by E. A. Copen
Chapter Three
Ed shifted the blanket across his lap and reached up to scratch his face. He winced when he accidentally rubbed the scab off the end of his nose.
The red and blue emergency lights reflected over the side of his face, betraying healing bruises. “No,” he said at length. “I’m not sure where Mara is right now.”
He chose his words carefully so that it wasn’t a lie. Werewolves and lots of other supernaturals can sense when someone is lying. I’m not one of them, but Ed had grown up in werewolf packs. He knew how to lie without lying.
“Tell us what happened, son,” Tindall said, putting his hands on his hips.
Ed looked at Sal. “Someone should stop the bleeding.” He nodded to his alpha’s wound.
I climbed up into the open squad and rooted around a few places for sterile gauze, antiseptic and medical tape. While I was looking, the EMT popped around the side of the ambulance free of werewolves and asked if I needed a hand. I leaned back out the door. “Will you let him help?”
Sal’s answer was a huff and roll of his eyes as if to say, “I’m a werewolf, not a monster.”
“You should be okay to try and patch him up,” I told the EMT. “But don’t bother with stitches. They’ll just tear out when he shifts back. Just get the bleeding to stop.” I hopped back out of the squad while the EMT gathered his supplies. “Okay, Ed, tell us what you were doing out here.”
Ed chewed on his lower lip.
I turned my head to Tindall and the EMT. “Give us a minute and some privacy, would you?”
Tindall nodded. Ed scrambled to tuck the blanket around him toga style. We still weren’t out of Sal’s hearing, but human ears wouldn’t have been able to pick up anything we said. I stepped forward to grab Ed by the arm and lead him off a few paces. Ed jerked his arm away and snarled at me, the unfamiliar sound freezing me in place. Sal, Valentino, and Nina had all growled at me at one time or another but to have Ed do it felt unnatural.
Ed turned on me. His upper lip twitched as if he wanted to curl it back and show his teeth but he didn’t. “I’m not the same person I was two years ago, Judah. Don’t think you can scare me into telling you anything.”
“That was never my intention, Ed, and you know it. Come on. I thought you knew me better than that.”
He turned away and stared at the burning building in silence.
I sighed and forced my shoulders to relax before I uncrossed my arms. “I know that, if Mara was in trouble, you probably wouldn’t tell Agent Judah Black anything, Ed. I know you’re pissed at me for how the situation was handled at Aisling.”
“You let Mara get tortured. By a vampire. You traded her like currency.”
I winced.
“You killed her parents in front of her,” Ed continued. “I know they were bad people and that they were hurting her, but imagine what that was like for her. You killed her parents and then tried to be her parents. She felt like your prisoner.”
He wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t seen it at the time because I thought I was saving Mara. Instead, I smothered her and pushed her further down a path that took her dark places. She was Ed’s first real love. I had hurt her and, by extension, him.
“I can’t change what happened,” I said. “I would if I could, but I can’t. The past sucks. Mara’s especially. I won’t sit here and fight to justify all the decisions I made but, yeah, some of them were bad. For that, I’m sorry.”
Ed lifted his chin. “Sorry doesn’t take away the scars. Sorry doesn’t take away the night terrors and heartache. It doesn’t fix Mara.”
“No,” I said gently. “It doesn’t.”
The firefighters shouted directions back and forth and the fire blazed, but we stood in strained silence.
“I know you wouldn’t tell Agent Black about Mara, but would you tell a friend who shed blood with you? For you? Someone who just wants to know she’s safe and loved.”
Ed’s throat worked. The wind shifted and blew smoke and ash toward us. I blamed that for the tears Ed wiped away. “I couldn’t stop her in time.”
I raised a hand. “Hold up. Let’s start from the beginning, okay?”
Ed nodded and swallowed. “Mara was never really missing. I’ve known where she was this whole time. Actually, I’ve been helping her stay under the radar.”
