3. Paul #2
“I will be fine,” I said, although I wasn’t quite sure that was the case.
Chris’s declaration about becoming the alpha had the more logical part of my brain trying to cast itself into the future.
Our family line had been the alpha of the Marchendi pack for at least ten generations.
The Marchendi pack was spread across seven states and contained thousands of members who looked to us for guidance, occasional financial and legal support, as well as social connection that wolf shifters were supposed to crave.
While Chris and I were both of the alpha designation, that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be challengers among those thousands.
Complications. So many complications over something I’d never ever been trained or wanted to think about.
“I’m leaving the case,” Penelope said calmly, which pulled me back to the present. “I’ll book the first flight out of here.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Paulie…”
“I don’t mean don’t come back ever, just not right now.
Continue to work on justice where you are, maybe bring some good into this world, and once we have all the details of the funeral arrangements, you can come home.
We’ll all be together then without having to worry about all that planning or details. ”
“Are you sure, Paul?” Jack asked, and he did look a little guilty. Good. Although he was generally harmless, and I understood his tendency to need a lot of extra time to process strong emotions, his behavior had hurt me too. Hurt Penelope. Probably hurt himself.
“I am,” I said with a long sigh. “Our father and our brother are property of the morgue, and we need to inform the security detail’s families why they won’t be coming home tonight, so we aren’t even to the funeral step. One thing at a time.”
“Yeah,” Jack agreed before taking a swig of whiskey.
I hadn’t even realized he’d opened it. “I know, uh, knew, Jacobyn and Fiona personally, used to cut class together back at boarding school. I’ll call their wives.
” He paused, looking down at the bottle.
“In a couple of hours, when their kids are down for the night.”
I nodded. As horrified as I was that he’d lost a pair of friends as well, I was glad he was stepping up. Before I could thank him, a noise distracted me.
I couldn’t say why it did, or even what was unusual about it.
Maybe my nerves were simply so frayed and raw that an errant tire streak from outside could have set me off.
My eyes flicked to the origin of the sound, focusing on the heavy, wooden rafter above Jackson’s head that supported the transitional hallway.
And it was cracking.
“Jackie!” I cried, leaping forward with all that shifter speed I rarely used.
“Wha- oooph! ”
We collided, hitting the floor outside the hall just in time for the extremely pointed tip of the pillar to fall down, balancing precariously before toppling into said cabinet and sending liquor and glass everywhere.
“I-I-I…” Jackson sputtered. If he had stayed standing there, I had no doubt he would have been impaled.
Not even an alpha could come back from that.
“Did I almost just die? I feel like I almost just died!” I could hear Jack’s heartbeat accelerate even more, and his scent turned sour and acrid. “What the fuck?”
“Calm down, you’re alive,” Chris said. “It was just a fluke because this disgustingly ostentatious estate is a legacy of caring more about the appearance of being opulent than the actual structure. It’s been falling apart for generations.”
I didn’t say it aloud as I stood and helped Jack to his feet, but I didn’t agree. There was something so stark about the sudden crash of the beam that had tried to take yet another sibling away. It ate at me, burying itself deep into my mind. I knew I would obsess over it.
“I’m going to call a contractor now,” Penelope said.
“I can probably find an overnight one who can get there in an hour or two. It’ll cost an arm and a leg but—” The color drained from her face.
She likely remembered that an arm with our family ring was the only limb separated from the mess of gore that’d been scattered all throughout our father’s office, set apart and arranged just so to make a crude gesture.
The killer was mocking us.
“You’re in another country,” Chris said, his voice softening slightly. “I’ll handle it.”
“I’ll call the detectives,” I murmured, still staring at that beam.
“Why?”
I stared at my older brother dolefully. “I would think the why is obvious.”
“You want to tell them our legacy estate is crumbling? I don’t think it’s relevant.”
Not relevant?
I stared at him some more but decided to drop it—for the moment, at least. I got Jackie up into his old room. He wasn’t all that keen to spend the night until I asked him if he really wanted to be completely alone in his penthouse, especially after he called his friends’ wives.
