Cursed Moon (Prospero's War) (3 page)

October 18

Waxing Crescent

T
he next morning I pulled my old Jeep, Sybil, into the gym’s parking lot at eight sharp. The lot sat next to some abandoned train rails that used to carry steel from Babylon’s mills to the rest of the country. Now the tracks were rusted and choked with weeds. Sort of like Babylon’s justice system.

I walked across the lot toward the front door of Rooster’s Gym. Downstairs, the building housed a bodega that sold cold drinks, cheap smokes, and titty magazines. Upstairs, though, was the space the MEA task force used as our office. It used to be one of those old-school boxing gyms before the steel bubble burst and the economy dried up faster than flop sweat on the mats.

Climbing the steps up to the gym, I inhaled the scent of body odor on stale vinyl and old varnish on scarred wood. Sun
streamed through huge steel-framed windows, casting an ethereal glow on the old boxing ring that dominated the center of the huge room.

In the center of the ring was a large whiteboard covered with a map of Babylon, where Gardner kept track of calls we responded to on behalf of the BPD. Technically, we were only supposed to lend a hand in the Cauldron, but with the double full moons that month the circuits had been so overwhelmed with calls, we sometimes had to venture into the Mundane parts of the city, too. I was the only local cop on the task force; the map helped the rest of the team find their way around.

At that moment Morales ducked a head from behind a wall of the makeshift lab our team wizard, Kichiri “Mesmer” Ren, had erected to separate his work from the investigative side of things. Mez cooked up defensive weapons for us and broke down potions to help solve cases there, but the space also served as the coffee room. I went to join them.

The two men stood over the coffee siphon with mugs at the ready. Morales stood about half a head taller than the wizard. Mez’s long dreadlocks were their natural brown this morning, but the sunlight caught the small bells and magical amulets he’d woven into the strands. A lab coat covered the top of his outfit, but the distressed jeans and motorcycle boots were visible below. In addition to basically being a magical genius, he was also the team’s snappiest dresser. Technically, he was a civilian employee of the MEA instead of a sworn officer, but he was as integral to our success on cases as any of us cops.

The coffee contraption looked like something out of a mad scientist’s lab. A glass siphon sat on a metal stand holding another glass bulb of water. Using gravity and the alchemy of heat, water, and strong coffee beans, the machine turned out a brew that wasn’t a potion, but sure tasted like magic.

Neither spoke to me as I approached, but I didn’t mind. Watching the coffee percolate through the contraption was something of a morning ritual. As usual, Morales had his favorite
SEMPER FI
marines mug. Mez’s had a picture of Sir Isaac Newton and the quote
I CAN CALCULATE THE MOTION OF HEAVENLY BODIES, BUT NOT THE MADNESS OF PEOPLE
.

I went to the cabinet over Mez’s collection of Erlenmeyer flasks and pulled out the
WORLD’S BEST SISTER
mug Danny had given me for Mother’s Day a few years earlier.

“Aha!” Mez said, suddenly. “It’s ready.” He started to elbow Morales out of the way.

“As ranking agent I should get the first cup,” Morales said.

A throat cleared from the doorway. We turned to find Special Agent Miranda Gardner standing at the entrance of the lab. That morning she wore simple brown pantsuit with an ivory shell. Her shoes bore a no-nonsense inch-tall heel, also in brown. The only jewelry she wore was a tiger-eye cabochon ring she never seemed to take off her middle finger.

“My office, two minutes,” she said. She had that look on her face. The one that meant she either hadn’t had her coffee yet or had just gotten off the phone with Captain Eldritch. In her hand she held a simple white mug half-full of the instant coffee she preferred, so it was safe she wasn’t about to pull rank at the coffeepot. “And Morales?” she added.

He raised his brows. Mez took advantage of Morales’s distraction to fill his own mug.

Gardner smiled tightly. “Make that second highest ranking.”

Morales grinned. “Yes, sir.”

