Heart of Fire

by Lisa Edmonds

  “You seem a little more like yourself today, so whatever he said, it must have helped get you out of the funk you’ve been in. I was just wondering.”

  “We talked about the construction site thing.” I ate quietly while Malcolm floated slowly back and forth in front of the fireplace. Finally, I added, “I’m sorry I’ve been difficult to get along with lately.”

  I expected him to respond with one of his trademark snorts or a snarky comment about how I’d been difficult to get along with since the moment he first appeared in my office and I threatened to have him exorcised, but he was surprisingly serious. “It’s okay. You went through some really bad stuff. Nobody expects you to bounce right back.” A pause. “But the drinking is making me worry.”

  “I think I’ll be cutting down on the drinking a bit.” I held up my bruised left elbow.

  Malcolm whistled. “You want me to heal that?”

  I shook my head and went back to my salad. “It’s a reminder.”

  “Why do you do that?”

  I stopped with the fork halfway to my mouth. “Do what?”

  “Hurt yourself—or get hurt and refuse to be healed—and say it’s to teach yourself a lesson, or to help you remember something.” Malcolm floated closer. “Because I have a theory.”

  “Don’t,” I said sharply. “Just…don’t.”

  We stared at each other.

  “You can talk to me about it, you know.”

  “No, I can’t. Just drop it.” I set my salad bowl aside, suddenly no longer hungry. This was the problem with having friends. They wanted things. They felt they deserved answers and explanations. Before Malcolm, before Sean, before things got complicated with Charles, no one bothered me. If I wanted to go days—or weeks—without speaking to anyone, nobody noticed or hounded me about it.

  “Before you get mad at me and everyone else for worrying about you, try to remember we do it because we care.” Malcolm moved back toward the fireplace. “And in case you think you were better off before we came along, keep in mind that when you’re alone there’s no one there to take care of you when you’re hurt. Or burned. Or kidnapped, stabbed, and dying.”

  My ire faded. “That’s a fair point,” I admitted. A strange frisson of energy washed over me. “What was that?”

  “Perimeter wards. Someone’s pulling into the driveway. By the way, I set up perimeter wards.”

  I remembered sort of asking him to do that last night, but hadn’t really expected him to. “Thanks.”

  “No problem. I had to do something while you slept all day.” Malcolm’s sarcasm was back.

  I went to peek out the front window. An unfamiliar red truck with tinted windows was parked in the driveway behind my car. The driver’s door opened, and Mark Dunlap stepped out, carrying a large file box.

  I stared at him. I hadn’t seen my former boss and mentor for more than three years. He’d been about fifty when I left his firm, but he looked like he’d aged a decade. His hair had gone from salt-and-pepper to full gray. He wore his trademark jeans and a plaid short-sleeved button-up shirt with work boots. As usual, the burly PI looked more like a construction worker.

  Halfway up the sidewalk, Mark looked at the window and caught my eye.

  For a moment, I was transported back five years, to the day I first stepped foot in the door of Mark Dunlap Investigations, brand new in the city and answering an ad for a low-paying trainee position. Mark Dunlap himself met me in the lobby. He shook my hand, told me his assistant was out sick with the flu, and asked me what I thought I could do. I told him I thought I could help people.

  Before the interview was over, he’d offered me the job.

  Now, looking at the shadows under Mark’s eyes, I felt a stab of regret that we’d parted company so badly and hadn’t spoken in so long. Something was chewing Mark up.

  I let go of the curtain, went to the door, and lowered the house wards. By the time Mark was on the porch, I had the door open.

  “Come in,” I said.

  3

  I put the rest of my salad in the fridge and got us a couple of beers. We settled on the couch. Malcolm had disappeared into the basement.

  Mark set the file box on the floor and looked around. “Bit sparse in here.”

  “All of my furniture got destroyed in a fight between a vampire and a werewolf.” I turned sideways and tucked my legs up under me. “I haven’t had time to buy new stuff yet.”

