He shrugged. “You could tell me you killed all of them and I couldn’t use a word of it in court.”
“I didn’t kill any of them.”
“That’s the damnedest part of it, you didn’t. It would work so much better if you had. You found one of the bodies, you went to work for the victim’s employer, heck, took over the victim’s old job for all I know. I’ve got witnesses that show you were out there trying to find a group of people, who all just happen to get killed that same way a couple days later. The more I look at those pictures, the more those chest wounds look like what a really big animal maw would do to a human body…and your old car got tore apart by wild animals, then burned to slag, a few nights before they died. You leave town and the murders stop.” He held up his hands in puzzlement. “If I found a guy who swore he saw you working as a lion tamer, I might have something that made half a lick of sense.”
“What if you found me in possession of a trio of severed wolf heads?” I tried to sound sarcastic.
“Now that’s more like what I’ve been orbiting around. Whatever killed those people, you took it out: But where’s Valente fit? And why did you visit the Old Ways before they were killed? And when did the big, bad wolves learn to fire forty-five caliber bullets through a glass-packed silencer?” Salazar tapped the photo still in my hands. “That’s what they dug out of his shoulder.”
He sighed. “Mr. Fisher, I’ve made a career out of understanding the weird ones, but this mess is beyond me. Serial rapists, arsonists who get a sexual thrill from fire, men that are homicidally attracted to seven year old girls…I understand those cases. This…I suspect you’re the only man on the planet who knows what really happened in Oklahoma.”
“You might want to move.”
I did so, a casual step to the right, just as a plump bumblebee dive-bombed over my shoulder. It crashed into Agent Salazar’s stomach with an angry splat. My time with Veruca was paying off: I ducked for cover, before turning to look for the gunmen trying to kill me.
3
I
t wasn’t hard to spot them. I had expected nothing, maybe a distant rooftop with a glint of metal on the edge. A man in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie, standing in the bed of a pickup truck was not what I had envisioned. With both hands, he held out an enormous pistol, the silenced barrel making it easily as long as a T-ball bat. Three more shots. The sickening whack of one told me it, too, hit Agent Salazar.
If I were a war wizard, I would’ve blown him up. My fireballs were unfortunately non-existent. I scrambled across the parking lot, taking shelter behind a forest green SUV. This did not deter my assailant as much as I had hoped. His gun didn’t make a sound, but his bullets did as they screamed through the metal of the vehicle. Five shots hit in rapid succession. Two tore all the way through the vehicle, not far from my head. I needed a spell, or a bodyguard, more than ever. A distant cha-chunk suggested he was reloading.
I took a quick inventory: a fat wallet, a chaos pen knife, car keys, and a mace-spray-sized canister. I pulled the last item out, disabled the safety, and mumbled a luck spell over it. I dashed past the front end of the SUV and hurled my pocket flamethrower in the attacker’s general direction. It landed with a clink in the bed of the pickup, but didn’t ignite.
The man was reloading, but he wasn’t alone. The driver and a passenger were crawling out of the cab. I couldn’t see the driver well, but the passenger was pulling out an oversized gun of his own. I dove for cover, but didn’t quite make it. A mini-pothole caught my foot and brought me crashing down to the asphalt. The passenger’s first volley sailed overhead. The gunmen in the truck bed took a step to get a better angle. All the luck spells I’d ever thrown were finally catching up to me; karmic balance due on delivery.
My luck wasn’t out. The gunman’s step brought his foot down on the incendiary and the belch of flame enveloped both him and the passenger. Their screams were unpleasant.
The newly appeared wall of flame cut off the driver from view. I forced myself up off the ground and backpedaled into hiding behind the SUV. I drew my pen, but couldn’t quite decide what I wanted it to look like. The chaos blade responded to my indecision with a cross between a short-sword and a katana with a main-gauche style blade catch near the hilt: I went with it.
