by Martha Carr
CONTENTS
Dedication
Legal
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Author Notes - Martha Carr
Author Notes - Michael Anderle
Social Links
Series List
DEDICATION
From Martha
To everyone who still believes in magic and all the possibilities that holds.
To all the readers who make this entire ride so much fun.
And to my son, Louie and the wonderful Katie
who remind me all the time of what really matters
and how wonderful life can be in any given moment.
And finally, a special thank you to John Nelson of the Austin, Texas
Police Department who patiently answers all of my questions.
I hope I made you proud.
Thank you for your service.
From Michael
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
To Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
To Live The Life We Are
Called.
QUEST FOR MAGIC Team
JIT Beta Readers
John Raison
James Caplan
Kelly ODonnell
Kimberly Boyer
Joshua Ahles
Micky Cocker
Peter Manis
Erika Daly
Melissa OHanlon
If I missed anyone, please let me know!
Editor
Ellen Campbell
QUEST FOR MAGIC (this book) is a work of fiction.
All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
This book Copyright © 2017 Martha Carr and Michael T. Anderle
Cover Design Cover Design by John-Paul Balmet
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas, NV 89109
First US edition, July 2017
The Oriceran (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are Copyright (c) 2017 by Martha Carr and LMBPN Publishing.
CHAPTER ONE
Detective Leira Berens was getting impatient. Murder suspects shouldn’t get to call the shots, at least not in her version of the rules.
This mother of all headaches wasn’t helping her attitude, either.
“You’re going to need to come out sometime, Arthur,” Leira yelled, from where she stood in the weed-filled, postage-stamp of a front yard. She was giving the suspect five minutes to think it over but then she was going in and getting him.
The five minutes was just to make her Captain happy. Happy Captain, happy life.
“Fuck, Arthur, it’s us or the Mexican Federales,” she yelled, squinting into the hot Texas sun as she tried to persuade him. “I hear our hospitality is better.” She turned back to looking at the house. “It’s not going to be pretty if we come in there, I’ve got a damned headache.”
“He’s coming out,” said her partner, Detective Felix Hagan. “He’s out of options. We’re the only ones who won’t shoot him,” he looked around at the neighborhood. “Or worse.”
Arthur was a punk kid in a local upstart gang trying to take over territory in Austin. He had killed a man in a Tijuana bar fight. Normally, not an Austin problem.
Tough luck that the dead guy was a member of the Latin Kings. Even worse luck when the Kings picked up Arthur’s best friend who quickly told them every secret, including a few about Arthur.
They had cornered Arthur in a biker bar on South Lamar and Arthur chose to shoot his way out of there. A kid fresh out of college, not much younger than Leira, took a bullet to his neck.
Unintended consequences.
He bled out in a minute making Arthur an Austin P.D. problem. Now, everyone was looking for Arthur.
Leira glanced down at her watch. The face of the watch shimmered and blurred for a moment. Gold sparks shot out in every direction. She froze, staring at her watch.
“Shit,” she whispered, looking around quickly before looking back at her watch, “Not again.” Two days of watching things lose their shape and glow like the fourth of July had her unnerved.
Too young for a stroke, or at least she hoped so.
Worse idea, she was going crazy like her mother, Eireka Berens. Sent off to the padded rooms at thirty-two when Leira was just ten years old for talking about entire worlds that no one else could see.
Leira shook her head and looked again. The dial of the watch cleared. One more minute.
“You getting antsy? Youth,” said her partner, with a snort of laughter.
Leira glanced at him and back at the run-down bungalow. She was giving him the look he had nicknamed, the dead fish, the first week they rode together. Leira thought of it as more of a blank stare.
“Don’t be an asshole, Felix, just because I can still see my shoes. Old age is making you cranky.” She said it matter of factly.
“That would bother me more if you were wearing grown-up shoes,” he said, smirking at her Merrell Vapor blue and orange thin-soled running shoes. It was the most expensive thing she ever wore.
“Somebody’s got to be able to run after the bad guys,” she told him, not looking in Hagan’s direction. He let out a laugh. He liked his young partner even if she was impossible to read. Frankly, he saw it as one of her better qualities even if he could never tell if she was trying to make a joke or just stating the obvious.
It didn’t take him long to also realize Leira didn’t like chitchat and never hesitated to shoot.
More reasons to like her.
She wasn’t much to look at despite the curves and skinny pants she favored, and flawless ivory skin with a face framed by thick, short dark hair that curled around her face. Men occasionally tried asking her out when she was at the University of Texas but no one ever got her way of looking at the world.
