Shadow's Blade, page 4
“I’m guessing,” I said. “But there’s magic on these trash cans.”
Kona’s eyebrows went up. “All right. So why wouldn’t she use the same mojo here? It worked well enough the first time.”
I considered the question. “There are a number of possible reasons. Maybe she didn’t want to hurt or kill the guys outside. Maybe she knew them, cared about them, and so she held back.”
“That’s one possibility. What’s the other?”
“I can think of two others. The first is that the casting she used inside wouldn’t work out here. It seems like she found some way to tap into the restaurant’s electrical system, and she might not have been able to replicate the spell once she was outside. But that reasoning breaks down pretty quickly. A sorcerer powerful enough to use magic like that inside would be able to come up with some other attack.”
“All right, then what about third?”
“Well,” I said, “if I found myself face-to-face with a sorcerer I knew I couldn’t beat, someone so powerful that any attack spell I tried was bound to fail, I’d go to a different sort of attack, something that a normal warding might not stop.”
“Like dropping a garbage can on him,” Kevin said.
“Exactly.”
My eyes met Kevin’s, and apparently Kona didn’t like what she saw pass between us.
“The woman killed a man,” she said. “At least that’s what my witnesses are telling me. For now at least, she’s as much a murder suspect as the guy with silver hair.”
“Even if she was protecting herself and her kids,” I said.
“Even if. And what’s more, you know I’m right. You haven’t been off the job that long.”
She was right. For the most part.
“Not that long, no. But the fact is, I don’t have a badge anymore.”
“Aside from the PPD, you don’t have a client, either.”
“The PPD isn’t a client, and you know it. I do this to help you out, and because, sick as it is, I still love working a crime scene. But I’m not bound by the same rules.”
“Justis,” she said, a warning in her tone.
I stepped closer to her. “Think about it, Kona,” I said, my voice low. “Procedure might be telling you one thing, but your head and your heart are telling you another. The woman had kids with her, little kids. She wouldn’t have gotten into a magical battle unless she had no choice.”
“That a new magic you’ve learned?” she asked. “You can listen in to what’s going in my head and my heart?”
I held her gaze, saying nothing. After a few seconds of this, she rolled her eyes.
“Fine, it might have been self-defense. Be that as it may—”
“You invited me in,” I said, “but I have no official role here. So wouldn’t it be helpful to you if I dug around a little bit?”
“That depends.”
“It’s not like I’m going to help her slip out of the country. But the magic is pointing me in a clear direction: She’s a victim, or would have been if she hadn’t gotten away. So let me work that angle. Maybe I can find her. And maybe through her I can find your silver-haired killer.” I pointed at the second corpse. “And figure out how he killed that woman.”
For a long time, Kona didn’t respond. She pursed her lips, her eyes trained on the ground in front of her, and after a while she began to shake her head, which told me that I had won.
“She’s driving a minivan, silver, late model. We have conflicting reports on whether it’s a Toyota, a Mazda, or a Honda. She was last seen turning onto the southbound entrance ramp.” I thought she might say more, but after a moment she closed her notepad.
“What else, Kona?”
“It’s probably nothing.”
“Probably?”
She raised her eyes to mine. “A couple of witnesses said that her van nearly tipped over as she sped away. And one of them was convinced he saw the silver-haired guy hold his hand up, like he was pointing at the van. This was before the woman he was holding died.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. I went back to the corpse and again used the pencil to uncover the wound on her shoulder. There was one possibility that explained the wound and what the silver-haired man might have been doing. It might even have explained why there was no trace of magic on the dead woman. The problem was, I didn’t believe what I was contemplating could be possible. Didn’t believe it, and didn’t want to.
“What’s on your mind, Justis?” Kona asked from behind me.
I shook my head, and stood once more. “Nothing. I’m . . . nothing.”
“Uh huh.” No one could pack more sarcasm into two syllables than Kona.
“I’ll let you know what I find out,” I said. “You’ll do the same?”
“As much as I can.”
It was, I knew, the best she could offer.
“All right. See you around, partner. Kevin, take care.”
“Later, Jay.”
I made my way back to the Z-ster, got in, and started her up. After idling for a few seconds, I pulled out of the parking lot and steered onto the interstate. But rather than heading back north into the city, I drove south. I couldn’t say why. I didn’t think I could track the woman by her magic, though to make sure I cast a spell that, at least in theory, might have worked.
Seven elements: the woman, her minivan, her kids, her red-brown magic, the freeway, me, and a magical trail connecting all of us. I felt the power of my spell dance along my skin as I drove, but I saw nothing.
Still, I drove for a while, emerging from the sprawl of Phoenix into the flat open desert of the Gila River Indian Community. The reservation covered close to six hundred square miles, and had been, since the middle of the nineteenth century, home to the Akimel O’odham and Pee-Posh tribes, also known as the Pimas and the Maricopas. As with so much Indian territory in the state, there wasn’t much to look at on this land. Even back in 1859, the Federal Government had already gotten very good at picking out the least valuable lands for the tribal nations. There were few landmarks along this stretch of highway beyond a small airfield about three miles south of the restaurant.
