, page 13
Unusual origin? I don’t even know what that means.
The older man pressed the blade harder against Tommy’s neck. Still, the kid’s expression remained blank. Think, Mister Kendall. Poor Tommy is depending on you.
You’re trying to find magical items, Burt said, his words a rushed jumble. Talismans, maybe old books, that sort of thing?
Have you received anything of that sort?
No. I keep an eye out for them. I have a certain clientele that wants to know when magical stuff comes in, and I haven’t had anything to show them in months. I swear it.
This particular piece might have resembled a weapon.
You mean like a magic gun?
Silver-hair glanced back at his companion and huffed a sigh. Then he faced Burt again, and when he did, Burt let out a scream that made me flinch.
He collapsed to the floor, clutching his leg. A few moments later, Silver-hair’s friend hoisted him to his feet once more.
I’m a tolerant man, but my patience is not without its limits. Where do you keep your magical items?
The pawned ones I keep in back, Burt said, his voice strained. On a shelf over my desk. If the loans aren’t repaid, I bring them out to that case. He pointed at a nearby display case. But aside from what’s there now, I’ve got nothing. I told you, I haven’t gotten anything new in—
His words trailed into another scream. I didn’t know what Silver-hair had done to him this time, but I had to grit my teeth against a rising tide of nausea.
You disappoint me, Mister Kendall. I had hoped to avoid this.
I couldn’t tell if he said more. Burt’s cries drowned out every other sound. I let the vision fade and slipped the stone back into my pocket before closing my eyes and rubbing a hand across my forehead. A headache had started to build behind my eyes.
“Well?” Kona asked.
I shook my head. “I didn’t see much. It was definitely our silver-haired friend again, and another guy who I’m sure was a weremyste.” I described what I’d seen in the stone and repeated as much of the conversation as I could remember. “I’m assuming that one of the spells intended to torture Burt wound up killing him, at which point they probably shot him in the chest to make make people think it was a robbery gone bad. I’d guess that they searched the place and then used the kid’s blood to power the spell that wrecked the shop.”
Kona pursed her lips, staring down at Burt’s corpse. “Is it possible that the kid saw something Burt missed?”
“It’s possible. But I don’t think that this kind of seeing spell will work on him. They had him in a . . . a thrall of some sort. During the final minutes of his life, he had no idea what he was seeing or doing.”
“So we don’t even know if they got what they were after,” Kevin said.
I surveyed the shop, taking in the level of destruction. “I’m guessing now,” I said. “But I don’t think they did. I have a feeling our friend was pretty well ticked off when he cast that last spell.”
“Would you know what they were after if you saw it?” Kona asked me.
“I might.”
She nodded once. “Then let’s take a look around.”
A doorway behind the counter drew my eye. The door stood ajar and a sign on it read “Employees only.”
“Anyone been back there yet?” I asked.
“We’ve been all over this place, but we don’t know what we’re after.”
I nodded and followed her into the back. The mess back here was almost as bad as that out front, though the one display case in this part of the building, which stood against the far wall, had not been shattered. It held a few handguns, including what appeared to be an original Colt .44-40 six-shooter. Apparently Silver-hair didn’t know crap about non-magical weapons. If he had really wanted to convince anyone that this was a robbery, he wouldn’t have left the Colt.
The shelf over Burt’s desk was empty, as he told Silver-hair it would be. The desk drawers had been pulled out and dumped on the floor, and with Kona’s permission, I searched through the pile of pencils and pens, papers and paper clips. As I expected, I didn’t find anything of note. Either Silver-hair found what he was after, or Burt was telling the truth. I was betting on the latter.
“There’s nothing here, Kona. At least nothing I can see. I can help you with this one, if you’ll let me. You’re probably not going to find these guys through the usual channels.”
“We could use the help, Justis. Thanks.” After the conversation we’d had about Gracie the day before, it felt good to be on the same page with her. Then she had to go and spoil it, at least that’s how she would think of it. “If this thing he’s after isn’t here, where else might it be?”
I met her gaze, and despite the grim surroundings, a grin tugged at the corners of my mouth. “You’re not going to like my answer.”
It took her a moment, and when it came to her, she rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t tell me.”
“What?” Kevin asked, looking from one of us to the other.
“Brother Q,” Kona and I said in unison. I was smiling as we said the name. She wasn’t.
CHAPTER 10
I first met Orestes Quinley when Kona and I were still working in the Robbery detail of the Violent Crimes Bureau. Back then, he was a small-time criminal who wound up doing a couple of years in Eyman State Prison for burglary. He was also a weremyste of limited power—limited enough that the prison held him for a while, until he earned his parole.
In the years since then, Orestes, who also went by the name Brother Q, had gone straight and had made himself into a sorcerer of some power. He owned a small shop in the Maryvale precinct of Phoenix called Brother Q’s Shop of the Occult, which had to be one of the worst names ever for a business. In all my years of going to see Q, I had never seen an actual customer in the place. But the work kept Q out of trouble, and I hadn’t seen any evidence to suggest that the guy was starving or on the verge of being evicted.
