City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set

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City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set Page 68

by Clara Coulson


  You know, Cooper was really excited then, but he still offered me a delicious breakfast. What could be so important this time that Cooper would forget to cook—?

  Déjà vu.

  The baseball bat skims my bicep as I dive off the couch and tumble across the carpet. By the time I push myself up into a crouch, hand groping for my gun, my assailant is already recovering from the miss and winding the bat up for a second swing.

  My assailant, who is…Cooper?

  What the fuck?

  What the fuck.

  I hesitate on pulling my gun, because there’s no way in hell that Cooper Lee just tried to take me out with a bat. “Hey, Coop,” I say, muscles tense, ready to run if Cooper rushes me, armed and dangerous. “Did we have an argument I don’t remember? Or did I unknowingly offend you somewhere along the line? Because if so, I think the best solution would be to talk it out. Physical fights can get pretty nasty, you know?”

  Cooper doesn’t lower the bat. He stares at me, his normally bright blue eyes hooded and calculating, his lips twisted into a sneer that is anathema to the very core of the archivist’s personality. I rapidly run through the possibilities of what the heck is happening here: One, Cooper is possessed by a spirit, and depending on the strength of this spirit, his mind is either perfectly salvageable or so far gone that I might as well shoot him the same way I shot Betty Smith in Holden Park. Two, someone is controlling Cooper with a spell, bending his will and compelling him to attack me. Or three—

  Cooper charges, and I roll out of the way again instead of launching a counterattack, because the only weapon on me is a gun, and I will absolutely not shoot Cooper unless I have no other choice. The bat wallops the floor so hard that the carpet tears and the wooden boards beneath splinter up into the air. Slivers whip past Cooper’s cheeks, leaving red streaks all the way to his ears. But he either doesn’t feel the pain, or he doesn’t care. Because as soon as the bat stops vibrating from the impact, Cooper stands up straight, widens the creepy sneer, and raises the bat a third time.

  It’s a spirit. It has to be a spirit. No way a spell could force Cooper Lee to make that psychotic expression.

  Using a nearby chair, I haul myself to my feet and reach for the phone on my belt.

  Cooper strikes again before my fingers even touch it.

  Faster than before.

  Much faster.

  The end of the bat smacks the fleshy underside of my wrist with an audible crack. Knocked off balance, I stumble into the side of the couch and wind up doubled over on my knees, cradling my injured forearm. Tears well up in my eyes as waves of agony resonate through the bones and muscles in my wrist. It feels like the whole appendage has been sheared in half beneath my skin, my hand detached from the rest of my body, freely floating in pooling blood. I grit my teeth until they nearly crack, biting back a scream.

  Cooper looms over me.

  I try to move, but my legs are like jelly.

  The bat slams into my right shoulder, propelling me forward onto the glass-top coffee table. The tabletop shatters under my weight, and a million shards paint the carpet, and I barely shield my face in time before I hit the glass-strewn floor hard enough to drive a hundred clinking pieces into my flesh. Without my uniform coat to protect me, the glass shreds my clothing and bites off bits of skin the way a cheese grater would flay raw meat.

  This time, the scream escapes.

  My right arm is now numb, my left on fire, weeping blood onto Cooper’s carpet. Overwhelmed by the flood of pain, I fail to react when Cooper snatches the gun from my belt, followed by my smartphone, and tosses them across the room, where they clatter uselessly to the floor. He rounds my quaking body supported only by the groaning wooden frame of the coffee table, the baseball bat bouncing off his shoulder with each slow, methodical step.

  When he’s in line with my head, he crouches in front of me and says in a snide tone I’ve never heard emerge from Cooper’s throat, “If you’d prefer to make this painless going forward, I’d suggest you tell me what I want to know without attempting any lies or tricks or traps.”

  Through clenched teeth, I say, “Is Cooper still alive?”

  Not-Cooper peers down at me, amused. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out eventually.” He leans closer to me, his grip tightening on the bat. “Now tell me, Calvin Kinsey, Detective Third Class, where is the fountain pen you recovered from the ruins of the Wellington Wallace Convention Center last night?”

