City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set

by Clara Coulson

  “Oh.” I tug at my bloodied bandages. “Yikes.”

  “That’s one way of putting it, Calvin.” Desmond shakes his head. “But it got worse from there.”

  “Instead of surrendering to Ella and me,” Riker says, “Feldman decided to run. As only a wizard can. He set his own house on fire, leaped out the hole in the window, and raced off down the street, veiling himself as he went. We gave chase, of course, but Feldman was invisible, and a marathon runner, so we lost track of him somewhere near the gate to Townsend Heights. And thus, the week-long manhunt for the murderous magic practitioner began.”

  “It took you a week to catch him?” I accidentally snag one of my torn stitches and bite back a cry, then proceed to fiddle with my splint instead. “He must’ve been one slippery bastard.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Ella chuckles. “We managed to track him down ten or twelve different times, in totally different areas of the city: bars, warehouses, squats. You name it, Patrick Feldman hid there at some point. And every time, he got away, until we finally caught the dirtbag at a public library. Or I should say Amy caught him by kicking over a ten-foot-high bookcase packed with about a thousand pounds of books.” She huffs. “We also had to pay for that damage, by the way.”

  “Sorry,” Amy mutters.

  “And then Feldman went to jail and all was well?” I guess.

  “Or so we thought.” Riker runs his finger down the front flap of the card in his lap. “This riddle unequivocally points to Feldman, and Feldman undeniably has a vendetta against this team, and me in particular, since I was the one who testified at his trial. Which means he’s out there, right now, plotting to blow up yet another building in Aurora, and apparently working high up in the hierarchy of the local faction of this ‘Methuselah Group.’ And that’s a bad place for Feldman to be, running free on the streets, wreaking havoc, given his propensity for evading arrest.”

  Ella peers back at Riker through the rearview mirror. “We need to catch him faster this time. Much faster.” She pulls the SUV onto Lombard Street, and the DSI office comes into view. “Problem is, Feldman led us to so many locations during the manhunt that we’ll have to review his case file and make a thorough list of every building in Aurora that might be the target of his next attack. Then, we’ll have to dispatch multiple agents to every single one of those locations to check for the wards and, if needed, evacuate at-risk civilians. At the same time, we’ll need more agents to go in search of Feldman himself.”

  Desmond says, “We don’t have enough available manpower for an operation of that scale.”

  “And that’s exactly what Feldman is counting on,” Amy sneers. “Bastard used the cover of the Methuselah Group’s attack against the vampires as a jumping-off point to launch his own personal attack against Team Riker. He knew our usual operations would be thrown out the window in the aftermath of the Wellington Center collapse, that the bulk of our forces would be reassigned to search and rescue.” She beats her fist against the dashboard. “He played us.”

  “And what’s even worse”—Riker slumps against the seat cushion—“is that he can keep planting these wards for the conceivable future. Because it could take weeks for DSI to resume normal operations, given the scale of the convention center disaster.”

  Ella drives the SUV into the garage and backs into the first available parking spot. “So what do we do, Nick? How do we tackle this one?”

  “I’m not quite sure yet,” Riker admits, rubbing his faint blond stubble. “But whatever we do, we have to do it quickly. Because according to this new riddle, Feldman’s only giving us one day to find the next target location. Since the vampire tampered with the strip club wards, we thankfully have more time than we otherwise would have had, but we’re still working on a tight deadline here. So we need to settle our butts in the task room and brainstorm like we have never brainstormed before.”

  “But first”—Ella parks the SUV and cuts the engine—“somebody needs to make a pit stop at the infirmary, because he tore his stitches punching a dangerous vampire spy in the face.”

  “Ella,” I say, “you can rag on me about my confrontation with that murderous motherfucker all you want, but I’m not going to apologize for slugging him in his arrogant mug.”

  Amy whirls around in her seat, nods at me in respect, and offers me a fist bump. “Here, here, Kinsey. To sucker-punching all the dicks in the world.”

