Brush With Death: A Sadie Salt Urban Fantasy (Sadie Salt Series)

by Ware Wilkins

  This is too similar to the same scene I came upon when I was sixteen. Back then it had been in my family home. And the shredded, bloody bodies had been my parents. When that had happened, I hadn’t frozen like this. I’d screamed and screamed and screamed until I came to in a hospital, a detective and my uncle waiting beside my bed.

  Maybe this numb-freeze is my new defense against the too-horrible-to-comprehend. Now I just shut down, because no one should have to go through this once and certainly not twice.

  Slowly, though, thoughts come. Thoughts like who turned the light out if Nash was still strapped to the chair? Which led to Obviously, the person who ripped open his chest and then the killer is probably in the APARTMENT oh God what should I do I don’t want to die GO GET ABE he’s probably still outside—

  My feet move before I can pull myself together. I run to the front door and am about to jerk it open when I realize that if I pull Abe in now, I’m basically sentencing him to death. Humans can’t know about the supernaturals. Not unless they’re part of the scene, via magic or relationships or family ties. Those last two are tolerated but frowned upon.

  Abe doesn’t have a tie to this. More than that, he’s a sheriff. There’s a general distaste among the supernaturals of law enforcement, if only because they make it difficult to remain undetected and behind the curtain.

  I can’t get Abe.

  But I might be in the apartment with a murderer. Ingrid’s in South Carolina. It takes her about an hour and a half to get to our home. She’s psychic, and not even a good psychic on her best day, as well as a strip dancer. What’s she going to do against something that carves open werewolves?

  Oliver. My uncle. Recluse and warlock extraordinaire. My phone is in my bedroom. The thought of moving through the apartment at all, unprotected and without my phone, has my mind shrieking in fear, but I have to do something before my legs stop working and I slump to the floor and wait to probably be murdered.

  There’s an itch in my pocket and I remember the teeth. You have to cast a spell, Sadie. Alarms fire off in my head, but I find myself gripping the two molars nonetheless. Oliver will understand. Besides, maybe just a small detection spell. It shouldn’t give out too much of a pulse. No one will be the wiser.

  Yet I hover, waiting. My lips are mouthing the words, words that have somehow always been locked inside of me, but I’m not drawing power from the teeth. Not yet. When someone warns you on pain of death not to practice the only kind of magic you’re good at, you tend to listen. That’s exactly what Uncle Ollie said to me when he discovered what I can do.

  “Bone magic is forbidden, Sadie. More than necromancy. It is the ultimate taboo and, for all species, punishable by death. And it comes at a cost. One that will make execution seem preferable to the end game.”

  If that’s not a no then I don’t know what is. Except...

  It’s all I have. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. And it isn’t like I asked to be a bone witch. I mean, I did ask for power, but not like that. Not specifically. For toast’s sake, Sadie, focus. Murderer. Apartment. Big problems now outweigh future problems.

  Gritting my teeth, I commit. Just one molar. A small detection spell. If another being is still in the apartment with me, I’ll know. And if there is, well, I’ve got another tooth and nothing to lose but my life.

  Breathing deep through my nostrils, I start opening up the magic I keep secreted away. Pulling from the molar, I can feel Nash’s energy expand. It’s a piece of him, a bit of his essence, and it makes me sick to be using it without his permission. But he’s dead and if I’m ever going to find out what happened, I have to stay alive.

  It slowly dissolves in my palm, its power transferred to me.

  Damn, I forgot how good this feels. All the paltry spellwork on the chair, or the talismans my uncle makes or the magic he tries to teach me pale in comparison. This is rich. Thoreau wanted to suck the marrow out of life. Man, he should have tried bone magic. It’s sucking the life out of marrow. Feels. Amazing. Euphoric.

  As power settles into my body, a tingling in anticipation in my limbs, my belly, and my chest, my lips speak the words. The spell blooms from that accumulated power and I can see my apartment in my mind, clear as a window. Searching in my head, I leave no nook unchecked.

