by C. C. Mahon
“No idea. Do phoenixes have a max number of rebirths?”
“And once they’ve reached that number, they die for good? No, my friend insisted on the fact that it’s an endless cycle.”
I imagined being prisoner to an eternity of lives and deaths and couldn’t hold back a small wave of claustrophobia from closing up my throat. “How horrifying,” I whispered.
Britannicus slowly nodded his head. “On the one hand, I envy the amount of knowledge that someone can accumulate in an eternity. On the other hand, I wonder if you would end up losing your mind.”
“But it would seem that someone has managed to seriously cut eternity short,” I said.
Britannicus frowned. “You’re certain that the little girl in question is truly Phoebe?”
“Two people recognized her, but I had never met her, so…”
He rummaged around in the pockets of his vest before pulling out an envelope. It contained pages from a notepad covered in messy writing and a photo that he handed to me.
I recognized the young girl. She was smiling in the shot. She was standing between two vulnerable-looking men dressed like caricatures of European academics.
“Taken at the Guild last year,” said Britannicus.
“It’s definitely her.”
He put the photo and envelope back in his pocket without a word and went back to studying his wine. “I’ll have to consult a few specialized books,” he said, “and several colleagues. But it will be more complicated if I can’t explain the crux of the issue. You really don’t want to divulge this information? Why?”
“You said it yourself: people would kill to get their hands on Phoebe’s body.”
“You don’t think a wizard killed her for the challenge, do you?”
“If that was the case, he wouldn’t have buried her quickly in the middle of the desert.”
“Very true. But why go after her?”
“Inconvenient witness? Maybe she saw or heard something, and they had to shut her up?”
The wizard pouted. “I’m still not fully up to date on all the American habits and customs, but even I find that a little too cliché. And it would explain why but not how. It would be simpler to lock up Phoebe until said information was no longer important than to find a way to kill a phoenix.”
We reflected on the issue in silence.
I finished my glass and said, “Check all the books you want, but stay discreet, okay? I have a little girl to bury, and I don’t want to have to worry about tomb raiders.”
I bit my lip.
“Something else?” asked Britannicus.
“Do you remember the thing with the Valkyrie?”
“How could I forget? Any news? Have you lost any hair?”
“A Valkyrie’s job,” I said, “it has to do with battles?”
He nodded. “You thinking of converting?”
“I had a dream…”
I explained to him what had happened with the wolves and the coyotes and how the latter had come to ask me to mind my own business. Britannicus listened to me, his attention almost palpable, without interrupting me.
“Do you think I’m becoming a Valkyrie?”
“I wish I could answer that. But you might want to stop sleeping with your sword. It would be bad to die charred in your bed.”
“If I was a phoenix, that wouldn’t be a problem.”
“You can’t become a phoenix, but you can promise me to put away that sword in its case every night before going to bed.”
“Yes, Mother!”
“And remember to brush your teeth,” he concluded, chuckling.
11
Nate built the coffin himself.
“I’m not particularly skilled,” he said, showing me the simple box, “but I couldn’t picture myself answering why I had to buy a child-sized coffin.”
He had, however, bought a dress to put on Phoebe and a pair of small shiny shoes. I cleaned the body as much as I could, arranged her beautiful hair on her shoulders, and Nate closed the coffin.
We transported it at dusk to the back of Nate’s truck. Matteo and I piled in next to Nate, who drove us to the desert, near a small isolated house, dozens of miles from the nearest buildings.
“I thought we could bury her near my house,” explained Nate. “That way I can keep an eye on her.”
“But not in your backyard,” said Matteo. “The police could come looking…”
“It’s not worth taking any chances,” said Nate.
I let them dig the grave. Not because they’re men and I’m only a weak woman, but because they possessed supernatural strength, and I settled for having a flaming sword and invincible hair.
No one made any speeches over Phoebe’s grave. It was a rather pitiful grave: Nate placed a single stone to mark the spot, not wanting to attract the attention of the authorities.
We piled into the front of Nate’s truck again, and Nate headed back towards Vegas.
“And now?” asked Matteo. “We go on as if nothing happened?”
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I grumbled. “Do I look like Columbo? Are you mistaking me for Sherlock? I asked Lola to dig into it on the human side. What more do you want me to do?”
The rest of the ride was spent in morose silence.
Nate parked in front of the club, and I slipped away under the pretext of speaking to Gertrude before the start of her shift. The young waitress was waiting for me at the bar, her face somber.
“They found Adam,” she announced without any preamble.
It took me a few moments to understand who she was talking about.
“The young dragon? He came home?”
“He’s dead. A succubus found his body in the back of a parking lot.”
I might have been imagining the reproach in Gertrude’s voice. But maybe not. She had brought me the boy’s parents so I would help them. I had refused. The boy was dead.
“Do they know what happened to him?” I asked.
“Not exactly. He was covered in bite marks. They think a ghoul had started eating him.”
Ugh. Now that’s information I could have gone without.
Then I imagined Mother and Father Dragons’ distress and cursed my uncalled-for sensitivity. They had lost a son.
