by SM Reine
“I do use blood,” she said. I grimaced, and she hastily added, “I get it from the butcher’s. Pig, cow, chicken.”
The thought of slaughtering animals for a spell didn’t bother me—I’d knocked off a few mice and rats in my time training with the OPA—but witches that were willing to kill for power often didn’t stop at animals. I watched Stonecrow warily as she mixed ingredients. After she’d tossed a few things into her cup, she replaced the plastic lid and shook it.
“I was impressed with your spell in the SUV,” she said, softer than before. “That was great.”
Great? Well, if that was the word she wanted to use for it, I wasn’t going to stop her. “What can I say? Panic is inspirational. I don’t even do ritual circles most of the time. I’m more of a potions and poultices kind of guy. My coworker, Suzy, she’s all about the circles of power and energy manipulation. Bet she could have cooked up something even better.” I laughed. “Bet she could have cursed both of them without even getting out of the car.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Well, you did well enough for both of us to survive.”
Yeah, we’d survived. Couldn’t ask for much more than that.
She took the lid off her cup again and scooped out a pulpy mess that smelled like a hamster cage. Stonecrow reached across the center console toward me.
I jerked back. “What’s that?”
She grabbed the wrist of my blistered hand.
“Relief,” Stonecrow said, smearing the mix on my skin.
The hot ache of the wound immediately subsided and was replaced by a damp coolness. Shivers rolled down my skin as the blisters dried, shriveled, and sloughed away to reveal fresh skin underneath.
It felt so good that I didn’t stop her when she dabbed it on the rest of the blisters, too. The stench was overpowering, but not magical. I didn’t even sneeze.
She handed me a fistful of napkins. “There you go.”
I wiped my face clean and checked the mirror. I looked like Cèsar again. A Cèsar that desperately needed to shave, but Cèsar nonetheless.
Stonecrow was smiling a little, giving me a weird look.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, tilting my jaw to see if I was turning purple or something.
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just—I didn’t get a good look at you in the cemetery before defending myself, so now I’m…looking at you.” The smile seemed fixed to her lips.
Fuck if I knew why. Women.
“Thanks for the…” I drew a circle in the air around my face with a finger, indicating all the freshly healed skin. “Even if you caused the damage to it in the first place.”
Her eyes had gone a little glassy as she gazed at me. She blinked and refocused. “Oh. Self-defense. I thought you were going to kill me.” It wasn’t exactly an apology. Guess I didn’t need one. Stonecrow grabbed a clean napkin. “You missed a spot.” She wiped along my jaw. I didn’t think I’d missed anything, but I appreciated not smelling like hamster cage, so I let her clean down my neck and collar.
Once she was done with the pawing, I finished my last burger. The beef didn’t taste quite as good now that she’d mentioned using animal blood in her rituals. “Let’s get one thing straight, Stonecrow. If you’re into human sacrifice for your magic, get out of the car right now. I don’t work with murderers.”
“Isobel,” she said. “Not Stonecrow. Isobel’s fine.”
I liked the sound of that, but I didn’t feel like being on first name terms with a murderess. “You haven’t killed anyone for a magic spell,” I pressed.
“Never,” Isobel said.
Good enough. We could always talk about the animal cruelty later.
“Then let’s have a talk with Erin,” I said, turning the SUV on.
+ + +
The night grew dark and sultry. It was nice enough out that I would have liked to roll down the windows and let the damp evening breeze into the car, but I was hesitant to give up what little privacy the tinted windows gave us. Not to mention the bulletproof glass. I could still feel the barrel of a gun jammed into the back of my skull. Now that the giddiness from my shitty luck/strength spell was wearing down, I could feel it real well.
I’d been one finger squeeze away from my brains splattered on the desert. That was enough to make a guy turn paranoid.
We parked outside Suzy’s townhouse.
Isobel glanced out the window. “What’s here?”
“My coworker. Suzy. She’s gonna be able to help us.”
