by Kat Parrish
“I think that’s important,” she said. ‘Not all of us were ‘out.’ Our attacker wouldn’t necessarily know that we were all witches.”
“The cops think it’s one killer, do you?”
“Oh yes,” she said, again in that dreamy voice. “At least the same person killed two others.”
Before I could ask her how she knew that and which ones, she continued. “There’s another connection that the police have been discounting as well. We all work—worked—in the health care field. “Shavonne Winters was a doctor, an ob-gyn. The second victim was a nurse-practitioner at Valley Prez. The third was a pharmacy assistant. Karen Reyes was a phlebotomist at Cedars. I’m an X-ray tech at St. Joseph’s.”
“So not all of you work in the Valley.”
“No.”
I thought about that. If Grisha was acting on Oleg’s orders, it only made sense if the victims had a connection to the Valley territory he claimed. I just wasn’t seeing the connection.
“All of you worked at different places?”
She nodded. “So, you think that you all being witches was just a coincidence?” I said. “That’s a pretty big coincidence.”
“In a room of just twenty-three people there’s a fifty-fifty chance that two people will share the same birthday.”
“That’s kind of random,” I said, wondering where she’d picked up that factoid.
She shrugged. “The world is full of coincidences,” she said. “The police may just be looking at the wrong one.”
“Still,” I said.
She looked at me appraisingly. “My birthday is September 12th,” she said. “When’s yours?”
You have got to be kidding me. There was no way I was going to tell her I was born on September 12th too.
“December 25th,” I said.
She shook her head. “No way are you a Capricorn,” she said. “A Taurus I might believe, but never a goat.”
“I don’t believe in astrology,” I said, mildly disappointed that she apparently did.
She started to laugh. “Michael gave me a copy of your file before he hired you. I remembered your birthday because it’s the same day as a friend of mine’s.”
“So, you don’t believe in astrology,” I said, just to be sure.
“I believe in a lot of things,” she said. “Love at first sight. Soul mates. Past lives. Don’t go all Piscean Age on me.”
I had no idea what that meant but decided to let it slide. Despite the grim subject matter, we were discussing, it felt good talking to Fee. Good in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time.
When she excused herself, telling me she needed to make some preparations for the next day, I felt her leaving like the phantom pain of an amputation.
“You’ve got it bad, Rezso,” Jon said as he handed me a mixing bowl size cup of coffee.
I wasn’t going to talk to Jon about Fee.
“What’s the plan,” I said. “I already know you’ve got Fee on display like a sacrificial lamb.”
Jon looked into his own vast mug of coffee and answered my question with a question of his own. “You’re going to see Dannon tomorrow?’
“Yes.”
“Then everything’s going according to plan,” he said.
“This is not Choose Your Own Adventure, Jon,” I said. “I want to know what you guys have in mind.”
He sighed and sat down on the loveseat where Fee had been sitting a few minutes before. “There have been rumors,” he said, “that the byks are making a move to take over the city.”
“That’s nothing new,” I said. “Oleg was always open about his ambitions.”
“But he never really made his move,” Jon said.
“No,” I said. “After your father broke off with him, he didn’t have an alliance strong enough to go up against the other paranormals.”
“Word is that may have changed,” Jon said. “And word is, it isn’t Oleg making the move.”
“Who’s saying this?” I asked, wondering if Jon’s girlfriend was feeding him inside information, she’d picked up reporting on paranormal crime for her blog.
“Ask Dannon about it,” he said. “Ask him about the meeting Grisha took with the Prince of Air and Darkness.”
“The fae are mixed up in this?” I said. “I thought they’d retreated into Lost Green and were staying above the fray.”
“Ask Dannon,” Jon said. “If what he’s hearing is true, we’re about to see a para-on-para conflict worse than the Goblin War.”
Fuck.
4
I met Dannon at City Wok, a Chinese restaurant in a Studio City strip mall nestled between a Baskin-Robbins and a supermarket. He was sitting against the back wall where he could watch the door and was already halfway through his order of sweet and spicy City Wok chicken when I arrived. I ordered Buddha’s Feast with brown rice before joining him at his table. I noticed C.J. Bowe sitting at another table pretending to be just another soccer mom instead of Dannon’s number two, and another guy I hadn’t seen before whose casual hipster pose stopped short of his watchful eyes. Dannon hadn’t come alone.
“Rezso,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”
“Sure,” I said as I studied him.
He’d gone full Patrick Stewart since I’d last seen him, shaving his head and owning his male-pattern baldness with dignity.
Dannon doesn’t like paranormals—the term he usually uses for us is “monsters”—but getting a vampire blood transfusion after nearly dying in a shoot-out, had given him a whole new perspective. It had been a few years since he and I had crossed paths and the last decade had been a brutal time for the L.A.P.P.D. But he no longer had bags under his eyes and his skin had a healthy glow. I chalked that up to the vampire blood.
“You want to know about the witch murders,” he said.
“If I’m not stepping on any toes,” I said. He laughed.
“We’ve got less than nothing to go on. Anything you can help us with? Be my guest.”
