by Zelda Knight
For the second time in a day my knees buckled, but this time, my head blessedly didn’t hit the floor. Dolion’s arms slid beneath my armpits, hauling me up against him. His lips moved soundlessly, like I was in a bubble of slow motion.
A shadow passed us on the other side; another blur that shouldn’t look the way it did. Like a memory in its own right.
I frowned after it, ignoring Dolion’s rather beautiful face to follow the familiar shadow. Ahead of it, a man waited at the other end. The paramedic gestured me into the lift and I watched myself follow his command. He disappeared into the lift that shouldn't be there.
“Clarrisa,” Dolion’s deep voice came at me, too loud, his dulcet tones grating on my frayed grasp on reality.
The conversation of the Institute foyer swamped me as I turned to face him, noting the frown lines on his face for the second time.
“Don’t do that,” I said softly, reaching up to brush my fingertips over his forehead “your facade will crack.”
“Not something I worry about.” The lines smoothed beneath my fingers, though more creased around his lips. They faded as he studied me. “Where did you go, then?”
“Didn’t you see– well. Clearly no, you didn’t.” I pressed my lips together, my stomach creating waves of nausea. “I thought I saw myself. Everything slowed down. Stupidly like a movie, but this one took my stomach on a rollercoaster ride along with it. And when I stepped into that apparently non-existent elevator again, it all came back to,” I waved my hands in his face, “normal.”
Dolion stared over my head for a long moment, his hands like steel bands around my arms. “Stay here.”
It was an order, spoken in a tone clearly used to being obeyed, and I was no exception. My feet stayed right where they were as he propped me against the wall. His tall figure strode away down the hall, and he approached the far wall.
Steadying myself on the wall that was cool at my touch — of course, now it’s cool — I edged across the hallway. No one came down this far from the entrance, but I wanted a better view of the area Dolion had claimed. He paused in front of a piece of blank wall where my head still told me a pair of elevator doors should be, rocking forward slightly in his inspection, but not touching the surface.
Passing the turning with the mirror I had tried to use earlier in the day, I continued to make my way along the silent and dead ended hallway to join the Medical Examiner in staring at a blank piece of wall.
“There’s nothing here.” I pressed my lips together.
Good work, Detective Obvious.
Murch’s phantom voice echoed around my head.
“No,” Dolion lingered a moment. “When you saw yourself before, were you in the moment, or more off to the side?”
I frowned, but he didn’t look at me. “What does off to the side mean?” I tried to reduce the sharp edge in my voice, but it slipped through, anyway.
Mostly because I knew exactly what he meant, but some part of me was loath to admit it. The whole situation was well off the sharp end of my acceptable scale, and my brain bumped fuzzily about in a soup of muddled nerves and memories to boot.
Dolion looked at me, hard.
The intensity in those liquid gold eyes snapped something inside me. Every hair on my arms raised in an uncomfortable prickle, irritation and confusion dissolving into a type of uncontrollable madness in my chest.
“Time. He’s…muted it, slowed it. Somehow,” Dolion mused, ignoring the boiling pot standing beside him.
I was surprised I didn't emit a whistle, ready to blow.
His attention was on the wall; his shoulders relaxed as he sorted through the puzzle and I wondered if this was how I looked when I worked at the edge of a crime, all the pieces falling into place.
Murch would know.
I missed the tiny gargoyle and his inevitable snark in that moment, questions and concepts I couldn’t answer as my grip on the rabbit hole loosened and I tumbled ever deeper. My reverie dulled the hiss longing to burst out from behind my clenched teeth. Instead, it slipped out in a hurried exhale, and I breathed properly again.
“He…who? The paramedic? Manson?” I managed to get the question out, then turned it around. “Or are you talking about your corpse?”
Dolion laughed. “Your odd friend, the paramedic. I believe if we can locate him, then we will also find our other missing friend.”
“Malcolm Dallas,” I recalled the victim’s name, pleased my brain had resumed its usual function. “So, how do we catch our people? This isn’t the type of investigation I’m used to working,” I said, surprised I wasn't panicking and running for the proverbial hills. Apparently, working with Murch over a prolonged period had dulled my acceptance of unusual things. I turned back to Dolion. “And don’t you have work to do?” A half assed joke about his work not being able to walk away died before it reached my throat.
Dolion glanced at me, the hint of a smile curling his lips. “Yes, I have to work. And that’s where we’re going.” He headed back to the stairwell. “Don’t touch that,” he warned, when I stretched my hand out to call the elevator.
“Why not?” I followed him into the stairwell. “And what the hell are you about with time?” It should have been the first question from my lips, but clearly, I was still playing catch up.
“Time isn’t stagnant. It moves all the time,” he glanced down at me as he held the door open.
I passed by him, registering the heat of his body. I shivered in response as I stepped into the open landing, already missing his warmth.
“Yes, I can see that. Sort of,” I fell into step with him as he traversed the stairs. “It moves forward, counting us into the future.” The words sounded stupider as they passed my lips and I wished I’d taken my brain’s belated advice not to say them.
