Black Magic Bayou (17 page)

I needed to show him, evidently. To make him understand what I meant. “The guy died from blunt force trauma, right? That’s what I heard someone at the station say.” It also explained why there’d been no obvious breaks or bruises on his body when I’d seen him yesterday.

Perry nodded.

“So he most likely hit his head on something or
got
hit on the head, yeah?”

Again, he quietly agreed with my assessment.

I scanned the area around me, trying to find something that would work by means of demonstration. A watermelon would have been awesome, really splashy and pink. I probably would have given the poor detective nightmares for a week if I had that for a prop.

Instead I took a broken cinder block from a pile next to the dumpster. The thing was heavy, in the same weight class as Santiago’s book of demons, but I was able to hold it in one hand. I judged the heft of it and said, “This weighs about thirty pounds, give or take.” I held it out to him so he could test it, assuring him it wasn’t Styrofoam or anything like that. “And if I learned anything from
Jerry Maguire
, it’s that the human head weighs roughly eight pounds.”

“Sure.”

I held the cinder block between my palms and squeezed. Without flinching, exerting myself, or so much as breaking a sweat, the hefty brick groaned in my hands, then crumbled, shattering apart into a dozen smaller pieces and clattering onto the pavement.

“That was without effort, Bryce. Without anger, or motivation, or adrenaline. My wolf didn’t even wake up.”

He was staring at me now, and I think if he’d had room, he might have backed up farther. But he was also nodding in a slow way that made me think I possibly could have gotten my point across.

“You’re saying if it had been your…wolves, and it had been a real brawl, Liam Casey’s head would have been…” He glanced down at the pile of concrete rubble at my feet.

This is where the watermelon would have made my point vividly.

Too vividly, considering Perry already looked shaky.

“I’m saying a wolf in a blind rage wouldn’t have given this guy a bump on the head.” He probably would have taken the guy’s head right off, but I decided it might be better to leave that part implied.

“What if it was just a tussle, guys being drunk idiots, you know?”

“I believe this guy could have been a drunk idiot.” I pointed to where the body had been. “And I absolutely will allow that Emmett and Mason could have been behaving like dumbasses. They’re loud, they’re young.”

Perry gave me an amused look at this last part, and it took me a second to realize why.

Mason and Emmett were each two years older than me.

They also had zero responsibility and hadn’t been at the epicenter of a near apocalypse. I think it was safe to say I was a lot wiser than my twenty-one years implied.

If not wiser, I at least had decidedly more life experience than two twenty-three-year-old werewolves who’d never left Louisiana.

Something else occurred to me then.

I’d been so busy looking at this from a werewolf perspective I hadn’t even considered the other option to determine what had really happened that night. There was a way, a difficult way, but one that could show Perry without a doubt who had killed the man in the alley.

“Were there witnesses?” I asked, unable to keep my excitement contained.

“Yeah. Two, aside from your guys.”

Good, because I doubted even with my brilliant new plan I’d be able to convince him I needed to let Mason and Emmett out for the night. “Do you think you could get them back here?”

“Could I…what? Look, Genie, I told you yesterday there was no way I was letting you participate in interviews, and that includes callbacks to witnesses.

I was already shaking my head. I didn’t
want
to explain my other non-wolf gifts to him, but I had an idea, and there was no getting around it.

“I can
show
you what happened here. But I need someone who saw it.”

He looked dubious, and I didn’t blame him. He’d only known that a world of monsters and magic existed for a few years. I’d been raised in it. I knew things were possible Detective Perry couldn’t fathom yet. Now it was my turn to show him something new.

I suspected, if this worked, I was going to regret it.

For one thing, yet another person was going to know about my abilities. And that person was a police detective who might want to take serious advantage of said abilities for his own gain.

I chewed my lip, wondering if I was making a terrible decision here. I could probably get Emmett and Mason off the hook, but was the cost going to outweigh the reward?

Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything and tried my hand at some old-fashioned sleuthing instead, except there wasn’t time. I didn’t know how long it would take Santiago to figure out his spell to catch the demon—and man did I ever want to ask him how he was doing it—but soon I’d have bigger fish to fry than a simple murder investigation.

“Look, I’m going to offer to do something here, and you’re going to need to roll with it. I can show you exactly who did this. You’ll be able to see it with your own eyes. But I am not going to make a habit of this, it’s a one-time deal, and it’s more for my benefit than yours.

“No surprise there.” It didn’t sound like he was insulting me, even though the words themselves were harsh.

Perry lived in the kind of world where everyone was out for themselves, and why should he think I was any different? I wasn’t. I wanted this for myself and my pack, and I didn’t care a lick about Perry’s arrest record.

As much as I hated to admit it, I didn’t really care about getting a killer off the street. I just wanted my wolves free, and I desperately wanted to disentangle myself from the attention of the police.

I had to believe the exposure and risk of doing this would be worth it. I was even willing to convince myself Perry would agree to my terms and never ask me to repeat the task again.

“All right. I’m willing to suspend disbelief and go with this. I’m curious to see what it is you think you can do. What do you need from me?”

This was where things went from peculiar to downright weird, and the mostly likely place for me to lose him.

“I need at least one of the witnesses.”

“Okay.”

I fidgeted, looking down at my feet, standing where the dead man had been only hours earlier. I could practically picture him the way he’d been when I saw him yesterday morning.

“And I need the body.”

Wilder collected me from the crime scene, pulling his motorcycle up to the mouth of the alley and killing the engine as Perry and I approached.

It had taken a lot of sweet-talking and several promises to sign nondisclosure agreements and to never, ever, ever, ever let my pack get involved in trouble again, but I’d convinced Perry to give me what I needed.

