City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set

by Clara Coulson

  My first big case with DSI, and I catch the difficult murder. I’m not sure whether I should feel honored that my skills will get put to use or worried that my terrible luck will follow me around for the rest of the investigation.

  Somebody knocks on the door to Jason’s room, and I retract my hand through the window, careful to avoid the broken glass. “Yes?” I call out.

  “This is Detective Lassiter, Aurora PD. You almost done in there?”

  Ah, the “real” detectives have arrived.

  I step away from Jason’s body and survey the room one last time, but I don’t see anything else of interest. I load up all the pictures I took and send them to the analysts at the department’s main office, then stick my phone back on its clip. Avoiding all the drops and spatters of blood covering half the surfaces in the room, I make my way to the door and reach for the knob to open it. And—

  I feel something. Vague and intangible, there but invisible, frustrating to find but impossible to ignore once you do. Like the scent of old perfume on the air you can smell when you step in exactly the right place.

  I freeze, mentally grabbing for it—residual magic.

  During my DSI training, there were a few students who discovered that they possess a rare ability for a “normal” human: the power to sense residual magic signatures. Most normal people can glimpse active magic auras, if the energy concentration is strong enough, but very few can perceive the faint traces left hanging in the air after the magic casters have moved on to spell and curse another day.

  It just so happens that I am among those few.

  Surprise!

  I took a special elective course on magic tracking and everything. Looks like it might come in handy for this case.

  Taking a step away from the door, I reach up with one hand and wave it through the space in the air where I caught the trace. I make a grabbing motion, as if I’m wrapping my fingers around a string of yarn hovering in front of me. Then I concentrate solely on the faint sensation of magic tickling my hand and feel for an extension, a trail.

  I find it, and the second my brain connects with the residual energy stream, I can see it. (I call this “magic sensing mode,” where my eyes perceive auras as being stronger and brighter than they appear to normal people.) It takes the form of a glowing blue thread suspended in the air. This thread zigzags all over the dorm room, skirting every surface but concentrated around Jason’s body, where the bulk of the magic was expended during the murder. Unfortunately, it appears to end at the window; the creature cut off its flow of magic before it fled. Which means I won’t be able to figure out where it went.

  Boo!

  However…the thread of magic goes right through the dorm room door, and, I can sense, continues on. Which means I might, might be able to figure out where the creature came from.

  Well, that’s a good enough lead for me.

  Chapter Three

  The residual magic trail leads me by two very confused detectives, a gaggle of jeering cops, back down the stairs, out a side door of the Hague dorm, and into the woods. I pass within fifteen feet of the indentations in the ground where the creature landed on its flight away from Jason’s dorm room, and three uniforms loitering nearby give me the stink eye when I don’t bother to stop and say hi. After I hit the edge of the woods, the light from the overcast fall day fades into dimness, and I have to take my pace down a few notches, from excited scamper to professional power walk, to avoid tripping in the dense underbrush.

  My sense of the magic stream grows stronger the deeper I travel into the woods, until there’s practically a laser-like thread of light hanging in the air, curving around the trees and thorny vines. The creature, despite its stature and weight, didn’t leave much in the way of footprints, and, to my surprise, didn’t break any branches or tear any vines or crush any bushes on its warpath. Which suggests it’s fairly intelligent, anger problems notwithstanding.

  My trek into nature goes on for another twelve minutes or so—Waverly College is on the edge of Aurora, bordered by miles of wilderness—before I hop over a narrow stream and enter a wide clearing. The trees in the clearing have been artificially removed, several deep holes dotting the soil where large root systems used to be. But this isn’t a logging area. It’s closed in. Which means somebody cut down the trees for another reason.

  And I’m guessing that reason isn’t a wood carving business.

  It could be, sure, but I’m going to go with the nefarious magic explanation.

  If only because the thread of residual magic ends in the center of the clearing. Right above an enormous, scorched-marked summoning circle.

