Authors: Anthony Francis
“Nobody fucking touch
nothing
,” McGough said, as we all stood in shock, watching firemen back away from the blackened corpse. Revy’s death had taken only a moment, but it had taken an eternity to put those tenacious fires out. “This just became a crime scene.”
“Wasn’t ‘magical assault with intent to kill’ already a crime?” I said, cradling Cinnamon against me. She was crying. I hadn’t realized how much she liked Revy. “I’m sorry, baby—”
“I
liked
him,” Cinnamon said bitterly. “The fang was
nice
to me—”
I drew a breath. “Rand,” I said. “There was someone else on the scene, a short little prick with baggy pants, a skateboard, and a huge-ass hat—”
“I-I saw him too,” Cinnamon said suddenly. “When I went to get the pole. Sittin’ on a wall, watchin’ it all, grinning with some nasty ol’ silver grill on his teeth—”
“So?” McGough said, eyes sharp. “What do you think that had to do with this?”
“I saw him right when the wind picked up,” I said.
“I caught that too,” Gibbs said. “Just a glimpse, but I definitely saw the guy—and as soon as I looked, the wind snapped like a bitch and near ripped the tarp out of my hands.”
“Can’t be a coincidence,” I said. “He may have been magically enhancing the wind—”
“Oh,
hell
. Thanks, Frost. We’ll search the area,” McGough said, motioning to an officer. “First things first, though—this is a crime scene now. I need you to wait by your car—”
“I wasn’t done,” I snapped. “He was pretty far off. At first I thought he was trying to watch from a safe distance, but I surveyed the ley line crossings a few years back and one goes through the Cemetery right where he was standing. He could be a technical practitioner rather than a bloodline witch, which might affect his choice of escape routes—”
“Oh, hell, we’ve got one who thinks she can be
helpful
,” McGough said, putting his hand to his to his brow. “Rand, get your pet witch and her pet cat out of my crime scene—”
“Now
just
a minute,” I began hotly. “You can’t just—”
“He can’t, but
I
can,” Rand said. “It’s
my
crime scene now.” McGough twitched and frowned, looking less like Mr. Wizard and more like an angry garden gnome, and Rand just raised an eyebrow at him. “Are you going to be a dick about this?”
McGough raised his little hands. “No, no, Homicide gets first crack at a body.”
“Thank you. I’ve called ident, but the Black Hats obviously can have the scene when the coroner pronounces,” Rand said. “Look, Dakota, seriously, McGough’s not trying to be a dick, we just need to get you physically off the crime scene. If you could wait by the car—”
“
Not
until he apologizes.”
“What, about the pet witch crack?” McGough said, laughing. “Look, babe, if your skin’s that thin you shouldn’t have scribbled all over it—”
“To Cinnamon,” I said coldly.
McGough looked down at my daughter. “Hey, little lady,” he said, a little of the kindly wizard creeping back into his features. “Sorry I called you a cat—”
“I
am
a cat,” Cinnamon said, hissing. “but don’t be calling me a
pet.
”
McGough stared blankly at her a moment, then forced the twinkle back into his eyes. “Sorry, little lady,” he said, “I was just kidding around—”
Cinnamon smiled, then suddenly barked, “Fucking
toad—”
“Cinnamon!” I said.
“What?” she said, looking away. “See how
he
likes bein’ called a name.”
McGough straightened. “Rand,” he said. “I ain’t trying to tell you your job, but clear the site—and take some separate statements before they’re completely cross-contaminated.”
“I know, I know,” Rand said, running his hand over his bald head. “I’ll take care of it. You get on the warrant for me. I don’t want this fucked up, not for any reason—”
“Why do you need a warrant?” I said, as Rand began herding us away from our improvised tent and the foul black smoke billowing out of it. “We all saw—”
“
That
was a public safety operation.
This
is a crime scene,” Rand said. “Technically we could get by on the permission of Oakland Cemetery—”
“What aren’t you tellin’ us?” Cinnamon said, stopping so suddenly I ran into her.
