The Turning Of The Tables (Beyond The Veil #7)

Chapter 1

1

SETH MAYS

Hi. You don’t know me, but Hart says I’m supposed to pick you up at the airport.

My name is Seth Mays.

I used to work with Hart. He gave me your number… hope that’s okay.

ELLIOT CRANE

He told me. I get in at 7:14.

Sounds good.

Delayed. 7:58.

Okay.

Delayed again. 8:43.

Okay.

You should probably tell him to come get me.

He’s working a case he can’t get out of. A senator’s wife got killed.

So you get me.

It’s going to be 10:36 now.

Okay.

Actually on the plane, now it shows 10:41.

In the air.

:)

Landed.

You have luggage?

Just carry on.

Turn left at the bottom of the escalator, far door. Big blond guy in a blue SUV.

Honda Passport?

I opened the driver’s side door and got out, wincing a little as my bad knee twinged at the slightly too-hard landing. I turned, watching an about-average-height guy with shoulders almost as broad as mine type into his phone with one thumb, a backpack over one shoulder, a brown fleece over the other arm, and what looked like a fat briefcase in his phoneless hand. What was really striking about him was the white streak that grew in a swath at the part in his hair, pulled back into a short queue so I could see that the rest of it—the sides, the back—was a deep black. Silver glinted from his earlobes, although from this distance I didn’t get a good look at what was causing it.

“You Elliot Crane?” I asked him, coming around the back of my royal blue FJ Cruiser, noting with amusement that the guy behind me was driving a navy Passport… Hence the texted question, clearly.

Elliot looked up, his eyes an arresting mix of green and gold and brown, the whites stark against his copper skin. He looked between the Passport and my Cruiser. “So the other blue SUV, then,” is what he said in a baritone that sounded just a little rough, tucking his phone in the back pocket of a pair of well-loved medium blue jeans that, if I were being completely honest, definitely loved him back.

I smiled. “Yeah. I didn’t realize there was another one behind me, or I’d have said something less generic. Seth Mays.” I held out my hand. “Seth. Or Mays. Either will do.”

He shook it. “Elliot,” he said, a faint smile on his full lips.

Most people are intimidated by my size—six-three and a good 210-odd pounds. I’m in decent shape, I guess. I walk—a lot—and do body weight exercises, but I’m no gym rat. And I like good food, so I’m not what you might call ‘cut,’ even if I do have enough muscle that I don’t normally have a problem throwing around heavy objects. Like dead bodies or the medium-in-a-wheelchair, Ward Campion, who shows up to work our crime scenes sometimes. Not that he usually needs my help, since he’s also usually accompanied by his six-seven orc husband, who makes me feel small.

Elliot did not appear in the least bothered by my size. Of course, his best friend is a six-four extremely mouthy elf, so I guessed he didn’t intimidate easily.

His face wasn’t exactly what I’d call handsome, but it was definitely striking, the kind of face you keep looking at because you can’t figure out why you can’t look away. The earrings that I’d seen glint in the heinous airport lighting were silver hoops with a single pinkish bead in the center. Not baby pink, but mottled, with bits of black and off-white. Elliot also had a lot of muscle under that long-sleeved dark grey t-shirt and jeans, but the used kind, not the sculpted kind that a lot of guys got at the gym that was mostly for show. I didn’t mind a show, but I wasn’t usually into the personality that usually comes along with it.

Not that I was in the market. I’d just gotten myself out of a four-year relationship that I’d thought was going to be The One, now and forever, and which he had decided was totally worth blowing—literally, and I wasn’t the recipient of that blow job. That had been some other blond guy, that one skinny and wearing sequins and a schoolgirl skirt, which is a look I can’t really pull off. I’d been lucky—or unlucky—enough to witness said blowing when I’d gone to the bathroom at the club where we were holding his birthday party.

He had a good birthday. At least I assume so. I wasn’t there when he got home and I hadn’t seen him since.

I left him a note telling him I hoped he had a good life, packed up my shit—I hadn’t had a lot, since the apartment and most of the stuff in it had been Devin’s—and called Noah to come get me.

I’d been living with him since, but Noah’s my twin, so he kind of has to put up with me when I have horrible, life-altering crises. Just like I’ve been there for him when the crises go in the other direction.

It had been two months since that night, and I was still living with Noah because I was too lazy to bother finding a new place to live, and Noah likes the fact that I can cook. I’m no gourmet or anything, but I like cooking, and my food is always edible and usually tasty, even if it isn’t going to win me any cooking shows.

All of which was completely irrelevant to the fact that I was not going to even think about getting involved with Hart’s childhood best friend who lived half a country away and was only in Richmond to assemble and hand-carve a table that was going to have some sort of magical sigil on the top of it. That’s what Hart told me when he’d begged me—between creative invectives—to pick up Elliot Crane.