  A chill creeps up my spine at the sight of it, and I reach down to unclip one of my handgun holsters. I don’t hear or see any movement in the woods around me, but it’s poor form for a sorcerer to leave a circle intact and unattended. Summoning circles, as I learned in my academy class, are unique for each magic practitioner, so forgetting to erase your circle after you’ve used it to, well, summon things is like leaving a John Hancock-sized signature. No one with a shred of intelligence would summon a creature to commit a murder and then leave their summoning circle in place. And no one without a shred of intelligence would be able to master the skills needed to summon a creature from the Eververse.

  It’s a trap, is my first thought. The summoner has laid out a trip wire spell to blow me up. Or he’s hiding in the woods, waiting for the perfect moment to attack. My eyes rove every direction, seeking out any movement that can’t be explained as a squirrel or a deer or another woodland creature. But the area around the clearing is still and quiet—too quiet—and I realize that the reek of magic permeating the air around and above the circle must have driven all the wildlife away. Animals are scary good at sensing magic. Much better than me.

  After I check again to make sure no one’s hiding in a branch, about to drop down and zap me with a death spell, I bend over, pick up a stick, and, holding my breath, toss it into the circle. I flinch immediately, curling in on myself, expecting a massive boom or the crackle of an electricity ward, or…anything loud and dangerous and deadly.

  But nothing happens.

  There are no active spells in the clearing. Only the residual magic from the summoning and the flow of power that was coursing through the creature as it marched off to kill Jason.

  No spells. No traps. No sorcerer in the shadows.

  Odd. Very odd.

  Hesitant, I step closer to the circle to get a good look at it. It’s a jumble of lines and curves and shapes, all of them overlapping, and in what few spaces exist in the complex construction are some of the same symbols I saw written on the wall in Jason’s room. I bring out my phone again, tap the camera app, and turn it landscape to capture the full circle. Then I snap a few shots back to back, until I’m satisfied I’ve captured every symbol and line and strange marking used to summon the creature.

  I send this second bundle of images to the analysts as well. So someone with a lot more knowledge about summoning circles and weird languages can take a crack at it. I can’t even guess the magic origin—European? Asian? Native American?—much less what creature was summoned.

  All I do know is that the creature is bad news.

  Anything summoned from the Eververse is bad news.

  The Eververse (short for the creatively named “Everything Universe”) contains all the creatures that don’t naturally roam the Earth, including the progenitors of the derivative creatures that do. Vampires and werewolves, for example, were created by things from the Eververse. Things that crossed into our world via magic at some point in the distant past. Things that left a permanent footprint on Earth in the form of hybrid offspring.

  The Eververse consists of every heaven and hell, every afterlife, every underworld, the sprawling kingdoms of the Fae, vast, wild wastelands and forests and deserts, pits of fire and ash and dust, deep, dark voids of soundless space, and the constant light of a million purgatories. And all of these places are filled with bei
ngs so strange and powerful that you could never conjure up their forms with a mortal imagination…

  …or so I’ve heard. That’s what my professor taught us in our academy course on the subject.

  Point is, there are an infinite number of things you could summon from the Eververse.

  And every last one of them could wreak havoc on Aurora, Michigan.

  Which means I need to get—

  “Hey, baby! Can I have your number?”

  Music blasts through the clearing, rebounds off the trees, into the woods, creating an echo of terrible pop music I picked as my ringtone to piss somebody off. The blaring noise scares me so bad, I drop my phone into the summoning circle and stagger backward into a tree. My hand flies up to grip my chest, my heart pounds hard against my ribs, and a hiss of panic breaks through my clenched teeth.

  I stand there rigid for a minute, first in sheer, irrational panic that the music is a secret attack by an unperceived enemy force, then in utter embarrassment that I scared the crap out of myself. Like a total amateur. And for the first time, I’m glad the rest of my new team, the experienced members, are off on a vital mission in France somewhere, helping a foreign branch of DSI. If any of them were stateside, I’d be partnered with one for this case.

