It was a solid three seconds before I remembered to breathe. Trying to act unconcerned, I resumed my trek up the stairs and unlocked my apartment. “I’m not causing problems.” That they knew about.
I left the door open, not precisely inviting him in. He lingered in the doorway.
Reason caught up with me. Had this been about raising Jameson, they wouldn’t have sent him alone. I casually set my backpack, with the box from Monique inside, by the dining room table. Leaning against the wall with my arms crossed over my chest, I studied him.
His smile could still charm the hardest hearts, and mine wasn’t immune. Six years wasn’t enough time to erase summer days splashing in the river or the hot nights before I went to college.
Years ago, I’d known his every thought from a quirk of a brow to the flash in his eyes. Not anymore. This face hid thoughts behind empty smiles and emotions that never truly reached his eyes.
“This will only take a minute. Can I come in?”
I shrugged.
He closed the door before turning to face me. “The clan asked me to check in. They noticed you used the flight service.”
“As a clan member in good standing, I am allowed.” Minister Olivia Crowder, the witch in charge of the clan, wasn’t fond of me or anyone who refused to go into the family business, but that didn’t change my standing.
“Yes.” He bowed his head. “However, you haven’t used the service in over two years.”
“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”
“Kelsey…” His shoulders tightened, and he rocked back on his heels. “They told me to check on you, so here I am. Olivia didn’t say it outright, but she wants you back.”
“And she thought you were the one to lure me? You broke up with me.” During my second semester of college, right after Jamie had dumped me, Olivia had forbidden Mom and Dad from sending me money. The clan knew how to educate witches, but their personnel policies could use some updates.
“You know how they are. I didn’t have a choice.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I told Olivia I was the wrong one, but she insisted.”
“Over using the dragon service? That doesn’t even make sense.” Olivia was crazy, but I’d never seen her act without logic to her brand of crazy.
“I was told to inquire why you felt the need to take a flight to visit your family for a couple of hours when it’s only a forty-minute drive.” He bit the words out as if they hurt to say.
“Because I had a hell of a day, didn’t feel up to driving, and wanted to get a hug from my parents.” That was a truth the clan could check.
“What happened?”
To give myself time to think, which I was too tired to do quickly, I pulled out a chair and sat down. Truth, but just the right amount, should give him reason to leave. “When you broke up with me you lost the position of chief confidant.”
He drew himself up. “That didn’t mean I stopped caring.”
“Six years too late, Jamie.” And a small lifetime of different experiences. “If there’s nothing else, you should go. I have to get up early for work.”
He looked hurt but still opened the door. “I’m on your side.”
I followed him to the door. “Good night, Jamie.”
“Sleep well, Kelsey.” The look he gave me before he left was one of longing.
It didn’t stop me from shutting the door and locking it behind him. Through the wood, I could make out the steps creaking as he left.
I shoved the package from Monique—she’s never been my mom—in a hidden compartment in the antique apothecary’s cabinet taking up one wall of my living room. Lynn had found it for me when I was in high school, and since then, it had been the home of all my supplies and a few secrets.
The compartment shut with a snap. If only it were that easy to forget the past.
Four years of my life. That’s how long I had wholeheartedly believed we’d get married, with the clan’s blessing. Six years without him, and living through the clan-enforced hardships, had changed me. I wasn’t seventeen and madly in love with the one boy who had looked at me and smiled back.
***
Morning didn’t bring peace, but it did bring distance. Jameson was dead, really dead. I hadn’t killed him. I had unkilled and rekilled him because I had lost control of my necromancy. Better control would make sure I didn’t accidentally raise anyone else. The clan had checked up because of the dragon flights, not my necromancy.
Perspective, and sleep, were good things.
At breakfast, the pile of unsorted mail served as a reminder that I wasn’t adulting well at the moment. Tonight I’d have to make time to pay bills. Oh, goody.
In a surprising turn of luck, the drive to work was nice, parking was easy, and no one said anything about Floyd or Jameson on my way through the building. The luck lasted all the way to my desk, where I found a note saying the medical examiner wanted to see me.
A chill crept over me. Could the medical examiner have found evidence that Jameson had been undead?
I carefully set the note in a drawer. That couldn’t be it. Officially, necromancers were extinct.
After convincing myself it was perfectly normal for the medical examiner to talk to a witch when magic was involved with several murders, I grabbed the key to a department vehicle and headed out.
