by Eileen Wilks
All at once she keyed into the phrase he’d used: “normal putrefaction.” “Shit. Oh, shit. Tell me the rest of it.”
“Death magic. I’m not sure, but . . . I think the bodies smell of death magic.”
JAY Deacon was thin, trim, under forty, and under six feet. With his gold-rimmed glasses and skin the color of wet tea leaves, he looked more like a Northern academic than a stereotypical Southern sheriff.
He sure acted like a small-town sheriff, though. “You’re not listenin’ to me, ma’am. Coroner’s van’ll be here any minute now. We don’t need the FBI to work the scene, so once you take us to the bodies, you can go on back to bed.”
Until a few months ago, Lily had been on the other side of the local-federal divide, working homicides in San Diego. She would have sympathized with the sheriff’s desire to hang on to his case if he weren’t virtually patting her on the head and telling her to toddle on home.
“Sheriff, I called you as a courtesy, not because there’s any question of jurisdiction. My ERT will be here within the hour. Your people can hang around or go back to bed themselves—your choice. I am not conducting you to the bodies.”
His people consisted of a pair of deputies, both male. No surprise there. They were also white, however, and didn’t seem to have a problem working for a black boss, which might give her hope for the future of the nation . . . later. When she could think about something other than bodies tainted by death magic.
After showing Lily what he’d found, Rule had walked her to the highway to wait for the FBI’s Emergency Response Team, then gone back to the scene to make sure no more little forest creatures chowed down on the remains. Lily had left her headlights on to guide the ERT, but their illumination was partly blocked now by the three county cars pulled up on the shoulder behind her car.
Both deputies held flashlights. Sheriff Deacon wasn’t carrying anything but an attitude.
“Your team can help, I suppose.” He grudged the words, as if he were offering a major concession. “If they get here in time. But like I said, we’ve got the perp locked up, which makes this my scene.”
“Murder by magical means is a federal crime.”
He shook his head and sighed. “Roy Don Meacham didn’t use magic to kill his family. Crazy sumbitch used his son Andrew’s baseball bat. We’ve got the bat. Roy Don handed it to me himself. We’ve got a pattern of domestic violence—”
“How many calls?”
“Just one, but plenty of witnesses say Roy Don didn’t mind using the back of his hand on the kids or Becky. We’ve got physical evidence—the murder weapon, and blood and other traces on his clothes and skin. Hell, we’ve got a witness. Bill Watkins has the postal route out that way. He heard screamin’ when he pulled his truck up to the mailbox, so he went to help. Ended up with a plate in his skull where Roy Don whacked him, but he tried.”
“He remembers what he saw at the house?” Severe head trauma usually meant some degree of amnesia covering the time of the injury.
“Oh, yeah. He went inside, saw Roy Don walloping on Becky with the bat. He doesn’t remember anything after that, but he remembers that much, poor bastard. We’ve got all the evidence we need.”
“Except a confession. Or the bodies.”
“Which you’ve found. You got a tip,” he added, his voice landing heavy on the last word. “One you haven’t elected to tell me about.”
“No, I haven’t.” Lily had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes. This wasn’t uncommon; at almost five foot three, she looked up a lot. But Deacon was standing too close, making a point of the difference in their heights. That annoyed her. “However, I’d heard of the case, which is why—”
“Didn’t know it had made any of the big city papers.”
“I’m visiting a relative in the area.” Sort of a relative. Rule’s son didn’t fit neatly into any of the labels people used for relationships. For that matter, neither did Rule. People looked at you funny if you spoke of your mate.
“Yeah? This relative have anything to do with that tip you won’t tell me about?”
“You know, Sheriff, I’d be more likely to share information if you weren’t such a pain in the ass. Step back.”
Deacon scowled. “What the hell do you—”
“I want you to quit crowding me physically. It doesn’t intimidate me. It just pisses me off.”
Impossible to tell if he flushed. But the quick duck of his head suggested embarrassment, and he did move back a pace, yanking off his cap and running his forearm over his forehead as if he’d worked up a sweat.