  Then, he or she would have had the delight of watching me almost knock myself out with a tree. Thanks to a phone call. Smooth, Kinsey. You’re totally living up to your placement on an elite team. I’m sure all the top DSI detectives jump out of their skin every time their phones ring.

  I shake the shock off and shuffle back to where I dropped the phone. It’s lying in the center of the circle, between two shallow indentations in the damp soil that must have been where the creature stood the moment of its summoning. I pass my hand very slowly into the summoning circle to retrieve the squawking phone.

  Nothing happens. The residual magic hangs in the air, dissipating by the minute.

  The circle is inert. The summoner is gone. And the thing it summoned is still out in the city somewhere, posing a danger to innocent citizens.

  Which is what I’ll have to tell my team captain, the guy who’s currently calling me on the phone. Nicholas Riker.

  Or, as he’s listed in my contacts: Captain Grumpy Pants.

  Chapter Four

  DSI’s main office building sits on the northern edge of Aurora, between a public library and a law office. It’s six stories of tall, tinted windows, abutted by a parking garage, and it looks more like your average corporate headquarters than the central operations center for an agency that hunts down rogue supernatural creatures. I heard early on in the academy—which takes up two floors on the western wing of the building—that DSI bought the place after a dot-com startup went bankrupt when that bubble burst in the late 90s.

  The captains’ offices in our could-have-been-a-Microsoft-rip-off are located at the far end of the Criminal Investigations Division, my division, on the fifth floor. Riker’s office is the last one on the hall. It’s a large, square space that mostly consists of windows and a vaulted ceiling with too many harsh fluorescent fixtures bolted to it. There’s a large, heavy wooden desk situated in the exact center of the floor that looks like it belongs in a British period flick, and every time I’ve been inside the office, said aging desk has been piled high with case files.

  Today is no exception.

  After we had a brief chat over the phone, Riker recalled me to his poorly illuminated office for a more in-depth chat. So now I’m sitting in an uncomfortable chair with a flat cushion, watching my boss flip through the crime scene photos on his computer, which is by far the most advanced piece of technology in the room. The rest of the office is decorated with paintings and shelves and even a few weapons that would be more fit in a museum exhibit.

  Riker spends ten minutes in silence analyzing the images, then leans back in his chair and sighs. He runs his hand through his sandy blond hair in need of a trim and says, “You shouldn’t be working this case alone.”

  I crack the knuckles on my left hand and reply, “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “Be serious,” he snarls. And there’s the Captain Grumpy Pants I know. “A crime of this nature should not be left in the hands of a rookie. You graduated from the academy two weeks ago, Kinsey. This is beyond you, and not”—he holds up a finger to silence me when I open my mouth—“because I doubt your skills. I watched your final exams. I know you’re smart, resourceful, and will make an excellent detective in this department. One day. But that day is not today. You’re too inexperienced for this.”

  Wringing my hands in my lap, I tear my eyes from Riker and cast them out the tinted window, toward the distant woods. “You know, while I understand your point, sir, you could at least give me a pat on the back for tracking down the circle.”

  Riker huffs. “You won highest marks in magic tracking, Kinsey. Finding the circle was an expectation I already had. When you do something beyond my expectations, then I’ll commend you.”

  “Oh, like what, sir?” I knock on the armrest of my chair with a knuckle. “Solving this case, maybe?”

  “Don’t be a smartass.”

  “Would you prefer I be a dumbass?”

  He smacks his palm on his messy desk. “For Christ’s sake, Kinsey. I’m trying to keep you safe here, not hamper your development. Your most dangerous case prior to this was capturing an enchanted flying bunny.”

  “Hey, that was plenty dangerous. I almost fell off the roof of that bank.” I shrug my shoulders in the most exaggerated manner possible.

