Chapter 34
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The next day, after a breakfast which appeared via another of Laurel’s employees, we got in Nick’s car and headed to Woolworth’s address.
Nick had drawn an alchemist circle on both of our chests and powered them both up with his returning magic.
When asked what the circles did, he said they were lower profile than a bulletproof vest.
Nick was putting on his holster and gun when his cell phone rang. After checking the number, he rolled his eyes and shook his head. Still, he answered it.
“What is it, Sam?” Whoever was on the other end spoke rapidly, and I took my time packing my bag, trying to eavesdrop out of habit.
Nick sighed. “He’s probably just out. You know how he is. If you’re worried, call 911. I’m in the middle of a case, but I’ll call you this afternoon if he hasn’t shown up.”
He hung up and slid the phone back into his pocket.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, that was my dad’s secretary. He came to town with my uncle for the conference. Apparently, my uncle went out this morning and hasn’t come back yet, and Sam’s worried he won’t make his presentation this afternoon.” Nick checked his gun and then clipped it into his holster.
“You aren’t worried?” I asked.
“My uncle can handle himself and Sam worries too much. I’m actually surprised my dad sent my uncle to the conference. It’s not really his thing. Even when I was little, he’d disappear for years and then he’d show back up. He wasn’t interested in the family legacy until I was in junior high.”
“If you’re sure,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go find a murderer.”
Woolworth’s neighborhood was in one of the older areas of San Amaro.
The houses were all Spanish style, with white walls and red ceramic roofs.
Large, heavy trees lined the streets, giving the impression we were in a whole different century.
Most of the houses were set back from the street, so when we parked, we had to walk up a couple flights of stairs to get from the sidewalk to the front door.
There was magic on the way up the steps. I could feel myself brushing against it like stepping through a cobweb. It didn’t feel anything like the hungry, sharp magic I’d activated in the morgue. If I had to put it into words, it reminded me of Shannon’s magic. Warm, friendly, familiar.
“Ready?” Nick said.
I nodded. He brought up his hand and pounded heavily on the door.
For a moment, there was silence, the dark wooden door standing still. Then it opened a crack and an older man poked his head out. His eyes were sleepy, and there was a crust of salt on his cheeks and beard. By the stiff quality of his graying hair, I pegged him as a surfer.
“Can I help you?” the man asked.
Nick glanced at me, but I shook my head. Whoever this was, he wasn’t our professor. Maybe Woolworth had a partner?
“SAPD. We’re here looking for Mark Woolworth.” Nick pulled out his badge and flashed it. The man held out his hand and Nick passed over the badge for examination.
Looking at the guy, he fit into the counter culture role, up to and including questioning all authority. Returning Nick’s badge, the guy sighed and ran a hand through his hair.
“Mark isn’t here right now,” he said. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes,” Nick said immediately. “We’re here because one of his seminar students was killed, and we were hoping to ask him a few questions.”
“Come on in.” The guy waved his hand towards the dim interior of the house.
We stepped in as he walked through the house, passing an open sitting room and heading into a remodeled kitchen. He leaned against the granite countertop and served himself some coffee. “You want any?”
Nick shook his head. I was curious why we were getting the royal treatment from someone who was clearly suspicious of police out of habit.
“You think he had something to do with the death?” the man asked.
“Why do you ask?” Nick said.
Sighing, the man scrubbed his hand through his hair and examined his cup of coffee. “He’s an odd kid. When he moved back, Adelaide thought maybe he was trying to mend fences.”
“You were Adelaide’s boyfriend?” I asked.
“Partner,” he said. “For almost ten years now. Mallory Silva.”
I leaned against the counter across from him. “You don’t think he came home to make peace.”
Nick stood back and I could feel him scanning the room, looking for any clue that would give us a legitimate reason to conduct a search.
“I think he came back because the job was here,” Mallory said. “There’s not many places hiring magical studies professors these days, and Mark got a junior position on staff.”
“So he and Adelaide didn’t get along?” I asked.
Mallory shook his head. “No. They had a falling out before I met her and barely talked.”
“What was the fight about?” I asked.
Mallory sighed. “Magic. He blamed her for being such a weak alchemist. I don’t know why he thought it was her fault.”
