by Eli Constant
“Are you okay?” I tense up. “You sound sick.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong. Naked in the cold maybe? Beast-mode did a number on me this time. I couldn’t drive home from the bar last night so I camped out. I thought I’d be better this morning, but I’m not.”
“I’m coming over.”
“That’s okay, Tori. You don’t need to.”
“Kyle, shut up. I’m your girlfriend. I love you. You’re sick. I’m coming.”
He chuckles a little, coughing at the end of it. “Okay, I’m not going anywhere.”
I check my alarm clock. Eight forty-five. Terrance could pick me up at the bar instead. I text him and he responds with a fast ‘Ok’.
Grabbing Adam’s jacket, I walk out of my bedroom. “Liam, I need to go to Kyle’s bar and check on him.”
“I’ll go with you.” Liam turns off the stove and flips a finished pancake onto a plate that’s piled ten high already.
“That’s not necessary. I’m perfectly happy to be alone. In fact, that’s exactly what I want.”
“I’ll drive,” Liam folds a napkin over two pancakes and shoves it at me. “Eat. You need your strength.”
Begrudgingly, I take the offered food. And then, magically, a to-go cup of coffee is in my hands too. He’s thought of everything. Well, I guess it’s not so bad to have a fairy stalker. As long as he gives me coffee and food. Quickest way to a man’s heart. Or… erhm… mine.
I’ll splurge for filet mignon and chardonnay next time then, Victoria.
Get out of my head, Liam.
And now we’re back to bickering. Some things will never change. Some things love can’t change, because love isn’t some universal healing salve. Even great love has cracks.
I eat as Liam drives. We don’t talk. The coffee is good, nearly exactly how I like it. When we pull into the bar parking lot I unbuckle before we’re properly parked. “Stay here. He’s sick and he doesn’t need to see we’ve been chummy in his absence.”
Liam isn’t looking at me though; he’s staring past me at the bar. He pulls into a close space and shifts into park before opening his door and getting out.
“Hey, didn’t you hear me?” I swing my door open hard, stand up, and slam it back closed. “Seriously. You’re being a jerk yet again.” I march forward to where he’s standing, completely ignoring me. I pause before shoving him, and I stare at what’s got him in a trance. The doors of the bar look like they always do. So, I do shove him. “Liam, what the hell?”
“Victoria, do shut up for a moment and be patient.” He holds a hand up, one finger in the air. My mouth falls open in surprise. He can’t talk to me like that! Yet, I find myself crossing my arms, shutting up, and being patient. For about two minutes.
“So what the hell are you looking at?”
Liam sighs, walks pointedly behind me, grips me gently by the shoulders and says ‘that’.
“Yeah, The Doors. Awesome. You want to be a little less ‘people are strange’ and just tell me what I’m supposed to see.”
“You should be able to see it, Victoria. You are connected to the fae.” He moves away from me and waves his hands slowly over the door, whispering a few strange-sounding words. Elvish again, I’m guessing.
When he’s done, and moves away from the door, I don’t see anything at first. I’m about to snarkily tell him so, but then something pale begins to glitter and glow until it’s like neon embedded in the darkly-painted door. “Holy crap,” I breathe out. “What in the world…”
“Light Court scouts.” He sounds disturbed. “I’ve done so much to keep them from this place. To keep them from you.”
“But they haven’t found me. Why here? Why the bar?” A thought springs to mind. “Kyle. Is this why Kyle’s sick?”
He shakes his head, “I don’t think so, but nonetheless I should look at him.”
We push through the doors into the bar. Crow, the manager Kyle hired a few weeks ago is behind the counter cleaning glasses. He’s a slight man, with fine line wrinkles and a head of long dark hair. Despite his age, only a hint of silver runs through the pony tail he keeps neatly tied with a leather cord. “Hey, Tori. Kyle said you were coming. Man, he looks like shit.” Crow set down one glass and picked up another. “Who’s that?” He points at Liam.
“A friend. He’s got some medical background and he’s in town.” I speak hastily, glad my brain is quick on its feet today, when often it’s a snail.
