Chapter 16
Lionel
There were eight bodies in total, but none of them were complete.
“With any luck, we’ll still find the missing parts,” Christine said as we stood outside the tent in the late afternoon sun, she and Mitch with their notebooks out, me taking shallow, calming breaths.
I exhaled. “Yeah, with any luck.”
I didn’t sound convincing, but that was due to all the decomposition smell messing with me and making my stomach churn even if there was nothing to bring up. Mitch gave me a sympathetic look, his face lit perfectly in the orange-gold sunlight.
“We should start with her.” On her notebook, Christine circled the name of the last victim we’d found, Joanne. The head had been fresh, and I’d been able to make the ID, or rather, Joanna had been able to tell us who she was.
“Are you joining us at the station?” Mitch asked me, the breeze from the ocean ruffling his blond hair. I wondered whether it was as soft as it looked. Would he let me touch if I asked nicely?
“Of course he will,” Christine said. “We need him there.”
For once, I didn’t mind that she took charge of my afternoon. Where she went, Mitch went, and I hadn’t yet seen enough of him. Or his hair.
Mitch cocked a brow. “Need him?”
I cleared my throat. “I’m pretty good at confirming when we’ve found a victim’s home or things that belonged to them.”
I wasn’t showing off or trying to impress him.
I didn’t do that. I was a professional necromancer, even in the face of Mitch’s sexiness.
I was just telling him what I was good for outside of the bedroom, and—hope of hopes—maybe he’d be interested in finding out what I was good for in the bedroom later on.
“I see.” Mitch nodded and once more appraised me as if I were the most interesting thing he’d seen all day.
I ran a hand over my jacket before I could stop myself, afraid something yucky had gotten on me, but Mitch’s smile told me it was fine. Come to think of it, he’d been pretty unflinching inside the tent too, almost like Christine.
“I’ll have to walk the poodle again before I join you.”
I’d left the scene once before, more to get out of that tent than because I was worried about Soul’s bladder, but no one needed to know that.
Christine shook her head in exasperation.
“Don’t see why you got a dog with the hours you work, Hawkes.”
I’d omitted the small detail that Soul was that same cursed poodle I’d told her I was going to take care of a year ago. I didn’t want Christine to fear for public safety and have Soul put down.
“I’m just dog-sitting, actually. For a…an acquaintance.”
That was true enough, and Lucifer was going to take the damn poodle back. I’d make sure of that.
“They must’ve been desperate,” Christine said before walking off, and I wondered whether it was a comment on my perceived ability to keep a pet alive or just genuine worry about how my nonexistent work schedule affected my ability to take care of a pet.
Then again, maybe it was me raising that raven and her wondering whether I preferred my pets dead.
Sexy Mitch followed her, but he took the time to smile at me over his shoulder. Fuck. I had to figure out if there was any regulation against me dating a cop I worked with.
Double fuck. I was getting ahead of myself, but if Sexy Mitch was open to dating… My mouth watered. For someone who’d not succeeded in dating despite giving it my best, I was pretty damn sure I was owed something from the universe, and maybe Sexy Mitch was it.
With my mind’s eye on that metaphorical ball, I left the ominous white tent behind, but I hadn’t managed three steps before one of the cops working in the marshes caught my attention by waving his arm and slogging toward me, his boots squelching.
“Hawkes! Wait!”
“Yeah?”
The cop had gotten his pants and jacket wet despite the rubber boots. The tide would probably have come in by now, making the water level rise. I didn’t like working in the tent, but outside couldn’t be much better. Getting your feet wet while digging for corpses had to suck.
The cop waved an evidence bag. “Can you have a look at this? We found it over there, and the markings… See for yourself.”
“Okay?”
I took the bag from his gloved hands and peered at its contents through the plastic.
Inside, a coin shimmered dully through encrusted dirt.
It was larger than a regular coin, and even though it had oxidized, I could tell it was silver.
The coin was a talisman, a focal point for power, something that helped a magic user gather and channel their power.
I could just about make out a pentagram carved into it, though the dirt was too thick to make out the runes the magic user had added.
I bit my lip.
“Let me see if I can match that to one of our victims inside.”
The officer nodded. “It’s one of those magic things, right?”
“A talisman, yes.”
I went back inside the tent, and the officer followed me. Simon and the other techs glanced up from their work as we came in. They’d put numbered cards down next to the remains I’d grouped; corner pieces of this people puzzle we were solving.
“Gloves!” the tech at the first table said, and pointed.
I ground my teeth, but turned and pulled on a pair, then I held the talisman in my right hand while touching the remains with my left. It wasn’t the first victim’s, so I went on to the second.
“And change them, Hawkes!” the tech called after me. “You have heard about cross contamination, haven’t you?”
“Yes, sorry,” I ground out.
The officer who’d found the coin stepped aside. He’d paled at the sight of the bodies laid out like they were—not unusual. It was one thing going out there to find the bags, quite another to see what had been inside of them.
“I’m going to…” He pointed toward the exit and left, very nearly at a run. I could relate.
But the talisman. I had a feeling it belonged, and I wanted to know to whom. I grabbed a bunch of the gloves and tried another victim. Nothing again.