“Your first time in Richmond?” I asked Elliot.

He nodded.

“It’s a nice city,” I told him, opening the back of the Cruiser. “You can put your bag back here if you want,” I offered.

“Thanks.” He half-tossed the backpack in, but kept the case with him.

“Your carving tools?”

Another nod.

“I guess they must be pretty delicate.”

Nod.

Okay. Not much for conversation. That was fine. He seemed tired, not stand-offish, which made sense, since it was almost eleven at night. Besides, I wasn’t interested.

“We’re going to the Marriott on Broad, yeah?” I asked him.

“Yes.” He pulled up something on his phone. “3800 block.”

I nodded. I knew it wasn’t far from Hart’s apartment, but only because Hart had said so when he pulled the keys off his keyring late this morning. I wasn’t totally clear on why Elliot needed keys to an apartment he wasn’t staying in, but I hadn’t had time to ask, and I was being herded away from the crime scene at the time because the Feds were taking over.

It had been a long day that had started when Dan Maza had woken me up at five a.m. to call me to a murder scene that turned out to be Senator Simon Adams’s wife, and shit hadn’t really improved from there .

The scene was messy, the murder ugly, and we’d been halfway through processing when Clarabel Quincy—my usual partner in helping to solve crime—had found a purse in one of the hotel dresser drawers with Yvonne Gates-Adams’s driver’s license. We were pretty sure the photo was our victim, which should tell you just how gnarly the crime had been.

There was also, of course, the unspoken question—by us lowly CSI techs, anyway—of what the hell the senator’s wife was doing in a hotel room when she lived in the city.

But you didn’t speculate on scene.

We left that to the cops, although Maza had shut it down every time he heard it spoken out loud. Once we’d IDed her, he’d called Hart, and Hart and Rajesh Parikh had shown up with the proverbial cavalry. Because Yvonne Gates-Adams had been a lynx shifter—a piece of information that had also been in the wallet in the form of a Virginia Registered Shifter ID.

The Shifter Identification Registry was a fun new piece of legislation that had been pushed through at the bitter end of last year, required to go into effect with the start of January of this year, and had put Noah—my twin—through hell because he’d had to get an RSID in like two weeks. Him and like every other shifter living in the state of Virginia, which meant that the government offices had been overwhelmed for the first two weeks of the year with shifters desperately trying to follow a law meant to essentially screw them over.

Thanks, Governor Littleford. And the Magic Free Movement. And all the assholes who supported them. I might be fully human, but I had friends and family who weren’t, and they deserved the same rights I had. As far as I could tell, the SID Registry was one step closer to creepy state- sanctioned authoritarian oppression of Arcanids. They hadn’t required IDs for the other Nids—but you can tell a vampire, ghoul, orc, faun, or elf on sight. Arc-humans and shifters you wouldn’t know just by looking at them. They hadn’t managed to push through the Arc-human Registry. Barely.

I guess the fact that Arc-humans were still genetically human gave them an advantage. Seeing ghosts or developing psychic powers wasn’t quite as scary as being able to shift into a massive predatory mammal of some variety—based on your ethnic group’s geographical origins. Some people had gotten quite the family history surprise when they’d shifted into a lion or a coyote or a sunbear. Or, I suppose, a plain old European wolf, depending on who you thought your ancestors had been.

But thanks to bigotry-turned-legislation, now every shifter in the state had to carry an ID with their shifter type—other Arcanids only escaped having to do the same thing because you could tell what they were by looking at them. Nobody was going to mistake an orc for anything but an orc. The part of the bill that had failed—thank God—was the part that had also wanted to register every Arc-human. But I guess there were enough of those in the State Assembly that they’d at least killed that. For now.

As I pulled out of the airport loop and headed back to the city, I reached into the cupholder and passed Elliot a set of keys. “Hart gave me these this morning so you can get into his apartment if you want. There’s a cat named Pet, and there may or may not be a Taavi. You know Taavi?”

He took the keys from me, although he looked a little bewildered. “Yeah. They both came back for… my father’s funeral.”

Oh. I’d known that Hart had gone back home a few months ago for a funeral, but I hadn’t realized it was for Elliot’s dad. Even though I’d helped on the case, I’d somehow not put two-and-two together. Let’s just say there’s probably a reason I’m a CSI tech and not a detective. In addition to my generally pacifist outlook, which doesn’t tend to go well with police training.

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling awkward.

“Thanks.” Elliot didn’t seem offended. “He called you about the evidence, I think.”

