by Morgan Brice
“Jump!”
Simon reacted before he could think, hurling himself into the bushes along the sidewalk as a black SUV hopped the curb and ran over the sidewalk where he had stood seconds before. It corrected course and roared off.
Simon stood, shaking, and looked around. There was no one in sight, and he wondered who had yelled the warning. As he brushed bits of twig and leaf out of his hair and off his clothing, he realized that someone was watching him. When he looked up, an old man with a shopping cart full of bundles stared at him.
“You warned me?” Simon asked in a whisper, in case anyone living might be near.
The ghost nodded. The spirit had mustered enough energy to shout a warning, but now either lacked the energy or the desire to say more.
“Thank you,” Simon said. “Can I help you pass over?”
The old man shrugged and pointed to the park on the other side of the hedgerow. Simon took his meaning. The park had been the man’s home in the last years of his life, and he wasn’t ready to leave just yet. Fortunately, Simon thought, he hadn’t wanted company.
“Thank you,” he repeated, as the ghost’s image faded. Simon grabbed his backpack from where it fell, brushed at the grass stains, and hurried his pace, although he only had a few blocks to go.
That car meant to hit me, he thought and felt chilled. Someone steered toward me. That was too controlled to be an accident.
But why? He wondered. Simon didn’t have any enemies, at least, not in the murderous sense. The circumstances of his departure at USC had left bruised feelings and damaged egos, but in the end, the only person who sustained permanent injury was Simon, with the loss of his teaching career. After three years, he doubted anyone cared enough to try to kill him.
He didn’t owe anyone money; at least, nobody but the bank for the loan on his shop. No gambling, no drugs, no blackmail, no crazy exes. Unless someone thinks I told Vic something dangerous, or that I will tell him—
Simon reached the shop, unlocked the door and turned off the alarm. He was breathing hard, and his heart still thudded against his ribs. Should he call Vic? He almost reached for his phone, then reconsidered.
And tell him what? A car jumped the curb? Everyone knows tourists can’t drive. He’ll say they were just on their phone or looking at their GPS.
Simon went to the break room, warmed up a cup of coffee, and flipped over the sign. He reached under the counter and pulled out a string of onyx and silver beads that usually helped to ground him and ease tension. They helped, but only a little.
The rest of the afternoon crawled. Simon jumped every time the door opened, then did his best to manage a greeting that didn’t sound fake. By closing time, he was ready to go and grateful that this wasn’t one of his tour nights.
Simon knew he should check in with the rest of his Skeleton Crew, but he felt too jumpy after the near-accident to walk around tonight. He did put up a sign in the window about starting a neighborhood watch program and picked a date for a meeting in his shop the following week.
He kept to the main streets on his way home, walking fast and staying as far off the road as possible. No one tried to run him down, and he couldn’t see that anyone was following him. Simon threw together a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, curled up on the couch, and put in an action movie, promising himself that come the weekend, he would find himself a date. Maybe.
The ringtone on his phone woke Simon out of a deep sleep. He squinted, trying to figure out where he was and realized he had fallen asleep on the couch, with the movie long over and his contacts dried out. He pawed for the phone and saw the text message.
“Shit,” he growled, jerking to alertness. “That’s the shop alarm.”
The LED display on his phone read 3:00. He debated taking the car, then decided he didn’t want to chance walking after the SUV incident. Simon grabbed his keys and phone, locked up, and drove back to Grand Strand Ghost Tours, scared of what he was going to find.
He silenced the alarm from his phone when he reached the shop, then advanced warily, wondering why out of all the stores on the boardwalk, anyone would pick his to break into. He never left cash in the register and did a fraction of the sales the big gift shops made. None of his merchandise was particularly valuable, or even easy to fence. ‘Cos I’m sure there’s a big demand for stolen New Age crystals and books about ghosts.
From a distance, the first thing he noticed was that the big plate glass window was still intact. The smell of blood stopped him cold.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” No way could what he was seeing be real. But as he stepped closer, his heart sank and his breath came short and fast as fear slithered down his spine.