I felt the tech’s watchful eye on my back and made a show of changing my gloves before moving on to the next corpse. I’d barely made contact when everything fell into place.
The ownership made itself known with something akin to a noise just evening out. The closest description I’d ever come up with to explain it to a non-magic user was the tuning of a string instrument and that moment when you just hit the right note.
“This is hers.”
The woman—the magic user—was one of the heads we’d found later, the one that had been able to give me her name, Joanne Frazer. The knowledge that she’d owned a talisman sort of put this crime into perspective for me.
Joanne had been a magic user, just like me. She must not have been strong enough to wield anything offensive—plenty of people weren’t, but still—or maybe she’d been surprised and overpowered before she could call on her magic.
I felt an immediate kinship with her. “I was being punished, but I did nothing,” Joanne had told me when I raised her.
Punished. It was an odd choice of word. I didn’t think she’d be saying that about herself, so possibly the murderer had told her, just before—
I closed my eyes and shook my head. I didn’t want to imagine what had been done to her, didn’t want to think about how she’d gone from being whole and alive to dead and dismembered.
“That was impressive.”
I jumped, then spun.
Mitch was there, smiling his sunshine smile.
“Huh?”
“I came to check on you. The officer looking a little green in the face told me he’d found something. May I see?”
I nodded and handed him the evidence bag, my gloved fingers brushing his ungloved ones. “Just a talisman. For focus.”
He nodded and looked from the coin to me. “Can you tell me anything else about this? Where she might have gotten it from?”
I pulled the gloves off. Hopefully, I was done needing them for the day.
“It’s possible she made it herself. You can get the basic coin pretty much anywhere, magic shops or online, but there are also smiths, magic users themselves, who will set them up to order.
Some also come pre-carved with a basic layout, but most people I know would prefer putting their own design on it since it’s an item used to help them focus their power. ”
Mitch nodded. “It needs to fit the magic user is what you’re saying. Like a ring.”
“That’s right.”
Mitch looked up from the coin. “What’s yours? Your talisman, I mean.”
I shoved my hands in my pockets, because the crime scene tech was still eyeing me critically, and I knew they were far happier if all non-scientifically trained staff kept their hands in their pockets around a scene.
“I don’t use them. Drawing and focusing my power comes pretty easily to me.”
If Mitch had been a magic user himself, he’d have been concerned about whether I was competent or not. A lot of people who didn’t go in for talismans were just too lazy to bother setting one up, or they thought their power was greater than it actually was.
I didn’t normally make a big deal out of it. I’d tried using a focus point once, a coin just like this. It had been when I’d first gone to the Collegium, too young and too unhappy about my crushed dreams of adoption, or at least a nice foster family.
One teacher had said it might help me learn control. What it actually taught me was how to get the coin so hot it would burn through a one-inch-thick desk, and the teacher had concluded I’d be best trained alongside the mages from then on out.
Mages were those who really didn’t need focal points in any of their spells.
They were pretty few and far between, and if I hadn’t been a necromancer, I’d have been one of them and able to do pretty much whatever I wanted with my power.
I could still do some spellwork, some force spells, sure, but my real strength was death and what came after it.
“I really don’t know a lot about this kind of stuff, about magic.” Mitch shrugged. “Do you think we could grab a bite to eat sometime? So I can pick your brain.”
This time around, he’d definitely see my jaw drop and my color rise.
I wasn’t sure this was a date, but it was food and Detective Sexy Mitch, which was miles better than just plain food, and maybe it could turn into a date.
At a minimum, I’d get more of that smile and those sparkly eyes, and I’d definitely get to see what he looked like without rubber boots and the windbreaker on.
“Oh, yeah. Totally.” I did my best to remain nonchalant.
Mitch’s smile brightened. “Great. I’ll text you. Are you going to catch us at the station?”
I nodded. “Yes, right after I walk the dog.”
Homicide investigations like this were no fun, but he’d be there while Christine got all the evidence and stuck it to the whiteboards she liked for that kind of thing.
“I’ll see you there, Lionel,” Mitch said, and his deep voice rippled over me like a warming summer breeze.
“Sure” was my much lamer response.
Mitch walked off and out of the tent, giving me a view of his broad back, almost as sexy as the front of him.
“That one’s sooo into you,” Simon said from behind me, making me jump. “And while he’s not my cup of tea, I’d say his gluteus maximus are well developed.”
“If you want to talk about anatomy not belonging to the victims,” the tech with the glove fetish said from her workplace, “can you please take it outside? I’m trying to work here.”
Simon rolled his eyes. “Nina is such a perfectionist.”
He went back to documenting and taking photos of the parts, which was clearly my cue to leave.
Christine and Mitch were already gone by the time I got to my car. Soul had spent her time growling and barking at passersby, and as a result, her breath had fogged up the driver’s side window, and her drool was splattered over the glass in a wild abstract artwork.
“You need to go back to the Devil,” I told her when I got into the car. I’d stop to walk her where there were fewer media cameras that might mistake the cursed poodle for part of the canine unit, and then I’d take her back home.
Back to her home. Back to Lucifer, which was where she belonged.