Against a Brightening Sky

by Jaime Lee Moyer

  Lynch looked up, startled. “You want me to go along to your murder scene?”

  “Why not? You’re an experienced cop.” Gabe stuffed his hands into his trouser pockets and shrugged. “I could use a second set of eyes on this one.”

  “I can’t promise to keep quiet. You should know that in advance.” Lynch glanced at Jack and back to Gabe. “But I’d like to see how detectives work in San Francisco.”

  “Then let’s go. I can fill you in on our cases on the way over.” Gabe grabbed his fedora and swung the door open. “Rockwell will bring you lunch later, Jack. My treat. Just don’t get crumbs all over my desk.”

  Jack grinned and limped over to sit in Gabe’s chair. “Make sure he brings me all the files too. I need something to do between now and lunch.”

  He let Lynch set the pace through the hallways and across the station lobby. The Chicago cop pretended not to notice the whispers and stares from the officers they passed, or the hostile looks from the civilians waiting their turn on oak benches, but that didn’t fool Gabe. Lynch saw.

  Lynch waited until the police car pulled away from the curb before he spoke. “If you don’t mind my asking, I’d like to know how Lieutenant Fitzgerald got hurt. Was it during the riot I read about?”

  “Jack got caught in one of the explosions. A building fell on him and some other officers.” Gabe’s throat threatened to close up before he got the rest of the words out. “The other men didn’t make it.”

  “Losing men under your command is a hard thing for anyone to go through.” Lynch looked out the window, his expression softer and far away. “I’ve lost a few over the years, and it never gets easier. I’m glad your partner made it out, Captain Ryan.”

  “Call me Gabe.” He held his hand out, unsure if Lynch would take it this time. “We’re going to work together while you’re in town, and I don’t see the need to be formal.”

  “Are you sure that’s wise, Captain?” Lynch shifted his cane so it lay across his lap, gripping it tight. “Some of your men might take issue with me being too familiar and not showing proper respect. I wouldn’t want to cause trouble for you.”

  Gabe had talked to Annie often enough about the small town where she’d grown up to understand Lynch’s apprehension. San Francisco wasn’t perfect, even in 1919, but Annie could walk on the sidewalks without being spit on for refusing to walk in the gutter. “You won’t cause me any trouble, Lieutenant. You’ve my word on that.”

  The hesitation was slight and Gabe might have missed it if he hadn’t been watching, but Lynch shook his hand and smiled. “All right, I’ll call you Gabe, but not when we’re in public. Call me Jordan. Only my wife called me Scott, God rest her soul, and that happened only when she was mad enough to start yelling.”

  Gabe couldn’t help but smile. “Was she mad at you often?”

  “Often enough.” Jordan’s expression was more bemused than sad. “She’s been gone five years, and not a day goes by that I don’t miss her yelling at me. Now, tell me about your case, Gabe. Start with explaining why you’ve got men guarding that girl Mr. Butler rushed off to be with.”

  Gabe told him everything, from the start of the riot to the monsters Mullaney’s men saw reaching for them to finding Rigaux’s body in Trula May’s bed and how the killers left her alive. Lynch was a good listener.

  But most detectives were.

  CHAPTER 12

  Delia

  The crystals inside the stone bowl sitting on my kitchen table pulsed purple, lavender, and violet. Dora dropped a folded and inscribed piece of parchment into the bowl, all the while quietly reciting charms and sketching warding glyphs on air. I’d little hope she could block the watcher’s meddling with my dreams, but she insisted on making the attempt.

  This was the third time we’d gone through this ritual, and the third time the parchment promptly caught fire. The words Isadora had painstakingly written charred black, and the spell packet crumbled to ash. Ginger-scented smoke rose toward the ceiling in lazy spirals.

  Dora yanked her hand back from the flames, but not fast enough. “Damn it! I burned myself.” She peered at the burnt fingertips and touched them gently. “Dee, would you be a dear and either fetch some cold water or some whiskey? I’d much rather have the whiskey, but dipping my fingers in water will do in a pinch. These may blister otherwise.”

