My head was killing me. I felt bewildered and completely drained. I needed to step into the ocean and refuel.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m done here as soon as the others get back to the office. I’ll come by as soon as I can. It’s sounding like your case and mine are connected somehow.”
“Thanks,” I said. “And yeah, it does. They cross, at least. The whole thing is confusing me. Can you bring the files on Broadhurst? Maybe something will jump out.”
“Sure, but you know how Juliana and Tyron are. If we’re sharing information, they’ll want you officially working on Broadhurst along with whatever else you’re doing.”
My teeth clamped down on the anger brewing in me. “I thought I was pretty clear. I’m not doing any more cases with bodies involved. Anything else, fine, but no more dead people.” I sighed. “I can’t take it, Dee. The dead break my heart.”
I closed the front door behind me, made sure my wards were up and strong, and crossed the Strand onto the beach. The early April weather had turned nippy and the sand felt cool beneath my feet. A slight breeze chilled the skin of my bare legs below my shorts. A quartet of guys maybe in their thirties were playing volleyball at one of the courts in front of my house and a few brave souls had stretched out on towels or blankets on the sand, but mostly I had the beach to myself.
I trekked across the beach down to where the sand lost its dry, golden tan color, stained dark by the ocean’s kisses.
April isn’t a time of big waves in Hermosa. Those come in the winter. Spring and summer waves are soft, gentle caresses in comparison, unless stirred up by a storm.
I crossed the tide line. The spent waves swirl around my feet and ankles as they rolled in and out. My heart and soul drew peace from the sound of the waves, the touch of the cold water on my skin, the smell of salt in the air. My magic drew strength from the water, filling itself up, making me feel calm and powerful.
I waded in deeper, the water up to my knees and swells almost to my waist. I closed my eyes and reveled in the push and pull of the swells, breaking around me, their touch as soft as a mother’s. The ocean embraced me, sang to me, restored me to myself again.
When I felt ready, I waded out of the water and walked slowly in the wet sand along the tide line toward the pier, my mind turning on the things I’d learned this morning.
John Broadhurst, murder victim. Not Aunt Mich’s kidnapper, however much Petra, for some reason, wanted him to be. But they were connected, I felt that strongly.
Too bad I’d missed it when I was in Broadhurst’s condo.
I shook the thought away. Berating myself wasn’t going to get me closer to figuring out where Aunt Mich was.
But how were they connected? John and Mich: lovers? Maybe. But there was something else there, some conflict between the two. I felt it as a roiling in my stomach.
The back of my neck prickled, and my shoulders tensed. The peace I’d been given by the ocean vanished as if it had been nothing more than a mirage. There was magic nearby, and not a flavor I was familiar with. A magical stranger.
Something poked me in the back. I started to turn, but a growling voice said, “Stare straight ahead and keep walking.”
A man’s voice, not one I knew. Not one I was going to challenge either.
“Oona Goodlight,” the man said, letting me know I wasn’t some randomly selected person to harass. “You are under arrest on suspicion of the murder of Sudie Wakanabe.”
I spun around, not giving much of a shit about anything except the fact the man claimed someone I knew and had recently visited had been murdered.
“What?” I said. “When? Where? I just saw her yesterday.”
I didn’t know this man or the man with him. Neither wore the white shirt and white trouser uniform of the magic police, but they had to be.
I stopped walking and stood my ground. “Who are you?”
The man who’d poked my back—I saw now that he’d used nothing deadlier than a finger—reached into the back pocket of his plaid shorts and pulled out his ID. I matched the photo to his face, then read the name: Lawrence Crosby.
“Turn back around, Ms. Goodlight,” he said. “You are under arrest.”
I didn’t turn. All I could think was Sudie is dead. I repeated my questions. “What happened? When? Was it in the store?”
Because a mugger could bash her over the head on the street in a random wrong place-wrong time thing, but if she was killed in the store, it had to be someone she knew, someone who could cast the spell to get inside. As much as I hated the idea that Sudie had been killed, I equally hated the idea that someone in the community had done this.
Lawrence Crosby glared at me and said nothing.
Not Lawrence at all, I decided. His true name was Eloise L. Crosby, because his mother had wanted a girl and he’d suffered for the name all his life. The birth name was why he was such a jerk.
Giving him a silly name helped me feel in control when clearly, I wasn’t.
He muttered a spell and before I could even begin to wonder what the spell was for, we teleported away.
We landed inside a long white hallway with lots of doors on either side. I’d never been inside a magic police station and couldn’t swear that was where we were now but, other than feeling a bit nauseous from the teleportation, I didn’t feel in imminent danger. It was just Officer Eloise and me in the hallway. I didn’t know where his companion had gone. At least I assumed it was just the two of us. Eloise was behind me. If there was a third person, he must have been floating because there were definitely the sounds of only two sets of feet walking.
A door opened, and a woman came out of the room. She was dressed in the all-white of the magic police. She nodded at Eloise and turned to walk the way we had just come.
“Are you going to tell me what happened to Sudie?” I said once the woman was gone and it was just the jerk and me again.
He seized my arm, forcing me to stop, and used his other hand to open a door.
