by Izzy Shows
“You shouldn’t ever change it.”
“No? I was thinking about dyeing it purple…maybe red…blue would be cool, huh?”
He glared at me before laughing, clearly not upset with me. “Providing you make your way back to silver, I can’t complain. It’s your hair to do with as you please.”
“Of course it is. No one owns me.”
He blinked, surprised, his eyebrows lifting. “I would never dare to insinuate that.”
I smile at him. “I know. Just making sure you knew where things stood.”
“Trust me. I was never under the impression that you could be caged—not that I would want to. Well…” He winked at me.
“Act, you are not a gentleman.” I laughed.
“Darling, I never claimed to be. You don’t inspire gentlemanly thoughts,” he said, his voice taking on that husky note again that made me blush.
“Somehow, I don’t think I ever have.” I didn’t mean the same thing he did, though. If he picked up on that, he didn’t acknowledge it.
We walked in companionable silence for a few moments, before he spoke up again.
“So, different topic. Why is it, that you trust me to fix you up all the time, but you never trust me with why I’m sewing your pieces back together?”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek. I knew we were going to reach this stage of the evening, but even so, I’d been hoping it wouldn’t come. Regardless of the touchy subject, it had been a nice evening thus far, and I didn’t want it to end in an argument.
“Are you saying you don’t enjoy stitching me up? I’d think you rather enjoy the view.” I edged around the question with a joke.
“Oh, I am not complaining about that, believe me,” he said with another wink. “And I’m not saying I’ll stop offering my services if you refuse to tell me what’s going on. But I can’t help but feel left out of the loop. Obviously, Finn knows what’s going on, he’s the one who brought you to me, and it’s almost like the two of you speak another language.”
“I’m sorry, Shawn, but I can’t tell you about it. I’m basically Batman,” I said, grinning. “I have to save the city from the shadows, or you know. Maybe I’m in a secret fight club, and I just enjoy getting pummelled.”
“Nah, I think you’re a little more Ironman. You’ve got too much personality to be Batman, and Ironman’s way cooler. Batman’s a bloody arsehole.”
I laughed at that, glad that he was letting the conversation slide away.
He slowed to a stop, and I did too after a second, not having realised he’d stopped at first. I took the step or two it took to get back to being beside him. “What?”
He was quiet, his eyes having drifted down to my lips, and I could hear that his breathing had deepened. My own breath hitched, heart starting to beat a little faster. He bridged the distance between the two of us, reaching out with one hand to grasp my own.
Some part of me knew that I needed to stop, pull away, because this wasn’t a good idea. Getting involved with Shawn was dangerous, the more that I knew him, cared about him, the more I would want to tell him about me. And that would open him up to a world he didn’t need to be a part of. And that was ignoring the fact that there was a high likelihood that if we were to become involved he could become a target for anyone looking to control me.
It just wasn’t a good idea.
I kept telling myself that even as he leaned in, his lips a hairsbreadth above mine.
“I’d very much like to kiss you,” he whispered, and I could almost feel the control he was exercising to wait and see what I would say.
The tension was palpable between us, and I closed my eyes as I fought to gain my own control. Because I knew that this was a bad idea, no matter how much I wanted to indulge. After what felt like an age, I finally opened my eyes and stepped away from him.
“I’m sorry, Shawn, I just…I can’t,” I said at last. “It’s not a good idea.”
He nodded, taking a step back himself. “I’m not looking for anything you aren’t ready to give, you know. It won’t hurt my feelings either way. I just want you to know that, if you ever change your mind.”
I tried to smile, but it didn’t come out quite right. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
18
The next morning, I was still a little caught up in my thoughts from the previous night, but I didn’t have time to analyse them anymore than I had already done. I’d made my decision and I needed to stick to it. And right now, I had more important things to worry about—like Emma, currently sitting on my couch. There had been so many people in and out of this house the past few days, it was exhausting. When this was over, I wanted to take a vacation. Just one weekend all to myself. Fat chance that was going to happen, though.
Bad guys don’t take vacations, the people who squash them don’t get to either.
I’d invited Emma over so that we could go over the incident together, as Finn had wanted.
We were not getting far.
“Emma, you have to remember at least something about the night,” I said, managing not to huff out the exasperated sigh that was dying to cross my lips.
“No, I don’t,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t remember any of it. There was a man, and he attacked me, I suppose he was looking for money, and you stopped him. That’s all I remember.”
I stared at her, wanting to throttle her. She had already blocked out most of what had happened apparently, having made up her own version of events to make herself feel more comfortable. If I wasn’t working an actual case related to this, I would have been overjoyed to hear this. It meant she wasn’t going to go talking about the supernatural and everything that went along with it, she wasn’t going to expose the community. That was a good thing, but right now I needed her to dig up some of the actual information from the evening and help me out.
“No, that isn’t what happened, Emma. You were attacked by a vampire. He tried to feed on you. I killed him. I need to know how he found you, how you met him, how he approached you.” I was so close to snapping at her it wasn’t even funny.
“You sound ridiculous. A vampire? No, that’s not a part of reality.” She laughed nervously, glancing away from me and scratching idly at her neck.
