Moon In The Mirror: A Tess Noncoire Adventure

by P. R. Frost

  WindScribe? She’d dumped the contents of my purse onto the bed. She could have looked further. Last night I’d sent her to a hot shower and bed at midnight. I didn’t think she could creep down the noisy stairs without me hearing her.

  Both Gollum and I had drunk a lot of scotch. Would we have heard anything?

  We trooped down the cellar stairs, collecting along the way a squarely built woman wearing a forensics team jacket and carrying a huge black case.

  Cold sweat trickled down my back. I kept telling myself that I had nothing to fear. I was innocent.

  But the clock kept ticking, and the number of people in various uniforms in my house and my yard kept growing.

  How was I supposed to meet King Scazzy in battle in less than an hour with all these authorities hanging around?

  Scrap, where are you?

  Keeping away from Donovan.

  Great. Just great.

  Too many bodies filled my cellar. I was supposed to be the only one who came down here. Mom did to do laundry and select preserves, but that was it. Scrap and I trained down here. No one else.

  No one.

  Gollum and I had sparred down here once.

  The forensics woman dusted the padlock with a black powder. “It’s clean,” she grunted.

  “Wiped?” Halohan asked.

  “Looks like it.” She didn’t clean the powder off. “Some scratches around the keyhole. Might have been picked. Can’t say for sure. Could be just wear and tear.”

  Halohan used my key to open the lock, still wearing his gloves.

  My teeth wanted to chatter. I clamped them shut.

  A bellow and a slamming door stopped us all. “Tess, what the hell is going on?” Donovan pounded down the stairs.

  “Donovan,” I said gently, stopping him from barreling into the overcrowded cellar. He seemed to fill the room all by himself, the top of his head nearly brushing the ceiling beams. The dirt and cement block walls crowded closer using up all the air.

  “It’s D. All they’ll tell me is that he’s dead.” Donovan dipped his face close to mine. The gesture was oddly intimate and conspiratorial.

  I blanked my mind to the allure of his scent, his heat, his charm. Easier now. All I had to do was remember how he relished licking my blood off a wound he’d inflicted on my arm.

  “Chief, I understand that I need to talk to you about viewing the body before the autopsy. There is a ritual . . .”

  “Don’t you worry, young man. We’ll get a rabbi or priest or whatever you need to oversee the autopsy, make sure everything is done correct and respectfully.” He placed a big hand on Donovan’s shoulder in reassurance.

  “I doubt you’ll find a shaman from his religion,” Donovan snorted in disgust. “No. I must see the body before the autopsy. The ritual must be performed before you cut him open.”

  “Can’t let you alone with the body. Might destroy some clue.”

  “I don’t need to be alone. I just need to perform a ritual, ” Donovan insisted.

  “Donovan, your foster father was stabbed in the middle of the night. This is a criminal investigation,” I tried to explain to him. All the while my mind whirled with questions. What kind of ritual? Would Donovan do something so that all vestiges of demonhood disappeared?

  I really wanted to be there when he did whatever he needed to do.

  “Stabbed? I don’t understand.” Real bewilderment clouded Donovan’s eyes. “No ordinary blade . . .”

  “That ain’t no ordinary hunting knife,” Halohan whistled as he pointed to the replica Celestial Blade. He ran a fingertip along the curved cutting edge and yelped. His finger bled through the gloves. He popped it into his mouth, glove and all and sucked on it.

  “Holy shit,” the forensics woman said. She took two steps into the armory and stopped dead in her tracks. Her head bounced around like the oversized bobble-head of a doll in the back window of a car.

  “So that’s where you keep it,” Donovan whistled through his teeth. “Can I hold it? I didn’t get a chance to examine it the one time I saw you use it.”

  I tried merging with the wall. Somehow this wasn’t going to turn out pretty.

  “You use these things?” Halohan looked at me with new respect and deeper suspicion.

  “I collect blades. A hobby I picked up after I started fencing. You’ll find my sport gear upstairs in my bedroom. I don’t like displaying sharpened blades on my wall. Someone could easily slice off something important if they tried playing with them. Or steal them to commit a crime. So I store them here.”

  “Oh, we’ll look upstairs, too. But I don’t think we’ll find anything more interesting than this.” The forensics woman backed out of the tiny room carrying a bloodstained weapon very gingerly.

