Logan grabbed Isaac by his collar and shoved him hard against the window, but Isaac put his hands out and stopped himself from going through the glass or even cracking it. The crows that had been perched on the windowsill cawed in protest and fluttered away into the night. Isaac’s heart was pumping hard now and adrenaline was filling his veins, clouding his composure.
“You have no right to touch me,” Isaac said.
“And you forget your place,” Logan said, his voice a scratchy growl. “You’re lying, and I know it. If you want to make this difficult for the both of us, fine. Lie. But if you come clean now, I’ll let you off easy.”
“I have nothing to lie about.”
“Bullshit. You’re lying to me right now, you lied about someone having been here earlier, and you lied to the praetors in the courtroom. You may be able to fool them, but you can’t get past me. I can smell the dishonesty on you. Now I’m going to ask again, nicely. Who was here earlier?”
Isaac’s eyes narrowed and he made a quick scan of his immediate vicinity for anything he could use. A lamp shade? A kitchen knife? Neither of these objects was in immediate range, and any move or action on his part would be easily countered by Logan or either of his cronies. Isaac may have outclassed Logan and his legionnaires in the wits department—at least that’s what he suspected—but he was fighting in a physical arena here… and he still outclassed them.
Fighting them, however, was still a risk—a big one, at that. There would be no going back from here if he fought them, especially if the room was bugged and anyone could review the footage on request. They would see Logan asking Isaac to confess, and then Isaac fighting back. Naturally they would come to the conclusion that Isaac was indeed hiding something—otherwise why would he risk engaging the Legio Prime in combat?
But Alice…
“I won’t say anything to you,” Isaac said, having made up his mind.
As soon as he said the words, Logan’s fist came flying. Isaac’s left hand jerked up and blocked Logan’s hand as a disciplined, but primal, instinct took over. Isaac chopped into Logan’s throat with his right hand and sent the big legionnaire staggering away a few steps, coughing and panting. The other two cronies made as if to move in on Isaac, but Logan stretched his hands out to either side and stopped them.
“That’s how he wants to play it,” Logan said between coughs, “Fine. I’ll give him what he wants.”
Isaac cracked his neck from side to side. He then casually rolled the right sleeve of his shirt up to his elbow. “You probably don’t know this about me,” Isaac said, “But before I went to University I did a brief tour in the Royal British Navy. My father was a Commodore. He had thought I needed a little toughening up when I was a lad and had suggested many times before he died that following in his footsteps would give me exactly what I needed.”
“We’ll see how tough you are,” Logan said, and he charged with his fist held high.
Isaac swept to the left. Just as Logan’s fist sailed across his right cheek, Isaac grabbed his wrist and twisted it. Logan cried out, and Isaac jabbed him in the ribs before releasing the bigger man who then continued to stumble forward a few paces.
“I never wanted to enlist,” Isaac said, “I did it because I thought it would be a good tribute to his memory, but I disagreed with my father’s idea that I needed toughening up. Do you know why?”
Logan composed himself, drew himself up, and turned to face Isaac. “Tell me.”
Isaac rolled his left sleeve up now. “Because I had already been boxing for years.”
“I’ve never met a Brit who could fight before.”
“I’m right here.”
A pair of arms wrapped themselves around Isaac’s midsection. The legionnaire to his back, a man, wasn’t as strong as he thought he was, but Isaac cursed himself for not being aware of his surroundings. Logan grinned, then charged, his eyes filled with venom and fire. Isaac struggled for an instant, and then he put his heel into the foot of the man behind him, and he was released. When Logan’s fist came again, Isaac had only a split second to act.
He ducked, and Logan’s brick of a fist bashed into the other legionnaire’s cheek. Isaac took advantage of the confusion to kick the back of Logan’s knee, sending the bigger man down to the floor. With a hard right hook, Isaac managed to turn Logan’s face and cause blood to fly out of his mouth, but Logan turned his head up to look at Isaac again and spread his bloodied mouth into a wide grin.
He was enjoying this.
Logan attacked again, this time breaking past Isaac’s block and plunging his fist into Isaac’s abdomen. The blow was enough to knock the wind out of Isaac’s lungs. He staggered, regained himself, and blocked the next attack, but Logan was on his feet now and had become a flurry of fists which Isaac had only milliseconds to block. Or duck away from.
Logan shot out a hard jab, and Isaac turned his head to avoid it. The fist slammed into a hardwood panel and Logan squealed. Isaac then buried his fist into Logan’s ribs once, twice. The bigger man staggered back. Isaac pressed on, throwing punch after punch, some which were blocked, others which went through to strike a cheek or the abdomen, but Logan made a surprising block and counter-punch move that hit Isaac squarely in the cheek and sent him to the floor.
Isaac turned on his back to face Logan, who towered over him like a giant, and said “You’ll pay for this.”
“Not once I find out what you’ve been hiding from the magistrate. They’ll give me a slap on the wrist and chew me out for using excessive force, but I’ve been chewed out before. I’ll be alright.”
“You’re wrong if you think I’ll tell you anything.”
“You don’t have to say a word, Doctor. Just stay still and let me do all the work.”