Maybe he had. It wasn’t as stinking hot at this hour as it had been yesterday when they arrived, but the moist air held on to heat. “You don’t want me messing in your case. I get it. Problem is, you have no choice. Magic was involved in the deaths of three people. That makes this mine.”
He reseated his cap and spoke with strained courtesy. “An’ you know about this magic how?”
“I’m a touch sensitive.” She waited to see if he knew what that meant. Most people did, or thought they did. As with many things magical, their assumptions were packed with old wives’ tales, prejudice, and tabloid headlines. Kind of like the way people “knew” all about lupi.
His eyebrows climbed, then descended in a scowl. “Shit.” He gave the word two syllables: shee-it. “You wouldn’t happen to be that weer-lover, would you?”
Lily sighed. Pronounced like weird without the D, weer was Southern for werewolf, and she’d made the news a few times. Then there were the gossip mags, which were fascinated by her relationship with “the Nokolai prince,” as they insisted on referring to Rule. “Maybe you haven’t heard. We call them lupi these days.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve heard about you. You and that Turner weer, the one who’s some kind of prince.”
Her hand tightened on the flashlight. “I doubt that whatever you’ve heard has any bearing on jurisdiction.”
“Maybe not.” His eyes were hard, dark walnuts, appraising her. “All right. I’ll cooperate if you’ll show me the bodies. I won’t mess up your scene.”
Temper urged her to give him the finger, but temper wasn’t a good guide, and he had called it her scene. She was going to have to work with this man. He and his deputies had gathered the initial evidence; they knew the area and the people.
Wait, wait. She wasn’t working with him because she’d be handing the case off. Assuming the Unit could get someone down here . . . well, they’d have to. She was here for Rule and Toby, not the FBI.
But for now, those bodies were her responsibility. “Deal. You’d better call your coroner, tell him to go back to bed.”
Deacon didn’t like that, but he was making an effort. He asked if she wanted his people to wait for the ERT. She thanked him, and he spoke to his deputies, then appropriated one of their flashlights. The batteries in his, he said, were dead. “How far is it?” he asked her.
“Less than a mile.”
“Hope you know how to find your way around without street signs. Under a mile doesn’t sound like much, but one tree looks a lot like another if you aren’t used to woods. Especially at night.”
Lily didn’t have to know how to track the pathless primeval, not with Rule waiting for her. She just had to find him, and that was easy. “There’s a deer trail, and I left someone on-scene who knows woods. If I have trouble finding the spot again, he’ll assist.”
He gave her a nod. She turned on her own flashlight and set off.
Near the highway the trees were new growth, young and dense and skinny. Teenage trees, she thought, but they were tall enough to spread an umbrella between her and the night sky. The moment she stepped under that canopy, the world turned godawful dark.
Crickets revved their motors like they were about to blast off. The ground was spongy, absorbing the sound of their footsteps as Deacon followed her. Lily kept her light trained on the piney carpet ahead. According to Rule, copperheads turned nocturnal in the hot months.
Tre
es had completely erased the highway behind them when Deacon spoke. “I guess you touched the bodies.”
“The one on top. I didn’t disturb the scene.” Which was as ugly as any she’d ever been called out on. Lily wouldn’t have known the body she’d touched was female if not for the bra tangled up with gnawed-on bones and scraps of stinking meat. “Why are you so determined to see the bodies, Sheriff?” She’d told him about the dogs. Did he think he had to prove how tough he was by seeing what they’d left?
He ignored her question. “When you touch things, you feel it if they’ve got magic in them.”
“That’s right. Magic is a texture to me.”
“Hold up a minute.”
Lily turned. With her flash pointed down, it was hard to make out his expression; his face was a dark blur in the greater darkness. But the pale skin on his outstretched palm showed up clearly.
Her eyebrows lifted. “Testing me?” Well, why not? She took his hand.
