by Krista Walsh
Gabe stretched his arms over his head to stretch his shoulders and forced his mind back to the case. He longed to stand under the spray of a hot shower to spark some ideas, but the building’s hot water tank, never overly reliable, had given up the pretense entirely when the power went out.
Adjusting his sunglasses, he turned his back on his reflection.
He returned to the futon and clicked open his video chat software. A few more button clicks, and a profile bubble popped up showing an antique coin with the carved profile of the Greek hero, Perseus. Although Percy shared the hero’s name — and lineage as it turned out, though Percy hadn’t been quick to reveal that bit of information when he’d first introduced himself — Gabe couldn’t picture the reclusive technophile following in his ancestor’s path of wild adventures.
The computer rang, and a few seconds later, the coin was replaced by the face of a man a few years younger than Gabe. In spite of the season, Percy was tanned, the golden glow of his skin adding to the similarities between him and his Greek-hero ancestor. His brown hair lay curled down to his chin, and his eyelashes were long and thick enough to serve as weapons against anyone who came too close.
Gabe marveled that a man with such good genes — without the drawback of any supernatural curse — wasn’t lined up with dates on a regular basis, but Percy remained hands-off. Just like every other night, he sat in a room bright with fluorescent lights, lined with computers and cables. The wall behind the setup was an intentionally bland gray, without any defining features. Percy was not a man who loved company, and he kept his contact information buried as deep as the internet would allow to make sure no one was able to find him.
“Gabe!” Percy exclaimed, raising his hands in greeting. “Haven’t heard from you in a week. Thought maybe your apartment had caved in under all the snow or something.”
“Not yet,” Gabe said, “but if this weather keeps up, it’s only a matter of time.”
Even as he spoke, his apartment building groaned, and he imagined the roof sagging in.
“Did you get your power back?” Percy asked. His attention shifted away from the camera, undoubtedly to another computer screen, and a moment later, he laughed. “Nope, not even close. Looks like they’re bringing it back in pockets around the hospitals, but you’re one street off the grid. Sucks to be you, man.”
Percy was lucky enough to live in Boston, which, although only a few hours away, hadn’t been hit by a single snowflake.
“I’m looking at the meteorological reports,” he said, “and it doesn’t look like this storm is moving at all. You know those sweeping colored clouds they show on the news — all bright and cheerful even though you know they’re about to ruin your mom’s family reunion that she spent a year planning? There’s none of that. It’s just a big blob of red right over your city. What’d you do to piss off the weather gods?”
“Beats me. Even if I did know, I wouldn’t be the one to apologize. They probably deserved it.”
“We’ll see how long you feel that way once you’ve run out of food.”
Gabe grinned. “That won’t be a problem. I’ll just transport myself to my old hunting grounds in Boston and put my PI skills to work to track you down. Then I’ll make you feed me.”
Percy smiled back. “If you can find me, the rib-eyes are on me.”
They both knew it would take a lot more than Gabe’s skills to find Percy Sparkes. For one thing, Gabe hadn’t returned to Boston in over a decade. His mother was dead, his dad who-knew-where, so there was no heading back to the family home for dinners or special occasions.
For another, Percy had been holed up in his warehouse apartment — information he’d once let slip — since he was eighteen, after being attacked on his college campus. He hadn’t stepped foot outside in at least five years, and Gabe often wondered if he’d left his house at all since he moved in fifteen years ago. The attack on him had made him turn his back on humanity and surround himself with computers, and he hadn’t taken any steps to move forward.
The change had worked to Percy’s benefit, though, giving him the time and space to start up his own company — first running remote servers out of his home, and then growing into software development as well. The guy wasn’t even thirty-five and already had more money than Gabe could hope to see in a lifetime.
Percy swung his chair around to look at another computer screen. He turned back a minute later and slapped his hands down on his desk. “So what do you want? I doubt you’re wasting your precious juice just to see my ugly mug.”
“Why not?” asked Gabe. “I needed a laugh.”
“Ha,” Percy replied, and stuck out his tongue in an expression of exaggerated offense. Then he sobered. “But seriously.”
“Seriously, I need your help. I got a case tonight.”
His friend’s dark eyebrows shot up. “How? Someone fly in through your window?”
“Fire elemental. Quite a trail blazer — and an attractive one at that.”
Percy clicked his tongue. Although completely human, his obsession with the otherworld had brought him to Gabe’s digital doorstep half a decade ago. His research into his heritage had led him to discover the unfortunate connection between his ancestor and Gabe’s and had fostered his desire to extend an olive branch and renew the connection in a more positive light.
Somehow, although it existed entirely over video chat, their friendship remained strong. The fact that Percy lived in Boston and was therefore less likely to be turned into a statue than someone Gabe interacted with regularly in person made their relationship less stressful, and Gabe was grateful for the evening company. Especially when Percy ran through his conspiracy theories, which usually turned out to be true.
