Heart of Fire

by Lisa Edmonds

  I’d rejected help from the paramedics three times before they finally gave up and left. I did accept a bag of ice wrapped in a towel from Mario before his boss arrived and sent him home. The ice and the aspirin took the edge off the pain, but I wanted so badly to get home to my healing spells and my bed that I was thinking seriously about just leaving and telling the cops the detective could track me down tomorrow.

  From my car, I could see Lake inside the store, talking to the store’s owner. He was angry with me for refusing medical help and I was too tired and sore to worry about his feelings. I was also trying to forget about what happened in the walk-in cooler, but every time I closed my eyes, I saw his bright blue gaze and the way he’d looked at me, like he was thinking about kissing me. Maybe I really was concussed. It seemed like the only reasonable explanation for why I’d reacted the way I did.

  I curled up tighter in the seat and tried not to wish I still had his coat. The night had gotten cold and my jacket didn’t provide nearly enough warmth. I closed my eyes, rested my head against the seat, and drifted.

  “Miss Worth?” A hand shook my shoulder gently. “I’m Detective Shay.”

  I opened my bleary eyes. The detective was petite, with short dark hair and startlingly green eyes. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. I had to get someone to watch my son.” She peered at me. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I would really like to be home in bed right now.”

  “I know. I’ll make this as quick as I can. Do you mind if I record us?”

  “No.”

  Detective Shay pulled out her cell phone and turned on the voice recorder. She let me tell my story, then asked questions and walked me through it again, in greater detail. We went through everything a third time, and she thanked me and turned the recorder off.

  “Are you going to be all right to drive home?” Shay asked. “You’re not looking so good.”

  That made me laugh. She looked at me quizzically. “I’ve been getting that a lot lately,” I said wryly.

  She smiled and dug into her pocket for a card. “If you think of anything else, give me a call. Thanks for waiting.”

  Not that I’d had much choice, but Shay was kind enough that I kept that thought to myself. “Have a good night,” I told her.

  She headed to the front doors of the store. With a groan, I forced myself to stumble out of the car, shut the door, and limp around toward the driver’s side.

  I hadn’t made it very far when Lake suddenly appeared and took my elbow. “I’ll drive you home.”

  I tried to pull away. “I’m fine.”

  He smiled and held on. “Yes, I know you’re the baddest, but you’re swaying on your feet and your eyes are unfocused and you know you shouldn’t be behind the wheel.”

  “I don’t want my car towed,” I protested.

  “We’ll take your car. One of the officers will follow us and bring me back.”

  Checkmated, I let him take me back to the passenger side of my car. I got in, put the ice pack between my head and the seat, and closed my eyes.

  Lake got in on the driver’s side and adjusted the seat. “Keys?”

  Without opening my eyes, I held them out.

  A pause. “Any of these spells on your key ring going to turn me into a newt?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” I muttered.

  He laughed softly, took the keys, and started the car. He backed carefully out of the parking spot, pulled out onto Ninth, and accelerated.

  He left the radio off but hummed as he drove. I was so tired and my head hurt so badly that I was starting to feel a little delirious.

  “How did you know I was down on the Stroll tonight?” I murmured, half-asleep.

  “I didn’t. I go down there a couple times a week, keeping an eye on things, hoping to catch a lead. I saw your car parked at the store and figured you were there for the same reason.”

  “Whatever. Stop following me, you jerk.”

  He chuckled.

  The next thing I knew, he was unfastening my seatbelt. I forced my eyes open and discovered we were parked under my carport.

  Lake picked up my shoulder bag and looked down at me. “Can you walk, or should I carry you?”

  I muttered something about hell freezing over and swung my legs out of the car, pushing myself to my feet using the door for leverage. I carried the half-melted ice pack and bloody towel and he brought my bag. A squad car idled at the curb, waiting to take him back to the store.

  I shuffled to the front steps and used the railing to drag myself up to the porch. “Keys,” I said.

  He put the keys in my hand. I fumbled, found the house key, and got it in the lock.

  I glanced up at Lake. “I’ve got it from here. Thanks for the ride.”

  He handed me my bag. “Half-demons, blood mages, and now robbers high on Black Fire. Do you have a death wish?”

  “Don’t forget the fact I work for the vamps,” I reminded him flippantly. “And for the fortieth time, I don’t know anything about the blood mage thing.”

  He laughed.

  I unlocked my door, stepped through the wards, and turned back.

  He stood on the porch, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read and was too tired to figure out.

  “Good night, Alice,” he said finally.

  “Good night, Lake.” Then I shut the door and locked it.

  6

  “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “Mark, it’s not like I planned—”

  “Damn it, Alice!” I winced and held the phone away from my ear as my former boss roared at me. “You said you wouldn’t do anything stupid!”

  “I said no such thing,” I shot back, then frowned. “Hey!”

  Mark harrumphed. “Are you all right, at least?”

  “Of course I am.” I still had a headache, but the lump on my head and pain in my back were gone, thanks to a healing spell and more aspirin. “It was two punks high on Black Fire. They had no idea what they were doing.”

  A pause. “It made the morning news, you know.”

