Before she reaches the threshold, I call out, “Say, what’s the deal with you and Riker?”
Her feet stop padding forward. “You think there’s a deal?”
I crane my neck to peer over the top of the couch, considering how to phrase my response. “There is. No question. You’ve known him for a while, haven’t you? And you’ve been, what, trading insider info in order to push your respective organizations to make the right moves in the right situations?”
“Oh-ho. Look at that. The hot Crow is clever.” She glances at me over her shoulder, eyes narrow and sly. “Me and Nick go back quite a few years. You got that right. And you’re not wrong about our arrangement either. We talk, sometimes about the weather, sometimes about things that have a bigger impact on the world.” A smile of triumph spreads across her face, as if she’s played a long con. “How do you think Riker earned his reputation, solving so many more cases than everybody else? How do you think he’s avoided so many losses—every major loss, until France, until the one mission where he left Aurora for a place an American witch could have no intel on?”
A sense of awe washes through my veins, this time for Erica’s cunning, not her raw, impressive magic power. She and Riker have been ducking under every barrier of mutual distaste, every line of bureaucracy between the ICM and DSI for years, in order to clean up Aurora’s streets, stop the monsters, save the innocent. For a guy who pretends so thoroughly to play by all the rules, Riker must be able to lie like a motherfucker, if he’s been hiding his arrangement with Erica this long, finding ways to play off apparent leaps of logic and random guesses, all of them correct, every time, as luck or intuition.
My respect for Riker grows, as does my respect for Erica. She told me straight up the ICM would bind her powers if she helped DSI outside the Council’s given bounds.
I reflect her mischievous smile back to her and say, “Good to know that’s how it is. I was worried, for a minute there, that you were trading Riker in for a newer model. Which would have made for a really awkward conversation with my boss.”
“Well, I never!” Erica huffs, feigns offense, and rolls her eyes. “Riker might be handsome on a good day, Cal, but I can do much, much better.”
“Oh, so I’m better?”
“You’re not bad.” She winks. “In more ways than one.”
“If you’re willing to spend some time teaching me, I can probably reach not bad at all.”
Erica snickers. “Was that another first boyfriend euphemism?”
“You bet.”
Turning on her toes, she marches off toward the door and gives me a short wave goodbye. “Call me, honey, when you want. I’m usually around for—”
“Hey.”
She pauses a few steps from the door and turns to face me one last time, her grin dropping into a frown at the tone of my voice. “What?”
I maneuver onto my knees on the couch, resting my elbow on the top, resting my hand in my palm, and hum a few notes, pondering the questions in my head. “You realize, don’t you, that there are two things in this case we still don’t know. They came up during the task meeting earlier, and no one had the answers.”
“What are those things?” Erica fingers the strap on her backpack. “Important things?”
“One of them, at least.” I sigh. “The less important one is the identity of the person who left the note on my door. The sticky note that had the address for the forum on it. If it hadn’t been for that note, we might not have figured out who the kids were at all.” My fingernails bite into my bruised face, but I ignore the sting. “I assume it was one of the kids, somebody who saw me at the Memorial Garden and decided to turn the group in, scared of the vengeance they’d brought down upon themselves. But because so many of the kids are dead—and the ones left alive aren’t in any shape to talk, may never be—I’ll probably never find out who left the note.”
“But you want to know?” Erica rubs her bare arms, and I realize she doesn’t have a coat to combat the chilly evening. “You want to know who helped you get the first big break on your first big case?”
“No,” I reply, almost a whisper. “I want to know which one of them had a change of heart, tried to do the right thing. I want to know which one tried their best for redemption, but still paid the ultimate price in the end. I want to know which one tried to be a good person, tried to save their friends from a terrible fate.”
“Oh, Cal.” Erica gives me a look of unwavering pity. “If only good intentions didn’t pave the way to hell.” She sucks in a short breath. “The more important detail. What is that?”
With a push from my exhausted mind, I bury my conflicting feelings about the mystery note writer. “The other thing,” I reply, “is the buyer of the key. The person who gave the kids the instructions on how to break into the Underworld and steal a precious item from one of its powerful guardians. There’s no way on Earth or in the Eververse those kids concocted that heist plan on their own. I saw Vanth, Aita, Charun, Tuchulcha—any of them could have crushed those kids with a single blow. No minor practitioner, or five, or ten could have stood up to their might to steal Vanth’s key. They must have done it sneakily. Must have gotten all the tips and tricks from somebody who, for some reason, knew all the ins and outs of the Etruscan Underworld. Who the hell was that? Who the hell was the buyer?”