When he’d learned about Percy’s obsession with the supernatural — which hadn’t taken long — Gabe had done his own investigation into the man’s background to make sure he wasn’t dealing with another Jermaine. Everything had come up clean. While Percy did have an interest in dabbling with inventions, the purpose of his equipment was to help him observe and learn. The knowledge he’d picked up, not to mention his technical engineering, had come in handy more than once as Gabe’s business grew.
“What was she looking for?” Percy asked. “Someone to warm her cooling blood at night?”
“Get your head out of the gutter. Someone killed her husband and she hired me to look into it. I need you to do me a favor.”
“Only if you have a picture of this new fiery client.”
“I don’t, but you’ll still do the favor. I promise it’ll be fun.”
Percy heaved a sigh, blowing the loose strands of hair out of his face. “What do you need?”
“I need you to hack into the security cameras at Wishrock Harbor and see if you can pick up her husband.”
“Wishrock,” Percy murmured, but he’d already moved his attention to one of his other screens. “That sounds familiar. It been in the news lately?”
Percy had set up email alerts for the more unusual events in New Haven, and he spent most of his free time following up on those leads in search of the latest supernatural occurrence. Anything to build his database and help him develop his next great invention. Although Gabe could never explain why New Haven was such a hub of otherworldly activity, he couldn’t deny that said activity had been on the rise over the last couple of months.
“It has,” Gabe said, replying to Percy’s question. “Most recently two days ago. A man was found naked and frozen to death.”
Percy’s eyebrows rose higher. He leaned toward his other screen, his face sliding out of frame. “I remember now. Connected to the deaths that happened last week, right?”
“So they claim. Maybe even a connection to a few others.”
“Got it,” Percy said. At first Gabe thought he meant that he understood the story, but then his smug face came back into view. “I’m sending you the footage now. You lucked out. Only a few hours after this was captured, the power went out, and there’s nothing a
fter the feed ends.”
Gabe’s laptop screen cut to black and then jumped to a view of the harbor. The blurred image was difficult to make out through the heavily falling snow and dim light, but the shape of a man came into frame walking toward the water. He looked like the man in the picture of Daphne’s Chronicle article.
“Hello, Mr. Davidson,” he said.
“What’s up with him?” Percy asked. “Is he high or something?”
Gabe leaned in to get a better look. Unlike Percy’s computer screens, which he guessed were the size of large-screened high-definition televisions, his laptop screen lacked the finer details. After some squinting, he understood Percy’s observation.
Sam walked toward the water like a man in a trance. His head never moved and his steps never hesitated. He plodded in a straight line, regardless of what lay in his path. Twice he tripped and stepped over coiled rope, but he never stopped or changed direction.
“According to the article, he was found right on the bank,” said Gabe. “So we should see what happened to him any minute now.”
His heart rate picked up and he leaned in closer, his hands gripping his knees. Any moment, he would see the murder take place, and then he could go out and find whatever had done it.
He considered the possibility that this would be the easiest money he’d ever made — watch a quick video at ten o’clock, collect the rest of his pay by midnight. Hell, depending on what the mystery turned out to be, he might even waive the second half of Clare’s payment. She’d already covered his rent for a few months.
Don’t get too cocky. If it were that easy, the cops would have solved this by now.
“Whoa, what the hell?” Percy exclaimed, and Gabe blinked, his thoughts stuttering.
Without a single glance to check his footing or his surroundings, Sam stepped onto the ice covering the river and walked forward until he disappeared into a cloud of snow.
“Shit,” Gabe said, and pushed his hands through his thick hair. Confusion burst through his mind in bright colors, questions bouncing around his skull. He grabbed at the most basic one and asked, “Does he come out? He’s still clothed and no one else is at the harbor with him — that can’t be the end of it.”
The video lurched as Percy fast-forwarded through the feed. The harbor remained still and silent, and if it weren’t for the driving snow and the rush of the time stamp, Gabe would have believed time had frozen along with everything else.
Two hours passed and the rope coils Sam had tripped on earlier were buried by the squall when the fire elemental returned to the screen. He emerged from the exact place he’d disappeared, as though popping out of thin air, and tipped backward into the snow to fall flat on his back. He’d gone into the storm clothed but now lay naked, staring up at the sky. Dead.
“Whoa…” Percy whispered, and froze the frame.
Gabe sat back and stared at the fuzzy image, his thoughts equally undefined. He scanned the screen to see if he could make anything out of the swirling storm where Sam had reappeared, but there was nothing. Nothing but the weather and the now-dead man.
He sagged into his futon, his gaze never leaving the corpse.
“What in the seven hells happened to him?”
3
Gabe woke up in a cold sweat just before the gray morning sunlight spilled through his window.
He’d gone to sleep thinking of the red hair and steady gray eyes that had kept his mind company for the last eight months, hoping they would follow him into his dreams and grant him the wishes from his waking world. Vera Goodall had swept into his life by random chance, and although they’d only spent a few hours together, locked in Jermaine Hershel’s magical room, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
He knew his reasons were far from romantic, but that didn’t change the fact that the vengeance demigoddess was the first person who could offer him what he’d wished for his entire life: an opportunity to be himself, to not have to hide. To forget for a while that he was cursed with his Gorgon sight.
