A crisis doesn’t wait for a good time; that is, in part, why it is called a crisis. It comes at the inopportune moment, striking at 9 o’clock on a Tuesday evening when the dishes aren’t done, and the remains of the meal are still on the table. It takes over your awareness, driving you to deeper depths within yourself to find the strength to battle on and survive.
Sometimes a life is depending on that strength.
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My cell phone rang an hour after Xelander left, and I knew without looking that it was Suzu. “Yeah, what?” No, that wasn’t my usual way of answering her calls, but given the fact that she’d probably talked to Xelander, I was expecting to be on the wrong side of her temper. I’d also had entirely too much alcohol to care, but that was beside the point, and par for the course.
“I think I’m more surprised that you’re sober enough to answer the phone,” Her voice was soft, a gentle flow of words that didn’t carry any surprise at all. I was sober enough to register the mild annoyance and would only get more sober as the call went. My magic had been busily going around behind me and undoing the alcohol. “What were you trying to do, Teimhean?” She never called me by my Irish name unless it was important, and I felt my magic flare under the constraints I had tried to put around it, pushing free and clearing my head. Damn it.
“Well, before you called, I was busy getting myself as drunk as I possibly could before my magic caught up with my intake. But now I’m completely and miserably sober. Again. Since you used my real name, I take it that this isn’t a pleasure call and that you have something more than marginally important on your mind.”
I didn’t need to be in the same room to see her expression. Her sigh told me everything I needed to know, and I could visualize her seated on that overstuffed chair of hers, the receiver of her telephone hidden by lengths of softly curled white hair. The tiny little creaks told me that she was threading her fingers through the coiled cord, twisting it this way and that while she considered the impact of her words. “I think it would be best if you didn’t come by the Bell Tree for a while. Give things time… to settle.”
“Yeah. I’ll be out of touch for a while, so don’t try looking for me. I’ll send word when I can.” I wasn’t planning to go anywhere; at least, I didn’t think I was. But she wanted me to stay clear, so stay clear I would. “No, don’t say it; it’s not an assignment; I’m just going to go dark for a while. And do me a favor: Tell Xelander to stay out of my life.”
“Sweetheart…” Her voice was softer now, a gentling to her tone, and I closed my eyes, seeing her in my mind, leaning into the phone from her perch on the edge of the bed, her teal eyes worried under lightly knitted brows. Yes, I loved her, and I needed to clear my head before things got worse. “I won’t tell you not to go; you’ve never listened to me before. Just,” there was that pause, that heavy moment like those others where something went forever unsaid. “Be careful.” And then, like all the other times, it was gone.
“Always, dear one.” And then I ended the call before I could say anything else that would get me in trouble.
Almost immediately, the damned thing rang again with a number I didn’t recognize. It was nearly nine at night, so it probably wasn’t a telemarketer. I hit the button and answered in my more standard fashion. “Shestin, go.”
“Shestin, I’ve got a killer on the loose, and I think you know something about him.”
My world fell out from under me. My lungs felt tight, and my hands instantly turned cold and damp. I scrambled in my memory, desperately trying to think of anything I might have left behind, anything that may have given John Kelly enough trace to point to me. And then the rational part of my brain kicked over and reminded the panicked lizard-brain that it wasn’t me he was after. If it had been, he’d have kicked down the door with glee.
“I’m not on any active cases at the moment,” I was overwhelmingly grateful that he hadn’t been within thought-reach to sense my panic. “And I’m usually only on London based white collar crimes. You know; embezzlement cases where the suspects have slipped into the US with the assets.” Not even that, honestly. After as many years as I had put in, I was considered an agent at call, and more freelance than anything. They only called me when they were up against other magekind.
“I need your help, Shestin. Anything you might know could break this.”
There was something he wasn’t telling me, and I considered my options. I could hear him out, offer what I could, and be done with it. I didn’t need to do anything more. I didn’t want to go haring around Downtown Charleston while having to keep a tight rein on my thoughts, but before I could speak; his voice came quietly over the line, changing everything.
“The bastard grabbed my baby sister from the College of Charleston campus, Shestin. Anything you can tell me… anything might help.”