He turned to gauge my reaction. I wasn’t surprised to hear that Ed had been helping her, only that she had stayed so close to home and been so successful. The whole county was looking for Mara and I sent her picture nationwide. I had been outsmarted by two kids who weren’t old enough to drink.
I must not have looked too surprised, either, because Ed lifted his chin and continued, bolder. “We’d been seeing each other weeknights. The place we meet changes, but it’s on a rotating schedule. I knew something was wrong, that something had changed, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was. Over time, she got more and more distant. I thought she just needed space. Then, last week she…” He choked and put a hand over his mouth. It was several minutes before he could compose himself. “She said we couldn’t see each other any more.”
“Oh, Ed. Breakups are always tough.” I reached forward to put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, but he jerked away.
“It wasn’t a breakup! I mean, not a normal one. It was that stupid cult, that boy she was hanging out with, Warren Demetrius.”
I held up my hands. “Slow down, Ed. What cult?”
He huffed out a deep breath and tilted his head to the side, thinking hard. “Do you know anything about the Tribulation Adventists?”
I knew enough to be worried the minute he brought them up. The Tribulation Adventist Church was a Christian fundamentalist group, an offshoot of Pentecostals, I think. They sprang up right in the middle of the Revelation and were one of the first groups to openly embrace supernaturals. That might sound good but I promise you, it isn’t. The church was exclusively supernatural and preached a doctrine straight out of the book of Revelations. According to them, we were living in the end times for humanity, soon to be replaced by a chosen, superior race of supernaturals. They weren’t openly anti-normative human, but BSI had kept tabs on when and where the church operated and how as well as they could. When the government flags a fundamentalist religious group for surveillance, nothing good is happening.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorta. I mean, I only know the basic info BSI sends out in their e-mails. Why?”
“Well, Mara started hanging out with one of them. A guy named Warren. His dad is the leader of the group here in Concho County. About nine months ago, they purchased a parcel of land not far from here and started to build.” Ed made a sour face. “Then, out of the blue, Mara says she can’t see me anymore. She’s going to be with Warren now in his dad’s little cult. Thing is, I’m not convinced he isn’t manipulating her somehow, maybe with magick.”
That didn’t sound like the Mara I knew. She might have been desperate to find somewhere to belong, but she wasn’t stupid and she wasn’t mentally weak. If the church tried to pressure her, she’d never cave. She wasn’t the type to do well in a cult. She liked her independence too much. Ed was right. It didn’t seem like something she’d do of her own free will, but I hadn’t seen Mara in almost a year.
“She was hiding out in a women’s shelter,” Ed continued. “Moved around a lot to keep from being noticed. She wasn’t interested in the cult at first, but the more she hung out with Warren, the more she talked about it. I think she might have gotten involved with rem. I know the Tribulation Adventists use it.”
Rem. Holy hell, this was bad news. Rem was the street name for a drug that was a cross between magickal speed, LSD and heroin. It’s little sister, Pixie, had started showing up on the streets of Eden a few months back and Tindall was having a hell of a time combating it. Made from some plant that had been imported from Faerie, the name of which I couldn’t pronounce, rem had two uses for magickal practitioners. First, it was, well, magickal speed. It would keep you going for crazy amounts of ti
me without sleep or rest. That made it popular with stressed-out teens and college kids. The second use was a massive ability boost. I could spark a tiny flame in between my fingers with a snap. With a hefty dose of rem, I could probably call up fire hot enough to burn bone to ash.
“I tried to check in on her. Then she stopped answering her cell. She didn’t answer her e-mail or text. I spent the last two days trying to get in contact with her before I resorted to…other things.”
“Other things?”
Ed nodded.
When he didn’t elaborate, I pressed, “What kinds of other things?”
“Magick.” He wiggled his fingers in the air, forgetting he was holding up the blanket. As soon as it started to slide, he grabbed for it and tucked it better.
I waited for him to smile, laugh or otherwise make a gesture that said he was joking. Time stretched on into more uncomfortable silence before he stuck out his hand, palm up. “Give me your cell.”
