by Ramy Vance
“Well, you know—it’s my first time talking to a real detective,” I lied.
“Sure, sure. These are unusual circumstances.” She pointed at the mirror, and a few seconds later a cop walked in with a file and my bag. “But we had expected more, even for a young first-year like yourself.”
I shrugged. “I moved around a lot and my dad was a very private person. Before he died, that is.”
“Yes, your file mentioned that. Sorry for your loss.”
I nodded. She was the second person today to offer me condolences for a man who died before the Titanic sank.
“OK, Ms. Darling, there are a few other things we need to know.” Detective Wilcox turned the file back to her, extracted an envelope, pulled out some photos and spread them out in front of me.
I had expected the photographs to be of the crime scene—the Old Librarian strung up, his organs displayed like pastry in a bakery—but instead, they were pictures of the Old Librarian alive, healthy and smiling. Then there were photos of him and me speaking beside the display cases. And finally, a photo of me standing outside the library at night—it must have been taken just before I tried to break in. Barely two hours ago.
“These certainly tell a story,” she said.
“How did you get those?”
“CCTV—there are cameras all over campus.”
“Hmph.” I picked up the photo of the Old Librarian and looked at it. My voice softened. “Did he suffer?”
Detective Wilcox narrowed her eyes. She hadn’t been expecting that question. Not at this point, at least. “Excuse me?”
“When he was killed—did he suffer?” I wasn’t playing a mind game with the detective; this wasn’t a trick like the meditation. I really wanted to know if he had suffered in the end.
“I would like to answer your question, but before I do, I need to know … what makes you ask that?”
“It’s just that the way he was killed—it was ritualistic, or psychotic, or both. Point is, it was preplanned. His killer wanted to hang him that way, wanted to cut him open that way. Wanted to pull out his organs that way. Either the killer was doing that because he—”
“He?”
“He, she, it—whatever,” I said, annoyed with myself for the assumption the killer was a boy (this was the GoneGod World—girls were just as capable as boys of being killers). That and accidently hinting that I might know something when I didn’t. “My point is … either the Old Librarian suffering was part of this or it wasn’t. And given how much blood and gore and dismemberment there was … why didn’t someone hear his screams? Someone like, oh, I dunno, the police?”
The detective glared at me, but I kept going.
“Maybe the killer put him asleep before doing what … ahh, it … did.”
She folded her arms. “That’s quite the astute observation for someone with a file thinner than a rice cake.”
I shrugged. “I watch a lot of TV.”
The detective raised one eyebrow.
“A lot.”
“OK,” she said, “tell you what: I’ll answer your question if you answer mine.”
“You really going to blackmail me into speaking to you over the question of whether or not my friend suffered when he died?”
Detective Wilcox paused at this. “No, I suppose not. From blood splatter, an examination of his body and blood work that measured the presence of adrenaline and other elements, our best guess is that the initial cuts were done with him fully awake, but as soon as those preliminary steps were taken, the killer drugged him. After that, he probably didn’t feel much when he, she or it really started to get into it.”
Really started to get into it. Well, that’s one way of describing what had happened.
“So you don’t know who the killer is?” I said.
Detective Wilcox pursed her lips, putting on her best poker face, but after centuries of playing mind games myself, I knew the answer. She had no idea who the killer was.
“Nothing on the cameras, then?” I asked.
Lips pursed. Poker face. Nothing.
“What about the Other that Egya and I killed? He could have been acting alone, right?”
She shook her head. “No, he wasn’t. But we’ll get to him in a moment.”
She emptied the contents of my bag onto the table. There was lip gloss, a vintage wallet containing forty measly bucks, my student ID, my debit card and credit card, my phone, my dorm keys and the O3 flyer.
Oh, and my father’s cherub mask. They’d confiscated that from my jacket pocket pretty quickly.
She picked up the flyer. “O3 is still at it, eh?”
“Excuse me?” I narrowed my eyes.
“O3—the party organizers. My cousin’s one of them.”
“Oh? Which one?”
She paused for a moment like she was considering not telling me, before she finally said, “Nate.”
“Yeah, I know him. Sort of. More like I know of him. And from what I know—nice guy.”
“You have no idea.” She dropped the flyer, looking at my other stuff. “Very well, then, let’s start by you telling me what this is.” She picked up the mask.
“Give that back,” I said, lunging forward. I immediately regretted doing that—just another instance where I was giving the detective the advantage, probably even playing right into her hands—but seeing my father’s mask in this cop’s said hands stirred some old rage in me. I was simultaneously scared by the image of the Divine Cherub and upset that another person dared touch my father’s most prized possession.
“Hold on, missy,” she said, pulling back. “So this is important to you, huh? What is it?”
“Sun protector,” I said. “I wear it to keep all those nasty UV rays off my face.”
“Cute,” she said. She dropped it on the table, just out of my reach.
I don’t know why I’m being difficult. I guess I’m just scared, I thought.
“Makes sense. You just saw a dead body. I’ve been on the force for years and I’m still not used to it.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I said out loud—on purpose this time.