I ground my teeth together, silently chanting, I will not snap, I will not snap, I will not snap.
“OK. Fine. You don’t want to admit what happened to you, that’s fine. That’s up to you. How did he approach you?” I switched tactics.
“Oh, um…” Her scratching intensified, and she was darting looks around the room. Uncomfortable, not wanting to be here or having this conversation. I could sympathise, I didn’t want to be with her any more than she with me. I wanted to get the rest of this information out of her and move on, and I was thankful that Finn had allowed me to do this instead of dragging her into the station—I might be impatient, but I didn’t want to think about how hard he would have been on her.
“I think, uh…I think maybe I met him in the bar,” she said at last.
I quirked an eyebrow, squinting my eyes at her. “Met him at a bar? But you think it was a random mugging?”
“Well, I mean, obviously, he picked me out of a crowded bar as an easy mark. I was spending a bit of money…”
I sighed. “OK, let’s say that’s what happened then. You met him at a bar, what was he like?”
“Oh, he was charming,” she said, seeming to relax now. “He was so nice to me, and he said all the right things, I thought he was a perfect gentleman. I don’t know why he had to turn out to be such a tosser, but I hope he learned his lesson when you beat him up.”
Killed him. I wanted to interject with that, but I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere, so I held my tongue.
“Charming, good,” I said, jotting it down in my notebook. It wasn’t a lot of help, it was exactly what I had expected. “What else?”
“Hm. Well, as charming as he was, he was a little hurried. He wanted to get out of there, kept bringing it up after I igno
red him a few times, I was trying to be polite.”
“Why did you leave with him if he was pushy?” I asked, cringing inwardly at the way it sounded. It wasn’t her fault what had happened to her, and I didn’t want her to think that…that I thought she was. “I don’t mean to imply anything; I just want to know what he said to convince you to leave.”
“No, it’s OK, I understand,” she said, laughing graciously. “It’s nothing amazing. He just, he looked deep into my eyes, it was like I was falling into those eyes…and he asked me to leave with him. No, wait,”—She frowned—“he told me I wanted to leave with him. And he was right, I wanted to. But that’s strange…I didn’t want to leave with him before that, I was starting to feel weird and wanted to go back to my friends…” She started to chew on her lip.
Mind compulsion. I wrote it down, nodding along. So, his charm hadn’t worked on her and he’d gone straight to the heavy-handed approach. That was risky, so he must have been extraordinarily hungry. That was interesting. I jotted that into the margin.
“Was anything else weird, out of the ordinary, like that?” I asked.
“I-I don’t think so,” she stuttered, and now she looked concerned. A part of me hated that I was robbing her of the innocent story she had crafted for herself, but a larger part of me didn’t care. It was honestly a little disgusting the way humanity had such a horrid habit of ignoring every obvious truth in front of them just because it made them more comfortable to do so.
“Can I go now?” she asked. “I appreciate that you wanted to get my story down for the police without having to bring me in, that would have been awful, but I just want to go now.”
“Yeah, I think you’ve told me everything you can. I’m sorry you had to go through that, Emma,” I said, meaning every bit of it. I wish the vampire had never attacked her. “I hope you’ll be able to get past it now.”
Because I won’t be around to keep reminding you of the truth.
“Thanks,” she said, flashing a weak smile at me. “I appreciate what you’re doing. Truly…thank you for saving me.”
“Hey, you can repay me by staying safe, OK?” I smiled back at her, but my smile was sad.
She couldn’t keep herself safe from vampires.
I let her out of the house, and my cell phone promptly rang. I snatched it off the table.
“What?” I barked.
“We’ve got another murder,” Finn said.
I sighed. How had I known it’d be him? “Fuck. OK. Where?”
“One of the industrial estates. I’ll text you the address.”
“I’ll see you there.”
19
It was the same place where I’d met Aidan. I stepped out of the car with shaky hands, forcing myself to take one breath after another. I’d worn my gear, having become anxious after the attacks I’d been subject to the past few days, but it afforded me little comfort. I had to stay focused. It was hard, harder than I had expected it to be—not that I’d thought about it recently. I hadn’t been here in a year and a half, since I’d met Aidan. Hadn’t been able to bring myself to walk these steps again, and I hadn’t recognised the address when Finn had given it to me.
How was I supposed to do this? Look at a murder scene when all I could see in my head was Aidan storming in and saving my life?
I never thanked him for that. How could I not have thanked him for that?
Pain squeezed my heart like a vice.
His footsteps hit the concrete floor, commanding silence with every foot fall. The adrenaline was spiking my heart to painful levels, and I didn’t know where I was going to go or how I was going to get out of there. My ankles burned as if an actual fire had been lit on them from the way my legs had almost been torn out when the wind had come and knocked me to the floor. The footsteps seemed to coincide with every painful lurch of my heart.
I couldn’t breathe. I needed to draw a breath, needed to get myself under control again. How did I do that again?
Finally, a breath was pulled into my burning lungs, and the stars began to fade from my vision. I should get up. Instead I left my forehead resting against the ground, hearing the echo of his footsteps and not knowing if this was another threat. High likelihood that he was a threat, the wind had almost ripped me to pieces, and he would just continue to try and finish the job.