  Some of Gabe’s whiskey went into a glass, and I poured water from the icebox pitcher into a small dish. Dora plunged her fingers into the water before sipping the whiskey. She frowned at the bits of ash drifting up out of the stone bowl. “This guardian is becoming much more of a nuisance than I’d anticipated. Writing out several new spell combinations last night was a wise precaution. We’ll try switching out rosemary for the ginger this time. Give me a minute to regroup and I’ll try again.”

  “There’s no need, Dora. We both know perfectly well it’s not going to work.” I sipped my tea, making a sour face over how cold it had grown. “The reaction is more violent each time, and I won’t risk you being seriously hurt. I’m ready to admit defeat.”

  “Well, I’m not. I will admit this would be much easier if I’d gotten answers to my telegrams. I could come up with a solution if I knew what we were facing and wasn’t reduced to taking shots in the dark.” Dora slumped back in the chair, wiping water from her fingers onto a small towel. I’d always thought Sadie and Gabe stubborn and obstinate to the extreme, but Isadora made the both of them appear reasonable. “For the life of me, I don’t understand why this guardian decided to pass Alina’s memories on to you and not to her. None of it makes any sense, Dee, especially since you can’t talk about these dreams in front of Alina. The mechanisms and the logic behind this elude me.”

  I’d tried to tell Alina about the dreams, hoping to shake loose memories of an event, a place, or the names of her family. Any attempt to speak with her—or with Gabe and Isadora, for that matter—ended with me retching and too dizzy to stand. Like Dora, I didn’t understand what the watcher hoped to accomplish.

  Being the unwilling vessel for Alina’s past both exhausted me and made me angry. Each night brought a new dream, more pieces of a story that filled me with dread and a deepening sense of doom. I still wasn’t convinced I’d be strong enough to bear the full burden of knowing how her had family died. Knowing at least a little of how the story must end, with Alina alone and hunted in a foreign land, made it all worse.

  One thing was certain. Alina was the fourth sister, the young woman whose life I lived in dreams and whose face I never saw. Dora knew her true name, but refused to tell me just yet. Speaking true names can leave wakes and eddies in the spirit world—an easy trail for the necromancer to follow.

  “You’re assuming some kind of logic exists. Or at least one we can comprehend.” I carried my teacup to the sink, rinsing away the residue of sodden black leaves, sugar and lemon, and leaving the delicate porcelain cup upended on the drain board. “You said yourself the watcher was an old-world creature, eons older than any spirit in North America. This may make perfect sense elsewhere. We just don’t understand the rules.”

  “I wish I was as clear that there are rules here.” Dora dubiously eyed the crystals in the bowl. The bright, vivid pulsing had died to a faint glimmer. “Making you suffer seems rather capricious. And if the entire point of shutting Alina’s memories away in the mirror ghost was to protect her identity, that strategy appears to be a dismal failure. Her enemies are still looking for her. Nothing has changed as far as I can see.”

  Mai sauntered into the kitchen, ears twitching as if straining to hear some faint sound. She leapt up onto the tabletop, ignoring Dora, and giving the bowl full of crystals a wide berth as she made her way to the windowsill. I’d seen the cat crouch on the sill frequently over the last few days, her position allowing her to keep an eye on both the kitchen and the yard outside. Mai’s tail thumped an angry rhythm against the wall beneath the window, her eyes narrow slits.

  I couldn’t say what my fierce gray cat saw or
heard, but she was decidedly unhappy. Given our previous encounter with the necromancer, I took Mai’s edginess seriously.

  “You’re thinking about this the wrong way, Dora. A great deal has changed, and Alina has far more people looking after her welfare.” I sat at the table again, choosing a seat near enough to the window I could pet the cat. Mai relaxed a bit under my hand, but never lost her keen watchfulness. “Whether it’s for the first time or the hundredth, Sam and Alina have found each other. He’s already proved he’d do anything necessary to protect her. We both know Gabe and Randy will as well. You’re acting as her guardian in place of the older couple that was killed, and I’m doing what I can to decipher the watcher’s riddles. Matters are decidedly different than they were the morning of the parade.”

