Winterstruck: an urban fantasy supernatural crime thriller

by Sara C. Walker

  5

  Morning light from the abundance of windows filled the room, forcing my eyes open. Blinking, I rolled over, reached across the soft bamboo sheets, and found his side cold and empty. The top of Luke’s dresser was void of his wallet, and I heard no sound of him from further in the apartment. I hadn't even heard him leave. I'd spent the night tossing and turning, and every time I finally fell asleep, I was chasing after Flint or a little girl in a magenta coat.

  I rubbed my eyes and glanced my cell phone. It was dead.

  Great.

  I threw back the covers, went into the bathroom, and showered. I pulled on a fresh pair of jeans and a sweater, and then tore apart my closet looking for another jacket. I couldn't very well wear the beer-covered shearling.

  I finally settled on the brown faux-leather bomber-style jacket, a thrift store find that I had worn through high school, much to my mother's chagrin. My word—was that...shoulder pads? Was this the nineties? When was the last time I went shopping for a winter coat? Ugh.

  After dropping off the faux shearling at the dry cleaner, I arrived at the office forty-seven minutes late with a frozen ponytail (thanks to the busted heater in my little car) shivering from the cold, and in a sneezing fit from the dust on my old bomber jacket. But hell, I made it.

  I got out of my car and tried to tuck my gun into the pocket of my jacket, but it just wasn't going to fit.

  As part of the insurance agency cover, we worked in the basement of a strip mall, right below an actual insurance agency. Our entrance was a service door at the back that opened to what appeared to be a storage room for the real insurance agency, but was really a hallway stuffed with empty crates. The stairs to our office were hidden behind another door in that storage closet.

  For years, I’d worked in the actual insurance agency, working my way up from filing and answering the phone to meeting clients and printing out agreements. Little did I know, those periodic company aptitude tests were actually testing me for another job entirely.

  I went through the fake storage room, down the stairs, and into the office. I found our main room empty but for the usual accoutrements: a few desks, chairs, ancient computers, etc.

  I sat down at my desk, fired up the computer, and plugged my phone in to charge. The room felt heavy with the emptiness of the desk across from me. Someone had cleared off the stack of files, printouts, and assorted papers, right down to the bare laminate desktop. It looked like it had been cleaned, too. No more coffee rings or crumbs from protein bars. No framed photo of his sister's happy family. Not one speck of dust that belonged to my former partner, Reece Thatcher.

  I jumped up out of my chair and went to the boss's office, intending to debrief him on last night’s activities, but it was empty.

  Pacing, I weighed bothering Oshaun, and ultimately decided that bothering her was better than sitting at my desk. I found our science expert and medical examiner in her lab, bent over with one eye pressed to a microscope.

  Pushing open the lab door, I cheerfully called out, "Morning, Oshaun."

  "Out." Oshaun Santos. Medical examiner. Albino Canadian of African descent. Charter member of the Julia Ivory Haters Club. Some members had valid reasons to hate me—like all the faeries I'd personally put into salt cells—but Oshaun? If she had a reason, I didn’t know what it was.

  Long yellow braids were gathered at the nape of her neck, the beaded ends trailing down her back. Her skin was a pink so pale it was almost indiscernible from her starched white lab coat. She said her name O-shawn, but sometimes her pronunciation sounded more like "ocean."

  "I was just wondering—" I started.

  "Out."

  "—if we could talk about—"

  "Out."

  Without so much as looking up from her microscope, she extended her arm to point at the door. Beads clicked at her wrist.

  "Right," I said with a sigh. "I know. Out." And I turned around and left.

  Oshaun had always been this way with me, right from my first day. She only spoke to me if she had information pertaining to one of my cases. And even then, her words were brief, her tone sharp—not unlike a lashing. When she could, she preferred to hand me a written report. She was much warmer when she talked to the boss. It helped my ego to believe she was only nice to him because he signed her paycheques.