  Mark’s eyebrows went up. “You don’t say. Was the vampire anyone we know?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Huh. Real sorry I missed that, then.” He raised his beer. We clinked bottles and drank.

  My former boss looked me over. It wasn’t sexual—more like professional assessment. “You’re looking rough.”

  “It’s been a rough month or two. I got caught up in a case that kicked my ass a bit, but I’m getting back on my feet, I think.”

  “That’s good to hear. Other than that, how have you been?”

  “Doing okay. Business is steady.”

  “Still by yourself?”

  “Yep.” At some point I might tell him about Malcolm, but not right now. “How are things at MDI?”

  Mark took another drink. “Damn good; we’ve got more work than we can handle. Made Kevin Garrison my partner last April and hired on two new investigators a month ago. One of ’em looks like she’ll do good, but I don’t think the other one has the knack. I’ll give him another month, then we’ll see.”

  I glanced at the gold band on his left hand, with its distinctive white opal signifying his air magic. “Still with Sharon?”

  “Thirty years this year.” He beamed.

  “Congrats. That’s great.” I meant it. I’d always liked Sharon, a CPA who was MDI’s longtime chief number-cruncher and bean-counter.

  “Yeah, she’s a good woman. Too good for me, probably, but who am I to tell her different?” We both grinned; it was a running joke.

  Mark drained his beer. I got up, went to the kitchen, and returned with two more bottles. I uncapped one and handed it over.

  “Thanks.” He rested the bottle on his knee. “I’m sorry for how I treated you, Alice.”

  “You had every right to be upset. I should have told you what my plans were. I was afraid you’d cut me loose if you knew I planned to start my own firm when I got my license, but that’s no excuse. You gave me the chance to get into the business. You trained me and watched my back. I wish I could have done things differently, but I had to leave.”

  “I know.” Mark rubbed his chin. “At first, I was pissed because my feelings were hurt, then I started feeling bad for cutting you off. Lately, I’ve been feeling like an asshole.”

  The Mark I remembered usually preferred a direct approach. “Should we just forgive each other and be done with it?”

  “If you can, I sure as hell can.”

  I raised my bottle and we clinked again. “Done.”

  We drank in companionable silence for a while. When we finished our beers, I went and got two more and a trash can for the empties.

  “You still like good whisky?” Mark asked.

  “Yes.” Maybe too much.

  “I got a bottle of Scotch from one of my clients as a gift. Not much of a whiskey drinker myself anymore. I’ll bring it over next time.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Mark seemed to steel himself and I figured he was ready to talk about what was bothering him. “I left you a message,” he said.

  I nodded. “I just listened to it today. You said you have an important case you’re working on. I’m not sure how I can help, though.”

  Mark hesitated. “What I’m about to tell you can’t leave this room.”

  My stomach lurched. “Understood.”

  “What do you know about the missing prostitutes in the city?”

  “I heard something about that. Isn’t there a local reporter who thinks there have been a lot of working girls going missing?”

  “Yes, Amanda Bailey. She wo
rks for the city paper. She’s been investigating the case for almost a year, trying to keep people’s attention on it. You know it’s hard to get cops interested in a case like that. There’s not much of a public outcry when hookers go missing.”

  I remembered reading about the missing women a while back. Bailey had published a series of articles online and in the city’s print newspaper. She suspected the disappearances were connected and that a local harnad, or group of blood mages, might be involved.

  I personally knew of one harnad in the city, and its leader, John West, was both a powerful blood mage and the strongest fire mage I had ever encountered. He was Amelia Wharton’s father and a man I wanted to avoid.

  “I read some of the articles, but it’s been a while,” I said. “What’s the latest?”

  “No one knows for sure, but there may be anywhere from twenty to thirty missing women over the past fourteen months. Amanda has been trying to track down some of the missing, but it’s tough. A lot of the women are transient. A few turned up in jail or in other cities. The rest are just gone.”