Well, hell. Guess I’m altruistic after all. “I’m on my way.”
On my way to Lockwood Station, I called London. They didn’t have any useful information, but the agent who had answered promised to keep his ear on things. I thanked him and slung the Pontiac into the parking lot, earning several disapproving glares from some officers. I didn’t care; they could cite me if they wanted. Technically, I was on official business. And, I have to admit, it’s really rather fun.
Kelly looked like a wreck. His desk was covered with files, there were three half-empty coffee mugs holding things in place, and he was on the phone, his free hand raking through his brown hair in frustration as he spoke. Whoever was on the line wasn’t any help, I could tell that by just his body language.
While he continued his heated conversation, I moved one of the mugs of cold half-drunk coffee and turned the file around so I could read it. It was a missing persons case from a few months ago, and I vaguely recalled hearing about it. She was a lawyer’s daughter out jogging down in the Battery area with her dog. Said dog was found several hours later wandering in White Point Gardens, and the daughter was gone.
I ignored the outburst of profanity from Kelly and moved another file around, this one on a housewife who had gone missing last month. Her car had been found in the parking lot of a grocery store on Meeting, and as with the other, there was little to no trace.
The third case was much the same, as with the fourth. I’d appropriated a pen and a notepad from a nearby desk and was making notes when Kelly finally hung up his phone and looked to me. “Well?” Nothing puts a man under pressure like having a family member missing.
“First off, why are you still on this case? Do the words ‘conflict of interest’ not mean anything to you? Second, how is it that this guy has managed to grab six women, and no-one has laid eyes on him? Third, and what I really want to know, is when did you last sleep?” I didn’t look up from the notes I was making, and I was starting to see several key patterns emerging. I circled three things in my notes and drew a series of lines over to another comment for emphasis.
“I’m not. Officially. But I can’t just go home and wait, Shestin. There’s something about this that doesn’t add up, and I can’t rest until I figure it out and she’s home.”
“Mm… there’s a lot that does add out,” I countered, glancing up from my notes. “Your targets are all white females with brunette hair and light eyes, ranging from late twenties to late thirties.” I spun the notepad as I dropped it, allowing it to land in front of him so he could read my notes. “Your target is male, and I’m willing to bet heavily that he’s magekind. Possibly demon, maybe vampire, and if he’s human, he’s likely to be good with illusion and air.” Kelly was staring at me. “At any rate, that’s my perspective. I could go home now, unless you want to try believing me.”
“Anything I do has to be off the case.” I didn’t need to be a thoughtmage to know he was unhappy with that.
I nodded and picked up the notepad. “Give me a minute.” Kelly’s supervisor and I had done some work together, and I went to talk to him. It didn’t take long, or much convincing. I was on… and Kelly could drive me where I needed to go. It came close enough to the line of Protocol, without stepping on it. Of course, it was on my head if Kelly did anything stupid, and I’d have to be on my toes to make sure he didn’t.
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He looked incredibly relieved when I told him, and we headed out to the College of Charleston to see where she’d been when she vanished. I didn’t expect to find anything, but there seemed to be a frenetic energy in Kelly that I imagined wouldn’t calm until he’d shown me the exact location.
Ten o’clock is a quiet time to meet on a sleepy Southern college campus, but there we were, standing in the grass in front of Randolph Hall next to a pink brick walkway, using handheld lights to illuminate the famous front façade. Kelly was telling me how his sister had been helping in the Admissions office, and that the last person to see her had been her Adjunct Professor.
I was only half listening to him as I scanned the area, looking for anything that might have hinted at the events that had transpired. There wasn’t so much as a whisper of a Gate, and I saw no indications that there were any pixies or fairies or anything out of the normal realm of a boringly old building. And then I looked up.
She was standing near the apex of the roof, the hem of her skirt dusting the shingles near the clock face, a pale figure frozen in place. In another location entirely, she might have passed as a marble statue, but I knew better. Her eyes met mine, and she startled, then fled around the cupola.
I didn’t even think, taking to the air and landing on the roof of the old building to give chase, ignoring the shouts from Kelly below me.