“Yes, we move forward, but does it? Time is as fluid as your water trapped in a bottle, bending back on itself in a ribbon. Humans only see in a straight line: they see their future and only what comes next for them. We look back at the past, but we do not experience it,” Dolion’s hand hovered at my lower back, its heat radiating through my shirt.
“And Mason did what, exactly? Bend time to make a door look further away? You said time pauses, upstairs.” I faced him before he opened the door to his workplace.
The usual occupants weren’t my issue; Murch was, and I needed to get this straight in my head before he busted my precarious thought patterns into a cosmos of alternatives. And my grasp was reasonably tentative.
“Paused, to make distance seem like time was passing. There’s little difference between the two,” he added, sliding his hands into his pockets. “For now we wait to find out how he had changed my office to a place of his own making.”
“And he’ll come back and show you this?” My grasp on the conversation, my reality and acceptance melded into a disjointed beast that threatened to overwhelm me. “Just like that?”
Dolion smiled gently. “Just like that. Tea?”
I nodded and followed him into the examination room.
Chapter Five
My phone screen was decorated with tiny scratches that bore a remarkable resemblance to certain a gargoyle’s claws. Murch hung from the ceiling, not-so-tiny grunts letting me know he was feigning sleep after his bat party on my screen.
I scrapped the wrecked screen cover into the bin beside Dolion’s desk. A steaming cup was proffered beneath my nose. I took it, murmuring my thanks, and lay my phone on the desk ignoring the stone bat hanging from the industrial ceiling in the underbelly of the Institute.
“Is he coming down?” Dolion asked softly from his seat on the floor, his long legs folded to his chest.
“Not likely,” I muttered, dwarfed beside his lean bulk as I settled next to him. The man was huge; his height disguised lean muscle all the more intimidating when it ewa curled into a smaller space, “I believe I’m in disgrace.”
Dolion flicked me an amused grin. “You have an unusual relationship,” his smile dipped at on
e end, though he recovered the slip quickly.
There’s a story there.
“What’s unusual about a girl and her stone bat, fighting crime in Cook County?” I asked lightly.
His gaze lifted to hold mine, the same shiver running over me as it had when he had grasped my hand earlier. “Nothing at all.”
“Tell me how this is going to work,” I raised my mug at the elevator doors, “and why I’m not out there, trying to find your missing corpse the traditional way.”
“Is there a traditional method of recovering the walking dead?” Dolion stared forward pensively, his shoulders drawn in a tight line. “We wait, because if you’ve seen the first part of Mason's paused moment, then the rest of it should come through here, or maybe it hasn’t yet. Or-”
“I get the picture,” I held up a hand, my head already swimming with information overload. Dolion laughed softly beside me. I sent him a death glare, but couldn't help the smile that answered his, “wait– are there walking dead?”
Zombies? Were we having the apocalypse and no one had told me? Visions of the Instituterising around us in a horror scene brought the prickles back in force.
“No, not the way you’re imagining.” Dolion said firmly, not bothering to disguise his smile this time, “no one is rising here today. Or night. Stop imagining,” he bumped his shoulder against mine.
I ducked my head into my coffee, fighting the heat that rushed to my cheeks, and told myself it was embarrassment.
“I can imagine a lot,” I sighed, “Okay, let’s start this thing straight. I have a murder victim who has walked away. I have a room and an elevator in my head where they shouldn’t be-”
“That’s your problem. The rooms were where they should be. They just weren’t.”
“That’s it? Oh, good. We can all go home now,” I snapped.
A cough that could have been a snort came from behind us.
“I believe your Mason has paused time long enough to make a pocket of it. Stored, or twisted it until he has a little bank collected he can access in a certain place.”
“An air bubble,” I blurted, thinking of bubbly chocolate. “But doesn’t that mean that the time can get out, if the bends…or loosens?” I had no idea if I was using terms that Dolion would understand. He nodded, to my greatest relief, and I felt less of an idiot than before.
“Indeed. Your moment in the foyer is proof of such a leakage. It is not an infinite resource. When the time depletes from his bubble, the past and the present will pop back together in a new moment.”
“Ending the sequence.” I mulled on this for a long moment, a million questions buzzing in my head, but I settled on just two. “Why would that not happen in the past, and who would have the power to do this? What sort of being?”
“Because you are not in the past. And being, well…” Dolion shifted slightly, his body slightly more solid-looking beside me.
I peered closer at his body.
Burnished bronze stone-tone covered his fingers, eeking along his hands to cover his wrist. When he turned to look at me, his eyes were golden topaz, no hint of the liquid brown they appeared to be when the sunlight hit him, both beautiful and eerie at once. Despite living with a miniature gargoyle, the sheer presence Dolion displayed drew me to him.
“And your walking corpse isn’t a vampire?” I asked hurriedly, before I fell into those golden eyes.
Lips tweaked the tiniest amount, stone creeping along his face. “Not this one.”
“Wait, does that mean–” I couldn't work out if he was joking or not as my reality lurched.
