Chapter 6

I woke up the next morning to my cell phone playing a loud, hard rock rendition of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance. The sun hadn’t even fully come up in the sky. I pushed myself up, wiped some drool off my chin and fought the urge to hurl the very expensive piece of technology out the also very expensive window. If it wasn’t obvious, I am not a morning person.

I looked at the phone, probably closer than my optometrist would have liked, but I didn’t feel like grabbing my glasses, and read the caller ID. It was Angelica. She was still in my contact list as Angie. I sent her to voicemail and laid back down. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I just rested my eyes. About thirty minutes later my actual alarm went off and I begrudgingly got up and put my glasses on. I rummaged in the small dresser against the wall of the loft and got dressed in a pair of black leggings and an oversized hoodie over a spaghetti strap tank. As I walked down to the kitchenette, I made sure to hang on to the handrail of the metal staircase. Groggily falling down stairs like those is a mistake one doesn’t make twice. I put some bread in the toaster and went into my shrine room. The room as a whole is kind of an all-purpose storage room that is supposed to be a second bedroom, which happens to also have my shrine in it, but “shrine room” is less of a mouthful.

There was a rolling metal rack against one wall where I kept clothes that should be hung up, rather than stuffed bodily into my tiny dresser: suits; long coats; the one dress that I own, which has been collecting dust since my high school prom, to give some examples. On the opposite wall was a stack of moving boxes that I had been too lazy to unpack as well as some shelves that held various reagents and ephemera used for my rituals or potion making, and of course there was my shrine in the corner.

Next to the shrine was a small pet bed, where Virgil’s crystal skull currently rested, along with his collar, laying in the spot roughly where his neck would have been. I put the skull and collar back in the suitcase, smiling as I gave the crystal skull another little pat.

I often wondered if he could feel that. Familiars like Virgil are wholly beings of the spirit world, drawn into the material plane by the will of magicians through totems and rituals. He might not even be anything close to a dog. I wondered if he was even completely mine to command. I hadn’t exactly signed a contract with the spirit or anything. He might have been helping any number of other practitioners. That was a sad sort of thought. I didn’t like the thought of having to share my dog. I shouldn’t think like that though. Virgil wasn’t mine. Not really. He was a spirit being who could come to whoever he pleased. I gave a little smile and closed the suitcase full of crystal skulls. Whether he was mine or not, he did right by me, and he was a very good boy.

I walked over to the shrine and took hold of the map. There were two large red splotches of ink connected by a thin line of dots that led back to my apartment.

I smirked to myself and strode out of the room, folding the map up and shoving it into a nylon backpack that I carried with me while I was on the job.

As I was putting on a pair of boots with a piece of toast between my teeth I heard the sparkly ba-da-ding of Sonic the Hedgehog collecting a golden ring come from my phone. I walked lopsidedly over to the kitchen counter and picked up the phone, checking the text message. It was a message from the chief editor of the Grimoire, Sergeant Kenneth Mooney. The folks in the office just called him Sarge. Sarge was an army vet, and despite running the Southeast’s foremost arcane journal he was a totally normal human. He had just run head first into the supernatural when he came across something a little more dangerous than the Taliban when he was overseas in Afghanistan. He and his unit fought an honest-to-god genie and won. That was impressive. Real genies don’t sing, dance, or do celebrity impressions. They don't even grant wishes. They are capital-B Bad News. When he came home with a Purple Heart and a newly open mind, he started scoping out the supernatural side of the tracks, and eventually he took over the Grimoire from the previous owner. He was a good man, and a good guy to work for.

“Hey Z,” Sarge's text read. “Don't come into the office for a bit.” A second message came up as I was reading, “Coven sniffing around. Literally. You in trouble?”

Literally sniffing around? That meant a Black Dog. I had a pretty good guess which one.

“Not yet.” I replied with a little winky face emoticon. “Working that death Reagan told me about. Definitely got something. Tell you more later.”

Sarge responded with a thumbs-up emoji.

My brows furrowed as I slid on my other boot and swallowed the last of my toast. Angelica was at my office, but why? Maybe to look for extra information that I might have gathered before she got here? After all, she didn’t know that I had only learned about Vanessa’s murder a couple of hours before we’d met last night.

Maybe she was trying to make sure you didn’t have anything on her. A dark part of my brain told me. I dismissed that line of thinking immediately. Angelica wouldn’t murder a young girl in cold blood. There was no way.

Then how do you explain that she just so happened to show up the day after Vanessa was murdered, with full knowledge that Jenny was taking care of the body?

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

There was certainly a reasonable explanation. Right?

What about the massive paw prints that were at Jenny’s door, and the human footprints on her floors?

There are thousands of shifters in the southeast alone, and the size of their beast form doesn’t always conform to the laws of nature.

I violently shook my head and told that suspicious part of my brain to shut the hell up, but I couldn’t help feeling that those points were incredibly valid. That was an awful lot of coincidence.

No. No. No. I wasn’t going to let myself believe that Angelica could do something like that. Not to an Innocent like Vanessa. My feelings towards her aside, she wouldn’t have compromised her morals like that.

