But Hatter surprised me by turning onto the path and heading down the winding dirt trail instead. He paused and looked back at me.
“You coming, Detective?” he asked with a sly grin.
I glanced at the pub one last time before turning and jogging to catch up with him. “Of course I am.”
The forest was thick with night. The chirping of insects was a low hum. Ancient, gnarled trees with massive limbs and exposed roots twisted through the forest to form a giant green labyrinth. I stepped up and around them as best I could, but my boots continually sank deep into the surprisingly swampy marsh beneath. I had to jiggle my heels each time I stepped out of it. Soon, all I heard was the sucking squish of our walking and our steady breaths.
“Rained the past few nights. Wasn’t this bad when we were here last. But the path up ahead should be dry. Tree boughs are tight enough that it should have kept out most of the rain.”
I wasn’t sure if his words were prophetic or whether he’d had a vision, but he was right. Soon enough, we were out of the swamp and on terra firma once more. I jiggled my foot.
“Thank the goddess,” I muttered beneath my breath. I might be a water elemental, but even I had my limits when it came to tramping through muck. I wrinkled my nose as I thought about how badly I’d need a bath when I got back home for the night.
I was rather surprised, though, that as meticulously groomed as Constable Hatter was, he seemed far less bothered by the mud than I.
I was dragging my muddy boot along an upraised root to clean it when I caught the scent of something very familiar. I went immediately still and sniffed, dragging air deeper into my lungs, forgetting all about the muddy boots.
Hatter, keenly aware of his surroundings, paused just a moment later and looked back at me with a curious frown on his face.
“What?” he asked, as though aware of my unnatural stillness.
Holding up my hand, I frowned hard as I tiptoed softly by him, keeping to the path laid out by MICE—a glowing trail of luminescent orange mushroom caps that marked a clean trail for crime scene investigators to walk through. I ignored many of the tiny orange flags that’d been shoved through the muddy soil to mark spots of interest for further investigation and continued to let my nose lead me.
“Detective Elle?” Hatter whispered more sharply this time, but again, I held up my hand and shook my head.
“Something. Something,” I mumbled, following the scent trail like a bloodhound would.
I walked outside of the obvious area where the body cast had been sprayed in white, moving several yards deeper into the woods, following my nose toward the source of the water I smelled.
Hatter stayed by my side, saying nothing, for which I was grateful.
“This could be nothing,” I mumbled beneath my breath as I started trotting to my left, where the sulfuric stench became more overwhelming.
“What could?”
I glanced over at him, noting that his blue eye was lit up like a firecracker and burning like flame in the night. I vaguely wondered if he was seeing a vision, but I was like a dogfish with a bone.
“Where’s the water?” I muttered. “Where’s the water?”
“Water?” he repeated. “I—we did not see any.”
The smell was punching me in the olfactory senses. I knew it was here somewhere. I jumped through a screen of heavy shrubbery, wincing at the twigs that cut into my arms.
“Detective,” he said with a surprised grunt.
I looked ahead and then stopped moving. Shimmering like black ink in the moonlight was a deep pool of natural spring water bubbling up from the earth. The surface of the water was a scummy green, which I ignored. I sniffed again and then grinned, yanking off my shirt with a hard jerk.
“Detective?” Hatter asked questioningly.
“Tell me, Maddox.” I smirked. “Did anyone bother to dredge the pools around here?”
This wasn’t the only body of water around, but it was the only one of interest to me. I smelled sulfides. Sulfides that, once again, didn’t belong to the flora and fauna in this part of the Grimm universe. It was a type of sulfide that belonged to mountainous sulfur springs only. So what the hells was it doing here? Two separate realms, but the same sulfides? That wasn’t a coincidence, surely.
As I undid the button of my pants and slid the leather down my athletic legs, I was shivering, not from fright but from near orgasmic excitement. There were few things in life better than a swim into the unknown.
Hatter’s eyes were hot brands as they traveled the length of my near-naked form unashamedly. The last thing I had to take off was my shirt. I didn’t want to. The magick of my waters was imbued within the fabric itself. But I also couldn’t afford to walk around Grimm nude until my shirt air-dried. Mixing my water with any other would dampen its effect and make it difficult to breathe. I couldn’t contaminate my waters and survive. Father had thought of almost everything when he’d exiled me.
With a grunt of determination, I undid the buttons one by one. I could feel the weakening of my waters already. The shirt had a day of magick left to it. I’d need to return to my waters before day’s end tomorrow. I dreaded the thought of depending solely on the trapped water inside my shell.
The teal shirt fluttered to the ground like feathers at my feet. Already, I felt weaker. My breaths turned shallow, and I had to stave off the panic that came anytime I felt myself bereft of my waters. But I still had my shell, and though its magick wasn’t nearly as strong as that of the sprite’s work, it would do well enough.
“I take it by your state of undress that you plan to swim, siren.” Hatter’s words rippled like hot velvet.
I laughed. “Does that bother you, Constable?”
“Oh, so now I’m Constable again, am I? I thought we moved beyond that back at my quarters. Or were you simply teasing me as a siren is often wont to do?” he asked not with anger, but with a teasing lilt.
