Val rolled his eyes. “Who, Sleepy? He’s a Southern boy, he and I can hash it out.”
Newquist rubbed his temples in frustration. “Valentine, so help me God, if you harass the Attorney General I will have you thrown in jail. No, damn it, not him. Hell, if anything, you know him better than I do.” He lifted his left arm and tapped fingers on the inside of his forearm, then looked significantly at Val’s own arm.
The long-healed scar on his arm tickled, just a bit, and for a moment he almost convinced himself that the feeling was coincidental. He winced, remembering an overwhelming flash of light and the sickly-sweet stench of his own burnt flesh. “You’re joking.”
“Look at my face and think about those words.”
Valentine stared at the deputy director, searching for any hint of dishonesty. He saw exhaustion in Newquist’s eyes, but nothing else. The man was telling him the truth. “Why didn’t he call me?”
“You of all people should know how little he seems to enjoy small talk. He usually talks to me long enough to create problems, then he’s gone.”
Val tried to hold back a laugh. “Yeah, that’s about right.” He thought for a moment. “I talked to the kid in the hospital, last week.” Valentine waited for the explosion, but none was forthcoming. “So obviously talking to him doesn’t violate your orders.”
“It would seem not,” Newquist agreed.
“Along those same lines, keeping an eye on Paxton should be fine.”
George cleared his throat. “I hate to interject, but I’m feeling a little bit lost here. Whose orders are we talking about?”
Eliot chuckled. “Remember Heidelberg?”
George frowned and rapped knuckles on the armrest of his wheelchair. “Do you really think I forgot?”
The other agent winced. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
“If he shows up or sticks his nose in something, you can bet that the situation is a bit worse than the norm,” Val added. “So obviously, higher powers than the US government have a vested interest in one Paxton Locke.” He turned to Director Newquist. “I have a proposal, sir.”
His boss raised an eyebrow at the sudden respectful tone but waved for Valentine to proceed.
“Full court press to track the kid down. Once we know his current whereabouts, we shadow him. Look, don’t touch. He won’t even know we’re there. But if his mom or any other nasty characters show up, he’ll have some ready-made backup.” He found himself rubbing at the scar on his forearm without thinking about it, then added, “And if he shows up, I can give him a piece of my mind.”
Newquist drummed his fingers on the table for a moment. “You’re basically talking about using Paxton as bait in hopes that his mother shows up.”
Valentine shrugged. “I’m working within the confines of what you’ve given me. And since he’s not trying to hide from us, he’ll probably be a hell of a lot easier to find. If you’d rather we black-bag him for interrogation, I’m down for that, too.”
“No. You’re right. Approved. Agent Laffer, can you take the lead on tracking Locke down?”
“I can do that, sir. We know where he was last week, do we have any other data points?”
“He was in Missouri as of Monday. Anything more than that, I can’t say.”
“It’s a start,” Morgan said. “I’m on it.”
Newquist favored Val with a crooked smile. “Cheer up, Agent Valentine. If the mother shows up, you might get your wish on that bullet to the head.”
“Looking forward to it, sir.”
Paxton
Phoenix, Arizona—Thursday morning
Kent drove south, further into the heart of the city. The strip malls and sparkling car dealerships faded into worn-looking stucco houses. Block walls or sagging chain-link fences surrounded most of them. dying weeds or stone and rock filled the few visible yards. I supposed that raking gravel was an easier chore than tending to a grass lawn, especially when the temperatures soared above triple digits.
That wasn’t a concern, today. The skies were clear and the temperature gauge in the dashboard of Kent’s truck signaled a perfect seventy-two degrees. It was easy to see why he’d wanted to relocate. Wisconsin winters suck in comparison. If staying in one place for too long didn’t make me feel antsy, I could definitely sign up for winters like this.
“This one is a little less picturesque,” he said as he pulled the Suburban into a convenience store parking lot. “This is the closest place.”
Kent led me and Cassie to the sidewalk. The edge of the gas station property transitioned to unpaved dirt, most of it fenced off from the rest of the road. An opening in the fence provided access, and as we stepped through I got a better look at what lay beyond.
The lane of unpaved dirt was, in truth, one bank of a massive trench running perpendicular to the street. A sluggish stream ran along the bottom of the trench, and I tried to imagine how much water it would take to fill it.
“There are canals all over the valley,” Kent explained. “Can’t get green in the desert without water. Some of them handle outflow from the Salt River. Others, like this one, are flood canals. It doesn’t rain here, much, but when it does, look out. Some of the flooding is nuts.” He pointed further down the lane. “Body was there.”
Most of the properties backing up to the canal shared a common block wall, blocking direct access to the banks. Short of coming in from the street, this was very much an isolated route.
It also cut off the possibility of prying eyes, which made it a much more cunning place to dump a body than in a public park. Had the killer realized their mistake, and changed up locations?
Cassie turned a slow circle, studying the canal. The fence continued across the bridge overpass—heaven forbid a forlorn soul take a suicidal swan dive. The brown murk of the water hardly looked appealing. “What about cameras? Don’t gas stations usually have surveillance in their parking lot?”
