CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
With the smell of smoke still clinging to her, Hero ventured into town for supplies.
She marched with purpose, leaves crinkling beneath her boots and dancing around her cane.
She had a job to do, and she needed a few necessary tools.
Downtown Havenside bustled with activity.
The finer set were lunching and shopping as usual, but fear infected them.
There were nervous glances, wide eyes and pale faces, and women huddled together outside boutiques, quietly whispering behind gloved hands.
Murder was a stranger to quiet Havenside.
Not so to Hero Viridian. To her, murder was a close friend indeed.
She drew shocked stares and a few unpleasant scowls as she strode down the busy street.
Did any of them remember the little white-haired girl she’d been, the perpetually blindfolded one?
She was never allowed to go about the town alone, instead always trailing along behind her parents on the way to church – the only place she ever went in Havenside.
Thoroughly unpleasant visits, every single one.
People had to know that this grown woman, this half-demon disgraced nun, was their very own Helen Franke, at least those who remembered her. The cursed child. The ill omen.
The constant scrutiny made her skin crawl. She was used to it, of course, yet somehow here it was different. Worse. This was the very first place she’d been an outcast, formed and nurtured.
Let them stare .
Hero moved carelessly, her long strides easy and sure. She was a death speaker, an inspector, respected and admired – well, tolerated anyway. As long as she solved cases.
The shop she wanted was at the corner of Grand and Wellington and sold nothing but art supplies – a frivolous indulgence only a town like Havenside could support, along with boutiques selling nothing but ribbons or hats.
They even had an entire shop devoted to selling lampshades.
Not lamps, just lampshades. Preposterous.
The door jingled merrily, announcing her entrance.
The patrons – mostly young men dressed in drab colors with shaggy hair and a few girls in fine frocks pinned high on one side to show a scandalous stretch of hose – pretended not to notice her, but she felt the shift in the cluttered shop the minute she entered.
It didn’t matter. She had a job to do. This case, this damnable case, was going to require a board, a careful accounting of all their evidence so far. A painstaking process.
A lick of fire rose from her gloved finger, and she extinguished it against her scapular with an annoyed grimace. She had to get control of herself. This place contained mostly paper, after all.
“I need all of this,” Hero said to the startled young clerk behind the front desk, laying down her list in front of him with what she hoped was a friendly smile.
His narrow, foxy face went white at the kind gesture, so she assumed she’d done it wrong.
She rearranged her face into an expressionless mask, quashing the urge to smirk.
“Now, if you please. And charge it to the Havenside PKs.”
“Y-y-yes, ma’am.”
Hero rolled her eyes behind her tinted glasses. Her second ma’am this week. Good enough, she supposed.
Later, with her supplies tucked beneath one arm, she returned to her flat and set to work transforming one wall into a patchwork of documents, drawings and red string.
Usually, she would have done this in the stationhouse, but after her confrontation with Dewey she was reluctant to show him any of her work.
Her suspicions. He’d seemed like real police when she’d first met him, but something had happened.
Somehow, since she’d found that spectral chain, the whole town had seemed to shift, just like the air in the Art Supplies Emporium.
Her presence there, her discovery, had been noticed.
After she’d finished with her initial layout – the case was barely a few days old, after all; she had no doubt more clues would be unearthed – she left to find a meal.
It had been a long day, and a bowl of something hot and a stiff drink would set her head straight.
After changing out of her clothes, on which the smell of smoke still lingered, she stepped out into the night.
She found her partner waiting for her on the stoop, agitated and impatient. Shit . She’d completely forgotten about him. Keeping her teeth behind her lips, she gave him a smile.
“DH Keen,” she said brightly. “Good evening. Will you join me for a drink?”
“A drink ?” he said scathingly. His cheeks were bright, and his baby face bent in a grimace. “Where have you been? You just left me at the station like a forgotten toddler at the market!”
She tapped the brim of her hat with her cane. “Well, don’t act like one now,” she said. “I had some things to do, and I had to get out of there. Dewey has lost it. I’m afraid it puts our whole case at risk.”
