Precinct 13

by Tate Hallaway

At the top of the stairs, I expected everyone to go in and start checking the place out. Instead, Jones stood in front of the unlocked door staring at it. He took a number of deep breaths, as if steeling himself for something. I wondered what on earth was on the other side that would cause him to need to prepare like that. He took the doorknob in his hand and flinched. After only a second, he jerked his hand away, as though it had burned him. As he shook out his hand, Jones looked to Devon.

  “Damn anti-natural wards. Would you?” he asked.

  Devon crossed his arms in front of his chest. “You asking or telling?”

  “Asking,” Jones said, in a tone that made it clear that that could change depending on Devon’s response.

  Devon’s usual petulance deflated with a shrug. When Jones stepped aside, Devon took his place in front of the door. He twisted the knob and pushed the door open a crack. I craned to see what all the fuss was about. I only saw shadow. It might have been my imagination, but the snake on my arm seemed to sigh happily and relaxed its hold.

  Meanwhile, Jones had backed up so far that he was pressed against the wall. His face was hard and tense. Devon looked over his shoulder at him and sneered.

  “Looks like the fairy is out for the count.” Devon cast his gaze first at Stone and then at me. “So which of you two lovely ladies will be able to accompany me into this den of unnaturalness?”

  Stone pushed the door open farther with her hand. “I can go.”

  She pushed past him, giving him a very slight nudge that nearly brought him to his knees. He straightened quickly and looked ready to strike, but she’d turned to face him already. She stood straight, tall, and solid. “Before you say anything,” she said, “kabbalah is not maleficium, understood?”

  Her finger was raised and pointed at his chest. Devon stared at it, no doubt remembering, like I was, the hole she’d put in the bulletproof glass with no effort at all.

  “Understood?” she repeated, her finger still pointed like a loaded gun.

  “Devon Fletcher,” Jones said, slowly, and I got the sense that the use of Devon’s full name was significant.

  I could see Devon’s eyes narrow, though he never took them from Stone’s finger. “All right,” he said.

  Though I thought his response sounded hollow and insincere, Stone seemed to find it acceptable. She deliberately turned her back on him, and went inside.

  “Unless she asks for your help, you’ll stay here where I can keep an eye on you,” Jones told Devon.

  “I rue the day we met, fairy. Would that I had ripped out your throat and not paused to sup,” he snarled.

  “I bet,” replied Jones flatly.

  With the door pushed wider, I could make out more of the interior. Heavy curtains were closed to the daylight, but just enough eked through to reveal a very sparsely furnished efficiency apartment. The view from the hallway afforded a good look at a wall leading to the kitchenette. At first I thought it was painted black, but then it became clear that the same gibberish I’d seen on the necromancer’s body had been scribbled all over the walls.

  I’d moved inside for a closer look before realizing the significance of it. I was staring at a doodle of a chicken-headed man defiling a sheep when I heard Devon’s voice saying, “That must be a disappointment for you.”

  I glanced back at the doorway. Should I be worried that I crossed the threshold so easily?

  Stone had put on surgical gloves and was thumbing through a notebook. When she noticed my stricken expression, she said, “I wouldn’t worry, if I were you. From what I can tell, you’ve cast exactly one spell your whole life. It was a curse.” She nodded in the direction of where the tattoo was under my coat sleeve. “You are only unnatural for lack of experience.”

  “So you can change? Someone natural could become unnatural and vice versa?”

  “Magic users, yes,” she said.

  From the doorway, Devon said, “Magical creatures, however, are whatever their masters made them, aren’t they, Hannah?”

  “Shut up,” she snapped.

  “You won’t speak again until I tell you to,” Jones said.

  Could Jones really control Devon so completely? Not letting him talk at all seemed kind of harsh. When Stone handed me a pair of gloves for my hands, I noted, “Nobody likes Devon much.”