She liked being able to reason things out and leave feelings out of it.
Not exactly willing to tell a guy what he wanted to hear accomplished diddly squat for her dating profile.
“Damn house looks like it’s being held together by the paint chips,” she said, still aiming her semi .40 at the front door. “Okay, enough of this,” she griped, taking the front steps two at a time. “Arthur shouldn’t get to eat his last meal as a free idiot in peace.”
“I’ll make sure to tell the Captain you paused before doing your usual foot through the front door,” said Hagan, following her up the stairs, his .45 raised as he quickly scanned left to right.
Leira turned, her back to the door and kicked backwards, splintering the old wood as the door swung open, banging against the wall. She swiveled and whispered, “Going left.”
Hagan nodded, slipping down the narrow hallway to the right toward the bedrooms.
/> “Clear!” Leira called out from the kitchen, looking out toward the back porch.
A plate of half-eaten mac and cheese was on the kitchen table. Leira kicked a fork, making it slide across the floor. “Arthur, your last meal was powdered orange cheese,” she called out looking around. “It’s poor choices like these that got you to this point in time.”
A loud crack rang out. Detective Hagan let out a deep, strangled scream. “Stop! Stop goddammit!” he yelled.
Detective Berens wasn’t sure if her partner was yelling in defense or out of habit. She ran down the hall and saw Arthur squirm through the window in the back bedroom.
She turned to see Hagan collapsed on the floor holding his shoulder. There was blood seeping through his fingers. “Go, get him!” he yelled through his clenched teeth. “Get the little fucker!”
“Call for a bus,” she called over her shoulder as she slipped easily through the window and took off after Arthur who was leaping the chain link fence into the next yard.
She vaulted the fence, already running as she closed the distance between them. Arthur looked back to see where she was and was surprised to find Leira right on his heels, he tried to bring the pistol up.
He was doubly surprised when she punched him hard in the face, mid-stride, before tackling him, the pistol flopping end over end in the grass.
“That’s for Hagan,” she spit out, wrenching his arms behind his back and closing the handcuffs tight around his wrists as he squirmed on the ground.
Spitting out some grass, he tried to turn to look up at her. “You broke my fucking nose, you bitch!”
“Yeah, you’re having one hell of a bad day,” she told him. She jammed a knee into the small of his back.
“What the hell? You taking steroids?” Arthur whined. “How you get to be so strong?” He bitched when she pulled him up and pushed him back the way they came. She’d come back for the pistol in a minute.
Leira dragged him back to the small house and right up to the window. Before he could react, she shoved him back through the window he had just slid out of and then followed herself.
He landed with a thud.
“Damn, lock me in the car instead. Why you have to do me like that? Never use a door?” he complained, rolling over and trying to stand.
Leira ignored the bitching and shoved him back to the floor. “Shut up and stay there.”
The sound of sirens was getting closer.
“Hagan, you okay?” she asked, after coming back from the bathroom, a rag in her hand. “Here, press this on your shoulder. It’s the least questionable towel I could find in this place.”
“Damn, Berens, you sound like you’re worried. Makes me think I might be dying if you’re concerned.” He grunted.
Leira gave him the dead fish look.
“Much better,” he smiled. “Now I know I’ll be okay.”
“Get a room,” Arthur sneered. Leira turned to him and delivered a swift kick. She stood there waiting to see if he had anything else to say.
Nothing but the occasional whimper until a couple of uniforms came to take him away.
“Feel free to bounce his head a couple of times when you tell him to duck getting into the backseat,” she said as they marched him out.
Later, Leira waited at the hospital until Detective Hagan was stitched up and relaxing with green jello in his own room.
“This is the life,” he said, lying back in his bed trying to fish out the last bite of jello with one hand. Leira managed a smile.
“All the paperwork we’re gonna have to fill out for a flesh wound. I better enjoy this.” He shook his head, slurping the square of jello off a white plastic spoon.
“I think the flesh wound is supposed to be the good news. Gotta go,” she told him. “Your wife on the way?”
He looked up and shrugged. “Yeah, damn boss wouldn’t let her off any earlier without clocking out. My fault, just a little. I told her all I got was a scratch. Go, before she sees me and the yelling starts,” he said with a wink.
Leira slipped past the nurses’ station as Rose Hagan was demanding to know why her husband had to stay overnight.
She thought about stopping to say hello but when she turned to head in that direction the desk lost its shape and the gold fireworks started again.
“Damn, it’s bigger,” Leira whispered, frozen to the spot. She reached back for the wall to try and orient herself.