During my time on the force, and in the year and a half since I had become a PI, Q had been a reliable informant on matters relating to magic. Kona thought he was crazy, and I suppose she had good reason. There was no denying that he was strange. He always referred to himself in the third person, and on occasion, for no reason whatsoever, he spoke in verse. He’d been doing this since the day I met him, and while I’m sure it began as an affectation, I wasn’t sure he could have stopped now if he tried.
But the truth was, I liked and trusted the guy, and I think he felt the same way about me. To this day, I was the only cop who had busted him and made the charges stick. I’ll admit that was a strange basis for a friendship, but it worked for us.
Often when I pulled up to Q’s place he was seated outside in an old lawn chair, sunglasses perched on the end of his nose. Not today. The door to his shop was shut, and a faded “Closed” sign had been placed in a window by the entrance.
I knocked on the door, waited, knocked again.
After a minute or so, I heard someone moving around inside.
I pounded on the door once more, rattling the frame. “Open up, Q.”
“Who’s that?”
“It’s Jay Fearsson. Let me in, will you? I have questions for you, and I have a twenty with your name on it.”
No answer.
“Q?”
“Yeah, all right,” he said. But I could tell he didn’t want to talk to me. He unlatched the chain and an instant later the door swung open.
Q stood before me in ragged jeans and a torn, faded Jimmy Cliff t-shirt. As always, his hair was in dreadlocks, and a gold hoop shone in his left ear. He also had a dark, angry bruise on his cheek, below his right eye.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“What?” He frowned. “Oh, that. Q had a fight with his woman.”
“She hit you?”
He nodded, turned, and walked into the shop. I closed the door behind me and followed.
“You hit her first?”
He rounded on me. “Q did no such thing! Q doesn’t hit women. Never has. Q was sorely tempted that night, let me tell you. But Q left instead. Seemed the best idea.”
“You’re back now.”
“Yeah, but she’s gone.”
“I’m sorry, Q,” I said, and meant it.
He shrugged. “Love and marriage ain’t for the faint of heart; ’times Q think men and women be better off far apart.”
I grinned. “That was a good one.”
He led me to the back of the shop and sat in a wooden chair indicating that I should do the same. “What’chyou after, Brother J?”
“I don’t know.”
His eyebrows went up. “That’s gonna make it hard for Q to earn that twenty you mentioned.”
“What do you know about a silver-haired weremyste? Dresses well, might be from Great Britain.”
“Q needs more to go on,” he said. But he averted his gaze as he said it.
“All right. He’s into dark magic, blood spells. And here’s something that might set him apart: he doesn’t need to cut himself in order to access the blood he uses. He doesn’t need to cut anyone else for that matter. He can draw it out of people; all he has to do is touch them.” I leaned forward, staring at Q, who continued to avoid my gaze. “That ring a bell?”
“He’s bad news,” Q said, his voice low.
“I think I just said as much.”
“Q doesn’t know much more about him than you do. He’s from England like you said, an’ he’s as dark as a man can be.”
“He have a name?”
“Q’s heard people call him Fitzwater, but that might not be his real name.”
“Who’s he working for?”
Q shook his head. “A man with power like that? People work for him.”
That made sense. Chances were that silver-hair—Fitzwater—answered directly to Saorla.
“He’s looking for something, Q. A magical weapon of some sort. I don’t know more than that. He thought Burt Kendall had it, and he killed him before tearing his shop apart to find it.”
Q’s eyes found mine. “Burt’s dead?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, shit. I always liked him.”
“Do you know what this guy Fitzwater might be chasing?”
Q got up and walked to the nearest window, his hands in his jeans pockets, his shoulders hunched. Despite his quirks, he was usually jovial—that was his default mood—and I wasn’t sure what to make of this quiet, brooding version of my old friend. I couldn’t tell if he was broken up about his woman leaving, or just plain scared of Fitzwater. “Q doesn’t carry weapons,” he said, his back to me. “You know that. It’s bad mojo.”
Which wasn’t at all what I had asked.
“I didn’t suggest that you had it here. I asked you if you know what the guy’s after. And since you won’t look at me, and you won’t answer my question, I’m guessing you do.”
He shifted his stance enough to let me see the sullen cast of his features. Then he faced the window again.
“Q—”
“This one’s different, Brother J. You come to Q all the time with questions like these. Except none of them have been like this. Not even when you were after the Blind Angel dude. This is different.”
“So it’s going to cost me more than twenty.”
He turned at that. “Q’s not talkin’ about money,” he said, shaking his head. “This is different. You’re not askin’ for help to put away some small-time conjurer, or even t’ stop a killer. You’re askin’ Q to take sides in a war.”
“A war? What kind of weapon is this?”
Q clamped his mouth shut and glared at me, no doubt wishing he hadn’t answered my knock in the first place.
“There’s no war yet,” I said. “I’d know if there was. But if this weapon is that powerful, then I need to find it now, before the killing starts in earnest. So yeah, I guess I am asking you to take sides. Did you really think you could avoid that choice forever? Was your plan to hunker down and hope that every dark sorcerer in the city ignored you until the fighting ended?”
