Wicked Misery (Miss Misery) (18 page)

“Hello?” The Gryphon’s upper torso disappeared from view. I held my breath.

“Hi,” came the sound of Steph’s voice.

“I see you got into the room,” the Gryphon said. “Security told me people from Bay Tech were here about the servers. I didn’t realize—”

“Oh yeah, someone already let me in.”

“Who?” Something darker, bitter, like rich chocolate, emerged within her. Suspicion.

Come on, Steph.

“Sorry, didn’t catch the name. Tall guy, brown hair. I’m almost done.”

“I wasn’t aware anyone had called you. Do you know who placed the service request?”

“Nope, I don’t. I just go where they tell me.”

I wet my lips. If the Gryphon asked to see Steph’s credentials, we were screwed. The fake ID might have been waved off by tired security, but a suspicious Gryphon was bound to take a closer look.

The Gryphon reappeared in my line of sight. She scratched her neck. “All right. Thank you.”

My fist tightened around the disorientation curse as she left. How long had Steph been working? She’d said she’d need ten minutes. It couldn’t have been more than five. Unless the curse was wicked powerful, there was no way it would last that long.

Once my awareness of the Gryphon subsided, I stepped out of the closet and peeked in on Steph. “Well?”

“Almost done. I thought for sure I was busted.”

I rested my head against the wall and exhaled heavily. That made two of us.

I did my best not to bug Steph, knowing that would only slow her down, but the close call with the Gryphon wore on my nerves. The next time I stretched out my gift, I noticed something was different. More emotions. Suspicion. Annoyance. An authoritative anxiety competing with Steph’s furtive anxiety.

Two or more people were on the move, heading our way. Shit. I glanced down the hallway in the opposite direction, but it was a dead end. So this was what it would come to—a showdown in the basement.

“People are coming.”

Swearing, Steph popped out of the server room and shut the door.

“Did it work? They know something’s up.”

“It’s good. We’re good.” She swung the laptop case over her shoulder.

I ran my fingers over the disorientation curse. “We’re not good. They’re coming this way.”

Whoever had made the disorientation curse had stuck it in a small spray bottle. Convenient. I positioned my finger on the trigger.

“You sure they’re coming about us?”

“Pretty sure. They must have checked with Bay Tech, or figured out no one called.”

“Great. Now what? Despite what I said earlier, I really don’t want to get arrested.”

“
You
don’t want to get arrested?” I grabbed her arm. “Walk. Look confident.”

No sooner had the words left my lips than two Gryphons—the woman from earlier and a man—turned the corner. I marched straight toward them, balling my magic in my gut as a last, most likely useless, resort. I’d never tried ensnaring a Gryphon before, and I doubted I was powerful enough.

“Excuse me.” The male Gryphon raised an arm to stop me, and I sprayed the curse in his face. He stumbled backward.

His companion reached for something on her belt. A gun? A stunning curse? Whichever, I got to her first. Two more sprays each and they were clutching the wall for support, the world probably spinning beneath them. Too bad it would be over in minutes.

I hightailed it to the stairs, hearing Steph pant as she brought up the rear. We tumbled out of the stairwell into the quiet lobby. The two security guards stood idly by while Gryphons disentangled dead imps from the defunct magic-detecting charms. I held my head high and strode to the doors without giving the Gryphons a second look. Between their fighting with the magic detectors and our distraction charms, they probably never noticed us.

The anticipation of freedom tortured me as I fought to keep my steps unrushed. I opened the front doors and sucked in a mouthful of night air. A great deal of Steph’s tension lifted, leaving me listless. Slowly, step by step, we descended the front stairs. Any second I expected the doors to burst open, to see Gryphons come flying out to grab us.

At street level, I turned to Steph and nodded. Then we made a mad run for half a block to where Lucen sat in his car waiting to make our getaway.

Chapter Thirteen

“Got it,” Steph said. “What was the last guy’s name?”