“ You’re putting our case at risk,” he countered, catching up to her as she strode down the sidewalk, cane tapping a rhythm. “You put Dewey all in a lather going after Bright Renewal like that.”
She stopped, turning on him, the butt of her cane coming down hard. “Not you too!” she cried, aghast. “I’d hoped you at least wouldn’t have succumbed to whatever has befallen this town. Get yourself together, Demonhunter! You should smell an enchantment like a good dog smells a duck!”
He jerked back, blinking at her. They had stopped under a flickering gas lamp, and she could see the befuddlement in his gaze. He shook his head, his jaw firming up.
“Fight it,” she hissed at him, getting in his face.
“I need one ally here, Keen, and unfortunately you are all I have. So. Snap out of it!” She poked him hard in the chest, just above his bandolier of vile potions.
Not all of them were designed to hurt demons – some were made to enhance a demonhunter’s skills – but she didn’t dare touch any of them.
“I – I don’t know what you mean–”
“Oh, for Hell’s sake, yes you do. Think , Oleander Keen. You grew up here. Had young Oleander ever heard of Bright Renewal Academy? Do you remember your friends talking about it? Do you really remember?”
He looked inward, his eyes bouncing, searching.
The befuddlement, the confusion, grew more pronounced.
Then with shocking suddenness, he grasped one of the vials at his bandolier and jerked it free, so terrifyingly quickly she nearly knocked it away with her cane, thinking he meant to use it against her.
Instead, he swallowed the contents in a single gulp.
The empty vial shattered on the sidewalk at their feet. For a moment, they stared at one another, Keen breathing hard, blowing like a winded horse, Hero tensed, waiting for violence.
A grimace twisted his face. He bent at the middle, stricken, one arm clutched across his midsection.
Passersby gave him looks but hurried on, leaving the two alone in the halo of the streetlamp.
Hero took a step back, her cane at the ready.
She’d club him, if necessary, but she felt a small hope it wouldn’t be.
Keen was a professional. He understood what she wanted from him, understood that things weren’t quite right.
The potion took him to one knee.
“Pull yourself together, DH Keen,” she ordered sharply.
Men like him responded well to directives.
She was his superior. That made a difference even if every instinct told him to distrust her.
To kill her, even. She was risking a lot on his professionalism, but she hadn’t been lying: she needed an ally.
Damn the Goddess for this sick joke, but she needed him, now more than ever.
Whatever the foul concoction was, it was fast acting, at least. Keen suddenly relaxed, both fists dropping to the sidewalk to prop him up as he sagged.
He took a few deep breaths, then staggered upright.
She didn’t help him, afraid to touch him lest he lash out at her.
Instincts honed by experience were hard to suppress, especially when you were as vulnerable as Keen was now.
His face had turned sickly in the glow of the gas lamp, but his eyes were clear.
The befuddlement was gone from his expression, replaced by hardness, an anger etched deep in the lines around his mouth and eyes.
His lips screwed up and he spat as if he’d eaten something unpleasant. The potion or the broken enchantment?
“There now,” she said quietly. “All better?”
He nodded. Another grimace and a hard swallow. He tugged at his uniform, setting it straight, took off his cap and ran a hand over his hair before replacing it. Shoulders squared, he clicked his heels together. “My apologies, Inspector Viridian. I – I was indisposed…”
“Yes, well, the important thing is you’re better now, right?” She peered at him. He seemed clear-eyed and lucid. Could be a trick, though. Any enchantment that blanketed an entire town was a powerful one. But demonhunters were a special breed.
His attention stance wavered, and he looked about ten years old.
“I should have known. I should have understood what was happening. The sudden shift with Dewey… Damn my blindness.” He lifted a fist, but his anger was directed entirely at himself.
“It won’t happen again. I see what we’re up against now. I’ll be more vigilant.”
Hero shrugged. She didn’t want to belabor his failing.
At least he’d managed to snap himself out of it.
Most men, most humans, wouldn’t have that fortitude; a demonhunter’s Sight potions would kill an ordinary man.
It hadn’t been so difficult to break him free, though the pounding in her heart belied the thought.
He could have just as easily responded with violence.
Then she would have had to solve this whole thing alone.