Diego drew a small silver incense burner from his bag. He lit the sage bundle with a spell, blew out the flame so the sage smoldered rather than burned, dropped it into the burner and closed the cap. He started walking around my house, striding along the inside perimeters of every room, chanting low.
I had mixed feelings about all of this. I didn’t like people in my house, but Diego had been here the day he asked me to help find Brad’s killer and was here now doing me a kindness. I thought briefly that the downstairs bathroom probably could use a clean before he walked into it but decided I couldn’t worry about that.
I heard his steps on the stairs and felt a pang, not wanting him in my bedroom—the bed unmade, and books strewn around, not to mention the coffee cup with the dregs of this morning’s brew on the bedside table—but that was a silly worry too.
He came back down, turned on the kitchen faucet and dowsed what little stub of sage was left. Then, just as I’d thought, he repeated the whole ritual with sweet grass, right down to using water to end fire.
He settled into a chair at the kitchen table like he’d been here a hundred times before. “I’ll take that beer now.”
I opened the fridge and pulled out a beer for him thinking it was funny that I felt safer and calmer since Diego had done his smudge-the-house-and-set-the-wards thing. I wasn’t quite sure if it was the rituals or his physical presence in my kitchen that did it. Maybe I should have company more often.
“Have you eaten?” I said as I handed him the Corona and a slice of lime. The lime tree in my yard fruited most of the year and I usually kept a cut supply in a small Tupperware bowl in my refrigerator. Beer without lime was an abomination as far as I was concerned. “I could do chicken burritos.”
“That would be great,” he said. “Thanks.”
I had half a roasted chicken in the fridge that I set about shredding. I grated cheese and lettuce, cut tomatoes, opened and drained a can of olives. All the time I worked, Diego watched me with that same relaxed, we’ve-done-this-a-hundred-times-before attitude he’d had since he walked in.
“When did you decide to become a wizard?” I asked just to break up the silence. He may have been relaxed but I wasn’t used to having people other than my parents around, much less to making dinner for a man I hardly knew.
He set his bottle on the table. “It was never a decision. Wizarding—is that a word?—is the family business. I’m tenth generation. I started learning the trade when I was five.”
Not knowing how hungry he was, I put four tortillas in the warmer.
“What about you?” he said before I could ask more follow-up questions. “When did you first know you were psychic?”
I lined up the plates with the various burrito components along an oak sideboard that had been in my family since the 1930s.
“I can’t remember ever not knowing. I guess my family is a bit like yours. Various forms of magic show up in every generation.”
I took the tortillas out of the warmer and set them on a plate on the sideboard as well.
“This is make your own.”
Diego stood, took a plate, and started building a giant burrito. I followed, building a much smaller one.
“Is everyone in your family psychic?” he asked after he’d wolfed down half of the burrito.
“Not everyone. Each generation seems to get their own gifts. My great-great-grandmother Audrey was the first one with obvious magic. She could find most anything. She was so good at finding lost people that the newspapers dubbed her ‘The Bloodhound of Hermosa Beach.’” I laughed. “Not a very flattering designation.”
“When was this?” he said.
“Late 1920s,” I said. “Her daughter, Cassie, so the family lore goes, saved her brother from a sea goblin that had kidnapped him. She never married, but—again, family lore—they say her daughter was fathered by a selkie.” I carried my plate to the table. “In my family, when a baby is born the parents gloss over the counting of fingers and toes and check for webbing in between them instead—a legacy from the selkie.”
Diego used a paper towel I’d given him to wipe his mouth. “Interesting family you have.”
“Um,” I said.
I’d never told anyone the full history of my family. But if anyone wasn’t going to laugh at it, surely it was someone who claimed to be a tenth-generation wizard.
“Go on,” he said. “Who came after Cassie?”
I smiled. “Cassie and Pax—the selkie—had one daughter, Marissa. She was the first full-blown psychic, with magic inherited from both sides of the family. It was said she was also a shape-shifter. Not a selkie, she didn’t become a seal, but she could turn herself into a crow to fly, a mouse to scurry away from danger, a horse to run fast. Evidently, she had to scurry away more than a few times because she had the habit of telling people what was in their minds. Some folks weren’t too happy about that.”
Diego smiled. “I’m guessing you learned from that lesson.”
“I suppose,” I said. “And experience. Once, when I was nine or ten, and already as tall as I am now, I was in the market with my mother. A tiny lady was trying to figure out how to reach something on the top shelf. Without her saying a word or even looking in the item’s direction, I plucked down what she wanted and handed it to her. She was freaked out and not happy to have been given the very thing she wanted without her even asking for help. Weird, huh? I never did that again.”
He laughed lightly. I had the feeling he’d had similar experiences with unappreciated magic when he was young.
“Marissa was what, your grandmother?”
I realized now there had only been girl babies born since Cassie and Pax, and all of them only children. I wondered why that was.
“Marissa married Sam Townsend,” I said, “an attorney, and they had my mother, Katrina. Mom got healing ability and is a well-known heart surgeon. Dad builds low-cost housing and isn’t magical at all, except for being a wonderful person. They do a lot of overseas charity work and are gone more than they’re here. When they’re home, they live in the same house downtown that Charles Goodlight built for Audrey in 1912.”