Matteo crossed the room to get to the kitchen, apparently lost in thought. He stopped on the threshold of his domain and turned towards us.
“What happened?” he asked.
Gertrude told him the news in a few words. Matteo’s eyes met mine. He seemed to be asking me if I was thinking the same thing he was. I didn’t know how to answer that question.
“Do you know if he had any marks?” he asked Gertrude.
“Other than the bite marks? No one said anything. Why?”
“No reason,” said Matteo. “Dying so young, it’s really sad.”
He disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me alone with a quiet Gertrude and my fairly loud thoughts.
Matteo had mentioned marks. Was he trying to find a link between Phoebe and Adam’s deaths? A little eight-year-old girl and a nineteen-year-old teenager, almost an adult… It wasn’t exactly what one would call a similar “profile.” Phoebe had been using her powers for nine hundred years, and Adam still hadn’t developed his. Phoebe lived alone or nearly; Adam was surrounded by the attention of his parents. Phoebe didn’t have any injuries; Adam was covered in bite marks…
But both of them were part of the supernatural community, and both were dead within a few days of each other.
“Gertrude?” I called.
“Hmm?”
The waitress was busy lining up chairs at the other end of the room.
“Are there usually a lot of suspicious deaths in the community?”
“Not really. There are accidents, scores being settled. In that case, the murderer has a tendency to properly claim his crime, as a way to bolster his image. Sometimes a ghoul attacks someone, but it’s rare; they’re not very brave. It happens that a human decides to attack
one of us—generally they go after vampires or metamorphs, sometimes zombies. That type of heinous crime is in no way mysterious.”
“Do you think it could be what happened to Adam?”
“That some human killed him out of pure racism? I don’t think so. He hadn’t yet reached the age when his powers would manifest themselves for dragons. He was just like any other human teenager, just more resilient. He went to school with humans…” She shrugged. “There’s been talk of a girl who’s been doing a lot of damage. Molly or Mo…”
“Mona?”
“That’s it. You’ve heard of her?”
“Once or twice, yes. You think she could’ve killed Adam?”
“They say she was working without a permit and that Customs had detained her. But I think she only went after predators. Those that kill humans—with or without a permit. Adam had never killed anyone. Dragons don’t feed like that.”
I attempted to make sense of all the information that Gertrude was bombarding me with, and my brain fixated on the weirdest one. “Customs gives permits to kill?”
“Of course, for the creatures who need to eat. And for a few bounty hunters who are allowed to take out supernaturals who don’t follow the rules. But I fail to see whose feathers poor Adam could’ve ruffled.” She let out a sigh that blew up the dust in the room and went back to work. The first customers arrived soon after, and we no longer had the chance to talk.
That night, I mixed up a half a dozen orders, messed up three cocktails, yelled at Gertrude for no reason, and forgot to bill at least two tables. Something was nagging at me in the back of my head. Words someone had said, an image or an idea. Around three o’clock in the morning, I decided that I needed a break. I left the back of the bar, found Gertrude to apologize to her, and went to hide out in the kitchen.
Matteo’s domain looked like it had been hit by a particularly organized tornado. The vampire moved from counter to counter so fast that I barely made out his silhouette. Vegetables were cut as dishes were simmering. The aroma of herbs, spices, and cocoa that filled the air was a match to any existential crisis.
“Something wrong, boss?”
I jumped when Matteo appeared at my side. “I was wondering if you had five minutes to talk,” I said.
“About?”
“I’m not sure. The other night, those people came to see me for my help. Supernaturals have been disappearing, and apparently no one gives a shit. Adam’s parents were among them. They asked me to find their son, and I refused…”
“And now you feel guilty because he’s dead?”
“I guess. But that’s not everything. I think the very idea of the disappearance is what’s bothering me.”
He put down the knife he was holding and perched himself on a counter. I leaned back against a fridge. “When I left Callum,” I said, “I disappeared. I didn’t just hide from him but also from my family, my old friends…everyone. I was scared that he would use the people I loved to get to me, that he would hurt them to find me. And now…and now my family is dead, and they won’t ever know what happened to me.”
“So why not help the families who asked you?”
“Because I’m not a cop.”
Matteo pouted. “That’s not the real reason. I’m sure there’s something else.”
“What else do you want there to be?”
“I don’t need to use my powers to sense that something else is going on.”
I wanted to make a joke to deflect the question. Instead, what came out of my mouth was, “If Callum finds me, I won’t survive.”
After a second of shocked silence, I stammered a correction, but he interrupted me, “You didn’t want to find them to not put them in danger?”
“No, no! That would be stupid. They’re not in the same situation as me.”
“But it was your first instinct,” insisted Matteo, “to not get involved because you know sometimes people have a good reason to disappear. Afterwards, you rationalized it by saying you weren’t qualified for the job, even though Barbie is living proof of your abilities.”
“I didn’t find Barbie,” I said. “Britannicus did.”
“But you’re the one who rushed into the Valkyrie’s lair to free Barbie.”