  I stared at my desk across the room, loathing the idea of going back to it. I decided to clean the coffee maker instead. I'd just unplugged the machine so I could carry it to the washroom when my phone finally had enough charge to blow up with text messages.

  It was the boss. He sent me an address with "911" to signal it was an emergency. The last message was probably the most important: "Bring coffee. And an apple fritter."

  I sent him a message to let him know I was on the way, and I headed for the door.

  Better late than never. I hoped.

  I found Magnusson in his car on a nice suburban street, where snowmen and snow forts decorated front lawns and minivans filled driveways.

  I yanked open the passenger door and managed to plunk myself into the seat with a tray holding our coffees in one hand and a bag of doughnuts in the other.

  "About time," Magnusson said, taking the coffees.

  I glanced over the schnitzel takeout boxes piled on the back seat. "Were you here all night, boss?"

  He yawned as he pulled back the tab on his coffee lid. I waited while he took his first sip before responding. In this weather, hot beverages didn't stay hot for long.

  "Got a report from the neighbourhood complaining of someone making snowmobile sounds between houses, but no tracks in the snow were ever found. Not even human footprints."

  He took another gulp and then grabbed the bag, dug inside, and pulled out an apple fritter.

  "So you've been on a stakeout," I said while he chewed.

  He nodded. "Bagged a subspecies of boggart just before you got here. Sometimes known as an echo, it likes to mimic sounds. You're taking it to lockup." He pointed his thumb toward the back of the car, where I assumed the echo was locked up in the trunk.

  "Why? Where are you going?"

  "Meetings. Unless you'd rather talk budget with government officials or explain to the chief of police why we’re not releasing any information about last night’s indoor fireworks?"

  "No, thanks." I drew in a deep breath. "I lost Flint."

  "Flint?"

  "The fireworks faerie. I've named him Flint." I shrugged.

  He yawned again and drained his coffee cup. "So what you're saying is, you need a new partner."

  "No, I—"

  "Already on it." He put the empty cup into a plastic bag with other empty coffee cups and set it on the floor in the backseat. "Let's go."

  He yanked open his door and proceeded to the rear of his car, having missed my point entirely. I followed but before I could open my mouth to explain, the boss thrust a squirming canvas sack at me. I barely got my arms around it before he let go.

  "Thanks for the lockup," he said. "I'll see you back at the office."

  He pivoted and headed back to the driver's side, but paused before opening the door.

  "One word of warning," he said. "Ignore everything it says to you."

  He climbed back into his car and sped away before I realized he’d taken off with my unfinished breakfast.

  Union Station was the city's main hub, connecting the aboveground trains to the subway. Most people entered from the subway platform, the train lines, or from the grand stairs outside the doors on Front Street.

  But we weren't using any of the normal entrances today.

  The broken heater wasn't the worst thing about my car. The worst thing was the radio antenna busted somewhere behind the dashboard, so I couldn't tune in to anything but static. Even here, directly under the CN Tower. No chance of catching the news to see if anyone had reported on last night’s fun at the arena. And no chance of music to cover the various noises coming from the engine. Not even from the ancient tape deck. At some poi
nt in time, a cassette tape of Billy Ocean's greatest hits got stuck in the tape deck. And wouldn't come out. It just kept playing that one tape over and over.

  I used to love Billy Ocean.

  I drove my car behind Union Station, under the train’s overpass and parked my car next to a door marked "Maintenance." I killed the engine, hopped out, and retrieved the squirming sack from the trunk.

  In my early days with the agency, I'd talked to some of the staff employed at Union Station, and it always seemed they thought this door was used by a different department.

  As I stepped away from my car, a chill wiggled down my spine. I felt as though I were being watched, though my scan of the area revealed no curious passersby. Not in this weather.

  This eerie feeling had been common for me, what with faeries running amok since May 5, 2000, but this time it felt different. More personal.

  I glanced around again, searching for a sign of life or an odd glimmer of light.