“Cool, cool. Hope it’s not contagious.” Crow gives a wry smile and starts combining half-empty bottles. He pours a top shelf whisky in with low brow liquor and I wonder if Kyle knows he does that. I want to say something, but I also don’t. Because Crow, despite his smaller build, doesn’t give off the vibes of someone who appreciates being questioned.
“This way. He’s probably in his office on the couch.” We walk down the hall past the bathrooms and push through the store room towards a nondescript door. The back exit is a few yards to the right. I rap my knuckles quietly on the door before speaking. “Kyle, it’s me… and Liam.”
“Come in,” his voice croaks out. I’m not sure why, but I steel myself before opening the door. He just sounds so damn sick.
The room is dim. I flick the second light switch that only turns on the lower overhead lights, not the blinding ones. Kyle is wrapped up in a dark blue blanket on his couch, even his head cradled by cloth so he looks like a giant oversized Yentl.
Liam is paused in the threshold behind me. “This… isn’t good,” he murmurs.
“What isn’t good?” I ask, walking towards Kyle and sitting on the rickety milk cartons with the wood on top that Jim had the gall to call a coffee table. I don’t know why Kyle hasn’t changed it yet. I put my hand on Kyle’s forehead. He’s pale, and so hot.
“This isn’t a bear thing, I’m afraid,” Liam enters the room now, but his movements are stiff and halted, not like his normal fluid movement. “I know why the Light Court is keeping dibs on our beastly friend here. Kyle, are you able to sit up and take off the blanket? Please.” He finishes speaking on a gentle note.
“Yeah, course I can,” Kyle’s voice is trying to be stubborn and macho, but I see how his face goes from parchment pale to virgin snow pale as he forces himself to sit up. Freeing himself from the blanket’s another chore that leaves him breathing hard by the time he’s sat up with no shirt on. “Sorry.” He tries to cover himself with his hands. “Though I guess you’ve carried my naked ass, so seeing me half-dressed isn’t a big deal anymore.” He gives Liam a small smile, and it surprises me. Who knew that bonding between my beau and my fae would happen over a nude stroll through the woods.
Liam begins checking Kyle over, examining every inch of him, until his breath hisses out. “It’s what I feared. You’ve been Dark Court touched.”
“Wait a minute.” I hold up my hands too quickly and the so called ‘table’ beneath me wobbles. I cock my thumb back towards the main bar. “Light Court on the outside, Dark Court on the inside? Is this… something that happens?”
“Yes, often unfortunately. Dark Court members like to meddle. They like to find unusual supernaturals and toy with them. The Light Court has a small task force of scouts that polices this sort of thing.”
“So it’s completely coincidental that the courts are waltzing around Bonneau? They’re not here for me?” I should be relieved, but it feels too impossible. I mean, Braeden told the Light Court where I was. No. I didn’t buy that this was just some fluke. Because, it’s freaking not.
“Here, look.” Liam is pointing to Kyle’s side. He repeats what he did to the door outside, but this time, a hand-shaped spot begins to darken on the skin. Darken until it is black as tar and glowing with a deep-seated light. “Kyle,” Liam joins me on the unsafe makeshift furniture, “has anything strange happened to you lately? Something out of the ordinary?”
Kyle’s brow furrows for a moment, before he cracks a wide, yet slightly-pitiful, smile. “You mean, other than beasting-out and waking up naked in the
woods?”
“Seriously, Kyle. Anything else?” I lean forward, and take his hands in mine. “Think, babe.”
He’s thoughtful for a moment, then nods slightly. “A few days ago, I had one of my blackout spells. I haven’t had one of those in a while—not since figuring out what was happening to me and you teaching me how to start taking control of the animal.” Kyle glances at Liam as he says the last.
“That’s probably when they marked you,” Liam stands up and paces the room. “Berserkers are rare now. Discovering you was an entertainment they couldn’t turn down. They were probably even there, that night, watching you lose control. It explains the Light Court mark on your bar. Scouts from both courts try to keep this behavior controlled. All the fae need is a rogue court member outing our existence.”
“But how would they have found him, Liam? If Berserkers are so rare?” I still didn’t believe this was some coincidence.