I dredged the name from the depths of my memory. “Gregory Penfield.” Had it really been only three days since I’d taken blood from him? Yawning, I glanced at my watch. Okay, technically it was now four days. No wonder I felt at death’s door.

I sipped my coffee, but caffeine was failing me. Adrenaline had come and gone. Once Steph had established she could get into the Gryphons’ system, I’d crashed. Utterly. She, on the other hand, had perked up considerably from the challenge. We were on borrowed time. Steph didn’t think it would be long before the real Bay Tech closed the breach, and she had to rush. Not even Lucen, Dezzi and the two other satyrs watching over her shoulders could spook her.

Well, not too much, anyway. Steph shifted closer to her laptop as Dezzi rested a hand on the back of her chair. “Here he is. If I send you all this information, can I go home now? Jim’s probably freaking out.”

“Of course,” Dezzi said. “Lucen, call her a cab.”

Scowling, Lucen shuffled through slips of paper by the bar. “You’ll have to meet them at the T stop. Human cabbies don’t venture deeper into this neighborhood at night.”

“Not the smart ones,” Steph muttered.

Lucen hung up the phone after explaining three times to the dispatcher that the cab was for a human who was heading
away
from Shadowtown. From the sound of it, there was going to be an extra fee added to the ride for hazard duty.

“Jessica needs sleep,” Lucen said. “She’s been up way too long.”

A protest formed on my tongue and died of its own absurdity. Lucen was right. Yet as exhausted as I was, I didn’t believe I’d actually get any sleep tonight. For one, I’d be in Lucen’s apartment. Two, the clock was ticking. Sleep wasted valuable thinking hours.

Dezzi nodded. “We will reconvene the whole council tomorrow.”

I shuffled upstairs, weirdly conscious of Lucen behind me and a thousand other random thoughts. To distract myself from visions of him sleeping mere feet away, I gave voice to one of the less bizarre ones. “I don’t have a toothbrush.”

“I have unused ones.”

“You keep unused toothbrushes lying around?”

He unlocked the apartment door. “I don’t like my visitors to have morning breath.”

“You mean your addicts?”

He didn’t contradict me. Feeling more ill than tired, I followed him through the kitchen and to the second floor.

“Spare room,” Lucen said, opening the door at the top of the steep stairwell and turning on the light. “You can use it as long as you need. I’ll get the toothbrush.” His voice was flat. I thought maybe he was tired too, but he had no reason to be.

The room was small with barely enough space for the bed and a dresser. The two doors on the right led to a closet and a bathroom. I checked over my shoulder then sniffed the bedsheets. A hint of detergent tickled my nose, but no cinnamon. That was a relief.

The sheets were a navy satin, cool and slippery under my thumb. I shuddered to consider how many other people might have enjoyed themselves beneath them. Thank whatever that satyrs, like all preds, kept their world clean.

“Your toothbrush, little siren. And a towel.”

I jumped and slid the blanket back in place. “Thanks.”

“Do you always sniff where you’re going to sleep?”

“Yes. I mean, no. Your, uh, clothes had a certain scent to them. I wondered if your linens had it too.”

He raised an eyebrow and seemed to be fighting a smirk. “I think you need your rest. I’ll probably be sleeping when you get up. Feel free to make yourself coffee or toast or anything when you do.”

“Thanks.”

I brushed my teeth, sat on the edge of the bed and kicked off my sneakers. The mattress was soft. The pillows felt like down. My body craved sleep, yet my brain wouldn’t shut up. Through the open drapes, the clouds rushed by, occasionally revealing hints of a black, star-filled night. By tomorrow, the sky would be clear and sunny. By tomorrow, my own dilemma would still be murky. And I’d have less time…

I could hear Lucen moving about downstairs. My mind raced with the clouds. I needed sleep, but I was restless. I needed answers more. Especially needed to know tonight’s mission had accomplished something.