  “So what’s your involvement in this? What is the Court’s interest?”

  “The parents of two of the missing women believe a vampire—or group of vampires—are taking prostitutes and draining them, or keeping them as blood-slaves in some dungeon, and they’ve openly accused the Court of covering it up. At first, the Court wasn’t all that concerned; there’s no evidence to suggest the missing women are victims of vampire attacks and certainly nothing to indicate they’re being held in a vamp’s lair somewhere. Then some of the national news channels got wind of it and you know how they love a sensational story with blood, sex, and vampires. There have been some anti-vampire demonstrations around the city.”

  I stared at him, shocked. “I hadn’t heard about that.”

  Mark looked grim. “The Court is concerned that this may get even uglier. There’s no proof vamps are responsible, but nothing says they aren’t, either. You and I both know that when it comes to vampires, they’re guilty until proven innocent. It wouldn’t take much to set people off. Most people already don’t trust vampires. If even one of the girls turns up drained, the city could go off like a powder keg. We might see mobs going after any vampire they can find, like what happened in Kansas City two years ago.”

  “Or in Cincinnati, the year before that,” I added.

  “Meanwhile, the police are fixated on the vampire angle and they aren’t interested in other theories. That’s why I’m investigating. The Court hired me to quietly find out who, if anyone, has been taking these girls, and to get them back if any of them are still alive.”

  Mark finished his beer. He tossed it into the trash can and went to the kitchen to grab another. When he came back, he sat back down heavily on the couch. “I’ve been working on it for three weeks, and I’ve got shit.”

  “As in…?”

  “As in nothing. No trace of any of the girls. It’s damn hard to get working girls to tell you anything. The few who have talked to me say that this girl or that girl got into a car with a john and never came back. No one got any license plates or has much of a description of any of the cars or drivers. Sometimes the girls disappeared when they weren’t working. Nobody knows anything.”

  “So why does Amanda Bailey, the reporter, think a local harnad has been taking the girls?”

  “A roommate of one of the girls who disappeared told her that the missing girl said she had been invited to join a group of mages. A ‘group of mages’ is probably either a cabal or a harnad, and nobody gets randomly invited to join one, either. If she was invited to a harnad meeting, it wasn’t to become a member.”

  “How credible is the witness?”

  “She’s pretty credible.” Mark leaned forward. “If it’s a harnad, I have to find out what’s going on. These girls deserve justice, and the vamps are going to get blamed unless we find the people responsible and drop them on the steps of police headquarters.”

  I rubbed my face. “If it is a harnad taking these girls—and I’m not saying it is—it would have to be a series of individual rituals, since this has apparently been going on for at least fourteen months, and you can’t store blood for ritual magic because the life energy dissipates quickly. That would be an extremely active harnad, though, and we haven’t seen any evidence of major harnad workings in the city: no natural disasters, no infrastructure collapses, no aberrant weather patterns.”

  He took a long drink. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. This is the kind of help I need. That, and someone to talk to these girls and their friends. To most of them, I’m one step above a cop and a man too and they don’t trust me. You might be able to get more information. You were good at that when we worked together before.”

  I sighed. “Mark, I agree, this is really bad, but I’m not sure I have much to offer in the way of help on this. It doesn’t sound like there’s much to go on.”

  He slammed his fist down on the arm of the couch and I jumped. “I know there’s not much to go on!” he shouted. “Damn it, I’ve got nothing to tell the Court after three weeks on this. I need your help, Alice. I wouldn’t be asking if I wasn’t desperate.”

  “Well, that’s great,” I said acerbically. “Desperate times, desperate measures, huh?”

  “That’s not what I meant.” He ran his hand through his hair in a frustrated gesture I’d seen a hundred times. “I’ve been intending to call you for weeks and just hadn’t done it. All I wanted was to talk to you, see if we could work things out. Then all this came up, and now I need someone who knows magic, who knows that world and the vampires too. I need you.”