“Oh no,” she said, as the middle section of the station disappeared altogether. The center of the oversized circle turned a watery gray. Her eyes grew wide and she instinctively rested her hand on her gun.
Someone, or something in the giant murky space was looking back at her. “Not happening,” she whispered, as she stepped forward to get a better look.
The gold fireworks around the edges hummed. Hell, they snapped, crackled and popped. “This is a hell of a hallucination,” said Leira, as she put out her hand to see what would happen.
Curiosity was always her go-to even when caution was the sane choice. But sanity was clearly checking out, so why not go all in?
Whatever it was felt large and squishy, more solid than she expected.
“Hey!” said a startled nurse, trying to right a tray of small paper cups filled with medications, bouncing around on the tray. Leira's hand was resting on her boob.
The nurses’ station was back where it belonged and the opening was gone.
No more sparklers. Just low fluorescent lighting.
“Sorry about that,” said Leira, quickly removing her hand. “Was trying to point at something.” Making something up on the fly always ended badly for her. She tended to stick closely to the truth, but she had never faced trying to explain her own crazy before.
“Next time, ask before you touch,” the nurse ordered.
Leira gave her the dead fish look. “Not really my type,” she said, trying to make a joke.
The nurse narrowed her eyes. “You should be so lucky.”
“Into… men…” Leira told the nurse’s retreating back. The nurses at the desk were all laughing. Leira nodded and waved, feeling her face grow warm as she headed down the hall. “Crap.”
She found her way to their unmarked patrol car, a green Mustang, opened the door and sat very still behind the wheel, waiting to see if something else was going to happen.
Nothing did.
“First step of going crazy is making an ass of yourself,” she said, taking deep breaths. She blinked a few times, hard, to see if she could conjure up the image.
Nothing. She tried again. She needed to be sure. Blink. Blink.
“So, this won’t be like I Dream of Jeanie. Okay, either I sit here or try driving.” She started the car. “Always did love a challenge. Steady as she goes, brain. Let’s see if we can get home in one piece.”
She pulled the Mustang onto the one-way street, tightening her grip on the wheel, turning up the music.
“I am not my mother, I am not my mother.”
Damn headaches.
From behind her there was a hum and a pop. A pinhole appeared between the cars in the first row, widening until it was large enough for the two tall elves to step through. Swirls of light surrounded them, making them invisible to the few people parking their cars or walking through the parking lot.
“She can see us,” said the older of the two elves. An elven crown held down his straight, silver hair that was tucked behind pointed ears, and flowed past his shoulders. His words sounded like a stream of music floating on the air.
“It would appear so,” the younger elf replied. He raised a long, slender arm trailing thin streams of colored light with every movement. He traced a half circle in the air with his right hand. A baseball-sized orb of violet light with a glowing yellow center bounced in the air in front of them.
“Go,” sang the elf.
The violet ball zipped down the street in the direction of the Mustang that was turning a corner a few blocks away. The light slipped under the back fender and
stayed there, glowing softly as the car drove out of sight.
“She’s well suited to our needs. A detective, right?” asked the royal elf.
“They call her a homicide detective.”
“You know what it means, don’t you? That she can see us? The energy within her is strong. Stronger than it should be in a human being. Stronger than it’s been in this world for thousands of years.”
“Thirteen millennia ago.” There was a short pause. “That could prove to be a problem,” the older elf mused, looking around at the buildings and vehicles lined up on the street.
“First the murder, now this girl can see us. Something is not right,” said the younger elf.
“One thing at a time. Be glad she can see us. We need her help.” His face spasmed with anguish. “My son is dead long before his time. Someone will need to pay for it.”
“Time is running short for answers I fear, your majesty.”
“Then let’s get on with it.”
The younger elf sang a single loud note. The hole widened again and they stepped back into the glowing portal in the middle of a parking lot.
No one in the lot even noticed, but they all suddenly remembered the same song.
“La, da, da, da,” sang an orderly on his way into work. “Ode to Joy, beautiful symphony. Wonder what made me think of that?”
“Ode to Joy? Nah, man, that’s the theme to Die Hard, dude,” said his friend, humming the same tune. “Best Christmas movie ever. Was thinking about the same song. Weird, huh? Coincidences.” the two walked in silence for a second or two before he added. “Gotta love ‘em.”
“Yeah, you and me,” the orderly smirked, “we’re like twins.”
A low hum behind them went undetected as the hole disappeared and a last spray of gold flashed and sparkled on the dark pavement.