  My power wanes as I finish my spell. I should be worried, because I’ve just lit a small beacon that says breaking supernatural law right here, folks. Bone magic has an essence, like a smell, that can be read if a supernatural gets too close to me. Their heightened senses can pick the life-stealing quality of it out of the magic, honing them in on the source. Great power comes at great cost, and I guess easy traceability is nature’s way of keeping balance. At least, that’s how Oliver explained it.

  Like I said, I should be worried, but I’m not. Not yet. Because even though I know I’m alone, the fear is still there. And with the fear comes the why. Why was Nash brutally killed in the minutes I’d been talking to Abe? And why haven’t I been killed alongside him?

  Either way, it’s time to get my phone. I rush into my bedroom and hit the speed dial for my uncle. It goes straight into voicemail and I curse the fact that he never answers. This isn’t a voicemail I want to leave. “Uncle Ollie, I’ve got an eviscerated werewolf in my apartment that is bringing back major post-traumatic stress from my parents and I just used a bit of that magic you forbade me to use, but I don’t know who else to call so come help make everything like it was before, okay?” “Call me.” It’s all I feel is safe to say.

  I flip through the people I know, trying to shuffle them according to who I feel I can trust. The list is embarrassingly thin. I might have a lot of clients, but there are few people, supernatural or not, that I call friend.

  There is one, though.

  Maybe not friend so much as very bizarre acquaintance. He came in with teeth from the sixteenth century. Let’s just say it took a lot of work to repair those suckers. I mean suckers almost literally. Benji’s a vampire.

  He’s not a part of the local nest and is quite an outcast because of it. Being a vampire, I know he won’t rush to judgment on the dead werewolf. I breathe easier when I find his number still in my contacts.

  Benji answers on the first ring. “Did I have an appointment I forgot?”

  “What are you doing right now?” The strain in my voice is obvious to me, and I’m just human. For vampire hearing it’s like screaming ‘HELP PLEASE’ over the line.

  There’s a pause. “I’ll be right over.”

  He’ll need an invitation. I allow vampires into my office, but I always rescind the invitation after. It’s a matter of safety. Vamps tend to be rather curious and, as the only paranormal dentist, I guess I draw some amount of their interest. I don’t mind, I just want to be awake and not hypnotized when they’re around. “The front door is open. You’re welcome to come in.”

  Part of me wants to go back into the room with Nash. To see if I’ve made the whole thing up. A hallucination brought about by too little sleep. But hallucinations can’t have the vivid, angry red that’s painted on my eyelids each time I try to shut out my current reality.

  My memories force themselves up, raging like a tornado. I can see my parent’s bodies again. Their kitchen was white because my mother liked pristine environments. White kitchens were like canvases, she’d say, inviting her to create art out of food. Only that day the canvas looked like Jackson Pollock had gone nuts with a can of Crimson Number Five and a paintbrush. I struggle not to, but the image of my father’s arm, wedding band glinting from a finger, is overwhelming. I remember it so strongly because the arm was on top of the refrigerator. The rest of him had been on the floor beside the kitchen island.

  It’s too much, these memories, and I try to swallow them down, but my body rejects my intentions. They rise along with dinner, and I turn to vomit in a corner just as Benji comes quietly in the front door. He’s dressed in skinny jeans and a t-shirt, his dark hair falling in his face like a surly hipster. When I man
age to meet his gaze, I see the pupils in his eyes have grown so large with hunger that his irises appear black.

  “Sadie,” he manages to growl through the fangs that have emerged from his gums, “Are you okay?”

  “No, but I’m not hurt.” Belatedly, I realize that it was not my best idea to invite a vampire to a bloodbath. But maybe I’m just Queen of bad ideas, and I didn’t have a lot of options. “Are you okay? I need help, but there’s a lot of blood.”

  His eyes shut and a small tremor ran through him. Slowly, his fangs retract. When he opens his eyes again, they’re still mostly black, but a ring of green iris showed. Benji is in control. “Yes, I can help.”

  I nod. “This way.” Holding myself steady with a hand on the wall, I start down the hall toward my office. If Benji is following me, I can’t hear it, though, so I turn around to check on him and jump back into the wall. He’s directly behind me. From the time my slow, scared human body had taken a single step, he’d moved from the door to no more than a foot from me.