  He drained his beer and dropped the bottle into the trash can. “You said you’ve had a rough couple of months, but it’s not just that, is it? Something about this case is making you skittish. It’s not like you to not want to help.”

  I scowled. I did want to help, but I also wanted to stay away from John West’s harnad and Charles. I was reluctant to explain either situation—the former because it would reveal my involvement in the construction site murders and the latter because I was embarrassed I’d let Charles manipulate me.

  When I didn’t say anything, he pushed for an answer. “Is it that there might be a harnad involved? I could understand that. Nobody wants to go around kicking hornets’ nests, but these women deserve justice.”

  “I know they do,” I said quietly. “Whether it’s vampires, a cabal, or a harnad, whoever is taking these women needs to answer for it.”

  Mark’s phone chimed. He glanced at the screen, texted back a quick reply, and then stuck it back in his pocket. “I have to go. That was Sharon, asking me to run an errand. Will you do something for me?”

  “What do you need?”

  He nudged the file box toward me with his foot. “Look through the files and tell me what you think. I need fresh eyes on this. Give me a direction to go. I’ll take any help I can get.”

  “I’ll look at them,” I promised. “Tell Sharon I said hi.”

  “Will do.” Mark stood and I walked him to the door. “Text me or call me anytime, day or night. You’ve got my number.”

  “I will. Keep me posted on your end.”

  He hesitated, then rested his hand lightly on my shoulder. When he’d hired me, I’d only been free of my grandfather’s cabal for a few months and couldn’t bear to be touched; even incidental contact was a source of anxiety. During the five years since, some of that had faded, and my time with Sean—brief as it was—had shown me physical contact could be a source of comfort.

  I leaned into the warmth and reassurance of Mark’s touch. He gave my shoulder a quick squeeze and headed down the steps.

  I watched him walk to his truck, then waved as he backed down my driveway. As he drove off down the street, I went back inside.

  In my living room, the file box sat where he’d left it. I sat on the couch and stared at it while I finished my beer.

  I did not want to get mixed up in a Vampire Court
case, and I really did not want to attract the attention of a harnad, especially John West’s harnad, but Mark had asked for my help and I owed him. The least I could do was look at the damn files.

  With a sigh, I tossed my bottle into the trash can with the rest of the afternoon’s dead soldiers, went to the kitchen for a cup of water, then returned to the living room. I took the lid off the file box and starting pulling out folders.

  When Malcolm came up from the basement, he found me sitting on the living room floor on a couch cushion, surrounded by stacks of files and papers. “What’s all this?”

  I told him about Mark’s visit, the missing women, and the Vamp Court’s concerns.

  “Wow, that’s bad,” he said. “So, what’s in all these files?”

  I unfolded myself from the cushion, stood up, and stretched, feeling my stiff joints pop. “The brown folders are copies of Mark’s notes. The loose papers clipped together are the reporter’s notes, going back over a year. The red folders are the Vampire Court reports on recent anti-supe activities and hate groups.”

  “What have you read so far?”

  I pointed to the stacks of brown folders. “I started with Mark’s notes. For the past three weeks, he’s been working on tracking down the women who have been reported missing. Most of the names came from Amanda Bailey and the rest from word of mouth. Mark tried to compile what information he could and piece together where and when they were last seen. There’s not a lot in there. He hasn’t had much luck getting witnesses to talk to him.”

  “How many women are missing?”

  I settled back onto the cushion. “Well, there are twenty-six names on the list who haven’t been accounted for. Hard to say how accurate the list is, though; there could be more who haven’t been reported missing.”

  “Or fewer, if some of those women left town to go somewhere else,” he pointed out.

  “That’s true, though it does seem like a lot of them left personal belongings that friends or roommates said they would never leave behind. We can probably assume the true number is somewhere upwards of twenty-six.”