I was impressed with his willingness to trust me. He had no idea what I was planning to do and had probably never seen magic performed in person before—real magic, not the Vegas sleight-of-hand stuff. Yet, in spite of all that, he’d actually said yes when I told him I needed a corpse returned to the scene of the crime.

He wasn’t
happy
about it, mind you, and I knew I had to deliver.

To make this work I was going to need a couple things that were not easy to come by, and Perry would have to convince the medical examiner to let us borrow the body for a night.

“Back here by nine o’clock sharp, right?” He spun his car keys around his index finger, and there was faint doubt in his expression that made me nervous. Was he worried this was some kind of setup to embarrass him? Like I’d make him bring a corpse and a witness to an empty alley and then not show up?

We hadn’t known each other very long, but I was hoping he thought better of me.

Prove yourself to him.

I wasn’t sure why I wanted to or why I cared so much, but it was important to me that Perry thought well of me. He’d been good to us up until this point. I knew without a doubt he was the reason this had been kept out of the news, and he couldn’t understand completely how much I appreciated that.

Stopping halfway between Perry and Wilder, I gave the detective my most earnest
trust me
smile. “I know you’re putting a lot on the line here, Bryce. I promise you I’ll be here at nine, and this will be worth all the trouble.”

He grunted and waved me off before jogging back to his car. How he planned to get the body here wasn’t my primary concern. All that mattered was that he succeeded. The rest of this was on me.

There was only one potential hiccup I could see.

I’d never done the ritual I was planning to perform.

Not even once.

And the only time I’d ever seen it done, I had been the one in the witness position.

So a great deal was riding on the things
Memere
had taught me and the skills I’d learned honing my craft day after day in the swamp.

Wilder handed me a helmet. “Where to?”

I climbed onto the bike behind him, hugging my arms tightly around his waist and burrowing my face against the back of his neck. Time was of the essence, but that didn’t mean I could resist placing one kiss on the bare bit of skin between his jacket and his hair.

If time were more plentiful, I’d have said we should go back to my place, but now wasn’t the best opportunity for a midmorning shag.

We’d have our chance again soon, I hoped.

Now that we’d crossed the line between confusing flirtation and actual sex, I wasn’t about to uncross it. Last night I’d told him I was his, and I’d meant it. It was hard to put into words the way he made me feel, because I’d never experienced anything quite like it in my life. It was dynamic and challenging, asking more from me than any other emotion I’d known before.

For the first time in my life I understood that caring about someone demanded giving up part of yourself to make room for the person. Whether I’d meant to or not, I hadn’t done that with Cash. I’d kept him just out of reach, and though I’d loved him, I’d done it with my internal doors on lockdown.

I’d known Wilder for mere months, but in that time he had managed to open me up in ways I’d never dreamed possible.

If I knew how to tell him all of that, I would. But there was no easy way to make it make sense to another person. I wish I could show him how being with him felt to me, because if he saw the way I saw him, he would never doubt for a second that Santiago could mean anything to me.

Saying
I love you
might have been the easiest way to do it, but it felt wrong somehow. Did I love him? I thought I must. I loved him because of the way he undid all the tethers that kept me moored to my repetitive life. I loved him for being the thing that excited me, when everything else tried to drag me down and tear away the small, hopeful pieces that remained.

I loved him for a thousand stupid things and a thousand not-stupid things, and all of them were beyond my ability to put into words.

So I kissed the back of his neck a second time and hugged him hard. There would come a time I might be able to explain it, but until then I’d make him understand in any other way I knew.

“I need to get a few things. Things…um…well, magic things.”

“You can do magic with a stern look and some dry oregano, Princess. I’m guessing what you’re trying to say is you need some weird black-magic shit you don’t keep in your pantry back at the house.” There was an edge of laughter in his voice, and I was glad he was putting the tension from my earlier phone call with Santiago behind us for the time being.

Would it get easier, me interacting with the other witch?

I had said I wanted nothing to do with him once the demon possession had been dealt with, but now I wondered if he might be a valuable ally. He knew a lot. And if he’d considered training under
Memere
, that meant he had real skill. Natural skill, not just the stuff you got from reading books and whispering incantations.

Born witches were so rare I’d never heard of a male one existing before.

I craved that connection. I wanted to know everything about his training, wanted to learn what tricks and spells he’d picked up. He had at least a decade more experience than I did, and in terms of spellcraft, that might as well be a whole extra lifetime.

Maybe.
Maybe
if I could convince Wilder there was no threat there, I might be able to learn from the other witch.

Then I remembered the way Santiago had taken my finger in his mouth and realized how badly I was kidding myself.

Was any magic worth that level of drama and discomfort to Wilder?

Memere
would have said yes.

My common sense was saying there was no way in hell it would ever work.

Damn you, common sense.

“Take me to Ezekiel’s.” We’d been to the little magic shop together a few times, so I didn’t need to give him directions. We both put on our helmets and drove off. All the while I was thinking how funny it was that magic could solve so many problems and yet create so many new ones.

Here was hoping the ritual tonight wouldn’t create any
more
issues for me.

I had plenty enough as it was.

Ezekiel’s was a few blocks away from the French Quarter, close enough to the action to get some foot traffic, but far enough removed it didn’t scare away the locals.

It had been Delphine—Cain’s girlfriend and my friend—who had shown me the place after I moved to New Orleans. She had a knack for knowing where all the best shops in town were, and that meant everything from cupcakes to grits to voodoo dolls.

Ezekiel’s was the best.

It was a squat one-story box surrounded by taller buildings, all tightly packed together like concrete sardines, on a street that looked more like a place you’d get robbed at knifepoint than go shopping in.

Wilder parked the motorcycle in front, and I did a quick protection incantation around the bike to make sure no one walked off with our helmets. Sure beat carrying them around with us.