  “Careful, that’s a seventeenth-century German short sword. Very rare and worth a small fortune,” I protested. A long thin blade with a gold etched bell guard. It weighed fifteen ounces and was perfectly balanced. It sang when I snapped it through the air. It very closely resembled a modern sport fencing foil. Except this one wasn’t foiled. The point was lethally sharp. And now covered with blood for about ten inches from the point up the blade. From the foible almost to the forte.

  I wanted to grab the antique away from these people who had no respect for its place in history.

  “We’ll take care of it, all right. What’s this?” The forensics woman looked closer at the bloodstain. “Strange metal that’s being eaten by the blood as if it were acid.”

  “More likely strange blood,” Donovan muttered.

  Heat flooded my face and made my knees weak. She’d found the murder weapon. And it probably had my fingerprints all over it.

  Chapter 34

  "YOU HAVE THE right to remain silent . . .” Allie began the ritual of arrest up in the kitchen. She looked happy about it.

  “What about fingerprints, Allie?” I protested, tensing my muscles against her grabbing my wrists and pinning them behind my back with her cuffs. “Your tech said it had been wiped clean of prints.”

  “What’s going on?” Mom asked. She looked dazed and confused. Very much herself.

  I would be bewildered, too.

  “Tess? Tell me what’s happening.” Now she chose to take her gaze out of hiding and fix me with a stern look.

  I opted on my right to remain silent. Anything I said at this point might get me into deeper trouble.

  “You didn’t kill him, did you?” Donovan asked on a whisper.

  I was sure Allie heard him. Mom, too.

  “Oh, my!” Mom placed one well-manicured hand over her mouth. Her nails matched her blouse. Instead of ruby, they now looked blood red.

  Allie clamped handcuffs on my wrists. I couldn’t feel more awkward.

  “Oh, Tess, you shouldn’t have. We’d have worked out any differences you and D had,” Mom added more fuel to the fire.

  I almost caught a hint of a glowing ember from hell deep behind her eyes.

  “Mom, don’t help!”

  “This is stupid,” Gollum bellowed from the doorway.

  At last, the voice of reason.

  Everyone paused to look at him. Fury splotched his bony cheeks and made his glasses slide all the way to the end of his nose. For once, his mild blue eyes blazed with emotion.

  A new fear crept through me. I’d never seen Gollum angry before. Suddenly the strength in his shoulders and the clenching of his fists alarmed me.

  I had a wisp of a memory: A Marine lieutenant and a corporal lying unconscious on the floor of an office trailer with thick bruises on their necks that looked like fingerprints. A Marine sergeant held a gun to Gollum’s temple shouting at him to back off.

  But I’d been barely conscious at the time, with severe muscle spasm from an industrial-strength military-grade tazer gone astray in my wacky nervous system. I couldn’t be sure if it was a memory or a dream.

  Just as I could never be sure whether my nightmares of demons were real or the product of a wasting fever. Scrap said
they were both. . . .

  Either way I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of Gollum’s anger.

  “Tess couldn’t have killed Darren Estevez. She spent the entire night with me,” Gollum stated with a straight face and a fierce look.

  “Tess, you didn’t!” Mom shrieked, as if sleeping with a man outside of marriage was worse than killing her husband of only thirty-six hours.

  Allie inhaled sharply. Her face looked hurt. Then she hardened and yanked on my handcuffs so that my shoulders threatened to dislocate. “That tears it. You’re coming down to the station, right now.”

  Jealousy. Allie and I had never had that between us. We’d always liked different boys in school. Always backed off when the other showed signs of interest in someone.

  “Allie, it wasn’t like that,” I whispered desperately.

  “Wasn’t like what?” Halohan barged into the conversation. “You sure she didn’t sneak out when you were asleep, young man?”

  “We didn’t sleep much.” Gollum held Halohan’s gaze steadily, not blinking.

  “You slept with him!” Donovan exploded. “You slept with that bastard. Doesn’t our relationship mean anything to you?”

  “It’s none of your damn business, Donovan. We only slept together once. Then you turned into someone I’m not sure I want to know.”

  “I’m still the same man you couldn’t wait to fall into bed with,” he ground out.

  “Are you? We have no relationship, Donovan. We’ve made no commitments.”

  “I asked you to bear my children.”

  “And I declined. Commitment, marriage, and happily ever after weren’t part of the offer. I’m free to choose any man I like as a bed partner. And I don’t choose you.”

  He bolted out the door, knocking police people aside in his angry hurry. WindScribe appeared out of nowhere and followed him. She climbed into his car while he was backing out into the lane. Then he peeled out like a devil was after him.

