SkinThief

by Sonnet O'Dell

  “So what does a Paranormal Investigator do?”

  “I fight the boogieman.”

  Kensington laughed and threw down his champagne. I was glad we weren’t on too high a floor, because I wouldn’t be able to carry him up more than a few flights of stairs. I didn’t want to test if I really did have increased strength or not. I doubted someone like Rourke would ever let me get away with dropping Kensington down a flight of stairs, no matter how tempting it might be.

  The waiter brought over a pitcher of water. I had him refill the champagne glass in front of Kensington, and he drank down half of it before he even realized it wasn’t champagne. He pulled a face and finished off his beef ravioli. I supposed I should have been grateful. He was paying for this meal out of his money; it’d been a while since I’d been out for a nice meal. I’d gone to have Christmas dinner with Magnus at his sisters’—and although seeing Aziel, his stepfather, in a paper crown was the funniest thing ever, I wouldn’t describe it as eating out. Magnus’s family was lovely, and some part of watching them together made me feel sad that it was just me. Sometimes I wondered what I’d be like if things had been different, if I’d had a father in my life, if my parents had had the opportunity to have more children, if I’d had a little brother or sister. I sighed at the thought. I didn’t know much about either of my parents; I didn’t know if either of them had been married before or if they had other children. Mom had kept a lot from me—she’d kept the secret of a whole other world, of a magical heritage I didn’t understand, and I couldn’t go back to ask her about it. I had so many questions, so many random unspoken thoughts that I kept locked up. What if I did have some family out there somewhere? Would it be a good or a bad thing, seeing as my mother chose to run to another reality?

  I really wanted to talk to Virginia about this. Virginia Toogood, witch and mentor, was the person I suppose I was the closest to in this world. At one point, I might have said Nancy was my closest confidante, until she had dragged me into her mess.

  Nancy and I had a lot in common. Her parents were gone too, but Nancy had had major issues with her parents. Her mother had left her and her father when Nancy was seven. Her father turned to drink and beating on his daughter whenever he got drunk, and the departure of the love of his life became too much for him to bear. He’d blamed Nancy because his wife hadn’t had thoughts about leaving him until Nancy had been born.

  Their flat mysteriously burnt down when Nancy turned sixteen, and she was taken in as apprentice witch by her mentor. He was harsh because he had to be. Nancy learned quickly and focused on studying tracking magic. She used it to find her mom, but she had a new family, a new and better life, and there was no room for Nancy in it. What actually happened next was not provable. Fires kill hundreds of people a year; most of them are just horrible accidents caused by simply forgetting basic fire safety. In any case, Nancy, like me, was an orphan by eighteen.

  “You ready to go?” Kensington asked, startling me out of my deep thoughts. He was putting his pin number into that little machine and smiling at me, flashing his platinum card. “It’s almost like we’re on a real date.”

  I stood up, slowly collecting my bag, and pulled the strap over my shoulder. Kensington wobbled to his feet, putting his wallet into his inside jacket pocket. We headed for the exit, and I pressed the earpiece in so I could hear Rourke and Hamilton as we walked over to the hotel. I couldn’t have gotten through dinner with them commenting all the way along. I knew they’d heard all of it, though. Kensington held open the door for me, and I directed my voice quietly at my chest.

  “Any signs?”

  “Not seen anything. You sure he’s coming after this moron?”

  “Yes,” I said, walking out of the door. Kensington stumbled into my back and slung his arm around my shoulders.

  “I like you as a blonde; did you Glamorgan all the way down?”

  “I don’t know what makes this guy so stupid, but it really works,” Rourke’s voice said in my ear.

  “He’s soused.” I slid my arm around him as he started to make me wobble. We approached the traffic lights, and I heard a car pull out behind us; Hamilton told me they were moving into position to be closer to the hotel. I helped Kensington across the main road to the city walls and then to the right-hand path in line with the Fownes Hotel.

  The Fownes was a large red brick building that had once upon Victorian times been a glove factory. It had large, regimented windows along the sides that spoke of bygone days and cheap labor. It was supposed to be a very high-class place, and I wondered how they felt about me marking their carpet. It was necessary to catch a murderer, and it would come out with some industrial-strength cleaner.

  Kensington looked up at the front of the building and whistled. It had an impressive awning, I suppose, and the potted plants were very sculptured.

  “I’ve never stayed here before,” he said.

  “Me neither, but when you live locally why would you?”

  “Hookers.”

  I stopped trying to balance him and opening the main door to stare at him.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “You don’t want to take hookers home—they have sticky fingers.”

  “Ah! Sound advice, I suppose,” I said, focusing on the door. I got it open and shoved him through. He wobbled on the carpet, and for a moment I thought about letting him fall on his face—it would be immensely satisfying. I hurried to get an arm back around him and get him to the desk. I leaned him against it while I talked to the small plump woman behind the desk.

  “Hi, room three fifteen, please.”

  She smiled at me and went to the back wall, fished the right key card out and handed it over the desk to me. Kensington leaned over the desk.

  “Do you have a room service menu?”

  “There’ll be one in your room, sir,” she said politely.

  “Never mind, I want champagne!”

