“I should warm you up.” His kisses started between my breasts and left a line of blue mating fire down as he kissed lower. They were perfect dream kisses, exactly the way I liked them, heading down between my legs to—wait a minute, wrong guy, let’s stop for a second, shall we? Thinking it didn’t make it happen and Reilly kept kissing me with blue fire.
It did warm me up, warmed me and started a different kind of heat between my legs. But the head that dipped down over my stomach wasn’t the right blond, which meant this wasn’t right; I should do something to stop it all. I wasn’t about to throw away what I had with Jakob for a tryst on the beach, even if it was really hot, even if it did feel so good—damn it, it was time to wake up.
****
Thankfully I did. I turned in bed and Jakob was watching me, his eyes open in the darkness of his bedroom, soon to be our bedroom.
“Hi,” I said softly.
“What were you dreaming about, my love?”
A nice easy question every other night of the week but not now. “Nothing important,” I whispered, pulling him close to me. My body was open and ready; Reilly’s mating fire saw to that. I kissed my lover, the man I cared about and trusted, chasing away the memory of the man sent to convert me. My mouth pressed against his as my hands moved between his legs. I found the part of him I wanted most and stroked it into hardness.
I shifted my hips beneath him, and in a second, he filled me. I kissed his neck as we moved together, loving the taste of his skin and the sound of his moans.
This was what I wanted, not a man who didn’t know me on a beach, but the pleasure that comes from knowing your lover. He said my name and I knew I was close. I struggled to control myself, to make this more than me taking my pleasure from him but my body was too ready. Before he could catch up to me, I threw my head back to scream as my body exploded in ecstasy.
“Mallory?” Jakob’s voice was a question when it should have been filled with passion. I opened my eyes to see why. Blue mating fire coated my hands, it danced along the skin of his chest. I swept my hands over him, coating him in it, knowing how it must have been making him feel, hoping the pleasure would be too much for him.
His confusion gave way to orgasm and his body tensed, not once but twice in a tight staccato. He picked me up and drove himself into me, my hands spreading blue flame as he came again. This time I joined him, letting the fire and the passion take me. With the last gasps of my release the fire ended, leaving the room cold and dark, leaving me desperate for air.
“We need to talk about this,” he said softly.
“Couldn’t we just have a nice cuddle and go back to sleep?”
“No. I’m afraid not.”
“Huh.” I nibbled my lip trying to appear thoughtful. “You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what do we talk about?”
His eyes filled with concern, making me feel like an ass for not sharing what was going on with me. “That was mating fire, my love, and you’re not a fire witch.”
“I could be. Raya has, well She sort of, that is I was dreaming and well, She made me an offer.”
“She would make you a fire witch?”
“Apparently, or at least that’s what the fire witch She sent me thinks. He said I could be death and fire; it seems that’s what Raya wants.”
“You were dreaming of another man?”
Well yes, but I knew better than to say that out loud. “I was dreaming of fire, fire and death. Raya sent me a fire witch to talk about it. I woke up before things got out of hand.”
“She sent someone to you? Who?”
“E, then Anna, then some guy, it doesn’t matter who she sends; they’re talking for Her.” It wasn’t a lie, but a tiny spin on the truth. Couldn’t fault a girl for that, could you?
****
Jakob had gone back to sleep after our early morning liaison but not before making me promise we’d talk about it all later. I skipped out to work delighted later didn’t mean this morning and hopeful later could actually mean much later, as in maybe never?
I didn’t know what I was going to say to Raya’s offer. I knew better than to turn Her down flat but nothing She’d done convinced me the power was worth the price. I hated how She’d tried to trick me into killing someone. And while the mating fire had been erotic beyond anything I’d experienced, the idea of Anna ruining her relationship for Aden kept creeping back in my mind. Was the best sex you could have worth giving up getting to decide who you had it with?