“I have a few… ideas on the matter. But I do not wish to speculate.” Liam’s eyes are half-closed, his gaze discerning, the mind behind those lovely orbs racing across possibilities. It was one of his looks that I was particularly fond of. Yet, there was also something else playing about his face and hovering around him like a magnetic field. He was keeping something from me.
“Can you help him?” I also stand, but keep holding Kyle’s large hands in my two smaller ones. “If the Light Court can remove the mark, can’t you?”
“I can try, but healing is not exactly my gift. If it were, you would not have suffered in the hospital after your fight with the Golem and its master.” He walks over to Kyle and I move automatically. “But I will try. The methods are not completely foreign to me.”
“Tori!” A voice is shouting from somewhere in the near distance. Terrance.
“Shit, what time is it?” My eyes rove the room until I find the dull silver clock with the teal splash of paint on it from when Jim decided he needed to cheer up his office. He’d revered back to shades of grey two days later. Ten o’clock. It was already ten, and I had to go. “I’m so sorry, but I have to leave. Kyle, I’m sorry.” I walk forward and kiss him gently on the lips. Liam is at his side, pressing at the obsidian handprint.
Kyle’s voice tells me it’s okay that I have to go, but his exhausted face and glazed-over eyes are saying something else. “I’m so sorry,” I say again, kissing him once more. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. You’re in good hands.”
“I will take care of your bear, Victoria. Be safe. Your encounter with the arsonist has planted a fear in me. He is strong. And ruthless, if he’s done what you claimed and slaughtered his coven.”
“Most of his coven.” I walk towards the door, worry filling my heart and head. “Mordecai warned me there were two leaders. Two people doing this.”
“Then there is double reason to fear,” Liam’s voice follows me out of the office. I left the door open behind me. Terrance is waiting in the bathroom hallway ahead—I can see him through the small viewing window in the store room door.
“I’ll be careful. I promise,” I call back to both the men in my life and push through the door into the hallway. “Hey.” Terrance looks curiously at me.
“So, why am I meeting you here?”
“It’s… my kind of stuff,” I offer up, hoping he’ll take the hint. He does.
“Good enough for me. Let’s go. Dan said he’d meet us there around 10:30 and we’re going to be late at this rate.” He strides back through the bar and I follow him outside. I can’t help myself after I push through the front doors. I have to look back at the mark.
It’s not there though. I wonder if Liam’s spell only revealed it temporarily or if someone… removed it. My eyes dart around the parking lot, but the only cars aside from my own are Terrance’s squad car and Crow’s tiny cooper. Kyle’s likely parked in the back.
Still though… strange.
Chapter Sixteen
I don’t mind the silence on the drive across county lines. I do mind that Terrance has the heat blasting. It’s spring; it’s not that damn cold anymore. I don’t say anything though. I shrug out of my jacket, maneuver it around the seatbelt across my chest, and fold it against my lap.
My mind is focused on the task ahead, but my heart is focused back on the men I’ve left. Weak Kyle, Liam with his emotions always right below the surface. And a nagging suspicion is growing in my stomach—that it’s my fault the Light and Dark Court are meddling in Bonneau. And I’m sure that Liam’s disinclination to speculate was because he didn’t want to say that obvious truth.
“Here. Now, it’s not some chauvinistic bullshit, but let me do the talking. You and your cop speak will set Dan on edge. You just try too damn hard.”
“Admit it, you find it endearing as hell.” I unbuckle as the engine goes quiet. A short, lean man is standing on the steps of a modern-looking building with mirrored glass windows. I whistled. “This looks brand-spanking new.”
“It is,” Terrance nods as he walks towards the building.
“Makes Bonneau look like—”
“And now it’s silence time,” Terrance loud-whispers back at me. I quirk an eyebrow, and a teensy part of me wants to throw one of those ‘don’t tell me what to do’ hissy fits that so many women employ when they feel put down by a man, but Terrance wasn’t that sort. And he’d explained why he needs to take lead here. So I shut my mouth, smile pretty, and give good ole Dan my best duty-bound female impression.
The two men chat as Dan unlocks the building and ushers us in; he glances at me, gives a slight nod, then goes back to focusing on Terrance. I wonder if he knows who I am—not just a consultant, but the cop-nicknamed Casper of Bonneau. A southern spook with a penchant for trouble.
