by Kat Parrish
I wouldn’t have been able to see her.
Half the yard looked like a post-apocalyptic landscape. It was a patch of dirt, dog shit, and trash, all of it overgrown with sow thistle. The other half looked like the Garden of Eden, a lush landscape of color and life that was radiating outward from a slender figure moving among the plants, bending over and touching each one as she passed. With each touch, another plant blossomed and bloomed—impossibly colorful and fragrant and beautiful.
It was like watching one of those time-lapse nature movies they used to show us in grade school. You could actually see the transformation of dry stalks into green life.
I heard a noise behind me and tensed, but it was just Axl. “Magic,” he said softly and there was awe in his voice. Like me, he just stood there for a moment watching the garden come alive. Then the girl sensed our presence and turned around.
Of course, she was beautiful.
Of course.
She had a pale, heart-shaped face dominated by huge, chocolate-brown eyes. Her hair was a tousled bedhead mess so sexy it looked like she’d spent a fortune at a salon to get it that way but somehow, I knew all she’d done was finger-comb it.
Just the sight of her …
And then she smiled, and that smile went straight to my groin.
“Hello,” she said, her voice light and musical. “Are you here to protect me?”
With my life, I thought as my cock sprang to life like I’d never seen a pretty girl before.
Axl looked from her to me and I could tell his feelings were hurt that she’d greeted me so warmly.
“Don’t let the food get cold,” he said gruffly as he retreated into the house.
I just looked at the girl for a moment, drinking her in.
“I’m Fee,” the girl said just before things got awkward, pronouncing it to rhyme with “tree.”
“Rezso,” I replied.
“Rezso,” she repeated, and I wanted to hear her say my name again.
No, I wanted to hear her scream my name in ecstasy—wanted to see her writhing star-fished beneath me, hair dripping with sweat, brown eyes wide in pleasure, her mouth open as I jack-hammered into her, each stroke deep and hard and—
What the fuck man?
It’s been a while since I’d had sex with a partner but going from zero to hardcore in less than sixty seconds was a new one for me.
I was glad it was dark. I hoped the shadows hid my had-on.
“Dinner’s here,” I said foolishly, holding the sliding door open for her.
She slid past me with a smile…
So close
…and I followed her in, locking the door behind us.
Everyone was in the kitchen where Axl was unloading the boxes and bags. The room looked like it hadn’t been updated since the 70s. All the appliances were avocado green and harvest gold.
Whoever thought that color combination was a good idea?
Jon pulled down a stack of paper plates from one of the cupboards and Axl started dishing out the food. There was pasta and salad for Fee, three extra-large pizzas for everyone else. They were topped with what my mother used to call “manly meat,” because she had a thing about toxic masculinity.
Years of living with my father was probably at the root of that. He’s the kind of guy who put the T into toxic. Axl smirked when he saw my reaction to the ham, pepperoni, Canadian bacon, and sausage piled on top of the extra cheesy pizzas. He knows I’m a vegan. He’d probably placed the order just to mess with me. I thought about busting him for it, but decided it wasn’t worth it. Wasn’t the first time I’d missed a meal on the job, wouldn’t be the last.
But damn, it was a dick move.
Fee noticed I’d turned down the pizza. She reached over and got an empty paper plate.
“Here,” she said, and handed it to me. As I took it, the plate filled up—some kind of stir-fry with veggies, mushrooms, and tofu and a dish of brown rice and lentils topped with perfect slices of ripe avocado.
“Wow,” I said, and she smiled.
“You looked hungry,” she said.
“You could have told me you could do that,” Axl said to her sulkily. “I just spent sixty dollars on pizza and salad.”
She looked at him. “You didn’t order anything for Rezso,” she said. “That was rude.”
I was liking this girl.
Even the way she said my name was sexy.
The food was delicious.
After we ate, crowded around a big farmhouse table in the kitchen, Fee and I went into the tiny living room to talk. She perched on a threadbare velvet-covered loveseat and I sat down in the ratty, mismatched overstuffed chair facing her. It creaked ominously under my weight but seemed solid enough.
Thanks to Jon, I knew the broad strokes of what was going on. She had survived a murder attempt by an unsub who may or may not have killed several other women, all of them witches. The cops had had her look through thousands of mug shots, but she hadn’t been able to put a name to the face she’d seen. They’d put her together with a sketch artist, but the sketch was close to useless. It could have been any white guy with a crew cut.
It could have been me.
The police were at a loss. Fee was all they had.
I suddenly realized that there was a reason Fee was in byk territory in this fortified shithole. She was bait.
“The killer is probably going to come for you here,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “that’s the plan.”
The plan?
“There’s no evidence to tie anyone to the murders. There’s no motive that anyone can attach to the killings. I’m the only living witness. Get rid of me and…”
“…and a killer gets away.”
“Yes,” she said. She was tense but resolute. “I can’t let that happen.”
I looked around at the team Mickey had assembled. Axl and Jon were cleaning up the remains of dinner as Drago and his wife Li patrolled the back yard. I didn’t see Walter or Kevaughn, but knew they were nearby, probably in the garage.
