My heart was pounding. A powerful instinct to run was crawling up my spine, heading for my brain. I tried to tell it to shut the hell up, to settle down. I was terrified I was going to look guilty and make these two detectives take me in.
“In his pocket,” Wallis said, “he had a notebook – you know, one of those little ones you can take everywhere?”
“Yeah?” I said.
I could feel a bomb about to drop. My whole world was instants from being reduced to ash.
“It had your name and this address written in it,” Wallis said.
Spots popped in my vision. My brain disengaged from my body. I thought I might faint.
“Ms. Kincaide, are you all right?” Weiss said.
I put a hand on the doorjamb to steady myself. My knees started to buckle.
“Easy there,” Wallis said.
He put a hand under my elbow and took my weight. I stood there for several seconds trying to breathe.
Holy fucking shit. What the hell was happening?
“Ms. Kincaide, can I get you some water or something?” Weiss asked.
“No, I . . .” I had to swallow to continue. “No, I think I’ll be fine.”
The spell passed. I felt like myself again, although my heart was beating at three thousand miles an hour.
“Ms. Kincaide, are you sure you don’t know Mr. Silverman?” Weiss asked.
I looked at the photos again. I didn’t know him. But I knew him. I just didn’t know how.
“I’m sure,” I said.
“It’s funny,” Weiss said. “You’ve both got green eyes. You’ve both got the same kind of freckles. There’s a bit of a family resemblance there.”
I looked at the photo again. Oh, shit. She was right. I’d noticed it in the dream. It looked like my features transferred onto an old, White guy. I could see myself in that face.
“Ms. Kincaide, anything you can tell us would be helpful,” Wallis said.
“I don’t know the man,” I said. “This is the first I’ve ever heard of him, and since he’s dead, I’m guessing it will be the last. But I didn’t kill him, and I don’t know who did.”
“No one’s accusing you of anything, Ms. Kincaide,” Wallis said.
“But you have to admit,” Weiss said. “It’s kind of funny a man with your name and address in his pocket gets gruesomely murdered. A man who looks like he could be your father.”
She may as well have punched me in the gut. My father? I had no idea who he was. Mama got knocked up with me, and the baby-daddy skipped town. Any time I’d asked her about him, she’d get angry. She’d say he was gone, and it didn’t matter. If I pressed and asked who he was, she’d tell me she didn’t know. I could tell that was a lie, but it didn’t help. I’m twenty-five years old, and for nearly all of them, I’d wondered who my father was. Now this cop was straight-up telling me it was this dead guy from my dreams.
“Don’t talk about my father,” I growled.
Weiss raised her eyebrows. She flashed Wallis a look. I cursed myself for saying anything.
“Did I?” she asked.
“Fuck you, lady,” I said.
It was all I could think of. I’d made a mistake, and I needed to turn the conversation a different way. If I said anything else, they might think I’d killed this guy, whoever he was.
“Ms. Kincaide,” Wallis said. “You’re not in any kind of trouble. We’re just concerned. This man was brutally murdered last night. We don’t have any leads except for the note in his pocket that led us here. It’s entirely possible that whoever killed him is looking for you too. If there’s anything you can tell us – anything at all – it might help keep you safe.”
“Keep me safe,” I said, the sarcasm pouring off my tongue like drool from a hungry dog. “Like you kept him safe? What are you people going to do?”
“Find the killer and bring him to justice,” Weiss said.
There was an edge in her tone now. Apparently telling her to fuck off had cancelled her matronly sympathy.
“Well, I don’t know anything,” I said. “I’d never heard of or seen this guy in my life before you showed up, telling me he was dead and accusing him of being my father. I don’t know a thing about this dude besides the fact that he’s dead. I don’t know who killed him. I don’t know why they would want to. And I sure as hell don’t know why he had my name in his pocket.
“Now, I had a bad night last night. I drank too much vodka and had shitty dreams. I need to get in the shower, so I can go to work. So unless there’s anything else?”
They stared at me without speaking for several seconds. They exchanged another one of those glances. Then Wallis sighed and reached into his pocket again.
“No, that’s all, Ms. Kincaide,” he said. “If you can think of anything else, please give us a call.”
He pulled a business card out of his pocket and handed it to me. I gave him back the pictures.
“Sorry I couldn’t be more help,” I said with a complete lack of sincerity.
I stepped back and started to shut the door. Weiss put her hand on it.
“Ms. Kincaide,” she said. “Whoever did this is a monster. We’ve seen the body. The picture doesn’t do it justice. The killer is around seven feet tall and made of muscle. You don’t want him coming after you. Make sure you call us if you think of anything.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I can take care of myself.”
I shut the door. Fucking cops. Like they could do anything but clean up the mess if Mr. Big-ass Demon got to me. Like they could arrest him and put him away if they did catch him. Cops don’t know how to deal with demons. They can barely deal with humans.
Of course, I didn’t know how to handle a demon either, and that was a problem. I had no idea what was actually going on, but I knew all this shit was related. Whoever the dead guy was – my father or someone else – he’d been looking for me when he got whacked. And the killer was the same demonic asshole who’d tried to take me out last night. So I was in the deepest shit I’d ever been.
