Precinct 13

by Tate Hallaway

  “Brilliant,” said Jack. He raised a hand to slap Boyd on the back, but stopped short. “Uh, thanks.” As Boyd moved back to a desk filled with an odd assortment of objects, including the wheel from a mountain bike, Jack leaned into me and said quietly, “Not big on touching, that one.”

  I imagined not. Did he get impressions from everyone and everything he touched? It must be overwhelming.

  Officer Jones muscled between Jack and me to hand me back my phone. Jack flashed him an irritated look before moving aside. To me, Jones said, “I wish you’d gotten more shots of the words. They may be other spells. Something that might be able to help us understand that thing.” He pointed, without touching, to the snake coiled around my arm.

  “Forensics may have better pictures,” I offered. It still seemed very strange to be talking so casually about all this stuff and not having a psychologist taking notes. “I wasn’t expecting this to be important. I mean, beyond the whole ‘look, I’m not crazy’ thing.”

  Officer Jones nodded distractedly. He was looking at my arm. He noticed I’d caught him staring and his jaw twitched. He glared back defiantly, as if challenging me to call him out on something. When I didn’t, he turned to Jack and jerked his chin in my direction. “What about that thing? Any ideas what stopped it?”

  “No,” Jack said. “We still don’t even know why it didn’t kill her.”

  “It wouldn’t have killed her,” he muttered.

  “I don’t know how you could be so sure,” Jack said.

  Jones laid a finger beside his nose. “What’s important is how it ended up on her.”

  They both looked at me.

  I shrugged, and sat back down. I looked at the crumbs on the paper napkin, wishing I could ask for another cookie. “Like I told you before, I tried to wash it off, but that didn’t work so I dumped some formaldehyde on it.”

  “That makes no sense,” Jones said. “Chemicals shouldn’t have bothered it.”

  “Formaldehyde is used in preserving the dead,” Stone offered. “Perhaps…”

  Jack interrupted. “Before, you said you were swearing. Did you curse it?”

  “I…Maybe? I was a bit freaked out. I might have called it an evil bastard or something.”

  “A hex,” Jack said to his colleagues as if he’d just explained everything. “She’s a natural.”

  “A natural what?” I asked.

  “Not a natural what, just a natural. Or maybe you’ve heard the term ‘switch’?” Jack asked.

  With his British accent, I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly. “Witch?”

  “Switch,” he repeated, more slowly. “Like the thing you flip to turn on a light.”

  He mimed with his finger wagging up and down.

  “You think I’m a light switch?”

  “No, a magical one,” he said.

  Both Jones and Stone were standing over me, watching the conversation with interest. I looked to them for further explanation. “What’s he talking about?”

  “A switch is someone who, in the presence of magic, is able to utilize it. It’s like magic makes them ‘turn on’ their own abilities,” Jones said. “They can also act like a circuit breaker to enhance the flow of magic, by letting it pass through themselves, or they can, with practice, learn to shut it down, close it off.” To Jack, Jones asked, “But are you sure? I never smelled even a whiff of sensibilitatem on her.”

  I fidgeted under their scrutiny, playing with the rim of the disposable coffee cup. I was beginning to think anytime someone started using Latin-sounding words, something I didn’t want to know was about to be revealed.

  “If she stopped that booby trap with a casual curse, she might be more than a switch,” Jack insisted. “She could be a witch.”

  Jones frowned sharply. “A witch? If she’s a witch, where’s the familiar?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “But this was more than some augment gone haywire. Curses are witch purview.”

  The two men seemed like they might argue over my head for a long time, so I raised my hand, like a kid in class. They stopped and looked down at me.

  “Yes?” Jones snapped.

  “I already explained this, I can’t be magical,” I said, setting the still-full coffee cup on the desk. The acrid smell of it threatened to turn my stomach again.

  Jones put his hands on his hips and looked smugly at Jack, as if to say: “See.”

  “Well, why the hell not?” Jack asked me.

  “Why not? Well—well, because.”

  “Because why?” he pushed.