  “I wouldn’t have phrased it that way, but maybe you’re right. The situation and the people involved have changed considerably.” She stared out the window, her eyes seeming to follow the male blue jay carrying sticks and bits of string into a cloud of peach blossoms. Within a few seconds, his mate darted away to take her turn. But Dora wasn’t watching the pair of jays build a nest in the peach tree any more than Mai was. “I should have taken those changes into account without need of your prodding, but I never factored Alina’s new protectors into the balance. I’m not usually so self-absorbed that anything that important would slip past. Someone, or something, didn’t want me to see.”

  “Alina’s guardian.” That this creature might be powerful enough to influence Dora without her knowing was more than a little frightening. “But why?”

  “For the same inscrutable reasons this creature is forcing memories on you.” Dora sat back hard, arms folded. Her scowl erased my last doubt about her state of mind. “If not for my loyalty toward you and Alina, I’d be tempted to walk away and let this watcher of yours sort things itself. This creature best keep that in mind.”

  Prudence kept me from mentioning the watcher filling my head, or how amusement danced through its eyes. “At least the balance appears to have shifted somewhat in Alina’s favor. You and I, Gabe and Sam and Randy—taken all together we’re much better able to deal with her enemies than Mina and Fyodor. Maybe that was the guardian’s plan all along.”

  “That’s very likely, Dee. People who have the ability to eliminate an enemy are always useful allies. Frankly, I’m not keen on the idea of a powerful spirit viewing any of us as potential assassins.” Dora sat up straighter and folded her hands on the tabletop. “I’d rather avoid violence of any kind. The sticky part comes when the other side leaves you no choice.”

  A small image of the princess ghost brightened into view at the top of the window. I tried to imagine Alina dressed in the same fashion as the ghost, a strand of pearls around her throat. The resemblance between them was stronger now, aided by knowing they were sisters. Or maybe I was finally able to see and more willing to believe what had been there all along.

  Alina had loved her family. I didn’t know which was sadder, that they were all dead, or that she didn’t remember what she’d lost. But I remembered. Each dream, each moment of reliving Alina’s captivity and how she’s longed for her family was stark and real. That had to mean something.

  The watcher’s eyes swallowed me again, plunging me into depths bottomless as the night sky. I held tight to the edge of the kitchen table and fought not to panic under the dragon’s regard. That I was utterly convinced the creature holding me in thrall was a dragon, the kin of Gods and myths far outside of San Francisco, was reason enough to panic in and of itself. Dragons had faded from the world centuries before I was born. Even the stories told about them had begun to disappear.

  But this dragon existed, here and now. She was already ancient when the New World had been settled, her essence rooted deep in the Russian land and pulsing through every river and stream. Stories were still told about her in far-flung villages and of castles build atop the cave where she slept. Her true name was long forgotten, but the dragon was still Russia’s heart.

  Tsars of old had carried images of her into battle on war flags and banners, striving to be half as fierce as the creature sworn to protect their throne. Their families.

  Neither whimsy nor cruelty played a part in why I dreamed of Alina’s past. I needed to remember the faces around Alina in that faraway mountain house, to memorize who was a friend and who had meant her family harm. Men could change their name, or alter their appearance, but I’d see through the illusion to the truth.

  Knowing the reason didn’t make me feel more equal to the task.

  I came back to myself to find Mai standing on the table and rubbing her head against my cheek. Thinking the cat looked relieved when I opened my eyes was pure fancy. Still, I pulled her close and snuggled her under my chin. How loudly she purred was real enough.

  There was no question of relief when it came to Isadora. She peered at me anxiously from the other side of the table and reached for my hand. “Are you all right?”

  Clearing my throat several times made speaking possible. “I’m fine. The only ill effects are an unreasonable urge to cry and a slight headache. Nothing I won’t survive.”

  “Thank heaven for that.” Dora slumped back in the chair. She wiped a hand over her face. “You gave me quite a turn that time, Dee. I wasn’t at all sure I could call you back. That creature has a lot to answer for.”

