by Skye Knizley
Raven took another step and tested her shoulder. It was sore, but she was already healing.
“I thought you wanted me alive.”
“We do, Lady Raven. But I will kill you if I must,” Arden said.
“I’m not going to let you kill Rupert,” Raven said.
Arden smiled and her eyes flashed with magik. “You have no choice, Lady Raven.”
Raven let her own power flow. “Wrong answer.”
She drew the blade from her right hip and attacked, crossing the remaining distance in a single fencer’s step. Arden danced back in surprise, but Raven gave no quarter, spinning, kicking, punching and slashing, trying to find an opening in Arden’s defenses. Her blade snaked out and slashed at the witch’s wrist where it opened a wide gash that made Arden cry out in pain.
“Impossible!” Arden screeched. “What magik is this?”
Raven drew her other knife and twirled it in her fingers. “To quote a favorite movie, I don’t think that word means what you think it means. Drop the dagger, you’re under arrest.”
Arden’s face darkened and she lunged with the dagger. Raven blocked with her off-hand weapon and slashed again, opening a wide cut in Arden’s cheek. The witch recoiled in anger and raised a hand to cast another spell. Raven stepped into the opening, dropped her free blade and grabbed the witch’s wrist. She shook the dagger free and head-butted the smaller woman, breaking her nose with an audible crack.
“What part of ‘under arrest’ didn’t you understand?” she asked.
Arden struggled in Raven’s grip, trying to free herself. Raven squeezed harder and pressed her knife to the witch’s throat.
“These are brand new boots. Don’t make me get blood all over them.”
The glow in Arden’s eyes faded. “As you wish.”
“Good girl. Free Rupert from your magik and I’ll let you live,” Raven said.
Arden glanced at Levac, where he knelt still frozen in place. She nodded once and Raven felt the magik fade, like a bad headache swirling away into the ether.
“Thank you. You have the right to remain silent, I suggest you exercise your right and not try to cast any spells,” Raven said, opening her cuffs. “You have the right to an attorney, please get one that was born after 1955. If you cannot afford an attorney, we’ll provide you with one guaranteed to get your ass locked up until hell freezes over.”
She snapped the cuffs around Arden’s wrists and pushed her down beside Levac. “Do you understand these rights?”
Arden glared at her, her jaw working as if there was something caught in her teeth. Raven shrugged and turned her attention to Levac, who was shaking free from the magik.
“I’ll take that as a yes. You okay, partner?”
Levac sank down until he was sitting on the floor that surrounded the altar. “Yeah… I think so. Just a headache. What the hell happened?”
“Frosty here tried to freeze us to death and steal your blood,” Raven said.
Levac blinked at the sullen witch. “You arrested her? You usually kill everyone and try to ask questions at a séance.”
Raven picked up her discarded knife and slipped it into her boot. “I don’t kill everyone, and Arden here knows more than she’s told us. She’s worth dragging back to the office.”
“I don’t disagree,” Levac said. “Lets get out of here, I could really use some coffee.”
He looked up and frowned. “Ray…do you know your eyes have turned red?”
“What, like bloodshot?” Raven asked.
Levac shook his head slowly. “No… I mean red. Where they’re usually blue when you’re pissed, they’re red. Like your dad’s when he draws that sword of his.”
Raven picked up Arden’s discarded dagger and held up the reflective surface. As she watched, her eyes faded from a deep red to their normal green.
“I guess different magik has different effects on me,” she said.
“What magik?”
“Her father’s,” Arden said in a voice filled with awe. “She can not only tap the abilities of Lord Strohm, she can tap her father’s magik.”
“How do you know who my father is?” Raven asked.
Arden smiled. “We know many things about you, Lady Raven.”
Raven grabbed her arm and jerked her to her feet. “Swell. You can explain that down at the office. You can also explain why you killed my sister, her familiar and ruined Christmas.”
Levac drew his pistol and followed. “My Christmas isn’t ruined. I still have chicken waiting for me.”
Raven glanced back at him and he smiled.
“Gotta find joy in the little things, Ray.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Aspen
Chicago Docks, 5:26 p.m. Dec 23rd
The city docks looked abandoned, a snow-covered hellscape abandoned to the elements, perhaps after the final apocalypse ended life on Earth. Buildings jutted here and there with snowbanks piled against the side, boats swayed and creaked at their moorings and the beacon lights, intended to guide vessels into the harbor, flashed and swayed in the wind.
Aspen parked her Jeep in the guest lot at the end of the pier and hurried through the snow to the shipping office. A light still glowed within, but the doors were locked and the building appeared empty, which was no surprise. She’d heard on the radio that the city, including the port, was closed due to the storm. Only pedestrian traffic, police and emergency crews were out and pedestrians were warned to stay home. She’d seen a few businesses braving the weather and the steep fine for remaining open during an emergency, but the streets were as deserted as the port. She’d never seen it this empty and she hoped to never see it again. A city was a living thing, as awake and thriving as any forest. To see one apparently empty and dead made her heart ache. She didn’t know how humans could stand the loneliness.
