Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I dropped to my knees, fingers laced behind my head. Nick copied me, but slower, and he was repeating, “SAPD, I’m SAPD, stand down!”
The trigger-happy cops didn’t seem to care they were about to shoot a superior officer, and we both ended up in handcuffs.
“Are you okay?” I asked Nick, the handcuffs tight on my wrists. I leaned over, trying to see his arm. “How bad is it?”
“I’m fine,” Nick snapped, his eyes narrowed on one of the cops who was radioing the situation in.
Shaking his head, Nick turned to me, his eyes catching on my cheek where the demon had nicked me. “Parker. You’re hurt.”
“Hey, it’s barely a paper cut. You definitely got it worse than me. What was that?”
Clearly unwilling to let my injury go, Nick called out, “Hey, he needs medical attention.”
One of the cops approached and examined me. He waved over another cop, and they tried to figure out if we needed an ambulance when someone spoke from the door.
“King, what the hell are you doing?”
Nick relaxed, his shoulders falling. “Captain.”
“Jesus Christ,” the man said, a toothpick clenched between his molars. “Get him out of these cuffs.”
“Sir?” The officer holding Nick’s badge rushed to grab his keys, the metal jangling together as he scrambled at the lock. “So sorry, sir.”
“Uncuff him.” Nick gestured to me. He crouched down next to me as they took off the handcuffs, and he reached into his jacket, pulling out a handkerchief, using it to wipe at my face. “Thanks for keeping me safe.”
I shivered as he blotted at my skin, and almost reached out to cup his hand, but stopped myself. Nodding, Nick reached down and took my hand, pressing it over the handkerchief so I was staunching the bleeding.
Then he stood, and I saw Senior Detective Nicholas King again, for the first time since we’d started this whole adventure. His captain was a portly man, his toothpick swaying up and down as he spoke.
“Give me a report, King. What the hell happened here? You said it was a dead body. This is not a dead body.” He plucked the toothpick out and gestured to the demon corpse before tucking it into his pocket and pulling a fresh one out.
“We discovered the body of Timothy Powell, someone I was looking into regarding the magic murders. He’d been killed, but when we entered the apartment, we must have set off the spell,” Nick said. An EMT showed up, gear in hand. He looked around and zeroed in on Nick.
With quick motions, Nick rolled up his sleeve, holding out his arm for a bandage as he continued speaking with his captain.
Once I saw the shallow scratches, I felt like I could breathe again.
The jacket and shirt must have taken some of the attack, because those claws could have sliced down to the bone.
“What spell?” the captain asked, eyeing the alchemy circles Nick had drawn. “This looks like a containment and disposal spell.”
“That was me,” Nick said. “I realized what it was when I saw the dead body.”
“Care to share with the class?” I muttered. “Enough with the suspense. What was that thing?”
“Alchemists have long believed there are more realms than the Far Realm,” Nick said. The medic finished up, and he gestured towards me. “In the Victorian era, a lot of powerful alchemists spent their entire lives searching for access to these other realms.”
I waved off the medic, and Nick sent me a narrow look. Huffing a sigh, I pulled off the handkerchief, getting a good look at it. It was monogrammed. Nick was ridiculous, I thought fondly. Of course his hankie was monogrammed.
The medic cleaned the wound and pressed a bandage on.
“Stay here, you need to take him to the hospital,” Nick said.
“You’ll both be going to the hospital,” the captain corrected.
“Captain—” Nick started.
“The demon?” I interrupted.
“What most people don’t know, is alchemists accessed some of the other realms. They’re numbered, by the level of difficulty involved in opening a gateway.
I saw the spell on Timothy Powell summoned a creature from the fifth realm.
” Nick frowned. “This is high level magic, higher than almost anyone could carry out. It would require a storehouse of magic.”
“Could you do it?” the captain asked.
“With time,” Nick said. “Maybe. It would be much easier with multiple practitioners.”
“So, you think it’s related to the magic killings?” the captain asked.
“I think if he’s draining magic, he must be using it for something,” I said. “The spell in the morgue sucked all the magic out of me, but it was going somewhere.”
