by Krista Walsh
“Dammit, Daphne. You just can’t let anything go,” she whispered, and started up the stairs.
Switching off her flashlight to avoid announcing her presence to whatever was on the third floor, she slid her foot toward the base of the bottom step and glided her hand along the wall until it reached the banister.
Slow step after slow step, she padded up the stairs, allowing the curve of the banister to guide her direction. The sobbing grew louder the higher she climbed, but still she sensed no other living person in the building.
Daphne pressed herself against the wall once she hit the final three steps to keep out of sight of anyone or anything that might be around the corner. She preferred to be the one doing the catching rather than the one being caught.
She peered around the wall. The dim light of the streetlight spilled into the hallway from the west-facing rooms, the glow revealing nothing but shadows and cracks in the walls.
The sobs became lost in a flurry of rising whispers that carried notes of curiosity and fear. The faint voices held a trace of emptiness, a sense of time and distance she had come to associate with the speech of the dead.
Her heart hammering in her chest, Daphne pushed open the door to the first room. Nothing except for a cracked and dust-covered end table.
Now that she was here, she sensed the trail of someone else’s magic — a green power she didn’t recognize. It was faint, nearly undetectable, but she wasn’t the only life form wandering the hospital’s hallways tonight.
She stretched her empty hand toward the ground and twitched her fingers. Drawing from one of the most basic spells she’d learned as a child, she lifted the dust and dirt from the unwashed floor. It swirled in the air in front of her, dipping in and out of the pale beam from the streetlight.
With one eye on the dirt and the other on the still-empty hallway, she raised her hand and flicked her fingers at the wall. The moisture in the plaster from the leaking pipes and cracked windows drew close to her and rounded into droplets. The water mingled with the dirt, turning it into thick, wet clay. Another twist of her fingers and the end of the clay flattened and elongated, the edge narrowing into a sharp point.
After shaping the blade, Daphne drew the excess water out of the clay until it hardened. The makeshift knife wouldn’t be strong enough to cut through anything too dense, but could still drive deep into any creature that tried to attack her.
Her magic flared in her veins, but she held it steady, refusing to let it take over. A soft ache thudded behind her right eye with the strain of holding her power back.
She crept down the hallway with her back to the wall, the knife hovering over her left shoulder.
The whispers grew to such a pitch that the ache behind her right eye became a demanding throb.
More imprints passed by her before fading into the dust in the air. The water-stained walls stretched on either side of her, interrupted at regular intervals by dark wooden doors, some open and others sealed shut on rusted hinges.
Seeing no purpose now in keeping her presence hidden, she switched her flashlight back on and cast the beam over the walls. As the light passed over the floor, it revealed two sets of footprints, one large and one small, cutting through the thick layer of dust on the hardwood planks.
She wondered if they’d been created by Denise’s trespassers, but found her interest in that mundane mystery had waned in the face of the much more intriguing question of what power had caused the imprints to show so strongly.
“Hello? Is there anyone here?”
The whispers hushed, and Daphne released a breath.
Her mother and grandmother had been horrified by her interest in necromancy when they’d walked in on her practicing with the corpse of a stray cat. They believed it to be a dangerous path toward the darker arts. Daphne agreed — that had been her purpose in learning — but now those skills would come in handy for a more positive mission.
“Can I help you?”
As the last syllable faded on the air, the sound of smashing glass echoed from a room at the end of the hallway. Daphne jumped and swung her beam of light toward the sound. The door to the room blew open and slammed against the wall as a draft gusted into the hallway. The wind brushed against Daphne’s cheek and played with her hair so it tickled the skin on her neck.
Her heart bounced against her ribs, and she tightened her grip around the flashlight as she strengthened her mental hold on the clay blade.
The energy of the house weighed on her with sudden anger. She edged forward, her senses on alert for more sounds or movement.
Just outside the doorway, she paused and drew in a deep breath. Her blood raced in her ears, and she waited until her breathing fell into a rhythm with her steadily pulsing magic before mustering her courage to step inside.
Empty.
She released a sharp exhale and approached the window. The view stretched out over the yard where the shadows of black trees loomed over long black grass. Glass shards crunched beneath her shoes as she turned back to the center of the room. She ran her flashlight beam over the walls and the door, looking for whatever the whispering ghosts had wanted her to find.
Her beam of light froze in the far right corner of the room. The spell around the knife crumbled, and Daphne vaguely noticed the loose dirt spilling onto her shoulder and sliding into a heap at her feet.
The young man looked to be no more than eighteen years old, with shaggy brown hair and piercings along his ears and on either side of his eyebrows. His ragged hoodie was bunched around his ears, as though he’d drawn it close to warm his neck. He lay on his side, his arms tucked up beside him.
Daphne swallowed and stepped closer. She cast her mind around the room to discover whatever presence she sensed was watching her. Nothing.
She took another step as she returned the light to the young man. Her stomach turned, and she clenched her teeth to keep her dinner down.