“Suzy,” she mused. “Bet she has blond pigtails.”
More like pure animal rage and filthy jokes trapped inside a woman’s body. Whatever. “Stay here,” I said, and got out. When I rounded the car, Isobel was slamming her door, hiking her shorts up her ample hips. “Uh, didn’t I say ‘stay here?’”
“You said it,” Isobel said, giving me a disarmingly dazzling smile.
Right.
She didn’t follow me when I headed toward Suzy’s blue door. She remained leaning against the SUV. I kept an eye on her as I headed up the walk.
I was on Suzy’s front step, about to knock, when the door flew open. There must have been magical alarms that I hadn’t sensed.
The instant of total relief on Suzy’s face was immediately overwhelmed by anger. “Cèsar, you are one stupid motherfucker,” she said, but she was grabbing me by the jacket, running her hands over my chest and arms, like she couldn’t believe I was still alive. “What are you doing here? Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”
Considering that I hadn’t gotten a bullet in the head? Yeah, I was feeling pretty thoroughly okay. “Did you get to Eduardo and Joey first? Did you question them?”
“Of course I didn’t,” she whispered. “The Union must have been ten seconds behind you. They recovered them first.”
“So you don’t know if executing people is Union procedure or if they’d been hired to kill us?”
“Executing people?” Suzy’s eyes went wide and round. Her fists clutched my lapels. “For fuck’s sake, Cèsar, what the fuck? Who would have hired Eduardo and Joey as assassins anyway? They’re dumbasses!” She shook her head. “No. They’re good. They wouldn’t—it couldn’t have been bribes or something. They wouldn’t do that.”
Either Suzy didn’t know her friends as well as I now did or it really was Union procedure to shoot people in the head the second they became nuisances. I wasn’t sure which was worse.
She pressed her face to my chest, wrapped her arms around me for a tight squeeze, and then pulled back to punch me in the stomach. Damn, Suzy was a violent hugger. “Fuck, Cèsar. My texts are monitored. You stole a fucking Union SUV. You—” She cut off. She had finally noticed that I wasn’t alone. “Who’s that?”
Isobel was coming up the sidewalk. I opened my mouth to respond.
“You brought the necrocognitive to my house?” Suzy interrupted. “What the flying fuck is wrong with you, Cèsar?”
Leaning my shoulder against her doorway to block her view, I shrugged. “Bet if you asked Pops, he’d tell you he dropped me a few times as a kid. Look, Suzy, like I was saying, we need your help.”
“We?”
Did she need to shout everything at me? “We need to find Erin Karwell’s remains so we can talk to her and clear my name.”
“We?”
Okay, she’d already said that.
Isobel touched my back. “Hey,” she said. “Is everything okay? You guys are…loud.”
Suzy’s expression shuttered. She looked between me and Isobel and the SUV with a weird look, brow furrowed, lips frowning. “I told you to get on a bus, Cèsar. I told you to run. I’m not going to help you serve your balls to the Union on a platter. We’re done with this bullshit.”
And then she slammed the door in my face.
“That was helpful,” Isobel said brightly.
No fucking kidding.
13
We got stuck in traffic after leaving Suzy’s. I didn’t know where we were going, so it didn’t really matt
er. I just drove without stopping, creeping down the 5 Freeway slowly enough that I might as well have walked it.
The Union was probably tracking us now. We’d have to ditch the car soon—find another one. Where and how, I didn’t know. I was exhausted and annoyed and my ability to plan had been left behind in the desert. I’d expected Suzy to have the answers—and access to Erin’s body. Without either of those, I had no idea what to do next.
“Do you know where the OPA takes victims for autopsy?” Isobel asked.
Guess my aimlessness was obvious. “No,” I admitted. “I never deal with murder. I specialize in picking up witches who’ve been getting into trouble, but generally not the homicidal type.”
“More like the ‘talking to the dead’ type?” she asked with a teasing smile.
