Spellsmoke: An Urban Fantasy Novel (A Fistful of Daggers Book 2)

by SM Reine

She took a sip from her cup. Her face collapsed into a wince. “The Lipton tea is wretched!”

  “Let me show you what to do with that.” He grabbed the ever-present sugar bowl from the side of the table and dumped half of it into Sophie’s steaming tea. “There you go. Sweet tea.”

  She sipped it and laughed. “Now all I taste is sugar water!”

  “See? All better,” Lincoln said.

  “Overconsumption of glucose is correlated with increased diagnoses of type two diabetes.”

  “And it’s correlated with Sophie Keyes actually laughing for once, which is worth the diabetes,” he said.

  Her laugh faded to a closed-lipped smile. “I think I know why you’re calling me shortcake, and it’s not a height joke.”

  “Maybe you do,” he said, “but I bet you don’t.”

  The stairs creaked. Small feet padded down the stairs. Noah and Abigail’s herd was descending.

  The children shot through the kitchen at maximum speed, blowing past the breakfast table without a glance. Lincoln saw barely more than a blur of pajamas before they’d shot out to the garden.

  Abigail followed much slower, wearing an oversized Colorado State tee and shorts. She’d forgotten to remove her eye mask and wore it like a headband. Her goldenrod hair stuck up behind it like a bouffant.

  “What was that herd of buffalo that just stampeded through here?” Lincoln asked. The kids had scattered into the grass. Someone was putting on a blindfold, while someone else was shouting about how they were going to hide on the moon.

  “Those are your nieces and nephews,” Abigail said without the faintest hint of smile. “You’d know that if you saw them more than once a decade.”

  So much for trying to joke with her. “Where’s Noah?”

  “He went home to Northgate last night. He wanted to get into the sheriff’s office early this morning.” Abigail hesitated at the side of the table, looking at the spread. “Is this to be shared?”

  “You may help yourself,” Sophie said coolly. Lincoln wondered if that was her idea of acting like an impartial observer.

  He stood up. “You can have my seat, Abby. I’ve gotta get to Northgate and talk with Noah. You coming, shortcake?”

  “To a sheriff’s office?” Her nose wrinkled with distaste.

  “Or you can stay here,” Lincoln said. Abigail was poking at the krummelpap and making faces, as though afraid it was going to jump at her.

  Sophie sighed. “Very well. Give me a moment to retrieve my notebook, and I’ll accompany you to the sheriff’s office.”

  Chapter 19

  Sophie had as much fun walking through the woods as she had taking an airplane. She gaped into the canopy every time a bird rustled, her mouth formed into a tiny oh of surprise. Sunlight and shadow marbled her upturned face. She didn’t even make a sound of pain when she walked through a thistle bush—she only laughed as she tried to tug her blouse free.

  “Walk where I do,” Lincoln said. “There’s a trail you can’t see through here.”

  “Is it a trail if I cannot see it?” Sophie asked.

  “Not one that’s hospitable to clueless Historians, especially if you don’t stick behind me.”

  “I’m only as clueless as a child newly born unto the world,” she said. “I am learning in every moment! You may mock me for it, but you’re the one who’s allowed age to turn you cynical.”

  “I ain’t mocking.” Sure, her enthusiasm for the boring minutiae of his hometown was weird. But it was hard to get too upset over someone who found everything so wonderful.

  They’d parked Dad’s pickup outside the Sheetz in Northgate, where gas was currently running ten dollars a gallon—a steal. Lincoln hadn’t seen it so cheap anywhere else. But cheap gas meant a lot of farmers passing through to refuel, and nobody would notice one extra pickup.

  Was it futile to try to hide his movements throughout the county? Maybe. But the Falias cathedral had found him whether he was in Reno or Mortise. Sophie’s assassin might not take long to zero in on Grove County, and he didn’t want finding them to be too easy.

  “There’s the sheriff’s office, I believe,” Sophie said, stepping free of the woods. “What a drab office building. And we’ve come to the rear of it! Why did we not come through Northgate itself?”