“So, the mask? Care to elaborate?”
“It’s … very old. An antique, you might say.” A family heirloom, you might say, I was careful to think silently.
“And … not a sun protector, I take it.”
I shook my head. “No—just something my dad gave me. It’s been in our family for generations,” I admitted, glossing over the fact that I had stolen it from the library.
The detective looked at me expectantly. I was lying to her by omitting certain facts, but it wasn’t like I could just come out and say that I stole the mask from the library, but it wasn’t technically stealing because it really was a family heirloom.
So I did what I always did in situations like this: I kept lying.
Fake it till you make it. That was basically the ex-Other motto.
“I brought the mask with me to university because …”
“Because …?”
I shrugged, assuming a carefully guarded look of sadness. “It reminds me of Da’ … and I’m homesick.”
She looked up at me, putting down the pen.
“The mask—it was something my father really loved and, well, I guess I wanted to have something to remember him by.”
Detective Wilcox stared at me for a long time before finally nodding and saying, “OK—you’re free to go.” She handed me a card. “If you think of anything else, please call me directly.”
“What?” I took the card, staring at it blankly, a bit surprised this was it. “Nothing else? No questions about what I saw, felt … did?”
“The officer on the scene already got your statement. If we need anything else from you, I’ll be sure to contact you.”
“So that’s it? I’m free to go?”
“That is what I said.”
I didn’t move.
Detective Wilcox gave me a curious look. She gestured at the mask. “We know th
at didn’t have anything to do with the librarian’s murder. What’s more, forensics is pretty advanced these days and we didn’t find a single hair strand, fabric fiber, fingerprint or DNA sample of yours on the scene.”
“Really? You got that already?”
She sighed. “No. But I don’t expect to find anything. We have campus security footage that clearly shows you leaving your dorm and going for a walk at the time of the murder. Because of those little cameras everywhere, violating your privacy rights but aiding in allowing your freedom to have privacy rights, you have an airtight alibi.”
“Oh?” I said. “Oh! Well … good thing I’m not that private of a person anyway.”
The detective gave me a suspicious look, then shook her head. She was clearly tired. “Unless there is a reason I should be arresting you … you are free to go.” She pointed at the door.
I know that was what I wanted, but being let go so easily really boiled my blood. For one thing, I was the first person on the scene, and the junior cop who took my statement had barely scratched the surface of what I could tell them. Granted, a lot of what I knew stemmed from my experience as a vampire, and I wanted to protect that secret as best I could—but still! Couldn’t this self-important detective recognize an asset when she saw one?
But that wasn’t what really upset me. No, what engulfed my recently returned soul in flame was that she was letting me walk after I killed an Other. A living, breathing Other.
Is Other life so worthless that you could literally kill one of them and not go to jail? Or—even if I killed him in self-defense—can’t the authorities at least investigate with more than a passing interest? Last I checked, killing someone in self-defense at least requires an investigation. I should be calling my lawyer. I should be explaining over and over again how I had to kill him. I should—
“Actually, what you killed wasn’t a sentient Other,” she said, interrupting my out-loud thoughts. “It was a kelb. A common jinni elemental, often used as a guard dog. Which means—”
“So?” I asked, with perhaps a bit too much venom in my tone for someone who was being let go. “Shouldn’t I still be charged with something? Or at least investigated?”
“As much as you would like to be a martyr for Other equal rights by forcing me to arrest you, kelb is a type-C classification Other. It is the Other equivalent of a domestic dog or cat—although who would want something so big and vicious as a pet, I have no idea. We do not file cases against killed pets—especially when it was clearly done in self-defense. That’s up to the owner. And since the owner is clearly the killer, I doubt he or she will be filing a suit against you anytime soon.”
I took a minute to let that sink in. The creature Egya and I killed was a guard dog of sorts unleashed on us by its master. Not the killer at all.
“Oh?” I said, kind of wishing I’d asked first, ranted later—out-loud thoughts or not. “OK, then.” I stood up and put the contents of my purse back into my bag, including my father’s mask. Once that was done, I paused and looked Detective Wilcox directly in the eyes. “You said you have footage of the murder.”
She nodded.
“So you know who the killer is?”
She gave me a look that said she couldn’t answer that.
“Come on—you’ve got to give me something. The librarian was my friend. The only friend I’ve made since I got here.”
Wilcox shook her head, cursing to herself. “This stays in this room.”
“OK—cross my heart.” I did so, to show her I was serious.
“The assailant was … blurred.”
“Blurred?”
“Yeah—like what you see in documentaries where the interviewee wants to remain anonymous.”
“Magic?”
“We can only assume,” Detective Wilcox said. “We can gather quite a bit of evidence from the video, but a clear ID? Not as of yet. But we’ll get the bastard. I promise you.”
“Thank you,” I said. Then I pulled my purse strap onto my shoulder and headed out the door.