  “That’s because he’s a first-class jerk.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t sure I agreed. He seemed to provoke Jones and Stone easily, but I hadn’t found him particularly loathsome or especially deserving of the intensity of their reaction. In fact, they seemed most upset when he said things that appeared to be true. Stone was the one who’d been defensive about her ability to tolerate entering the necromancer’s apartment. I pulled the gloves on with a snap.

  I wandered over to the window and pulled the curtain back to let in some light. The instant the sun hit the writing on the walls, it vanished.

  I closed the curtain again and the writing reappeared…changed. I could see that the chicken-headed guy was now getting it on with a tiger, for instance. “Sorry,” I said to Stone, who had paused in her perusal of another book, to watch me. “I kind of forgot that would happen.”

  “What?” asked Jones from outside the door.

  “I let some light in,” I said. “The words changed.”

  “Get out!” he shouted, just as the spiders started dropping from the ceiling.

  NINE

  The dozens of spiders descended on thin lines. Their abdomens were the size of my fist. Hairy legs stretched out nearly twelve inches. Five bulging eyes glowed red. Mandibles clicked and chattered. Directly above me, one twitched its legs, lifting them to reveal hideous fangs.

  Reflexively my hands went up to protect my face. The snake’s head nestled between my thumb and pointer finger twitched. The ink began to lift itself from my skin. I felt a thin slip of tongue flicker. It raised its head up out of my flesh. The snake hissed at the spider, showing its larger fangs.

  But before the snake’s head could defend me, Stone batted away the spider. One-handed, she scooped me up and threw me over her shoulder. I bounced against her shoulder and back. Webs snagged at my hair. Squealing, I covered my face with my hands. The snake struck and spit.

  In three pounding strides, Stone had carried me out the door. The moment we crossed the threshold, the snake collapsed back into my flesh. This time, the head rested across the back of my hand. Its nose curled along the ridge of my knuckles. Its tongue extended slightly. From my awkward position, I took a moment to stroke its head. “Thank you,” I whispered and made a solemn vow to myself never to let Jack’s bird gang try to eat it again.

  I felt hands swatting at my back and legs. After a few moments of that, Stone let me slide down to a standing position.

  Jones stomped on something that tried to scurry back under the door. “Fuck. That was a disaster.”

  “Not entirely,” Stone said, holding out the book she’d been looking at when I triggered the spell. “I got this. It’s a diary of some kind. Besides”—she nodded in my direction—“we learned something valuable.”

  “That the new girl has a nose for booby traps?” Jones snarled.

  “Well, yes,” Stone said. With the toe of her boot, she nudged a smudged spot on the stairs that seemed to be smoldering slightly. “But also, sunlight will wipe everything clean.”

  Jones scratched his jawline, staring at the same smoldering spot on the carpet. “He’s using aethra-magic?”

  I had no idea what that meant, but the semantic nerd in me felt a need to point out the misused verb form. “Used,” I said.

  “Excellent point,” Stone said. “Perhaps the spells have devolved to the point where they’re affected by natural light.”

  “So we could go back in there if we had UV lights or something?” I wondered. I thought I’d spotted an iPad on the kitchen counter that I was certain would be even more helpful than his journal. “Or maybe just break the window on a sunny day?”

  “We’re going to ha
ve to do something,” Jones said. “We can’t leave those things in there for some normal to find.”

  Devon leaned both shoulders against the wall of the landing, listening to all of this with a “serves you right” smirk on his face.

  Jones turned on him. “Go to my house and fetch my light therapy box right away. It’s in my office on the desk.” He dug keys from his pocket and thrust them at Devon. “Bring it back here as fast as possible.”

  Devon took the keys. His fist curled around them so hard that I thought he might crush them. His face was barely controlled rage, but he obediently turned on his heels and took off down the stairs. He moved fast, like a wild cat, in leaps and bounds.

  In a matter of seconds the door slammed behind him, and he was gone.

  That left the three of us standing on the steps. Stone had gone back to flipping through the book. Jones began to pace around the small square landing. I thought he could be a handsome man, if his face wasn’t so constantly pinched. He had the kind of right angles and sharpness that could suit an actor or teen idol. In fact, if he let his hair grow, he could look like one of those guys who were one square jaw away from being prettier than their female costars. I wondered if that was why he spent so much time frowning. It disguised his beauty thoroughly.

