Chapter 29
Lionel
Mitch’s smile was expectant, and I realized I hadn’t answered. Hadn’t told him how much I’d like to grab a bite of food with him.
“Food later sounds great.” Was I smiling too much? I turned it down a notch, but that wasn’t easy, not when I was still trying to imagine Mitch sitting on my couch with his shoes off, waiting for me, beckoning me to cozy up to him.
Unbidden, the memory of Lucifer’s oddly inhuman growling sliced through my fantasy like a habanero through a mildly flavored chili, and I frowned.
“You okay?” Mitch asked.
Yes, kind and concerned was what I needed, not smug, oversized, and entirely too full of himself. Forget Lucy’s stupidly fluffy hair. Amnesia for the win.
“Oh, I’m fine.” Then, the wind turned, and I got a noseful of burned meat, foul in a way even animal meat left too long on a barbecue never got.
I concentrated on breathing. In, out. Breathing, not heaving, that was the mantra I clung to.
“This looks like a witch burning,” I told Mitch, because I couldn’t go closer to the corpse, not yet. My stomach needed another minute.
“That’s pretty much what we’re thinking.” Mitch turned to look at the scene, a faraway expression on his face. “It’s what used to happen to all witches.”
Before I could ask where he’d gotten that from, Christine stomped toward us through the sand.
“There you are. Lewis, don’t distract the necromancer before he gets the body to talk.”
“Right, sorry.” Mitch winked at me. He was really cute when he winked, and the wind turned again to fan his short blond hair against his forehead.
“Hawkes, your turn to make her tell us her name. We figure it’s a woman, at least. Do you need to get up there?” Christine asked. “I don’t want you up there, because that woodpile under the stake is unstable, or so I’m told. But if you have to…”
She shrugged as if a few broken bones were something she’d risk if it got the case solved. She was a good cop, but sometimes she got really, really focused, which was when work could get intense.
“That’s okay. I can do the raising from the ground.” I walked toward the pyre, my stomach in knots and on the verge of revolting, but so far holding in the angel juice.
“The insurance department will be happy about that,” Christine said as she followed me.
The piled wood still radiated heat, and the smell of burned and crisped flesh was impossible to ignore the closer I got.
I looked at the arms. Metal wound around the wrists, smooth against the charred bone.
I could only imagine what it would have been like for our victim, being bound and feeling the flames come for her.
Mitch stepped closer and followed my line of sight. “They think our perp used zip ties to hold the vic, but the metal wire was used to keep the body in place in case the zip ties disintegrated too badly. That way, she stayed upright.”
“I see.” I looked away from the bound wrists, preparing to do what I had to.
I got as close as I could. The face was not nearly as badly burned as I’d have thought.
I remembered reading somewhere that executions like this could kill by suffocation, which would have been a kindness.
It was odd to be standing here, that foul smell in my nose, hoping the poor person on the pyre had suffocated rather than burned.
I concentrated and drew on my power, channeling it into the corpse.
It was easy, easier than with the head from the salt marsh, mostly because this victim was not long removed from the point of death, the body intact for the most part.
The burn victim stirred, but the bindings still held her in place.
“Speak,” I commanded her. “Who are you?”
She moved, her head tilting up and her shoulders moving as if, even now, she wanted to get her hands free.
As it had been when she was alive, it was futile.
“You know me,” she said, voice raspy and broken. “You told me you didn’t mind that the coffee at the station sucked.”
Now that was wholly unexpected. The thing was, it didn’t narrow down the pool of possible victims, because the coffee there always sucked, and I wasn’t shy about telling people, even if I needed my five cups a day and couldn’t be too picky. It meant she was likely a cop, one of our own.
Christine and Mitch standing behind me sucked in a hissing breath and released a mildly descriptive curse, respectively.
This was someone we all knew, someone close to us.
If the two of them were anything like me, they were running through a list of names and faces, wondering who this was, hoping the corpse was lying.
Which I knew she couldn’t. The dead couldn’t lie to me or disobey me. Such was my power.
“Give me your name,” I said, my voice trembling. I knew it could be easy to forget about the self, especially if the death had been traumatic. I needed her to remember.
After a moment, charred lips parted. “Lily. I’m Lily. Like the flower.”
Dr. Lily. This was Dr. Lily. How often had she forced me into her office to talk about a case or my sex life? How often had she forced me to talk about my feelings, which were fine? She’d spent time with me, even if others needed her more, but she’d insisted on doing so anyway.