  Riker picks up a pen and starts rapping it against his keyboard. “My point is that your caseload is supposed to gradually get more serious. It’s supposed to be a learning process. You’re not supposed to go from zero to eighty in two weeks. That’s a recipe for disaster, and a disaster in this department almost always entails a funeral. You—” His voice cuts out, and a jolt of pain shoots across his face, warping his eyes and mouth. A harsh breath sticks in his throat, and his teeth clench so tight I’m sure they’re going to shatter.

  I drop my attitude in a heartbeat and leap up, crossing the distance between the chair and the desk in a single step. “Captain, are you all right?”

  His right hand sinks under his desk, to the corresponding leg, and grips the loose black fabric around his knee. “Give me a second,” he breathes out. He then lifts the hand from his leg and reaches for a desk drawer, fumbling to get it open. I round the desk and open it for him, revealing a bottle of high-dose pain medication tucked neatly into a corner behind a box of staples.

  “Let me get it for you, sir.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Sir.”

  With a deep, exasperated sigh, he rubs his stubbly cheeks and points to a low bookshelf; on it, a pitcher of water and some plastic cups sit next to a lamp. I walk over, fill one of the cups, and return, setting the cup in front of him. Next, I grab the pill bottle, skim the instructions, pop the top, and tap out two pills. I place them on the desk next to the cup and wait.

  At first, Riker stares at the pills but doesn’t touch them. His face is white as a sheet, and I can tell he’s barely holding back a cry. Half a minute passes as the man tries to grin and bear it, but he can’t, and he finally surrenders. He picks up the pills with trembling fingers and drops them into his mouth, following with the water. When he sits the half-empty cup back down, an expression of utter shame overtakes him. His gaze falls to the desk, and he bites his bottom lip so hard I’m worried the skin is going to split and bleed.

  For the first time since I arrived, I glance at the cane propped against the desk next to his chair, and a sudden wave of guilt washes over me.

  From my end of this short stick, Riker’s been doing his best to piss me off since the day I met him. An hour after my graduation ceremony, I found out that I was being assigned to an elite team instead of one of the middling groups where most newbies end up. It was a dream come true for about two-point-five seconds. Standing there in the commis
sioner’s office, elated at the news. And then a door opened and Riker hobbled in, and my end of the conversation devolved from what a great honor to why are you punishing me, oh God.

  Because the first thing Nick Riker said of me was, “You’re handing me a brat?”

  And the first thing I said of him was, “You’re handing me over to this asshole?”

  Things went downhill from there.

  Looking at him now, though, in so much pain, the wriggling pity that’s been growing in the back of my brain for two weeks finally works its way to the forefront. I know for a fact that Riker hasn’t always been this gruff and short-tempered, and that maybe a year or so from now, he won’t be anymore. He’s suffering from an intense combination of chronic pain and…grief.

  There’s a reason I was stuck on Riker’s team, see—a new opening.

  About two months ago, this office received a frantic plea from the French branch of DSI, still in its infancy. A band of roaming ghouls was terrorizing the countryside. The creatures would attack during the night, kidnapping the vulnerable. Eating the vulnerable, as nasty, reeking, flesh-devouring ghouls are wont to do. But during the day, they were nowhere to be seen. Elusive. They managed to snatch and kill eighteen people before the DSI folks in Paris called Aurora for help. We have more elite detectives here than any other branch, so we usually have some to spare.

  The commissioner decided to send Riker’s team. (And most of the team is still there.)

  Days after landing on French soil, Riker and his team managed to figure out how the ghouls were getting around so stealthily: a cave system. After an extensive surveillance and mapping process, Riker formulated a solid attack plan. Then, one night, he led his team on a raid into the caves, and they hacked the hell out of a whole den of ghouls. Twenty-eight of those monsters went down, heads cut clean off…before the unthinkable and unpredictable happened.

  A cave-in.

  When the ceiling collapsed, one member of Riker’s team, Norman Bishop, eighteen-year veteran of DSI, got separated from the rest of the team. With six ghouls. And no weapons.