  Between the closeness and the new awareness of just how freaking fast he is, my senses sharpen and I become much, much more aware of just how vampire Benji is. From a distance, he’s deceiving. He’s taller than me, but then again, I’m a shortie, so everyone is taller than me, but he stands at maybe only 5’8” or 5’9”, tops. He’s slim, too, in a way that probably didn’t do him many favors until emo-goth boys, with their pasty, emaciated bodies, became all the rage. Benji’s got the dark and brooding thing down pat, though, if you didn’t know him. Pale skin, green eyes, dark and tousled hair. Unfairly long eyelashes. You know, the kind that beg you to swoon.

  If you knew him at all, though, you’d know that’s just his looks. Benji’s personality... flamboyant is the word that comes to mind. None of the sensitive, mysterious shadow dwelling type that vampires are expected to be is in him. He’s jubilant most of the time, speaks quickly in his medium-timbred voice that only growls when he is irritated, and he talks with his hands. Which is mesmerizing to watch since they move faster than a human can, blurring as they punctuate his story.

  Grimloch is small. We get a lot of the weirdos because we’re close to Asheville, NC. Which is a kind of hippie-artist mecca. I mean weirdos in the best, nicest way. Benji, fits in here. No, the townsfolk don’t know he’s a vampire, just like they don’t know Alec doesn’t run a rehab center, it’s where his pack lives, or that Tiffany at Tiffany’s Treats is a brownie (which is hilarious), and so on and so forth. The point is, he fits in because he’s funny, sassy, and more than a little gay.

  When he first came to my practice, I was startled because not many vamps had been willing to trust me with their teeth, seeing as their teeth are their actual livelihood. But Benji is one of those classic cases of proving how the myths we see on television don’t always line up with the legends in person. His fangs were in great shape. His teeth were strong, but a little crooked and in desperate need of a cleaning. He’d been turned in a time before fluoride. While I couldn’t do anything to straighten his smile (his body would shift the teeth right back moments later), I was able to whiten and brighten, as well as cap some of the teeth that had been ground down before he was turned.

  It helps to be on a vamp’s good side.

  Benji doesn’t pay me in teeth, as much as I wish he would. An old vampire tooth would go a long way with Tee. But he does keep me stocked in vamp venom, which I’m able to use as a numbing agent on other paranormals. We’ve got a bit of a rapport going and thank goodness, because while I might be unnerved by his speed and obvious hunger, I’m also way out of my league right now.

  “Whoa,” I choke out. “Didn’t hear you move.”

  “Sorry,” he shrugs. “I wasn’t sure about our level of secrecy right now.” Now that he has control of himself, there was a hint of amusement in Benji’s voice I absolutely do not appreciate.

  “Nash Kincaid is dead in my office.”

  “The new were?” Small town, remember? Like Ingrid and myself, most of the town’s paranormals know all the newcomers.

  “Yes.” Grief hasn’t had a chance to appear yet, since I’m still wrapped up in oh-shit right now. But later? I’ll be heartbroken. “Let me show you.”

  “Wait,” he grabs my wrist and I pause, too afraid to move. Does he sense whoever did this? Was my spell wrong and someone is still lurking in my home? His nostrils flare as he takes a deep breath. He doesn’t need the oxygen, but his olfactories work just fine. “What’s that magic I smell?”

  Oh. Oh. Of course. I’m so rattled that I didn’t think of the fact that I’d just cast bone magic in this same apartment. Benji and I are familiar, but we aren’t close enough for me to tell him the truth. “I... I don’t smell anything.” The best thing I can do is play human. Which I am, mostly, if I ignore the fact that I’m also a bone-witch who isn’t supposed to be witching.

  His eyebrows press together. He steps closer and I know he can hear my heart beating more quickly, feel my pulse escalating under his fingers as they hold my wrist. Benji smells my hair, my hand, my elbow. He’s moving toward my neck and I finally shy away. “I’m not comfortable with you this close to my jugular.” My words sound strangled.

  “Why are you so afraid?”

  “Because I have a dead werewolf in my home and a hungry vampire is trying to smell my neck.”

  He straightens and smiles. His fangs have retracted, but his canines are still longer than a human standard size. The white teeth glint. “That makes sense. Let’s see the poor kid.”