The prickle of magic was immediate. And confusing. She held his hand longer than she’d intended, frowning, trying to sort the sensation . . . slick, all slickness and surface, like a gumball. A faint pulsing, as if the magic within swayed to some distant tidal pull . . . “You’re Gifted,” she said at last, dropping his hand, “but damned if I can say what kind of Gift, though it’s tied to water. There’s some sort of worked magic overlaying it. Suppressing it, maybe.”
After a moment he muttered, “Guess you know what you’re doin’. No one’s ever been able to tell. No one.”
“You going to tell me about your Gift?”
He wasn’t at all sure he would. That was obvious in his hesitation, if not his expression—she couldn’t see clearly—but finally he said, “Empathy.”
Her eyebrows rose. He wasn’t talking about physical empathy. That was an Earth Gift, and rare. No, his Gift would be the emotional sort—more common and less welcome. With a minor empathic Gift, you could get by okay as long as you avoided crowds. A strong Gift like Deacon’s could make life unlivable.
“That’s a rough Gift for anyone,” she said, “but for a cop . . . it seemed to be coated.”
“I keep it spelled shut.”
“I hadn’t realized that was possible.”
“My granny put up the block years ago. She, ah . . . she knows stuff. Her great-granddad was a shaman. Some stuff got passed down.”
Lily nodded and turned to hunt her way through the trees. “I’ve got a friend trained in African traditions. She’d be interested in that spell, if you’re willing to talk about it.”
“Might be. Depends. I’d have to get a feel for her.”
Even with his Gift coated by that spell, he probably picked up impressions about people. Lily’s mouth twisted wryly. That didn’t say much for her, considering how hostile he’d been. “You had any trouble with your block since the Turning? It’s handling more magic now.”
“I have to freshen the spell more often. That’s about it. You were connected with that, weren’t you? With the Turning and the dragons and all.”
“With the dragons, anyway.”
He stopped, staring at her. “So that part’s true?”
THREE
THE Turning. The first person to call it that had been Lily’s grandmother, and the name had somehow spread and stuck. It fit. The world had turned from one thing into another, leaving everyone scrambling to understand the new rules.
It happened just before Christmas last year. The realms had shifted and nodes all over the world had cracked open, spilling a tsunami of raw magic. Computers—and everything they controlled—had been scrambled for days. That initial, overwhelming surge hadn’t been repeated, thank God, but power continued to leak into the world. Ambient magic levels were up and expected to keep rising.
One expert expected them to rise to levels not seen in roughly three thousand years.
For the moment, computers and related tech worked fine in places that lacked a major node. Unfortunately, people seemed attracted to nodes. All the big population centers had multiple nodes, which meant multiple problems . . . except for the cities that had dragons.
People used to think dragons were myth, like Cyclops or Baba Yaga. That’s what Lily had believed until last November, when she ran into them in Dis . . . a realm better known as hell. The dragons had been ready to end their centuries-long exile; Lily had been more than ready to return to Earth. Together, they’d made that happen . . . for a price.
The price had been Lily. Part of her, anyway, a part that had been separately embodied at the time. But they’d brought Rule home; he’d had the surgery he needed, and he’d healed. And it turned out that the part of her that had been sacrificed wasn’t entirely gone. Just mute. Mostly.
As for the dragons, they’d gone into hiding at first. Two months later, the Turning hit—and the dragons reappeared.
The world learned that dragons act as oversize sponges, soaking up magic. After serious negotiation culminating in the Dragon Accords, the dragons had agreed that each would overfly a prescribed territory, keeping the ambient magic level low. Problem was, there weren’t enough dragons. Only the largest U.S. cities and a dozen overseas had a resident dragon. Rural areas like this had to make do with lesser protections—spelled collection crystals, silk coverings, and less proven barriers or receptors.
Then there were cell phones. Radios worked reliably everywhere, but cell phones were hit or miss—fine in some areas, chancy in others. This randomness offended scientists. Both radios and cell phones operated on broadcast radio waves, yet for some reason cell phones were more affected by magic. Worse, the interference seemed random.