“Cinnamon, Dakota,” Rand said, motioning to a sandy-haired female officer. “I’m … going to need to split you two up for a minute. Just long enough to take the statements.”
“Fuck that—” I began, then put my hand to my head. “Let me guess, it’s—”
“Just standard procedure,” Rand finished for me, staring at me and Cinnamon cautiously. Then he grinned. “You’re not going to be a pain about this, are you, Kotie?”
“No, we’ve been around the block,” I said. The female officer smiled at us, through a dozen little white tape bandages on her face, and I nodded at Cinnamon to go with her.
Rand walked over to his cruiser, sat down on the hood, and motioned for me to join him. I did, and for a few minutes we just watched the swarm of police activity. I folded my arms over my chest: I was still trembling with adrenaline and the crisp air felt good against my hot skin.
After a few moments, instead of working the case, Rand surprised me by touching a sore spot. “Look, Kotie … you
are
going to see your Dad, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I snapped. “This Saturday, in fact.” Then I softened. “Look, I know Dad and I don’t get along … but you’re right. He deserves to meet his granddaughter.”
“Yeah,” Rand said, and then fell silent.
Instinctively, I looked for and found Cinnamon, talking with Officer Lee next to a distant grave. But ultimately my eyes were drawn back to that horrible smoke, now just trailing wisps. Revenance was gone, burned up before our eyes, and I couldn’t believe it. “We
saw
it. You really need to go through all this?” I asked sadly. “A warrant, separating the witnesses—”
“Absolutely,” Rand said grimly. “A robber opened up on your Dad and me in a crowded store, but the evidence—spent casings, slugs, even the gun with prints—got thrown out because we didn’t get the shopkeeper’s permission to search. Another case went sour when two witnesses convinced each other a house’s blinds were up when the cruiser’s camera showed them down.”
“And them?” I said, motioning to the officers milling about. “Aren’t they witnesses too?”
Rand looked up sharply, seeing McGough yelling at an officer who had peeked under the tarp. “This is a fucking mess. You shouldn’t have been here.
He
shouldn’t have been here—”
“Who is the little toad?”
“Head of Magical Crimes Investigation, the Black Hats,” Rand said, still staring. “Homicide normally calls them
after
whatever’s gone down.”
“Come to think of it, Revy wasn’t—” I began, then stopped. I didn’t want to say Revy wasn’t already dead out loud; my mind hadn’t wrapped around that yet. But my question remained: “So … why was Homicide here?”
“To get you,” Rand said simply, and I leaned back to stare at him. “You attracted a lot of attention with your little stunt at the Masquerade a couple of months back, and I owe McGough a favor, so … when he couldn’t handle this, he called me, and I called you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Now I know how a marker feels—called in.”
“I’m sorry,” Rand said. “If I’d known that fang … that Revenance wasn’t going to make it, I wouldn’t have called you. This is why McGough suddenly turned into a dick. Having someone with magical training at the scene of a magical crime creates a horrible mess.”
“Why?” I asked. “Seems like you’d want the knowledge—”
“If we ever
do
catch the guy,” Rand said grimly, “his lawyer will argue
you
did it.”
“
What?
” I said. “
Me?
How? You called me after it was already started—”
“People don’t understand magic,” Rand said. “
Anything
sounds plausible. If they can’t pin it on you, they’ll try McGough next, and he couldn’t even do a card trick—”
“The largest School of Magic in North America is five miles from here,” I said. “Emory University—a billion dollar endowment, my alma mater? Maybe you’ve heard of it? There are plenty of expert witnesses you can get who can explain magic.”
“Not to a jury,” Rand said. “Not so they’d understand. And defense lawyers know it. And the only thing that scares juries more than a wizard on the loose is a cop with a wand.”
I sighed. I just wanted to create art, to fill the finest canvases on Earth with marks of beauty. Ours is a great world, full of magic and wonders, and yet there I sat, mourning a friend, my skin still tingling with stray mana from the spell that had killed him.