Unprepared, my stomach tried to go with it, but I fought against the sensation of the solid floor beneath me shifting in a set of random undulations. Neither my mind nor my eyes could work it all out, which wreaked havoc on the rest of my systems.
The elevator doors partially opened, two shadows sliding across the room too fast for me to make out who was who, though I knew I had been the first person to enter. The room wavered, bending at the sides and pulsing madly outward. I inhaled slowly, but my heart wanted to pound at the same rate as the room. I clutched my untouched tea, propped up.
Ignoring a second past version of myself that came into vision and shifted, fading all at once, my attention was drawn into the depths of the elevator. Very slowly, I rose as the third shadow, this one far morse distinguishable and present than the last two, emerged.
Malcolm Dallas still bore the marks of his violent death. He crossed the room with painstaking steps, pausing at the table Dolion had placed in the centre of the room. He rolled his struggling body onto it, drawing the sheet over himself as though preparing for a night’s rest, and lay still.
Dolion’s desk was once again neat and tidy, as though Murch hadn’t spent the past few hours trashing it. Even his little trail of dust had disappeared.
Shadows flickered faintly as the walls ceased their throbbing, a wave of phantom wings fluttering over me. I stumbled backward in their wake as the shroud settled over Malcolm’s head. I blinked, turning to Dolion, but he had resumed an entirely stone facade.
Once again, I was the only breathing being in the still and silent room.
Epilogue
“I still don’t have an answer on who,” I bitched, collecting the files spread over my bell tower room. The lot were in a disarray; apparently I’b been mad enough to leave a window open while I was off gallivanting about Chicago, hunting down a walking dead body. Who knew a paranormal occurrence could be so disturbing to my usual routine. “This is going to make a hell of a report.”
“Be creative.” Murch suggested unhelpfully. “That’s what you people do when you report the evidence, isn’t it? You fit the facts to a fun little story you’ve concocted and hunt down someone suits your needs and arrest them. Well? Of you go.” He made a shooing motion with his claws.
I shook my head, “You’re snarkier than ever. Do bats get PMS?” The last file slipped into place and I made a neat stack, pressing my coffee cup firmly on the top. A glance over my shoulder told me the window was closed. “Wait. Is it because I’m meeting Dolion later on?”
It turned out that the Medical Examiner was an avid ice hockey fan, and seeing as the Blackhawks were playing tonight, he had invited me to share the Institute’s corporate box. I’d jumped at the chance, not having been to a game in years. Plus, I wanted to see what the stone man was like outside of his regular habitat. The fact that my heart beat a little faster at the thought of being near him again was pushed firmly to the back of my mind, Tonight was a social evening, nothing else.
Dolion had provided a handy document co-signed by another coroner’s office apparently run by another shifter of some kind stating the body had been moved for processing purposes. The process remained undisclosed, of course, but it gave me an easy out to close the case.
I would continue to investigate the time thief, or bender — I hadn’t settled on a suitable term yet, and my gargoyles were unhelpful on that front — and Dolion had promised me an introduction to the paranormal community, under the provision that Murch was my guarantor.
“Go have your date,” Murch snarked. “I’ll sit here and tend the radio.”
I burst out laughing. “You should have been a nineteen fifties detective. Would have fit right in with Dick Tracey.”
“Slept through it.” Murch faked a yawn for rest he didn’t need. “Well, go on. Off you go,” he canted his small, squished head, pushing my phone across the table he rested on in a not so subtle gesture.
“You’re giving up crime fighting for tonight? Or are you going to scour Netflix for Batman movies while I’m out?” I checked my light makeup and fixed my ponytail.
“Hardee har har,” Murch muttered, tapping a claw on my screen. “Is this a new cover? I could use it in sharpening my claws.”
“Don’t you dare, you pile of pebbles,” I squeaked, rolling my eyes when he backed off with a shuffle. A tiny pile of dust lay heaped in his shadow.
“Go.” Murch turne
d to face the window overlooking the city. “I’ll be here, watching over everything while you have your date. Might even find you a new case.”
“Good night, Murch.” I smiled, but the tiny bat had hardened into his traditional shade of black, his neck stretched out in the pose that came most natural to him, watching over the city each night.
My little stone sentinel.
The End
I hope you loved Clarissa & Dolion’s story. They will return! Sign up for my NEWSLETTER to be the first to hear about their next story. Dolion also features in A PORTRAIT IN ASH & LACE.
About Sofia Aves
Sofia Aves writes fast-paced police romances, suspenseful mysteries, steamy cowboys with a Montana backdrop and the occasional cheeky god. She loves reading Indie authors and hides her collection of college romance books beneath an ever-growing TBR pile.
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Sofia is a mum of three crazies and an overly large fur baby who thinks she’s a teacup puppy. She loves orchids but can’t always keep them alive. Sofia lives near Brisbane, Australia.
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Find Out More:
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Website: https://www.sofiaaves.com/
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A PORTRAIT IN ASH & LACE
https://books2read.com/APortraitinAshandLace
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TRICKSTER’S LAW
https://books2read.com/TrickstersLaw
Bonded
(The Candle District Series, Book 1)