  “She didn’t plan to keep me.” Clouds had begun blowing in off the Bay and filling the sky. The kitchen grew colder, but I wasn’t at all sure a lack of sunshine was entirely to blame. “But she needed to tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

  Dora grew very still, her calm expression at odds with the rapt attention and speculation in her eyes. “The guardian?”

  “The … the watcher. She’s older than we thought, Dora, one of the last of her kind. I only wish I’d been able to see what she looked like.” I couldn’t tell her the watcher was a dragon. Not out of compulsion or fear of what would happen if I said the word, or that I was afraid she wouldn’t believe me, but because I’d been entrusted with a secret. Breaking that trust was wrong. I shut my eyes, remembering what I’d been shown, and opened them again to find Dora watching me with alarm. “I was never supposed to pass on Alina’s memories.”

  Dora sat huddled in her chair while I explained, so still and quiet that if she’d been anyone else, I might have thought she wasn’t paying attention. Some of the alarm left her expression, replaced by a frown. She was far from happy with what I had to say.

  “It’s times like these I regret promising Randy I’d leave the flask at home.” Dora stood and began pacing my kitchen, fists clenched tight. “Dear God in heaven, old-world guardians, necromancers, Bolsheviks … there’s no telling what else followed Alina here from Russia. I don’t like this, Dee. It’s too byzantine for me to be comfortable with the risk you’d be taking. Let me do this. I’ve had more experience.”

  I continued petting Mai, oddly calm for the moment. “You’ve no more experience with this than I do, Isadora Bobet. I’ve learned an enormous amount about the spirit realm over the last four years, and you’ve given me skills I’d never have learned from anyone else. Eventually lack of experience has to stop being an excuse for keeping me wrapped in cotton wool. You can’t be my shield forever.”

  She leaned against the icebox, arms crossed and glaring at nothing in particular. Dora’s anger was much like a summer cloudburst, intense and blustery and soon over. This time was no exception.

  “Damn it, Delia. You have the most infuriating habit of being right.” Dora stepped away from the icebox and busied herself filling the teakettle. “Are there any cookies?”

  “In the bread box.”

  The wind had picked up, putting an end to the jays’ nest building and scattering peach blossoms across the yard in pale pink clouds. I set Mai back on the sill to keep watch and waited for my tea.

  Infuriating habit by Dora’s standards or not, I was right. I had to face this on my own.

  That didn’t
mean I wasn’t frightened.

  Gabe

  One of the new crop of rookies had been assigned by the desk sergeant to drive Gabe to the scene. Harrison Walken drove well enough, but the young officer was new to the city and got lost twice. The delay cost only a few minutes at most, but Gabe spent the last block or two perched on the edge of the seat, peering past Walken’s head and trying to catch a glimpse of the church.

  Very few cars lined the street, a surprise given how much time had passed since the body was found. Most murder scenes resembled controlled chaos. New people arrived on the scene while others left, a constant ebb and flow that didn’t end until his squad had gathered every scrap of information possible. Gabe had expected to see the bustle of officers gathering evidence, reporters shouting questions at anyone who looked as if he might be in charge, and neighbors gawking in hopes of seeing something gruesome or interesting.

  The calm around Holy Trinity made him vaguely uneasy. Something wasn’t right.

  Lynch had been leaning forward too, watching intently for his first glimpse of the scene. Now he sat back, his expression openly curious. “Did all your men go home early, Gabe? Looks too quiet.”

  “It is too quiet.” That Jordan Lynch had asked confirmed Gabe’s growing opinion that the Chicago detective was a good cop. He pointed. “I expected to find beat cops, at least six or seven patrol cars, and the coroner’s men waiting on us. My men know their jobs. If they’re not here, someone higher up ordered them away.”

  “No neighbors or reporters either. They’d be even harder to run off.” Jordan kneaded his wounded leg, a gesture Gabe took as a newly acquired habit. “I’m going to guess that doesn’t happen often.”

  “Never.” Gabe’s smile was grim. “I’ll be honest, Jordan, I don’t know what’s going on. I doubt I’m going to like finding out.”

  Jordan grinned, the first unguarded expression Gabe had seen from him. He knew then they were going to be friends.