“What happened after he moved back?” I asked.
“It was tense for a while,” Mallory said. “Especially when he’d pick at her for doing witchcraft. She was between covens, and so she’d do solo practice out in the backyard.”
He jerked his thumb towards a giant bay window overlooking a garden. It was overgrown, full of herbs and bushes which would make any kitchen witch happy. You could probably do almost anything with what was back there.
“He’s still living here?” Nick clarified.
“Yeah,” Mallory said. “He hasn’t said anything, but he inherited her half of the house. I offered to buy him out, but he’s been... odd since she died.”
“What do you mean?” I let myself slip just a little bit. Part of obligation magic is that you have to know what people want, what their deepest desires are. I knew this guy’s deepest desire was to have someone listen to him. It took just a brush of my magic and he was pouring out the entire story.
“Adelaide had been sick for a while—cancer, the big C, you know,” he said.
“But she was on the mend. She’d just finished another round of chemo and was home on bed rest. I was here most of the time—I sold my company and retired a few years ago—but I had to go out to get this bone broth she’d fallen in love with. ”
I waited, the listening ear he craved. No judgment for how much he disliked his stepson, no commentary, just a vast cavern of listening. Behind me, I could feel Nick’s confusion. He wanted to ask questions, but the web of listening I was casting only let him hear.
“Mark was home, and I asked him to look in on her and make sure she didn’t need anything.
He said he would and when I got back... well, he said he went in to check on her, and she’d passed away.
He even called 911, but because Adelaide had a DNR, they said to just call the mortuary.
” Mallory sighed and rubbed at his face.
“It’s not that I don’t believe him. The doctor warned us she was going to be weak and there could be complications.
But... he had black marks on his fingers like he’d been using an alchemist’s marker.
I didn’t see any circles, so it might have just been for work, for one of the classes he was teaching.
Still... I can’t stop thinking about it.
And then, he started keeping his room locked.
He bought a new lock and didn’t give me the key.
I’m worried about him. I think maybe he saw something when Adelaide died, and it changed him. ”
He stopped and for a moment, the kitchen hummed with the silence. I broke it. This poor schmuck didn’t even know he owed me now. I could feel the thin ribbon of obligation tying us together. There was another one, too, faint enough I almost missed it.
Woolworth. He owed me. Not a lot, barely even a favor, but enough. What had I done that was a gift for him?
“Do you mind if we take a look in his room?” Nick asked. If we got the homeowner’s permission, we were golden. We were legal.
For a moment, Mallory was silent. He was going to say no. He might not like Mark, might even think he had something to do with Adelaide’s death, but he didn’t want to think of himself as a guy who would give up his stepson.
In my head, I swore. We were about to lose him. Angrily, I pressed my knuckles into the countertop and without looking at either Mallory or Nick, I said, “You should let us see his room. It would help.”
With the words, I pulled on the obligation and felt it unravel under the pressure of the request. Slowly, Mallory nodded. “Yeah. If it would help you.”
His confusion was apparent in the frown on his face, and he said, “This way. I want to help you.”
He said the latter to himself, as he led us up a staircase and down a long hall. Nick came up beside me, his eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”
“He thinks Mark did something,” I murmured. “All I did was nudge him.”
“Like you nudged me to hit myself?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“That’s illegal. That’s not consent, Parker.”
I ignored him, my back stiff. I knew. I knew it wasn’t right, but it was in my nature. I was just as bad as the rest of the fae, and now I had proof. When it came down to it, I’d do what it took to win.
At the door to a bedroom, Mallory stood back, his mouth tight. He pointed at the deadbolt above the handle.
“See?” he said.
Nodding, Nick pursed his lips. He tried the knob, and it easily turned. My stomach tightened. Glancing at me, Nick’s brows were drawn together and I could read the uncertainty in his gaze. It was too easy.
Still, he nudged the door open, careful not to step inside. There weren’t any obvious alchemy circles on the floor, which was bare wood like the rest of the house. The room itself was chaos.
Books were stacked everywhere, and what had once been a pleasant blue wall, perfect for a guest bedroom, was covered with papers.
Woolworth had hung a whiteboard on the wall next to the bed, and there were drafts of circles on it, the same symbols repeating in different patterns.
