by Nova Nelson
“Oh.”
“But I was too scared to make it official. I’d been in love with her since we were kids. My family used to rent a place on Fluke Mountain, and she lived in a cabin down the road. I only struck up the confidence to speak with her once we were older. It was actually Darius who officially introduced us at Lunasa Festival one year, and it went from there.
“We’d spent the whole day together, watching the Titan Games and the cook-off, and shopping. We might have stolen a little beer as well. I was in so deep, and I knew it. Spending a day with Sasha Fontaine was a dream come true. Then she told me: she’d had a crush on me since we were kids. I would have told her the same, but she kissed me behind one of the booths before I could. I grabbed her hand and we left together. Things were hot and heavy for a while, but we never had ‘the talk.’ I assumed it was obvious that I was in love with her. I was worried that if I started to say it, I would scare her away, that the depth of my feelings for her would be too much for an eighteen-year-old to bear.
“So we were just… friends, I guess. Officially, anyway.”
I was already halfway done with my tiramisu by that point. “We call that friends with benefits where I come from.”
“Makes sense. The benefits were many.” He grinned. “But then things began to fall apart. We got into more fights than ever, and over stupid things. We got in a real blow-out about I-can’t-even-remember-what, and I knew she would need some time to cool down. Usually, she’d come find me when she was ready, and we’d both apologize and make up. But this time, three days passed, and I still hadn’t talked to her. I wasn’t especially worried, until I saw her at Fulcrum Park. With Darius. They were lying on a blanket in the sun, clearly more cozy than two platonic friends would be.
“I interrupted their good time and asked her what was going on, what she was doing with him. She told me he was her boyfriend. I didn’t know how long things had been going on between them, but I suspected longer than three days.
“And the worst part was that I couldn’t argue with her. I couldn’t say, ‘But I’m your boyfriend!’ because we’d never talked about that. I’d just assumed that she’d known, that it was obvious from the way we were carrying on. But, apparently, my lack of formality had only bred bitter resentment in her.”
“Siren’s song,” I said, “she could have brought it up. It wasn’t just to be up to you.”
“That’s true. But it doesn’t excuse me from it.”
I stared down forlornly at my now empty dessert plate. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“It gets worse,” he bemoaned. “She and Darius had their fair share of rough patches, and every time they did, guess who she came running to, just to talk things out.”
“And did you? Talk things out, I mean?”
“At first, yes.” And now a wry grin appeared on his face. “But one night, she showed up at my door with tears streaming down her face. She said she’d messed up, really crossed a line with him, and she was sure he would never take her back.”
“What line did she cross?”
“I never found out.”
“She wouldn’t tell you?”
“She might have if I’d asked. But I wasn’t thinking about that. All I was thinking was Yes! Finally! and she seemed to be thinking the same thing. We didn’t do a whole lot of talking that night.”
“So you two got back together?”
“No.” He paused, staring in my direction but clearly focusing on something a thousand miles away. Spirits did that a lot. They love nostalgia. “That night was the last we had together. She said it was a mistake, blamed me for taking advantage of her when she was weak.”
“Yikes.” I could see her point, but I couldn’t say I wouldn’t have gone for it if I were in his shoes. “And she got back together with Darius?”
“No. She’d been right. She’d crossed a line, and they weren’t getting back together.”
I considered that a moment. “So, you and Darius both lost.”
“Yes.”
But both Dmitri and Darius were, from what I could tell, good men. Which meant Sasha had lost, too.
Everyone lost. Was that the way it went with love triangles? Was a loss across the board inevitable? Surely not.
I returned my attention to my wine, swirling the last portion at the bottom of the glass while my thoughts moved in much the same motion. Then I said, “And you’re sure Darius wouldn’t want to maul you to death?”
“Considering I’m dead, I’d say that ship has sailed.”
I waved him off, hoping he would get on the same track as me without too much work on my part. “No, but I mean before you died.”
“No, no, no. He and I straightened things out a few years later. Of course, it wasn’t until after she married Paul Stormstruck. In fact, I’d say those turbulent years with her might have bonded Darius and me in a strange way.”
“Paul Stormstruck… Is he the man she just divorced?”
“Well, he took her last name, so he was Paul Fontaine for a while, but yes. Same werebear.”
I pondered it for a moment. “Do you think Donovan will give up on me?”
Without missing a beat, Dmitri answered, “Not a chance. He’s braver than I was. He’s never going to let you go so long as he has a breath in him. But he might respect it if you tell him to hold off.”
“He did once. Sort of. I don’t know if he would do it again.”
“If you choose Tanner, he will. He loves you. Sure, he wants to be the one with you, but he also wants you to be happy. You have to pick who’s right for you, not who you feel most sorry for.”
“Donovan would hate Tanner forever if I went through that portal.”
“No doubt. And it takes a lot for someone to hate Tanner Culpepper.”
I nodded. Never a truer word spoken. Even Eastwind’s crabbiest had a soft spot for him. And not for no reason. He’d been able to see the good in everyone, even those who the rest of the town turned their back on, and he treated people with respect.
Good goddess, he was a good man.
Is. He is a good man.
