Precinct 13

by Tate Hallaway

  Jones stomped after one that was making a brave run at him. He missed. When it scuttled over my boot on its way back under the door, I felt my snake shift. Quickly, I covered it with my other hand. For some reason, I was convinced that Jones wouldn’t approve if he saw the way it seemed to want to protect me.

  We stood together outside the door, straining to hear what was happening inside with Stone. I hoped she was right that the spiders couldn’t hurt her. I held my breath until she called the all clear.

  Cautiously, I pushed open the door. Stone stood near the windows. The glow light was on the kitchen counter. The curtains were wide open, and the place looked entirely empty. There was no sign of the creepy scrawl on the walls, or any trace that the place had been overrun by arachnids with gigantism.

  In the light, all was hidden.

  With the sun streaming in, Jones seemed to have less trouble tolerating the unnaturalness of the space. He was able to lean into the room and look around. I grabbed the iPad, while Stone stuffed a few more books under her arm. We both still wore our gloves. I’d forgotten to take mine off earlier, and my hands were slick with sweat underneath the latex.

  Before leaving, I took a quick look under the sink. I found no sign of rat poison, though I no longer really expected to.

  In fact, I was beginning to suspect that whoever wrote the report—Boyd or the mysterious Peterson—may have intentionally lied. Now, why they would, I didn’t know. It was possible, of course, that “poison” was the cover story to satisfy the ordinarium.

  I didn’t think it was a purposeful attack on me. How could it be? No one knew I was magical before this morning, not even me, but what had Jones said? Something about being convinced the spell he’d sensed in the body would knock me out? What if incapacitating the coroner had been part of a plan hatched between co-conspirators? And, what if that meant that I was now in the crosshairs, for having evaded that part of their scheme?

  I decided it behooved me to become the detective here if no one else would.

  I checked the room thoroughly.

  There was one closet, and Stone met me in front of it. Neither of us reached for the knob. Instead, we stared at the door nervously. “Inside is where they found the altar,” Stone said.

  “The decoy.”

  “If Peterson was telling the truth,” Stone said. She seemed a lot more at ease with the idea of his possible betrayal. Before I could say something about it, she asked, “Do you feel anything? Any magic?”

  I had no idea what magic was supposed to feel like. I held my snake-covered hand up in front of the cheap plywood. There was nothing from the snake, though it hadn’t warned me about the spiders either.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But we should look.”

  Stone stepped in front of me and pulled the door open. The interior was larger than a standard closet, big enough to walk inside several steps: a perfect place for a hidden altar. Clothes hung on a bar along the left side and a pile of laundry was heaped underneath. Our necromancer seemed to have an interest in vintage cartoon characters. He had a lot of T-shirts sporting Warner Brothers images. He also had an apparent fondness for leather and buckles. I was kind of half-surprised not to find any fetish wear or obvious bondage equipment.

  The other side was completely bare. The only evidence that an altar had been there were the black wax spots spattered on the carpeting. I thought it might be a dead end, after all, but, on a whim, I knelt down to feel the floor. I found a loose section of carpeting. “Here,” I said.

  Stone pushed me gently aside. I let her. I wanted to see what, if anything, I’d found, but I also didn’t need a blast of black magic in the face, especially if it involved more spiders. The carpeting pulled up with a rending sound. “Sometimes I don’t know my own strength,” she admitted, holding the carpet shred.

  “He’s probably not too worried about his security deposit, anyway, being dead and all,” I noted.

  I looked around her shoulders and saw that we’d found a trapdoor.

  “What’s going on?” Jones yelled from the doorway. The closet was on the wall opposite the kitchenette.

  “There’s a trapdoor,” I told him. “It’s got some kind of latch. Do you think we should try to open it?”

  “I think we’d better get Jack,” Jones said. He pulled out his cell phone and punched in a few numbers. After a brief conversation, Jones snapped the cell shut and slid it back into the holster on his belt. “Let’s sit tight. He can be here in ten.”