No, Isaac thought, he can’t use magic on me; the wards won’t let him. But no sooner had the thought formed than he saw Sonia, the other still-standing legionnaire, drawing symbols into the air and muttering under her breath. Her hands moved fluidly, like exotic fish swimming in a tank, and the symbols they drew into the air left floating, glowing trails; they were white at first, then purple, and then deep red.
Logan put his hands around Isaac’s neck and held him pinned against the floor. Isaac struggled, but his attacker was stronger than him and used to physical confrontations. Isaac could do nothing but watch and wait for the legionnaire to tear down the magical wards built around this safe house. Because that was what she was doing. The magistrate had created these wards, and while the legionnaires weren’t entirely exempt from their power, they and anyone else responsible for creating them had some kind of power here. Even now, with the dismantling of the protection spells only half complete, he could already feel his connection to the Tempest returning, could feel his Guardian stirring.
“Now,” Logan said, “Hold still; this will hurt.”
Isaac closed his eyes and grit his teeth as Logan’s psychic tendrils stretched from his mind and searched for Isaac’s. He filled his mind with static, frantic, and random surface thoughts to create a kind of mundane bulwark against Logan’s invasive magic. When his mind wasn’t immediately torn apart and rifled through, he knew his trick had awarded him a moment to think. To collect himself. In that moment of calm quiet, in this space out of time he had made for himself, the Good Doctor arrived.
“I need help,” Isaac said.
“We don’t have choices,” the Good Doctor said, “Logan’s magic is powerful. You are stalling him, but he will break in.”
“He already is,” Isaac said, “I can feel him rummaging around in my mind.”
“If we leave, the connection will sever.”
Isaac considered this. “The teleportation spell? We don’t know where it’ll take us. For all we know, this is one big trap.”
“If this is a trap, then we are already in it.”
Dammit, Isaac thought, and he allowed his mental defenses to relax so that he could get a grip on his concentration. When he found himself again, Isaac closed his eye
s and imagined the spell forming in his mind, imagined the runes taking shape, the mathematical coordinates locking into place. All he had to do now was draw the power from the roiling, turbulent plane known as the Tempest, and he would be gone. Where? He didn’t know, but that hardly mattered now. It was this, or let Logan—
“Who is Alice Werner?” Logan asked.
A whip of lightning tore open the sky above Ashwood, and Isaac Moreau’s body slipped out of Logan’s grasp leaving a cloud of sparkling black and purple dust where he had once been.
Logan stood and dusted himself off. His eyes were white, but after a couple of hard blinks they turned red and he became alert. He scowled and breathed long, hard breaths through his nose as the dust settled on the floor. He hadn’t had enough time to look through Isaac’s mind, hadn’t been able to pull everything out of the asshole’s headspace, but he had gotten something. Alice Werner, he thought. I know that name.
“How did he do that?” Sonia asked. “Did you know he could do that?”
“No,” Logan said. “I didn’t think he had it in him.”
“So, now what do we do?”
“We go out and find him, right?” asked the other legionnaire.
“Find him if you can, and bring him in.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“I’ve got another target to hunt down,” he said, striding out of the room.
CHAPTER 7
Kasey's Diner
Kasey’s Diner came up on the right—a single building sitting at the back of a too-large parking lot. Cameron pulled up and parked the bike in an open spot only a short walk from the door. When Alice stepped off the bike and removed her helmet, the first thing she noticed was the huge, inert garbage truck parked only a few spaces down. Don’t they get stored in depots until the morning, she thought, and then she headed into the diner. Cameron followed.
The door jingled as Alice pushed it open. The diner seemed quaint enough. It had a rock n’ roll theme she could appreciate, checkerboard floors, and there were red vinyl covers on the seats. In the far corner of the room, a classic juke was playing the only Johnny Cash song she knew—Ring of Fire. But the place was as empty as a dive-bar in a bad neighborhood, and when Alice walked over the spot where Helena had met her untimely end, she knew why.
The invasive, almost paralyzing chill she felt was instantaneous and practically pushed her back out the way she had come. Cameron didn’t say anything until he sat down, but even he had felt it.
“Jesus,” he said, “Talk about creepy.”
“It happened there,” Alice said, nodding in the direction of the counter where a man in dark blue coveralls sat nurturing a cup of coffee.
“What did?”
“Helena died there… and Nyx left her body.”
“You know that’s the cause of the feeling for sure?”
“You’re the mage—can’t you figure it out?”
“I’m not that kind of mage.”
“This is the second time you’ve said that. What kind of a mage are you?”
Before Cameron could open his mouth, a waitress wearing a Barbie pink uniform walked up. This woman may, a couple of years ago, have been attractive, but she looked worn now. Ragged. Her dirty blonde hair was a little too frazzled, her cheeks a little too sunken.
“What can I get you?” the waitress asked.
“Just a cup of coffee,” she said.
“I’ll have a sealed bottle of mineral water,” Cameron said.
The waitress glanced at him, cocked an eyebrow, and wrote down the order before leaving.
“Sealed mineral water?” Alice asked. “What are you, a Victoria’s Secret model?”