Kent tapped a finger on his temple in salute. “Sharp, kid. They do, yes. Unfortunately, we can’t tell when the killer dumped the body. We’ve got a window based on witness statements, but that gives us hundreds of potential vehicles. Since the camera focuses primarily on the parking lot, we’re only getting one southbound lane. Who knows if they pulled over from the left lane, or even came from the opposite direction. We’ve got people running down plates, but it’s pro forma, mostly. No black vans.”
I took a few steps along the bank, further away from the street. “Another homeless person?”
“Yeah. Good looking guy, cleaned up. Whoever is doing this is one sadistic bastard. Getting these people clean, then—” He sighed. “No offense, kid, but I thought what happened to your dad was bad.”
“None taken,” I said. I knelt down and traced my fingers through the dirt. It was light—airy, almost. More like a heavy dust than dirt. The impressions of dozens if not hundreds of tennis shoes covered the bank. Narrow lines here and there boasted the presence of bicycles. It made sense. A fenced-in lane, secure from the hustle and bustle of traffic. A natural place for runners and cyclists to gravitate to. Relatively safe save for the streets they’d have to cross every so often. Given the small sample size of Phoenix drivers I’d seen in the last few days, relative in that sense was an understatement. Speed limits were just a suggestion, and aggression seemed the way to go.
Both of which told me something, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what. “What’s your window? Late to early, right?”
“Sometime after midnight and before dawn, yeah. A jogger found the body about six.”
“Come,” I said. As before, nothing happened, and unlike the park, the canal was truly deserted. The runners and cyclists had moved on, bound for work or whatever else they occupied their day with.
Two crime scenes in a row stretched coincidence a bit far for my taste. Cassie moved to my side and waited a moment before murmuring, “Nothing?”
“Zilch,” I said with a shake of my head.
“What happens if they die in th
eir sleep? Or are drunk or high? Do they have to be conscious to get a ghost?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” Pretty much every ghost I’d ever dealt with had gone out the hard way but I wasn’t ready to say that was the end-all of the condition. Most of what I now accepted as the truth came more as a result of hard-earned experience than so-called scholarly learning. In the beginning, I’d scoured through dozens of books in search for snippets. I’d quickly learned that the signal to noise ratio in my adopted calling rested on a knife’s edge. Given Mother’s background and what she’d accomplished, she’d figured out how to filter the nuggets of gold out of the morass, but I wasn’t exactly in a position to pick her brain even if I could trust her answers.
I brushed the dirt from my fingers. Before I could speak, Kent cursed under his breath. Cassie and I turned to find him peering at the screen of his phone. He looked up at us.
“Something’s up. Captain’s called a task force meeting in an hour. We’re going to have to cut this short.”
I considered for a moment, then said, “You’ve got a list of addresses, right?”
He gave me a squint-eyed look, and I could tell he didn’t like where he thought I was going. “Yes.”
“Drop us off at the airport. We’ll rent a car and keep searching.” I patted my back pocket. My stack of mail at Kent’s house had yielded about sixteen pounds of fireplace tinder and my replacement license and cards. For official purposes, Paxton Locke existed once again.
Kent made a face. “Some of these scenes aren’t in the greatest of neighborhoods, Pax. And unless you’ve spent a lot more time practicing than I know about, you can’t hit the broad side of a barn with a pistol.” Arizona, last bastion of the Wild West, allowed non-permitted open carry of handguns. I wasn’t sure about the law regarding shotguns, but I assumed it was frowned upon.
“I don’t own a pistol,” I pointed out, then wished that I’d had the good sense to keep my mouth shut. “C’mon. We’ll be fine. Anybody gives us grief, I’ll push them to do a song-and-dance number. West Side Story.”
He gave me another look. Kent knew my self-imposed rules about pushing people around. His eyes flicked over to Cassie. “Miss Hatcher, I expect you to keep him out of trouble.”
Suppressing a grin, Cassie gave him a mock salute. “Of course.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re obviously unfamiliar with the rules regarding wizards, and not meddling in their affairs.”
Cassie grabbed my hand. “Let’s go rent a car, Gandalf.”
They
Phoenix, Arizona—Thursday morning
He’d had a name once, but that was unimportant, now. He was a part of something greater. Sense of self had transitioned to something more. I became They, and that was good.
Not being among the fastest or strongest of They, he was still of use. His eyes were sharper than most, and They had put him to watch. Most of those who were not They appeared to him as mere abstract, people who did not belong who avoided him as though those were not They sensed some subtle difference.
Some of those who did not belong were of concern to They, though, and appeared in sharp relief to his eyes. The bald, pot-bellied man who stepped out of the truck and walked in front of him was one such, and the thrill of pleasure that ran through him as They realized what he’d seen was so intense that he found himself squinting at the sheer joy of it.
At once, that pleasure ceased, and the shock that coursed through They rocked him backward on his heels. There was another with the one to be watched, and as he looked at him the other jumped into sharp focus. He was young where the other was old, slender where the other was beefy, and the closely-cropped hair on his head was an incongruous bone-white.
They did not speak in words, as such, but at once, all knew that this one to be watched was more than that. He was a threat. And although the watcher was a poor combatant at best, he found himself squeezing his hands in a desire to defend the collective.
