by L. J. Red
I pulled my brain back on track. “You can’t stay here,” I told Raven, not with Valerian sticking around, even if he was channeling some kind of vampire Martha Stewart. And not since those goons had broken in. My place wasn’t safe. Raven had gone very still beside me. Did she think I was just gonna kick her out? “I love Jazz too much to wake her up in the middle of the night for a second time,” I continued. “So it’s going to have to be Dr. Allister. You got any objections?” Raven unclenched and shook her head.
“Good,” I said, and I escaped from the breakfast bar and retreated to my room, unable to deal with the complicated emotions that Valerian was dragging out. How could my body be such a traitor?
I called Rufus. He sounded half asleep but woke up pretty quick when I explained what happened with Raven and told me he’d be over in half an hour. I wanted to hide out in my room like a complete coward but I forced myself to go back and sit down.
My appetite was still wonky but the pancakes really were delicious and I managed to get my body’s unruly reactions back under my control while I ate.
Raven inhaled an entire stack. Valerian just leaned against the counter.
“Watching your figure?” I asked him. “There, that’s healthy.” I pointed to the last apple in the bowl. He took it and raised it to his mouth, fangs flashing as he took a bite. I shivered. He brought the apple away from his lips, shiny with juice. Shit. I shouldn’t have said anything.
There was a knock at the door. I escaped Valerian’s heavy gaze and pulled the door open. “Hey, Rufus, thanks for coming.”
“No problem,” Rufus said with a tired smile.
Raven came out to meet him. “Hi, Dr. Allister.”
“Raven, Tiana told me you were in a spot of trouble and needed a place to stay.” She nodded. “Well, I’ve got a guest room,” he said. “Tiana has stayed over more than once; she can vouch for the comfortableness of the mattress.” He traded a look with me. I had spent more than just a couple of nights in Rufus’s guestroom. Hell, I spent an entire year and a half there after my violent exit from the vampire court.
Valerian exited the kitchen and I felt Rufus go still next to me. “Um, right…” My words awkwardly fell into the silence. “Rufus, this is Valerian. Valerian, Dr. Rufus Allister.”
“What’s he doing here?” Rufus said, and I was surprised at the depth of hatred in his voice. His eyes were hard. He didn’t know it was Valerian who had left me for dead, I had never told him that. I knew Rufus disliked vampires after seeing what they’d done to me, but I hadn’t expected such a reaction.
“Valerian, give us a minute.” I pointed to my bedroom. He gave me a look but did as I asked.
“He’s here on the case,” I said, turning to Rufus.
“The case?” Rufus asked.
“Yeah, you know, the drained murders.”
“Cool,” Raven said, “the photographs you brought to the coven. Using a vampire to hunt vampires, smart.” She glanced at my closed bedroom door. “Does that mean he’s a good vampire?”
“He’s…" Fuck. What could I say?
“Tiana,” Rufus said, stepping close to me.
I turned away from Raven, but I couldn’t meet Rufus’ eyes. I didn’t want to deal with his concern. Guilt was already starting to eat me up. Seeing Rufus here brought back all the memories of how much of a wreck I had been in those first few weeks and months after Valerian left me for dead. I had just blithely invited him back into my house, into my life. What was I thinking? Eating pancakes and joking around with Raven like this was some kind of normal situation? This wasn’t fucking normal at all.
“Don’t, Rufus,” I said. “I know.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think you do.” He turned away from me sadly.
I didn’t know what to say to him. I turned. “Raven, come here.” I tried to hide the tremble in my voice. Rufus took a step away from me, toward the counter.
“Sorry to ruin your night,” Raven said.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “You didn’t. None of this is your fault, Raven.” I turned away from Rufus slightly. “Rufus and I, we have… history,” I finally said. “History that involves vampires. It’s not you, okay? Although, don’t think you’re getting a free pass for shoplifting. If you’ve got time to go around stealing shit from stores then you got time to turn up to my sessions. I’ll see you tomorrow at the community center, got it?”
“Got it,” she said, glancing up at me with a tiny smile. “I’m kind of looking forward to it.”
“Yeah? Well don’t. I’m going to work you until you sweat,” I said with an evil grin. I let her go. Rufus walked out behind her without looking at me and I felt the strength of his disappointment.
A moment later, Valerian stepped back out into the silent apartment. Any hint of the relaxed expression from before was wiped blank. “I should go as well,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, awkwardly stepping to the side of the doorway. “You probably should.” He paused as he passed me. Despite everything, I ached for him to touch me. Desire involuntary and entirely unstoppable. I didn’t dare look at him. I fastened my gaze somewhere around his collarbone and held my breath. I heard him inhale as if to speak but, in the end, he said nothing. He brushed past me and he was gone too.
I pulled the door shut behind me and stared at the empty kitchen. The pancakes eaten, the plates cleared. Even the apple was gone, a scatter of sugar on the countertop the only mark to show he had been here at all.
Chapter 24
The next day I was still feeling guilty, groggy from broken sleep. I wanted to get to the community center before Raven, to have a chance to investigate the stolen books. I thought I might also have a look at Michelle’s desk and see if I could find any hint as to where she had gotten to. It had been over a week now and I was worried. Part of me ready to suspect the worst. I pushed the thought away. It was the murders preying on me. Sometimes people just had to go out of town, suddenly and without telling anyone. Right. Sure.