I tried the tracking spell a second time, but was no more successful than I’d been before. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to turn around. I drove forty miles through the heart of the territory and beyond its southern boundary, until I reached the outskirts of Casa Grande. There, finally, I took the exit and reentered the freeway heading north.
I’d wasted some gas and some time, but I didn’t mind that. What bothered me was the sense I had after starting back toward Phoenix that I was now heading in the wrong direction. My spell hadn’t worked, and I couldn’t explain what I was feeling. But I had been a cop and a weremyste for too long to dismiss it.
I resisted the urge to head south again, and made my way back into the city. The one blessing in all of this was that I was driving against the worst of the traffic. Before long I had pulled up in front of Billie Castle’s house in Tempe.
Billie and I met during my investigation into the last of the Blind Angel murders. The killer’s final victim, a girl named Claudia Deegan, was the daughter of Arizona’s senior U.S. Senator, Randolph Deegan, who had established himself as the most powerful politician in the state. He was about to be elected governor in what everyone, including his opponent, knew would be a landslide, and many believed he had presidential ambitions. Among those who believed this was my girlfriend. Billie was a journalist. To be more precise, she was what many in the business call an opinion shaper. She maintained a blog called “Castle’s Village,” which attracted a wide readership throughout the Southwest.
When we met, she was digging up information on Claudia’s murder, and I was less than forthcoming with what I knew. Eight years on the Phoenix police force had left me with a healthy aversion to the press.
But in addition to being tenacious and smart as hell, she was also charming and beautiful, and for some reason surpassing understanding, she wound up being drawn to me as powerfully as I was to her.
Notwithstanding a few preliminary bumps, our relationship had been developing steadily ever since. It took her a little while to believe in the magic I wield, and a bit longer to accept that my ability to cast spells was worth the cost of the phasings. To be honest, I’m not sure that she’s convinced of this yet. There are drugs that a weremyste can take—they’re called blockers—that would blunt the effects of the full moon and probably keep me from going insane later in life. But they do this at the expense of my runecrafting, and that’s not a trade I’m willing to make. At least not yet. But I was convinced that if Billie had her way, I’d be taking them.
Aside from that, though, things have been great.
Well, mostly. Being involved with me did almost get her killed during the summer, when Saorla threw the magical equivalent of a bomb at a Mexican place in which we were having lunch. Billie’s injuries were severe: broken bones, concussion, a collapsed lung. But she’s better now.
Yeah.
I have no idea why she is still with me. If I had been in her position, I would have run screaming from this relationship months ago. I was a lucky man.
I parked out front, pulled the Glock from beneath the seat and slipped it into my jacket pocket, and approached her front door. Before I was halfway up the path, the door opened and she came outside looking none-too-happy.
“Thank God,” she said. “I’ve been calling you, texting you; I even tried email.”
“I was driving. What’s up?”
“Your friend’s here. He’s doing that silent immovable thing and it’s driving me nuts.”
CHAPTER 4
My “friend,” as she put it, was Namid, the runemyste. And it was a measure of how much time Billie and I had been spending together that Namid would choose to wait for me here as opposed to at my home or office.
I walked the rest of the way up the path and halted in front of her. The sun shone in her eyes, making them gleam like gem-cut emeralds. I kissed her, drawing a reluctant grin.
“Hi.”
“You should have told me you had a pet before we got involved.”
I laughed. “I don’t think Namid would like being called a pet any more than he likes being called a ghost.”
“Like I care. He should have thought of that before he started sitting like a statue in the middle of my dining room.”
“At least he doesn’t eat much.”
She smiled again, even as she shook her head. “Get inside, and get him out of my house.”
“That might take a while.”
“The sooner he’s gone, the sooner you have me to yourself.”
Well, there you go. That’s called motivation.
She pulled the screen door open and I stepped past her into the house. As she’d said, Namid was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her dining room, as still as ice.
Namid and his fellow runemystes were created by the Runeclave, an assembly of powerful sorcerers, centuries ago, in an act of sacrifice and self-abnegation so profound I can barely comprehend it. Namid and the others were weremystes, like me, but far more skilled. At the time, the magical community was split between those who believed runecrafting ought to serve the greater good, and those who saw in their talents a path to domination of the non-magical world. Thirty-nine weremystes were put to death and then brought back in spirit form to be eternal guardians against practitioners of dark sorcery.
Namid, who had been a Zuni shaman, was one of them. He had once been my dad’s mentor; now he was mine. On some level he believed he had failed my father, and that his failure had led to my dad’s early descent into insanity. That, it seemed to me, more than any inherent promise I possessed as a runecrafter, explained why Namid had taken such an interest in me.
He could be an exasperating teacher. He was terse to the point of rudeness, he expected me to master with ease spells that I knew were beyond my meager talents, and he was reluctant to answer questions that weren’t relevant to what we were doing at any given moment. But he was powerful and wise, and on more than one occasion he had saved my life.
