by DAVID B. COE
But I had a feeling that Shari had meant more than all of that.
It occurred to me that given the ease with which he’d tested my defenses those three times, chasing after him might not have been the best idea.
Even as I formed the thought, he stopped and turned to face me. I slowed, then halted, too, holding my weapon loosely at my side. I had a feeling that shooting at him again would be pointless, that he would be able to save himself with magic. The same magic he could use to attack me.
Defend yourself!
It was as if Namid was right beside me, shouting warnings. I sheathed myself in a shielding spell, the same protective cocoon I’d used against against Namid’s magical fire. At the same time, I raised my pistol again.
The sorcerer laughed.
The touch of his magic was about as light as one of those lead aprons the dentist gives you for x-rays. It draped over my mind, pressing down on me. I couldn’t move my arms or my legs. I stood on the sidewalk, my weapon still aimed at the man, and I couldn’t even bring myself to pull the trigger.
“You should have left it alone,” he said. He didn’t shout or call back to me. He spoke the words, and I heard them as I would if he had been standing beside me, whispering in my ear. He had an accent of some sort, but at that moment I couldn’t place it. “You should have stayed away.”
My shooting hand started to turn. I fought to keep the Glock trained on him, but I might as well have tried to make the sun move west to east. I had no control over my own body. In a tiny corner of my mind I wondered what spell he was using on me; it was beyond any magic I knew. Panicking, I tried everything I could think of to throw him off. I recited wardings in my mind. I threw assailing spells at him. I even attempted my father’s transporting spell. Nothing worked. The weapon was turned toward me now. I opened my mouth and stuck the muzzle in, tasting the tang of metal and the bitter residue of gunpowder. I wanted to gag, but I couldn’t even do that much.
I felt my trigger finger twitch, and I closed my eyes, tears streaming down my face.
I heard Namid’s voice again. Defend yourself!
Yes. I refused to die here, killed by my own pistol. I had thrown every spell I knew at the guy, but maybe that was my mistake.
Three elements: the sidewalk, his feet, and a great big crack in the cement. I knew I couldn’t hurt him, but I didn’t need to. I only needed to knock him off balance for a second.
And I did. I opened my eyes in time to see him stumble, then right himself.
His magic wavered for an instant, long enough that I managed to pull the weapon from my mouth, nearly retching. I pointed the Glock at him again, though my hand was unsteady and my legs felt like they were about to give way.
“Hey! What the hell are you doin’?”
The voice came from the house to the right of me. I glanced that way, but wasn’t willing to take my eyes off the sorcerer for long. I saw anger flash across the killer’s face, and then I saw him laugh again.
He ran, vanishing around a corner. I couldn’t tell if he’d gone past the point where I could see him, or had used a spell to make himself disappear. To be honest, I didn’t care. I sank to my knees, my chest heaving.
“Hey, mister? You all right?”
I looked over at the man who’d saved my life. He was wearing old cutoff-jean shorts and a sleeveless undershirt. His hair was black, but he had a grizzled beard.
“You shouldn’t play with your gun like that,” he said, frowning at me. “Scared me half to death.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice ragged. “Sorry.”
“Who was that guy, anyway?” he asked, standing on tiptoes and craning to peer down the street after the sorcerer. “The one you were talking to.”
“I don’t know.” I forced myself back to my feet, though my legs still felt rubbery. “You need to call 911,” I told him. “Something’s happened to Ms. Bettancourt.”
“Shari?” the man said, concern in his voice, his brow knitting.
“Yes.”
“Did he do it? That guy?”
“Call 911. Please.”
He stared at me a moment longer. Then he hurried back inside.
I walked—staggered really—back to Shari’s house, sat down on her front steps and placed my Glock on the top step next to me. If the sorcerer had come back, I’m not sure I would have had the strength even to lift the pistol, but having it near at hand made me feel better.
A squad car arrived a few minutes later, stopping first in front of the neighbor’s house and then pulling up to Shari’s place. I didn’t move.
Two uniformed guys got out of the car, one Latino, one white, both of them young and burly. The Latino cop spotted my Glock first and reached for his weapon.
“Hands up!” he said, leveling his weapon at me.
I raised my hands and stared back at him as he and his partner—now with his pistol out, too—hurried up the path. The Latino cop kicked the Glock beyond my reach.
“He’s all right!” the neighbor called, running up the street toward the house. “He didn’t do anything! It was the other guy.”
“Who are you?” the Latino cop asked, his weapon still aimed at me. The badge he wore identified him as Roberto Torres.
“My name’s Jay Fearsson,” I said, my voice even. “I’m a PI. I used to be on the force.”
“The Glock’s yours?”
I nodded. “I fired it once at the man who killed Shari Bettancourt. I hit that street sign over there.” I pointed with my chin, keeping my hands as they were.
“You hit a street sign?” the other cop asked.
I wasn’t about to explain that the guy I’d been aiming at used a deflection spell to steer my bullet away. I nodded, and tried to ignore their shared grins and raised eyebrows. But while they both had me pegged as a lousy shot, they also seemed convinced that I wasn’t a threat. Both men holstered their pistols.