“Who the hell is this?” the captain asked.
“Sorry,” Nick said. “Captain Tate, this is Parker Ferro, the source I’ve been consulting with.”
“Ferro,” Tate mused. “You took over Ortega’s old PI business, right?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I changed the name, though.”
“Okay, so our mystery killer drains this kid—what was he, another werewolf?” Tate asked.
“I’m not sure,” Nick said. “We’ll have to look more into his life in order to tell.”
“Drains him and then uses the magic he took to summon a demon. Why?” Tate said.
“He knew someone was going to come after him, maybe?” Nick suggested.
I was examining the couch where the killer left Tim. It looked staged. If he’d been killed there, he’d gone easily, which didn’t seem like Tim’s MO.
“Maybe it was a trial run,” I said. “To see if he could.”
Shaking his head, Tate said, “If he was just testing his abilities, I don’t like what that means.”
Nodding, Nick began going over the complicated technical aspects of the spell. As he spoke, I drifted away, examining the rest of Tim’s apartment.
The living room was sparse: a few posters on the wall from big-budget action movies, a bookshelf crammed with textbooks.
I looked at the titles and saw a range of subjects from math to psychology to magical studies.
It also meant he had enough money he didn’t worry about selling the textbooks back every semester.
A few houseplants were sunning themselves under the window. They looked well cared for, but I wasn’t an expert on ferns. Still, I could feel the happiness radiating from them, echoing in my magic like the bubbles in a brook.
Nick glanced at me and I waved him off. He narrowed his eyes, clearly saying he didn’t want me touching anything, and I held up both hands. Fine, fine, no touching.
A crime-scene tech circled around me, marking on the floor where there was some blood spatter from the demon. I nudged open the bedroom with my foot and squinted in the darkness.
Using my elbow, I flicked on the lights and took in the room. Plants lined the bedroom window, flowering lilies of some sort. A sun lamp was off to the side, tucked in the corner of the room.
The bed was unmade, sheets crumpled and a pair of pajama bottoms tossed on top. I walked over to the night stand, seeing a phone charger and a couple of thrillers stacked on the wooden table. A gold chain hung out of the book on top.
Glancing back to the living room, I saw no one was looking at me, so I picked up the book, opening it to the chain. The necklace slithered out, and I caught it in my hand before it fell to the floor. My heart jumped. I could feel it slamming in my chest like I’d run a marathon.
The pendant was a series of interlocking leaves, maple, oak, poplar. It was made of gold and copper and brass with gems set into the points of the leaves. The metal felt warm in my palm.
With another glance back, I pocketed the pendant, making sure none of the long gold chain was showing. Carefully, I put the book back as I’d found it. I examined the rest of the room and found a stash of HAH gear in the back of the closet.
When I walked back into the living room, Nick was watching the techs work with his arms crossed. He smiled when he saw me.
“Anything interesting?” he asked.
The necklace sat heavy in my pocket, a lie I couldn’t tell without my house of cards falling apart. I shook my head.
“Do you need my statement?” I asked.
“Not right now,” Nick said. “You can come by tomorrow. You should go to the hospital.”
One of the techs began photographing the counterspell he’d used against the demon, catching Nick’s attention.
“I’ll see you later?” I said, backing towards the door.
“I’ll be by tonight,” he confirmed. “Go to the doctor, Parker.”
I grunted, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, and Nick stepped over to see what a tech was talking about, something about a secondary spell in the floor.
Outside, police cars and flashing lights lined the street. A couple of more techs rushed passed me, and the cop that had cuffed us had been assigned to guard the perimeter. He shot me a nasty look as I passed, but I ignored him.
There was a park nearby, and I wandered towards it, going against the flow of traffic heading towards the building to see what all the noise was about.
As soon as my feet touched the grass, a cool relief seeped into my muscles.
I found a shady picnic table and sat, shifting to pull out the necklace.
The chain pooled in my hand, and I held the pendant up. The precious metals and stones glittered in the light. It was fae, and I could even tell which fae court it came from.