Hatter knew far too much about my species. I should hate him for it. And yet, I completely didn’t. Choosing to ignore his not-so-subtle dig at me, I took a running leap and dove square into the center of the deep but narrow pool.
The moment my flesh touched water, the sizzle of my transformation took over, and I sighed with relief. This might not be my water, but the feel of its liquid coolness was like a drug to my overheated senses.
Focused on the task at hand, I swished my tail, swimming powerfully toward the source of the scent buried deep below the earth. Again, I was overcome by the familiarity of the slightly sulfurous yet peaty smell.
The pool was deeper than I’d first imagined, taking me many leagues down as I continued to inhale and taste the waters on my gills and tongue. Again, just as before, the sulfides were naught but a trace element, so minor that they could only have been detected by a water elemental.
Then another odor caught my attention. Something sharp, and metallic. Not blood necessarily, but it could be.
It was dark as pitch down here and nearly impossible for me to see anything despite my ability to see in near dark. But that did not deter me. Most of the universes’ waters were so black that we often swam blind.
Frowning, I pushed my muscles harder as I allowed my instinctive nature to guide me. The pool had no life in it, no plants or animals. It was as dead as the Sea of Balam in the eastern realms of Grimm. Completely lifeless. The natural essence of this water should have been pristine and unsoiled, but there was definitely a contamination about.
No longer within the range of sunlight, I was completely immersed in the deepest darkness of my world, relying more on my sharp awareness of water purity and disturbances than sight.
When I hit two-hundred meters deep, I knew I’d arrived.
I ran my fingers along the roughened mud walls of the pool and paused when my fingers tapped along a portion much rougher and less packed than the rest.
Using just a touch of my magick, I began sifting through the granules of mud, forming a hole deep enough for me to put my
fist through, and then my forearm, and finally my entire arm’s length, but still I found nothing when I wiggled my fingers.
There was definitely something there, though. I felt the rippling disturbance of a foreign body, but I could no more see it than the air I was forced to breathe when upon dry land.
Glowering, I tried to work out just what I could do. If I excavated away too much of the mud wall, I could cause the entire structure to weaken and collapse down on itself, potentially fracturing whatever clue lay hidden inside.
But if I didn’t dig deeper, all I’d have was my gut feeling that something important rested behind this location, however many feet deep, with nothing to show for my efforts.
Water bubbles burbled from my lips in exasperation as an insidious little thought began to take root in my mind. Very few creatures in Grimm were capable of going to such lengths to hide their treasures within the waves. Sirens could, of course. But sirens enjoyed looking at what they’d taken. It wasn’t in our nature to bury our possessions.
I had no choice. I had to risk it. Closing my eyes, I focused my mind solely on the very delicate, very intricate task of pushing aside the mud while keeping the integrity of the walls intact.
It took several long, painstaking minutes of intense mental manipulation before my fingers finally felt the press of something hard. With a cry of jubilation, I swiped the object out, packing mud back into the hole just as quickly as I could. The earth shuddered, but it did not fall.
Breathing a deep sigh of relief, I wilted against the wall, hugging the foreign object to my breast for half a second as I waited for my excited pulse to return to normal. If that wall had collapsed, the item wouldn’t have been the only thing to have been buried.
Fingers shaking just a little, I brought the object up to my face. It was too dark to see anything still, but I had other ways of figuring out just what in the hells I’d put my life on the line for. Pressing down on it with my fingers, I discovered it was long, hard, and flat with roughened outer edges.
Bringing it up to my mouth, I delicately touched the tip of my tongue to it.
Definitely metal.
What in the hells was this thing, and why had someone worked so hard to hide it? I hoped with the last dregs of my soul that this might crack the case wide open, but I doubted I’d be so lucky.
Just then, a piercing wail snatched me from my thoughts, causing me to wince and twitch. I looked up just in time to feel the water move with yet another sonic frequency wave across my flesh.
The sound came from above. Hatter was up there.
In a flash, I shoved at the water with my tail, speeding up from the deep, breaking through the surface less than three minutes later, to discover that the shrill, piercing wail had come from Hatter himself. He whistled again just as my head popped above the water.
Dropping the fingers from his mouth, he jerked his chin to indicate the space behind him. “We’ve company, Detective.”
His words were rough and hurried. I fixed a stern frown on my face.
“So? This is your investigation and—”
“No longer,” an uptight male voice snapped as I came forward, and my heart sank.
Even blind, I’d have known who it was. The bastard, the prick of a school-yard bully, Special Agent Crowley, aka... Big Bad himself.
He wore his perpetual ensemble of black leather jacket, scuffed-up jeans, dark boots, and reflective sunglasses. With his head of dark, shaggy hair and week-old scruff along his jawline, he always looked a little wild, courtesy of his shifter heritage.
“What the hells are you doing at my crime scene?” I snarled, using a nifty parlor trick Ich had taught me years ago to hide my find in my curved palm. Then I slammed my hands down on the ground as I smoothly exited the water, transforming my tail into legs instantly. Water puddled around my feet. I made no effort to snatch up my clothing, but instead, scowled fiercely at him with my hands on my hips.