The driver miscalculated that I had continued running forward, out of the lot. He moved up to where I had fallen, his back toward me as he scanned that direction, gun raised. I lunged and thrust a brilliant yellow pointy end into his jacket. There was a crackle as the blade pierced his flesh and tiny blue-white electrical arcs raced over the cloth. No blood came out, only a hiss of gray smoke. The man twitched like he had just shoved a fork into a wall outlet.
For a second, I thought I had stabbed a robot assassin. When I pulled out the chaos blade, though, his scream was human enough. Maybe it meant I was a bad person, but what I did next came naturally enough: I stabbed him again. The blade had changed to a murky gray hue. No wound ever appeared; the man’s flesh turned to liquid as my swing advanced. By the time I checked my momentum, nothing was left of the assailant but a bubbling puddle and a few strips of cloth.
V had warned me about the “secondary” effects, but liquefying an enemy on contact seemed pretty damn primary to me.
4
Agent Salazar was down on the sidewalk, a pool of blood spreading out beneath him. I pulled out my grem-phone and dialed 911. The device sputtered, sparked, then fell to pieces in my hand. I cursed, but no sooner had the last modified toy car tire stopped rolling then I heard the sirens in the distance. Apparently, my deal with the Gremlin only covered three calls.
“Colin, we really need to go.”
My dark voice was right.
“I usually am.”
I stayed anyway. I had become associated with a lot of unpleasant things in recent weeks. I needed penance, even if only for psychological reasons. I grabbed Salazar’s hand and squeezed it. “Come on, buddy, hang in there. The cavalry’s on its way.”
I thought he was unconscious, but his eyes opened and looked at me. “Thank you.”
The next hour was a blur of names and faces. For all the officers, agents, paramedics, and special investigators I met, I don’t really remember any of them. Unlike in my vagabond days, they all seemed to believe I was one of the good guys. They respected that I had stayed with the downed agent until help arrived…but they also respected my employer once his name came up. I answered their questions (sans any reference to magic or pocket flamethrowers), but they seemed more interested in running forensics on the scorched truck, two bodies, and the strange acidic slime puddle in the middle of the parking lot than in talking to me.
“Fisher.” I recognized that voice immediately.
Her eyes were chestnut brown this time, not the lake water blue I’d seen in the Oklahoma interrogation room. A quick glimpse at her aura revealed no supernatural skin-riders. “Agent Devereaux.”
She stood beside me and watched the technicians at work. “I told him coming to see you was a bad idea. I’ll admit this wasn’t exactly what I was worried about, but I knew it was a bad idea. Everything involving you is a bad idea.”
I nodded, uncertain of what to say. I didn’t know Rick Salazar well, but I had intuitively liked him. It didn’t help that I had no idea what she did or didn’t remember of our past conversation.
We stood there in silence. At last, she gave up and asked the question I’d been dreading for the last hour. “Were they trying to kill you or him?”
I went with my gut. “Me, I think.”
“Yeah, me too.” Her reply surprised me. “It’ll be a tough sell. Most of the locals are already committed to calling it an attempted cop killing. Hard to blame them. I wouldn’t want to investigate anything involving Valente International, either.”
I didn’t feel like talking. Agent Devereaux eventually continued. “Do you have it taken care of? Will Valente make sure the people responsible pay?”
I nodded. “If he doesn’t, I will.”
More silence followed before I asked, “What about Salazar? Is he going to make it?”
“Early reports, the docs think he has a chance. He caught both shots in the belly, well away from heart and spine. Still...”
“Still.” I glanced around the crowded parking lot. “You want to go for a walk? My car’s trapped inside the crime scene tape.”
I could tell she wanted to remind me I was a suspected serial killer, but instead she nodded. “What’s on your mind?”
I waited till we were comfortably away from the buzz of the crowd before answering. “I want to know what Salazar was looking for. I feel a little responsible for what happened to him.”
“I was hoping you’d tell me. Whatever it was, he wasn’t sharing with the rest of the team. Something about Oklahoma was gnawing at him…maybe in spite of, or more likely because of, the orders from on high to file the deaths under unsolved and move along.”