  “Because I take very expensive medication not to be, okay?” I snapped, a flood of shame brightening my cheeks.

  “Oh.” Jack’s voice was small, confused, but he seemed unwilling to let my confession stop the conversation. “Okay. Well. Still? Because that could be why Spense can’t smell your magic.”

  “Of course still,” I said. “You’re very strictly advised not to randomly stop taking the pills just because you feel better.” I didn’t want to look at any of them. I hated admitting this part of my life, my little “break.”

  I was always one of those kids who got labeled with an “overactive imagination” because I always thought I saw trolls under bridges, fairies in the garden, gargoyles on the rooftops, and all those fanciful things.

  Things started to get rough when my mother died and my father remarried. I was sixteen, going through puberty, still so caught up in grief, and along came this other woman my father loved, it seemed sometimes, more than me.

  My father had always tolerated my silliness before. Gayle, the stepmonster, as I came to think of her, convinced everyone that my imagination was a product of hallucinations and pathology. Next came a parade of diagnoses: delusional, bipolar, and schizoaffective disorders…even, briefly, schizophrenia. There were drugs, combinations, therapies, and stints in and out of hospitals.

  Somehow I survived long enough to graduate high school.

  I learned to ignore what I saw and to never, ever talk about it. There were several years that things were mostly okay. I went off to college, even got accepted into medical school. I met Valentine and he made my magic feel like a gift, rather than a curse.

  Unfortunately, on a trip home to “meet the folks,” I convinced myself that my stepmom was more than just a pain in the butt, but an actual demon from hell. I flushed at the memory. God, what a fairy-tale cliché! You’d think my subconscious could have been cleverer. The worst part was that I talked Valentine into helping me “exorcise” her. He ended up serving eighteen months for aggravated assault. I spent nearly the same amount of time in a locked psych ward.

  Jones was watching me with that penetrating gaze again, so I feigned interest in a developing hole in the knee of my jeans in order to break eye contact. “Magic,” I continued, my voice a hoarse whisper and my eyes averted, “isn’t real. Only crazy people believe in magic. All that stuff I thought I saw, that was my own imagination, paranoia.”

  “I smell them now,” Officer Jones said sadly. “Antipsychotics.”

  Stone muttered, “Such a tragedy.” Her hand covered my shoulder long enough to give me a gentle, sympathetic squeeze. “I’m so sorry you had to go through any of that.”

  Her kindness was like a punch in the gut. My eyes threatened to fill with tears. I held them back by biting my lip. She could not know what she was apologizing for, but it was a lot: my lover imprisoned, my medical career in ruins, my family—fuck, my family—my dad walking away when I needed him the most. A life full of accusations of being strange, weird…insane.

  “It’s over now,” I heard Jones say. “You’re not alone anymore.”

  That did it. The floodgates broke. I sobbed like a baby.

  SIX

  Stone, who seemed to be the only one able to touch me without triggering a bad reaction from the snake tattoo, put her arms around me and let me cry into her massive, solid shoulder. I have no idea how long I clung there, just letting myself weep.

  When I
finally calmed to a hiccup, a box of Kleenex had appeared by the desk and the guys were gone. They’d moved off somewhere to give us privacy, apparently.

  Stone handed me a tissue. “You and Jack need to talk,” she said. “You will benefit from understanding more about who you are.”

  “What is that?” I croaked, blowing my nose noisily. “What am I?”

  Her large brown eyes held a kindness, a softness that belied the rest of her rough-hewn features. “At the very least you are a sensitive. You may be a switch, or, as Jack thinks, a witch—though those are extremely rare.”

  “I don’t understand any of it,” I said.

  “You will, given time,” she said in a patient, matronly voice. “Wait here. You and Jack can go into the interrogation room for some privacy.”

  I didn’t want her to leave, but I knew that was irrational. She had an aura of utter calm that I craved, so with great reluctance, I watched her go. She went over to an office door I hadn’t noticed before. It was near the bank of television screens. She rapped once before entering. The name on the door was S. JONES.