“Who, in the end, liberated herself. You can twist the facts any way you want; the truth is that I’m not some superheroine. I asked for help, and more skilled people than me did the work. You’re in a good position to know that. You were there.”
Matteo had been the one who had knocked out the Valkyrie with a strike of a magical hammer. I had simply delivered the final blow.
The vampire shook his mane of brown curls. “You asked for help, and we helped you. Now the families of the missing are asking you for help. What are you going to do?”
I glared at him, let out a sigh of frustration, and left the kitchen without another word.
At the bar, I pulled Gertrude aside. “Could you contact Patricia’s sister and Kitty’s friends? Tell them I want to help them, if they still want me to.”
12
Less than an hour later, after speaking with Gertrude, I had in front of me a succubus with the face of an angel and a biker covered in tattoos on every visible part of his body. I led them to the back room of the club.
“Is it the death of the dragon that changed your mind?” asked the succubus as way of introduction.
The girl looked to be about fifteen years old, but her hard eyes had nothing angelic about them. She resented me for not having acted sooner; I didn’t need Matteo’s powers to figure that out.
“I’m going to need official names, addresses, phone numbers, license plate numbers, and pictures of the missing,” I said in the most neutral tone I could manage. “If you have a time frame and an area where they disappeared from, that would be very helpful. Did they say anything unusual to you before you lost contact with them? Someone who might have been following or threatening them?”
“We went out with Kitty on the night of Friday going into Saturday,” said the biker. “We went running on the side of Charleston Peak, and a bit before dawn we got back on our bikes to head home. We all stopped for a bite in a diner north of Vegas off Route 95. Kitty left before us; he had to take a shower before going to work. When we left, we saw signs of an accident a few streets over, but we didn’t pay much attention to it. People who run into each other, it happens, and there were only skid marks and broken glass…”
“But…?” I asked.
“That night a friend called us. He had found Kitty’s bike on the side of the road, in the desert. He wanted to know if we needed a tow. We went to see. No tire marks, no broken glass. The bike had taken a hit, but…it didn’t happen there.”
“You think the accident happened that morning near the diner?” I asked.
He nodded.
“And no one saw anything?” I asked.
“It was early. All the stores were still closed. And the little old ladies don’t talk to people like us. They think we want their money and take off running—or start hitting us.”
“I could talk to them,” interjected the succubus.
The biker looked at her suspiciously. She flashed him a brilliant smile and offered him her hand. “My name is Julie. I have no interest in your life force. I only think we could help each other out.”
The biker loosely shook her hand, mumbling, “Walter. Help each other how?”
“Patricia disappeared one night on the Strip.”
“Do you know what she was doing there?” I asked.
“Casino + alcohol = ruined suckers who are drunk and in need of attention,” said Julie with a calculated coldness. “It’s not the best life force to sink your teeth into, but the hunt is easy and the result is guaranteed. Only Monday morning, she didn’t come back, and no one has seen her since.”
Walter frowned. “Aren’t succubi usually pretty sturdy?”
“You could say that,” said Julie with a proud smile.
“So what could have happened to
you sister?” I asked.
“That’s what worries me. A human couldn’t have hurt her.”
“A supernatural?” I asked.
Walter pouted. “We, the pumas, we do pretty well in close combat. But even several of us would think twice about it before taking on an adult succubus.”
“Do you think maybe—” I started.
“She wouldn’t have left on her own!” Julie cut me off. “Not without letting me know. Something happened to her, something bad… And no one knows anything.”
“I’ll see what I can do from my end,” I said. “Try to find me one of Patricia’s and Kitty’s personal effects. A toothbrush, a comb, that sort of thing.”
“I don’t have the means to pay for a location spell,” said Julie.
“I’ll try to get a discount,” I said. “No promises.”
They left together, deciding to interrogate some drunk tourist on the Strip before the end of the night. I stayed sitting in front of the notes I had just taken. Patricia the succubus called herself Smith and lived in Paradise. Julie had left me a picture, printed off a call-girl website.
Kitty’s real name was Georges Davis the Third. He was from Canada, with his parents leading the Vancouver pack. He rented an apartment in the west of Vegas and worked at a small local tech company. A young man with no apparent problem, who came to Vegas to get out of his family’s shadow. His picture showed him in the middle of his biker friends, slimmer, blonder, and younger than the rest of the gang.
“No girlfriend,” I mumbled, re-reading my notes, “no debts, no known enemies…”
“And those wolves who just came to town?”
I jumped in my booth. While I had been lost in my thoughts, someone had approached me without a sound. I recognized the regular customer from the back room, the girl with the dusty books.
“My name is Lizzie,” she announced, stretching her hand out to me.
I took it reflexively. Lizzie obviously took that as an invitation and sat down in front of me on the chair that Walter had vacated.
“I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation,” said Lizzie. “People are going missing. Do you think it could be connected to the arrival of those new metamorphs? Is it true that poor Adam was found covered in bite marks? Do you think wolves could’ve done it?”