“Why?”
“Do you want to know how I tracked Mara here or not?”
I glanced back over at the ambulance. The EMT was wrapping some gauze around Sal and Tindall was pretending not to be interested in our conversation. “Okay, Ed. You’ve got my attention.”
I tugged my cell phone from my pocket and slapped it into Ed’s hand. He immediately squatted down to draw a circle in the dirt with his finger. A few inches inside the big circle, he drew a smaller one and then started connecting the two with several lines. It only took me a few seconds to recognize the simple circle. It was the one everyone started with.
Circles aren’t inherently magick, not until you add something to make them so. Usually, that’s a drop of blood, spit, or some other bodily fluid, depending on the purpose of the circle. With that and focused will, just about anyone with a hint of magickal talent could perform simple spells inside the circle. Inside a powered circle, energy is amplified and, since the circle acts as a barrier, the energy stays inside, trapped and feeding off whatever’s inside as a fuel source. Fire and water were standard offerings, though you could use almost anything. Whatever you put in that center circle as a fuel source, however, changed the nature of the spell so you had to be careful. Putting anything living inside that center circle to be consumed was not something a person with good intentions would do.
Once he was finished drawing the connecting lines, Ed placed my cell phone in the center circle. He fiddled with a few buttons to find my GPS program and then put it back down. He plucked a few hairs out of his head and tossed them into the inner circle under the cell phone before he closed the circle with a little spit. A small static charge zipped around the outer circle and then funneled to the inner circle. There weren’t any magick words for Ed’s spell, but he did spend a few minutes sitting there with his eyes closed and kneeling at the edge of the circle, long enough that the backlight on my phone turned off. I was just about to interrupt him when the light turned back on and my phone made a sound I’d never heard it make before. The GPS program queued up with a message that said it was searching. The map zoomed in, first on Texas, then Concho County, then on the nearby county road.
I flinched when the phone made a loud hissing sound and a small puff of smoke flew out of the charging port. A breath later, fire jumped out of the screen. I flinched back at the sudden pop while Ed broke the outer and then inner circle.
“Fuck!” He swung the blanket at the fire.
I put a hand on him and pulled him away before he set the blanket and himself on fire. It was better to just let the phone burn and bill BSI for a replacement. I was still too busy processing what I’d just seen.
Theoretically, it made sense. He’d satisfied all the ingredients for a simple tracking spell, except that normally people used paper maps. That he’d been able to manipulate something as complicated as my cell phone’s GPS using such a simple spell, that was the part I couldn’t figure out. Anyone could do simple magick. Ed was the only one I’d seen use an electronic screen as the output.
I closed my eyes and called up my auric sight. Ed had never been much to look at as far as power went. Like most werewolves, his aura had always been streaked with a touch of magick, but werewolf magick drew on pack bonds so it was difficult to tell how much of that was his and how much of it belonged to the pack as a whole.
When I looked at Ed in that empty field next to the burning building, however, it was alive with colors that hadn’t been there before. Rich hues of electric blue and neon red streaked and swam like particles in a collider. The colors swirled and crashed into each other, flickering briefly out of existence before coming alive again a few centimeters away in brilliant flashes. They moved in pre-set lines and patterns, as if his circulatory system were a circuit board. Beautiful, but odd.
“Ed, how are you doing that?”
A proud smile flashed over Ed’s face, but it soon faded and his shoulders slumped. “Mara. She was teaching me.”
“Dammit, Ed, magick isn’t a game.”
“I know that,” Ed snapped. “I’m a fucking werewolf. I know a thing or two. I read the papers and browse the internet. Mara’s a spirit sensitive. She can let ghosts possess her. We weren’t helpless children. Everything was fine until…” He cast a wary glance back at the fire.
I placed my hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “It’s okay, Ed. You said you tracked Mara here. Then what happened?”