A plastic Bojack horsehead mask hung off one of the decorative boardwalk posts, with the face pointing at the shop. The mask and post were soaked with blood. To anyone else, it might look like a malicious prank.
To someone with a doctorate in folklore and mythology, Simon recognized it as a deadly threat.
“Niding horse,” he murmured, unable to believe his eyes. Norse mythology, from the Viking days, a thousand fucking years ago. The custom was too obscure for him to have even brought it up in his classes, but he knew the lore. Vikings were hardcore on their gender roles. Weaving and magic were for women; men did the fighting and plowing. Men who did magic were killed, and so were gay men. The niding horse was a curse and a hate crime rolled into one.
Simon moved carefully, stretching out his senses for any indication of dark magic. The area around the bloody horsehead itself made him recoil with the taint of malicious power. The cops weren’t going to show up; he had enough false alarms from drunks rattling doorknobs to only have patrols respond when he was out of town. That gave him a chance to handle the threat in his own way, since the police definitely weren’t prepared for the paranormal.
Simon went around to the back door and let himself in, flicking on the lights so that they blazed brightly. Cutting down on shoplifting meant having good lines of sight in the store, and he always kept the door to the upstairs locked when he wasn’t in the shop. That meant he could see everything, and no one lurked waiting to get the drop on him.
He grabbed some sage and an abalone shell, along with blessed salt, charcoal, and holy water. Then he filled a bucket with salted water to wash away the blood and dispel the bad magic. Simon went back around, avoiding the cursed area directly in front of the door, and took pictures of the bloody mask with his phone. He lit the sage bundle and placed it on the shell, and threw several handfuls of salt over the plastic horsehead and onto the area contaminated by blood, followed by holy water. Simon chanted a blessing and followed it up with a litany to dispel evil. When he finished, all that was left was a soggy pillar and a wet novelty mask.
Simon used a broomstick to lift the mask off the post. Then he locked the shop again and carried the mask down to one of the metal garbage bins on the beach, where he dropped it in and set it on fire. Starting a blaze on the beach was illegal, and it occurred to him that it would really suck to get arrested for burning a cursed object, but fortunately, the blaze died down before anyone noticed.
He went back to the shop and stretched out his senses again, but all traces of the dangerous magic were gone. Simon reset the alarm and turned off the brightest lights. He unlocked the stairs to his office, stretched out on the sofa he kept for emergencies, and tried, unsuccessfully, to go back to sleep until the sun came up.
Would have been nice to be dating a cop right about now, he thought as sleep eluded him. One who believed in the supernatural. Too bad I’m not.
6
Vic
“Another fucking murder, and we’re no closer to catching the son of a bitch.” Vic wanted to kick something, but that wasn’t practical at a crime scene surrounded by other cops.
“You go talk to the roommate,” Ross offered. “I’ll babysit the forensics team.”
Vic knew Ross was letting him off easy, and he almost argued, then changed his mind. He’d take the hard
part next time. Changing off made it marginally easier to keep the awful details at bay.
He went back to the apartment’s living room, where a woman in her early twenties sat on one end of a blue sofa that sagged in the middle, probably purchased at a consignment store or grabbed off the curb on trash day if the stained and threadbare fabric was any clue.
Like the dead woman, the roommate, Agata Marsalak was a J-one, here on a seasonal visa from the Czech Republic. Agata’s dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, a severe, unflattering look that made her tear-stained cheeks and red eyes all the more noticeable. She twisted a dish towel between her hands, looking desolate and frightened.
“Hey,” Vic said, sitting down on the other end of the couch. He spoke softly, trying not to spook her. “I need to ask you a few questions. You speak English, right?” Technically, proficiency was a requirement to get the visa, but less scrupulous employment firms were known to fudge the facts in a hot market.
She nodded, and swallowed hard. “Well enough,” she replied, her voice husky with tears.