  While we waited for Jack to arrive, I finished my survey of the apartment. Something felt very off to me, and not just in the “there might be spiders lurking in the shadows” way. “Does this guy own any other property?” I asked Jones, who’d taken to leaning a hip on the door frame and thumbing through one of the books Stone had identified as important.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  I ignored the continued hostility in his responses. Maybe he didn’t care if the corpse was after him, but I did. “No beakers. No test tubes. No hoses dripping neon green goo.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “One of the theories is that this guy was trying to create the Philosopher’s Stone, right? A formula for eternal life? Well, where’s all his lab equipment? I don’t even see a home-brewing kit. You’d think he’d at least have jars of eyes of newt or whatever, right? Where is all that?”

  “Maybe it’s behind door number one,” Jones said with a nod in the direction of the closet.

  Maybe.

  I went back to flipping through the necromancer’s iPad. Luckily, he hadn’t bothered to install a lock code. But a quick perusal of the apps made it clear why not: There was nothing much on it. He played a lot of Angry Birds and bought a bunch of erotic romances that involved M/M/F pairings and light BDSM via the Kindle store, but otherwise I didn’t learn that much about him. Even his e-mail was fairly mundane. He had a few friends, but they seemed to correspond about their shared enthusiasm for various rock bands while mangling the English language. Unless there was some hidden code among all the “dude, srsly!”s, I didn’t see anything magical being discussed. His Twitter account was slightly more cryptic, but that was mostly due to his atrocious spelling and the fact that most of the tweets were out of context.

  I did notice that one name came up a lot, someone going by the Twitter handle @skull_lady. She—or he, since there was no way to verify the gender, really—had a Gmail account under the same user name. A lover? A possible accomplice?

  I showed Jones my findings. As he was copying down the information in his trusty notepad, there was a knock on the door. It was probably Jack. I handed Jones the iPad, and told him I’d get it.

  Jack wore a lime green stocking hat with large, floppy pointed ears hanging off the sides. When he saw me staring at it, he smiled. “Yoda ears. Do you like them?”

  Honestly, on him, it sort of worked, even with the straggles of black hair that stuck out from underneath the edges and hung down to his shoulders, ruining the illusion. “Yeah,” I said, stepping aside to let him in.

  He stomped his boots on the welcome mat, knocking off the bits of slush that clung to the treads. He’d exchanged his leather for a long wool coat.

  I’d left my own coat slung over the back of the necromancer’s couch. We walked back up to the apartment, and I noticed Jack staring at my arm. “It’s changed,” he said before I could hide it. He was looking at the snake’s head. He stopped abruptly, causing me to pause with him. We were just outside the door. Jones looked up expectantly. “It’s bonding to you,” Jack said, worried.

  “We can talk about that later. We’ve got a trapdoor to open.” I turned away so he couldn’t see the mixed emotions I was sure were visible on my face.

  Turned out Jack couldn’t enter the room any more than Jones could. Instead, he shouted orders to me from the doorway. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to do half the things he asked of me.

  “Open your mind,” he said.

  I rolle
d my eyes. I’d never understood how to do that even when the hypnotist asked as part of my therapy. “Okay,” I said, though my brain felt no more open than it had a moment before.

  “Tell me what you see.”

  A ripped piece of carpet and an obviously handmade trapdoor cut into the floorboards. The latch was an eye and hook. But, as I was staring uselessly at it, wondering what the hell I was supposed to be noticing, my eyes slipped out of focus. All of a sudden, words appeared. They looked like they’d been carved onto the surface with a wood-burning pen. But the moment I tried to focus on them they disappeared. “Words!” I shouted. “I saw words.”

  “Good, they’re probably a spell guarding the lock.” Jack couldn’t quite disguise the relief in his voice. “What did they say?”

  “Um.” I let my focus blur again. I stared just above where I’d seen them appear, and after several attempts, they reappeared. “It’s Latin, I think. Mal—”

  “Stop!” Jack shouted. “Spell it. Don’t speak it.”

