Shifty Magic (9 page)

Several colorful 1950s-styled bicycles lined
the wall on this side. I picked a red and silver number with
Schwinn painted on it, turned on its fender light and mounted
up.

The sky arched above me bigger than in the
city and dense with glittering stars. Dark groves of fruit trees
and fields with cows cluttering around their shelters marked the
way. A serene atmosphere that I never felt in town seemed to
overlay the entire property.

I was beginning to see the appeal of living
in a place like this when I passed a pile of rubble set back from
the road. A historic landmark sign was planted in front declaring
that in 2024 the unprovoked attack by the Fifth Parish Vampire Unit
had resulted in the deaths of Senator Tarson and his family. The
sign finished up by reporting that the attackers were heroically
corralled by neighboring families and captured. Tragically, when
Were reinforcements arrived, the terrified community slaughtered
them.

Beside the rubble under the gloomy darkness
of an old tree, I saw a dozen grave markers with crescent moons
carved on them, identifying the Were graves. A shadow of regret
brushed across my heart at the sight. I continued on, not nearly as
enchanted by my surroundings as I had been.

A sweaty ten minutes later, I propped the
bike against one of the white columns of an enormous colonial style
mansion, climbed the steps to the front door and pushed the
intercom for apartment two, the number indicated on the note. "Lord
Bellmonte's secretary sent me," I announced on a hunch when a woman
answered.

"Oh, thank God," she whispered as she buzzed
open the door. "I'd given up hope."

* * *

Laiyla Billings was a tall, willowy woman with
shoulder-length, wavy, cinnamon-colored hair peppered with gray as
if it was considering the wisdom of taking the plunge. Her
complexion was flawless, her average blue eyes bright with anxiety.
I put her age at anywhere between thirty-five and fifty.

She offered me tea in a delicate porcelain
cup with tiny yellow birds painted on it. Her hand trembled
slightly as she handed the cup to me across the coffee table
scattered with magazines that sat between us.

"I'm so relieved the Church is finally
taking this seriously," she said as I took the cup. Her voice was
smooth and gentle, a perfect reflection of her appearance. "I'd
concluded they didn't care as long as it was only renegades."

"Why do you live with people who hate
paranormals?" I asked, setting the cup down on the table.

Her eyes widened. "What do you mean?"

"You're a practitioner." I nodded to the
ring on her left hand. "Moon and sun symbols woven together on a
silver band on your ring finger and a fairy star necklace with
what's probably a spelled ruby for protection." I glanced at the
gem softly glowing with power.

Her expression remained guileless and full
of curiosity as she waited for me to continue. I made a show of
pulling in a deep breath. A faint scent like ancient, dark soil
that had been soaked with vinegar and set on fire still clung to
the apartment. "But it was the smell of a Cupid Spell cooking in
the kitchen that really tipped me off."

Six months ago at a certain department
Christmas party, I'd had an accidental encounter with that
particular potion. Sadly, I knew what I was talking about. "That
kind of magic takes skill. Almost as much as the fence around this
place."

"You're very unusual," Laiyla mused. She
tilted her head slightly as if that might give her a better view of
me. "How do you know this?"

"I'm a private investigator. I'm paid to
know. If I don't know, I'm paid to find out."

"And you work for the Church?"

"In a temporary, mutually unfriendly
capacity. Did you poison the tea?"

A smile flickered across her mouth. "Of
course not." Her gaze swept above, around and through me as if she
could see things no one else could. "You have an old wisdom and a
heart that could love, but you've closed yourself off. There is no
family in your life. I'm sorry."

I hid my surprise. Dealing with
practitioners, at least the strong ones, meant being prepared for
exactly this sort of thing. In varying degrees, all of them had the
ability to see beyond the physical and to work with those other
levels of reality. That was how they infused items and potions with
energy.

How well they could do that determined how
powerful a practitioner they were. The fact that she'd
spontaneously gotten a psychic hit off me told me a lot about her
level of talent.

A practitioner this strong would be able to
subdue a vampire. All she'd need would be someone to slit the
vamp's throat while she kept him immobile.

"You're the one who's running the spells
around this place," I said, stalling for time while I figured out
my strategy. "Morrocroft is human exclusive. How'd you get the
gig?"

"Experience has taught them that employing
someone like me is the only way to keep less desirable paranormals
at a distance. When a friend recommended me, I applied." She
finished her scan of me and a focused intensity that hadn't been
there before edged into her gaze.

"You're not what you seem," she murmured.
She narrowed her eyes and their focus turned distant again, like a
person trying to see something on the horizon. "Deeply hidden.
Powerful. But just beyond reach...oh!"

She blinked and stared past me for a second,
a look of dazed confusion on her face. After a minute, her
expression cleared. "I'm sorry, did you say something?"

I considered responding
with,
you mean something like you might be
strong, but you're kind of flaky?
"Where
were you last night between the hours of eleven and one, Ms.
Billings?" I asked instead, wishing my gun wasn't half a mile away
in a locked box.

"Creating the Cupid Spell." Concern
flickered through her steady gaze. "Why?"

"Can anyone verify that?"

"Travis brought me the Tongkat Ali about
this time last night, maybe closer to 9:30. He stayed while I
processed the potion. He's the guard you met when you came in," she
added when I gave her a questioning look. "The spell was for
him."

Which meant they could easily be
collaborating by being mutual witnesses for each other. "How long
was he here?"

"Cupid Spells are very delicate. They
require over four hours to properly infuse the ingredients."

If her story was true, then she was off the
hook. Morrocroft was at least forty minutes from the location of
the murder. But if her story was a cover, then there was a good
chance I was having tea with last night's killer. A chill ran
across the back of my neck.

"I'm sorry," Laiyla said, "but are you here
about the information I tried to report to the Church or not?"