“I’m Lieutenant D’Amato. I’m a homicide detective. And I’m very sorry about your roommate.”
“She was a good girl,” Agata said, with a look that dared Vic to say otherwise. “We work hard. Too hard sometimes, for not enough pay.”
Vic didn’t doubt that was true. He’d heard the stories of employers who abused their summer help but fixing it didn’t fall to his unit. Murder did. “Tell me about her?”
“Her name is…was…Katya Buzek,” Agata said. “We came over together. It was going to be, how you say? A lark. Fun. An adventure.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I will say to her parents.”
“Did Katya have any enemies?” Vic probed.
Agata shook her head. “No enemies. Like I said, she was a good girl. Didn’t mess around with bad boys. No drugs. Didn’t owe money. We both save everything we can, to take home.”
“Was she afraid?”
Agata looked away, and Vic knew she was hiding something. “Please, tell me what you know. Keeping her secrets now might get someone else killed.”
Agata looked like she was arguing with herself for a moment. “She had nightmares. Strange dreams. Not normal dreams.”
Vic felt a shiver at Agata’s words. “What do you mean, not ‘normal’?”
“Do you believe in magic, detective?” she asked. “The, what’s the word? Supernatural?”
“I’m more of a ‘see it to believe it’ kind of guy,” he replied. “Did Katya think her dreams were omens?” At Agata’s blank look, he searched for a synonym. “A bad sign?”
Agata nodded. “Many people believe such things, here, and back home. She told me that she saw things in her dreams she had not seen for real. People she didn’t know, dead. Cut, like she is. It scared her.”
“Did she tell anyone?”
“I don’t know. She went to a class yesterday, to find out about how to control such things. When she came back, she seemed better.”
“What kind of class?” Vic pressed.
Agata motioned toward a book and some pamphlets on the end table. “At the library.”
Vic glanced at the materials, and his heart stopped for a second as he recognized the name of the author. Dr. Sebastian Kincaide. “Did she say anything about the class? Anyone she met there?” Vic slipped on a pair of latex gloves and picked up the book. A brochure for Grand Strand Ghost Tours slipped out, along with a card for the shop and a strip of paper, which fluttered to the floor. The torn paper landed upside down, revealing a handwritten phone number on the back.
“She said the class was very good. The instructor, he made her feel better, I think. Gave her the book. She didn’t say much else.”
“What did she do today?”
“We worked third shift. I was late coming back. About an hour. When I got here, I opened the door, and I saw her.” She looked down but did not cry, although Vic could see the tension in her jaw as she tried to contain her grief.
“Did you see anyone else in the apartment?”
“No. Just Katya. The door was shut when I came home. I didn’t think anything was wrong.”
“All right,” Vic said in his most reassuring voice. “That’s it for now. We might have more questions for you later. And…I’m sorry.”
Agata nodded, swallowing hard, looking like she had reached her breaking point. Vic picked up the torn paper and then pulled out his phone. When he entered the number, “Simon” popped up from his contacts. A glance confirmed that this number wasn’t the same as the one for the shop on the business card.
Why the hell did a dead woman—a dead maybe-psychic woman—have Simon’s personal cell phone number?
It took another couple of hours to clear the scene, as Vic and Ross coordinated with the beat cops, the forensics team, and the coroner’s office, then filed their reports. By the time they were finished, Vic had a pounding headache, due in part to not having eaten for hours.
“You’ve been quiet,” Ross said as they left the dead woman’s apartment.
Vic shrugged, unwilling to put a name to the tangle of feelings churning in his gut. “It’s the Slitter again, and we’ve still got nothing.”
“Jumping the gun on forensics, aren’t you?”
Vic glared at him. “Looks the same as the others—same pattern of knife wounds, same choice of victim. All that ever changes is the where and when.”
“He’ll slip up,” Ross said with more conviction than Vic felt. “They always do. Maybe not as fast as we’d like, but sooner or later.”
“The ‘or later’ part means more dead women,” Vic growled. “We’re missing something.”