  “Well, at least somebody’s on my side,” I say, though I decline the fist bump…because my hand hurts.

  We all climb out of the SUV and shuffle toward the garage entrance to the building, the conversation falling off as we each contemplate how to solve our manpower dilemma. I already have one idea, but I don’t want to blurt it out without thinking it through. Not only because Ella and Riker are likely wondering if I can think things through, given my behavior regarding Lucian Ardelean. But also because I’m unsure if the other party I’m considering calling in to help will be up to the task. I want to ask my “contact” about the feasibility of the idea first, instead of throwing it out to my team on a whim, only for it to fail before it gets off the ground.

  As we near the glass doors of the entrance, a flicker of movement draws my attention up from the concrete. Someone’s in the hallway, pacing back and forth behind the turnstiles, wringing his hands so furiously it’s a wonder his skin hasn’t fallen off. A few steps more, and his features consolidate into the familiar skinny blond that is archivist Cooper Lee. His face is the palest I’ve ever seen it, and his eyes look ready to spring a leak. Cooper is extremely upset.

  Ella notices this at the same time I do and pulls ahead of the group, walking briskly through the doors, badging through a turnstile, and swinging around to place both her hands on Cooper’s shoulders, one of the moves in her grab-bag of reassuring gestures. “Cooper, are you okay? Did something happen while we were gone?”

  Cooper, held in place by Ella’s hands, can’t keep pacing, so he resorts to full-body fidgeting instead. He glances at the rest of the team, does a double-take when he finds me among them—though he doesn’t display any of the anger he holds for my white lie earlier—and then babbles out a number of incoherent syllables before Ella shushes him.

  “Take a deep breath, Cooper,” she says, “and speak slowly.”

  Cooper follows her instructions, and the words spill from his lips. “Oh, god. Ella, I don’t know what to do. Someone broke in and destroyed everything. My copies. The originals. Months and months’ worth, from September all the way up to this morning. And the security agent Commissioner Bollinger called in checked the backups, and they’re gone too. Everything’s gone. Everything.”

  “Cooper, what are you talking about?” Ella rubs his arms. “What’s gone?”

  The archivist lets out a high-pitched whine that carries all the way down the hall. “The security cam files! They’ve all been erased.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The security office looks like a scene from a 1990s hacker movie. Computer monitors cover two walls, their usual two-by-two cam displays replaced with red warning messages that read FEED NOT FOUND. On the desk in the corner where the walls meet sit another two monitors atop their horizontal towers, and these monitors are overloaded with open windows, a dozen diagnostic apps used for keeping the office-wide security system up and running. The security agent, a middle-aged black man with a streak of gray curving around his closely shaven scalp, is frantically clicking through these various apps, on the hunt for vital information about who wrecked our cam files, and how.

  The man, named Jarvis, blows out a rough breath, and cranes his neck to look over his shoulder at where Team Riker is crowded in the doorway to the office. Flashing a grimace, he plucks off his wireframe glasses and says, “I don’t know what to tell you guys. I really don’t. Someone, somehow, bypassed the biometric locks and the multi-passcode sequence to access the camera records dating back almost seven months, which they then proceeded to delete in their entirety. They got the main files st
ored on our security servers, plus the backups—which require additional passcodes to access—and they wiped the partition I created for Archivist Lee, which contained a number of temp copies. Quite frankly, I didn’t think this sort of breach was possible with the system we had in place.”

  Riker motions for us to huddle closer in the doorway and mutters under his breath, “There’s no way in hell this was the work of an outside agent who briefly infiltrated the office to steal the fountain pen. This sabotage has been weeks, maybe months, in the making.”

  “The pen was an afterthought,” Ella says. “We coincidentally booked it into evidence around the same time the perp was preparing to erase the tapes, so they used the preplanned destruction of the files as a way to cover up the theft.” She stomps her boot on the floor. “The mole. It had to be the mole.”