She could look into his eyes.
For a single instant, when his broken sunglasses had fallen from his nose, their gazes had locked — and she hadn’t turned to stone. She was something he never knew existed, and ever since, his thoughts had been filled with what-ifs.
But while his dreams had started out sweet and soft, her simple elegance had soon been replaced by snow. The snow’s thick swirls had then transformed into the wide-eyed face of his older brother staring up at him from the water, his small fingers grabbing at Gabe’s arms. It was the same dream that had plagued him since Rick’s death twenty-three years ago.
The vividness of the dream — of the memory — twisted Gabe’s stomach and closed his throat. No matter how often the images came to him, he couldn’t shake the side effects after he woke up.
Remembering how his recurring nightmare had become intertwined with a vision of the world trapped in snow made him dread going anywhere near Wishrock Harbor. Sure, the Haven River was frozen, but even the idea of getting so close to the water left him covered in a faint sheen of sweat.
He wiped his forehead with the back of his arm, clenching and unclenching his fists to gain control over his physical body even as he struggled to regain mastery over his mind.
You’re stronger than this, he told himself. You were paid good money to go and check this out. It’s not like you need to go scuba diving. Suck it up.
He rubbed his eyes, keeping his gaze steady on the shadowed hills and valleys of the stippled ceiling. As his panic subsided, he reached for his sunglasses, upsetting an empty beer can on the coffee table. The aluminum clattered onto the uneven planks of the bare floor, and he winced at the sharp noise in the silent apartment.
He slid on his glasses, and his shoulders weighed down as the already dim light of the morning faded to a murky brown.
After a lifetime of seeing the world in shadow, he didn’t often dwell on what it looked like in its full brightness beyond the occasional glimpses he managed to catch, but in the extended darkness of the snowed-in world, he found himself craving the light more than ever.
He sat up with a groan and twisted in place to stretch out his back. Ice pellets tapped against his window and the wind whistled through the open gap around the generator hose. Chills scurried down to the base of his spine at the draft. His Gorgon-Fae blood kept him from feeling the worst of it, but after a night burrowed under the warmth of his blankets, the change was a sharp kick in the pants.
His stomach grumbled, and he pushed himself off the futon toward the kitchen, where he grabbed the last granola bar from the box after discounting some questionable oranges and a block of cheese that had turned an unfamiliar shade of blue.
“Gabriel,” he chided himself. “You need to grow up and start keeping food in the house.”
But really, what was the point? He’d lived off pizza delivery for most of his adult life, and he saw no reason to change things now. Except for the fact that most of his favorite pizza places were currently lost under mountains of snow.
A problem for later.
He grabbed a quick shower, the water only a few degrees warmer than ice, then bundled himself into jeans, a black T-shirt, and a thick wool sweater. He debated turning the generator back on for one last look at the security tapes, but decided to conserve power. He could watch those videos a hundred times and not learn anything new. To find his answers, he would have to go to the source. If he was lucky, he might come across some of Sam’s clothes buried under the snow, which could give him some clue about what killed the guy.
His stomach tightened as his brother’s face rose from the depths of his mind. He reminded himself again that the river was frozen. There would be no white-capped rapids or waves crashing on the riverbed to bring him back to that day.
Shoving the memory away before his stomach heaved, Gabe grabbed his leather trench coat from the hook on the back of his door and pulled the collar up around his neck. Any human who spotted him would think he
was determined to come down with pneumonia, but he hated suffering through the immobility created by a stiff parka just for the sake of appearances.
He closed his eyes and pictured the scene from the security video: the coils of rope on the docks, the shipping crates stacked haphazardly, abandoned because of the weather. He pictured the stretch of ice and the security booth with its whitewashed frame and thick glass windows.
Not for the first time, he wished his ability to jump through space came as easily to him as it did to the full-blooded Fae, letting him travel wherever he wanted just by drawing the wish into his mind. If that were the case, he could take himself right to the creature who had committed these crimes and deal with it, or at least jump in and out quickly enough to get a handle on the creature before it spotted him.
As it stood, his partial blood permitted him to pass along the edges of the Fae dimension to step between places in his own world, but only if he could envision exactly where he was going, either from a memory or a picture. Then he just had to hope that no one was nearby when he passed through.
In good weather, he limited himself to traveling between his apartment and his office — or occasionally the back alley behind his favorite pizza place — but with the roads as bad as they were, his chances of bumping into anyone on the street were slim.
When he had a solid image of his destination fixed in his mind, he opened his eyes and ran his index finger in a vertical line through the air. Beyond the golden light that lined the edges of the new doorway, the glare of sunlight reflected off the snow at his destination, and he turned his face away from it.
The need to wear sunglasses all the time occasionally had its benefits.