I glanced at Nick, but his eyes were darting all over the room, looking for any danger.
We were both on edge, it seemed, after the attack at Tim’s place.
Mallory pushed past us, and Nick grabbed at his arm a second too late.
He stepped into the room, his eyes wide.
He spun in a slow circle and said, “It wasn’t like this a few weeks ago.
Before he put the lock on it. It wasn’t like this at all. This is—”
He shook his head and pushed his toes into a stack of papers. “I don’t even know what this is.”
“Sir,” Nick said, his commanding voice on. “I’m going to need you to step out of the room.”
“Oh,” Mallory looked around again and shuffled out, his socks silent on the wood. “Of course.”
He covered his mouth with his hand and leaned against the hallway wall.
Nick glanced at me, and I shrugged. There hadn’t been any obvious magic when Mallory entered the room. Maybe Woolworth had just left the house too quickly to set up a booby trap.
“When was the last time Mark was here?” I asked. “Exactly?”
“He left last night,” Mallory said. “He was here at dinner time, I think.”
Deliberately, I took a step into the room, but nothing happened.
Pulling out my phone, I started shooting pictures of everything.
The whiteboard, papers, the stack of books, all of it recorded on my phone in case we needed it later.
Nick followed behind me, taking a pair of blue gloves out of his jacket pocket.
He snapped them on and then handed me another pair. Juggling my phone, I slid my hand into them and continued recording the room. Most of it looked like variations on what was in the textbook, but some of the books looked old. I picked one up and thumbed through it.
“That’s one of Adelaide’s research texts,” Mallory called out. “She had it here on loan, but I know I returned it to the university after she passed. They were supposed to return it to the private collection it had come from.”
Woolworth had scribbled notes on the pages.
Whatever book Mallory had returned to the collection, Woolworth had either outright stolen it or replaced it with a copy.
It looked like the book was written in Latin, and I didn’t read it nearly well enough to make out what it said, but the diagrams told a pretty good story.
Several circles that were similar to the one we knew were diagrammed on the pages.
The difference seemed to be, unlike modern alchemy circles, these were broken, missing the clean lines which would keep spells contained and magic conserved.
Instead, they were messy, half witchcraft, with an uneven split of the words of power across the diagram.
I put the book down and picked up another.
This one was in English, although it looked over a century old.
The typeface made me squint, but I got the gist it was an apocryphal alchemy text which posited that anchor points could be used to do more than maintain a spell’s integrity and limit its scope.
Nick was methodically going through the papers on the wall, the grooves on his forehead deepening into a frown which made my stomach clench.
“What?” I asked, low.
“He was experimenting,” Nick said. “The incubus was the second, and Woolworth drained him on purpose. But, the spell still wasn’t right, so he did a different iteration on the vampire. I think it wasn’t until he got to the Five Dragons werewolf that he perfected it.”
“Who was his first?” I asked, thickening the air so the sound wouldn’t carry to Mallory.
Glancing at the doorway, Nick raised an eyebrow. I shook my head. He shouldn’t be able to hear us and with our backs to him, he couldn’t read our lips.
Looking at me, his eyebrows up, Nick said, “Adelaide. Although the way he writes about it, it might have been an accident.”
“No.” I used my phone to scratch at my hairline. “No, how do you accidentally drain your mother of magic?”
“Practicing one of these ancient spells, bringing it in to the in-house expert,” Nick suggested. “It seemed like initially he was just trying to upstage her.”
I began snapping pictures of the notes Nick was referencing, wanting to get as much on camera as possible. A notification popped up on my screen. Skylar was calling.
I swiped it away, only to have a text pop up when the call disappeared.
YOU ARE IN DANGER. CARDS SAY BAD. GET OUT.
A moment later, she texted again.
Are you already dead?
“Uh,” I said. “We need to go, Nick.”
“What?” He was holding his phone to his ear, I assumed calling his captain.
Pushing him in front of me, gathering Mallory along the way, I said, “Move. Now.”
The explosion happened as soon as we left the room. Our backs were to it, so neither of us got any protective spell up. We knew exactly who the killer was, and he wanted us to die with the knowledge.