Lucen had left me a pair of shorts and a T-shirt on the bed. I slipped them on. The shorts were absurdly large, but the drawstring waist held them. I threw his sweatshirt on over them and went downstairs in my bare feet.

He sat in the living room, staring at his laptop. “Problem with the toothbrush?”

“The toothbrush served its purpose, but I can’t sleep. Are you looking at the files?”

“Yeah. Come take a look if you like. It’s weird stuff. No surprise the Gryphons are grasping for anything they can find.”

I flopped on the sofa and curled my legs under me. Lucen had set his laptop on the table. Stretching toward him, I could see he’d been busy. Several files were open, and he’d been making notes.

He shifted next to me as he reached for his glass, and his leg brushed against mine. Chills broke out on my back as I realized how close I’d sat to him. Perhaps it was a testament to my tiredness or Lucen’s preoccupation with the murder cases, but my body only reacted with the faintest stirrings of lust. More than anything, I was possessed by a desire to rest my head on his shoulder and close my eyes to sleep. I didn’t like that any better than the lascivious urges that normally came in his presence. It suggested that after not even twelve hours in his company I was becoming complacent around him.

I sat up straighter and inched away. “What’s so weird?”

Lucen brought one of the files to the forefront of the screen. “The magic patterns. This is Leslie Liu’s case file. You see those lines on the graph there?” He pointed to something that looked like an EKG printout. “They ran some very sensitive magic-detecting spells on her blood. The top line indicates how the spells reacted to the levels of soluble magic in her blood. The bottom line indicates the levels of non-soluble magic.”

“That has something to do with her being an addict, doesn’t it?” I’d heard the phrases bantered around at the Academy, but if anyone had explained them, I’d since forgotten all but the most general stuff. “Or is that because she’s human?”

“You’re thinking natural and unnatural magic. Natural magic is what you or I have, but a normal, non-Gryphon human doesn’t. Unnatural magic refers to magic that’s left in the blood by someone else, and anyone can have it. Soluble and insoluble magic are both unnatural.” Lucen pointed to the line again. “This is the soluble magic. If she wasn’t an addict, most likely that line wouldn’t even show up.”

“Okay, but we already knew she was an addict.”

“Right, but that doesn’t explain the lower line.” He pointed at it.

“So what does insoluble mean?”

“It’s more like an imprint. Someone who’s around magic will show traces of it in their system even if it’s not affecting them. Think of it as magic dust settling in your blood. You would show very strong signs of it right now simply from being here so long. It would fade after you’d been away a while.”

I wet my lips. “So she
was
around a pred when she died?”

“Not necessarily.” He pointed to more notes below the graph. “The Gryphons were able to determine that the insoluble magic in her system was pred in nature, but that’s it. Your magic, little siren, would probably show up much like that. Notice the strength of the insoluble magic is much weaker than the strength of the soluble magic.”

“That could only mean time had passed. Right?”

“Right, but there’s a connection between how long the women had been dead and the intensity of the insoluble magic left in their blood.” Lucen flipped to his notes. “Those traces are too weak to be caused by one of my people.”

“So you don’t think it was a pred?”

“Nor one of the magi, at this point. Just a guess, but I’d bet that line is what your magical imprint would look like.”

“But there’s no notes in the file where the Gryphons call it human magic?”

“Not that I’ve seen.” Lucen scrolled through the long document. “But they wouldn’t have ever seen human magic that makes a pattern like that. You’re an anomaly, remember. They wouldn’t know what to make of it.”

I swallowed. “Until they found the blood on my bandage, which would also show up weirdly.”

“As natural magic, but yes.”

I groaned.

“It’s more interesting than that.” Lucen smiled in a mirthless way. “The male victims show a different pattern altogether. Here’s your Gregory Penfield. Note the soluble line first.”

Lucen brought up Greg’s graph. This time the patterns were reversed. “As far as I can tell, the women were around a weak magical presence when they died, but the men were around a strong one.”