CHAPTER ELEVEN
Someone was waiting for her when Hero returned to her rental flat in downtown Havenside.
A few turns off the main square, it was a roomy place with a kitchenette, decent furniture and a working fireplace free of ash and soot.
Comfortable enough for a short stay, though she was beginning to think this case wouldn’t be as easy as she’d hoped.
It had been a false hope, anyway. Nothing about Havenside could be called simple.
“Well, that was fun ,” she’d exclaimed once she and the scandalized demonhunter had exited Grantham House. “Tell me what you saw in there, Keen.”
“A lot of angry people?” her partner had muttered, slapping his cap back on his head as he joined her on the sidewalk.
“Exactly. It was Chief Dewey who requested a death speaker, not any other town official,” she continued. “The PKs might be desperate to solve this case, but many others not so much, eh?”
His lips thinned and he rubbed at his generous nose. “Your methods leave much to be desired, Inspector, but you certainly poked a few bears back there. Sister Catarine’s death might be more complicated than we feared.”
“Oh, my dear demonhunter, on the contrary. It is just as complicated as I’d feared.”
After promising to meet her at the PK station first thing in the morning, he’d absconded.
Maybe he didn’t find her as offensive as he had upon their first meeting (though his nostrils still flared when she stood close), but he certainly hadn’t come to like her much.
Tolerance was probably all she could expect from him.
Unfortunately, they were partners at the moment for better or worse, and trust was essential, especially when there was no one else in town they could trust at all. He needed to acquire it, and soon.
So finding a tall, dark figure lurking outside her door in the deep shadows of evening made her hackles rise. She nearly drew her sword before the person spoke.
“Helen,” it said. He said.
A single gas lamp flickered above the entrance, casting the man’s face in darkness. She didn’t need to see his face to know who he was. Even after all this time, she recognized her brother’s voice.
Half brother , she amended automatically. Unwillingly, she remembered the day she’d learned she had a different father than him – the day she’d nearly killed him. Accidentally, of course.
It was hard to forget that day. Her mother had tried to drown her in a rain barrel, shrieking and cursing like a madwoman while her brother lay crumpled on the grass after she’d dared him to jump off the roof.
Only then did she understand that children shouldn’t be able to leap off the roof of a two-story house and remain unharmed.
It was the first time in her life she’d ever felt real fear, despite all the things her mother had done to her over the years. Seeing her brother so white and still…
Luckily, little Liam Franke had woken up and started crying, distracting their mother from her murderous task.
“Liam,” she said, her voice carrying an unfortunate quaver. She cleared her throat and adjusted her glasses. “I didn’t see you at the station. I assumed you wanted nothing to do with me.”
“You assumed correctly,” he replied. He moved closer to the light, and she could see him better.
He looked haggard, the boyish face she remembered replaced by a hard jaw and sunken cheeks.
His very normal brown eyes regarded her coolly.
“You have no idea the shame you brought on our family, Helen, with your antics. I would just as well never lay eyes on you again, but here you are, working in my own PK unit, so that’s impossible. ”
She backed up another step. The disappointment tightening her chest and clawing at her throat was unexpected.
They had been close once. “What are you doing here? If it’s about the case, you could have waited until tomorrow to speak to me.
Unless you’ve found another body,” she added, a little too eagerly.
Wrong move. His lip curled slightly, and his brown eyes filled with disgust. “This has nothing to do with the case. Mother sent me.”
She jerked, unable to help herself. “Mother? That foul bitch is still alive?”
His sneer deepened. “Show some respect. She’s our mother!”
“She was never a mother to me. Or don’t you recall? Maybe you were too young to remember her gouging out my eyes?”
He winced. Well, at least it bothered him – that was something.
She slipped by him to reach the door, the iron key in her hand shaking only slightly before she jammed it into the lock.
His boots shuffled on the concrete stoop.
He sighed, a sharp huff of a sound. “She’s dying, Helen. That should make you happy.”
“It’s Hero now, or Inspector Viridian if you prefer.” She paused, gripping the key and wishing she could escape inside. “I am not happy to hear it. Frankly, I don’t care at all one way or the other. She means nothing to me.”