Without another word she turned on her heel and marched back toward her office. I jumped in front of Morales, grabbing the second cup from the special pot. Judging from the look on his face, the offense ranked up there with making fun of his
mama. I stuck my tongue at him and filled his cup for him. “There, you big baby. Let’s go see what the boss lady wants.”

Gardner’s office wasn’t anything to write home about. A simple metal desk, a filing cabinet, and an ancient office chair. A couple of thin wooden planks that served as bookshelves. Single window cloudy as milk glass offering pitiful light. On top of her desk were a blotter, a phone, and a sign that read,
NO BULLSHIT BEFORE FIVE P.M.
I knew from personal experience she wasn’t too fond of it after five, either.

“Sit down.” She took her own seat. “Captain Eldritch will join us momentarily.”

I frowned. “He’s coming here?”

Eldritch used to be my boss before I joined the MEA task force. He was the captain of the Cauldron precinct of the Babylon Police Department. He specialized in Arcane crimes and political maneuvering, not necessarily in that order. He’d encouraged me to take the gig with the MEA in the hopes I’d be his insider gal, but once he realized I was more interested in solving crimes than earning brownie points our professional rapport had suffered. Still, he hadn’t argued about granting me a promotion to detective after my first case with MEA resulted in the arrest of one of the Cauldron’s most powerful wizards.

She nodded to the phone. “He’s on his way up.”

Morales shot me a grimace. A call from my former boss was usually bad enough, but a personal visit? Could only mean trouble.

The sound of footsteps trudging up stairs from the other end of the gym announced Eldritch’s arrival. A few seconds later Mez called out a greeting that was met with a grumble. A good sign. If he’d been in a shitty mood, he wouldn’t have responded at all.

Two seconds later the door to Gardner’s office was filled
with the bulk of Captain Robert Eldritch. There was a coffee stain on the wide belly of his off-white dress shirt. His forehead shone with beads of sweat from the exertion of hefting his bulk up the steps. The brass clip on his navy-blue tie had been given to him by the mayor himself when Eldritch had been promoted to captain several years earlier. Now he was angling for the gold tie clip and sweet pay-grade increase a promotion to chief of police would earn him.

“How well you know Aphrodite Johnson?” This was his only greeting and when he said it, he was staring right at me.

My shoulders lifted even as my hopes plummeted. Here we go, I thought, back in the shit. I self-consciously tugged my left sleeve down to cover the Ouroboros tattoo on my wrist that marked me as a made member of the Votary Coven. I’d never had it removed because the snake winding around my flesh was a reminder of the viper pit I’d escaped a decade earlier.

“Hold on,” Gardner cut in. Clearly she wasn’t going to let Eldritch stroll in and take over. “You mean the head of the O Coven?”

“I’m impressed you’ve done your homework on the covens, Gardner,” he said.

Her eyes went all cold steel on him. “I’ve been brushing up on Cauldron politics when I’m not busy picking up your precinct’s slack.”

Eldritch’s eyes narrowed.

I stepped in to defuse the tension. “Yes, Aphrodite is the Hierophant of the Mystical Coven of the Sacred Orgasm.”

Morales perked up the instant he heard the word
orgasm
. “Since the O’s are a sex magic coven, does that make the Hierophant like a madam?”

“Something like that,” I said.
Pimp
also worked, depending on the day.

“How well do you know Aphrodite personally?” Eldritch pressed me.

When you call yourself Aphrodite, you have to have either some serious confidence or a well-developed sense of irony. Judging from my dealings with the Hierophant of the O Coven, Aphrodite Johnson was in possession of both.

I sighed. “More than I’d like, honestly. The Hierophant was an old ally of Uncle Abe’s.” Aphrodite also knew my mother very well, but I didn’t want to get into my mother’s scandalous associations at the moment.

“How did she escape getting caught up in the net when he was arrested?” Morales asked.

I didn’t bother correcting his presumption of using the feminine pronoun with Aphrodite. We’d get to the Hierophant’s gender situation eventually.