  “We’re being slippery,” Lincoln said. And he also successfully avoided the statue of Bain Marshall in town square. “Before we head inside, I gotta warn you: don’t tell Noah anything. Don’t tell anyone anything. If he’s got a badge, he’s not your friend.”

  “I’m not sure why you feel compelled to warn me of this,” Sophie said. “I’m the one who has attempted to convince you that law enforcement is the enemy of the people.”

  “They’re not your enemies either. But Noah’s gonna use anything you say to build his case against the werewolves, and if his case starts shaping up, he won’t wait for a warrant to go after them.”

  “It sounds like you think that he has any sort of case against the werewolves.”

  “I don’t know who’s guilty,” Lincoln said. “All I know is that I don’t want Noah to arrest anyone from the pack.”

  “They’ll be perfectly safe. If this office building is the entirety of the sheriff’s department’s facilities, they hardly have the jail to contain shifters,” Sophie said.

  “Exactly,” he replied grimly.

  Walking into the Grove County Sheriff’s Department as a civilian was surreal. He knew this lobby and these halls; the office he used to inhabit was against the east wall. Yet now he was a stranger among the desks. He didn’t know any of the employees ranged around him, even though they were wearing hand-me-down uniforms from his tenure at the department.

  “Lincoln!” Noah seemed to have been expecting them. He waved from his office doorway, the room beyond lit only by its open window. “Get in here and bring the lady.”

  All eyes were on Lincoln as he crossed the office. They must have known who he was. They must have known why he wasn’t the sheriff, instead of Noah.

  Noah shut the door, closing Lincoln and Sophie into his office.

  “Who are all those guys out there?” Lincoln asked.

  “They came from Florida with me,” Noah said. “They’re good guys. Men I can trust.”

  They were outsiders, to a much more alarming degree than the shapeshifters who’d been settled for years. But Noah didn’t mind because they were his outsiders.

  “I looked into Abel Wilder’s suggestion that the deaths are connected,” said the sheriff. “I called up a contact I’ve got at a clinic in Tampa, and he was happy to look at the hospice records I faxed over. He agrees the patients should have lasted longer. He also said it could easily be coincidence, but I’m not much for coincidence.”

  That was one thing they still had in common. Maybe the only thing. “Thanks for checking it out.”

  “Don’t thank me for doing my job. If it turns out that those premature deaths link back to the werewolves too, you’ve just given me a lot more charges to hold against them.”

  “You don’t have anything linking them yet. Those claw marks weren’t from a werewolf.”

  “You’d know, wouldn’t you?” Noah asked.

  “He would,” Sophie piped up. She had used their distraction as an opportunity to peruse Noah’s office, and now she was holding a photograph by the window, picked out from among his many framed family pictures. “Sometimes Mr. Marshall astonishes me with the breadth of his knowledge, and that’s difficult to do.”

  Noah’s gaze skimmed Sophie, sizing her up. “You an old college friend of Linc’s or something?”

  “We’re barely friends at all,” she said. “That said, if he were to diagnose the cause of a preternatural disruption, I would believe him. To double-check his work is to waste your time. Werewolves should be eliminated from your suspect pool.”

  “But I’m not here to talk suspects,” Lincoln said hastily. Getting help from Sophie was the least helpful thing here. If he let her talk, s
he’d probably start babbling about how racist the evil police were. “We can’t form a good suspect pool without looking at the victims—and potential victims. We should look at the files on everyone who’s been in that hospice since Genesis.” Including John Marshall.

  Noah barked a laugh. “There’s no ‘we.’ You seem to think a vigilante license filed with the OPA gives you a right to oversee what I’m doing. I don’t recognize that license. I don’t gotta give you any access.”

  An unpleasant idea unfurled in Lincoln’s gut. “You’ve been looking into my background too, haven’t you?”

  “And there’s not much to find,” Noah said. “Not after you got kicked out of the deputy’s office.”

  So this was why Noah had permitted him into the office. Not so they could collaborate on the case, but so that Noah could test new ways to threaten him.