  “That true, Tess?” Allie asked. “You slept with Gollum? ”

  The hurt in her voice almost broke my heart.

  “We slept the entire night together, in my apartment,” Gollum insisted, daring anyone to contradict him.

  “We’ll sort it out down at the station.” Halohan jerked his head for Allie to take me out to the squad car.

  “Don’t worry, Tess. I’ll have a lawyer down there in minutes,” Gollum called after me.

  “What about my noon appointment?” I dug my heels into the slushy grass. Allie yanked again on my arms.

  “Can’t you see I’m trying to save your life? If you are safely locked in a jail cell, Scazzy can’t kill you,” Allie snarled at me. “Though why I should bother saving your traitorous hide is beyond me.”

  “That isn’t the issue.”

  “It’s the only issue that really matters. I’m still your friend, I guess. Sometimes, like right now, I wish I weren’t.” Allie looked back at Gollum standing in the doorway with longing and pain. Then she leaned her greater height and weight into propelling me forward. I had no choice but to climb into the back of her huge four-wheel-drive rig. Not a graceful maneuver with my hands cuffed behind my back.

  “Does this mean we have to cancel family game night?” Mom called after me.

  Tess isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon. I should go hold her hand, so to speak, but there are things happening that tweak my curiosity.

  There are too many people in uniform at the house to sort out the emotions and the tensions. If they find anything interesting, I can discover it, too, by peeking at their reports. I’ll wait to go home until the police decamp.

  So I pop over to Donovan’s motel room.

  I have to watch from outside the window. I think I know the source of that forcefield. I’ve felt something similar before. Twice now. But that theory is just too outré for words. Too humiliating to admit.

  He and WindScribe are going at it hot and heavy. Oh, my, he does have a beautiful body. Lovely muscles ripple beneath his smooth skin. Not a lot of body hair. I do so admire lovely men. No wonder Tess turns to pudding every time he walks into the room. The only thing more beautiful than this man naked is an imp covered in warts.

  Now, WindScribe is just another female to my jaundiced eye. Too skinny with hardly any boobs. He takes his time, working with hands and tongue. He captures WindScribe’s gaze with his as he slowly, ever so slowly enters her.

  She squeaks in passionate wonder. Her eyes glaze and her muscles ripple all the way to her curling toes.

  She is transparent to me. I can see through her skin, to all her inner workings. And young as she is, she hasn’t kept fit. Too much fat under the skin. Few females can measure up to Tess for beauty and muscle tone. She doesn’t think so, but she doesn’t look at her own soul. I love Tess more than life. She’s my warrior, and I her blade. Our lives have melded to the point that if she dies, I die. If I die, she dies. That is an intimacy far deeper than mere sex.

  Speaking of which . . . where did WindScribe learn to do that? She isn’t the innocent teenager she pretends to be. Before she went off to Faery with her coven, she’d been around. Several times. Either that, or she spent her time with the little folk servicing the king . . . and all of his minions.

  Oooh, so flexible. And Donovan measures up to the task, in more ways than one. He is so virile and potent. He is like the Damiri. They breed and breed and breed. She’s ripe. And eager.

  They reach their peak at High Noon Exactly. How appropriate.

  She’s following through with her offer to bear Donovan’s babies.

  I don’t think Tess is going to like this even though it will be weeks before anyone but me can know for sure if the pregnancy will hold.

  It’s over all too soon.

  A cold wind blows up. I have felt this wind before. Icy, bitter. It smells of Windago.

  Goose bumps appear on WindScribe’s skin. She cuddles close to Donovan and burrows beneath the covers. He takes longer to notice, merely accepting her desperate seeking of warmth as the prelude to more sex.

  I turn blood red without bothering with any shades of pink. My body stretches and sharpens. I need to transform. But I have no warrior nearby to handle and control me.

  Without Tess, I can do nothing. I am nothing. I am useless.

  I bang on the window and shout at Donovan. Beware. Hide. Get ready to fight.

  He can’t hear me.

  WindScribe jumps and starts.

  “It’s just the wind banging a branch against the glass,” he soothes her.

  No, no, no! It’s more than that. Danger.

  Why do I bother? Donovan out of the way will make life easier for Tess. I’ve fulfilled my obligation to warn him.

  Three swirling black forms made of air and ice catch hold of me and slap me away. I fight for control with inadequate wings and insubstantial weight. A real imp would have enough weight to work with gravity to fly into the face of these demons.