“The O’s are a special case,” Eldritch said with a scowl. “Back in the ’seventies the Hierophant’s predecessor, Matahari Jenkins, figured out how to get the coven registered as a religious organization on account of them using sex magic as a form of worship, which is why they call Aphrodite a Hierophant instead of just a wizard. Anyway, now they get to skirt all sorts of pesky laws and avoid paying taxes.”

Morales laughed. “That’s actually kind of brilliant.”

“It would be if it didn’t mean that a lot of their members get away with everything from prostitution to human trafficking and rape,” I added. That wiped the smile off Morales’s face. “Why are you asking about Johnson, sir?”

Eldritch crossed his arms. “It seems one of the O’s ‘houses of worship’ was robbed last night.”

I frowned. “Okay? What does that have to do with us?”

“She claims the thief got away with about fifty thousand dollars’ worth of sex magic potions.”

“Again,” Gardner said, “how is that our problem?”

Eldritch sighed and dropped the combative expression. “Look, I’m up to my ass in potion freaks who think the full moons are excuses to raise hell all over the city. I don’t have enough detectives on staff to deal with Johnson right now, especially with Prospero on your team.”

Technically, I still worked for the BPD. The MEA paid for my overtime, but the city of Babylon still cut my paychecks. The task force model had been pioneered by the MEA a few years earlier to get more local law enforcement involved in bringing down large covens. It helped the feds navigate around some pesky jurisdictional issues, and allowed local cops like me to get experience and major federal busts under their gun belts.

My brows rose. “In other words, you suspect this is another vengeance stunt.”

“Something like that.” Eldritch nodded.

“Explain,” Gardner said.

“Aphrodite is famous for holding grudges over the slightest insult. S/he’s called the cops a couple of times after framing enemies for crimes they didn’t commit.”

“If you knew she was framing them, why isn’t she in jail?” Morales asked.

“She’s slippery,” Eldritch said. “And has a lawyer that’s a crafty son of a bitch.”

“So let me see if I understand. You don’t have the manpower to send on a wild goose chase, but you’re more than willing to send federal agents on one? We’re already saving your ass by backing up your patrols. And, by the way, we’re still waiting on those extra officers we were promised to help my team bring down the covens.”

“You were cleared to have Detective Duffy from the First Precinct.”

The First was the main precinct in the Mundane areas of Babylon. Despite being an Adept, Duffy had managed to work his way up to a reputation as one of the best homicide detectives in the city. In Gardner’s opinion, the more Adept cops she could get fighting the covens, the better the MEA’s chances of closing some major busts. Problem was, most Adepts in law enforcement went into forensics or lab work. We tended to be pretty scarce on the investigative side, since most cops distrusted Adepts to solve cases without employing magic.

Upon hearing Duffy’s name, I grimaced, bracing for Gardner’s explosion.

Instead of yelling, she gritted her teeth. “You know damned well Duffy turned us down.”

Eldritch shrugged. “Yeah, I heard that. Too bad,” he said, sounding anything but disappointed. “Since you couldn’t convince him, you’re just going to have to wait until my crews aren’t working overtime to keep the Blue Moon bullshit contained.” Gardner opened her mouth to respond, but Eldritch wasn’t done. “And as for building cases against the covens, wouldn’t working on a case involving one of the covens be right in line with your mission?”

“Not if we’re busy tracking down false leads on the Hierophant’s behalf!”

Eldritch’s lips curved. “Shall I call the mayor and ask him to send you an engraved invitation?”

She blew out a sigh. As it was the MEA’s presence in Babylon was tenuous at best. We were coming up on an election, and Mayor Owens wanted to ensure the feds didn’t steal any of the credit for high-profile arrests. We already had one strike against us after a raid went awry during the Bane case. To be seen as uncooperative with the BPD when the Blue Moon was causing so much havoc would be a second strike we couldn’t afford.

“Fine. Morales and Prospero will go interview Johnson, but once we close that case, I expect at least one new head count the instant the Blue Moon passes and not a day more.”