She cast a charm on the locked doors and entered without a sound into the quiet interior. The front office was decorated with a man’s touch, leather chairs, chrome trim and a few fake plants matched with brown carpet and acoustic ceiling tiles. The front desk, where a receptionist sat fielding calls and directing traffic for fourteen hours a day, was clean and empty of any decoration. An older computer and monitor sat in the middle next to a clean coffee cup and a notepad.
Aspen checked the rear office for any sign of life then sat at the reception desk. It took less than ten minutes to crack the password and she was into the system. Images and letters danced across the screen as she worked and she smiled in the glow of the screen. Hacking computers was a sort of magik, the kind she’d practiced for years before learning to channel human magik and regaining her fae abilities. There was joy in the practice, though she would never tell anyone else that. It was breaking the law, after all.
She found what she was looking for on the mainframe, a manifest of containers brought across the lake from Canada. Thirst used a particular root native to northern Canada. The desolate town of Resolute was home to the only gnome who knew how to process the root and convert it from a poison to a useful soporific. Whoever was picking up that shipment was likely the one making Thirst.
“Bingo,” she muttered, staring at the screen. “Levine Biotech. Who the hell is Levine Biotech? Did Riscassi and Levine open a new business right under our noses?”
She tapped a few more keys and confirmed that a shipment containing a package from Resolute was picked up by a Levine Biotech representative six times in as many months. The timeline matched, according to the casefile King had emailed her Thirst began to trickle onto the streets around the same time. Just a few vials, enough to chum the waters and wet the appetite of the high end clients they were targeting.
Aspen sat back and popped a piece of bubblegum into her mouth. Damian was the street man, the guy in charge of getting product to the clients, that much was obvious. He might be the high man on the totem pole, but
that seemed unlikely. The guy at the top was usually the same guy producing the merchandise. Or, more correctly, he was in command of the people making the drugs and everyone attached to the cartel. Franklin Decker was probably just a dealer making connections at a five star hotel. He was killed over the Thirst, was stumbling on this just a coincidence? If it was, it would the first one they’d ever had.
She blew a bubble and stared at the screen for a moment before leaning forward and opening a fresh hacking window. A computer was a computer and this one didn’t carry her virtual footprint.
It took an hour to sort through the virtual red tape that surrounded Levine BioTech. The company was registered under a shell corporation that traced back to Rocky Riscassi the elder, who was still in prison and would be until the day he died. He had more than a dozen of them, still laundering money, still importing and selling goods and buying prison officials to make is life on the inside easier. The latter was one of the evils of privatizing prisons. Almost anyone could be bought, you just had to throw enough money at them.
The elder Riscassi had never been into the drug business, that was his brother Rico’s side of the business, and later Maria’s. He was the money man, the art dealer and the strong arm of the family. But that didn’t mean that someone else didn’t have access to create a front corporation and use it to manufacture Thirst. She just had to find out who it was.
There was an address for Levine BioTech on Grande Avenue in the heart of the city’s dying manufacturing sector. Aspen wrote the address down on the notepad, tore the sheet off and stuck it in her pocket. She then shut the computer down, wiped her prints off the keyboard and stepped back into the storm. She locked the door behind her with a simple spell and started back across the empty lot to her waiting Jeep.
Once inside, she checked her messages and noticed a set of scene photos from Raven. She’d found them in an abandoned house near Harm’s Woods. Aspen scrolled through them and shook her head. Ash had deserved better, he was a good man, loyal to the house. He could have stayed with house Tempeste, but chose to depart with Pandora when she was banished.
She didn’t recognize the ritual surrounding Ash, but the sigils were ancient Fae mixed with Hattic, a human language lost to antiquity. Aspen called Raven and got her voicemail on the third ring.
“Hey baby,” she said after the recording. “I’m working on a case for King, but I saw the photos. I’m so sorry, love. I don’t recognize the ritual, but I’ve seen the language. Maybe Ming can match it to something in the Section Thirteen database.”
She paused and pulled off the stocking cap that was making her head hurt. “I’ve got one more lead to follow up on, want to meet for dinner? Call me back, babes.”
The call ended and she put her phone in the vehicle’s cradle before backing out and guiding the purple SUV back into the street. The snow was now so heavy on the roads she could hear it scraping against the floor beneath her boots. Road crews were out, but they would be focusing on the city’s heart before coming this way.
Lightning flashed in the distance and she blinked in the sudden light. The heavy snow reflected the lightning and made it ten times brighter than usual. To make it worse, the lightning was a strange red hue, like the fires of hell reaching down from heaven.
Grande Avenue was plowed better than the side roads, but that wasn’t saying much. The freak blizzard was dropping so much snow the city couldn’t keep up. Aspen guessed it had been less than an hour since one of the giant v-shaped plows had passed by, yet there was already another inch of fresh powder on top of already treacherous ice and slush. Still, she made better time and pulled into the parking lot of Levine BioTech just thirty minutes after leaving the docks.
Several vehicles were parked in the lot including a pair of delivery vans with tire chains and a massive SUV-limousine conversion. All were free of all but a light dusting of snow, indicating they’d been cleared or driven in the recent past.