I used the drive into work to mull over my personal problems, but I stopped the minute I pulled into the parking garage. Christine’s killer was still out there and he didn’t care if I was going through some existential crisis of faith (or lack of faith). It was February and I’d promised myself the case would be closed by the end of January. I pushed all my other thoughts aside to concentrate on it.
“I checked up on your guy,” Danny started before I even put down my coffee cup.
“My guy?”
“The MP? He was right. Anything water related could’ve done it. Most of the people I talked to thought nixie or naiad before they thought water witch but that would work too. The problem with water witch is it would have to be one really pissed off witch.”
“And we don’t have one related to this case at all.” I sighed.
“So know where we can get a list of all the supernatural citizens related to water?”
“Actually, I might,” I said with a smile.
****
The Terra Prima offices hid inside a turn-of-the-century dry goods store. The outside still showed the faded sign “Blum Brothers, Hardware & Supplies” painted in letters faded yellow against the red brick. Inside, the same brick made up two of the walls, while the rest of the space was divided by plants. Looking closely, I could see cubicle dividers peeking out from behind the foliage.
The lights glowed with environmentally sensitive LED light white, while a small sign told me the floor contained only bamboo. I wondered if bamboo was somehow kinder to the environment but before I could ask Danny we were stopped by a rather imposing-looking man.
He stood head and shoulders above Danny, well over six foot, maybe even seven, his body thick at the shoulders but equally large everywhere else.
“Can I help you?” His voice made the question sound like “you’d better have a good reason for being here.”
“We’re hoping to talk to someone about a case,” Danny started, but his simple statement made heads turn. Even the behemoth in front of us looked sharp.
“It’s about a nixie or maybe a naiad, I’d love to get Ethan’s advice.” I picked my words carefully and was rewarded when a half-dozen heads went back to their work.
“Did I hear my name?” Ethan came down a set of floating stairs that stood against the wall. His brown curls bounced with each step and he still hadn’t shaved. In his jeans and hiking boots he could have been headed out to a park instead of down to the front office.
“Thanks, George, I’ve got them,” he dismissed the larger man when he was halfway down. “Great to see you again, Mallory. Why don’t you two come up?”
The second floor was more casual than the first. Four couches were grouped together in the center of the room, with a coffee table in the middle of them. At least five cups sat on the edges, making me think we’d interrupted some meeting. If we had Ethan didn’t mention it. He directed us to seats that were drowning in sunlight from the biggest skylight I’d ever seen. I told Ethan so before we sat down.
“More sunlight means less electric light which means less power, but I don’t want to start pontificating again. What’s up?”
Danny and I sketched the case out for him with broad strokes, an odd death, definitely supernatural, and probably a water elemental. I enjoyed using Trevor’s word and sounding so knowledgeable and official.
“And you’re thinking naiad?” Ethan shook his head curls swinging. “I mean I guess it’s possible, it’s just…I know some of
them; they don’t seem rough like that, unless someone threatens their river then I could see it.”
“Our victim was doctoring samples to cover up industrial pollution,” Danny shared.
“Oh yeah, that would do it,” Ethan agreed. “So I guess you want the list?”
“The list?” I prompted. I hadn’t expected him to suggest exactly what I came looking for.
“Terra Prima keeps a directory of supernatural creatures associated with the environment. Dryads, nixies that sort of thing. They’re wonderful in court. You really want to convince a judge a stream or a grove should be saved, show him someone who’ll die if it isn’t. Getting permission to damn up a spring is one thing, but getting permission to damn up a spring when you know it’ll kill someone is a heck of a lot harder.”
“That never occurred to me,” I said mostly to myself, but he caught it.
“It doesn’t occur to anyone, that’s why we’re here. Why don’t we head downstairs and I’ll get you a copy?” We started to walk down but I wasn’t watching where I was going. I bumped the edge of the coffee table, knocking down a mug and soaking the leg of my pants. Groaning, I realized I was going to be half wet in the nearly fifty-degree weather.