He was still alive somewhere. And now there was a way to get to him. So long as that existed, he wouldn’t be past tense.
“Wait,” I said, my mind catching up. “Did you know him?” I’d never considered the possibility, simply because I hadn’t known Dmitri prior to his death. But Tanner knew most people in town.
“I knew him only casually. He was never at the Coven meetings. But I knew his parents very well. They were active in the Coven, and when they saw me getting into some darker stuff in my mid-teens, they stepped up and helped me out. I owe a lot to them. They took me under their wing when my own parents seemed set on pretending I didn’t exist. And when they died…”
“Were murdered,” I corrected. “By the High Priest.”
He jerked his head back like I’d taken a swipe at him. “What?”
“Yep. I guess I can tell you, since you can’t exactly go around telling everyone. Oh wait! Don’t tell Ted.”
“I won’t. Why did he kill them?”
“It’s a long story, but the gist of it is that it’s my fault.”
“You weren’t even in Eastwind then.”
“Like I said, it’s a long story.”
I reached for the wine bottle on the table to pour myself a refill but paused and grabbed my water glass instead. That’s called being an adult.
“The Culpeppers were good people,” Dmitri added. “And everything I heard and saw for myself about Tanner said the same.”
“Yeah,” I said, “A whole family of good people. And all gone.”
“Not all gone.” He held up a finger. “One is still around. And he doesn’t know there’s a way home.”
“Then he can’t miss what he doesn’t know.”
“But you can. And I think you do, Nora.”
I groaned. “Of course I do! You think loss ever disappears? I loved him. Love him. But he left me, and now I love Do
novan.”
He cocked his head to the side. “You do?”
“Yes,” I mumbled.
“Ah, I just thought you’d meant it casually and then decided to stand by the statement so he wouldn’t storm off.”
I threw my hands into the air. “Sphinx’s riddle, Dmitri! How much of our conversation did you listen to?”
“All of it. What? It was a good moment. Passionate in all the right ways.”
“Except when he turned and left.”
The spirit shrugged. “Call me crazy, but I think that might have been the most passionate part of the whole thing.”
Chapter Seventeen
The Friday breakfast rush bled over into the Friday lunch rush, which didn’t let up. Jane came in to take over for me and immediately found herself in the weeds, even while I stayed on a bit longer.
Finally, I had a chance to slip away into the manager’s office and run over some of the sales for the morning, but my quiet time wasn’t long lived. The bell at the back door rang loudly, announcing a letter. I went out to find that the owl had already departed, and the letter was waiting for me in the drop box below the perch.
I unrolled it and read: MagEx at 3:30. Want you there. Stu.
I popped back into the office to check the clock. It was 3:20. “Swirls!” As I grabbed up my things, patting my pockets to make sure I had my keys, Dmitri appeared.
“Where are you off to in such a hurry?”
“Gotta see the magical examiner. They’re checking out your body at the sheriff’s department today.”
“Mind if I join?”
“As long as you don’t make it weird, it seems like your right.”
“Should I get Grim and Monster?”
“You can try, but I’d bet they’d both rather stick out the heat of the day indoors with the possibility of scraps than haul their hides into town. Heck, I’d rather do that, too.”
We arrived just five minutes late. The sweat soaking through my shirt on my lower back and, regretfully, underneath my breasts, would at least show that I’d hurried over as quickly as I could.
“They’re already down in the examination room,” Jingo said, painting his toenails a vomit green at his desk. “You know how to get there.”
I did.
When I arrived downstairs, the cellar coolness a welcome relief, I knocked on the glass, and Stu let me in. “Just in time, Ms. Ashcroft. I was worried you wouldn’t be able to make it.”
“Why? Because you only gave me 15 minutes’ notice?”
He nodded. “Sorry about that.”
Dmitri followed me in, and when he passed too close to the deputy, Stu said, “He’s here?”
“Yep. Seemed only fair.”
Magical Examiner Calvin Brightburn was a small witch with large, thick-rimmed glasses resting on a button nose that seemed ill-suited for an adult. He wore sky blue robes with the official Eastwind Coven crest on the front, which told me two things: first, he was probably a North Wind, and second, his allegiance was to the Coven over the sheriff.
Once we were set, the MagEx held his wand at both ends, closed his eyes, and held the stick just beyond Dmitri’s feet, then began moving it slowly up toward Dmitri’s head. I had no idea what he was looking for, but that was okay, because I wasn’t the MagEx, so I didn’t need to know.
They kept the body covered in a sheet, which was a small mercy, not just for me, but for Dmitri’s spirit as well, I’m sure. The wand progressed over his knees, then his thighs, his hips, stomach, sternum—
“Huh,” Brightburn said when the wand reached Dmitri’s chest. “Deputy Manchester, could you pull back the coverings? There seems to be some kind of disturbance.”
Stu pulled back the blanket just enough to expose the tattoo on Dmitri’s chest.
“Very interesting,” said the examiner, leaning over it. He poked it with the tip of his wand.
“Watch where you’re sticking that thing,” Dmitri said.