“All of them in service to the community, one way or another,” he said.
I hadn’t ever thought about that either, but he was right. “Well, maybe not Marissa the shape-shifter. She seems to have blurted out whatever she read in someone’s mind, helpful or not. Her habit was the catalyst for more than one divorce and at least three politicians going to jail.”
“Sounds like service to the community to me,” Diego said.
I laughed, but after that it seemed we’d run out of conversation. We sat at the table and ate, silence and expectation humming in the air. I felt him wondering what it would be like to kiss me and his practical mind telling him it was a bad idea and likely I wasn’t interested anyway.
I wondered if he felt the same conflicting feelings from me? I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t attracted to him. Something about him amused me, made me want to know more. But we’d be working together until Brad’s killer was discovered and caught. Office romances were never a good idea.
Besides, I wasn’t the casual one-night-stand sort and it would never work long-term between us. What I felt from Diego was he liked women, liked sex, and fervently didn’t like the idea of being partnered.
Well, then, I thought, it seems we’re two of a kind in a lot of ways.
For me, hermiting was a survival tactic as much as anything else. Being the kind of empathic psychic I was, meant knowing way too much about anyone I was intimate with. Being the person I was, I didn’t have much interest in being the object of expectations I couldn’t escape knowing about. It was way too much pressure.
Diego glanced at his very expensive-looking watch.
“Thanks for dinner. I’ll smudge your property lines and put on some extra wards on my way out.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate your help.”
At the door there was another kiss-and-see-w
hat-happens-or-just-leave moment.
Diego left.
5
In the morning, I realized the fridge was empty of anything worth eating, unless breakfast was going to be butter, a limp stalk of celery, and a glass of almond milk. No amount of holding the door open and staring at the interior shelves was going to make food suddenly appear. Probably I shouldn’t have used up nearly everything in the house making last night’s dinner. I thought briefly about going out for breakfast and decided against it. Decided against going to the store, too. Takeaway it was, then.
Mickey’s Deli was only a couple of blocks from my house and they had great sub sandwiches. A sub for breakfast may seem odd, but as my mother says, ‘Your stomach doesn’t know what time it is.’
Mid-October at the beach often meant cool mornings, warm days, and chilly nights. I stripped off the sweatshirt I’d put on first thing this morning while it was cold, revealing the navy-blue tank top I had on underneath. I slipped into a pair of flip-flops, grabbed my purse at the door—and halted.
I didn’t know if the wards Diego had put on would let me go in and out of the house freely or if they needed to be taken down and put back up each time. He’d said he’d come by to pick me up at eleven and take me to the office—Fridays were evidently late starts. My ‘I can drive myself, thanks’, had been ignored.
Maybe he planned to take the wards down when he came to get me and then put them back up. He’d do the same when he brought me home. I didn’t like the idea of being more or less locked into my house until he showed up. I didn’t really know him, but my instincts said he wasn’t the type to basically imprison someone to keep them safe.
I relaxed and let my inner eyes survey the wards. They were pretty, like little sparkling lights domed over my property. They also looked like the kind I could traverse without needing a spell. I walked out the door and locked it behind me.
There weren’t a lot of people on the Strand as I headed toward Second Street. I loved autumn for this—good California weather, the kids back in school, the tourists, summer surfers, and frat boys back home, and the Strand a wide-open concrete promenade mostly for locals. The ocean was a murmuring backdrop as I made my way, thinking about what kind of sub to get for breakfast.
Something about a group of young men heading toward me made the back of my neck prickle. I’m not one of those kick-ass girls who knows three types of martial arts and carries guns and knives at all times. There was a 9 mm Smith & Wesson Shield in my purse, but my preferred way of dealing with danger was to get out of the way.
I sent my psychic senses out toward the five men. Each one had spotted me, and a couple thought I was cute, but that was it. No lurking evil intentions. But the prickle at the back of my neck didn’t go away.
I felt for the source and turned my gaze westward, across the low concrete wall that separated the Strand from the beach. A man in his thirties, I guessed him to be, wearing a wet suit and carrying a surfboard was standing stock still, staring at me. Our eyes met. He didn’t look away. Neither did I.
A sudden loud roaring filled my ears. I wobbled slightly, my knees weakening as nausea rose in me. For a brief moment I saw Brad stand beside the surfer, and then the dead man was gone—the kind of thing that you’d think you’d imagined if you didn’t know better.
I knew better. I knew this was the man, Brad’s killer. I stared at him hard, memorizing his features.
Except his features were changing. He’d been tallish and buff, his hair a sandy color, his skin darkened by the sun. Now he was shorter with a bit of a belly pushing at the front of his wetsuit and his hair was as black as oil. He grinned and walked toward me. I stood my ground, even when he stepped onto the Strand and was only feet away. He gave a little half-nod as he passed, as though he knew me. As though he wanted to make sure I saw him.