  A shudder ran through my shoulders. I shook off the feeling, threw the sack over my shoulder, and headed for the door. I held my badge to the scanner, the lock popped, and I pulled open the door and proceeded down the hallway to where our holding cells were hidden behind a nondescript black door. I ran my security badge through the reader. The mechanics buzzed and clicked, popping the lock. I yanked the door open and carried the sack inside.

  I inhaled damp air, tasting the salt on my tongue. Dim puddles of yellow light spilled down from the ceiling in the dark room. Vibrations from the subway ratcheting down the tracks accompanied the screech of brakes.

  An outsider to my agency might have questions about this room. They might wonder about the two iron cages to the left, but would likely be more curious about the ten centimetres of salt on the floor, the carvings scratched into the cement walls and steel beams, and the kind of wax the infinity candles were made of—but a faerie would know the reason for all these things.

  The moment I stepped into the room, the creature inside the sack became frantic, kicking and screaming.

  It didn't have a window to the room, but it already knew its fate.

  I dumped the sack inside the first cell, stepped out, and locked the cell door. I reached between the bars to untie the sack.

  With the first breath of salt dust, it stopped squirming and chose to stay inside the sack.

  "Please," it begged. "Please don't leave me here. Please let me out. The salt—it hurts. It hurts so much."

  When inside the sack, it had growled like a mountain lion. Now, it adjusted its voice as it spoke, bringing the sound down to the naturally softer tones of a woman's voice, almost the sweet dulcet notes of a child, and then twisted into the sound of a child in pain.

  Magnusson had warned me to ignore everything it said. I could certainly see why.

  But my stomach twisted in knots anyway.

  I double-checked the cell locks. Good. I pulled the clipboard off the wall and made the entries for the pick-up crew who would arrive sometime later to retrieve the fae and transport it to the salt mines near Windsor. I made sure to note Magnusson's warning in the log, just in case the fae was still conscious when they arrived.

  The echo continued to beg, plead, and cry in a range of voices as I closed the door and left the lockup.

  I'd no sooner stepped outside when I felt the presence of a faerie. A young woman stepped around the front of my car. She appeared to be an eighteen-year-old human with short hair that lightened from amethyst to lavender from root to tip. She wore a long wool coat in navy blue, cut in a neo-Victorian style with a stand-up collar and lightly puffed sleeves. It probably went all the way down to her ankles. A knit scarf the colour of raspberries wound around her neck and a fuchsia beret topped her head.

  She smiled. "Let's talk, shall we?"

  6

  An ice-cold wind rose up, blowing from behind me, and the world stretched into the distance like pulled taffy and then snapped back into place. Disoriented and nauseous, I stumbled forward, no longer pushed by the wind, and tried to figure out my location since I was clearly not in the alley next to Union Station. The purple-haired teenager stood in front of me. The sound of a multitude of conversations rose around us. Bright, artificial light shone overhead and reflected on the polished tile floor. I smelled French fries and doughnuts.

  "Hmmm. Too busy," the girl said.

  I had barely registered the fact that we were standing in the food court of a mall when the world stretched away from me again.

  As reality snapped into place once more, I fought off the bile rising in my throat as my stomach lurched, my body trying to keep up with the rest of me. When the motion stopped, darkness surrounded me. I blinked, trying to decide if my eyes were open or not, finally caught sight of a red exit sign and decided they were in fact open. I squinted, barely recognizing the outline of tables and chairs. From somewhere in what appeared to be a dark and dreary nightclub, death metal droned from poorly tuned speakers. The twin scents of beer and hard liquor tickled my nose, rolling my nausea over the breaking point. Vomit splashed on the floor.

  "Quiet, but too dark," the girl commented, sounding disappointed. Not even caring that I'd just thrown up by her feet.

  "Wait—" I started.

  The world stretched again and yanked me along with it. This time, when reality snapped into place, I found myself sitting in a chair. The girl sat across from me, her fuchsia felted beret on the table next to a pair of steaming paper cups. A cafe, but not a super busy one. I recognized the cafe's logo hanging on the wall behind the counter. Rumour was, this place made a cheesecake covered in real gold.