  He doesn’t mention the smell again and I’m not going to bring it up. Instead, we make our way into the office. Seeing Nash again makes me sick and I worry I’m going to vomit again. Benji breezes past me and goes immediately to Nash’s body. “Do you mind if I touch him?”

  There’s something so startlingly bizarre about Benji asking me for permission to touch the corpse that I bark out a laugh. “I mean, sure. I don’t know what to do, so touch away, I guess.”

  I wince as Benji’s fingers probe the open chest cavity, but somehow just having another person with me, vampire or not, gives me the boost in strength I need to stand up and start paying attention. “What’re you looking for?”

  “His heart’s gone, for one,” Benji mutters. “Which means whoever killed him did not want him healed.” Werewolves could recover from a lot of things: bullets, knife wounds, and the like didn’t slow them down. Given enough time and food and rest, it was rumored they could even regrow limbs, though I’d never asked Alec if that was true. I doubt he’d tell me if it was. But no head or no heart were things a wolf couldn’t bounce back from.

  I know it’s sick of me, but now that the vines of panic are beginning to wither, pragmatism is kicking in. In a few hours, Tee is going to be here. She won’t give a damn about the body, knowing her. But she’ll want to know... “I should check his mouth.”

  Benji’s eyes dart to me and narrow. “Why?”

  Balls. I’ll need to tell him a truth. Just not the whole truth. He’s helping me with a body, after all, so I owe him something. “I have a debt with the tooth fairy.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I wish.”

  “I thought that bitch twinked out of existence ages ago,” he muttered, and the fact that he believes me is interesting. Tee doesn’t get a lot of credit, even in the paranormal community.

  I risk a step closer to him and to Nash’s body. “You know her?”

  “Just of her. But it’s always good to be familiar with the people who collect teeth and bones.” Another one of his shrewd looks and I know he’s connecting me to the magic smell. Not good.

  “Look, you’re the third person to know about my debt, and I’d rather not make it known more.”

  “That’s why you wanted my teeth,” he mumbles, focused back on Nash. His fingers pry into Nash’s mouth and I lean in, trying to see and sickened that my hopes are going up. Debts can make assholes of us all, I guess.

  “Yeah,” I sigh. “Not th
at you were willing to deal.”

  “Hell, no. Do you know what people can do with teeth?”

  I really, really do. “Nope. That’s just the currency my payments are in.”

  “Well, you’re shit out of luck, Sadie.”

  My gut twists. “Why?”

  He angles Nash’s open mouth toward me and it’s good I’ve already thrown up, because I see that each and every one of his teeth has been removed. “What the hell?” I gasp. “I’m so screwed.”

  “You’re going to need to call Alec,” Benji says. “I could hide the body, but the weres would still come sniffing around here. A new were like Nash has to tell the pack leader everywhere he goes this close to a full moon.”

  “Yeah, I was already going to have to call him about keeping Nash’s teeth. But I’m not thinking this conversation will be easier.” There’s something happening, a weird kind of osmosis about the situation. Not long before, I was so paralyzed by finding a body that I could barely think. Now I’m standing next to it, talking about what to do next as if I am planning a grocery run and want Benji’s input. It’s like I’ve absorbed all the screwed-up I can, and instead of rejecting it and crumbling, I’ve evolved.

  Into a person who can casually discuss what to do with the body of some poor kid.

  “Benji. Can you smell anything else? Tell who might have done this?”

  “No.” He gives a quick shake of his head. “Unfortunately, all the blood is blocking any other scents in the room. But I smelled something out in the hall—” oh damn no don’t say it “—that I haven’t smelled in a long time. Have you ever heard of bone magic?”

  It takes a lot of work to remain calm. “Only a bit from Uncle Ollie.”

  “Well, it’s majorly fucked up magic. Since Nash’s teeth are missing, I think he was murdered by a bone witch. That’s bad news for all of us.”

  “Why’s that?” I know I’m the one who cast it. He smelled my magic, but I’m sure as hell not going to admit to that. It hits me that this puts me in an even shittier place, because by lying, I’m throwing off the trail to the real killer. If I tell the truth, it’ll most likely be pinned on me.