Both of the men ahead of me turned back at the sound of the crash but there wasn’t much they could do for the damage. Ethan made a bad joke about getting one of the water witches downstairs to help with the stain but I brushed him off and asked for the bathroom. He pointed in the back and I left the two of them alone to talk.
The bathroom was an actual bathroom with a combination tub shower like most people had at home. It probably had some deep environmental purpose but I wasn’t going to ask about it and risk getting Ethan started. I grabbed a washcloth to try to blot the coffee stain. Thankfully my pants were dark brown; the stain wouldn’t show too much.
I sighed and sat down on the toilet seat, leaning back to curse my bad luck. How the hell had I managed to hit the coffee table just right? Was some coffee god out to get me too? I looked up at the ceiling to pray for forgiveness for whatever I had done and stopped.
The ceiling was a distinctive shade of light sea foam green. The exact color I remembered from the last minutes of Christine Sweeny’s life.
****
Danny and Ethan were already downstairs when I joined them, a little shaken from seeing that color. There was a woman, someone new, with short blonde hair and a bright silver nose ring, chatting politely.
“And there she is. Did you survive your baptism by coffee?” Ethan joked as I came into view.
“I guess so,” I mumbled, distracted. That color of paint could be everywhere. There were at least five old buildings like this on each block in the historic district. Lots of bathrooms to check, lots of possibilities, but it didn’t stop me from being spooked.
“Marina was waiting to meet you,” Ethan said, and I plastered a false smile on my face.
“Phoebe mentioned you when she stopped by.” The woman smiled at me, offering her hand for a shake. I took it by reflex, feeling the tingle of magic but dismissing it. “It’s great to put a name with the face.”
“Thanks, I hope she didn’t say anything too crazy,” I said.
She made some witty remark. Ethan and Danny laughed. I should have joined in but my head was still upstairs seeing light green.
“What do you think of them?” I asked Danny when we got into the car.
“I guess they’re okay, bunch of earth and water witches trying to do good. Why? You looked half dead coming down those stairs.”
“Before Christine Sweeny died she saw this green color. I figured it was river water or the roof of some car but the bathroom in there…it was the same color.”
“Might not mean anything.” Danny shrugged. “It’s a color, could show up in a thousand places or maybe you were right and it was river water.”
“Yeah, it’s…disturbing I guess. I haven’t seen it anywhere since.” I shook my head, trying to lose the feeling. It didn’t work. I was too close to it all. “Do you think about her? About Christine, I mean, this woman who had two lovers but didn’t seem to care about either of them, and was covering up pollution.”
“Not really,” he admitted. “It’s not my job to think about her, just to solve the case.”
“But that’s not really true, is it? Our job is to serve justice, not just uphold the law, right? And Christine doesn’t seem like an incredibly law-abiding citizen.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Danny took his eyes off the road to give me a hard look. “Law-abiding or not, her family deserves to know what happened. She deserves justice.”
“But do you like her? Like if you met her on the street or at a party would you think ‘wow she’s a bitch’ or what?”
He pondered it for a while, parking the car back in the car pool lot. “It doesn’t really matter what I think; we solve the case. Catch the killer, let justice work.”
It was a wonderfully sage answer but it didn’t help me from feeling mixed up about our victim. As we headed back upstairs to work I worried I’d never develop the detachment I needed to do my job.
****
Ethan’s directory was printed on both sides with names sorted into columns beside contact numbers. It wasn’t a short list; over two hundred people in our city of two hundred and twenty thousand could commit the crime I wanted to solve. We’d visited Terra Prima first thing in the morning and by lunch we narrowed it down even farther. There were only twenty we really needed to get in touch with. I started leaving messages with the most likely suspects, but when Danny unpacked his healthy-looking salad I headed downstairs for a sandwich.