Long pale hair flew behind her, and I’ll admit, she was fast. She turned, running towards St. Phillip Street, and I picked up my pace, flinging out my hand and magic, trying to slow her down. My magic caught her on the edge of the building, preventing her from jumping to the ground and losing herself in the street below. She screamed and spun, trying to get free, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep her long.
My rebellious air magic deserted her just as she spun out towards me, and suddenly she was flying my way, arms outstretched, mouth open and bloody hell, she was a vampire. “I’m fire! I’m fire! For the love of Christ, don’t bite!” I flung my arms around her, hugging her tightly to me, praying she’d listen. Even if she was the one responsible for the missing women, I didn’t want her to suffer the way I knew a vampire would. “Tine, ar ghrá dé, tine!!” The Irish escaped me in my panic to prevent the potential destruction of both of us.
The world went very still, my air magic sweeping back into play, catching both of us up and preventing any movement. Pressure built, and I fought it back, pushing it away and taking a deep breath when the air reluctantly settled back within me and calmed. “Right, then. Thanks for not biting; that would have been a lousy way to end the night. Now I know a vampire or two, but not you, so how about telling me your name?”
She drew away from me, a thin creature almost ghostly pale. Bright blue eyes were wild and her almost colorless hair flipped about her like an ethereal cape. Everything about her spoke of a creature terrified, as if she were a frightened rabbit caught in the playground of a tiger. I was certain she wasn’t our target, but she might know something if this was her territory. I could hear Kelly below, cussing and shouting and I knew it wouldn’t be long before he got the idea to call my cellphone, so I lifted both hands and tried again. “Come on; I don’t mean you any harm.”
She wavered, and then my cellphone rang. She leapt off the building like a deer and I let off a litany of curses as I answered the phone. “Kelly, gods-damn it, I had someone up here and you just managed to scare her away. Now I’m going to have to be out here all night in the hopes that I can catch up with her again and see if she knows anything. Go home. Sleep. I’ll call you when I know something.” And then I hung up. I set the ringer to silent before he had a chance to call back, and ignoring his angry shouts from below, I went on a wander of the roof of Randolph Hall.
My phone rang less than two minutes after I’d hung up, and I answered without looking at it, knowing full well it was Kelly. “Kelly, go home. I said I’d call you.”
“Father says you are to come right away.”
My brain caught itself up, tripped over the words and landed flat on the word ‘father’ with that sickening squelch that shoves the bottom of your stomach into your shoes. “Fath-huh?” I scrambled around in my head, placing the whispered child-voice, realizing that it wasn’t John Kelly. “Vanessa. Right. Where are you?”
“At home.” As if somehow, I was supposed to know this. “Are you really a cop?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose for a moment, sighing, and wondering what I had done to give the Fates cause to spend my life in mockery, and then started looking for my keys. “I’ll bring my badge.”
“Okay.” And then she hung up.
I pocketed the phone, spun away from the cupola and headed for the rental; glad I hadn’t taken Kelly up on his offer of a ride to the college campus. I didn’t want to leave, but it wasn’t as if I had much choice.
When I pulled into the circular drive of the ostentatious house, the sheer depth of darkness around the building was overwhelming. And I don’t just mean magical auras, either. The security lights were out, and the house seemed empty. Almost everything about it screamed ‘trap’ at me, but if by any chance Vanessa was in there, I was duty-bound to go in and spring things.
Just another day, right?
Right.
I parked the rental car in the driveway and wasted a few minutes trying to decide if I wanted to leave the headlights on or not. Ultimately, I turned them off and headed towards the front door, wondering if it was a trap, the aftermath of an attack, or just an ordinarily stupid power outage.
Well, it probably wasn’t the latter; the front door was ajar.
I released the hold on my fire magic, allowing the power to thrill through me as I slipped into the house and looked around. It was dark, but between my memory and the small sphere of fire I held out like a light, I could see well enough to move around without running into furniture.
I cleared the kitchen, dining room, and living room first, only doing a cursory check to pantry and hall closet. Empty. Where was Ravenswing, and that Hellhound of hers? I rounded the stairs and came out in the hallway that led to her room. They, too, were empty, and that was determined after checking the closet, under the bed, and the bathroom.