  No.

  No, it can’t be.

  I can’t have gotten Cooper hurt again because I recovered an important object from a crime scene.

  Some fucked-up god has got to be screwing with me right now.

  Not-Cooper suddenly grabs my chin and twists my neck at an awkward angle, forcing me to look him in the eye. “Stop trying to figure out how to escape, Crow, and answer my question. Where’s the pen? Is it at your apartment? Your captain’s house? With one of your other teammates? Huh? Where?” He squeezes my jaw until my lips part by necessity.

  “The pen,” I choke out, “is at the DSI office.”

  And that’s what horrifies me about this situation the most. I followed procedure this time. I locked the fountain pen up myself, with my own two goddamn hands, so how, how did my discovery of the pen still result in Cooper’s life hanging in the balance?

  Not-Cooper taps the bat against his shoulder in an aggressive rhythm. “Oh, come on. Do you really think I didn’t check the DSI evidence lockup before I went slumming around for this pretty boy nerd and the sarcastic asswipe of a rookie detective known as Calvin Kinsey? This isn’t my first rodeo, moron.” He lifts the bat an inch from his shoulder, enough to make his threat clear as water. “Now tell me where you put the fucking pen!”

  Okay. Two things.

  One, if this guy already searched the evidence lockup, why didn’t he find the pen? Unless someone else from my team checked it out after I left for the night—and they shouldn’t have, because the case file review is the priority task right now—the pen should have been there for the taking when this guy snuck into the office.

  And two, did my supernatural assailant call me a sarcastic asswipe?

  Biting back a groan, I slowly close my bloody left hand around the largest sliver of glass I can find out of Not-Cooper’s line of sight. To distract him, in the hope he won’t brain me with the bat, I keep talking. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you, buddy. I locked the pen in the evidence room at the DSI office before I clocked out. If you didn’t find it there, it’s because somebody else removed it from storage after I left.”

  Not-Cooper tilts his head to the side, a skewed expression on his face. He can’t decide if I’m telling the truth or trying to pull one over on him. “Are you playing word games with me? Because if so, I’m going to break your legs next.”

  “What word games?” The four-inch-long piece of glass in my hand starts to eat into the joints of my fingers, but I ignore the sharp sting because I only have one shot at this.

  Not-Cooper releases his grasp on my chin. “The evidence lockup log claims that you checked the fountain pen in at around 3:30 AM. But it also claims that Cooper Lee checked the pen out about twenty minutes later. Which is why I came here first, thinking the pretty boy nerd had the pen in his possession, for late-night research or some shit.” He waves his hand in a frustrated manner, indicating the room in general. “Thing is, I searched this place from attic to basement, and I didn’t find the pen anywhere. So I figured that Lee must’ve passed the pen to you at some point, seeing as you two are all buddy-buddy.”

  “And how do you know we’re ‘buddy-buddy’ exactly?” I grip the shard harder, the jagged edge protruding from the side of my fist like a glass knife. “You been following me around today?”

  Not-Cooper snorts. “Today? Please. I’ve been staking out DSI for weeks now, and in particular making careful observations about Team Riker. The team of interest.”

  I grip the glass shard so tightly I feel it sink toward my bones
.

  “Why is Team Riker of interest to you?” I spit. “And what the hell do you want with the pen?”

  Not-Cooper plants his cheek on his fist and makes a tsk-tsk sound. “Not my secrets to spill, Kinsey. I’m just part of the cleanup crew.” He flicks his eyes up at the picture window that overlooks the street, lips open a fraction like he’s about to wax poetic about his villainy or some other ridiculous crap. Which is fine with me. Because I take the opportunity, the instant he looks away, to spring at him wielding the glass shard.

  Not-Cooper recoils, quick as a snake, but we’re so close to each other that he can’t dodge me. The glass shard splits his cheek and forces him to drop the bat so he can avoid a deadly laceration to the neck. (Not that I would have followed through with it. I would never risk killing Cooper. But he doesn’t have to know that.)