The snot I had talked Hart through collecting off a window had been the DNA evidence that led to the arrest of one of the men responsible for killing this man’s father. “Yeah, he did,” I confirmed, feeling a little embarrassed.

“Thanks for helping.”

“I was… I’m glad I could help,” I replied honestly. “I’m a bit of a science nerd.”

“You usually explain evidence collection over the phone?” he asked.

“That would be the one and only time,” I replied with an awkward little laugh. “It’s not really SOP. Sorry. Standard Operating Procedure.”

“You remember who my best friend is, right? I’m familiar with cop lingo.”

I shot him a look, trying to figure out if I’d offended him, but there was a slight upturn to one corner of his lips, so I didn’t think so.

I’m not super great at small talk, so I let the conversation drop.

Elliot didn’t say anything, either, but every time I glanced over at him, he was looking around at the city as we drove through the neighborhoods leading back toward downtown. It wasn’t a terribly pretty drive, but there had been a crash on 64 in the westbound lanes when I’d driven out to the airport, and I had no desire to get us stuck in that on the way back, so through the city it was. Kind of like a mini tour—except with a tour guide who didn’t tell you anything.

But Elliot didn’t seem to mind, his eyes glinting in the beams of the oncoming headlights as he glanced at the houses, shops, and trees we passed driving through the city.

“Will we go by Beyond the Veil?” he asked as I rounded the curve at the top of Church Hill.

“I can,” I replied. I’d been planning on taking a different street to the hotel, but it was easy enough to detour. “It’s maybe an extra minute or two.”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

Beyond the Veil, co-owned by Ward Campion and Mason Manning, occupied the ground floor of a commercial space that might once have been a residential building, and which had converted the top floor—which had definitely been residential at some point—into the offices for the Lost Lineage Foundation, their partner company owned by the exceedingly rich woman they worked with.

Ward, the founder of Beyond the Veil and a powerful medium, often showed up to my homicide scenes—particularly the weird and messy ones. He’d more than once pulled some really spectacularly terrible cases. My least favorite so far had been the creepy-as-hell basement cult room that had almost killed Piper Emory, one of my fellow techs who had promptly quit as soon as she had the breath to do so.

I didn’t blame her. I’d been upstairs, organizing the collection of evidence from the rest of the house, including blood-stained clothing and tools, when that whole thing had gone down. And then, because all of a sudden the team down there had all become victims, I’d had to take charge of evidence collection in the aftermath .

I still have nightmares about the blackened thing that had DNA-matched as human that we’d brought out in a cooler because it was too gooey to be contained by a body bag.

Don’t get me wrong—I like Ward. I like his husband, Mason, too, although Ward was a lot more useful at murder scenes. Some of the other techs get annoyed when Ward shows up, either because they’re just generally creeped out about the idea of a medium talking to ghosts or because he puts tire tracks all over everything—or both—but he knows his way around a crime scene and will do his best not to roll over anything particularly important. But they haven’t figured out a way to put booties on a wheelchair yet, so we just have to deal with it.

He's also good enough at his job that nobody argues when Dan Maza, the current lead detective on all Arcane cases since Hart quit, calls him.

Elliot was in Richmond because he was making Ward a table—some sort of ritual thing that I knew next to nothing about, but that apparently required someone particularly skilled at… carving? Or something? I don’t know much about either woodworking or summoning ghosts. I’m a decent hand at helping with basic projects, like a fence or building a dog house or something like that, but nobody would ever mistake me for a real carpenter.

“It’s right there,” I said, pointing across Elliot’s lap toward the darkened front glass windows of the office. “There’s parking in the back for the staff, and they’ve got a little kitchen and stuff. And a coffee-maker.”

I didn’t work with the company itself often, but every now and then I’d drop something off for Rayn Alverno—the company’s touch-psychic—to handle, or, more rarely, I’d have to bring in a piece of bone for Ward to identify if we couldn’t get a match with DNA or dental records. He’s not a fan of that, but he was definitely happier about it when it was clean or old bone than when it was a fresh corpse.

I didn’t blame him for that, either.

“It’s… cute,” was what Elliot said.

He wasn’t wrong, although I don’t think I’d have called it that without him suggesting the term. “There are a lot of storefronts like that in Richmond,” I replied.

“Very old-school Main Street,” he observed, then shot me a funny look when I laughed.

“It’s… literally on Main Street,” I replied.

His lips quirked. “Ah.”

We drove the rest of the way in silence, although he thanked me when I pulled up at the hotel and helped him get his stuff out of the back. I watched him walk into the lobby, bag over his shoulder and tool-case in his hand, and reminded myself very firmly that I was not going to get involved with this guy. I wasn’t even interested.

Have I mentioned that I lie to myself a lot? It’s one of my more problematic flaws.