Erica the witch clenches her fists and casts me an expression of true anxiety, the same one she wore when I walked into her store and showed her the summoning circle. “A sorcerer,” she answers with certainty. “A sorcerer of great skill, great knowledge, great and dangerous power. Maybe human. Maybe not. Very few Earth-born creatures know the Eververse that well, and most who do know better than to walk its ways. Only the craziest among us practitioners, only those warped by dark, dark magic, would dare journey to the other side often enough to learn the layout of another realm, to learn its vulnerabilities.”
She backs toward my door and reaches out, brushing the hole in the wall I made the night the note appeared. She mutters, so quiet I almost miss the words, “No matter how you look at it, Cal, there’s a major player in this game. And since he failed to get that key, he’s probably not done playing.”
Epilogue
It’s a week and a day after my trip to the Eververse when I finally figure it out.
I wake up late, still home on leave by Navarro’s orders, fix myself a breakfast of sugary cereal and chocolate milk, and plop down on my couch to watch some crappy morning television. As I’m shoveling in the Cookie Crisp, I intermittently flip through the channels, too lazy to pull up the guide and scroll through two thousand options. I mean, you know there’s nothing good to watch, no matter how many channels you have, at 11:00 AM in the morning. After ten minutes of spooning and flipping, spooning and flipping, I surrender to the power of HGTV and start watching one of those shows about house flipping. The people on TV always make it seem so easy that I have it marked as a backup option in case this DSI thing doesn’t work out.
Satisfied, I drop the remote on the cushion next to me and keep on chewing away, as a demo team comes in and starts gutting the flip house. But, a few minutes later, during the most tense part of the show, when the flippers realize they’ve gone too far over budget and will never sell for a profit—Oh no!—I somehow manage to drop my spoon. It slips out of my fingers and falls between the couch cushions, and I scramble to retrieve it before the milk soaks into the fabric. At some point during my fumbling, I push a few buttons on the remote with my ass. And that exact sequence of buttons happens to equate to a valid channel number.
Yes, it is this sequence of stupid events that leads me to the revelation that changes my life forever.
The TV flips to the butt-designated channel, and a man’s voice comes through my speakers. I look up from the sofa cushions, realizing what just happened, and make to grab the remote, press the previous button, when—
A sense of déjà vu envelops me. So strong I seize up, muscles tight, and the cereal bowl tumble
s right out of my frozen fingers. It hits the edge of my coffee table, shatters, chocolate milk and Cookie Crisp and shards of bowl spilling all over my carpet. But my brain doesn’t register the mess quite yet, won’t for nearly half an hour. Until I come out of the stupor that results from what I see on the TV screen:
A man with graying sideburns that I have never seen before but who looks painfully familiar stands at a podium, giving a speech. The live broadcast is on a foreign news channel, or a domestic station relaying foreign news. Whatever the case, the man on the screen is some important official from some important European country, giving an important speech about an important new law. What this law is about, I don’t care. How this law will affect people, I don’t care. Who this man on my screen is, I don’t care.
All I care about is placing his face, placing his voice in my memory. The drive to remember, remember is so overwhelming that I almost cry out like I’m in physical pain. And it does hurt, in my chest, in my head, this burning need to recall the memory of the man on the screen, recall it from where I buried it during a moment of fear and agony, during a moment of mind-shattering confusion, where I witnessed so much at once, heard so much at once, experienced so much at once…
And then it comes to me.
The memory of the man on the screen, giving a speech.
I saw him, from this same angle, at this same volume, during the jumbled vision I had the moment Vanth’s blade kissed my neck.
I…
I…
I sit on the sofa for half an hour, limp and listless, staring at the screen, with the cut on my neck stinging like a brand, before I’m able to process the truth.
When Vanth tried to kill me, my life flashed before my eyes.
The life I have lived. The life I will live.
I saw the future. I saw my future.
All of it.
The Story Continues
IN SHADE CHASER
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About Clara Coulson
Clara Coulson was born and raised in backwoods Virginia, USA. Currently in her mid-twenties, Clara holds a degree in English and Finance from the College of William & Mary and recently retired from the hustle and bustle of Washington, DC to return to the homeland and pick up the quiet writing life.
Clara spends most of her time (when she's not writing) dreaming up new story ideas, studying Japanese, and slowly reading through the several-hundred-book backlog in her budding home library. If she's not occupied with any of those things, then you can probably find her playing with her two cats or lurking in the shadows of various social media websites.
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