  I groaned.

  “For the record,” he added, “when I said the Court hired me to investigate quietly, that directive extended to you as well.”

  “What was I supposed to do? Let them kill the clerk and burn the place down?”

  “I suppose not,” Mark said grudgingly. “Well done, Wonder Woman. Speaking of, you find out anything before all this went down?”

  I hesitated. After a restless night, I’d spent a good part of the morning debating whether to tell Mark about the black BMW, but I could see no other option. It was looking more and more like this investigation was going to put me on a collision course with John West.

  “Alice?” Mark’s voice was sharp. “What do you have?”

  “I’ve got a possible lead.” I recounted Danielle’s story of the last time she’d seen Missy Daniels. “It’s vague,” I added. “There are probably hundreds of black BMWs driven by older white men in the city.”

  “It’s more than we had yesterday. I knew you’d come through for me. Are you free this morning?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “I’ve got some paperwork for you and some information on the harnads. Can you come to my office, say, around nine thirty?”

  When I didn’t reply immediately, Mark made an impatient sound. “You’re already working on the case. I need your signature on the forms for insurance and payroll. You know how this works.”

  “Mark…”

  “Alice, tell me what’s going on. You clearly want in on this case but something’s scaring you off. I know you thought about keeping the information about the BMW to yourself, and there’s more you aren’t telling me. It was obvious yesterday and it’s even more obvious today.” He was getting angry. “We can’t work like this. I need to know you aren’t holding out on me.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him I wasn’t holding out, then closed it. I couldn’t lie to Mar
k, not about this.

  “If you and I can’t trust each other, who the hell can we trust?” he demanded.

  “This isn’t about whether or not I trust you.”

  Silence. “So there’s someone involved you don’t trust.”

  “This is not something I’m going to discuss over the phone.”

  “Come to MDI, then. We’ll sort this out.”

  I took a deep breath and exhaled. “Forty-five minutes,” I said finally. “Put the coffee on.”

  Walking back into Mark’s firm was like stepping through a mirror into a looking-glass world that was both eerily familiar and disconcertingly different. I paused just inside the front doors, looking around in wonder.

  So much was the same: the large lobby, the hallways branching off into the recesses of the office, the thick carpet Sharon had talked Mark into getting despite how difficult it was to keep clean. Even the smell was familiar.

  And yet, there were many changes, from the receptionist to the cheery blue paint on the walls. Several designer sofas were grouped around a tropical aquarium. When I looked closer, I saw glossy travel magazines stacked neatly on the side tables. When I’d worked here, there were hard plastic chairs and a secondhand coffee table covered with back issues of Field & Stream and National Geographic.

  “May I help you?” the receptionist asked me.

  Before I could answer, Mark appeared. He must have seen me pull up out front. “Alice,” he said warmly, approaching me with his hand out. I shook it, more relieved than I wanted to admit that he had come out to meet me.

  “Marian, this is Alice Worth,” he said to the young woman at the front desk, who rose to shake my hand. “Alice is consulting with us on a case. She started her career here and now owns her own firm.”

  A firm of one, I almost added, but smiled instead as Marian’s eyes lit up. “That’s fantastic!” she said. “Congratulations!”

  Mark beamed with pride. My eyes burned.

  He put his hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “We’re going to be in Conference Room Three,” he told Marian. “I’m expecting someone to join us later. It’s on the calendar. Just bring him back when he arrives.”

  “Will do,” Marian said, settling back in behind her desk. “It was wonderful to meet you,” she added.

  “Nice to meet you too,” I echoed.

  I followed Mark down the hall, still trying to process my feelings as we walked through a maze of familiar hallways.

  Finally, Mark opened a door and ushered me into a small conference room with an oval table, six leather chairs, and a much fancier audio-visual setup than it used to have.

  Mark went directly to the coffee pot, as I moved around the conference table and sat facing the door. He poured two mugs of coffee and added sugar and creamer to mine without needing to ask. I took the coffee gratefully as he sat down across from me.

  “Now, tell me what you need to tell me,” he said briskly.

  “This room is secure?”

  Mark’s gaze became distant. “Sub rosa,” he murmured. My arms tingled as a powerful ward flared. “Completely secure. Nothing’s getting in or out through that ward. Talk.”

  I talked.

  I laid it all out for him: Amelia Wharton, the construction site murders, John West, Agent Lake, and my suspicion Charles had caused me to be injured during the fight that wrecked my living room. My former boss listened quietly and drank his coffee.

  When I described the vampire’s aggressive attempt to seduce me after I woke from the coma, however, Mark got up and paced. A cold wind blew through the conference room, making papers flutter off the side table and the light fixtures spark. My skin prickled at the surge of magic from my former boss, a mid-level air mage with a high-level Scots-Irish temper.

  When I finished, Mark was livid. “It shouldn’t surprise me. I know how vamps think, how they act. I don’t know why I expected better of Vaughan, but I did.”

  “I did too, and that was my mistake.” I shifted in the chair and crossed my legs. “I’m embarrassed to say I let my guard down. Of course, I have no proof he bit me. I’m sure if I confronted him about it, he’d only deny it. No one lies better than a vampire.”