“The Old Ways massacre and the animal-like bite marks. He showed me a few pictures, but that’s as far as we got before the attack.” That was what I started to say, before I dodged a silenced bullet via intuition, but that was way too weird, even for me to accept. How had I known it was coming? And why didn’t I instinctively try to pull Salazar out of the way too?
“Yeah, that was the odd one. Three gunshot victims, fifty-seven heartless, frozen bodies. Our guy profiles as a lone killer, but there’s no way one person did all that. It was almost like one of those religious cult suicides. But why that MO?” I could feel her eyes digging into me, as if the answers were written just beneath my skin.
“
No, no, NO.”
“Too late, I’ve made up my mind. It’s penance and I’m doing it.”
“Doesn’t that have to be assigned by a priest or something?”
Before I could talk myself out of it, I opened my mouth. “Look, he seemed to think I knew what happened. I don’t, at least not all of it, but if you send me his files on it, I’ll see if I can’t fill in the gaps. I think I can name the killer to you, maybe even prove it to your satisfaction, but I doubt it will be anything you can type up in a report.”
She looked stunned. “Are you offering to turn state’s evidence against Lucien Valente?”
“Not exactly. Just get me Salazar’s file and I’ll see what I can do.” I was being a Good Samaritan, but I was also curious as to what exactly had happened at the Old Ways commune after Veruca and I had left. Thinking back on all the very young and very old living there, I could see how they would be easy pickings for an angry wendigo. But...
“Why so many? Why didn’t they run?”
“Exactly.”
5
T
he dinner with the Unseelie ambassador that evening went a lot smoother than anticipated. I suspected that sending a less-than-brilliant troll as diplomat might have been an indirect commentary about the quality of Valente’s previous personal wizards, but I didn’t let that get in the way of having a good time. Of all my hospitality offerings, he took to the Kahlua with the greatest enthusiasm.
After the Eye of Winter, the troll was almost mundane by comparison. If you squinted just right, he looked human…if NFL defensive linemen counted as human. His skin looked professionally tanned, every ravenesque hair was gelled in place, and his hunter green suit was perfectly tailored to his massive frame. His physical form was easily three inches taller than mine, but over it all hung the shadow of his true self. The troll’s essence was so strong that no attempt to disguise him as human could ever be wholly successful. Still, I appreciated the attempt at camouflage—his size was unnerving even without his true form.
He spoke in between massive gulps of coffee liquor. “I tell you, wiz. You sure know how to throw dinner. Though...” He leaned closer. “You don’t know much about negotiating. Number one rule: let the troll have what he wants.”
It came out more like nee-goat-shheat, which was a comfort to me. Despite his massive size, he was sloshed drunk, one step removed from stuporville.
“Remind me why that’s a good thing? I don’t want to be the one to bounce this guy after last call.”
The laws of hospitality forbade physical violence during this meeting for about fifteen different reasons. No, if he was really drunk, it meant I didn’t have to worry about him tricking me.
“But he’s dumb as a box of
…
yeah, that would be pretty embarrassing.”
“Sir Kerath, I appreciate the free advice, but my instructions were unequivocal: I cannot sell that tract of land to the court.” I paused to pour a quarter-inch in my glass, before emptying the rest of the bottle in Kerath’s. “But...”
“But what?” The troll’s voice could have been heard on the other side of my massive laboratory residence. Next to him, it was deafening.
I did my best to politely ignore the ringing in my ears and settled back into my chair. “No, no. I should not have said anything.”
“Tell me. Kerath commands it.”
I’m guessing that’s what he said. Whatever the fae usually drank, I don’t think it was processed via modern distillation technology. “I shouldn’t…but since you wish it, Sir Kerath, I will. Perhaps if I knew what your people needed the land for, I could present a suitable counteroffer.”
Kerath shook his head, like a large dog trying to shed water. “What little…I mean, what wiz say?”
“What do the Unseelie intend to do with the land?”