  As did his personality, frankly.

  But, then again, perhaps he was depressed. “You have a glow light?” I asked. “Do you have seasonal affective disorder?”

  He stopped abruptly. I could see a blush creeping up his neck. He looked ready to deny it, though he clearly couldn’t.

  Without looking up from the book, Stone said on his behalf, “Fairy are outdoors creatures. Humans seem to prefer dank, dark caves.”

  “Like office cubicles,” I said. “And morgues. I guess I’d have to agree.”

  A spider leg made a tentative wiggle under the door frame. Spotting it, I stomped, but it scuttled back too quickly. I watched the gap below the door for more legs, considering. Absently, I continued to stroke the snake’s head on the back of my palm. The camera flash had been some kind of trigger for the necromancer’s tattoos. This morning the place must have been crawling with CSI agents and cameras. “Why didn’t the locals get jumped on by these spiders?”

  Not having followed my internal thoughts, Stone and Jones shot me confused looks.

  I considered laying it all out, but instead I went sideways. “How quickly do spells degrade after someone dies?”

  “Depends if the user is natural or unnatural.”

  “Natural lasts longer,” I guessed. “Because it draws on the energy of living things, right?”

  Jones nodded. “I suppose for an extremely unnatural mage, the spells could begin to devolve almost instantly.”

  I hazarded a glance at my new tattoo. That didn’t quite fit the necromancer, did it? His spells clearly lasted until triggered. In the case of the spiders, they’d lasted long after the necromancer died. Unless, it was his unnatural state of being walking-around-dead that kept them active?

  There were too many things I didn’t understand about magic. I looked to Jones and Stone. Jones had resumed pacing and Stone’s nose was buried in the journal. Neither of them seemed interested in unraveling what I considered a rather critical puzzle. I cleared my throat.

  Jones’s eyes flicked in my direction. His face crumbled in irritation. “What?”

  “Aren’t you wondering the same thing I am?”

  He scowled at me for a long moment. Eventually, he managed a snide: “Enlighten us.”

  “Why did the spider spell trigger now?”

  “Because you let in the light,” Jones said simply.

  “Well, yeah, but I mean, why didn’t it also trigger earlier, when he was first discovered? I mean, don’t you presume the necromancer must have set it up before he committed suicide or whatever happened to him this morning? I can’t have been the first person to push aside the curtains. And, anyway, photo flash worked on the other spells. Moving the tattoos around…and all that. Even if no one opened the curtains before, shouldn’t all the picture-taking have set something off?”

  Jones’s lip curled. It was an oddly threatening look.

  Stone, who was still paging through the book and was oblivious to the expression on her partner’s face, said, “Maybe the spell only works in the presence of a magical.”

  Oh. I hadn’t considered that. I supposed that could be true for the tattoos as well. “But…wasn’t Boyd here this morning?”

  “Boyd?” Stone said. “I thought it was Peterson.”

  “Swanson?” Jones offered.

  “Whoever,” I said. “The point is: Wasn’t someone on the team here?”

  “Peterson is sensibilitatem,” Jones said. “So is Swanson. Neither one is really magical, they’ve just grown sensitive to it. They’ve been exposed enough to sometimes see. That’s why they work for us.”

  That could happen? Was that why the precinct worked so hard to stay hidden?

  “But you were on the scene,” I insisted.

  “Obviously I couldn’t go inside,” he said. “We came as soon as we heard Dispatch read the address. I had to stay in close proximity to the EMT guys.” He saw the confusion in my face, and added, “I used glamour to convince them to let us take possession of the body once we got back to HQ. It works sort of like blarney; I have to keep them actively engaged.”

  Not that I knew how either glamour or blarney worked, but I nodded anyway. “What about you, Stone?”