A little pressure might get some answers if
she were guilty. "Lord Bellmonte gave me your name in connection
with a murder investigation," I lied. "It involves a renegade
vampire."

Her hand shot to her mouth, and her eyes
widened. "Oh, no," she breathed. Agitation tightened her shoulders.
"This is exactly—I'd hoped to prevent another one."

My stomach tensed and my hand reflexively
jerked toward my empty holster. "What do you mean?"

"I was in New York at a conference about six
months ago. A gentleman was giving a workshop on enhancing natural
magical ability, which is impossible. I was intrigued."

"I thought practitioners worked on their
craft constantly."

"Work on, yes. But you can't boost what
nature gives you. It's there or it's not. Like a musician. The
ability to perceive sound and layers of sound is inborn, but to
build one's skill, one must study and practice."

"So this guy was full of crap?"

"His demonstrations were inconclusive and
his methods morally questionable," she said, her gaze drifting to a
space by my left shoulder as some memory played out in her
mind.

Her attention slid back to me. Clasping her
hands, she shook her head. "He was jeered off the stage. An unfair
response, considering how young he was. I followed him, hoping to
encourage him to consider pursuing a more wholesome direction in
his practice."

She looked down at the floor. "I found him
in an empty lecture room in a heated discussion
with...something."

"Something what?"

"Well, himself I suppose." She met my gaze.
"Yet there was...an energy. A feeling. Something dark. I retreated,
of course, but I must have made some small noise because he looked
at me just before I closed the door. His eyes were filled with a
black nothingness like I've never seen before."

I rubbed my temples where a headache was
starting up. "How can a nothingness be a something, um, ness?"

A frown touched her mouth. "A lack of soul,
although even that isn't accurate. I don't know. As I said, I'd
never seen anything like it. I hope I never do again."

"What was his name?" I was beginning to
understand why the vamps had blown this woman off.

"If you're planning to question him, that
would be difficult. He was found dead in his room the next morning.
I heard from the hotel manager that it was an aneurism, but that
never felt right."

"Why'd you go to the Church with this? Isn't
it more coven business?"

Fear and worry saturated her gaze. "We'd
been tracking a series of unreported vampire slayings for about a
month. That's really why I was in New York. But after his death,
they stopped."

The whole story sounded like a load of crap
to me. I gave her my best understanding smile and rose to leave. My
gut told me that she was hiding something, my brain had no idea
what. She definitely had the strength to subdue a vampire if she
put her mind to it. Which also meant that she was powerful enough
to find plenty of uses for a boat load of vamp blood.

I needed to learn more before I went to
Cooper and threw it in his face, but for the moment it looked like
I had myself another suspect.

CHAPTER FOUR

I reclaimed my gun for the second time in the last eight
hours and started the hike back to the hoverbus platform. Even with
the longer days of summer, the night was well underway and inky
black shadows stretched under the trees and shrubs that choked the
edges of Morrocroft Farms Lane. It never took nature long to
reclaim her territory once humans abandoned an area. The sidewalks
on either side were not much more than broken chunks with grass and
weeds shooting up out of them. The surface of the street under my
boots was nothing but a cracked, pitted path of old
asphalt.

Cooper was nowhere in sight, and I told
myself that I was glad he'd finally taken the hint and found
something else to do. I wondered if the vampire murders Laiyla had
mentioned were connected with the venom trafficking case I
suspected he was working on—that is, if her convoluted story hadn't
been a complete fabrication. Next time I saw him, I'd have to pry
information out of him to verify.

I caught a whisper of sound behind me and a
tingle ran down my spine. I stopped, the muscles along my back
tensing. "Cooper, you moron. If you're trying to sneak up on me,
I'm going to shoot you." To prove my point, I reached down and
flipped the strap off my gun with my thumb.

The woods crowding against the street went
suddenly quiet, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I'd
just cleared my gun of the holster when something bolted from the
woods, crashed into me and slammed me into the asphalt. My weapon
clattered across the street and bounced off the broken curb on the
other side while my brain registered gleaming fangs and the
hideously distorted face of a vampire.

Instinctively, I latched onto his throat
with both hands and pushed as he bore down on me. Black, soulless
eyes locked with mine and fear sliced like a cold knife across my
stomach. Vamp eyes retained their human color even when their
feeding aspect manifested. The eyes focused on my face were solid
black, blank eyes, not even filled with madness.

Horror crackled through my body like static.
A counter pulse of searing energy streamed into my chest and
through my arms as adrenaline pumped into my blood. My hands seemed
to glow in the watery light of the half moon, and I dug my fingers
into the monster's throat, fighting to keep him from my neck.

From the corner of my eye, something black
and low to the ground shot from the underbrush. I had a moment to
register the open jaws and gleaming teeth of a wolf before it
launched itself at my stomach.

Like a freight train, another wolf burst
from behind me, a blend of silver and black like the moonlight and
shadows streaking the pavement. It knocked the black wolf off
course and the two animals tangled into snarling, snapping madness
as they tumbled out of my field of vision.

The vamp pushed closer, his open mouth now
inches from my neck. I struggled to shove him off of me with the
desperate wildness of prey that knows it's about to die. He clamped
his hands on my shoulders and squeezed.

Jabbing pain burst from my joints as he
squeezed hard and pressed me into the rough surface of the old
street. I gritted my teeth against the anguish and dug my nails
into his neck, praying that the pressure would slow him. At the
very least, I might be able to cut off the blood supply to his
brain and gain some advantage.

I heard one of the wolves behind me give a
sharp yelp of pain and surprise just as my left shoulder popped. A
jolt of excruciating pain exploded into me. I lost feeling in the
arm and my grip gave out. The vamp struck, its fangs puncturing the
muscle where my neck and shoulder met.