He wasn’t here to hurt me though. Not today. I felt that clearly enough. I watched his back until he was a good twenty feet ahead of me and then followed. He turned up Fourth Place to Hermosa Avenue and stowed his board in the back of a dark blue Chevy Tahoe parked beside a meter. I took out my phone and typed the license plate number into Notes. He got in the car and drove off without so much as a glance back, but I was sure he’d known I was there. That he’d wanted me to follow him and see him drive away.
My mother is a surgeon, but she’s also a community healer. I must have been about five or six when an injured shape-shifter came to our door asking her for help. She was always open to helping werewolves, werebears, and the like, and it wasn’t unusual to find them at her office after-hours in either their human or animal form.
But flat-out base-shifters were not welcome, not since Audrey and Cassie’s day, when a base-shifting sea goblin had kidnapped James Goodlight when he was only four. Werewolves and the like were fundamentally human, but a base-shifter was fundamentally other.
It was almost as if the revulsion I felt watching the base-shifter change his face and body right in front of me was encoded in my DNA. It coursed in my blood right alongside whatever it was that gave every woman in my family for generations a different brand of magical ability.
Knowing that he had murdered Brad doubled the revulsion I felt.
Doubled.
I still had that strange sense of doubling with this man—more than just the base-shifter thing. If I hadn’t been so stunned at running into him practically in my front yard and then totally pissed at his ‘fuck you’ attitude, I would have taken a good look at him with my inner eyes.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda.
Nothing I could do about it now.
I heaved out a sigh and walked the short distance to Mickey’s Deli.
The kid behind the counter was new. I was in Mickey’s often enough to know everyone who worked there at least by sight, if not by name. I ordered a large sauce and cheese and pondered while I watched the kid make it. A large sauce and cheese submarine sandwich wasn’t the healthiest thing—usually I got the vegetarian deluxe—but it fit my mood.
What was the doubling thing about? Why would a base-shifter kill Brad? Not that murders by shifters were any more, or less, common than murders by normal humans and probably happened for much the same reasons—anger, jealousy, and needs that weren’t met.
Brad and the shifter obviously had known each other well enough to break into the rink together as a lark. How had Brad become friends with a base-shifter and why would his friend kill him? Why kill him like that—hockey stick in the belly, hockey skate blade across his throat. That was seriously personal. I hadn’t known Brad well, but he didn’t seem the type to get crossways with a shifter.
True, he had interned at Danyon and Peet, but if he’d met his killer through that connection, wouldn’t Diego have known the shifter as well? And if Diego knew that a base-shifter and Brad were friends, wouldn’t his suspicions have turned immediately in that direction?
The new kid wrapped my sandwich in white paper, put it in a bag, and held it out to me. I thanked him, paid, and walked home, still asking questions in my mind and not coming up with any answers.
* * *
Diego maneuvered his dark-blue Audi coupe through the traffic on Pacific Coast Highway so smoothly that I thought he must have been helping things along. Every time he wanted to change lanes a hole in traffic instantly appeared. We hadn’t hit a red light once.
I sent my psychic senses out to feel for magic.
Oh yeah. He was using it.
I turned on my inner eyes and dug around in his thoughts enough to know that he was trying to impress me. Not trying too hard, just a little something to show what he could do. He was so nonchalant about it, if I hadn’t taken a psychic peek I’d never have known. I looked away and smiled. I mean really, how often does a girl have a guy smooth out traffic just to impress her?
My good feeling faded. I had to tell him, and now seemed as good—or bad—a time as any.
“I saw Brad’s killer this morning,” I said.
Other than his hands tighte
ning slightly on the wheel no one could have seen that the news affected him at all.
I plunged on with the tale. “I went out to get something to eat. I felt him almost as soon as I stepped out the door.”
“You’re sure it was him?”
“Positive. He might as well have had a flashing neon sign over his head that said murderer.”
Diego grunted and slowed for a stop sign. The pedestrians on the corner motioned for him to go on through.
“So now we know what the killer looks like,” he said as he accelerated. “All we have to do is put a name to the face.”
“It’s not that easy,” I said. “He’s a base-shifter. I watched him go from a tall, sandy-haired man to short with a paunch right in front of me.”
His hands tightened on the wheel again, more this time.
“The good news is,” I said, “I’m pretty sure I caught his signature.”
“Signature?”
“Every living thing has its own signature, the frequency they vibrate to. Once I home in on it, I can follow a fresh trail pretty easily, like a hunter follows bear tracks. Older trails are harder. After a day or two, the trail is impossible to follow.”
Diego glanced over at me. “I’ve never heard of that.”
“Really?” I said, surprised.
“Can you teach me to do it?” he said. “It sounds like a good tool for someone in my line of work.”
I knew the reason I could do it was my psychic ability. Somehow, I assumed a wizard private investigator would have a similar skill.
“I can try. But can’t you just make a spell or something to do the same thing?”
Diego shook his head. “I can see where someone is if I have something of theirs, but if they leave that place I can’t follow them. I’d have to keep casting new spells until they’ve stopped and stayed somewhere again.”
For all that I’d paid close attention to Diego’s magical driving, I hadn’t paid attention to where we were going. We’d left the beach area and were headed inland.
Ice Cold Death Page 4