He blinked several times and turned back to me slowly. “Moving as a wolf is faster so I got here on all fours. I could smell her. There were others, too, at least three counting Reed, but I didn’t know he was around. I didn’t recognize his scent right away. I did hear voices on the other side of the door. Mara’s voice and another man. She sounded hurt. I didn’t even think about it. I charged the door. That was a mistake.” Ed looked back over at the barn. “There was this old dude inside with Mara and Reed. He was bald and had crazy green eyes. As soon as I came through the door and they determined I was a threat, the old dude shouted something in another language—not sure what—and Reed went berserk on me. Threw fire everywhere. That’s how the fire started.”
“You said there were three other people besides Mara and Reed. That makes five people total,” I said, counting on my fingers. “So far, you’ve only named Mara, Reed, and the bald, green-eyed guy. Who were the other two people you scented?”
Ed shrugged. “Beats me. Might’ve been fae, but there was so much magick in the air, and I was kinda upset, thinking my girlfriend…ex-girlfriend was in trouble, so I didn’t pay much attention.” Ed gave a pained expression when he called Mara his ex-girlfriend.
I narrowed my eyes, glaring at the dying embers of the fire. The firemen had almost conquered it now, and the barn was a smoldering pile of ash. It was still too hot for them to go in and search for bodies, and the water would have destroyed any residual magickal energies, effectively making the crime scene useless to me.
“The old man and Mara?” I asked. “What happened to them?”
Ed shook his head. “Gone. Reed kicked me aside, opened them a Way and they hopped right through.”
So, whoever baldie was, it looked like Reed had allied himself with him. Now, that was odd. In all the time I’d known Gideon Reed, I hadn’t ever seen him make friends. Something about the way Reed had acted during the fight didn’t sit right with me, either.
“Do you think Mara’s okay?” He fidgeted with two fingers and stared at the ground.
“I think you and I are going to have a very long chat when things have calmed down.” The dull thud of uneven paws on ground made me turn my head. Sal limped out toward where we stood. “But I think I’ll give your alpha the privilege of ripping you a new asshole first about keeping secrets and getting involved. You and me, we’re going to talk about this magick.” I pointed at him sternly and then turned my back to walk away.
Sal gave me a tired look as he limped past but I didn’t stop for him. I needed to talk to Tindall. I walked closer to the crime scene and stopped beside Tinda
ll and a fireman whose helmet announced was the fire marshal. Tindall greeted me with a bob of his head. “Find out anything useful?”
“You having a problem with rem in Eden?”
“Fuck.” Tindall scratched at his chin. “Drugs are always a problem. You get one off the street, the pushers have got another, stronger, more deadly one lined up. Yeah, I know a few corners where it’s a problem, but nobody’s dying from rem and funding is limited. I’d rather get the heroin pushers since I have to choose. Best I can do until legislature catches up and pick up the overdoses and harass the dealers. Why? What’s that got to do with the fire?”
“Word on the street is your victims might have been involved with the Tribulation Adventists and maybe the rem trade.”
“Fuck,” Tindall breathed and scratched at his chin. “Don’t suppose you got stuff to back that up?”
“Not yet, I don’t. And the fire probably destroyed anything inside the building.” I shook my head, trying to think through the smoke and noise. I dismissed the reference with a wave. “We need to find out who this property belonged to and go knock on their door.”
The fire marshal, a muscular and mustached guy nodded. “I can answer that. Flagged in the system when I put the address in to find the place. This whole parcel belongs to that group of weirdo new-age people with the compound over that-a-way.” He pointed southwest. “System said they still owed on a fine for a permit violation.”
“Tell me you don’t mean the Tribulation Adventists? That’d be too easy.”
The fire marshal nodded. “That does sound right, yeah.”
I tipped my head to the side. “You feel like throwing a few badges my way to go ruffle some feathers over at the compound?”
“Careful, Black,” he said with a grunt. “I don’t need a Waco incident on my badge.”
“I won’t go busting down doors without a warrant,” I promised. “I just need a few grunts with badges. Enough to let the head honcho know I’m onto their rem operation. Maybe he knows something about all this.”