cop lost her. That wasn’t actually a person. Which means she was what?”

  Fairy, my mind whispered, before I could stop it.

  Brody demanded this last while looking at me, but I had nothing. Well, that wasn’t true. I had a disappearing banshee, I had ancient Irish demons who might be on the warpath for a self-exiled druid, I had dead people and almost-dead people, and maybe a possessed soon-to-be dead person. I also had a nearly dead Connected detective. All that put me in mind of a whole lot of Death.

  “No clue, but I’ve got an idea of who does,” I said grimly. “You guys stay here and do not show that to anyone. I need to take a walk.”

  “Don’t take too long,” Brody sighed. “We’re going to…” He shook his head. “No. We can’t show this feed to anyone. This is the LVMPD, not CSI: Paranormal Investigations. We cop to this and everyone’s going to lose their shit, which will totally derail the investigation.”