The drive went too quickly, and before I knew it, I was parked and walking into a nondescript building with stucco walls. Through the opaque glass doors, I found a small reception area with the secretary sending annoyed looks at the medical examiner leaning against her desk. It was the same elf I’d seen entering CJ’s Machine Shop while I was leaving.
He pushed away from the front desk and smiled at me. His silver hair was pulled back at the temples, leaving his pointed ears bare. “Agent Pine, I’m glad you could make it.” He held out his hand.
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“It’s nice to meet you properly.” His hand was warm against mine and his grip polite rather than testing. A nice change after my interactions with Floyd.
“Call me Nash.” He motioned down the hall. “My office is this way.” Nash set an easy pace.
“Did you get my report? Agent Smith assured me it would be sent to you immediately.” I looked at him out of the corner of my eye.
“Yes, but I’d like to go over a few details.” He guided me to the right when the hall split. “It can be tricky to put your analysis and mine together through reports. Magic isn’t so easily translated.”
If those words had been intended to relax me, it didn’t work. If he knew about magic, he might be able to figure out magic had played a part in Jameson’s death and would ask questions I couldn’t easily answer.
“Here we are.” He pushed open a door to a small but tidy office with a suspiciously clean desk taking up most of the space. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cleared my desk enough to see two square feet of the top. “Same side would be easier.”
“What?”
Nash jerked his head up, a touch of pink staining the tips of his ears. “Sorry, thinking out loud. It will be easier to review the diagrams if we’re sitting on the same side of the desk.”
“Oh, sure.” I took the one seat on this side and waited for him to figure everything else out.
He tugged a file out of a pile on a shelf beside his desk and rolled his chair next to mine. He started to open the file and paused. “The remains from CJ’s Machine Shop. Will it bother you to review the evidence? Several officers had trouble, as did one of my assistants.”
Relief that this wasn’t about Jameson waged a short war with surprise. I buried the relief, which would seem out of place. My eyebrows crept up. “One of your assistants? Never mind, none of my business.” Everyone had things they were sensitive to, often for personal reasons. “I’ll be fine.”
Nash fiddled with the edge of the folder. “We don’t normally see things like this.”
“I spent a lot of time with werelynxes growing up. Cats aren’t dainty about their meals and have an odd sense of gifts.” Like the time Drew had hid an eviscerated and partly-skinned rabbit in my bed. The next night, I had made sure his covers wound about him like a snake and hissed. We’d both ended up grounded.
He moved his hand on top of the file, as if that could keep the horrors hidden. “He was alive for most of the injuries.”
My stomach clenched. “I hadn’t realized.” If I’d known for sure about the pain and suffering the man had endured, I would’ve had a harder time at the crime scene.
“Are you sure you can do this?” Nash asked gently.
I tugged the file out from under his hand and flipped it open. “This victim deserves justice.” Inside on the left was a diagram of a humanoid body with notations around it and on the right was a page covered in text. Alive, bites, and skinned leapt out at me.
Nash flipped through the diagrams before he found one he liked. “The overview is too crowded. This shows the head and neck. I isolated tooth and knife impressions from the neck. The knife had a smooth blade and was between four and eight inches long. The teeth marks match those of a partly-shifted werewolf. Due to the purification ritual, I had little success isolating chemicals or other trace evidence,” he finished without accusation.
“It couldn’t be helped.” I wouldn’t apologize for preventing the spread of blood magic.
He shrugged. “Every case has challenges. What I need is a clearer picture of the magic and how it interacts with my findings.”
“The report is detailed.” All of mine had to be because people had a lot of misconceptions about magic. “I don’t know what else I can tell you.”
“Indulge me.” He tapped the folder. “This person deserves our time.”
“That he does, but I can’t tell you what I don’t know.” Either he hadn’t read the report, or he thought I was holding out. As far as this case was concerned, he was wrong.
Nash leaned back and folded his arms across his chest while he assessed me. “You don’t draw any conclusions. Why was the blood magic centered around the body? You didn’t find it in other places.”
Even though it was in the report, I went through it again. This time I used small words so he would understand. “Some of the spell fragments had elements of stimulant spells, likely intended to stimulate a person. Since the blood magic was concentrated around the remains, either someone purposely intended to siphon magic from the body but didn’t absorb all of it, or the stimulant spell interacted with the blood and resulted in blood magic.”