“Then we’ll get a fresh start on it in the morning.” Ross pulled up to the curb by Vic’s apartment building. “Try not to spin your wheels all night. Let’s see what the lab tests come back with.”
Vic got out and wished him a good evening, wondering how the fuck his partner managed to compartmentalize so well. Ross cared about the job, Vic knew he did. But somehow, when it was time to go home, Ross seemed to flip a switch in his brain and let the crud they’d dealt with all day rest until tomorrow. Maybe it helped to have someone to go home to, Vic thought, which didn’t help his mood as he pressed the passcode on the door to get into the building.
Vic needed a shower after the crime scene. No matter how long he’d been a cop, he’d never gotten over the smell of blood and shit that went with dead bodies. A hot shower with the strongest smelling soap he could find took the stench of death out of his nose, and he felt a little better just having a fresh t-shirt and jeans.
He headed down to the boardwalk, intending to catch Simon before the shop closed. When he got to Grand Strand Ghost Tours, Simon was in the back, straightening stock. He turned, and for an instant, he smiled when he saw Vic in the doorway.
“Vic—” His smile faded as if he recognized from Vic’s expression and stance that this was not a social call. Simon’s head lifted and his shoulders squared. “Lieutenant D’Amato. To what do I owe the pleasure?” His voice held a bitter edge.
“Where were you yesterday?” Vic asked, ignoring the way the hurt in Simon’s eyes made his stomach twist. Damn, seeing him again stirred up feelings Vic wasn’t ready to confront. Not that it looked like he’d ever get to act on any of the things Simon’s smile made him want, or any of the dirty dreams that starred a certain long-haired ghost hunter up close and very personal.
“In the shop all morning,” Simon replied. “Then I taught a class at the library and almost got killed walking back. Spent the afternoon—”
“You what?”
“A car tried to run me over. I went through a hedgerow to keep from getting hit. It sped off.” Simon recounted the incident matter-of-factly, but the words hit Vic like a douse of cold water.
“Did you call the police?”
Simon gave him a look. “Black SUV. I didn’t get the plates. No identifying marks. So, no. Nothing they could do about it. Not
hing I could prove.”
“Then how do you know they were trying to hit you?”
“Because the driver aimed,” Simon replied. “Didn’t try to correct until they realized I wasn’t under the wheels.
Vic felt a surge of anger and protectiveness that surprised him. “And then what?” he ground out.
“Came back to the store, finished out the afternoon. Went home, fell asleep on the couch. The store alarm tripped at 3 a.m., so I came down to check and found a bloody horse head on a pole.”
“Tell me that you called the police.”
“Last summer, a bunch of teenagers thought it was fun to bang on the glass and rattle the doors along the boardwalk to make the alarms go off,” Simon replied. “After the third or fourth false alarm, the cops got snippy. So I changed the monitoring protocol to just notify me, unless I’m out of town.”
Vic pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to stop a migraine. “Did you have a weapon?”
“I don’t own a gun.” Not a real one, anyhow. A paintball pistol didn’t count, from a disastrous “fun” outing Tracey had talked him into years ago.
“Did you say…bloody horse head? Like in The Godfather?”
“More Viking than Sicilian, in this case,” Simon replied. “And the police couldn’t have handled the situation. It was dark magic, a curse…and a death threat.”
“Who the hell would leave a Viking curse for a shop owner in Myrtle Beach?”
Simon met his gaze. “Someone who knows I have a Ph.D. in folklore and mythology and would understand the message.”
Vic wondered if apoplexy felt like this, the certainty that his head might explode. “But you didn’t call in this new threat, either?”
Simon shrugged. “Cops don’t believe in the supernatural. Why bother?” That last phrase was said without heat, but Vic knew it was aimed right at him.
“You have any proof?” Vic asked, refusing to rise to the bait.
Simon pulled out his phone and called up photos. He held it out for Vic to see but didn’t hand it over as he flipped through the pictures he had taken of the niding horse.