As Brightburn proceeded to draw little figure eights in the air above the Dmitri’s heart with his wand, Stu Manchester explained, “The MedEx already concluded that it was a heart condition that ended his life. You’ll find all that in the report.”
The MagEx whipped his head around to glare at the deputy. “You think I haven’t read the report? Of course I know what the MedEx said. But there’s a reason there are two of us who examine every body, and this is a prime example of why the system exists.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean,” Brightburn said impatiently, “the MedEx was able to tell you that it was his heart that stopped. And you seem to believe he had a heart condition. But I’m here to tell you that the heart failure was, in fact, due to magic.”
“Come again?” I said.
He waved a palm back and forth over Dmitri’s tattoo. “There’s a cord here.”
“I don’t see anything,” said Stu.
“Of course you don’t. It’s not a visible cord. It’s a magical one. It’s more like a tether, really, because I can tell from the tension it’s connected to something else. But I’m not sure what.”
“What kind of energy are you getting from it?” Stu asked. “Dark? Light?”
“It’s a curse,” the examiner announced firmly. “I can’t explain why, but I’ve felt enough of these to know. The curses hold on tight, and this one seems rather old.”
“Do you think it’s related to the tattoo?” I asked.
The MagEx looked at me like I should not have been let in the room, due to low intelligence. “Of course it is.”
So there was more to the story of the mark than Dmitri had let on. I turned around to ask him more, but, somewhat predictably, he’d vanished.
Son of a banshee. He must have known he’d just been caught in a lie. Just an innocent tattoo? Not so much.
Oh well. He’d be back, and when he was, I’d anchor his haunted hide to the spot until I got some real answers.
As the examiner continued his investigation, jotting occasional notes in his report before running the wand back over various parts, Stu turned to me. “Looks like it might be a homicide after all.” To his credit, it sounded like he was trying very hard not to gloat. But he wasn’t doing a great job of it.
“You don’t know that. If the mark has anything to do with the curse, well, he put that on himself as far as we know.”
Stu’s brows pinched together, and his mustache hitched to the side. “Why don’t you just ask him?”
“He split.”
“That’s suspicious.”
“No kidding.”
Stu tucked his thumbs into his duty belt. “You think he cursed himself and it’s what’s keeping him here?”
“I’d be shocked if that wasn’t the case, given what we just learned.”
The deputy sighed. I knew he wasn’t a huge fan of magic, possessing none himself outside of his ability to shift into an elk at will. I wasn’t big on magic myself, so I understood. He said, “Did he ever tell you what that tattoo means?”
“He told me, but I think he might have been skewing the facts a bit. I’ll have to follow up with him before I confirm anything. But I have a strong hunch.”
Stu nodded. “That’s good news. Your hunches are usually pretty solid.”
I nodded my appreciation for his approval, and we left the MagEx to finish up his paperwork without us.
But what I didn’t tell Stu, as we climbed out of the cool basement and into the main floor of the station, was that I had more than a hunch on this case now.
I had a theory.
And it involved Dmitri Flint, Sasha Fontaine, and Darius Pine.
Chapter Eighteen
Until Dmitri decided to stop hiding and start talking, there wasn’t much I could do for the investigation other than, perhaps, try that meditation thing again. But I was so far from mastering that skill that it was laughable.
And I had a far more pressing matter to attend to after leaving the Sheriff’s Department.
/> Since my dinner conversation with Dmitri the night before, all kinds of scenarios had spun their way through my mind. Did I know what I was going to do about the portal? Not quite. I had strong opinions about it, don’t get me wrong, but I hadn’t landed on anything definite.
What I was sure about was that I absolutely had to make things right with Donovan. I couldn’t leave things the way they were.
I wasn’t sure when his shift at Franco’s started, but I knew it was sometime around now. His house was farther away than Franco’s Pizza, so I decided to start at the latter.
I entered, and the hostess first greeted me like an old friend then said, “Donovan’s already behind the bar, if that’s who you’re looking for.”
I suspected that under normal circumstances she wouldn’t have tacked on the “if that’s who you’re looking for,” but that my tipsy dinner date with a ghost had muddied the waters a bit.
I thanked her and stepped into the dining area. The second my eyes found him, my heart skipped a beat. I wanted to stay and watch him for a while longer. His family turned up their noses at his chosen profession, but bartending was what he enjoyed, and he was great at it. And that was more than what most people could say about their careers.
He flicked his wand, and bottles poured themselves into glasses of various sizes, whizzing either to customers seated at the bar or drink trays that the servers could grab and go.
And when his eyes locked onto mine, everything hovered in place for a quick second, and I was subjected to that sharp look from him I knew all too well—it was the one I’d seen in all those encounters before our first adventure into the Deadwoods. But what did it mean now, after so much had happened?
The objects in the air finished their movements, landing effortlessly where they belonged, but no more jumped off the shelves. A waiting customer tried to order a drink, but Donovan held up a finger for him to wait one second, and then he nodded for me to follow him to the kitchen.
Silently, I complied, and he didn’t say a word to me until we were in the narrow back alley.
“Donovan, I know you’re still upset, but I just want to say—” I didn’t get to finish before his body pressed mine against the wall and he silenced me with his lips.