“Why,” I asked, “do people have to go fuck everything up?”
And then McGough was yelling at Horscht, who was … holding a spray can.
“Oh, hell,” Rand said, rising—and I followed. “This is why we clear first responders—”
“What do you mean, put it down?” Horscht said, jerking the can back from McGough protectively, making the little gnome even madder. “This, this is evidence—”
“But where did you
get
it?” McGough barked. “Did you take a picture? Did you make some notes? Did you bother to use a glove or a baggie before getting your stupid paws on it—”
“No, I didn’t have one,” Horscht said, jerking it back, but I noticed he
was
holding it with a piece of paper so his fingerprints wouldn’t get on it. “And you don’t either. I came to get an evidence bag. This is
important
. He
had
to use this to spray the tag—”
“It wasn’t spray painted,” I said, cocking my head back at the mess that was left of the tag. “Hard to tell now, after all that fire and water, but it
had
to be infused oil chalk.”
McGough looked over at me sharply, then back at the tag. “You’re right,” he said slowly, “he couldn’t have … or could he—”
“Horscht, put it down before McGruff the Crime Dog bursts a blood vessel,” I said. “I’m sure he wants to fingerprint it, even though the killer couldn’t have used it to make this mark—”
“I get the point, I shouldn’t have touched it,” Horscht said, staring down at the can, a plain white affair with a larger-than normal top and glittery gold oozing down one of its sides. “But I
did
take a picture, and I
do
remember where I got it—in the yard where we found the basketball goal. These crime scene guys, they think they’re so sharp but they
miss
stuff—”
At that crack, McGough, who had calmed down as Horscht explained himself, suddenly glared at Rand, who scowled back at him. I remembered the ‘first responders’ crack. Oh, great.
I’d
just blundered onto some internal rivalry in the APD. Joy.
“—and I thought
this
was evidence,” he was saying. “Why are you so sure that it isn’t?”
“Fair question,” I said, “but Home Depot doesn’t sell spray cans filled with a thousand bucks of magical pigment, and even if they did you wouldn’t want to
spray
a magical mark—”
“Why not?” Horscht said, shaking the can experimentally. “I mean—”
“NO!” yelled McGough, but it was too late. Horscht squeezed the top, and a screaming blaze of golden flame erupted as the magical ink—
magical ink, oh shit!
—reacted against the stray mana floating through the air. He flinched and screamed, dropping the can, which skittered across the pavement, propelled for a moment by an elaborate trail of fire.
Like a fat number six made of yellow and orange sparkles, the fireball folded in on itself and curled lazily up into the sky, taking the trail with it, coiling off into the clouds. Horscht was still screaming, chest and face covered in glowing wildstyle flames, but I grabbed him, flexed my hand over his face and chest, generating enough mana to pull the ink out of his skin before it could set and do damage. The sparkling stuff began attacking my skin now, a thousand pricking ants, but I just shook my hand until it dissipated into a cloud of colorful, acrid dust.
“Damnation, Horscht,” Rand said, steadying him. “You’d think you’d never been on a crime scene before. What were you thinking?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Horscht said, scared. “I’m sorry, sir—”
“You can’t play around with this shit,” I said. “Magic is really dangerous.”
“Cut him a break, he showed us all up,” McGough said. “Sorry I went off on you, Horscht. This is the best piece of evidence yet.”
We all stared at him in shock. McGough’s bluster was gone, replaced with a quiet seriousness. He’d put on a rubber glove and picked up the can, turning it so I could see an air valve sticking out of its neck, like you see on bicycle tires—a rechargeable spray can.
“Hell, Frost,” he said, “I sure wish you hadn’t been wrong about this.”
I stared at it. “Me too,” I said. “I’d never
heard
of magical marks this powerful before today, and if someone has learned to spray paint them …”
“ … we have a big problem,” McGough finished.