Nash’s eyes narrowed. “That’s the part I don’t understand. How could blood and magic mixing result in blood magic? Isn’t there ritual, ceremony, and intent behind it?”
“I haven’t made a study of blood magic,” I said sharply. “I’ve powered spells with my own blood, which isn’t the same.”
“My apologies.” Nash rubbed his temple. “No insult intended.”
“Only a little taken.” I took pity on him. Elves had their own abilities, but active magic wasn’t one of them. “From what I understand, the pain and suffering must be intentional, and the person drawing in the magic must derive some satisfaction from the suffering.”
“They’re all sadists who profit by gaining magic?”
“That’s one way of looking at it.” Though not one my childhood teachers had promoted. Their stories had centered on all the reasons we should never ever be tempted to use blood magic. “Witches stay away from blood magic. It can corrupt a witch’s power, and corrupt their morals and ethics in the process. Blood magic wants to be used, and it wants to be fed with more pain and death.”
“Hedge-practitioners, who are usually human, are the most common blood magic users, correct?”
I nodded. The theory was many of them were tempted by powers they didn’t have and resorted to blood magic to increase their abilities. It also reduced their life expectancies. Not many magic users were hated more than necromancers, but blood magic users qualified. “Humans, hedge-practitioners or not, or other species who want power. It’s easier for them to hide. Witches can see and feel the corruption. As close as clans are, one of us couldn’t hide something like that.”
“Right, so not likely to be a witch.” Nash dragged his fingers on the desk as he stared past me, lost in thought.
Thinking back to how the magic felt, I added, “Before you go too far down that path, I’m not sure we’re looking at intentional blood magic. The area was coated, so whoever created it didn’t absorb much. If you’d asked me before I saw that scene, I would’ve said it was impossible to accidentally make blood magic, but now I’m not so sure. The spells were broken and twisted, and there was so much blood.”
Nash took the folder and flipped to another page, this one outlining everything that had happened to the body in a simple list. “Then why skin the body?”
“To obscure the bite marks?” I mused. “I know teeth can leave impressions on bone, but not everyone grew up with werelynxes.”
He tipped his head to the side. “They cut around several areas where I could see imprints of teeth deeper in the tissue. It’s possible, but that leaves the question of who did the biting and who did the cover-up.”
“A werewolf with regrets or a fey missing a chunk of leg? Do you know the species of the body?” It hadn’t looked fey, but there’d been enough damage it was hard to say for sure.
“Werewolf. We have blood from three people. One werewolf victim, one who attacked the other, and a chunk of flesh at the scene also indicates a fey was involved.”
“Syed.” Werewolves could live through things a human couldn’t. How he must’ve suffered.
“I hope whoever killed him ends up at Syed’s mercy.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “It was the blood loss, not the injuries to the neck and face, you know.”
Syed wasn’t known for her mercy, though it seemed like a fitting punishment considering the crime. “We’ll find them.” I left off the part about how many more mutilated bodies we’d both see. I didn’t think this was the last, and I doubted Nash was so naive.
“Try to leave a little more evidence behind next time, will you?” He stood up.
“No promises. Blood magic can’t be allowed to contaminate anything.” He hadn’t grown up hearing those stories. As fast as clans killed necromancers, they killed blood magic practitioners even faster. A clan had to have its standards.
“I’ll make you a deal.” His words stopped me on my way to the door.
I turned back with my best blank police face. Men wanting something from me, be it a deal or a training run, hadn’t gone so well lately.
“You let me look at things before you remove the blood magic, help me understand the magic in context, and we won’t have any more of these meetings.” He held out his hand.
“Done.” I ignored his satisfied smile and shook his hand. “Next time, don’t take so long to get there.”
“I won’t.” Nash opened the door for me. “I’ll see you out.”
The walk back to the front door seemed to take more time. Maybe with the meeting out of the way I actually noticed the trip, or maybe it was the way he kept glancing at me.
We passed the front desk, and I couldn’t take it any longer. “Is there a problem?”
“No.” He stopped next to the door, a sunbeam gleaming off his silver hair. Nash smiled slowly, and forest green darkened the outer ring of his irises. “You do good work, Pine.”
“And here I thought you didn’t appreciate my work.” I shoved the door open and marched out, ignoring his chuckle.