For years she’d worked to master the dark side of her magic, trying to gain the power she believed she deserved. A year ago, that plan had come crashing down over her head because she couldn’t accept the idea of killing anyone.
She hated the thought of being the reason someone would never see another morning.
She hated the thought of death even when she didn’t have a hand in it.
And this young man was definitely dead.
Dead with his eyes wide open and his mouth sewn shut.
2
Daphne leaned against the wall across from the room where the body lay. She caught herself chewing the side of her thumb and told herself to stop fidgeting. She repeated the process twice more before giving up and returning her thumb to her teeth. After all, no one was there to judge her for it.
As she waited for the police to talk to her, her mind raced to answer the questions she knew they wouldn’t ask. Why had a ghost been sobbing? What were the whispers saying? Why had they wanted her to find this body?
Before calling the police, she’d done just enough poking around to answer her one burning question: the young man’s death had been far from natural. The actual cause of death remained to be seen, but what she’d thought to be white thread sewing his mouth shut had, on closer inspection, turned out to be something like glue. It glistened under her flashlight beam, and even an hour later, her stomach churned at the thought of it.
She’d debated waiting to report the murder until she completed her own investigation around the rest of the hospital in search of whatever had given off that hint of green-hued magic, but knew that would have ended badly. She’d been working hard to improve her reputation with the New Haven Police Department, so she would have to wait for another time to dig deeper.
Uniformed officers had cordoned off the hospital already, and the crime scene search team was working under the floodlights they’d brought in, analyzing the building room by room to ensure not a single trace of evidence was missed. The two detective sergeants at the crime scene across from her were evaluating what they could
find before the medical examiner arrived to provide a more in-depth look.
They were all focused on the victim.
Daphne, from her place against the wall, focused on Peony House.
I should have driven away when I saw the lights were gone, she scolded herself. I promised myself I wouldn’t get involved in these situations anymore.
She knew it would only take a couple of slips for her to end up back where she’d been: out summoning demons and absorbing their power until her veins burned with the heat of it.
Her skin flushed, and she wiped her palms on her pant legs. The old desire slammed against her determination to put that life behind her.
Even as she wished she’d walked away, her ambition couldn’t help but send up a prayer of thanks that she’d stumbled on exactly the kind of story she needed to catch Gerry’s interest.
And how could she walk away from the other story, the one no one else would be able to tell? Some power at Peony House had thinned the barrier between the mundane world and the supernatural one. As she watched, the technicians walked through shimmering imprints as they exited one room and went into another. One of the techs shivered and looked over his shoulder, seeing nothing.
I shouldn’t be able to see them so well, either, she thought. So why are these memories walking around like they’re about to step into our time?
Her thoughts returned to the hint of magic she’d picked up before the glass shattered. It hadn’t been strong, but had come from the same direction as the murder room.
Daphne couldn’t bring herself to chalk it up to coincidence.
No, this tragedy went deeper than one dead man. Unfortunately, getting to the bottom of it was going to be challenging now that the police were involved.
Her track record of racing to the top of both her sorcery and her career had put her on the red pages of the police department’s ledger books. Getting around them to work her own case would be a true test of her skill.
And that test had already started. The uniformed officers had questioned her about her presence at the hospital, about how she’d found the body, about whether she’d touched anything. They had searched her for weapons and spent minutes assessing her credentials to make sure she was who she said she was. She’d hoped that would be the end of it and she could get back to her article for the next morning, but then the homicide team had arrived. Of the six detective sergeants on staff, it was just her luck that the two who responded to her call were the two with whom she had the muddiest history.
Because what else could go wrong with her evening?
She raised her chin and drew herself up as Detectives Hunter Avery and Meg Kealey stepped out of the murder room.
As always, Daphne was struck by how unusual they were as partners in that they were so perfect together. If she had met them at a star-studded Hollywood awards party, she would have thought they were a hot new power couple rather than a pair of cops. And yet, in spite of their apparent compatibility, their six-year relationship was platonic, based on mutual respect and common career goals.
Meg Kealey was the sort of woman who looked like she’d just walked out of a salon. Not because she was always picture perfect — although her shoulder-length brown hair and neatly lined brown eyes looked impeccable despite her being at the end of her shift — but because she carried herself with the confidence of a woman who knew she was on the right track. She’d sped through the officer ranks on her own merit and had only paused at detective sergeant because she enjoyed working with her team in the Major Crimes Unit.
She did not, however, enjoy having to deal with Daphne.
Meg’s eyes narrowed in a dark glare as she stepped into the hallway, and Daphne forced herself to hold her gaze, refusing to appear cowed.
Daphne would be the first person to agree that Meg had reason to dislike her. Prior to her life-changing self-revelation, Daphne had been a private hell for the MCU, particularly for Hunter and Meg. Chance had aligned them on many cases, and Daphne had gone out of her way to make life difficult for them.