I remembered her holding her talisman pen and taking notes, her smile when she had encouraged me to talk even if I hadn’t needed it. She’d always been persistent, and now…
“Lily…” Christine said behind me, shaking me out of my stupor.
Falling apart now wouldn’t do any good. I was a necromancer, and for all the many times Lily had offered me help I didn’t need, she did need me now. In no reality was what had happened to her not getting solved, not if I had any say.
“Who did this?” I pressed, forcing my voice to remain steady as I poured my magic into her.
Once more, Lily stirred against her bonds. “I was in a trunk, and I thought I would be saved. He said this was my judgment. Justice. The right path. I didn’t think the wood would catch. I didn’t believe it, until it did. I didn’t think I’d die. I didn’t think I’d burn. But I did.”
I felt the pull on my magic like a current in the ocean threatening to take my control away.
It was the panic, the fear that carried over into death.
This was all I was going to get from her, and if I pushed, I’d only find the panic the brain had known in the last moments.
I let my magic seep away, and the struggling limbs stilled at last.
“How could this happen?” I asked, turning to Christine. Her expression looked hard, and her mouth was set in a thin line. While her eyes had a wet sheen, she kept the tears to herself, or kept them for later.
She didn’t bother hiding her fury though.
“That, we will find out.” She pushed a strand of her hair back behind her ear where it had escaped from her bun. “I need to know if this is connected to the other cases.”
I nodded. “Because she worked on that.” Christine had sent her to talk to the magical community, because I… She had sent Lily, and not me. “You think she got too close to something when she asked around?”
That was a scary thought, and not just because a magic user murdering people would be bad.
Anyone going on a murder spree was bad, whether they were a wild bear, a guy unable to deal with his place in the world, a magic user, or an immortal with a sinful mouth that could make me feel as if I were on fire…
I really needed to forget about that particular immortal.
At the very least, I was his alibi, and that thought made my head reel, but then the wind drove a whiff of my burned colleague into my nose, and I was back to focusing on not throwing up then and there.
The real reason a magic user out to kill was scary was because of all the fear and prejudice it would ignite. It had happened before, and it had ended with pyres much like this one in the past.
Christine gave me a long, hard stare. “We need to follow the evidence.” Her thoughts probably ran along the same lines as mine.
“Hawkes, if I get you the bags from the salt marsh, the ones the parts were in, can you tell me if the same person who used them to dispose of the body parts lit this pyre and tied her restraints?”
I scratched my head. “It’s not really my area. You’d want someone with more of a psychic bent to their magic. I could only tell you if Lily was responsible for the bags in the marsh.”
Christine nodded. “That would be a start. Even if you can exclude the possibility. Some idiot is bound to think she was involved, that she worked with a partner and things soured between them. I’ll have someone bring samples over for you to check, and once you do, you’re going home and sitting this one out. ”
That didn’t surprise me all that much, but it still sucked. “You realize I’m motivated to solve this? It’s personal. Just because magic users are potentially on the suspect list, it doesn’t mean I’d cover for them. It’s not like I even move around in that community.”
“Lily was my ten o’clock every fucking Thursday for the past three years, so yeah, personal here too.
But you know damn well that people will claim your influence slowed us down or some shit, or that you just blamed the next non-magic user who looked at you wrong.
This has to be done above board so nothing can overturn a conviction when we get our murderer. And we are going to get him.”
She was right, I knew that. Still, I opened my mouth to argue.
“Don’t.” Christine held up a finger at me.
“You know I’m fucking right, whether we both like it or not, and because I know you are smarter than people give you credit for, I know you are going to be a good necromancer and sit this one out, maybe put names to a few Jay Does while you’re at it.
There’s a whole shelf full of unsolved homicides if you get really desperate, Hawkes. ”
I shoved my hands into my pockets to hide the tight fists my fingers had curled into. “I get it. You don’t have to tie me to a desk to keep an eye on me, Christine.”
She turned to Mitch. “See? Smart. Say what you want about his love for rodents and the odd crow, but at least you never have to worry about Hawkes ruining an investigation. He’d never do that. Never.”
“Heavens, I get it, okay? I’ll stay put.”
And I really did. Christine would do whatever it took to keep me from compromising the investigation, even if she had to put me in a cell for a few days. I shouldn’t have minded, but seeing a fellow magic user burned at the stake, that made me mind. A lot.