  He scampers away, the bat hitting the floor with a clang and rolling off under a chair. The second he’s out of close combat range, I pull away, drop the glass shard—which is embedded so deep in my hand that it sticks for a second—and leap backward into a tactical roll, coming up on one knee next to my discarded phone and handgun.

  I grab the gun with my numb hand and my phone with the bloody one. As fast as I can, I unlock the screen, click into my contacts, and hit the green symbol next to Ella’s name. Then I rise to my feet and aim the gun at Not-Cooper’s shoulder. I honestly don’t know if I can bring myself to shoot Cooper, but if push comes to shove…

  My phone rings three times before Ella picks up. “Cal, what is it? You’re supposed to be asleep for—”

  “Ella,” I say, “I’m at Cooper’s house, in the middle of a very dangerous situation. I need backup immediately.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m not entirely sure, but my life is at risk, and I’m pretty sure Cooper’s is too. So get over here.”

  There’s a sharp intake of breath over the speaker, and Ella says, “We’ll be there in ten. Hang on.”

  Ten more minutes in the ring with Not-Cooper.

  Well, I can certainly try not to die.

  “I’ll be waiting.” I end the call and stick the phone back on my belt, bringing my bloody hand up to steady the gun. Both my hands are shaking wildly, but two hands will at least ensure I don’t drop the gun by accident and cost myself my only weapon a second time.

  I lament the fact that I broke my beggar rings again. If I had a set on me now, I’d already have escaped from this fight, or ended it with a force blast hard enough to knock Not-Cooper out without risking permanent injury to Actual-Cooper.

  “Surrender,” I bark to the imposter on the other side of the living room, who’s stooped over, prodding at the deep cut on his cheek. “Surrender, or I’ll shoot you.”

  Not-Cooper goes still, still as a statue, an inhuman level of still, and then he pops up straight like a jack-in-the-box, wearing that wide, awful sneer on one side of Cooper’s face and a coat of fresh blood on the other. But the worst part isn’t the sneer, or the blood, or even the freakishly rigid posture. The worst part is his eyes. Those poisonous violet eyes.

  Eyes don’t change color like that when someone is possessed. Occasionally, you can glimpse phantom images of the true form of the spirit, super-imposed onto the possessed individual’s body, but the physical traits of a spirit’s host don’t change.

  Which means that the creature in front of me isn’t a spirit. It’s…It’s…

  The answer hits me, and I suddenly feel very, very stupid.

  “You’re a shapeshifter,” I whisper.

  Not-Cooper chuckles. “Boy, it took you long enough.”

  But if the person in front of me is a shapeshifter, Cooper isn’t here at all.

  “What’d you do to Cooper?” I snap. “Is he in the house? Is he hurt?”

  The violet eyes fade back into Cooper’s baby blues, but the vicious expression doesn’t change. “What’s wrong, Kinsey? Are you worried I killed him and dumped his body in the woods?”

  Memories rush through me. That blustery, miserable day when I followed Mayor Slate’s ghost to the place where his body had been dumped before the Jameson murders even took place. Dragging Matt Lassiter with me to the medical examiner’s office, only to find that the fake Slate’s body had gotten up by itself and walked right out the door while no one was paying attention. Realizing that the vampires had hired a shapeshifter assassin to kill Slate, Halliburton, and Martinez, and to expose Marcus and McKinney’s rogue plot to preemptively start a supernatural war.

  All the little charred pieces of the convention center disaster start to fall into place.

  I reassert my grip on the gun. “You’re the bastard who killed the Jameson trio, aren’t you?”

  The shapeshifter laughs again. “Me? Oh, no. That job was, unfortunately, reserved for the top-notch mercs. But I wish it had been me, because that gig paid like a bank heist.” He snaps his fingers. “But I do know the shapeshifter who pulled that job off, and my advice to you, Kinsey, is to let that thread hang. That particular shifter is not the sort you catch. He’s the sort who catches you.”

  “Oh, and I suppose you’re a nicer sort of assassin-for-hire?”

  “Well, for one thing, I’m not an assassin.” He shrugs.