“In here,” he said, and gave me a little push to get me turned.
The room was bare but for cinderblock walls painted goose-shit green and a metal table with four folding chairs set around it—three on one side, one on the other. A room designed to make a person feel nervous and worried. To feel small. Eloise pushed down on my shoulders, forcing me into the chair that had a tableside all to its lonesome. He continued standing, so he could look down on me. I knew what he was doing, so it didn’t annoy me. What did annoy me was not getting the information I wanted.
“Look,” I said, “Sudie and I weren’t close friends, but I knew her, and I’d really like to know what happened.”
The policeman’s mouth crinkled in a sneering smile.
“You know exactly what happened to her.” He leaned in to loom over me. “Tell me why you did it.” He raised his voice nearly to a shout. “Tell me why you were so brutal. What had she done to you to make you kill her like that?”
I didn’t lean back or squirm away, even though my heart sunk at his words. Sudie didn’t deserve the end that had come to her.
I fixed the policeman with the haughtiest glare I could manage.
“You’re beginning to get on my nerves,” I said. “Playing this game is disrespectful to the dead. I need an innocence speaker, right now.”
Here’s the thing about being a psychic tangled up with the magic community: you tend to know all your options. An innocence speaker is an empathic psychic who specializes in reading truth and lies. I can occasionally be fooled, but an innocence speaker knows every time.
With the normal cops, if you want a lawyer and you have one in mind, you can call that person. With an innocence speaker, you get whomever the station has contracted with. I knew a couple of innocence speakers who were friends of Dee’s, but not the tall, dark-skinned woman who walked in. Her badge of office—a small gold gryphon tattooed on the inside of her right forearm—glowed faintly, her powers already engaged. This woman had come ready to do her job.
The policeman gave her a slight head bow when she entered the room and said, “Celeste.”
Celeste acknowledged the greeting with a slight head bob back and took a chair on the other side of the table from me. She glanced my way, then looked up at policeman.
He squared his shoulders. “Murder.”
Celeste nodded. She turned her attention back to me.
“Oh,” she said, surprise clear in her voice. “You’re a psychic. I thought I was called in to read a witch.”
I held out my hand. “Oona Goodlight.”
Celeste didn’t take it and I felt a little foolish with my arm stuck out. I folded both my hands together and let them rest on the tabletop.
A lot of psychics have to touch a subject or some object of theirs to read them. I didn’t, and clearly Celeste didn’t either. She closed her eyes and I knew she was centering herself to get a read on me. Her tattoo glowed brightly as she probed my mind. I felt her rumbling around in there as an itch inside my skull. I didn’t put up any barriers. I had nothing to hide.
A small smile crossed her lips and I wondered what she’d run into in my mind that amused her. She opened her eyes, looked up at the Magic Policeman, shook her head, and stood up—her job done.
I looked at him as well. “Now will you tell me what happened to Sudie?”
He took the chair Celeste had vacated and sat down.
He cleared his throat. “She was killed in her store. A customer came in around three o’clock yesterday afternoon and found her. The store had been ransacked. We think the killer was looking for something specific.”
A terrible feeling of gloom settled over me, like being covered in a heavy, wet blanket. It took an effort to ask, “The customer who found her, you’re sure they didn’t—”
“The innocence speaker checked him first thing,” he said.
I decided I really didn’t want to know the gory details, so I didn’t ask how she’d died, and I certainly didn’t turn my inner eyes to see the scene.
The policeman was being my new best friend now that the innocence speaker had cleared me of wrongdoing. He leaned toward me and asked all friendly-like, “Where did you go after you left Miss Wakanabe’s store?”
It took me a moment to summon up the memory from my stunned mind. “Uh, I stopped by a bakery and then went to see someone. Then I went home.”
“Who did you go see?” he said. “It will help up if we can trace everyone’s actions who saw Miss Wakanabe that day. You never know when the smallest, seemingly unrelated bit of information will unlock the truth.”
That sounded a bit like bullshit, but it seemed easy enough to give him the information he wanted.
“I went to see Maurice the rat. I needed a metal identified. After that I went home. Maurice and some of his crew came over around seven thirty. We visited for a while, and then I went to bed. I got up this morning and went for a walk on the beach, where you found me.”
I assumed he knew who Maurice was, or he was letting that go for now.
He stood up. “Thank you for your help.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What made you think I had anything to do with what happened to Sudie?”
He hiked up one shoulder in a half-shrug. “We found your name written in blood on the floor next to her body.”
My stomach cramped. Vertigo set in and I leaned my forearms against the table to steady myself. I didn’t need to ask what had happened to Sudie because I suddenly saw the aftermath all too clearly—Sudie beaten to a bloody mess, her body sprawled on the floor as if she were trying to crawl toward the door in her last seconds, the name Oona in blood next to her left hand. I could barely think. The image of Sudie and my name were seared into my brain.
I supposed he could see how his words had affected me because he said, “Are you all right? Would you like someone to drive you home?”
We’d teleported here, wherever here was. I didn’t want to spend one more second in the company of the magic police than I had to.
“I’ll Lyft, thanks,” I muttered.