  “No! No more champagne,” I said, leading him toward the stairs, “and God help me, if you go anywhere near the mini bar, I’ll whack you myself.”

  “Why are we taking the stairs? They have an elevator.”

  “Mmm, and we don’t want to get trapped in it—we need to get to the room.”

  He looked down at me and smiled. “There’ll be a bed in the room,” he said, a suggestive lilt in his voice. I rolled my eyes, ignoring him, and pushed open the door to the third floor. I followed the signs toward our room number. We’d come up in the elevator before, and Benjamin had led the way; it all looked different from the stairs exit.

  “I always wondered why I got into such a dangerous line of work, y’know. I thought about going to see one of those mind-reader people you seen on TV, maybe dig up some answers from my subconscious.”

  “Don’t go to a mind reader—you need a palm reader. I know you’ve got a palm.”

  He smiled at me, and I felt that palm slip down my back and caress my butt. I closed my eyes and bowed my head.

  “Rourke,” I whispered, “will the city get on my case if I break his fingers? He’s touching me.”

  “Brave face, Farbanks, brave face.”

  I grumbled.

  We had an end room; it was the last one directly at the end of the corridor, so our backs were to the whole of the empty space behind us. I felt something behind my eyes twitch as I reached to put the key card in the door. I missed real keys. As I struggled with it, I started to see something else, like a sepia movie playing over my regular vision: a figure behind us and a gun in Kensington’s back. It was odd because I knew it hadn’t happened yet. I heard the stair door flap open and closed.

  “He’s here.”

  Kensington gasped as a gun barrel was pressed into his back; he squealed like a girl. The voice of Oliver Warner came from behind us.

  “No sudden moves, Mr. Powell. Open up t
he room and we’ll all go inside.”

  “What do you want?” Kensington asked, playing along. I looked over my shoulder out the corner of my eyes and saw him jab the gun barrel into Kensington’s back harder.

  “Inside,” he demanded. I pushed the key into the door and jiggled the handle; the door swung open slowly. The three of us walked inside. The door closed behind us, and Kensington turned to face him.

  “You’re just a boy,” he said with a drunken, overconfident sneer.

  “A boy, yes, but one who had a Glock 36 pointed at you, you arrogant prick. You’re going to tell me what I want to know.”

  Kensington sat on the bed and pressed his fingers into the edge, his knuckles going white against the coverlet. I pretended to cower to the side by a dresser. I looked down at the floor; he was about two steps away from where he needed to be.

  “What do you think it is I can tell you?”

  “I want the name of the boss.”

  He cocked the gun and took a step forward. Kensington shook his head.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  He lowered the muzzle of the gun. For the first time, I realized he had a silencer on the end of it. Where had he gotten it? His finger flexed against the trigger. He was going to shoot; I had to distract him. I made a weak attempt to take the gun, and he smashed me away. I hit the dresser I’d just stood in front of, and I felt blood trickle out of my lip.

  “Stupid bitch! Don’t get brave. I don’t want to hurt you.” He took another step toward Kensington. I wiped the blood from my lip so that it was on my fingertips.

  “You already did,” I said, slamming my bloody fingers down on the circle on the floor. “Snare!”

  The circle was activated by my blood and my will, and a sharp wave of electricity rolled through Oliver Warner’s body. He dropped the gun and fell to his knees. Kensington picked up the gun, pointing it at the boy’s head. Petrovich tried to move but couldn’t get past the glowing circle on the floor; it zapped him with a milder volt of electricity every time he tried. I put my hand on the gun, shaking my hair and returning it to its natural color, and pushed the barrel down. Kensington let me.

  “We have him,” I said toward the mike. I took the gun from Kensington, put it on the dresser and went to open the door. Benjamin came in, gun drawn, followed by LeBron, but he holstered it again when he was sure Petrovich was neutralized. I bent down in front of Petrovich, looking into his eyes.

  “You’re under arrest. You get that, right? You’re done.”

  “You don’t understand,” he growled.

  “I understand plenty, Ivan. You don’t understand that you shouldn’t mess about with magic when I’m around.”

  I reached through the shield—it felt like the beginning of pins and needles—and he let me take the amulet from around his neck. I looked at it; it really was quite beautiful up close. I let the snare shield drop.

  “Book ‘em, Dano.” I laughed. I’d always wanted to say that.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Oliver Warner—Petrovich—sat in the little interrogation room staring defiantly at the glass, which we stood behind. He looked even worse in the bright lights. His lank dark hair fell over his forehead into his eyes, which were dark rimmed, and his cheekbones stuck out, making his face almost gaunt. He was pale white due to lack of exposure to the sun and had calluses on his thumbs from repeated game playing. He had acne that looked sore and itchy from where he couldn’t leave it alone, but he sat in that chair like he was an Adonis, a king; he was proud. So much pride in a man was wrong; it was what had led him into this whole mess. I turned my back, sick of looking at him and those eyes—the eyes of a kid, but it wasn’t a kid in the driving seat.

  “What do we do with him?” I asked Hamilton and Rourke, who had been talking quietly behind me. I leaned my back against the glass and pulled my ponytail over my shoulder, playing with the end of it. I was still in my little black dress, but I’d taken a minute to put my hair up in a ponytail to keep it out of the way.