Seven of us, I thought. The not-so-magnificent seven.
I’d called John Dannon and asked him to meet me the next day. I had some questions only he could answer. But for now, I needed to know everything Fee could tell me.
I didn’t really know where to start.
She just sat there drinking a mug of Bengal spice herb tea and watching me with her big brown eyes.
It was distracting.
“I know you’ve answered all these questions before,” I finally said.
“That’s all right,” she said.
‘Had you ever seen your attacker before?”
“No,” she said, no hesitation.
‘You work at a hospital. A lot of people come in and out.”
“He had a remarkable face,” she said. “Not one I’d forget.”
“Outside of your day job, do you do any…” I searched for a way to ask my question without sounding like a dirtbag. “…do you have any side hustles? Anything that would put you in bad company?”
She looked perplexed for a moment. Then her expression cleared. “You mean something illegal? Criminal?
“Yeah.”
“It’s kind of a gray area,” she said.
I kept quiet, but nodded, curious.
I volunteer with a medical mission in Van Nuys. We operate a clinic for the unhoused and low-income people who need medical treatment.”
“Sounds pretty straightforward,” I said. “what’s illegal about it?”
“Most of us aren’t licensed to practice medicine.”
“But you’re healers?”
“Yes,” she said simply.
Okay.
“You ever have any patients who seemed unstable?”
‘We’ve had one or two incidents, but nothing directed at me personally.”
“Where’s your clinic?”
She named a street in a neighborhood notorious for gang activity. She saw my reaction and added, “We have an
agreement with the Mara Salvatrucha. We treat gunshot wounds no questions asked and in return, they respect our neutrality.”
That was pretty impressive. MS-13 bangers are not known for being particularly honorable.
“We’re also under the protection of Amalie Saint Croix.”
That made sense. A vampire who’d migrated to Los Angeles after hurricane Katrina had devastated New Orleans, Amalie Saint Croix had engineered a mostly bloodless coup to take over the city’s largest vampire family and now controlled most of the paranormal population of the city. To do that, she’d had to help take out Jon and Mickey’s old boss, but there didn’t seem to be any bad blood between them. At least not on their side.
“Why would Amalie Saint Croix care about a bunch of homeless people in Van Nuys?”
“I never asked her,” Fee said.
“Do you have any kind of blood tithe arrangement with her?” I said, fighting to keep the disgust out of my voice. Amalie’s crew seemed to stick pretty much to themselves, but there were vampire families in L.A. who preyed on humans and weren’t dainty about getting consent first.
Fee didn’t pretend to misunderstand and didn’t seem offended by the question. “Not that I know of,” she said. “I hope not.”
I thought about that. According to the police, trace evidence and residual dark magic collected at the site where Fee had been attacked suggested that the attacker was some kind of paranormal. But L.A. is home to a lot of different kinds of monsters, so that didn’t help much. But if the clinic was under Amalie’s protection, it wasn’t likely the attacker was a vampire.
“She’s put out a bounty on the killer,’ Fee said.
“Good,” I said. A reward would make it easier for someone to justify talking. “How much?”
“Two million,” she said. “In bitcoin.”
Of course, the vampires would be into cryptocurrency.
I didn’t want to think about how vampires were slowly taking over the financial future of the world, so I changed the subject. “You have any pissed off coworkers? Ex-boyfriends?” I hesitated for a before adding, “Girlfriends?”
“No,” she said.
Of course not. If it had been that easy, the cops would already have solved the case and I’d still be back home.
“Tell me about that night,” I said.
For the first time, she lost her composure. Her body tensed up, and she unconsciously hunched over, making herself small as she hugged herself.
I felt a flash of anger at the person responsible for scaring her so badly.
Fee took a deep breath and closed her eyes as if centering herself. When she opened them, her pupils were wide, blown out so large her eyes looked black. She looked disoriented, as if she were half-asleep or drugged.
Please don’t be a druggie, I thought. I’ve been down that road. Paranormals don’t respond well to drug addiction.
“Tell me about that night, Fee.”
“It’s cold,” she said in a dreamy voice. “I remember being surprised how cold it was so late in the year. I was wearing a hoodie, but it wasn’t very warm.”
She fell silent and when she didn’t seem inclined to say anything more, I said, “Describe the attacker to me.”
“I’ll show you,” she said, and before I could react, she’d taken my hand and sandwiched in between her two smaller hands.
So soft.
And then her memory hit me.
I’ve shared witch sight before, but never like this. Usually when you’re looking at someone else’s memories, it’s like standing at the back of a movie theater and watching from a distance. Not this time. I was actually experiencing it as if I was seeing it happen from Fee’s point of view. The intimacy of it was shocking. She was in me and I wanted to be in her, so it was awkward.
At least buy me a drink first,” Fee said in my mind, but I could tell she was laughing.
And then the laughter dried up.
Because he was there.