Thinking about it now made her blush, and a big part of her attempts to change over the last year had been to try to make amends for what she’d put them through. More than once over the four years that she’d hounded them and thumbed her nose at their authority, Hunter and Meg had been brought up in front of their boss because she had managed to get details about a case that should have been held close to their vests. Hunter in particular had nearly lost his job because of her.
And Daphne hadn’t cared. The Chronicle had boasted higher print and online subscriptions than any other newspaper in the city because of the depth she gave her stories, so Gerry had budgeted the bail money for her. The many residents of New Haven who enjoyed a good mystery felt like they were part of the investigation, thanks to her.
Never mind the setbacks she might have caused for the cases or the harm she had done to the victims’ families.
Guilt pressed down on her, and she dropped her gaze to her shoes. When she looked back up, Meg wore a hard smirk on her neatly lipsticked mouth.
But Meg’s smirk was nothing compared to Hunter’s coldness. After all, Daphne had done much more to him than damage his professional reputation.
When they’d first met, the attraction between them had been instantaneous, the chemistry electric. In spite of the detective-journalist divide, she’d made him laugh and had warmed under his subtle, teasing flirtations. His smile had made her stomach flop, and his closeness had left her skin singing with a desire for more. When they’d finally caved to their sexual tension, the trouble had been getting out of bed long enough to go to work.
All the promise of something happening between them had evaporated when he discovered she’d got her hands on evidence that should have been locked in the medical examiner’s cabinet. For a long time, she hadn’t cared about what she’d lost, too focused on the end goal, but now that her priorities had changed, it hurt her to see the deadness in his eyes when he looked at her.
She was the bug, he was the boot, and it was up to him to decide if and when he would squash her.
She held no hopes of bringing them back to where they’d been at the start, but the occasional smile would have been nice.
With his broad shoulders and confident posture, he struck an imposing figure, tempered by the lines around his hazel eyes and soft lips that gave away his quickness to laugh when he wasn’t around her. Tonight, his auburn hair was damp and slicked back, and Daphne guessed the call had caught him at the gym, where he usually went at the end of his shift.
He approached her with a raised eyebrow, his grim face so full of pointed questions that Daphne saw no point in waiting for him to ask them.
She raised her hands and opted for a direct approach. “I didn’t do it.”
Hunter crossed his arms, the lines of his cheap suit creasing at the waist, and the corners of his mouth twisted downward. Meg pulled out her notebook and pen, her gaze steely and expression blank.
“While it would give me great pleasure to solve a murder and get you out of my hair in one go, I’m prepared to believe you,” he said. “But you need to tell me what the hell you’re doing here. I might not be able to get you for murder, but I will gladly charge you with trespassing.”
Daphne pushed away from the wall and dropped her hands to her sides. Her magic swirled in her chest, protesting as she pressed it down. Defensiveness would get her nowhere. She wouldn’t put it past Hunter to follow up on the threat.
“Sure, but think of all the paperwork,” she teased, hoping to get him to relax even a single muscle in his face. Instead, the lines around his mouth deepened, and she gave up on any attempt at levity. “I came here to follow up on a tip. A friend of mine lives across the street and saw lights in the window. By the time I got here, whoever it was had left, and I found him in there.”
She jerked her head toward the room and cleared her throat to ease the sudden constriction. The fear in the young man’s eyes still screamed at
her each time she blinked. She’d picked up on the lingering energy around him when she found him, so she knew he hadn’t been dead long. Whatever had been done to him had probably happened shortly before she arrived, and by the expression on his face, his death had been far from gentle.
“Are you all right?” Hunter asked. For a fleeting moment, Daphne’s hopes rose that his empathy had pushed through his anger, but by the time she shifted her gaze to meet his, the concern was gone. As though her silence reassured him that she wasn’t about to collapse into hysterics, he left the question unanswered and asked instead, “What else did your friend tell you? Did they see anyone go in? Any cars in the driveway?”
Daphne shook her head. “I did ask. If there had been a car, I would have had her get out binoculars and scribble down the plate number for me, but there was nothing.”
Meg hooked her finger into the notebook to hold her page, then brushed her fingers against Hunter’s arm to get his attention. With a dark look at Daphne, she leaned close to his ear.
Daphne watched her lips, made out the words “service road,” and guessed the rest of Meg’s theory. Peony House marked the end of the residential zone. Beyond this street was nothing but farmland, the houses few and far between. Businesses had begun snatching the land up at the outskirts in recent years, and the city had built a new highway there for easier access. The old route had been left to wither away. Now it was used primarily as a service road for the farms, and it passed by the hospital.
If no car had been seen at the front of the house, it was a reasonable guess that the murderer had used the service road to get here.
Only if the murderer drove, Daphne thought. It’s possible he flew out of here. Or he never left at all.
She wished she could take another walk through the hospital on her own, but the chances of that happening would be slim for a couple of days.
Hunter rubbed the back of his neck until the skin was as red as his hair under the harsh glare of the floodlights.