  While I waited for her return, I looked around the room. The morning’s activity seemed to have dissipated. There were still a few uniformed officers at desks, but most of the others seemed to have headed out on whatever assignments they had. Boyd was sitting in front of a pile of oddments. His eyes were closed and he held the bicycle tire in his hand. He blinked suddenly, shook his head, and then, setting the tire to the side, pulled his laptop closer and began to type. At a nearby desk sat a young woman who seemed to be playing solitaire, though the cards she had looked like nothing I’d ever seen before.

  Jack came out of Jones’s office and stood in front of where I sat, patting my eyes dry. His hands were shoved in his pockets, and he seemed a bit awkward with my tears. “Er, Hannah thinks we should head for the interrogation room. I guess I need to give you a bit of ‘the real real-world 101.’ ”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said, feeling too drained to ask him to repeat all that in some way that made more sense.

  “Spense wants us to meet back in the war room in an hour, though. He wants to get going on the necromancer case as soon as you’re up to speed. Oh, right. I hope it’s okay, I’m downloading the pictures from your phone.”

  I didn’t think I had anything unseemly on my phone, so I nodded.

  “Brilliant. All right, Alex, follow me.”

  Nothing in Precinct 13 was what I expected. The interrogation room looked nothing like the one in Chicago I had spent significant time in. There was no mirrored window, no scummy, scuffed table, or ghostly white walls that smelled of despair.

  Instead, the whole place was bright with sunlight. A huge, nearly floor-to-ceiling window looked out into a snow-spattered courtyard. The walls were exposed brick and beams, and an ivy plant trailed up and around three of the four walls. There was a sunken indoor koi pool in the center of the room, with four golden and one black fish swimming lazily in it. The room smelled fresh and green. The only place to sit was on terraced steps leading down to the pond.

  Jack noticed my reaction to the place. “It’s as natural as possible. You won’t believe how much it freaks out the bad guys.” He leaned in conspiratorially and added, “And boosts our abilities.”

  I gripped my snake tattoo and took a tentative step over the threshold. I expected an angry buzz or a painful constriction, but I felt nothing specific. There was a vague sense of an angry adjustment with an irritated hiss.

  Jack’s eyebrows raised. “A little persnickety, isn’t it?”

  “You heard that?”

  “Not exactly, more like felt it,” he said. We were standing by a row of coat hooks. It was warm and moist in the room, and Jack slipped out of his shoes. I saw a mat underneath the hooks, and wondered if I should take off mine, too. I decided my socks were nice enough that I could leave my boots behind.

  “Just resist the urge to get naked—not that I would mind—but that’s a bit awkward on the first day.” He smiled. When I looked ready to call him a pervert, he put up his hands to stop me and added, “It’s this place, honest! The room inspires some naturals to go…well, au naturel.”

  I gaped at him for a long moment, and then shook my head. “I can’t say that any of this makes sense to me,” I said. The room was relaxing, however, and I sighed as I settled onto the cool stone seat. The soft sound of gurgling water reminded me of the little desktop meditation fountain Valentine had.

  Jack sat next to me, resting his arms on the step above. “Liar,” he said casually.

  I was taken aback by his easy accusation. “What?”

  “I think after this morning you can finally admit it, eh? This makes much more sense than anything anyone else has ever told you. I imagine you’ve been harangued all your life to deny what you know is true, and act like you don’t see what is clearly there.”

  “Are you telling me there are monsters under the bridges in Chicago?”

  “No, I believe you’re telling me,” he said simply. “I’d call them trolls myself. Bridges are a natural gathering place for such creatures. That’s why there are stories about them.”

  I frowned down at the koi, which were turning in circles near our feet. A few of them gulped at the air as if expecting to be fed. The golden ones had interesting patterns on their bodies, reminding me of Chinese dragons. I opened my mouth a couple of times, but didn’t have words for all the mixed emotions I was feeling, especially since I’d seen so many dark and twisted things in what I’d considered my unstable, unmedicated times. If that stuff was real, the world was a hell of a lot scarier than most people thought.