“The police sketch is shit,” I said. “You’re looking for this guy.”
I held up my phone to show him a selfie I’d taken at another cousin’s wedding. You could see Grisha in the background, macking on one of the bridesmaids.
“Wedding?” he asked.
No, we always dress up for funerals.
“Yes,” I said.
“That your cousin Grisha?”
“Yep.”
It did not surprise me that Dannon could recognize him on sight. His crew has resurrected LAPD’s notorious CRASH unit to monitor paranormal gang activity around town. In this part of town, they’d be watching Oleg’s crew especially closely.
“I hear the byks are making a move,” I said. “What do you know about that?”
He looked like he really didn’t want to tell me anything but knew he owed me.
“There’s a legend—” he began.
“No there isn’t,” I interrupted.
“You asked.”
I sighed. “There’s a legend,” I prompted.
“Says that the byks and the fae will be brought together by a child.”
I started to say, “bullshit” and then I remembered what Fee had told me the night before. One of the dead women was a doctor?” I said, wheels beginning to turn.
Dannon nodded grimly.
“Was she the first one killed?”
“Yes.”
“and the second one was a nurse-practitioner?”
“Yes,” Dannon said. And I could see he was starting to get where I was going with this.
“We need to look at patient records for all the dead women, see if any of the names match.”
“I’ll get on it,” he said. “And meanwhile, ask your guest if she can do that voodoo that she does and witch up an image of anyone she might have treated who had fairy blood.”
“There still isn’t a legend,” I said.
“A legend is just a rumor that’s been around for a while,” Dannon said.
“You know the guy
at the table sitting by himself, first table in the door?” Dannon asked casually as he chased a crispy morsel of chicken around on his plate with his chopsticks.
I turned around, not bothering to be subtle.
A wiry guy in a blue track suit was plowing through a double order of Szechuan dumplings and staring at me. I waved at him. He scowled.
I turned back to Dannon.
“Name’s Anton,” I said. “He used to work with that Latvian crew in Miami, scamming tourists for their credit card numbers. Showed up here after the big boss got busted.”
Dannon pushed his now-empty plate away, swigged the last of his iced tea.
“You’re well-informed for someone who doesn’t live here,” Dannon said, as if he was interrogating me and had just caught me in a lie.
“Fuck you, Dannon,” I said. “I sleep with one eye open because of these bastards. I keep tabs.”
“Do you know that your cousin and your father have had a falling out as of late?”
I almost choked on a mouthful of broccoli.
“What?”
Dannon looked smug. “Oleg’s not as young as he once was.”
I thought about that for a minute. A palace coup didn’t really seem like Grisha’s style, but if he’d gotten the fairies involved, all bets were off.
“The only one who might know what’s going on is your father,” Dannon said.
“Oleg,” I corrected him, even though I knew he was right.
“Gonna be hard to get a warrant for Grisha’s arrest,” Dannon said.
No shit.
Up until the 70s, paranormals were pretty much closeted. There were reporters like Carl Kolchak in Chicago who tried to sound the alarm, but no one wanted to believe that their next-door neighbor who worked nights could be a vampire or a werewolf or something worse. But then a series of monster-on-monster outbreaks occurred across country, and everyone lost their shit.
The law’s been trying to catch up ever since. There have been a few test cases where witch sight has been introduced in evidence, but it’s still considered unreliable, like DNA evidence was in the early days. Without something more solid, Dannon couldn’t act. Hence the whole fishing expedition with Fee as bait. Hence me being brought in to goad the byks into action.
“What do you want from me Dannon? Hoping I’ll just go in guns blazing? Kill Grisha for you?”
That was his cue to say, “Fuck you” and he made it sound sincere. Dannon was a Boy Scout. If they eve re-cast the Avengers with real people, Dannon would be Captain America.
I stood up so abruptly my chair crashed over, causing everyone in the restaurant to look up from their meals. Whatever they saw on my face caused them to look back down in a hurry.
“I’ll call you,” I said to Dannon. He nodded and began breaking open his fortune cookie.
I hope he got one of those lame fortunes.
I stopped by Anton’s table on the way out. “Long time no see Anton,” I said.
“Not long enough,” he said. Anton wasn’t one for witty conversation.
“I have a hankering for potato vareniki,” I said. “I’ll be at the restaurant tomorrow at two.” There was no reason to be more specific. My father ate lunch at the same restaurant every day. Free of charge of course. And he ate all by himself because the restaurant was only open for dinner.
Except for Oleg, and his bodyguards.
I had no idea if Oleg would allow the audience or order his minions to kill me on sight.
But I’d been hired to keep Fee safe and I was going to do that.
Or die trying.
I drove by a Home Depot on my way back to the safe house and used my Etebari Enterprises credit card to charge lumber and nails and tools and sealant.
I had decided to build a little deck in the back of the house to keep from going fucking crazy while I waited for something to happen.
I was pretty sure we’d be safe for the night because once my father knew I wanted to meet with him, he’d be curious enough to keep the bulls penned. Afterwards, he’d have plenty of time to kill me and everyone else if he wanted to.