Try being the operative word. I had no intention of dying.
“I always had a soft spot for a damsel in distress.”
The memory let me go, the vivid scene fading from my mind as quickly as it had come.
I wanted to throw up. It wasn’t fair, for me to be here and for him to be gone. It should have been the other way around. He was the experienced Wizard; I was the new kid on the block that had cheated on the test. If I could go back and do it differently, find a way to get him away from Tyburn Tree alive even if it meant that I had to stay back and die, I would do it in a heartbeat. He was much better suited to this job than I was, and I knew that he would have found a better replacement, someone to train, before he’d passed.
It was hard to remember that no matter what, he would have died anyway. Not then, not there, and not like that. And that was what mattered to me.
“Blair? I know this is hard, but I need you to focus.” Finn’s voice brought me back to reality, grounded me.
I tightened my hands into fists, digging my nails into my palms so that the pain would sharpen my mind.
“I’m fine. I should be able to handle this,” I said. It wasn’t a lie—I should be able to handle this, but I wasn’t. I was five seconds away from having a break down at any given moment, and I had to hold myself together or Finn would be so disappointed in me.
“It’s OK to hurt, Blair.” His voice was soft, cautious, careful. He knew that I was breaking.
I shook my head. “Not here, not now.” I grimaced, hearing the echo of that compared to the thoughts I’d just been having. I could break when I was at home and in front of his grave, when my tears could come freely and no one would see me. That was when I would break, not at a crime scene.
It was a different warehouse that we walked into, thank the Gods, but the murder scene was just as grotesque as the first one had been—yet made all the worse by the fact that it was two teenagers. Kids, basically. I had been able to prepare myself for the physical desecration, but I hadn’t had the mental preparation for seeing young people torn to pieces like this.
“Two victims, both black. Young, not yet of age, most likely. Female wearing a dress, black, knee length. Male wearing jeans and a button-down shirt.” Finn rattled off the descriptions for the rest of his team to write down. I was just standing there, gaping at the bodies, trying to pull myself together.
He stepped forward, kneeling in front of the boy. “No handbag on the girl, we’ll have to look through missing persons to try and identify her.” He reached into the boy’s pockets. “Age seventeen, name Brian Roberts. We can probably contact his family and get an idea as to who the girl is.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, finally finding my voice.
“Why not?”
“Well, it looks like they were meeting each other here, which would indicate that their relationship is a secret. They wouldn’t need to come out to a warehouse if their relationship was approved, they would just sneak around in a car or at a movie or something. A warehouse, that’s a secret.”
“Huh,” Alex grunted. “That was good.”
I looked over my shoulder at him. “I do know what I’m doing, thank you very much. Just because you don’t believe in what I do doesn’t mean you have to doubt my intelligence.”
“Anyone who believes what you can do has to be mad, but sure. Whatever.”
“I’m not crazy,” Krista said, glaring at him. “And I believe her. I saw what she did at the last scene, she knows what she’s doing. I trust her. You should lay off.”
The boys just rolled their eyes at her, and she sent me a sympathetic look. I suppose the girls had to stick together when
surrounded by so much testosterone. I gave her an easy smile, not feeling the kinship, but there was no sense in pushing away someone who was trying to connect with me.
Look at me, I can learn.
“Blair?”
I shook my head as soon as Finn asked, adamant this time. I wasn’t going to touch their heads, wasn’t going to connect with either of them and see the brutality of their last moments on Earth. It was an invasion of privacy, and doing it once had drained the shit out of me. I wasn’t going to.
“I can’t do that again. It won’t tell us anything, we were only confirming what was going on last time.”
“It will. It’ll tell us if it’s the same guy or someone new.”
“What does that matter? We already know that we’re dealing with more than one attacker. I already confirmed that for you. Why am I here?” I snapped at him, taking a step back. I knew that I was being defensive, but I didn’t want to be there. Not surrounded by all the memories of Aidan, not being asked to enact spell work in the first place that I had seen it happen.
“Incendium,” The man breathed the word with a vicious smile on his face. He was enjoying whatever it was he was doing.
I saw the fire leap from the staff, sliding across the ground like serpents that had set their eyes on their next victim. They were trained on the goons who had attacked me, dead set on killing them. It was terrifying to behold, fire coming from a staff as if by magic. How had he done that? What trick was this? He must have some sort of mechanism in the staff that released gasoline and ignited it at the same time—but that wouldn’t account for the way the fire moved, the way it curved to follow the goons whenever they moved this way or that.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. How could I?
I didn’t want to believe, because then I’d have to admit that this stranger that had swooped in and somehow saved me, this stranger was a threat greater than any other I had known.
I blinked and the memory was gone. My shoulders sagged with the weight of the sadness that overtook me, remembering the magic that I had seen for the first time. Aidan had been powerful and impressive, just as he’d been throughout the weekend I had known him. How had it only been a weekend? It felt like I’d known him for a lifetime. Too short of a lifetime, too quickly had he been taken from me, and just when I’d needed him the most.