  “Are you saying you didn’t kill Cooper?”

  “I’m not saying shit.” He ambles over to the chair, bends down, and retrieves the baseball bat. “I’m not allowed to say shit. My orders are to find the fountain pen and return it to my employers.”

  I home in on one word in that statement. “Return? As in, it belonged to them before?”

  The shapeshifter stiffens slightly and frowns, realizing he slipped up. “Ah, you got me there. You’re pretty perceptive, Kinsey.”

  The wheels are turning in my head now, faster and faster. “The last time I encountered a shapeshifter, he was working for the vampires. Which means you’re probably also working for the vampires. Which means the pen belongs to the vampires. And since the pen was found in the rubble of the west wing of the convention center, that means there were vampires in the convention center at the time it came down. And since the wards were planted in the west wing…” I take a deep breath. “The vampires were the targets of the attack.”

  The shapeshifter stares at me in disbelief. “Damn, all that because I flubbed one word. I’m definitely getting my pay docked for this.” His eyes flash violet for a split second. “Unless I eliminate you before anybody else discovers my mistake.” His hands wrap tightly around the grip of the bat. “Wasn’t my original plan, but us shapeshifters are known for changing up on the fly, so…”

  He pounces, bat wound back to strike, body moving like a bullet hurtling straight at me. And I suddenly, viscerally understand how a wizard and a werewolf lost to a shapeshifter in the storeroom at Jameson’s Bar & Grill.

  I narrowly dodge the blow, and the bat smashes into the living room window. Glass explodes outward and rains down onto the sidewalk. The shapeshifter runs into the wall, having missed his chance to slow down. He almost flips over the window ledge, but he avoids it by grabbing the sill and yanking himself back into the room. Then he turns and bounds after me again.

  As I scramble backward into the hallway, I slip on the polished hardwood and land on my ass for the second time in twenty-four hours. The shapeshifter leaps toward me, bat held above his head like a battle-ax, and I don’t even have a chance to process my latest pain before my reflexes kick in. Raise my gun. Pull the trigger. Three times.

  Two bullets tear into the shapeshifter’s chest—the third goes wide—and the force is enough to throw him off course. He crashes into the edge of the living room doorway, rebounds off the frame, flies into the hallway, and collides with a side table next to the staircase. The table implodes under the weight, and the shapeshifter crumples to the floor atop a bundle of broken wooden pieces.

  The baseball bat strikes the floor right next to my head, then rolls off harmlessly into the kitchen.

  I lie on my back
in the foyer, heaving in air, attention stuck to the motionless form of the shapeshifter. I hit him center mass. But is that enough?

  The answer is apparently no.

  Because after only twelve seconds of inactivity, the shapeshifter starts to jerk like he’s having a seizure, and the bones beneath his skin crack and pop, rearranging themselves. His flesh ripples as if a horde of insects have infested his veins, and before my eyes, the appearance of Cooper Lee distorts into something I can only describe as Picasso in three dimensions.

  Gradually, a new persona coalesces from the grotesque amalgam: dark hair, a medium build, light brown eyes, faint stubble. A generic sort of man I could pass on the street every day and not notice.

  When the transformation stops, the shapeshifter rolls over onto his knees, and the bullets I buried in his chest fall off his tattered, ill-fitting shirt and clatter across the floor. As the creature stands, I also notice that the cuts on his face have healed, including the deep laceration from the glass shard. All that remains is drying blood.

  The shapeshifter grins. “Fun fact, Kinsey,” he says in a deep baritone, “when shapeshifters change form, all our injuries heal. A neat little quirk of the magic in our DNA.”

  He surges forward, and before I can move, kicks the gun out of my hand. It flies off back into the living room, too far away to recover. That same foot lands on my chest, compressing my ribs until the air evacuates from my lungs. I end up gasping, pinned to the floor, uselessly scrabbling at the shapeshifter’s ankle. He’s too strong for me to overcome with brute force, and as the pressure on my chest increases, second after second, all I can do is picture my ribcage shattering, bone shards tearing through my heart and lungs.

 

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