Li helped me carry the lumber out to the back yard and offered to stay and help. She and her husband had been on babysitting detail for a week and it was starting to wear on her. I sketched out a rough design and put her to work cutting the boards to length.
Whoever had poured the concrete patio had done a piss-poor job and the first thing I had to do was bust it up and replace it with a load of gravel. It felt good using the sledge hammer. I pretended I was swinging it at Grisha’s head.
I know. I have anger management issues.
5
“You’re a craftsman,” Fee commented as I started placing the planks. “Who taught you?
“My grandfather,” I said. I looked around at the ramshackle house. “He’d be horrified the owners let the place get into such bad shape.”
“It was never a happy house,” Fee said. She sounded sad.
“It looks happier with the flowers,” I said.
She smiled. “It does, doesn’t it?”
“Could you always do that?” I asked.
“Pretty much,” she said. “I used to pick weeds for my mother and by the time I got home, I’d be holding a bouquet of flowers. And I never realized I was changing the weeds into flowers because when I looked at weeds, they looked like flowers to me.”
“You saw their potential and not their reality,” I said.
“More like I could see the best version of their reality.”
“Getting a little too metaphysical for me,” I said.
She studied me for a minute. The day had turned hot and I’d stripped off my shirt an hour ago. The weather had been in the 50s and rainy when I’d left Washington. The sun felt good on my bare skin, warming me to the bone. And maybe I wanted to show myself to Fee. I work hard to stay fit. I know I look good.
“Why did you say that?” she asked. “Pretending like all you are is a meat head?”
I started to say something glib but the look in her eyes stopped me.
“It’s useful camouflage,” I admitted. “People tend to get nervous around big guys. But they’re less anxious around someone they think is stupid.”
“Do you let the women you sleep with think you’re stupid?”
Whoa, that took a turn.
“If that’s what they’re looking for,” I said, knowing that more than a few of the women I’d been with hadn’t seen me as more than an oversize, interactive vibrator. They’d wanted to get laid, and then they wanted to get gone. I was happy enough to oblige them.
A peculiar expression flitted across her face.
“What if they’re looking for something more?”
What the fuck? She can read minds?
“Didn’t you ever want…I don’t know, a ‘marriage of true minds?’”
“Do I look like the marrying type?” I said, even though I recognized the Shakespeare quote and the context of the word “marriage.”
Her wide eyes seemed to get even bigger and suddenly I was angry with her. I wanted to…
Don’t let her hurt you.
I wanted to make her to leave me alone. I wanted her to go away. I wanted…
I turned around and punched the nearest stucco wall as hard as I could.
So hard I felt bones crack.
Hurts so good.
I did it again and my blood spattered on the stucco, which had once been beige but had been sun-blasted to a piss yellow.
And then I did it again.
“Rezso, stop.”
I heard Fee’s voice dimly through the roar in my head.
“Stop it,” she said.
I pulled back to hit the wall again and she grabbed my fist.
Her touch sent fresh waves of pain up my arm to explode in my head.
I howled and tried to pull away but somehow, she held onto me, like a little kid desperately holding on to a bucking horse.
“This isn’t you,” I heard her say.
It is me. It is. I am the useless son of a monster, a thing of pain and rage. I will hurt you if you get too close.
I saw myself standing at the edge of an abyss. I’d been there before, many times, but I knew I’d never been so close to jumping in. Being back in L.A. had brought everything back. All the things I’d tried to forget. All the things I’d wanted to leave behind. All the things that were inside me, fighting to get out.
The idea of seeing my father terrified me, but what frightened me even more was the idea that one day I could turn into him, that one day the anger and pain I carried would burst out of me in one murderous explosion and I’d hurt someone.
Fee.
And then I felt heat flowing from her hands into my fist, burning and cauterizing the bleeding wounds, knitting the bones and muscles and tissues back together. The torn skin mended. The abrasions healed over. The bones strengthened.
And I felt a sense of…well-being…come over me, a feeling that I was loved and protected and cherished. I hadn’t felt that way since my grandfather died and I started to cry.
Fuck me. Crying like a pussy.
I heard the glass door slide open and felt Fee shake her head at whoever was there, warning them away.
I fell to my knees and clutched her to me, burrowing into the cleft of her jeans-clad thighs. I could smell her scent through the fabric, pheromones and flowers. “Come with me,” she said, and I followed like a bull with a ring through its nose. She guided me through the house into the little bedroom she’d made into a nest for herself. The bed looked impossibly small.
As if she knew my thought, she turned and said, “It’s big enough.” And as I watched, the bed expanded, getting so large its sides touched the wall.
I wanted to applaud. I’d never been around anyone who could do true magic. My mother’s talents tended toward kitchen witchery and small spells to keep her hair from going gray.
‘Fee,” I said, and my voice came out husky.
“Ssh,” she said and pushed me.
Off-balance, I fell onto the bed.
The mattress was so deep and cushiony, it was like falling into a cloud.
And then Fee was over me, her knees on either side of my thighs, her hands…everywhere.