I lingered by the soda case but there was almost no chance I’d be doing magic today and I’d skipped my run this morning thanks to last night’s fun. Mildly disappointed I couldn’t justify the calories, I stepped past the Dr. Peppers and headed upstairs, an idea bubbling in my mind.
“Care to indulge me after lunch?” I asked Danny.
“Depends on what the indulgence is.” The way he looked up from his salad I could tell he was hoping for a stop at Indigo’s for chocolate. I almost hated to disappointment him.
“I want to go back to Rivermont.”
Danny agreed and after he’d finished we headed back out. The path I’d gone running on was the same chipped mulch and the afternoon sunlight wasn’t much different than it had been the morning I’d found Simon’s stabbing victim. Still, there wasn’t any feeling of danger here. Whatever happened in this park, the trees and ground were okay with it. They gave off an air of serene peace, and a feeling of protection settled over me as I walked along the path.
“It’s a nice park,” I said more to myself than to Danny.
“Well, it’s got a good view of the river anyway.” He nodded and I realized he was right; not far away from us on our right side the river bubbled and churned. I paused at one overlook, more a break in the trees than anything else. I picked a brown leaf off a tree and tossed it in, watching the leaf dip and swirl for a while before it finally succumbed to the water, slipping down to a wet end, like Christine had.
“Is there any way to know if she went in the water here?” I asked Danny, sure the answer was no.
“Well, we found her car near here, so there’s a chance but the body was found a good way down, so…”
“So there’s a chance not. No way to know for sure.” I backed up from the edge of the water, and started walking again.
“Of course, if it was something that controlled water, keeping her in the river moving down, even when it was cold, wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Right, we’re back to needing a naiad or something.” We’d gone from not enough leads to too many. The list Ethan gave me might have the person I needed, but there was a better chance it had one hundred and ninety-nine people I didn’t need. “If there was a spring hiding someone in here, how would we find it?” I spread my hands wide as if the small strip of scrub forest would produce what I needed.
“
We walk,” Danny declared, ruining my hopes for Deus Ex Machina. We walked ten minutes in silence with me in the lead when Danny broke into my thoughts with an unusual question. “Now that you’re moving in, you and Jakob talked about kids?”
I stopped in my tracks. Danny knew Jakob was a vampire and couldn’t have kids. He knew I didn’t want them. I turned around completely perplexed only to see him mouth “followed” without any sound. I couldn’t hear footsteps but I trusted his extra-normal senses.
“Not really. But then we haven’t talked about a lot. I got movers lined up, went with the people Lucas recommended; they seemed like a normal bunch of guys.” I used my own code words hoping he would get there was no way I would call an all werewolf moving company a bunch of normal guys.
He nodded and I knew he got it. Our conversation of seemingly normal half-truths kept up for a few minutes before Danny reached through a set of bushes and grabbed onto something. There was a shout, and the noise of a dozen breaking branches before Danny produced Mr. Meredith, the man we’d met almost a month ago.
“Care to tell me why you’re following us?” Danny growled. I realized suddenly this wasn’t about being followed; it was about the selkie skin coat. I tried to step between the two of them but it didn’t work. Danny held him too close, and all I could do was get a hand on the man’s arm.
“I…I wasn’t…I just…” His prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he struggled to put words together. “You mentioned naiads.”
“We’re looking for one,” I agreed, hoping it would ratchet down the tension between the two of them.
“And we don’t like being hunted,” Danny added, proving my words hadn’t helped at all. How strong was my partner? Could he break a neck? Would he? I’d always trusted Danny to be a standup guy, a dad, a guy who went to church, but something about the rage in his eyes argued there was a side of him I hadn’t seen.
“Why here? Why are you looking? Because she’s gone, she’s been gone for years.” Our captive looked old and weak. When he started crying the look only got worse. I eased Danny’s hands off of him, letting the man cry for a second. “The house is just there. If you’ll come inside and tell me what you know, please, I’m happy to help.”
Blood, Dirt, and Lies Page 23