Hyenas and Denial Are Like Oil and Water
The cops were less willing to take me back home than they had been to take me in. I guess it tends to be a one-way flow. Not that it really mattered—the campus was about a twenty-minute walk away. Stepping outside, I saw that dawn had already come and gone, and what greeted me was the morning hustle-bustle of a city getting ready for work.
I wrapped my ruined jacket close to my body, held my purse tight and entered the flow of people walking to work. Montreal is a beautiful city—there’s no doubt about it—but at that moment I wanted nothing more than to leave this place far behind. I mean, I had been here less than a day and already I had seen the inside of a police station.
And the inside of my only friend’s chest cavity.
But there was one more thing to consider. I had killed. Yes, in self-defense, and it was only an attack dog that I felled. Granted, I killed a fire-breathing attack dog the size of a bull from the jinn’s mythical realm of Qa, but still: I killed. Coming to university was my attempt at being a normal, average human. Normal and average usually means does not kill … but here I was, on day one, stabbing my dirk into someone’s neck. I could chalk it up to seeing my friend strung up like a macabre puppet, something that could believably have brought out my old instincts, but that would be a lie. Truth was, as a vampire, I was good at killing. I may have lost most of my powers when I became human, but I didn’t lose everything.
What really scared me was how easily it all went down. Once I decided that the creature responsible for killing my friend deserved to die, I acted without hesitation, guilt or remorse. Even now, after the adrenaline had worn out and the heat of the battle had cooled, I felt no regret.
Killing was too easy. At least for me.
I considered my options. I could quit college. After all, I had enough money to last me several lifetimes; given that I was human again, I only needed it to last one. I had an old Victorian mansion waiting for me near Edinburgh’s Meadows. And I had enough life experience that the so-called “college experience” wasn’t really necessary. When I was considering my options, one of the things the McGill brochure highlighted was how university helped you mature, helped you grow up.
I was over three hundred years old.
Maybe I’d already done all the growing up I needed.
I wasn’t sure what to do. Get out of here? Stay? I pulled my purse closer. I could feel the bulge of my father’s cherub mask under its plush leather. I thought about my father—the relentless hunter who never quit. What would he think about me leaving? Leaving meant quitting—and I’d never been very good at doing that.
So maybe I don’t quit. There were other options. I could leave this university and go somewhere else. There are plenty of schools that don’t accept Others … they would be less complicated and—
“Coward.”
“Excuse me?” I said, turning to see who was calling me names.
I saw Egya sitting under the umbra of a Tim Hortons coffee-shop canopy, where three metal tables and several chairs were positioned. It stank of cigarette smoke and coffee dregs from early commuters. The table he sat at had no ashtray, but it did have two coffees, and from the fact that one of the cups was empty and the other one had a total lack of steam coming out of it, I guessed he had been sitting there for a while.
Which meant he was waiting for me. Great.
He gestured to the seat across from him.
I shook my head. “I don’t sit with people who insult me.”
“Then don’t say things worth insulting.”
“Like what?”
“Girl—you talk to yourself. And when you are not talking in a loud voice that birds high in the sky can hear—” He pointed to the sky with long, skinny arms that had firm, defined muscle. He might not have had much meat on him, but there was no doubt he was strong. Also, he was wearing a tight black polo shirt, and I could see his lean muscle bulge from beneath. “—when you are not
thinking loudly, you think quietly, mouthing your thoughts so that one with keen eyesight such as myself can read your lips.” He caught my eyes with his own emerald eyes, accentuated against his dark skin. “Keen eyes like mine. Please sit—I bought you a coffee.”
“Hmph,” I said, walking past him.
“I know what you are,” he called after me.
I froze, looking around at all the humans walking by.
“And I know what you are pretending to be,” he said. “Shall I announce it to the world and free you of your terrible secret? Or will you join—”
“Fine, fine,” I huffed, turning around and taking a seat. I grabbed the coffee and downed the now-tepid liquid in one gulp. Given I hadn’t eaten in a while, I knew it would only be a matter of minutes before it gave me that anxious coffee buzz. Not that I cared. I wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible, away from this stranger. A finished cup implied a finished conversation. At least, I thought it did. I was still learning human customs. “So,” I said, wiping my mouth on a brown paper napkin. “What do you think you know about me?”
“You are no ordinary girl,” he said, looking through me just like he had in class.
I shuddered under his gaze. “Well, thank you very much,” I said, throwing in as much sarcasm as I could.
“Don’t mention it,” he replied, either not noticing the scorn in my voice or not caring about it. “It is quite obvious. For one, you fight monsters.”
“Not usually. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and—”
“Most humans simply die when the time and place are wrong. But not you. You fight.”
“And what about you? Are you … what, my knight in shining armor?”
He laughed at this, pointing at his orange polo-shirt logo. “I am not a knight, but I do have the horse. But come now,” he said, leaning in close, his arms resting on the cool metal of the outdoor table. “Let us address the … what do you Westerners say? … the elephant in the room. A funny expression for a culture that has no indigenous elephants. I, on the other hand, come from a land filled with elephants, and I can say one thing about them—we never take them inside.”
“Très drôle,” I said.