So far, Lily’s cell had worked fine here in Halo, North Carolina.
Deacon was staring at her as if she’d sprouted a second head. She sighed. “I don’t know what you’ve heard. My involvement wasn’t in the news.”
“My cousin’s with the Washington PD. He said you summoned the dragons.”
Good grief. Lily wondered what other crazy stories were flying around, but for once left a question unasked. No point in it. As Grandmother said, rumors were like politics—inevitable whenever more than two people were around. “No one summons a dragon.”
“What did you do, then?”
“It’s complicated, large parts of the story are classified, and none of it relates to our problem tonight.” She turned and started walking again, skirting a large fallen branch.
They’d left the mob of teenage trees behind. Here the trunks were thick and widely spaced, with little underbrush. Nothing looked like a path.
She aimed her light up into the trees. There. A scrap of white. When Rule was taking her back to the highway, he’d shredded a tissue from her purse, fixing the bits on branches here and there to mark a detour she needed to take around some low, wet ground. Lily hitched her purse more securely on her shoulder and followed the tiny white flags.
Deacon moved up beside her. “Nothing you learned by touch is admissible in court.”
“Not as evidence, no. But it gives me reasonable grounds to believe magic was involved in the commission of a felony. According to the recent amendment to the Domestic Security and Magical Crimes Act—”
“Fuck that gobbledygook. Why are you here, huntin’ up crimes? Don’t you have anything better to do? Seems like I’m always hearing about how stretched you MCD folks are since the Turning, yet here you are, complicatin’ a simple case.”
MCD stood for Magical Crimes Division, the FBI division that, on paper, contained the unit Lily belonged to. And yes, they were stretched. Badly. “Sheer lust for power.”
He didn’t laugh.
Lily didn’t roll her eyes. But she wanted to. “Joke, Sheriff. That was a joke. I’m not eager to complicate your life or mine. I’m supposed to be on vacation.”
“Yeah? I don’t see Disneyworld nearby.”
“Personal leave, actually. Family stuff.” And that’s all she planned to say about it. Rule had given up a lot to protect his son from
his own notoriety, and though the secret couldn’t be kept much longer—not with Toby moving to San Diego to live with them—Lily wouldn’t be the one to reveal it.
And she could not, of course, refer to the other reason they were in North Carolina. Rule’s new tie to Leidolf was secret. “I understand the perp you’ve locked up—Meacham, right?—hasn’t admitted anything.”
“Claims he doesn’t remember. Shit, half the time he refuses to believe his family’s dead, says we’re lying’ to him. The DA thinks Roy Don’s hopin’ to cop an insanity plea.”
“What do you think?”
“Oh, Roy Don’s nuts, all right. I don’t know if he matches up with the legal definition, but he’s crazy as hell.”
He sounded deeply sad, as if Meacham’s insanity robbed him of something important. “Did you know him? Or the victims?”
“I met Roy Don a few times. Went to high school with his wife, Becky. Rebecca Nordstrom, back then. Didn’t know her well—around here, kids mostly hang with their own in high school. Some of it’s prejudice, but a lot is just social hang-ups. You know how, at a middle school dance, the boys bunch up together along one wall, the girls across from them? No one’s sure what to say to the folks on the other side. That’s how it is. Loosens up some if you go on to college, but Becky didn’t—married Roy Don right out of high school.” He was silent a moment. “Their youngest daughter was friends with my little girl. Pretty thing. Real sweet.”
And now decaying under a tree. Lily thought she understood why he’d been such an ass about holding on to his case. “I used to work Homicide. It’s hard when the victims are kids. And it’s hell if you knew them.”
“I don’t let it interfere.”
“I’m sure you don’t.” Lily didn’t believe that, but he needed to. She knew how it was when the professional and the personal trampled all over each other. Most of the time, you could hold professionalism up like a shield to keep the horror at bay. Not entirely, maybe, but enough to do the job. When an investigation turned personal, you worked harder than ever at the shield. Knowing it wasn’t enough.