  She had put the book aside at some point and was listening quite intently. “I went in, Spense,” she admitted. “The curtains were open. I do remember the sun was really bright, now that I think of it. The only thing I saw that seemed magical at all was the altar that the lab crew was dismantling. Our guy on the inside, Peterson, pulled me aside and told me it was a decoy. The real magic was somewhere else but he didn’t know where, though he thought it was in the body. I came right down to tell Spense, and we brought the body to you.”

  “So this Peterson guy or whoever was left behind?” I asked.

  “Are you suggesting Peterson set up this spell?” Jones asked brusquely.

  Honestly, I was still convinced it was Boyd. I made a note to check my e-mail as soon as possible.

  Jones was shaking his head vigorously. “There’s no way. Not only do I trust him implicitly, but he’s only a sensitive. He couldn’t set a spell of this magnitude.”

  “What if all he had to do was shut a curtain?” I asked.

  Jones didn’t like the implication, but he considered it. He absently chewed the edge of his thumb for a moment. “Why would Peterson be in league with the necromancer?”

  I shrugged. How should I know? I still thought it was Boyd who’d been here earlier. “Jack said people do stupid things for eternal life. The necromancer was clearly on to something, or he wouldn’t have been able to walk out of the morgue. Maybe Peterson wanted a piece of it.”

  Jones and Stone exchanged a couple of glances.

  I waited and wondered what they silently communicated about. What I wanted to know was why Jones was so hostile to anything I suggested? Was he one of those cops who’d grown soft in a cushy job? Devon’s comment seemed to imply that could be the case.

  And what was up with all that business between Devon and Stone? This precinct seemed rife with infighting about who was natural and who was not. Maybe they no longer worked as a functioning team.

  I shook my head sadly. I thought the Chicago cops were messed up.

  “Okay,” Jones said finally. “I’ll entertain the possibility we have a traitor on the team. I don’t like it, but I think you might be right that someone set up this trap after the locals left. It makes sense that someone from our unit would be the next one in the door. I’m not willing to put Peterson entirely in the frame just yet. He’s been with us a long time, and this is a serious accusation. It’s possible there was someone else, someone we don’t know about among the ordinarium. But we’ll watch Peterson extra clo
sely.”

  I nodded, pleased to hear Jones sounding like a real cop.

  Maybe there was hope for him, after all.

  We fell back into silence. Jones returned to pacing and chewing on his cuticles. Just when I started to wonder how long we would wait for Devon, we heard a pounding on the door.

  Jones, who was already halfway down the stairs, walked the rest of the way and opened the door for him. Devon stumbled in to where I could see him. Steam rose in heat waves from Devon’s head. His breath was a cloud in the colder air. His arm trembled as he handed over the lamp. Once relieved of it, he clung to the door frame, panting. I wondered if the order “as fast as you can” had brought him to this state of near exhaustion.

  Muttering a quick word of thanks, Jones leaned in close to say something else. With a quick nod, Devon limped back outside. The door swung closed. I hoped whatever Jones had ordered him to do next, it involved rest. I reminded myself to never eat or drink anything a fairy offered. Ever.

  Jones handed the full-spectrum light to Stone. “You’re going to have to find an outlet, I’m afraid.”

  “Wait,” I said, thinking of all those horrible spiders, “She can’t go in there alone. The only outlet I saw was in the kitchenette. She’ll die before she gets there.”

  “All I need to do is clear a path to the curtains with the light,” she said. “I’ll open them wide and the sun will do the rest of the work.”

  “But…”

  Stone cut me off with a small smile, and her hand came down heavily on my shoulder. “Thank you for your concern, but I’ll be fine.”

  She handed me the book and took a moment to straighten her police cap. Her bangs shifted slightly and I saw strange indentations on her forehead. They weren’t scars; they were a smooth series of dents, like someone pressed a finger into wet concrete and wrote something. Jones and I stepped back as she pulled open the door. The flip side was covered in spiders, crawling all over each other. Several scurried away from the light, back into the room. I had to bite back a scream as I saw one leap and attach itself to her back.

  Fighting my instincts to pull her back out, I pushed the door shut quickly.