“If you ask for water at a diner, they give you tap water,” Cameron said. If you ask for a bottle of water, what they give you is a bottle they’ve already used themselves and refilled with tap water. If you ask for a sealed bottle, you get what you pay for.”
“So it’s a cheap thing?”
“No, it’s… complicated. Can we just focus on what we came here for? What’s the game plan?”
Alice looked around. Besides the man at the bar and the waitress, there wasn’t exactly anyone around to talk to. “When the waitress comes around again, we’ll ask her if she knows what happened.”
“She’s probably been asked that question a hundred times in the past week.”
“Probably, but right now we have nothing else to go on.” Alice lowered her voice. “Unless you’ve got some fancy magic I don’t know about.”
“If the trail weren’t a week old, I may have been able to do something.”
“So then we settle for some good old fashioned police investigation.”
“Police? We aren’t cops.”
“I was, or did you forget?”
The waitress returned after a few short minutes with a cup of coffee and a bottle of sealed mineral water. Johnny Cash was still singing out of the juke, and two more customers had walked into the diner.
“Miss,” Alice said just as the waitress was about to leave. “I was wondering if I could—”
“Ask me about the girl who was killed?” the waitress said.
“Yeah, I’d like to ask you about what happened that night.”
“You a cop?”
Alice’s eyes flashed over at Cameron, and then settled back on the waitress. “I’m… a private investigator. I’ve been hired to work the case, seeing as the police haven’t gotten any leads.”
The waitress sighed, expelling all of the air out of her lungs and sagging like a limp plastic bag. “Look,” she said, “I’ve already been over this with the cops, the news, and just about everyone else in the damn neighborhood. What else do you want to me to tell you?”
“I know you’ve been through a lot—what happened here was terrible—but I just want to know what happened… I’m working for a client.”
“Who’s your client?”
“I can’t say.”
“Is it a friend of Raegan’s?”
“Raegan? Who is Raegan?”
“That’s the girl who was here the night it all happened? Hasn’t been to work since? Don’t you private investigator types watch the news?”
“I… do…”
“Listen, I’ve got a shift to run and I’m tired of answering questions. Go find help someplace else.”
The waitress turned around and left, crossing the length of the diner to serve the newcomers. Alice watched, lost in thought, chastising herself for not having done a little more research before rolling up to the diner. Raegan, she thought, here on the night Helena died, and hasn’t been to work since. Maybe she knows something.
“What are you thinking?” Cameron asked.
“I’m thinking we need to know more about this girl.”
Cameron pulled his phone out of his pocket and did a quick online search, but found relatively little on the girl. There was mention of the girl in one of the articles he found online; a brief note that mentioned a girl named Raegan Theroux who had been working the night shift prior to the discovery of Helena’s body. She was not considered a suspect, but was questioned as a person of interest about five days ago. The lack of information certainly struck Alice as odd.
“So they talked to her,” Alice said. “Which means she’s alive.”
Only it was entirely possible Nyx had taken the body over as she had done to Helena. If this was true, then Nyx would have been in complete control of that body and would have been able to say or do anything in a believable way. Alice had fallen for the act moments before Helena bashed her cheek in with her own camera.
“She just hasn’t come to work since that night,” Cameron said. “Maybe she blames herself for what happened? Or maybe she got fired?”
“If I could interject,” said a voice which was far closer than either Alice or Cameron would have liked to admit. Standing next to their booth was the man in the dark coveralls. It had the words “Ashwood Waste Management” embroidered above the left breast. “My name
’s Douglas M. Church, an’ I think I can be of some assistance.”
Alice looked up at his wide eyes, receding hairline, and bulbous nose, studying his features to try and get a taste of his aura, but she couldn’t reach it. The aura was there, she knew, as was her ability to sense its presence, but her power wasn’t strong enough to get to it. Maybe Trapper really was a vital part of her supernatural ability—more so than she had thought. But then, back at the house, she hadn’t been able to sense anything at all, so maybe all she had to do was exercise the muscle again.
She nodded at Cameron, who then stood and gestured toward the booth. “Please,” he said, “Take a seat.”
Doug nodded, smiled, and slid into the booth with a grunt and a little wiggling. For a garbage man, he didn’t smell. “Sorry,” Doug said, heartily patting his gut. “Not quite as slim as I used to be.”
Cameron slid in next to Alice.
Alice smiled politely and nodded. “I didn’t realize that we were talking loud enough to be overheard,” she said.
“It’s not you,” Doug said, “I got ears like a bat. These babies hear everything. I really didn’t mean to intrude, I just thought—seeing as you’re a P.I. working a case—that you could use a little help from a concerned citizen.”
“I appreciate it,” Alice said, putting on her best cop Alice expression. “Any help you can provide would be great.”
“Alright, well, what’d you like to know?”
“Ideally, anything you could tell us about Raegan.”
“I didn’t know Raegan a whole lot, but I saw her that night a week ago. She was closing up shop, and I came in to grab a cup of coffee before my rounds—much like tonight.”
“What time was this?”
“Oh, around midnight. Poor girl had to get home quick, but she kept the place open to let me have a cup of my favorite brew before the long night of stink and diesel I had ahead of me.”
“And was there a blonde woman here at that time?”
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