The room where we normally had our coven meetings was being used for band practice and the squeaky noise of brass and woodwind followed me up the stairs. The admin office was little more than a storage cupboard, with a narrow window in one wall, Michelle’s desk directly under it, and the other three walls were lined with bookshelves. The one thing we cared most about at Starlight Coven was our books. This was entirely due to Jazz’s efforts. From the start she had insisted that we invest in a real library for the coven. She wanted future generations to be able to learn and share our knowledge.
So many witches kept their magics in private family grimoires, and if the magical line died out or a feud broke the family apart, grimoire were so easily lost either to age and damp or to collectors who locked them up in fancy safes for the antique value, not for the value of the spells themselves.
A few of our books were old, worn copies of magical textbooks from Washington University library’s discards courtesy of Rufus, our very own magical studies professor. But the rest had been gathered painstakingly, one by one, by the coven members over the years. So, the fact that somebody was coming through and taking them was an insult not just to our coven but to us personally. I pulled the door shut behind me, closing out the sound of the tortured orchestra from downstairs. I took a step into the room, closed my eyes, and sank into the half world. It rushed up around me, quicker than ever before. Sharper and clearer than I had ever known it.
Was it just because I had finally eaten a real meal? Or was there something more going on here? My magic was awakening in a way I had never experienced before. Like something deep inside me had finally been unlocked.
I walked toward the shelves and brushed my fingers along the spines, sensing old memories, loves and frustrations on every page. It was far too much information. Almost everyone in the coven had read these books at one time or another; it was impossible to untangle a single presence or pull out the most recent. Time passed weirdly in the half world. I couldn’t tell you why som
e of the oldest books felt the most alive, while others, fresh and new in their bindings, felt almost dead. I opened my eyes, frustrated. I wasn’t going to track the thief this way. That would have been too easy.
While my affinity was with the dead, I was still a witch and I could cast spells with the best of them. I decided the best thing to do would be to set a few traps for the unsuspecting thief. I raised my hands, then paused. This might be a good thing to do with Raven, I realized, and lowered my hands again, deciding to wait until she arrived.
In the meantime, I could get some investigating done. I turned to look at Michelle’s desk. I walked over and sat down at the seat, smoothing my hand over the surface. It was entirely clean of papers. I had no idea how she did it. My desk in my apartment was a mess of files and photos. I could barely find my laptop most days under all the stuff I’d accumulated.
I pulled open the drawers one by one and found a great deal of documents neatly filed and labeled, stationery in the top drawer, but nothing interesting, nothing useful, nothing I could use to track her down.
I pressed my hands down on the surface of the desk and closed my eyes, calling up the half world once more. My senses flooded and I reached into the air around me.
Downstairs, I felt the familiar presence of Mrs. Jones, who had died of a heart attack in the middle of her knitting club three years ago, and to my left the faint flicker of a dead mouse that had crawled behind the air vent and been unable to find its way out. All around I felt the ghostly echoes of generations of people who had come to the center for classes, for meetings, and for celebrations. A fluttering rush of emotion, highs and lows. All of it natural, balanced. Part of the ebb and flow of life. But directly around me was a total aching void. A pocket of silence, terrifyingly familiar. I snapped my eyes open, my skin cold, goosebumps on my arms.
I pulled out my phone and dialed Detective Pierce.
“It’s Tiana,” I said, my voice tight. “I need you to log a missing person’s report.”
“That’s not my department,” Pierce said.
“It’s connected to the killings.”
“Connected how?” she asked.
“You know how, in the morgue, I tried to sense something from the bodies and didn’t get anything?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I felt that again, that nothing.”
“Okay?”
I could tell she didn’t really understand. I didn’t know how to explain how skin crawlingly wrong it felt to touch a body and not get any sense of the person who had lived in it. I brushed that thought aside. I didn’t need to explain to her how my magic worked. I just needed her to understand why she needed to start looking for Michelle.
“Just trust me,” I said. “It’s unusual, it’s not right, and I’ve sensed it again. That lack of presence, like their imprint on the world has been wiped clean. It’s a friend of mine, a neighbor actually. She works with me at the Starlight Coven and she’s been missing for about a week. It’s not like her. She wanted to speak to me before she disappeared. She left a message on my phone. She sounded tense, she sounded afraid. I’m sitting at her desk right now and I’m not getting anything, you understand? I’m not getting a sense of her. It’s like she never existed.”
“Okay, okay.” Pierce cut me off. “Slow down, Tiana. Give me her name.
“It’s Michelle,” I said. “Michelle DuPont.”
I described her quickly to the detective and gave her any information I could think of to help track her down. I didn’t know Michelle that well; she had only joined the coven recently. Rufus had recommended her to Jazz when she’d mentioned needing an assistant to deal with the paperwork. I was kicking myself for not finding out more about her. If I’d known her better, I might have been able to stop this, whatever this was. I finally hung up with the detective’s promise that she would accelerate the paperwork and start looking.