  At least I was still in Toronto.

  The girl pushed one of the cups at me. "Here, drink this," she said. Her voice was bright and just as youthful as she appeared to be.

  I blinked at her. I took a paper napkin from the dispenser on the table and wiped my mouth. A killer headache pounded inside my skull.

  I looked at the paper cup with its plastic lid. It could be concealing anything.

  Dagger Magnusson's rule number one: never accept anything to eat or drink from faeries.

  Rule number two: don't thank them. For anything. It was the worst kind of insult.

  She smiled. "At least use it to warm your hands."

  Her own hands were wrapped around an identical cup. Her gloves were hand-knit from wool dyed the colour of overripe raspberries. The scent of sweet berry syrup mingled with the warm coffee aroma.

  "I think you've mistaken me for someone else." I still felt dizzy and nauseous, and though I wasn’t yet steady on my feet, I pushed out of the chair, wanting to leave.

  "Please, Julia. Have some. It really will help with the after-effects of travel," she said.

  On hearing her say my name, my skin went ice cold.

  "What do you want?" I had no idea who she was or what she wanted with me…but there was something familiar about her. A dark swirl of fear wrapped around my gut. She looked so perfectly human, and given what she had just put me through, she had to be extremely powerful. More powerful than Simon.

  "To talk, silly." She rolled her eyes.

  I wondered what I had done to suddenly become so popular with the faeries. First Simon, now this? I frowned. This conversation felt very different from last night's chat with Simon.

  "What is this about?" I asked.

  "I thought we should meet." She extended her hand. "I'm Ruby Blackthorn."

  "Ruby..." Funny, I’d just a met a Ruby last night. The little girl in the pink coat. The same shade of pink that this Ruby was wearing. A chill broke out across my skin. Coincidence? I was beginning to understand the boss's policy on coincidences, namely that there's no such thing.

  I caught a glimpse of a grin as she took a drink from her paper cup.

  My eyebrows shot up. "That was you? How? How were you a little girl last night and a teenager today?" As far as I knew, the fae had only two forms: their nature-related form and one human form. I’d never heard of a faerie having multip
le human forms. "And I’m guessing your name’s not really Ruby?"

  "And you're Julia Ivory. Faerie catcher." Another faerie that knew more about me than I knew about them. Her smile was smug, but again, I went cold.

  That little girl…I hadn’t sensed she was a faerie. I’d thought she was human. If she could slip past my senses then, why hadn’t she today? She wanted to be noticed today.

  She had skin that was so pale it was almost white but for the barest hint of pink. I'd mistaken the colour for frostbite last night, and certainly it could have been, if she were human. Her eyes, sparkling with amusement, were just as unusual as her hair colour: amethyst.

  "Am I supposed to be impressed?" I asked.

  "That I learned your name? That I found you last night or that I found you again today?"

  Even buried inside my warm coat, I felt the hairs on my arms stand up. "That you copied Elizabeth Taylor's eyes. Right down to the thick eyelashes."

  She smiled, clearly amused by my response. "Yes, Liz and I share having a second set of eyelashes, but while her eyes were merely a deep blue, mine are true violet."

  "Fascinating. Should we paint our nails and do each other's hair now?" She still hadn't gotten around to telling me what this was about.

  She frowned. "Are you angry with me?"

  "You kidnapped me and brought me here. Tell me what this is really about." She opened her mouth, but I cut her off. "What do you want?"

  "I thought we could be on the same side," she said in a small voice.

  "What side is that?"

  "If you have a seat, we can discuss this without the entire room listening in." Her eyes flicked to the other tables nearby. I turned my head and saw that indeed, I was attracting attention.

  My instincts were telling me to run, but my feet were firmly planted. If that really was her last night, then I had follow-up questions.

  "Fine," I said and slid onto the chair. "Get to the point."

  "I was really hoping you could help return my kind to our home."