  The vigilante license gave Lincoln some level of protection. It meant that the police would have to run his license number past the OPA if they arrested him, and if his license got run, then the whole county would likely get to live through a visit from Secretary Friederling. Lincoln had friends in high places—though he could only describe them as friends to about the same degree as Sophie.

  The only thing Lincoln wanted less than Sophie’s help was Friederling’s. Not just because Friederling was in bed with the faeries—literally—but because they’d take over the case.

  “I’ve got a theory about the killings,” Lincoln said. “I’m thinking that, for deaths this discreet, most of them must have been done by a witch. That’s also why it’s so imprecise. They’re trying to target someone in the hospice remotely and zinging the wrong folks with hexes.”

  “Like casting blind,” Sophie said thoughtfully. “It’s entirely possible. The nature of magic has altered significantly since Genesis, so a seasoned witch capable of such hexes may have trouble targeting them now where she did not before.”

  “How would you know that?” Noah asked.

  “Obviously, I was a witch prior to Genesis. I’ve since lost my abilities, which means I too am unfamiliar with new practices, and cannot consult on techniques likely used by such a witch,” Sophie said.

  Lincoln hadn’t heard anything about this. “You used to be a witch?”

  “Before Genesis,” she said. “It didn’t seem worthy of note. I seldom used my powers and don’t mourn their absence.”

  Now Noah was looking at Sophie differently. Like he was mentally weighing the likelihood she might be the killer.

  Lincoln elbowed her, which he hoped she’d read as ‘stop talking right the fuck now.’

  Sophie only looked confused. “Why do you keep nudging me? Stop that.” God, the lady was awful clueless for a genius.

  “The woman killed last night—who was she?” Lincoln asked. “She was killed more violently than the others. Seems like she might have been the target.”

  “That was Mama Cassidy, of Cassidy Farms,” Noah said.

  “You mean with the corn maze?”

  “I mean with the oil derricks,” the sheriff said. “They struck oil on her farm back in June. The county only just signed a deal with her family—that’s why we’ve got such cheap gas.”

  “Money and murder are close kin,” Lincoln said. “Could explain why she was killed more violently.”

  “Except that she was dead before someone caved her chest in. Time of death places the actual murder almost an hour before Leslie saw the monster break her window. I was wondering why until you filled in that bit about witches and hexing.”

  “So you’ve got a theory now?”

  “Sure,” Noah said. “They’ve got their own witches at the shifter sanctuary. It’s possible that they meant to kill someone else, and when they realized they got the wrong victim, they punched her in a fit of rage.”

  “That’s one theory,” Lincoln said. “There’s a lot of witches around these parts, though—always has been. I’ll take a look around Cassidy Farms, talk to the family. See if I can scrape another theory out of them.”

  “We’re on it. You’re not going anywhere near them.”

  “Like it or not, my vigilante license means you don’t got the authority to stop my independent investigation.”

  Noah purpled. “You can’t investigate if I arrest you.” His temptation was screamed in the rigid lines of his fingers hooking the cuffs on his belt, in the other arm that hovered near his gun. Like he couldn’t decide if he’d rather apprehend or start shooting.

  The sheriff was thinking of shooting him.

  “You know what gives me authority to handle this?” Lincoln asked. “I spent months in Hell. I was enslaved by nightmare demons. I fought alongside the Godslayer. I saw when angels rained destruction on Northgate. I’m a veteran of the Breaking, you don’t gotta like me, but you will respect me!”

  Noah threw the first punch. Lincoln was certain.

  But he dodged so fast that it was like Noah was only flailing in his sleep. He went under Noah’s fist, came up with an elbow, snapped it into his jaw.

  His brother-in-law staggered.

  Sophie yelped and pulled Lincoln back. She was too small to force him to stop, but it didn’t take force. Her light touch was enough to chill his sudden rage.

  He let her coax him back, out the office door.

  Noah swiped the blood off his upper lip. Insult, alarm—whatever shined in his eyes was a dark and angry thing. He hadn’t gotten off a single hit against Lincoln.

  His silence followed them out of the office, so much worse than shouts. The quiet left room for Inanna’s smug words to echo within him.

  This isn’t over.