Torres stepped past me to the doorway.
The white cop—Allen Marra, according to his badge—said, “I’ll need to see your license, Mister . . .”
“Fearsson.” I pulled out my wallet and handed it to him.
I heard his partner rattling the door.
“This is chained,” he said. “How’d he kill her?”
“I don’t know. You need to call Kona Shaw in Homicide. She knows me, and she knows what I’m working on.”
“Do you know the guy’s name?” Torres asked, ignoring what I’d said.
“I heard her call him ‘Cower,’ or something like that.”
“And why are you here? Did you have a relationship with the victim?”
“No.” I said. “I met her this morning at a . . . a farmer’s market. I talked to her for a while there, and then followed her back here to ask her a few more questions. While I was talking to her, the other guy showed up.”
“And he killed her.”
“Yes.”
“Is that what you saw?” Torres asked, speaking past me to Shari’s neighbor.
“I didn’t see any of that,” the man said. “I saw this guy and the other one. This guy was chasing him, and then he stopped. They both did. And then this guy puts his gun in his mouth, and then pulls it out again, and that’s when I yelled at them. The other guy ran away.” He hesitated. Then, “Is Shari really dead?”
Marra still held my wallet, and now he frowned at the man. “Fearsson put his weapon in the other guy’s mouth?”
“No. He put it in his own mouth.”
Marra grimaced. “Why the hell would you do that?”
“It’s hard to explain,” I said, sighing the words.
Torres descended the steps and planted himself right in front of me. “Give it a try,” he said.
“The other guy made me do it. I couldn’t help myself.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Please, call Kona Shaw. She’ll know what I’m talking about.”
“First you explain this.”
“The guy’s a m
yste. A sorcerer. He used some kind of mojo on me.”
Torres raised an eyebrow, drawing a roll of the eyes from his partner. I figured I was about thirty seconds away from an all-expenses-paid trip to the psych ward.
“Please call Kona,” I said. “You have a dead woman in there. I’ve told you that I didn’t kill her, and that’s been corroborated by another witness. The rest I’ll explain to the homicide detectives.”
“We can run you in anyway,” Torres said.
“Yeah, you can. But you’d be wasting your time.” I took a breath. “I’m working on behalf of the Deegan family, and so my investigation is connected to the Blind Angel killings. I worked the case when I was still on the job, and now I’m working it again. Kona was my partner. The guy I was after—the guy who killed this woman—I’m pretty sure he’s the Blind Angel Killer.”
“The Blind Angel Killer is already in custody.”
“Gann’s not your man,” I said.
“Holy shit,” the neighbor said in a hushed voice. “That was the Blind Angel Killer?”
“I swear to God, Fearsson,” Torres said, wagging his finger in my face. “If you’re bullshitting me, I’m going to make your life a living hell.”
“I’m not. Call Kona.”
Torres considered me, the muscles in his jaw bunching. After a moment he nodded to Marra, who hurried to the squad car.
“Holy shit,” I heard the neighbor whisper again.
It took Kona and Kevin, her partner, some time to get there, and then they spent several minutes speaking in low voices with Torres and Marra. The forensics team had arrived in the interim and after cutting through Shari’s chain lock, had entered the house. I moved off the stairs to a shady corner of her yard. Kona and Kevin joined me there now, both of them grim-faced.
Kevin was younger than Kona and me, and had only been in Homicide for three or four years. He’d shaved his head since the last time I saw him; it looked good on him. He was a handsome African-American man, with dark eyes, a lean build, and an easy smile. I’d tried to be as nice to him as I could since meeting him about a year ago, but both of us remained wary of each other. I think he felt that I was critiquing him all the time, measuring his performance as a cop against my own. I wasn’t. I just found it hard to think of Kona working with anyone other than me.
“You all right?” Kona asked me.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“You sure this was our guy?”
My eyes flicked toward Kevin. He didn’t know I was a weremyste.
“Pretty sure,” I said.
“There isn’t a mark on the woman,” Kevin said. “No sign that anyone broke in. Is it possible she died of . . . of something natural?”
“I don’t think so,” I told him.
“Kevin,” Kona said, “why don’t you go see what they’re doing in there. Make sure they’re not messing with my crime scene. I’ll be in soon.”
Kevin eyed us both. It wasn’t the first time one of us had contrived to speak in private with the other while he was around. “Yeah, all right,” he said, his voice flat. “Catch you later, Jay.”
“See you, Kevin.”
Kona and I watched him walk away.
“You’re going to have to tell him eventually,” I said.
“I keep hoping you two will become friends so that you can tell him yourself.” Her eyes raked over me. “You look like hell.”
“I thought I was dead. This guy’s stronger than any weremyste I’ve ever seen. He made me . . .” I broke off shaking my head.
“So it is our guy.”
I managed a smile, but it was fleeting. “It better be. If there are two sorcerers walking around with this kind of power, we’re in trouble.”
“And the pistol in the mouth thing?”
I shook my head again. “Don’t ask.” Taking a long breath, I said, “He killed her, Kona. I saw him do it, although I can’t tell you how it happened. She said his name—Cower, I think it was. She knew he was there. She felt him. And then she was dead.”