The other side of the hallway was Ravenswing’s room. The thought of poking about in his room gave me a case of the screaming habdabs, but I sucked it up and stormed the castle, as it were. Empty.
Where the hell was she?
I looked in the closet, under his bed, and poked about in his bathroom, resisting the urge to look in the cabinet under the sink. She wouldn’t have fit in there anyway.
I checked the other rooms in the upper floor, an office, a playroom, seeing no signs of struggle, and absolutely no indication that there had been a break-in. It was eerily quiet and as still as death.
At a loss, I returned to the living room where we’d played Go Fish, and stood there, just listening. Nothing. I pulled out my phone to call Suzu and noticed that the number from which Vanessa had called me wasn’t named. That is, it didn’t match what was in my cell phone’s memory, so it had come across as a number.
I called it back.
I also nearly jumped out of my skin when the wailing of something erupted from behind me, a cell phone exploding into tinny rock music and shattering the silence. There was a sudden shriek of dismay and a flurry of activity from behind the curtain as I turned around and watched in amusement. Found her. I hung up the call and waited.
The curtain almost stilled.
I walked up to it, reached out and moved it aside and looked at her. “Next time, silence the ringer before you call for help, hmm?”
She glared up at me with all the fury of a scorned woman that an eight-year-old could manage. When she hit the teenage years, she was definitely going to be Trouble. “All right, Vanessa. You’re safe now. Come on out and tell me what happened. Where is everyone?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I called you.”
"So, your father didn’t tell you to call me.” I wasn’t terribly upset, mind, but it was a bit disconcerting that the child had fingered my leash so fast.
“He told me to call you if I couldn’t find him.”
Oh. Well, that would do it. “You came home, found the house empty, and called me.”
“I called you when the power went out and I couldn’t get the front door to close.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose for a moment, and then sighed. “Right. And did you call your father?”
She stared at me as if I had lost my mind. I looked back at her, and she shrugged. “He didn’t answer.”
Both Ravenswing and the Hellhound were AWOL, leaving me to handle the child from Hell. And that might not be too much of a stretch to call her that, all things considered. “Okay, then. Let’s go up to your room and pack an overnight bag. My townhouse has power and you’ll be safer there.”
She trudged up the stairs as if I had sentenced her to a beheading. There wasn’t any verbal drama, mind, it was all physical. Shoulders drooped, head down, dragging herself up hand-over-hand on the banister… she was the picture-perfect heroine in distress. Once we got to her room and I re-lit the small sphere of flame, however, she perked up and rounded on me.
"Mister Shestin?"
"Yes, Vanessa?"
"If 'God' is up there in Heaven, and 'the Devil' is down there in Hell..." she pointed in the appropriate directions as she spoke, and I could feel that cold prickly sensation of Impending Doom fall over me. "Why do they bury people in the ground if they want to go to Heaven?"
Christ, but this kid was going to be the end of me. "Well... I... That is... Um. You know, I’ve never quite grasped the concept myself. If you figure it out, let me know."
"You're not a cop. Cops are supposed to know everything."
Hang on... what the Hell does understanding burial customs have to do with being a police officer? And at any rate, it wasn't getting me any answers. "No, cops are supposed to find out everything. Little girls are supposed to give us answers."
"Forty-two."
I wanted to strangle her.
She looked at me, curiously. "That's what Carrie told Scott was the answer to everything. She's really smart."
"She reads too much," I growled. “Now pack your bag.” I leaned against the wall by the door, holding the sphere of fire aloft so that she could see her way around to pack things. When she was done, we hurried out to my car.
“So do all cops drive cars like this?”
I glanced her way as I started the rental Pontiac. “No, this is a rental.”
“What’s a rental?”
“I’ve borrowed this from a company, and I pay them to be able to drive it. Like a library, only for cars.”
“Why did you do that?” The questions were endless.
“Because someone stole my car.”
The look that she gave me was long and slow, a calculating look that didn’t belong on an eight-year old’s face. “You are so not a cop.”
Technically, she was correct, but I fished my badge folio out of the door pocket and tossed it at her, and then we headed back to my townhouse.