“As you wish,” he said, walking towards the door.
I steadied myself and managed to stand and then walk without wobbling. He held the door open and led me down the long hall to the exit.
Outside, I looked around and realized I had absolutely no idea what city I was in.
“Pleasant journey,” he said, an odd smile creasing his mouth.
The next instant I was back on the beach near my house. I looked around nervously. There were only a few people down by the water, none of whom seemed to have noticed my sudden appearance.
“Asshole,” I muttered under my breath. He just had to have the last little say so, didn’t he? Teleporting me back when I’d said I’d take a Lyft. Showing me who was in charge.
“Pendejo,” I spat, liking the feel of the Spanish word I’d learned from a teammate better than the English—it conveyed my anger so much better—and started toward my house.
9
I checked the clock when I got home and was surprised to see it was only 11:15. My throat was parched. I headed straight to the kitchen, poured a tall glass of ice water from a jug I kept in the fridge, and drank it down, still standing. It felt like a whole week’s worth of things had happened in just a few morning hours. Sudie was dead. She, or someone, had scrawled my name in blood next to her body. Why my name? It didn’t make any sense. We knew each other but weren’t close. I hadn’t seen her in months before yesterday. I refilled the glass and sat down at the kitchen table.
Why my name?
Maybe not my name. Maybe she was trying to write something longer that began with the same letters that made up my name. Or she was trying to write the word one, the first or second O a mistake, the A a misshapen E. Or maybe they were initials: Omar Oswald Nash-Anderson, Oliver Otis Nakamora-Abe
There were tons of possible alternate theories. It wasn’t necessarily my name at all that was written on the floor.
And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was my name—that Sudie was trying to tell me something in her last moments. Something I should pay attention to. And would, if I knew what it was.
One thing I did know—there was more going on than I’d originally thought when Petra had spilled her story of the missing Aunt Mich. Mich was tied up with the dead John Broadhurst in the condo downtown, and somehow—I didn’t have a clue how yet—Sudie was tied into it too.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed Dee’s number.
“Hey, Oona.” His voice was cheerful, happy.
I tried to make the words I’d called to say come out, but all I managed was a small whimper.
“What’s wrong?” His cheerful tone turned to one of concern.
“Oh, Dee. I’m so sorry,” I said. “Sudie Wakanabe has been killed.”
Dee, more wizard than I would ever be, often bought supplies from Sudie. He’d introduced us and had trusted me with the spell that opened her shop door.
“I know,” he said softly.
I felt the deep sorrow in him like a pain in my own heart.
I wondered how he knew—and how he’d managed to sound cheerful with the weight of his sorrow bowing him down. Had the magic police brought him in, too? Were they hauling in anyone who’d done business in her shop lately? Or was it simply that “small town” thing again, everyone anxious to share the latest news even when it was awful.
“Could you come over as soon as you’re off work?” I said.
There was a tiny silence, one just long enough for him to check his watch and run through his internal list of things he needed to do.
“’I’ll be there in half an hour.”
“Thank you,” I said, and we rang off.
I kept seeing Sudie’s mangled body in my mind’s eye. I had half an hour at least until Dee would arrive. I needed to keep busy, to keep the vision at bay. I picked some limes off the tree in my backyard, and—still trusting that I’d done a good job with the personal protection spell—
walked over to Mickey’s on Hermosa Avenue at Second Place. I bought a six-pack of Tecate, a couple of subs, and some of their really good macaroni salad.
He arrived forty-five minutes or so after we’d hung up our call. Dee was usually punctual, more or less. I met him at the door and led him into what had been called the parlor back when the house was first built. I still thought of it that way.
This room had originally been much smaller, but my grandmother had knocked down the wall between the old parlor and formal dining room, making the new parlor a lovely, open space. The sofa was upholstered in taupe Ultrasuede. The walls were painted French blue. A large bay window that looked out onto the Strand held a family-antique chaise. Framed on one wall were the original plans for the house and a dozen family photos stretching from 1900 to the present. Other walls held paintings that had come down through the family and one or two of my own. It was a peaceful room. I liked it.
“Beer?” I said when he’d settled on the sofa in his usual spot.
He shook his head.
It wasn’t like him to turn down a beer. I sat beside him. “Sudie.”
He nodded slightly. “Yeah.”
“You shopped at her store. You knew her well.”
My eyes widened as the deep sense of sorrow and loss Dee felt flowed into my mind.
“Oh,” I said. My throat seemed to close around the word.
Oh.
“Was it serious?” I said.
“More friends with benefits,” he said, “and a long time ago. She celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday with me. A few months later, we’d both moved on. We stayed close though. She was a good person.”
A silence set in and I let it stretch out. I knew memories were stirring through his mind. Best to let him work through them in his own time and way. The kindest thing I could do for him now was to be his friend, too.
After a while he sighed and looked at me. “What did you want to talk about?”
I brushed my hair away from my face. Maybe this really wasn’t the time to tell him what I’d been thinking.
He’d been sitting with his arms crossed over his body, one hand idly rubbing just below the shoulder of the other arm. He loosened his arms and let his hands fall into his lap. “Just tell me.”
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