“If you’re asking if you’re one of my cases, yes. You are.” I huffed out a breath. “Were.” But she had the gears in my skull turning. Where did we take the dead? I’d never seen body bags hauled into my office building, but I had seen ambulances around. They probably went somewhere on the OPA campus.
The idea of breaking into one of our buildings was laughably bad. We had hundreds of magical and physical alarms—I’d have gotten arrested before I made it past the Starbucks between the Magical Violations and Infernal Relations buildings.
But maybe if someone could bring Erin’s body out…
“How much body do you need?” I asked. “The whole thing, or would an arm or a finger work?”
Isobel pulled a face. “I don’t know. I suppose I could do it with any part of the body.”
Any part?
I cast my mind back to the blood in my bathroom. It might not have been cleaned up yet. And Erin had to have left some tissue behind, too.
We were almost past the exit closest to my apartment. I changed lanes without signaling, slicing through the narrow space between cars. Horns blared at me.
Isobel grabbed the leather arm of her chair. “What are you doing?”
“Getting you a piece of the victim.”
+ + +
We parked a few blocks away from my apartment building and walked the rest of the way there. I noticed that Isobel was carrying the bag from the herb shop with her, but didn’t ask what else she had bought. She’d already admitted to using animal blood. I probably didn’t want to know what she had in there.
It was a nice night for walking, even if I was out with a necrocognitive. The moon was hazy yellow, and the air was quiet and still. No signs of cops or Union anywhere. Didn’t get any better than that.
Isobel eyeballed my building as we headed around back. “What is this place?”
“What, got a problem with it?”
Guess my defensiveness had given me away. She gave me a skeptical look. “You live here?”
I took another look at my apartment. It was indistinguishable from any of a million other apartment buildings in Los Angeles. The architecture was…well, it wasn’t going to win any awards, but it wasn’t like I spent much time looking at the big taupe box from the outside. It had a secure lobby and a couple trees. Whatever. I spent most of my time at the office anyway.
“You live in a teal RV with beaded curtains,” I pointed out.
“Teal is a magical conductor. The curtains…” The corner of her mouth quirked. “Well, there’s no excuse for that.”
At least she was willing to admit it.
Grabbing the fire escape’s ladder, I pulled it down and stepped aside.
“Ladies first,” I said.
Isobel stared up at it. “I don’t like heights.”
“It’s the only way up.” I extended my hands toward her. “I won’t let you fall.”
She hesitated then climbed onto the first rung. I dutifully stood behind her, prepared to catch her in the unlikely event of the fire escape suddenly melting and throwing her to the ground. As soon as she reached the second floor, I followed her. And we did that all the way up to my floor.
When we got up to my apartment’s window, Isobel glanced over the railing at the ground and turned pale. She grabbed my sleeve.
“I’ve got you,” I said, steadying her.
She sighed and leaned against my chest, all warm and soft. Probably trying not to fall over. “You do have me, don’t you?”
And with that weird question, she pushed in the screen for my window and slipped inside.
I climbed in after her.
My apartment hadn’t changed since the last time I was there. I was relieved to see everything intact. The landlord was kind of a dick; I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d tossed all my belongings to the curb as soon as I went missing. But a cursory search proved that nothing new had gone missing since my last visit. The rent was paid through to the end of the month—maybe I could actually keep my home if I managed to clear my name before April rolled around.
Not that it felt like home anymore. I stood awkwardly in the bedroom as Isobel picked through my closet, staring at the bed that I’d woken up in on my last morning as an innocent man.
I’d been with Erin there. She’d died in this place. Shot and strangled.
I wasn’t sure I could feel at home anywhere ever again.
“What do you need out of my closet?” I asked.
“Oh, just looking around,” she said airily, with a hint of that “shaman princess” tone. Yeah, right. She was snooping.
I pushed the door shut. “Look around somewhere else.”
She lifted her hands in a gesture of surrender. “All right, all right.”