  Oh, duh. I felt stupid. I almost fell for the oldest trick in horror movies: Never read the spell out loud. Instead, I slowly listed each letter, which was actually probably easier since I wouldn’t have known how to pronounce the words anyway.

  Jack let out a low whistle when I’d finished. Beside me, I heard Stone sigh, as if deflated. “It’s a tough one, huh?” I guessed.

  “It’s okay,” Jack said. “We can counter this. I just need to think for a minute.”

  My knees were getting sore from kneeling in front of the trap. I put my hand down to steady myself as I shifted position. I hadn’t considered which hand I was using, until I felt the snake’s head moving. It slithered out of my skin and over my fingers. The scales were warm and soft, though I could feel their shape. A tongue flicked out once, twice, and by the third time, I knew something was different.

  The lock spell was broken. I sensed, rather than heard, a kind of click of release. When the snake slowly returned to its new position on the back of my hand and seemed to nod its head once, I was certain.

  Even so, my fingers hovered over the hook. I let my focus blur again, and was satisfied to see that the words had disappeared. “I got this,” I said, as I undid the latch.

  “You do? How?”

  I lifted the lid slowly, cautiously. I knew whatever the necromancer had hidden here was sure to be a doozy. But even so, I wasn’t quite prepared for a severed head.

  TEN

  A moldering severed human head stared back at me from beneath the floorboards. Its shriveled skin stretched over bone and teeth, giving it a skull-like grin. Eyelids flattened over liquefied eyeballs. The hair had been carefully arranged at some point, probably for a funeral, and clung, lacquered, to the forehead.

  I guess we knew why the necromancer had been robbing graves now.

  It was clearly bespelled because it neither smelled nor attracted any vermin. Also, silver wires crossed the forehead and throat, holding it in place. The wires were nailed to the subflooring, and continued around a series of nails arranged in a perfect circle. They’d clearly been woven in a specific pattern of loops and knots.

  Something glimmered inside the corpse head’s mouth. I had to resist my scientific urge to pry the jaws open to see what it was. So, I could only guess that it was either a large, polished stone of some kind, like hematite, or a piece of silvered mirror.

  I felt Stone peering over my shoulder. I was about to ask her what the hell this thing was supposed to be when its ruined sockets seemed to blink and its mouth moved. The sound that came out rattled like death, even as it quoted scripture, “Ask and it shall be given, seek and ye shall find.”

  “Where is the necromancer?” I asked it, because I thought I might as well give it a try.

  A dry, spooky laugh full of dust filled my ears. “Look in the mirror.”

  I hate riddles almost as much as I hate trying to “clear my mind,” and this one stumped me utterly. Did the head want me to see the answer in the polished surface inside its mouth, or was it trying to imply that I need to do some self-reflection?

  “Well, that was cryptic,” I told Stone.

  Though I normally found her expression hard to read, she seemed to be looking at me especially strangely.

  “What?”

  “Did the head talk to you?” she asked.

  “Of course, not that it made much—wait, didn’t you hear it?”

  She shook her head. “I only heard you ask it a question.”

  I returned my attention to the severed head. I half expected it to give me a grotesque wink or something, but it just lay there, suddenly appearing very dead, indeed. “Well,” I said. “It told me that if I want to find the necromancer, I need to look in the mirror.”

  “It thinks you’re a necromancer?”

  “Maybe,” I agreed reluctantly. I pointed at the papery skin pulled taut over the slightly opened jaw. “There’s also something shiny in there.” Pitching my voice loud enough for Jack to hear, I asked, “Can I touch it, do you think?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Stone murmured.

  “I don’t know,” Jack shouted back. “Frankly, I’m surprised you got around the lock. I guess you should trust your instincts. They haven’t failed you so far.”

  Except, I thought with a quick glance at the snake, I didn’t see that one coming. My ignorance also caused the spiders to, quite literally, jump out of the woodwork.

  I hesitated for several heartbeats. I stared at the snake curled on the back of my hand. It had helped me twice now. I wish I knew how to control it, how to ask its advice.