My phone buzzed. I looked at it. Somehow, in my drunken stupor, I’d had the good sense to plug it in. It kept buzzing, meaning I was getting a call.
Wearily, I wandered over to it. It was Felicia. I thought about ignoring her, but I really needed to talk to someone, and she was the only person I trusted.
“Hello?” I said after picking up.
“Sassy, Jesus, I was so worried about you,” Felicia said. “I’ve been calling and texting, and you haven’t answered at all.”
“Sorry. I got drunk and passed out. I didn’t see any of your texts.”
“Are you okay? What happened last night?”
No, I was definitely not okay. And how did I begin to tell her what happened last night?
“Listen, I can’t talk about it over the phone,” I said.
That much was true. First of all, I didn’t want anyone listening in. It’s not like my phone service was secure or anything. Who knew if the NSA or even the cops had bugged it? Secondly, I couldn’t tell Felicia I’d been attacked by a demon without her sitting in front of me. She needed to see the look on my face. She needed to see I wasn’t crazy or pulling a practical joke.
“Do you want to get breakfast?” she asked.
Hell yes, I wanted to get breakfast. The only thing that ever cured a hangover for me was food. And coffee. A shit-ton of coffee.
“Yeah,” I said. “Meet me at Java Jive in twenty minutes?”
“Sure,” she said. “Sassy, are you okay? What happened last night?”
“Felicia, I’ll tell you all about it over breakfast. I promise.”
“Okay. See you soon.”
“Bye.”
I hung up and went into the bathroom. I glanced at myself in the mirror. I looked like a refugee from the Mos Eisley Cantina. Shit. How the hell was I gonna be able to make myself look decent enough to leave the apartment and make it to the coffee shop in twenty minutes?
Four
J ava Jive is
exactly what you might think of when you imagine a coffee shop. Wooden walls, posters of unknown bands performing at local bars, and infested with hipsters like roaches in a low-rent apartment building. The coffee is good but overpriced. The food is mediocre and also overpriced. And the staff is underpaid and treats the customers accordingly.
But Felicia and I liked it. They have a cranberry-walnut muffin that is to die for – definitely an exception to the mediocre food rule – and the coffee is strong and delicious. Plus, it’s close to my apartment building. It was everything I needed after the strange morning and even stranger night.
Felicia stared at me slack-jawed as I related my experiences. Her eyes grew wide at the revelation of my attacker being some kind of demon. And her mouth fell open when I told her the cops showed up at my apartment the next day. She asked no questions. She just chewed her raspberry scone and listened while I told my tale.
When I’d finished, she still had no comment. She gaped at me.
“Please tell me you believe me,” I said.
“Of course I believe you. Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know. Because I told you a real-from-Hell demon tried to kill me, and he used a magic knife that disintegrated when it hit me?”
She smiled. I’ll say this for Felicia: Most people don’t like my caustic sarcasm; she adores it.
“Sweetie, you would never make up a story like that,” she said. “It’s not you. You wouldn’t try to hurt me by spinning some bullshit about skipping D&D because you got attacked by a demon. You might make up an excuse, but not one like that. So it must be true.
“The question is: What does it mean?”
I nodded. Not only was I grateful she didn’t think I was lying, she nailed the question perfectly. What did it mean?
“I wish I knew,” I said. “Why would someone want to kill me?”
“I don’t know,” she said with a twisted grin. “Who have you pissed off lately?”
“Ha-ha,” I said. “Seriously, Felicia, I’m pretty messed up over this.”
“Sorry,” she said.
We sat in silence for a few moments, each of us thinking and eating. I didn’t have any ideas, so I hoped Felicia was getting some.
“What do we know about demons?” she asked at last.
“That they come from Hell, tempt people into doing bad shit, and are ugly as all fuck,” I offered.
Felicia nodded. Evidently, her understanding of demons was the same.
“So he had a tattoo of a knife on his chest?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “It was a giant, fancy one – the kind some medieval weapons fetishist would draw, you know?”
“Sure.”
“But when he touched his hand to it, it became real. I mean he pulled it off his chest like it had been stuck there. And when we fought, my sword parried it. His blade was as solid as mine.”
“So how did you destroy it?”
“I don’t know,” I said with a sigh.
I felt stupid. “I don’t know,” was all I seemed to be able to say anymore. The last twelve hours had pretty much turned everything I thought I knew inside out.
“I should be dead,” I continued. “He had me defenseless. He knocked me down, and I lost my katana. He threw the knife at me, and it hit me straight in the chest. It should have pierced my heart.”
“But instead it shattered,” Felicia commented.
“Yeah. Like, it turned to red light just like when he pulled it off his chest. And then it blew into a million tiny little sparks. He looked scared when that happened.”
“Did it hurt?” Felicia asked.
I thought about it. I’d thought I was going to die, so I hadn’t paid attention to much of anything about the knife other than I expected it to kill me. But . . .
“No,” I said. “Actually, it didn’t.”
“What did it feel like?”
“It’s hard to describe. It was like . . . I don’t know, satisfying? All I was really thinking was, ‘Holy shit! I’m not dead. Now what?’ I can’t really remember the sensation.”