“Need lights so that you can search for Erin’s tissue?” I opened my bedside table in search of a flashlight.
She wandered out of the bedroom. “No, thanks. I don’t need to see to find what I’m looking for.”
I grabbed the flashlight anyway and turned it on. There was still blood on the hallway carpet. Isobel flinched at the sight of it. A little skittish for someone who had slapped animal blood on her bare breasts for a ritual in a cemetery.
“Getting any vibes?” I asked.
She shook her head slowly. “Where did Erin die?”
I led her to the bathroom. “The tub.”
It was hard to stand there, staring at the empty bathtub, knowing what had been inside of it. But I had the necrocognitive. We were on the scene of the crime. If this were what I had to do to find Erin’s killer—well, I’d do a hell of a lot worse to bring justice to her.
Isobel stopped beside me in the doorway. She swallowed hard.
“Do it,” I urged. “Raise her.”
Isobel kneeled on a clear patch of floor by the tub, clutching her bag from the herb shop. Her face was ashen in the darkness. “So much blood,” she whispered, trailing her hand over the edge of the tub. “How did she die?”
The memory of the bruised handprints on Erin’s throat came to mind. “You tell me.”
She clenched her jaw. Reached into the bag and sprinkled herbs across the floor. Thank God that was some kind of plant matter and nothing animal in origin. “Erin Karwell,” Isobel said, one hand on the herbs, the other hand stretched over a tacky puddle of dried blood. She cleared her throat. When she spoke, she only had a trace of that dramatic, fake Indian accent. “I summon—I summon the spirits to…” She looked at me and trailed off.
“Well?” I demanded.
She put both hands on the tub and squeezed her eyes shut. “Erin Karwell,” she whispered.
Isobel was silent for several long seconds. It was nothing like the cemetery. She wasn’t even pretending to put on a show. She just…sat there. Doing nothing.
And after a minute, her eyes popped open again. “I don’t have the right supplies.” It sounded like she had to fight with herself to make the words come out, like she was confessing to something awful.
“What do you need?” There was a hard edge to my voice. Harder than I meant. “Do you need candles and salt? Do you need raccoon bones? Do you need to take off your shirt?”
“Cèsar…”
“
Well?”
“I need a body.”
“You’ve got her blood, you’ve got the herbs,” I said. “Talk to the damn victim, Isobel!”
It exploded out of her. “I can’t!”
The force of her frustration punched through me. I stepped back, gripping the doorframe.
So there was the truth. Isobel Stonecrow wasn’t really a necrocog. She was a liar, a scammer. Exactly what the OPA had thought she was.
“The drums,” I said. “The bones. The blood. Fake.”
“Yes, all of that was fake,” Isobel said, scattering the herbs across the bathroom floor as she stood. “And the herbs don’t do anything, either, I was just—I always try to put on a show. But—”
I’d heard enough. I shoved away from the door.
“I can still help you, Cèsar! I just don’t—”
“Forget about it,” I said. The anger burned out of me, dwindling down into a hard iron core of defeat.
Isobel couldn’t raise Erin. She couldn’t give me the truth. I couldn’t get vengeance—couldn’t clear my name, get my job back, get my life back.
I didn’t bother with the window. I ripped open the front door of the apartment, tore down the yellow police tape, and stalked away from the home I might never see again.
Isobel followed me to the top of the stairs and gazed at me with wounded eyes.
“Let me help you,” she said. “We can still figure something out.”
What the hell could a scammer do for me? For Erin? I froze on the landing and glared at her. “If you’re smart, you’ll get out of town, Stonecrow. And you won’t come back.”
Maybe that was what I should have done in the first place.
14
The house I was standing in front of was by far the nicest I’d been to since this whole thing started, so long as you liked suburban sprawl—which I did. It was quiet on this street. The kind of place where everyone was in bed by nine and trouble didn’t roam the sidewalks looking for things to tag with spray-paint. Trees were swaying with the breeze, a dog barked in the distance.