  “They didn’t stop working with the rogues when Marcus kicked the bucket,” Amy spits, pacing around with a heavy gait outside the door. “They’re in all the way with the Methuselah Group. Their contacts run higher on the chain than the bottom feeders working the local plays.”

  “An awful revelation, for sure,” Desmond adds, back against the wall, “but I would like to point out that there’s one advantage to this: if we catch the mole and successfully interrogate them, we’ll be able to expose some of the major players in the Methuselah Group and disrupt the downward orders that have been so heavily impacting Aurora.”

  “Yeah, if.” I stuff my hands in my coat pockets, my focus half on my captain’s sour face and half on Cooper Lee, who’s almost shaking in his boots. And I can’t blame him for being afraid. “But we have a more immediate issue to resolve than potentially cracking the egg on the Methuselah hierarchy, guys. If the mole knew they needed to destroy the security files running all the way back to last fall, including Cooper’s copies—which were linked to Cooper’s in-office login ID—then that means they’ve been onto our internal investigation the whole time. They knew we were getting close to the answer. They knew Cooper was getting close. Which puts Cooper in danger.”

  Ella pinches the bridge of her nose. “Oh, god, you’re right.”

  Cooper clears his throat and says, “And I think the mole might’ve already made a run at me…by putting my name in the checkout log for the fountain pen.”

  I have the urge to smack myself. “The mole knew the vampires would try to recover the pen. So they put your name on the log to reroute the shapeshifter to you, knowing you’d get hurt. Or worse. So help me god, when I get my hands on that mole…”

  “Get in line, buddy,” Amy says. “I’m going to crack that fucker’s skull open.”

  “We’ll get there.” Riker turns back to Jarvis, who’s been watching us curiously for the past couple minutes, our conversation too muted for him to hear. “Restore what you can, if anything, and get the system up and running again so we’re not left sitting blind in the face of any subsequent breaches. Then write up a thorough report, send it directly to the commissioner, and copy me into the email. I’ll take it from there and discuss the issue with Commissioner Bollinger myself, as soon as I have a break in this current case.”

  Jarvis asks, “So this isn’t going to blow back on me, or the other security guys?”

  “Definitely not. This breach lies far outside your responsibility. There won’t be any reprimands. I promise.”

  “All right, then. I’ll leave it to you, Captain.” He spins back around in his chair and gets to work on restoring the system, typing away at the fancy ergonomic keyboard between the two monitors on the desk.

  Riker ushers us out of the doorway and closes the door. “As much as I’d love to look into the breach immediately, we’re still on the clock for Feldman’s next attack, so we can’t stall our investigation. Let’s pull his file and compile our list of probable attack sites, plot the logistics of the search, and try to reconcile our manpower problem. If we work efficiently, we might be in a position to dispatch recon orders by this evening.”

  Ella throws her hand up like a blocking bar in front of my chest. “While we’re doing that, Cal, you go to the infirmary and get your hand fixed. Again.” She points at Cooper with a commanding index finger. “You, make sure he gets there. No detours.”

  Cooper grips my arm like he’s my jailor, and we watch my team march off down the hall until they turn a corner and disappear from view. When they’re gone, Cooper gives me a judgmental look. “Why am I not surprised you got hurt again, huh?”

  I murmur, “Why am I not surprised you got kidnapped again?”

  Cooper elbows me. “Watch it.”

  “All right, all right.” I raise my hands in my best I surrender gesture. “To the infirmary with my injury-prone ass.”

  The only doctor working in the infirmary takes one look at me when I walk in the door, flushes an angry shade of pink, storms across the room, grabs me by the ear like I’m a child who broke a vase, drags me to a bed, and orders me to sit down under penalty of, I assume, being stabbed with a very sharp scalpel. She quickly strips off my bloody bandages, examines my ruined stitches, tsking at me the whole time, and then, before I can protest, jabs me with a syringe full of local anesthetic. I yelp, and Cooper, standing off to the side, snickers at me.