His gaze was insolent as it traveled the length of my body. Leaning against his chrome motorcycle, Crowley crossed his feet at the ankles and smirked. Behind him was a posse of black suits littering the crime scene like ants at a picnic. Whatever evidence there might have been was now surely gone. I pursed my lips in disapproval.
“You’re no match for me, little mermaid. I’d eat you up.”
I grinned, but it dripped with condescension. “Funny, because I don’t think I was offering, dog.”
Crowley might be a special agent, but he was a class-A pig who thought his looks and his badge were enough to get him by in life. He was known to use both to a punishing degree.
Hatter, about whom I’d almost completely forgotten in my seething hatred, came over to me with my clothing draped over his arm. Nodding my thanks, I snatched my shirt up and put it on first, able to breathe just a tad easier when its comforting presence pressed down on me.
“Shut this little shindig down, detectives,” Crowley snapped, voice all business and with a hint of a growl to it.
“Says who?” I snapped right back, knowing damned well I wasn’t going to like the answer.
“Says the Bureau of Special Investigations.” He flashed an official looking document at me that no doubt stated we were now trespassing on the absolute directive of the Grimm upper echelon.
The Bureau of Special Investigations, or as we in the business liked to call it, the Bureau of Silence—BS for short—only dealt with cases that involved a person or persons of such a high level of notoriety that, at all costs, knowledge of it must be suppressed.
My nostrils flared. As much as I wanted to rail and scream at the injustice of having this scene yanked out from under our noses, at least I had something to show for our efforts. I curled my fingers tight around the piece of metal firmly tucked in my palm. Licking my front teeth, I snapped up my pants.
“Whatever you say, Crowley.”
He snorted. “C’mon, fish. I figured you’d give me more fight than that. And I don’t think I need to tell you that if you’ve found anything while trekking down there, it now belongs to the BSI.”
I growled and took a step toward him with my hands balled tight by my sides, feeling the heavy presence of that metal. It was just the reminder I needed to keep me calm. No one knew about the metal shard but me. I grinned. “Thanks for the warning, Special Agent. Trust me, I know my job. If there was something down there, you’d have been the first to know.”
He snorted and rolled his eyes. “I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you, Elle. And I think we both know why.”
My nostrils flared at the reminder of our one-time only and very unfortunate past. Balls. I’d been desperate, and he’d been there. Spreading my arms wide, I turned slowly for him, letting him inspect me from every angle. Once I was facing him again, I executed another smooth little parlor trick, tucking the metal between my fingers and hiding it in plain sight, showing him empty palms and praying to the goddess that none of his cronies happened to walk behind me.
“I’m pretty sure I’m not hiding anything.”
From the corner of my eye, I caught Hatter tense. No doubt he’d caught the flash of silver. He moved just an inch closer to me.
Crowley’s eyes were hot, hard, and full of lusty anger. “Get dressed and get the hells away from here, Elle. I won’t be so nice again.”
Glancing at Hatter, Crowley smirked. “We good, Constable? Or would you care to read the document yourself? It’s sealed with the king’s signet. I would think that should be good enough, no?”
Hatter’s arm twitched, reminding me that he still held my pants. Without saying a word, I took them and began tugging them on, carefully slipping the metal sliver into my pocket.
“For now,” Hatter said. “But mark my words, demon dog. You’ve not heard the end of this.”
Crowley smirked, and I could practically read the seething hatred behind his sunglasses as he said, “You’re nothing but a lowly constable. How’s about you just stay in your lane there, arse for brains, while the b
ig guns talk this one out.”
“You’ve still got such a way with words, Crowley,” I snapped, then marched off without looking back. I wasn’t even wearing my boots, but I didn’t care. Grabbing them off the ground, I hugged them to my chest and took several deep breaths to ease the tightness of fury in my stomach.
Seconds later, I heard Hatter’s footfalls keeping pace with my own. The crime scene was now littered with MICE and yet more special agents. Whatever the two hells had happened here, it was now serious enough to involve them. I had a bad feeling about this.
A very bad feeling.
Taking the key card out of his inner pocket, Hatter swiped the air, and neither of us said a word until we were ensconced in the safety of the between.
He whirled on me just as I whirled on him.
“You found something,” he said.
“I found something,” I said at the same time.
His lips curved into a seductive grin of satisfaction that made my already-frazzled nerves feel tingly.
I reached into my pocket, withdrew the piece of metal, and handed it to him. I’d not been able to get a good look at it at the scene, but examining it, I saw there was something oddly familiar about its shape and size. The flat piece of metal looked like it might have been overlaid in gold at one point. There were filigree patterns etched in acid on each of the four corners and words at the center that had been scratched off as though by a metal file.
“What is this?” Hatter asked with a frown as he glanced at me.
“Maddox, give me the key card.” I held my hand out to him impatiently.
He reached into his pocket and, without question, handed it back to me. I took it one with one hand, picked up the distressed metal with the other, and pressed them together. They were the exact same size, a perfect match.
I looked at him just as he looked at me.
“Is it a key?” he asked.
It was hard to tell. So much of what would prove definitively whether it was a key had been scrubbed off, but... “My gut says maybe.”
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