At once the urge eased. They needed to be careful. They needed to watch and wait. An opportunity would come, and the threat would be dealt with.
CHAPTER 13
Helen
Burlingame, California—Thursday morning
If there was a positive to splitting up across two vehicles, it was that it made it easier to screen away prying eyes.
A few hours before dawn, they’d pulled off the southbound Interstate and caught a few hours of fitful sleep. It was a risk, but Helen judged it an acceptable one. The familiars were intelligent enough to keep an eye out and didn’t require sleep. If the police cruised the rest area and ran plates, neither of the two vehicles the coven had acquired would show as stolen.
Giselle and Roxanne had pushed to kill the vehicle donors, but Helen had pointed out that it was more likely than not that police would discover the abandoned van, and if there were dead bodies in the same area, it would be a short jump of logic to conclude that they’d stolen the victims’ vehicles as replacements.
In the end, Helen demonstrated a more graceful solution. She’d pushed the shopping woman and the businessman who’d come after to forget their car theft encounters, then convinced each of them that they were madly infatuated with one another. Based on the way the two had been slobbering all over each other when she’d departed, she imagined they were still holed up in a hotel room. When the compulsion wore off and they realized their vehicles were missing, Helen and her followers would have long-abandoned them. Division M might be able to make the connection between the impromptu affair and her appearance in San Francisco, but it was a bigger jump than it might have been had they left dead bodies behind.
Screened between the SUV and the businessman’s sedan, she considered the rest of the parking lot for a moment. Maybe we need an RV. It would be ironic, given the vehicle her son had parked at their home, but she could see the appeal of it. It would be more comfortable than the van had been for sure.
Satisfied that the area was devoid of prying eyes for the moment, Helen knelt back down. She’d placed a map of the United States in the center of the parking spot between their two vehicles, weighing the corners down with rocks. Murmuring words under her breath, she called up the spell she’d recovered from Walter’s shop. At the culmination of the casting, she pressed the tip of a pocketknife to the pad of her index finger. Squeezing, she drew forth a pearl of blood, then held her finger a few feet over the map.
The girls watched with rapt attention to either side. Al through Frank, arranged in trios, stood at the front and rear of the space between the vehicles, doing their best to slouch comfortably while keeping an eye out for dog walkers or other possible witnesses.
She felt a slight pulling sensation on her finger, and the drop of blood came away. Rather than falling, it hovered over the center of the map for a few moments, before taking a curve down and to the left. The blood plopped down into the center of Arizona.
“Phoenix,” she announced, thoughtfully. “Close enough, at least. Let’s pack up and get a move on.”
Giselle crossed her arms and tilted her head. “Can’t you use a smaller map, narrow it down a little bit?”
Helen resisted the urge to smile. Her logic might have swayed Roxanne back in San Francisco, but the other girl was still bucking her leadership. To be expected. The type of person attracted to the mystical arts was also the sort of person that didn’t generally play well with others. The fact that the three got along amongst themselves as well as they did was more due to the fact of their prior relationship. As time went by, concurrent desires for power would create fractures, without a firm hand of leadership.
Time to exercise the hand. “You’re more than welcome to try and learn the spell for yourself, dear. But I won’t be donating any of my blood to the cause.”
The younger girl leaned back a bit as though surprised by the offer. “Why wouldn’t my blood work?”
Helen crossed her arms and adopted a professorial tone. “The spell requires something that’s linked in some way to the
subject. A picture would do, or a piece of the material, if you were searching for a non-living object. Unlike me, you aren’t related to Paxton. If we were looking for a member of your family, it would work.” She smiled. “Then there are the caveats. The accuracy falls off as a function of distance. If we were closer , I would have gotten a reading within a few miles . Then there’s the fact that the spell can only be directed toward a given subject once every six hours.”
“Why?” Kelsey’s face held a look of honest curiosity. “Does it take too much chi?”
“It would if I’d used my own,” Helen agreed. “In some sense, magic runs contrary to the natural order. Nearly half of the text on the spell description provides a list of qualifiers and gotchas. The six-hour limit is the main one. But no matter. In six hours, we’ll be that much closer, and we can reorient, and carry on. At this rate, we’ll have the grimoire in a day or two.”
Roxanne kept her face still, but Helen had seen the look of raw hunger in her eyes more than once. The girl’s desire to transform her own body was the carrot Helen could use to keep her in line.
“I still want the spell,” Giselle said. Helen’s eyes flicked to her face.
And what carrot can I use for you, my dear? She could always push the problem child, but that would turn the girl into the literal equivalent of a remote-controlled car. She didn’t want a robot—she wanted thinking, reasoning allies. If they had to go up against Division M agents that weren’t as incompetent as the ones in San Francisco had been, they were in for trouble.
“Of course,” Helen said. “I don’t recommend trying it until you master siphoning, though. The power requirements are impressive.” Giselle nodded, mollified. Helen continued. “Now, if there’s nothing else—let’s hit the road and grab some breakfast. We’ve got miles to go, ladies.”
Paxton
Phoenix, Arizona—Thursday afternoon
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