  Cassidy Farms was a community fixture in Northgate. It was out on the road to Woodbridge, but technically within city limits, and they’d held the Northgate Fall Festival there every single year of Lincoln’s childhood. In late summer, they should have been preparing the cornfields for the maze, and new pumpkins should have been popping up among the vines.

  Instead, the fields had been razed and the bobbing heads of derricks urged oil from the deep. There had been no oil in Grove County before Genesis. It was another quirk of the gods that had changed resource dispersal, just like the regularity of the rising and falling moon.

  “We’re lucky that it got switched around like this,” said Sissy Cassidy, a sixty-something year old woman who always talked like she had chew tucked in her bottom lip. Which she did, most of the time. But now she also wore a gaudy gem-studded bolero and turquoise eyeshadow. Sissy Cassidy seemed to be feeling fancy. “Would you like some rhubarb pie? Fresh from a farm out of the county!”

  “I would be delighted to try it,” Sophie said.

  “Here you go, pretty thing.” Sissy carved out a slice of pie and served it to Sophie at the counter. “Did I mention it came from outside of the county?”

  “You did indeed. Forgive my ignorance, but is that special for some reason?”

  “Oh yes,” Sissy said. “Most peoples is still eating out of their back yards right now, and I’m hiring trucks to bring me food from all the way in Pennsylvania sometimes!”

  “It sounds as though you have been blessed enormously by the gods,” Sophie said. She bowed her head in momentary prayer over the pie before eating. “Incredible. This is delicious. The gods are very good!”

  “He sure is!” Sissy said.

  “Not good to everyone,” Lincoln said. “Is there nobody who might have wanted your aunt dead? People who are jealous, or didn’t get a cut they think they deserved, or…?”

  Some of Sissy’s glow dimmed at the reminder. She whipped a rag off the oven’s handle and started wiping imaginary messes off of her wood slab counter, which was freshly varnished. “I dunno. The family’s been nice as we can about the new wealth. I think most everyone’s happy about the general store we stocked, and the new school we’re building, but…” She wasn’t meeting Lincoln’s eyes. “Some folks could be a mite bitter about the shift in economics ‘round these parts.”

  �
�Like the logging industry,” Lincoln said. Logging had always been Grove County’s primary source of revenue—until it hadn’t been, and the lumber mill had turned into an expensive, outdated liability that no longer made jobs. It just made unemployed men who filled bars every listless evening, lamenting that the farming jobs had been taken by migrants.

  “The logging industry would have reasons to be resentful,” Sissy said. “I tried to make them happy, though. But…” She sighed. “Your dad’s the one I’ve really gotta make amends with and I can’t, with his condition.”

  “John Marshall owned the lumber mill,” Lincoln explained for Sophie’s benefit. “But it’s been out of operation for a decade.”

  “That explains your family’s wealth,” Sophie said, swallowing down another bite of pie. Her eyes closed with contentment.

  “We’re not wealthy.”

  “I was able to find cornmeal and butter in your pantry. You have fuel for a barbecue, vehicles for each adult member of your family, and a working refrigerator with consistent power. Your family must have been the equivalent of royalty in Grove County prior to the fall of society, were they not?”

  “Royalty’s got soft palms and does jack but wear crowns,” Lincoln said. “We worked hard for what we’ve got.”

  Sophie scraped rhubarb off her plate and licked the fork. “I believe you mean to say that the tradesmen worked hard for what you have.”

  “John was a king all right,” Sissy said fondly.

  Maybe too fondly.

  Ashley hadn’t known who John Marshall had a baby with—only that he had. Sissy had been in town around the time the baby was born.

  “Were you close with him?” Lincoln asked.

  Sissy patted his hand. “Only through the church. You know, those years that John ministered for the community were some of the best times. He was known for being so good with the youth, but I was always grateful for how he helped Mama when her health declined.”

  “Then you wouldn’t say you had a personal relationship with him?”

  “Aside from enjoying some moving sermons and great comfort when Mama’s diabetes acted up, not at all,” Sissy said. “All my memories of him are good, Lincoln Logs. Your daddy’s a good man.”