Unless the Grand Coven told her it was necessary.

I rolled into the small parking lot outside Three Trees Park a little after eight in the morning, when most of the park's usual population would be at work or school. Thunder clouds loomed menacingly overhead. It looked like it was going to be a pretty rainy weekend. I cut the engine and got out. The previous night's storm had left the air muggy and thick. And despite the cloud cover it was still sweltering. I was beginning to regret wearing the hoodie.

Three Trees Park is a large expanse of open field surrounded by densely packed pine trees that gradually steepen into a hillock upon which rests the three pine trees that are the town’s namesake. They were arranged in a triangle, and at their center there sat a life-size stone statue of a beautiful woman kneeling on a stone plinth, whom the townsfolk have dubbed The Marble Lady. Nobody knew who she was or when the statue had been placed there. The original artist had left no name or mark or any indication that he'd even existed, and the statue and the trees had been there before the town had been founded during the time of the Civil War. It was quite the mysterious piece, and as such it had drawn many myths and legends as to who she was. Some say she was the artist's wife, who he immortalized in stone before killing her and then himself. Others claimed that the statue was a self portrait, left unmarked by the artist because her work wouldn't have been accepted by the patriarchal society of the 1800's. I'd even heard that she was the victim of a Medusa-like creature that turned her to stone. I could personally debunk that one, gorgons are only found in the Mediterranean, and they’re nearly extinct, so it was incredibly unlikely that one had made its way to nineteenth century Tennessee.

No matter the story, it was a beautifully crafted piece, and it drew more than a little attention to the town, but I wasn't there to appreciate local artwork. I had a crime scene to find.

Of course, it wasn't officially a crime scene. To the public, Vanessa DeSilva died as a result of a tragic accident, but there was a pretty good chance that cops would still have the area closed off. Either way, I'd need to be smart if I wanted to get a good look at the place.

According to Jenny, the cops had found Vanessa near one of the public restrooms placed around the park. Looking at a map set up at the entrance, I could see that there were three restrooms along the walking path and one by the main gates. I took a quick glance and sufficiently determined that the restroom by the gate was not the one in question.

“Well, at least you’ll get your steps in today, Zee.” I told myself. Then I started walking.

As if by some cruel joke of the universe, the restroom I was looking for was the last one down the path from where I had started. It was exactly the same as the other two I had passed on the way here, a small square building made of concrete with a metal door on either side. Where this one differed was the blood that had splattered against the side of one wall. It looked like somebody had tried to wash it off, but there was still a pink-ish stain on the white-painted wall that couldn't easily have been mistaken for anything else. The police had cleared the crime scene already, so I wasn’t technically breaking any laws by snooping around, but I made sure to have my laminated Press badge on a lanyard tucked under my hoodie, within easy reach, just in case.

I liked to work from the inside out. I started by looking through the stalls and under the sinks in both bathrooms, but if any evidence had been left behind it had already been picked up. I slowly circled the building and expanded my search radius, still finding zilch. I bit the inside of my cheek in thought, and then raised my right hand. The tides of Chaos washed over me and my vision transformed.

I didn’t see the tell-tale glow of magic anywhere, but I did notice a slight contrast that I hadn’t before. A hint of purple peeking out of the brown pixels of the dirt. I squatted down and let the Chaos ebb from my body, my vision returning to normal. A couple of small branches were in a heap near the corner of the building. I gently pushed them to the side and saw a glint of purple foil that had been covered by a fresh smattering of dirt. I rummaged in my backpack for a pen and used it to free the small object. I hadn't really had much need for one of these things, especially lately, but the little cartoon Spartan on the small square package was unmistakable. Looking up I noticed one of the trees above the restroom was missing a few of its lower branches. The ends were frayed and still green. Another branch in the same cluster was dangling by a single strip of living wood.

I had been wondering what a high school girl had been doing at a park in the middle of the night. I now had my answer, and a new piece for the puzzle. Vanessa DeSilva had been trying to get lucky, and considering the girlfriend isn't likely to be the one bringing the condom, there was somebody else here on the night she was murdered.

Jenny answered the phone on the second ring. “Hey, Zee. What's up?”

“Had a question about Vanessa. You got a minute?” I hadn’t found anything else at the scene, so I was making my way back to my car.

“Yeah, sure.” She said, “Wanna get lunch?”

“Sorry, can't. Got one more stop to make and then I gotta head to the office and explain why I wasn't at work this morning.”

“Oh, okay.” I pretended not to notice the disappointment in her voice. “Well, ask away.”

“Did she have a boyfriend?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she answered, “he came with her family to discuss the funeral arrangements. Why?”

“I was just at the crime scene and I found a condom on the ground. It was covered up by dirt and stuff so I think the cops missed it.”

“So you're thinking they were doing it when they were attacked?”

“Maybe that was the plan. It wasn't opened. But more importantly–”

She finished my sentence for me. “He was an eyewitness to Vanessa's murder. He might have seen what did it.”

“Bingo.” I said, and cranked the engine.