The building itself was only three stories and was the only business on the block not decorated with holiday lights, wreaths and baubles. A shoveled path led to the front doors, while another led to a loading dock at the side of the building. Another delivery van sat at the dock with a heavy wooden plank stretching from its rear doors into the gloom of the building.
Aspen parked her Jeep on the street and used the snow as cover to circle around to the dock out of sight of anyone who might be watching from within. Once in the safety of the shadows she knelt and watched the building. Damien was a cautious fellow, she’d caught him with his pants down once already, if he had any brains he’d have notified his men and they would be on alert.
She was right. Two men armed with what looked like submachine guns stepped into view on the far side of the building. They were dressed in heavy snow gear and had night vision goggles resting on their caps.
Aspen waited until they passed to the front of the building then hurried across the distance to the dock. She chinned herself on the edge of the dock and rolled beneath the door before regaining her feet.
She was in a small warehouse space mostly filled with disused office furniture. A dozen boxes marked with Damien’s smiling vampire logo sat on a rolling conveyor waiting to be loaded onto trucks.
“I hate being right,” Aspen muttered.
She snapped photos of the boxes and the contents to be uploaded to King then proceeded through the warehouse to a wide sliding cargo door at the opposite end. The door stood open about six inches and she was able to peer through into the room beyond, which was a Frankenstein’s lab of drug paraphernalia. Everything needed to cook meth, crack, coke and Thirst was in the room, along with several workers in hazmat suits and breathers still bent to the task of illegal drug manufacture.
Aspen slipped through the space and entered the lab, using a glamour to make herself look like any other worker. A few of the others looked up as she made her way between the assembly line and laboratory equipment, but none made comment. She bobbed her head as if she recognized them and kept walking until she reached the area where they were making Thirst. It was a complicated process involving heat, magik and a collection of components more likely to kill someone than create the most highly addictive drug in human history. Trays of desiccated roots, powders that glowed green in the light and a base of basilisk venom all sat together next to the equipment needed to convert them into Thirst. Two workers were doing just that, distilling the liquid and filling tiny vials one by one.
At the near end of the table, where the process began, was a small beaker of what could only be blood. Aspen stepped closer and chewed her lip, wondering how she could get a sample without anyone noticing.
“Don’t touch that!” a voice ordered.
Aspen turned. One of the technicians, a larger man wearing a hazmat suit with a tinted visor, stood behind her.
“Why not?” Aspen asked.
The man folded his arms. “It was all part of the briefing. That is a hazardous substance that can kill you just as dead as the basilisk venom.”
Aspen cocked her head. “No it isn’t, its blood. Vampire blood, am I right?”
“There is no such thing as a vampire. Who are you? What’s your operating number?” the man asked.
Aspen paused. She could try to fake it in hopes of getting out without drawing any more attention or she could stride boldly forward, as it were, and shut this thing down right now. By herself. In a building that could be full of armed guards. Right.
“I’m T1138, I’m new here, just sent over by Fish,” she said.
“Nobody told me about any new hires, I’ll have to check with Mr. Riscassi,” the man replied.
“Are you sure you want to do that, sir? Mr. Riscassi was pretty upset about someone setting fire to his place, I don’t want to see you shot for being paranoid,” Aspen said, almost touching his arm.
The man stepped back. “Maybe you’re right. Get back to work,
this shipment needs to be out by midnight.”
“Yes, sir,” Aspen replied.
She turned away and went to a work station, pretending to make crystal meth until he was out of sight. As soon as he was gone she took a clean pipet and pulled a sample from the blood. It wouldn’t do much good to track the owner, but Raven had an amazing sense of smell. There was a chance she could recognize the blood and help them find out who was really behind all of this and where they got the blood.
She put the sample in a sterile vial, sealed the top and hurried for the exit. She was almost there when a heavy hand fell on her shoulder. She jumped and half-turned to see the managing tech standing behind her again.
“Fish says he didn’t send anyone over. Who are you, lady?”
Aspen dropped her glamour. “You know, you’re pretty quiet for a big man. Aspen Kincaid, FBI. Step back, you and your team are all under arrest for the production and distribution of illegal narcotics.”
The tech stepped back and reached for the Glock at his waistband.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Aspen said, tracing a protection sigil in the area.
“You don’t look like any FBI agent I ever saw,” he replied, drawing his weapon.
“It’s the hair, isn’t it? Everyone gets thrown off by the hair. Would you believe its all natural?” Aspen asked, giving her hair a flip.
The tech raised his weapon and reached for an alarm button on the wall. “You ain’t no FBI agent, but you sure are stupid.”
“I warned you,” Aspen said.
Her firebolt caught him in the chest and sent him flying backward into the next room.
‘Baby, if you’re out there, I could really use some backup,’ she sent along her link with Raven.
Raven responded almost immediately. ‘Rupe and I have a suspect, heading back to the office, where are you?’
‘Home in on me, and hurry.’ Aspen replied. ‘I need the cavalry.’