We sat there in silence again. In the background, some shitty, smooth-jazz song played, weaving through my thoughts and keeping them from crystallizing.
“Maybe the knife wasn’t real,” Felicia said.
“But how could that be? It was real enough when I was fighting him. And he looked scared as shit when it shattered. He thought he was going to kill me when he threw it.”
“I’m not sure,” Felicia said. “But I think we have to assume all this is magic. And if that’s the case, something must have gone wrong with the spell.”
“What? So he rolled a ‘1’ on his attack roll?”
Felicia chuckled despite my obvious worry. A soft and sexy smile crept up her face.
“I don’t know, maybe,” she said. “There must be rules governing the magic, though. So it stands to reason something went wrong.”
I threw up my hands in frustration. I supposed she was right, but what good did it do me? Knowing something went wrong brought me no closer to understanding what the hell happened in the first place.
“Do you think this guy the cops found could be your dad?” Felicia asked, suddenly changing the subject.
I didn’t want to answer that. Yeah, he sure looked like he could be my dad. Mama was light-skinned to begin with. If a fair-skinned redhead knocked her up, it would stand to reason that the kid was gonna be even Whiter-looking than the mom. And he had those freckles and green eyes. It was creepy and weird.
But I also didn’t want it to be my father. Because if it was, he’d gotten himself murdered before I could get to know him and ask him all the questions that had been raging in my brain for the past twenty-five years.
Like where the fuck has he been?
“I don’t know, Felicia. Let’s not go there.”
“Why not?”
“You know why.”
“But Sassy,” she said, “if it was your father, he must have been looking for you. He had your name and address in his pocket. And if you’re sure it was the same demon who killed him as tried to kill you, then it means you’re part of something much larger.”
Great. That was all I fucking needed. I did not want to be part of some grand conspiracy. I’m just a lonely woman who didn’t have a father growing up, whose mother died too young of cancer, and whose brother looks down on her. I’m no one special.
“Felicia—”
“Look, I’ll drop it,” she said. “I get that you don’t want to talk about what it might all mean. But you need to think about what’s happening, Sassy. There’s a lot more going on than a demon materializing out of nowhere and trying to kill you. For your own safety and sanity, you need to figure out what it is.”
Damn it, if she didn’t stop saying things like this, I was going to cry. I knew she was right. But I didn’t have any answers, and I didn’t have the slightest idea how to get any.
“Yeah, well, when you know who to ask about teleporting demons with tattoos that come to life, you let me know,” I said, putting just a little too much bitterness into my tone.
Felicia reached across the table and put her hand on my wrist. She gazed on me with those deep, brown eyes. Her touch was so comforting. The love on her face so obvious. If she’d asked me to go to bed with her right then, I totally would have. I prayed she wouldn’t. I didn’t need things more complicated.
“I’m sorry, Sassy,” she said. “This has got to be hard on you. I don’t know how I would react if it had happened to me.”
“If it had happened to you, you’d be dead,” I said before I could stop myself.
She frowned and withdrew her hand. Damn it. Why did I have to be such an asshole sometimes?
“You’re probably right,” she said. “I don’t know Kenpo or how to swordfight.”
“Sorry,” I managed.
She gave me a tight-lipped smile that said she accepted my apology but that it was still a shitty thing to say. Fair.
“Any
way, did you get a good look at the demon?”
“What do you mean? Of course I did! I was fighting him!”
“Okay,” she soothed. “Could you pick him out of a lineup?”
I felt chagrinned when I realized what she meant. Damn. Apparently nearly getting killed had turned me into a mega-bitch.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I could.”
“So head down to the library. See if they have any books on demonology. Or just Google it on your phone. See if there’s anything you can figure out. Maybe you can at least find the kind of demon that tried to kill you.”
I cocked my head.
“What do you mean?”
“Look, it stands to reason there is more than one kind of demon, right? I mean, there are tons of them in D&D. Maybe demons have species or subtypes or whatever in real life too.”
Damn, that was pretty smart. Why the hell couldn’t I think of shit like that. Probably because I was the one who’d been attacked and then questioned by the police.
“What makes you think real demons are anything like the ones in the game?” I asked.
“D&D is based on mythology and literature,” she said. “They ripped off just about every legend in Western culture and stuck it in the game. So whether it was Gary Gygax back in the day or one of the new developers, they had to be inspired by something. Maybe Wizards of the Coast knows more about demons and monsters than they’re letting on.
“Besides, you have to start somewhere.”
I nodded again. I wasn’t sure any of this would help. But at least it would give me something to do.
“Okay,” I said.
“Do you want me to come with you? I’m supposed to work at noon, but I could call off. We’ve got three people on this afternoon since shipments are due in, but they could manage without me.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I think I’ll pass. You need the money, and I need some time alone.”
“I don’t need the money that bad. I made more on my Etsy jewelry last month than I did working at the store.”
“Yeah, but your paycheck from Ron gives you the money to buy supplies for jewelry-making.”
“One day’s pay isn’t going to make that much of difference.”
Sleeping Dragons Page 3