“How do you know Q won’t join the dark ones and help them kick your ass?”
I laughed. That probably wasn’t the wisest thing to do, given that I still needed information from him.
“Q’s stronger than you think, Jay. There’s plenty out there who’d want Q on their side. And there’s even more who don’t want Q as an enemy. You get what Q’s sayin’?”
“I’m not laughing at the idea of you kicking my ass, Q. I swear I’m not. I’m laughing because never in a million years would you join forces with dark sorcerers. That’s not your way.”
He tried to scowl at me, but wasn’t very successful. After a few seconds, a reluctant grin split his face, and the whole room seemed to get brighter. That was the Q I knew.
“That might be the best thing you’ve ever said to Q.”
I shrugged. “I meant it. I understand you not wanting to get in the middle of this. And you and I have done business long enough that you know I would never let slip where the information came from. But I have to know what I’m hunting for.”
His smile had faded, leaving his expression solemn and fearful. “It’s a knife.”
I blinked. “That must be some knife.”
“It’s old. Really old. Q’s never seen it, but he’s heard folks talk about it for a long, long time. It’s made of stone. Pale, the color o’ coffee with cream in it. ’Cept for a streak of red in the blade, like blood.”
“In the blade or on it?”
“In it,” Q said. “Embedded in the stone.”
“You say you’ve never seen it. Do you know where it is, or who has it?”
“Q don’t know any more than he’s told you. Not who has it or where, not even where it comes from. Like Q said, it’s old. And it’s supposed to be powerful, wicked. Some people would pay a lot of money to have it. An’ others, includin’ Q, don’t want it anywhere near them.”
“If this thing is as old as you say, why are people suddenly after it now?”
“Q don’t know the answer to that either, but it’s a good question. A knife like this doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Somebody found it again, or decided now was th’ time t’ use it.”
I didn’t like the sound of that one bit. An ancient blade, with what looked like blood embedded in the stone. I had no doubt that the “somebody” Q referred to was Saorla, and that she had Fitzwater and his buddies scouring the city for this knife. Even having no idea what the weapon could do, or what kind of magic it possessed, I was certain I didn’t want it falling into her hands.
“Brother J?”
“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head to clear my thoughts. “Sorry.” I took out my wallet and pulled a crisp twenty from the billfold. “Here you go.”
He took it and slipped it into his pocket. “Thanks.”
His brow had furrowed, and I sensed that he was wrestling with something. I watched him, saying nothing.
“You might want to ask yourself,” he said after some time, “how it came to be here in the first place.”
“What do you mean?”
“From what Q’s heard, this isn’t an Indian knife. It doesn’t belong here.”
“Do you know where it’s from?”
“No idea. But not Phoenix, not even the Southwest. Q heard that a long time, back when he did want to find it an’ sell it, back before he knew the dark ones were after it. Understand?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Thanks, Q.” I started toward the door.
“You going after this thing?”
I pulled the door open but paused to face him once more. “I’m not sure I have much choice. I don’t know who else is trying to track it down. But even if Fitzwater is the only one, I have to find it before he does.”
“Q doesn’t know what it takes to use it, but that kind of power . . .”
“I’m not sure I’d want to use it. Can it be destroyed?”
“It might be a thousand years old. In all that time, it seems likely somebody’s tried. Don’t you think?”
It was worth considering.
“Take care, Q.”
I stepped back out into the afternoon sunlight and checked the street. A part of me expected to see weres and weremancers coming at me from every direction, led by the silver-haired gentleman. But the sidewalks were empty. I slid into the pickup, started her up, and pulled away from the curb.
“Namid, I need to speak with you.”
The last word had barely crossed my lips when he materialized in the passenger seat of the truck, his waters roughened, so that the sunlight shining through the windshield made him sparkle like a tropical sea.
“Ohanko, the glamour your father put on you still protects you. I would not have found you but for your summons.”
“That’s good to know.”
“And yet, you have summoned me again, something you and your father do with entirely too much frequency. I have told you this before.”
“What do you know about a magical stone blade?” I asked, ignoring the reprimand.
He stared back at me, his eyes shining, his translucent features conveying enough surprise to tell me that he knew of the knife.
“I would ask the same question of you,” he said, his voice like waves pounding a rocky shore. “What do you know of it?”
I trusted Namid as much as I did any person or creature I’d ever encountered, but I had given Q my word that I wouldn’t tell anyone where I got my information. Not even Namid. “I know that dark sorcerers are searching for it. They killed a pawn broker, a man I knew, and wrecked his shop. I don’t know where their search will take them next, but they’re after it.” Something occurred to me then, something I should have considered earlier.
“They cannot be allowed to find it.”
I put that other thought aside for now.
“Why not? What is it?”
I wasn’t sure he would answer me. Namid wasn’t always forthcoming with this sort of information. He usually preferred to handle matters of magical intrigue on his own, rather than to involve me. He surprised me, though, and that scared me.
“It is a weapon of unparalleled magical power.”