  “We can’t really arrest him, not like this. He’s in a kid. He didn’t use the kid to commit all of the murders, so we can only at best tie him to one, and even then, it wasn’t the kid’s fault—it’s Petrovich in control of his body.”

  “It’s tricky, I’ll admit. He’s already in prison, deathly ill, in fact; the best we can do is get him back to where he should be.”

  “It’s a crime using magic, right? Won’t those—what were they called?—enforcer people want to know about this?” Rourke asked. I thought about it for a minute.

  “It’s not a good idea to tell them right now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, Rourke, intentionally using magic to cause death either directly or indirectly is punished only one way. Death. They won’t wait for Petrovich to be out of the kid; they’ll kill him as quickly as possible. As long as they have proof of magic, they will procure sentence.”

  “Rather strict rules, aren’t they?” Hamilton said. I nodded.

  “If you had someone who could potentially blow up an entire building with just their will... They have to be strict; someone with as much power as a trained Wizard who’s using it to harm people isn’t going to be stopped by jail. The Wizard council won’t tolerate repeat offenders of that fashion.”

  “I thought they believed in all life being precious?”

  “They do, and if one bad seed has to die to protect the preciousness of the other lives around it, then they will do it. The council see things in very black and white terms. They forget there are all sorts of nasty shades of gray.”

  “So we get everyone back the way they should be?” Rourke asked, pointing at me. I was wearing the amulet around my neck. It was the best place for an amulet—it saved carrying it around.

  “Best we can do. You said you’d moved them all to a safe house; you need to bring them back here. It might take a little while, but we should be able to take it a step at a time backwards till he’s back in the guard, and then we take him up to Birmingham.”

  “Maybe I can talk to the governor there, get him to extend Petrovich’s sentence in accordance with the other crimes he’s committed by proxy,” Hamilton said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. We all jumped when Petrovich pounded on the glass I was leaning against. I whirled around and he was peering at the darkness, trying to see through glass he couldn’t.

  “I want to talk to the witch,” he barked at the glass. I looked at him and then at Hamilton and Rourke; they both shrugged. It was up to me whether I wanted to talk to him or not. I looked at him. I took the amulet off and shoved it into my handbag, leaving it there in the observation room, and walked around to go into the interrogation room. Petrovich was seated when I came into the room; he nodded his head at the empty seat, and I took it.

  “I’m here. What do you want?”

  “You said you understood,” he said, leaving it hanging in the air like an open-ended question. I crossed my arms over my chest and leant against the back of the chair.

  “I do. I mean I get what your motivation is.” I looked down at the table. “I know what they did to Nikki. I know that her boyfriend had his men kill her, that he was probably there too, watching. I know that he took Anna from school, and as far as we know, she is still alive and healthy.”

  “Anna is alive?” He looked both surprised and pleased. He’d not expected that. In his mind, he had probably been avenging two murders. Revenge never did wait for the facts.

  “Yes, she is with her father—her biological father.”

  Ivan growled through Oliver Warner’s lips.

  “Biological father?” he questioned. Nikki must have kept the secret from everyone, including her father. I didn’t know what kind of relationship they had had. It could have been that apart from the letters, she didn’t really care to be near her father. T
he governor had never mentioned that she had visited him; and then she went and fell for a man just like her father. Irony was definitely alive and well, it seemed. I didn’t see the harm in telling him the truth. We had him in custody now; there was little he could do about it.

  “Yes, the man you’ve been looking for is Anna’s biological father. It’s why we believe she is still well—he wouldn’t hurt his child.”

  He bit his lip and snorted derisively.

  “Do you know why? Why he killed my Nikki? My baby girl.”

  “She never told him that Anna was his, and when he found out, she threatened to take Anna and vanish. He didn’t want her to, so he killed her. I don’t condone it, and he will be brought to justice for it.” I was very careful with my words; I was not going to give him the name. If he finally had the name, then he might possibly try to break out of our custody. Currently he was being extremely docile.

  I leaned back, and I could see a little tear trickle out of his eye. I felt sorry for him. He’d lost both his wives, one to natural causes but the other to trauma-induced suicide, and now he’d lost his daughter, his only child, to murder. A petty and unnecessary one. He seemed both angry about that and relieved that his granddaughter, the only family he had left apart from a sister who didn’t want to acknowledge him, was safe and well. I couldn’t imagine the turmoil of emotions inside him. I didn’t want to. Pain like that was not something I wanted to feel if I could possibly avoid it.

  “You might not realize it now, but it’s very good that you were stopped before you could kill Kensington.”

  “How so? If he had any part in Nikki’s death, then he deserves no less than the others.” Petrovich was glaring at me out of the boy’s eyes, and I almost saw Petrovich’s features superimposed over the top of Oliver’s. I shook my head, clearing my vision. Powers, please don’t freak out on me now.

  “Because we got to him before you did, he agreed to roll over on his boss. He’s a figure whom organized crime has been watching for some time. With what we now know about his involvement in the death of your daughter and the kidnapping of your granddaughter, they have enough to move on him.”