“She was a weremyste, too?”
I nodded. “I saw her at the Moon Market this morning. She had on a necklace that was glowing with his magic. That’s how I knew to follow her.” I followed a passing car with my gaze, my mouth twitching. “I guess I got her killed.”
“We’re going to need a statement,” she said. “You know that.”
“You’ll have to take it. This guy’s magic is unlike anything we’ve gone up against before. No one else will believe me.”
“Who says I do?” She smiled to soften it.
“You’re going to get a description from the neighbor,” I told her, as we started to walk back toward the house. “It’ll be nothing at all like what I told you yesterday.”
“He was disguised?”
“I think he’s a chameleon. He can look like anything and anyone he wants.”
“I’m starting not to like this guy, Justis.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Tell me about it.”
Between waiting for Kona to finish her work at the Bettancourt house, and going back to 620 to give her my statement, most of my afternoon was gone. The only thing that could have made my day worse would have been running into Cole Hibbard before I managed to get out of the building.
So, of course, that was exactly what happened.
When old Cole found out I’d been at the scene of a murder, he practically wet himself. When Kona told him that I’d only been a witness, he started trying to find ways to charge me with the killing anyway. I left as soon as I could, and was seething the whole way home, not only for myself, but also for my father.
Hibbard and my dad had been close. In fact, for a while Hibbard and his wife had been my parents’ closest friends. I still remembered them coming over to the house and staying up late playing Spades, smoking cigarettes, and drinking daiquiris. I was supposed to be sleeping, of course, but I’d spy on them from the stairway, mostly because I thought Hibbard’s wife, whose name I’ve forgotten, was the prettiest woman I’d ever seen.
Eventually the phasings started taking their toll on my father, and though Hibbard was his friend, I gather that Dad wasn’t able to confide in him about the magic and Namid and all the rest. Or maybe that’s an excuse that both he and I have used too often. I did confide in Kona, and in the end it changed nothing.
After a while, Hibbard turned on him. I suppose he had cause. My mother turned on him, too, in her own way. Hell, so did I. To Hibbard, it must have seemed that his friend had lost it, had burned out right before his eyes. When my mother and her lover died, Hibbard was one of those who believed my father had killed them both. And when my father went all the way over the edge, leaving me without a family or a home, Hibbard and his wife were among the few couples who refused to help me out. I guess that’s understandable, too. The Hibbards had lost their two closest friends in a tragic, ugly sequence of events. The last thing they would have wanted was a living reminder of both Dara and Leander Fearsson haunting their home.
But try telling that to a fifteen-year-old kid who’d lost his parents. That’s when I started hating Cole Hibbard. One of the reasons I so wanted to be a cop, and not just a cop, but a homicide detective, was to show Hibbard and all the others who had turned their backs on my father and me that we deserved better. I had a lot to prove, and I’m sure that I came into the force with an attitude to match. It’s not surprising that Hibbard had it in for me from the start; I had it in for him, too.
In the end, the only thing he had done to me that I couldn’t forgive was to refuse to accept that maybe I could be a decent cop and wouldn’t necessarily become my father.
Of course, I understood all this in my calmer moments, when I could reflect on all that happened back then. At other times, though, I couldn’t get past the fact that Hibbard was such a jerk.
By the time I reached my office, I’d worked myself into quite a state. I’d watched a woman die, nearly been killed myself, and had been shown, in no uncertain terms,
that whatever magic I wielded was nothing next to the power of the Blind Angel Killer.
The Republic was still running stories about Claudia’s death above the fold. It had a picture of Gann on the front page, too, beneath a caption that read, “Is This the Blind Angel Murderer?” I wondered if Torres and Marra believed what I’d told them about Shari’s killer being the one who’d killed Claudia Deegan. Maybe that was the one good thing that would come out of this day.
I dropped the paper in the trash and rubbed my eyes. After a moment I stood again and started to pace.
Where was Namid when I needed him? I was eager to train, to work some magic and get the day out of my system. The runemyste would have told me that this wasn’t a proper use of magic, that the purpose of clearing prior to conjuring was to keep emotions and frustrations from intruding on the spells. Whatever. I wanted to break something. Failing that, I wanted to use my magic against someone, even if it was Namid and I couldn’t hope to do any real damage. In fact, better that it be him, for that reason.
“Namid!” I called.
After a few moments, he materialized, as smooth and clear as a mountain lake in early morning.
“I am not your servant, Ohanko. I am not to be summoned like one.”
“I know that,” I said. “But I need to train, and I . . . I thought maybe we could work on some more wardings.” I winced at what I heard in my voice. I sounded like some willful spoiled kid ordering around a playmate. “If you’d be willing to help me, I mean,” I added, knowing it was too little too late.
He considered me, his face placid. Then he shook his head. “No. You are clouded.”
“I can clear myself.”
“No,” he said again. “I do not think so. Not now. I sense much anger in you. Restlessness. This is not a good time for you to conjure.”
It only helped a little that I’d known he would say something like this. “Yeah, all right,” I said. “I’m sorry I called for you.”