He was also the the most beautiful being I had ever seen. No doubt because he had been in life a member of the K’ya’na-Kwe clan, the water people, his spirit had taken a form appropriate to that ancestry. He stood as tall as a warrior, muscular and broad in the shoulders and chest. But he was composed entirely of faintly luminous waters. Often, as now, he appeared clear and placid, like a mountain lake at dawn; at other times his surface roughened, leaving him roiled, impenetrable, and steel gray, like the sea in a storm. Always, though, his eyes shone from his chiseled face, as bright and clear as winter stars.
He peered up at me now as I crossed into Billie’s dining room, his expression unfathomable. “You are late in getting here. Where have you been?”
Let me tell you, it was a little disconcerting having a centuries-old watery ghost talk to you like he was your mother.
Billie had followed me into the room and was watching me, expectant, also waiting for an answer.
“Kona called me,” I said, more to her than to the runemyste. “She needed me to swing by a crime scene over near the interstate.”
“Needed you. As in, someone used magic?”
“Yes. Two people were killed at a fast-food burger place. The restaurant wound up looking like a magical battlefield.”
I could tell she wanted to ask me more, but Namid cut in with his usual charm and social aplomb.
“These matters can wait. Ohanko needs to train.”
Ohanko was a name he had given me years ago. In his language it meant something akin to “reckless one.” I didn’t mind it; in his own way, I think Namid used it with affection. And I could hardly argue with what it said about me and my behavior over the years.
“Fine,” Billie said, turning her back on us and seeking sanctuary in her kitchen. “Train as much as you like. But try not to make a mess of my house this time.”
“Have we made a mess?” Namid asked, his liquid brow furrowing.
I pulled off my leather bomber jacket, and the shoulder holster I wore beneath it. “You have a tendency to throw things at me: books, silverware, CDs.” I took my Glock from my bomber pocket and secured it in the holster. Then I lowered myself to the floor opposite him.
“I am trying to teach you to defend yourself from a variety of assaults.”
“I know. But they’re Billie’s books and silverware and CDs, and this is Billie’s house.”
The runemyste stared after her, seeming to contemplate this. “I see. I will try to make my attacks less . . . disruptive.”
“I’m sure she’d appreciate that.”
“Clear yourself,” he said.
Clearing was a technique runecrafters used to focus their thoughts and enhance their spellcasting. In truth, the most skilled of my kind didn’t need to work on such things, and even I didn’t take the time to clear when I was out on the street, casting to save my life or to attack an enemy. But Namid tended to push me hard in our training sessions, and the act of clearing had become a ritual of sorts, one that allowed me to set aside possible distractions—Billie, my father, whatever work I was doing for clients, and, on days like this one, whatever investigations I had taken on at Kona’s request—and concentrate on my runecrafting.
I closed my eyes and summoned a memory from my childhood of a camping trip my parents and I took to the Superstition Wilderness. This was when I was no more than ten or eleven, before my dad’s phasings got so bad that his mind started to quit on him, and before my mother died in a scandal that poisoned my youth and left me essentially orphaned. It was the happiest I could remember being. One afternoon we hiked out to a high promontory, and while we were there, I spotted an eagle circling above the desert, the sunlight reflecting off the golden feathers on its neck, its wing tips splayed. Whenever I needed to clear myself, I focused on that image of the eagle until the rest of the world fell away.
This was what I did now, and when I felt ready to cast, I opened my eyes again, meeting the runemyste’s bright gaze.
“Defend yourself,” Namid said, his voice rumbling like distant floodwaters.
Namid had never been one to ease into a training session, and true to form, he started me off with a wicked attack spell. I flew off the floor and slammed into Billie’s ceiling, my arms and legs spread wide. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, and had no idea how to get down. It was as if he had strapped me to the ceiling with invisible steel cables, including one that constricted my chest.
Billie emerged from the kitchen holding a towel and damp bowl, no doubt drawn by the noise I’d made when I hit. Spotting me suspended above her dining room, she rolled her eyes and walked back into the other room.
I had learned that the images I called to mind when envisioning Namid’s attacks often held the secret to defeating them. I’d thought of myself being strapped to the ceiling with cables, and so that was how I conceived of my warding. Me, the steel ropes holding me in place, and a magical cable cutter to slice through them.
It was only when I felt the spell tickle my skin that I remembered one crucial detail. And before I could do anything about it, I was falling.
I landed on my stomach in front of Namid and let out a grunt and then a groan.
“Your predicament required a more nuanced solution,” the myste said, so calmly he might have been talking about the weather. “If you had been held one hundred feet above the street rather than nine feet above this floor, you would be dead now.”
“In my defense, I realized that right after I cast the spell.”
He lifted an eyebrow but offered no other response.
I sat up, my movements stiff and painful, not only from the fall, but also from my earlier battle with GQ and Vogue. But I repositioned myself so that I was facing the myste again, sitting cross-legged as he was, and I waited for his next assault.
“Defend yourself.”
For the next hour, Namid attacked me with an array of spells, some of them familiar, some of them new and terrifying, including one that ripped gashes in my wrists, so that abruptly blood was gushing onto Billie’s oak floors. I didn’t think that she would be any happier about massive bloodstains on the polished wood than she was about the scattering of her books across her living room, but I also didn’t think Namid would want me fixating on that while I bled out.