A hesitant knock came at the door and I turned to see Raven in the doorway. “Are you busy?” she asked. “I woulda waited in our room downstairs, only there’s some kind of brass band playing there.”
“Hey,” I said, “yeah sure. Come in.” I put my phone away. “We can practice in here,” I said. It wasn’t easy to switch tracks from my fear for Michell and my plans for Raven’s lesson, but I forced myself to do it. I had to trust Detective Pierce to do her job.
I stood up from Michelle’s desk and walked over to Raven. “Did you sleep all right at Rufus’s?”
She nodded. “Yeah, he’s all right,” she said.
“All right, well that’s a resounding seal of approval from a teenager.”
“You realize I’m practically not a teenager anymore.”
“Oh? So, in that case you can tell me how long the stealing thing has been going on?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, a year or so I guess?”
“And is it just shoplifting? Or have you found yourself breaking into banks in your free time?”
She stared at me, and while she didn’t roll her eyes this time, I could tell she was doing it in her mind. “It’s just a few things. You know, nothing anyone will really miss.”
“I’m pretty sure the shop owners would disagree with you, but okay.” I pointed at the books. “You ever felt the need to take any of these?”
She turned to look at the books with a frown of confusion. “Steal the coven’s books? No,” she said, shocked, and I could see the emotion was entirely honest. “No way, I wouldn’t do that.”
“Don’t shit where you live,” I said. “Smart.”
She blushed red. “It’s not like that, okay? I’m not a thief. I just…”
“You just take things that don’t belong to you,” I finished.
“Look, it’s not a big deal, all right?”
“Um, excuse me? You were escorted to my house by the police. What happens next time? What if Valerian isn’t there to save your ass?”
“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my ass he was concerned with,” she said.
“Hey,” I snapped. “Focus, I’m being serious here.” I didn’t want to think about Valerian staring at my ass. He hadn’t been, had he? No. Shut up brain. I stood and advanced on her, damn girl was too tall for me to loom over properly, so I settled for a solid glare.
“You think the police will treat you well when they find out you’re a witch? You think us magicals get slaps on the wrist? Because the world doesn’t work that way. We’re not some powerful coven that rules the city, hell, we don’t even own the building we practice in.” I waved my hand to indicate the community center.
“You work with the police.”
“I work for them. For one detective. The rest just tolerate me, and believe me, that took work. Mundanes don’t trust us. We’ve got too much power for them to trust us. Hell, look at what Valerian did to get you away from those cops. You think that shit is okay?”
She hunched her shoulders and I saw a flicker of doubt cross her face. Good. Relying on vampire mind tricks was a slippery slope to full blown evil in my opinion.
“Look, Raven, I don’t want to stand here and chew you out, all right? We’ve all done stupid things; hell, I’ve done my fair share. But you’ve gotta grow up. You can’t afford to be a kid with powers like yours. I’m sorry, but there’s no room for messing around, no space for fuckups. You don’t get three strikes, you get one, and you just used it up.”
She was looking down at her feet now, scraping her toe across the floorboards. I softened my voice. “You’ve got potential. I know Jazz thinks you do as well, and neither of us want to see you wasting it away in a prison cell somewhere. Understand?”
“Yeah” Raven said. “I guess.”
“No,” I said, “not, ‘I guess’. You have to want it. Really want it. I can teach you. Jazz and Rufus as well. We can train you and give you all the tools you need but if you don’t want it, all of that is meaningless.”
I stared at her downturned head, hoping she’d look up and take the opportunity I was offering her.
I had no idea what I’d do if she didn’t.
Chapter 25
Raven straightened and stared me in the eyes. “I do,” she said, her voice quiet, but growing stronger. “I do want it. I want to get a handle on my magic.”
“Okay then,” I said. “I’ll make a deal with you.” I stretched out my hand. “You put the effort in. You make this your priority. You study hard. And I swear, I’ll teach you everything I know, and when I can’t teach you anymore, I’ll find someone who can.”
She stared at me as if unable to entirely believe what I was saying, then she reached out, her palm slightly cold in mine but her grip firm. “Deal,” she said.
“Good,” I said, dropping her hand and standing. “Right, this is the part where you say goodbye to all your free time.”
Since it was our first proper session, I began by taking her through the basics, running over a lot of the stuff we did in the group classes. She was at the point of manifesting her power, the tiny little baby black hole that had caused so much drama at the last session, so I took her over and over up to that point, but no further. Making her pause on the brink of manifesting power from the half world into the real. The channel of her body, her magic, held trembling and taut.
By the end, she was sweating and frustrated. “Why can’t I just let it out?” she snapped.
“Because,” I said, “it isn’t about letting it out and making a flash. Real magic is about control, testing your own limits until you know them instinctively. Until you know when you can push past them and when you can’t. If you can light a single candle flame in the midst of an inferno, that is the proof of a master sorcerer.”
She sagged into the chair. “All right,” I said, “I think you’re done for today. Let’s try something a little more fun.” I pulled out the book I had been leafing through as she had been practicing and opened it to the correct page. “Here’s a tandem spell, it’ll take both of us. I need you to read it out while I cast.”