“I had the other counties send over shots of their victims. The coroner reports are, for all intents and purposes, identical. You look at this body, you’ve seen them all. Right down to the little scratches on their necks.” Dan leads us to a set of gleaming stainless-steel doors. I waited to feel something in the building like I do in the Bonneau morgue, which is smaller and older than the official county building located in Hanahan. There used to only be one morgue per county in the US. One county coroner. But The Rising made death a big business, and one official wasn’t enough to go around in most places. The change stuck, even after the bodies stopped piling up… and reanimating, as it were.
Through the doors, the compact man with authority thick as nineteen-eighties’ shoulder pads beelines for a lower level storage drawer. He checks the tag to be sure, then opens the lock pad and door. The body inside is covered by a thin white sheet. It’s a vinyl-blend, not cloth as you see often in the movies. Vinyl’s more resilient, easier to sanitize. Have you ever tried to get residual body fluids out of a white shirt? Cold water only goes so far.
Dan pulls the tray out slowly, then he takes his time, almost reverently, folding back the sheet to fold around the victim’s hips. He preserves her lower dignity, though it’s impossible to keep her upper half covered. Not that there’s a whole lot to shield. I want to say, like always, that the body is just a vessel, that the respect, whilst a nice gesture, isn’t necessary.
But it is, of course, for human grieving. We need the reality of what we see, not the emptiness that’s left when a soul is well and truly gone from our world.
My first thought is that the woman was pretty. Not in a conventional way, but in a… dignified and wise way, with high cheekbones and dark arched brows. Her hair is smoothed back, tied nicely behind her neck. The coroner here isn’t like Bonneau’s, who often has a cavalier attitude towards the bodies he processes.
I moved past the collarbones, past the small expanse of chest before breast level.
Where a hole the size of a Belgium waffle waited to be recognized. It was cleanly done, like a hole punch through paper. The cavity was charred, as if cauterized during the wound-making. It was a tunnel, through which I could see the stainless steel table beneath the body.
Bodies didn’t normal
ly make me queasy. I worked with them for a living. But the woman, with her Katherine Hepburn face and her heartless chest, made bile gather in my mouth.
Terrance looks as pale as it’s possible for him to look, and his navy-blue eyes are red-rimmed. I’ll never understand how such an experienced cop can still be so soft spirited.
Dan and Terrance move off to the side, giving me space. I wish they hadn’t, but I take my cue and lean forward to study the body. With little effort, I find the scratches on her neck that Dan mentioned. They’re not, though. Not exactly. Too precise, shallow enough not to bleed too long. They are too evenly space. The edges too clean.
Five perfect lines across the neck. They would have sent tiny rivers of blood down the woman. And I suspect, though do not know, that they were made before the heart was removed. I swallow, and move my gaze back to the silo-shaped space. I’ll never look at grain storage the same way again.
“The report says the wound was cauterized as it was made?” I asked absentmindedly as I turn around and search for gloves. “And that the scratch marks were made with a very sharp tool, like a scalpel, but even more narrow.”
“That’s right, ma’am,” Dan’s voice, which I’ve not really focused on totally since he and Terrance did their man thing whilst I tagged along, is clean with only the slightest drawl beneath the words. Like a memory of a history he’s tried to smash down.
I find the gloves. Purple instead of blue. I’m used to blue. I don’t know why that strikes me as odd. It shouldn’t. It’s not important. Though, the idea of blue gloves flashes me back to Doctor Sherwin, to almost losing Mei to that psycho. Terrance hasn’t brought that up in months, not since I had to witness in court. The last time he mentioned the case was to tell me they’d set an execution date.
Every state has the death penalty now, because if they didn’t then it wouldn’t be legal to kill a necromancer—if one were stupid enough to get caught. There had been just enough sane people in the government during The Rising to not write in a singular, specific law that would allow the death penalty to be applied only to one type of individual. It was either all or nothing. And a neighbor couldn’t just accuse Jane next-door of being a necromancer. There had to be solid proof. Of course, the necro-genetic test made that a piece of cake once it was devised.