Once Penelope was sure we weren’t going to rip each other apart, she ended the call. Chris? Well, Chris was Chris, as he always was. But eventually, I managed to get some time alone to make my own call.
“Detective Tutorillo,” came the terse voice across the line. I decided I was still going to mentally call him Detective Righty. If he wanted my brain to remember his name, maybe he should have been a bit more pleasant to remember. “Who’s this?”
“Paul VanMarche,” I said quickly.
“What’s wrong? Did you remember something you wanted to tell us?”
“Ah, no. Nothing quite like that. I’m calling because a rafter fell in our home and nearly killed Jackson, the youngest.”
“Do you need an ambulance?”
“No, we’re okay.”
“All right, then…” His pause was particularly pregnant, even over the phone line. “Why are you telling us about it?”
Was I taking crazy pills? And if I was, would they even work on a wolf shifter?
“Because that certainly seems suspicious, doesn’t it?”
“Suspicious as in you believe someone somehow purposefully sabotaged a roof support to magically have a perfect fall and harm your sibling?”
“I’m not sure why you say it like that when magic exists, Detective. A good witch could?—”
“Look, it’s an old house, and there was a violent attack there that used magical shielding to contain everything, including scent, within the scene of the crime. It makes sense that a few things have come loose or become damaged.
“I know emotions are high right now, and you’re going through something no kid should have to experience, but it was just an unfortunate coincidence.”
“Unfortunate coincidence,” I repeated, even though my instincts were screaming that was false. “Right, Detective Righ— Tutorillo. I’ll keep that in mind.”
I hung up, staring down the hall. Maybe… maybe I just needed a little sleep to reset my brain and come to terms with the new hell I was living in.
Sleep eluded me.
Not exactly shocking, but certainly disappointing. For once, I agreed with my brother that shutting my brain off for just a couple of minutes would be a pleasant relief from the maelstrom going on between my ears.
I tried all the techniques I had used throughout my thirty-three years, but lying there in the quiet was just too much.
I kept seeing the scene in the study. It was haunting me like it was its own specter, except I was entirely cognizant that every time my mind conjured it up, it made it a bit worse.
It wasn’t going to stop unless I did something about it, so I got out of bed and headed back to the scene of the crime.
Before the magical community revealed themselves to humans about two hundred years ago, such a crime scene would have been sectioned off for days and taken quite a long time to clean.
However, now there were all sorts of magical folks in law enforcement, and I had been promised that the office would be magically scrubbed once everything was meticulously documented in both physical and enchanted ways.
Hopefully, seeing the room in its normal state instead of a scene out of a horror movie would help my brain stop replaying that one moment over and over again.
Once more, I was struck by that sense of everything being far too surreal, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I was locked in a nightmare.
It was a subtle sense of foreboding at first, but it grew stronger until it was practically a drumbeat behind my temples as I turned the doorknob of what had been my father’s study just the day before.
Now it was a tomb.
An empty tomb, however, or at least that was what I hoped. Taking a deep breath, I pushed through my disquiet and opened the door.
Only to be greeted by complete and utter normalcy.
No blood. No sense of horror and betrayal, of fear and pain. There wasn’t even a speck of dust, all of it having been collected by whatever forensic wizard had been on the team to handle our case. It was uncanny, but finally, that horrific image in my head began to ebb.
It didn’t vanish entirely, of course. I feared the sight would linger in my memories until I was old and gray, but it helped take some of the teeth out of it, so I stepped in a little farther.
Then a little farther.
I had no idea what possessed me, but I slowly walked around, letting my eyes roam where they wanted. The forensic team had done a truly incredible job with enchanting away all the evidence to their labs, but certain little things were off.
I knew my father’s study like the back of my hand. The thick coaster that he always used for his morning tea was on the wrong side of the desk. Luther had made him that one summer, and my father had always treasured it.
“They put his books back in the wrong spot,” I mused to myself as I spotted his favorite reads, Himalayas! and The Discerning Alpha , on the shelf behind his desk rather than on the small bookstand our mother had found during one of her thrifting expeditions.