  “The real mystery,” Jack continued when I didn’t say anything right away, “isn’t whether or not trolls or magic are real—because we both know they are— but why you can see them when others can’t. Do you want to know my theory?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “That’s the spirit,” he said gently. I think he could tell that I was beginning to feel very overwhelmed by all this. He stared out at the courtyard through the frost- and steam-covered glass. “I think you might be an actual witch. It’s much more likely, of course, that you’re a switch. They’re as common as dirt. But no switch I know could stop a kill spell in its tracks.”

  I nodded, my eyes focusing on the snake tattoo. It certainly was an ugly thing. I flexed my arm, trying to feel the malicious presence under my skin, but, for now, it seemed quiet. “So I’m a witch?”

  Well, that certainly rhymed with what my stepmother had called me.

  “Maybe,” he said, hazarding a quick sidelong glance at me. “Thing is, for as many criteria you meet, there’s several major ones you don’t.”

  “Like what?”

  He stretched his long legs and wiggled his stocking feet. I noticed he wore striped purple and black socks, like the Wicked Witch of the West. “No familiar.” His voice dropped and softened. “At least none we’ve seen. If you had a familiar, you’d have been protected. You wouldn’t have…Well, he would have introduced you to others a lot sooner.”

  I was done crying over all that, so I just hugged myself tightly.

  Jack seemed to take my silence as an indication to go on. “All children, even those who grow up to be completely ordinarium, can see magic. This is one of the reasons we love fairy stories when we’re little. We recognize the truth in them.”

  I nodded, too exhausted from my earlier tears to comment.

  “Teenage hormones change everything,” Jack said with a crooked smile. “Your brain goes through a massive reorganization at that age, as well. With the mind’s remapping, most people lose the ability to perceive magic. They give up their teddy bears at the same time. It’s a symbol of an actual transition. Ordinarium like to call it ‘growing up,’ but it’s really growing out of magic.”

  That made a lot of sense to me. I’d held on to a lot of “childish” things far into my teenage years.

  Jack nodded, as if he could sense my silent understa
nding. “Those of us who remain sensitive are particularly vulnerable at this time. We don’t realize it, but like that other new body odor we’re dealing with as teens, we’re sending out a kind of chemical signal, a witchy pheromone of sorts—that signals to others of our kind that we’re like them.”

  He turned to look at me, as if hoping for some recognition from me. I had nothing for him. No one had come to this princess’s rescue.

  “This scent is how our familiars find us. Familiars are like mentors at first, teaching us, keeping us out of mischief, and away from those that would harm us for our power. I wouldn’t have survived without Sarah Jane.”

  “So what’s a familiar exactly? You mean like some kind of talking black cat?”

  “They don’t have to be cats, though familiar animals do tend to be black, black and white, or very rarely albino. There are familiars among all the mammals, some reptiles and amphibians, and the occasional bird.” He watched my face carefully, like he expected an aha moment at any time. Only, I didn’t have one.

  “I never even had a pet goldfish,” I said with a nod in the direction of the circling koi. “Our apartments never allowed them.”

  He frowned at that, clearly disappointed. “Despite the black cat stereotype, most familiars are wild, not pets. They can be anything. Think, Alex, did any animal seem particularly tame around you?”

  Having grown up in Chicago, I didn’t have a lot of experience with animals, wild or otherwise. We would have squirrels and pigeons in our neighborhood, of course, and I loved going to the zoo and the Shedd Aquarium, but I couldn’t remember any special connection to any of the animals I saw. Sure, like every girl at a certain age, I dreamed of growing up and becoming a veterinarian once in a while, but I’d wanted to be a princess more. I shook my head sadly.

  Jack didn’t seem to want to give up this idea, however. “It’s possible if you were…uh, medicated early, your scent would have been masked.”

  I had been on and off drugs all through my teenage years, so I just shrugged noncommittally.

  Jack’s face reflected the hurt I felt but didn’t dare show. “Ironically,” he said, “sometimes the more powerful witch you are, the longer it takes your familiar to find you. A very special familiar might have to come a great distance, for instance.”