  “Can’t argue with that.” Mark returned to his chair. “I won’t ask you to keep working this case knowing about Vaughan and the threat West poses to you.”

  “I don’t want you to leave me out just because it might mean I run into West or because it’s likely I’ll end up in the same room as Charles. There are twenty-eight missing women, Mark. That’s bigger and more important than anything I’ve got going on.”

  “It’s your decision. I’ll support you either way. What about this SPEMA agent? What’s your read on him?”

  “Lake is a smug, authoritarian asshole, just like every other SPEMA agent I’ve ever met.” I hesitated. “But having said that, he’s not fixated on the vampire angle and he might be our only ally in law enforcement if things start to go south. I think we’ve established some kind of détente for now. He seems to genuinely want to know what happened to the missing women, and unlike Diaz, his list has twenty-eight names on it.”

  Mark grabbed a pen. “Do you know what the two additional names are?”

  I gave him the names: Jenny Alvarez and Tiana James. Mark made a note on a legal pad, then drained his coffee and got up to get more.

  When he returned to his chair, he reached for an inch-thick folder. “I’ve got someone coming in with information about the case a little later, and we need to go over what my researcher has turned up on the harnads, but first let’s take care of the paperwork.”

  I groaned.

  MDI’s freelance researcher, Caitlyn Morse, arrived at the conference room just as I finished signing the last of the forms.

  Cait was a little shorter than me, with shoulder-length brown hair and cute glasses. “It’s so nice to finally meet you,” she told me sincerely as she put her laptop bag on the table. “Mark has told me so much about you.”

  I slid a glance at my former boss. “Has he? That’s alarming.”

  Cait’s laugh was loud and infectious. I found myself smiling. “It was all good,” she assured me.

  I raised my eyebrow skeptically.

  “Well, almost all good,” she amended as we sat down and Mark headed to the side table.

  “That sounds more believable.” I flipped my notebook to a clean page. “So, what can you tell me?”

  She took out her laptop and opened it. “As you know, this has been going on for well over a year. There were at least sixteen women missing before the police would look into it, and even now there’s not much going on with the investigation.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said. “What about the vampire angle? Does Diaz actually have anything?”

  “I don’t think so,” Cait said.

  “Then why is he so convinced it’s a vampire doing it?”

  “Diaz, like a lot of cops, doesn’t like vamps. He knows better than to say it out loud, but I think he agrees with the Human rights folks that vampires don’t have any place among us. To him, they’re monsters.”

  “But there’s no evidence implicating a vampire,” I said, exasperated. “We’ve got circumstantial evidence pointing to harnad involvement, so you’d think they’d at least consider the possibility.”

  “The problem is that the police have been saying since the early nineties that there are no active harnads in the city,” Mark pointed out. “You weren’t here at the time, Alice, but I’m sure you heard about the Drayton harnad.”

  I grimaced. “I heard about it. Six children murdered, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Cait shuddered. “I was in junior high. It was sheer panic in the city. After one of the harnad mages was killed in the jail despite being in protective custody, SPEMA came in and took them all, convicted them in federal court, and sent them to the ultra-max supe prison in Colorado Springs.”

  “So they’re afraid if they admit there is an active harnad here, it will set
off mass hysteria again?”

  “That’s about the size of it.” Mark gave me a nod.

  “What do you know about the two harnads that are supposed to be active in the city?” I asked.

  Cait glanced at her laptop. “Information is sketchy. From what I understand, there are two harnads, one smaller, one larger. The smaller harnad refers to itself as Niger Sanguis. It appears to have six to eight members and a female leader.”

  “Niger Sanguis? Black Blood?” I frowned and thought about it more. “Sanguis can also mean lifeblood. They probably use lifeblood in their spells and wards. Fantastic. What about the other group?”

  Cait raised her hands apologetically. “I don’t have a name for the larger harnad, so I’ve been referring to it as H2. They appear to be the more active of the two groups, with an estimated fourteen members.”

  I was floored. “Fourteen?” It was unusual for a harnad to be so large. That many high-level blood mages tended to result in a lot of egos battling for control and influence. Large harnads inevitably split into smaller ones, often with one faction taking out the others in spectacular fashion. I thought of John West drawing on the combined power of a dozen blood mages and felt dizzy.

  Mark spoke. “Do we have any idea who the leaders of these harnads are?”

  Cait shook her head. “I don’t. As you might imagine, it’s hard to find anything out beyond rumors. I’ve been digging, looking for names, but I have to be careful. The last thing I want to do is tip someone off we’re onto them.”

  “I second that,” I said. “We don’t want to show our hand before we’re ready to make a move. If the trail leads to H2 and we think they’re behind the disappearances, we may have to act fast to have a chance of finding survivors, assuming there are any.”

  “Especially since we appear to be on our own with our suspicions about H2,” Cait said.

  I got up to get a refill on my coffee. “We may not be totally alone on that one.” I told her about Lake without identifying him by name and returned to the table. “So we may have one ally at SPEMA. If we get some hard evidence they can act on, we might be able to sic the feds on H2.”