  A big part of me rebelled at the mere idea of leaving evidence of this magnitude behind. I wanted that object badly. The severed head had told me the answer to my question was in the mirror. But had I asked the right one? Did its answer mean I needed to do it literally, figuratively, or what?

  I decided to try the indirect approach.

  Pulling myself up to a kneel, I fished my iPhone out of my pocket. After making absolutely sure there was no way there would be any kind of flash, I took several pictures of the head in situ. Then, moving in as close as possible without actually disturbing the head or breaking the magical circle, I took a picture of the inside of the mouth. If the answer was reflected there, maybe I could take a photo of it.

  Examining the image on the screen, I saw that the object was a metallic stone, very likely hematite as I’d first thought. A reflection was barely visible. I used my fingers to expand that section of the photo. The image still wasn’t terribly clear, thanks to the irregular curvature of the stone, but I saw the back of my own hand holding the camera. The back of my hand—where I could just make out the tattoo of the black snake.

  The severed head had answered my question both literally and metaphorically. I was carrying a part of the necromancer with me. If I was going to find him, I’d have to use the snake in some way.

  I wasn’t sure I liked that answer at all.

  I pulled myself to my feet, slowly, conscious of cramped muscles.

  Stone stood as well. Her eyes watched me as I stretched out, my joints creaking and popping. “You found something,” she said.

  Likewise, Jack and Jones seemed to be waiting to hear what I might say. I wanted to fall back on old habits, to shrug and say I’d seen nothing. Ironically, they’d never believe me.

  I took in a deep breath. “Why don’t I explain it all in the car?”

  We put the iPad and the books Stone had grabbed into the truck of the squad. She kept the journal, however, and continued to glance through it in the front seat. Jones had turned the engine on for the heat. Devon was passed out, snoring, in the seat beside me, looking like some drunk college kid. Jack nestled up against my other side. At first, he’d been hesitant to touch me, but when our knees accidentally bumped, it was clear he wasn’t going to get a shock from the tattoo.

  I wasn’t sure if that comforted me or not.

  “So what happened?” Jones wanted to know. He twisted in hi
s seat, looking back through the cracked Plexiglas shield. Since Jack had come in his own car, we idled in the parking lot. The Radio Dispatch crackled with the usual cop chatter, but Jones had turned the volume down low. I caught a bit of a discussion about an unauthorized flyover.

  After taking a steadying breath, I repeated the conversation with the severed head verbatim. Then I showed them the picture of the reflection. I even pulled the image wide enough for everyone to see my hand holding the camera phone.

  Jack did not come to the same conclusion I had. Instead, he asked, “So you think the necromancer is going to call you?”

  Stone, too, took a completely different tack. “No,” she said. “The answer is in the pictures she took of his body that are stored on her phone.”

  Jones was the only one giving me a dark, suspicious glare. Even though his expression wasn’t too far from his “normal” look, I found I couldn’t meet his eyes. I also wasn’t in a hurry to spell out my own theory. After all, despite what Jack had said, it was clear that unnatural magic was judged pretty harshly by this team.

  Jack and Stone continued to argue their points. I sat quietly, idly stroking the head of the snake on the back of my hand. In the end, though, Jack asked a question I’d been dreading. “How did you end up opening the lock?”

  “I didn’t,” I told my hands, clasped in my lap. My unmarked one covered up the other, as if I could protect the snake from what was to come. “The tattoo did.”

  Silence.

  The only noise in the car was the sound of the voices on the police radio. Everyone seemed to be holding their breaths. I felt Jack pull his body tighter, away from me.

  On my other side, Devon stirred, shifting slightly. Jones must have released him from the prohibition from speaking, because he said, “Sounds like I’m no longer the only unnatural on the team.”

  I tore my gaze away from my lap. My mouth opened, but I didn’t deny it. I’d been thinking the same thing. What if the snake tattoo had not killed me because of my accidental curse? What if it had sunk into my skin because it had found a new home—a place similar to the necromancer? Maybe the severed head’s mirror was metaphorical, as well. Maybe to find the dark, I just had to look inside.