“I was in the lobby of my apartment building,” Fee said. “I’d forgotten to collect my mail and I was expecting a check.”
Part of me thought, How quaint. Who even uses checks anymore?
As if she could hear my thoughts, she said. “Some of my clients are really old school.”
I saw her/my hands insert a small key into a metal mailbox, one of about thirty on a wall. I heard the front door buzz, but she/I didn’t turn around.
“I just thought it was one of the tenants coming in,” she said. “The lobby is shaped like an L, and I couldn’t see who it was.”
And then suddenly we could see him. A bulky, barrel-chested man-mountain rushed toward her/us.
I felt Fee’s fear as she fought to process what was happening in the nano-second before she was crushed by his weight and shoved hard into the mailboxes.
I felt the pain as her ribs cracked on contract with the wall of metal.
She/I looked up into the eyes of her assailant and I felt her confusion. The man was a stranger to her.
Why, Fee thought and then I felt her pain as the horn-bladed knife sliced into her.
Her attacker grinned, his face a mask of feral joy.
A stranger to her, but not to me.
Buzz-cut blond hair, ice blue eyes, three hundred and forty pounds of pure malevolence.
Grigory “Grisha” Rezansov .
My cousin.
Fuck.
3
And just like that, my psychic connection with Fee was severed. I pulled my hand away and she looked up at me and blinked like a sleepwalker.
“Rezso?”
I gripped her hands tight. “Stay with me, Fee. Tell me what happened next.” I felt like a monster pushing her past her comfort zone.
She swallowed. “He had a knife,” Fee said. “It was strange. It looked like an athame, a ceremonial knife.”
“I know what an athame is,” I said, harsher than I meant to and I felt her flinch.
“It had a blade of bone,” she said, still in that detached way.
“Not bone,” I corrected. “Horn.”
Her eyes focused on my face.
“You’ve seen a knife like that before?”
“Yes,” I said, not telling her that there was one just like it in my luggage. All byk carry them, even flawed ones like me. The weapon was protected by a small spell so that TSA hadn’t caught it when they X-rayed my carry-on. If they had seen it, I had paperwork that said I was the owner of the item, but I probably would have missed my flight to Burbank.
“Go on,” I said, as gently as I could.
A frown appeared on her face. “He pinned me against the mailboxes, one hand around my neck, choking me.” I had noticed the fading yellow and blue of the decaying bruises around her neck. I was surprised the pressure of Grisha’s fingers hadn’t snapped her neck.
“And then he stabbed me through the heart.”
It took me a moment to comprehend what she said.
“Through the heart?” I echoed.
“Yes,” she said faintly.
“How are you still alive?”
“My power is healing,” she said. “And before he could stab me again, the building manager’s husband came in from the parking lot and saw what was happening.”
Her voice faltered then. I’d seen the report and knew why. Ali Harrak, former mixed martial arts champion and current security guard, had come to Fee’s defense and died in the lobby instead of her.
Another tenant coming in behind Ali had speed-dialed 911 before fleeing back to his car. He’d been questioned by the cops but told them he hadn’t gotten a good look at the assailant. Ali had been a brave man. Not many people would have gone up against a beast like Grisha.
“Did you show the cops what you showed me?” I asked.
She gave me an odd look. “It doesn’t work on anyone who doesn’t have witch blood,” she said.
“I don’t have that much,” I said.
“Your mother’s blood was potent,” she said.
“How do you know my mother was a witch?” I asked.
“How do you know you’re a man?” she countered. “It’s just something I know.”
I wondered suddenly what else she knew about me. I hoped nothing that would make her fear me.
She studied my face. “You know him,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“Is a killer?”
“Yes,” I said. “He kills for both profit and pleasure.”
But how would he profit from Fee’s death, from the other women he killed? Was he carrying on some secret vendetta against witch-kind? And if so, was it something that had Oleg’s blessing?
“His clan has mostly been friendly to witches in the past. I have no idea why he would suddenly start killing them,” I said. I looked into her upturned face; her brown eyes wide as a deer’s. “Or why he might want to kill you.”
“I have a theory,” she said. “The police didn’t think much of it, but Michael thought it was worth pursuing.”
It took me a minute to remember who “Michael” was. Most people just called him “Mickey.”
“I don’t think it has anything to do with witches. I think it’s personal,” she said. “I think there’s some other connection between us that no one is making.”
That sounded plausible but I still felt like I had to go over everything. ‘What did the other victims look like?” I asked, knowing that a lot of serial killers had a “type.”
“None of us actually look alike.” Fee said. “His first victim was black. The second two were white. The woman he killed before he attacked me was Hispanic. Shavonne was really tall and thin. Karen was short and a little chubby. So, no common body type.”
“Then what’s the common denominator?” I asked, “besides the obvious.”
“That we’re all witches?” she asked with an amused look.
“Yes.”
“It’s true. we were all witches,” she said. “But you’re overlooking the really obvious connection between us.”
She looked at me for a minute and as I realized what she meant, I felt like an idiot. “You’re all women.”