  Once the numbing agent zaps the feeling in my hand, the doctor removes the torn stitches, revealing the nasty, ragged gashes, cleans my wounds, and re-stitches the mess twice as fast as Navarro did at St. Bartholomew’s. After she applies fresh bandages, and is satisfied that my hand won’t rot off, she takes it upon herself to check the status of my other injuries. My nose is healing fine, my right arm is still secure in the splint, and all my other cuts and bruises are nonthreatening.

  “That’ll do for now, Detective Kinsey,” says the curt doctor. “Take it easy on those stitches this time, will you? If you keep pulling them out, you’ll scar, and those lacerations are so deep that a bad scar or two could impair the movement of your hand. Permanently.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I reply.

  She nods, sensing I’ve been chastised enough, and walks off to carry out whatever infirmary tasks she was managing before I arrived. I’m left sitting on the bed with Cooper hovering over me, arms crossed, an expectant gleam in his eye. And I realize he’s decided to take this opportunity—us, alone, not currently buried in casework—to badger an apology out of me for lying to him at my apartment.

  How could I have been so callous, I wonder, as to leave him all alone after he went through such a terrible ordeal?

  Of course, I already know the answer to that question.

  I allowed the trauma of Gloston Square to overtake the few ounces of sense in my stupid brain. Again. It’s been two years, and I’m still letting that one terrible night get the better of me. At some point, very soon, I will have to get past Mac’s death, or the next mistake I make while sidetracked by post-traumatic flashbacks will cost an innocent person, probably one of my teammates, their life. I can’t be a DSI elite detective if I can’t compartmentalize—that’s the golden rule for being a soldier fighting the good fight against encroaching supernatural threats.

  In silence, I stare at the floor, gathering my thoughts, before I meet Cooper’s half-angry, half-concerned gaze and say, “I’m really sorry about earlier, Coop. I shouldn’t have lied to you like that. If you want to punch me, or kick me, or smack me for being an ass, I’ll totally understand. You deserve to be mad at me, and—”

  “Stop rambling.” Cooper flicks my forehead. “You’re doing that thing where you blow your mistakes out of proportion and act like the whole wide world will collapse if Calvin Kinsey, Detective Supreme, steps on one more crack in the sidewalk.” His expression softens. “Look, I am mad at you for running off after blatantly lying to me, but from what I gathered of your team discussion about this Feldman guy, I’m guessing you left to handle something important relating to the convention center case. So if you’ll kindly explain what this important something was, I may downgrade my anger to annoyed status.”

&n
bsp; “Oh, right. We haven’t filled you in yet.” I rub the sore spot on my head where his fingernail bounced off. “Well, it’s kind of a long story…” And I don’t want to recount my meeting with Lucian Ardelean twice in one day, not while my feelings are still tied in such a massive, confusing knot. But Cooper stares at me, waiting for me to continue, and I know I can’t deny him the truth, not after I treated him so poorly. So I suck it up, wet my lips, and start from the beginning.

  By the time I roll back around to the part of the story where the club blows up, the light flush of irritation on Cooper’s cheeks has drained away, leaving him a deathly shade of pale again. When I finally stop talking, after I wrap up the tale with the identification of Feldman as the perpetrator, Cooper sinks down onto the bed beside me and takes my re-stitched hand in his own.

  “Oh, Cal,” he says, “I’m sorry you had to go through all that. It must’ve brought back some awful memories.”

  “Yeah, well, it was bound to go down eventually, a confrontation between Lucian Ardelean and me, given his spy role in all this ‘secret war’ business.” I grip my pants with my splinted hand, wrinkling the fabric. “It was always a matter of time before our paths crossed in relation to one of these ICM rogue cases, unbeknownst to me. And because it was unbeknownst to me, it caught me off guard, so off guard that I…I basically had a breakdown, Cooper, right there in my foyer. My brain shut off, went on the fritz. It was like I turned into a robot, following predetermined commands. And I’m not saying that’s an excuse for treating you the way I did, but I, uh, I…”