The Autumn King was fond of giving pendants like this to his favored courtiers. To wear it would have been a sign of respect, of trust, as much as fae royalty trusted anyone. I’d seen only a handful during my years in the fae realm.
Yet Tim had one. I shouldn’t have been surprised. If the Summer Queen had her own operatives in the human realm, it made sense the other courts would, too.
What didn’t fit was Tim’s interest in HAH. If he was half-blood like Acacia, or a changeling like me, then he should have felt as annoyed by the messaging as we did. After all, HAH was against us, too.
And did Acacia know who she was dealing with? Was it all part of some joint venture? Maybe if Tim got kicked out for espousing HAH views, then he’d look more appealing to more dangerous HAH sects?
Still, none of it fit, and now I’d never be able to ask him about it.
Did whoever killed him know he was fae? They’d have to. One taste of his magic, and it’d be obvious. So, was the demon trap for the fae or the cops or both?
It brought too many questions to mind. I rubbed my finger against an emerald set into a maple leaf on the pendant and took a breath that filled my lungs. What was I supposed to do here? One fae was dead, another was missing, and a murderer was at the heart of it.
There was only one solution, one person who could help me detangle what was going on. The Windrose. The balance between the courts, who was rumored to know every trick the fae monarchs tried before they even thought it themselves.
The Windrose would have some way to get in contact with him in the human realm. In fact, I was pretty sure I knew what that way was.
Standing, I looked towards the hills, shading my eyes. There, in the distance, was a solitary oak tree. It was massive, its long arms dipping close to the ground, even as its canopy had to be seventy feet above the ground.
Looked like I was going hiking.
Stopping at my place, I picked up water, some snacks, and a better backpack for hiking. It shouldn’t take more than an hour of walking, but I wasn’t looking forward to it.
A bus dropped me close to the trailhead, and I wasn’t wrong about how unpleasant it was to walk the dry hills in the baking sun. By the time I reached the oak, I’d emptied every drop of water from my bottle and eaten an entire box of granola bars.
At the tree, I paused, leaning against one of the branches. I sighed, long and low, as I looked up at the massive tree. There was some debris from other hikers. A couple of old beer cans, a few plastic wrappers that had gotten caught in the spiked leaves.
“Okay,” I said. “How do you work?”
The tree was the first thing I’d noticed when I returned from the Far Realm, because it felt like the Far Realm. Its branches pulsed with the power and energy moving through every living thing in the Far Realm, the sort of power a fae might take to replenish their own.
If the Windrose was here—and I knew from court gossip that he lived exclusively in the human realm—the tree would be where he was. I circled the tree, but there weren’t any obvious doorways or a burrow leading to him. Even higher up, I didn’t see anything that looked like an entrance.
Closing my eyes, I reached out with my magic to look for anything hidden and felt only a faint, faint line of connection. It was gossamer thin, connecting the tree to something in the distance. When I tugged on it, I felt a shift in the world.
Snapping my eyes open, I realized I’d made a mistake. The thread acted like a doorway, and I’d accidentally stepped inside. Wherever I was, it looked like a house.
Everything was dark, polished woods. There was a small round hole in the center of the room, but other than that, the room was bare.
Stained glass windows climbed up massive walls, giving the impression of a church.
They featured fae, and when I turned in a circle, each window mapped to the four different courts.
Winter, first, with their pale whites and purples, the world around them covered in snow.
Spring, with greens and pinks, flowers covering the green land around them.
Summer, blue and yellow a harvest cornucopia surrounding them.
Finally, Autumn with its reds and browns, the world falling asleep as they walked through it.
When I approached one of the regular windows set between the mass of color, all I could see outside was a garden.
“Hello?” I called out.
The fae I was expecting didn’t arrive. I pursed my lips and began looking.
When I exited the room, it was set apart from the rest of the house.
I passed a modern kitchen with all the newest appliances.
Then, a door leading into a library, but there was no one sleeping in the chairs.
Finally, I reached a living room, with couches and a tv, the windows showing a view of an empty street.
“Huh,” I said. I saw four front doors, spaced evenly across a long wall, and then I saw the dead body.