It was a lie. She hated their mother with a bone-deep passion, and it warmed her heart – such as she had one – to hear of her impending death. She prayed to the Goddess that it would be a painful one.
“She’s been asking for you, He– Hero,” he said, stumbling over the unfamiliar name.
She’d picked it for its strangeness, once given to a saint who’d been martyred long ago in a foreign land.
It had been her chosen name as a novice, and she’d happily kept it.
Viridian she’d made up out of whole cloth, deciding that Franke wasn’t her surname.
Her father was some disgusting incubus, not Collin Franke, esteemed barrister and landowner.
“She’s desperate to see you,” he went on softly. Their mother had always loved him . “I think she’s hoping to make amends before she faces judgement.”
Hero swallowed a sharp retort. She didn’t hate her brother. What could he have done to help her? He’d been a child, too, only a couple years older than her. And he was here, reaching out – for their mother, yes, but he was here. “I’ll think about it,” she lied. “It’s all I can give you right now.”
He nodded, looking somewhat relieved. He even managed to smile at her. “Thank you. I won’t tell her anything yet, not until you’re certain. I wouldn’t want to get her hopes up. Trust me, H– Hero, it’s for your good, too.” He put a hand over his heart. “Forgiveness heals the soul.”
At that, Hero had to laugh bitterly. “Oh, dear brother, you forget. According to all of you, I don’t have a soul.”
Hero was in a foul mood as she made herself a coffee at the PK station the next morning.
There was a reason for it. Instead of reading through Sister Catarine’s correspondence and then dropping into bed for a good night’s sleep as she’d planned, she’d spent the night polishing off a bottle of cheap whiskey and pacing like a lunatic.
News of her mother’s impending demise coupled with her sudden, inexplicable change of heart towards her only daughter kept Hero’s mind racing.
Bad enough she had the vision of a desperate dead girl in her brain, mouth gaping like a fish’s while she tried to reveal her murderer but only managing hints and whispers.
Vague visions of potential assailants, all wrapped up in terror and pain.
And a dark presence behind it all, a looming shadow that gave Hero the willies.
Bad enough, yet somehow thoughts of her mother were worse. Being in Havenside had forced her to recall unpleasant events here and there, but she’d kept the worst of it at bay. Now, it was as if a floodgate had opened. She could almost feel the hot pokers searing into her eye sockets–
She took a slug of hot coffee, scalding her tongue.
Grimacing, she nearly spit it out, but a hard swallow sent the fire down her throat.
She sucked in a breath to soothe her burned tongue and settled her cup back on the table.
The steam rising from it should have warned her, but she’d been too distracted by her whirling thoughts.
Her demonic blood mended wounds quickly; she had only to wait for the pain to pass.
It seemed interminable. Her mood plummeted, and it wasn’t improved by Keen arriving at the samovar, practically tapping his toe as she added more sugar to her coffee.
“Officer Coates has the next witness ready. Are you finished with your break?”
All two minutes of it? She scowled. “Yes. Fine. Let’s get back to it.”
She returned with him to the interrogation room, blowing on her coffee as she went. “Have Coates send in the… who is it this time? Another nun?” she asked irritably as she took her seat again. “I’m sick to death of nuns.”
“No, we’ve spoken to all the sisters who had contact with her on the last day she was seen alive.”
“All but the revered mother,” Hero snarled.
It had infuriated her to learn Francesca refused to be questioned, sending a representative instead.
Unfortunately, they had no legal recourse; the Church of the Goddess and the Branch was a powerful institution.
She’d claimed being questioned violated the law of the Goddess, and Hero had no ready argument to counter that protection.
“We’re starting with some of the lay staff, and then her students,” Keen finished without acknowledging her interruption.
“Fine. Let’s get on with it.”
The interrogation room was small, devoid of windows and hope, with blank plaster walls, yellowing and water-stained.
The air was slightly cold, the chairs hard and uncomfortable.
Silent observers – Chief Dewey and her brother, Liam, his second-in-command watched from behind a small square of silvered glass.
A clever new invention, this “transparent mirror”; Hero was impressed.
Not even the much grander precinct in New Savage had one.