4. Chapter Four
Chapter Four
Two weeks passed—slow, sleepless, and numbingly dull. The buyer I’d met with over the gem declined, and I got twice the price for it at auction. I had no time for men who hesitate. I’d stopped doing it a long time ago.
And as I startled from a dream of warm lips refusing to go cold as they turned blue, my first thought was that I should have hesitated. I should have backed away and let Rook die.
I sighed and blinked at the light of my computer screen, my laptop sitting across my legs on top of rumpled sheets. My neck was stiff from falling asleep sitting against the headboard. A rhythmic hum sounded somewhere to my right.
My phone on the nightstand. That must be what woke me. I grasped it.
Unknown number.
Fucking hell. This was the third time this week, and there were three times the week before. Whoever this prick was wouldn’t leave a goddamn voicemail.
I flipped my phone open and jammed my finger against the answer button.
“Austin here,” I snapped into the speaker.
“Jesus. Do you always answer the phone like that?”
I swallowed hard, my tongue paralyzed in my mouth. My phone number wasn’t a secret, but one had to know the right people to get it. No one—no one—would dare give it to him.
“Still with me, England?”
My hand tightened around the back of the phone.
“Hellooooo…”
“How the fuck did you get this number?” I finally ground out.
Rook chuckled on the other end of the line. “You’re not exactly a hard person to track down. That’s the problem with owning all of the city. You said something like that, right? It’s hard to remember. I was dying and everything. It’s hard to think clearly when you can’t breathe.”
“What do you want?”
“An apology would be nice. Rope burn on the neck is kind of a bitch.”
I pushed my laptop and the messy sheets aside and stood to pace the length of my bedroom. I was seconds away from hanging up on him when my sleep-addled brain conjured an image of him sitting with a phone to his ear, his blue eyes laughing as he provoked me. That’s what he wanted—to wind me up.
“You suck at talking on the phone,” Rook continued. His voice laid over that image and I couldn’t bring myself to hang up. This was what I got for sleeping for once—dreams of his lips and the inability to cut off his voice. “You know you’re supposed to talk back, right?”
“It’s two in the morning,” I deadpanned.
“You don’t seem like someone who sleeps a lot.”
“Well, I was asleep.” I glanced at my laptop as I paced by the bed again, and I couldn’t even remember how far I got with Project Mori last night. Likely not very far. I was hitting too many dead ends.
“It was urgent.”
“Urgent?” I scoffed. “You needed to call to taunt me in the middle of the night?”
I could hear the grin on his smug face. “Not really, but that part is kind of fun.”
“I swear, the next time I see you—”
“What?” I heard the squeak of what must be a very rickety chair as he leaned back in it. “You’ll kiss me again?”
My skin grew hot, anger flooding my body. “I am going to hang up in five seconds. Five, four—”
“There was another murder,” he said. I paused, and I didn’t quite know why. Murder meant much less to me than the average person. Gray had murdered someone two days ago at my request. There were murders on the news every few nights. It was a large city. People died.
“You will have to be more specific. That isn’t news in our world, Rook.” I had no doubt Rook had spilled blood too. Otherwise, he never would have gained the foothold he had in Ashbruck.
He sighed, exasperation leaking through the phone. “A magician. Fuck, aren’t you supposed to know everything? Hands cut off. Tongue cut out. What the fuck do you even do all day in that pretty penthouse?”
“How do you know where I live?”
“I don’t. You just seem like someone who lives in a penthouse. Flashy. Rich. Annoying. Focus, man. Murder. Magician. Mangled body.”
I vaguely remembered Gray mentioning something about a murder a few weeks ago, but I sighed again. “It sounds like something that is not my problem.”
“Even if it were the Council representative?”
I stopped pacing. “Blackwell’s dead?”
“Just happened,” Rook said. “The police don’t know, but the Council has people investigating it right now. I thought you’d want to know.”
Right now? But he’d been calling all week, assuming it was the same unknown number. “What were you bothering me about before?”
“Oh, the other times I called? You’re rude as hell, by the way. Answer your phone.”
“I don’t answer if it’s not important.” I swallowed once, not sure why I asked, “Was it important?”
Of course it wasn’t. He was just trying to get in my head, some kind of mental warfare and—
“Maybe I just wanted to hear your voice.”
I ignored that and the goosebumps it raised all over my skin. No, that was the cold in my bedroom. Did I leave a window open?
I mentally cataloged why someone would chop up a magician’s body like that. Magic came in several forms—potions, spelled objects—but most magic required hands to direct it, and sometimes it was verbal. No hands, no tongue, no magic.
“Was there a message? On the body, I mean. Last time there was a message.”
“I don’t know. Maybe you should go find out.”
“Do you have an address for this murder?” I asked.
“Between Broadway and Blue, down by the river.” Bold. That wasn’t the seedy part of town I’d expect a body to turn up in. Bodies in the river tended to wash up with trash.
“I’ll look into it. Maybe.” Why did these things always have to happen in the middle of the night? I could send Gray, but he was probably fast asleep.
“Cool,” Rook said. “Answer your phone next time.”
“I have no intention of talking to you again.” I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at my walk-in closet. What did I even wear to a murder investigation? I had about twenty tailored suits, none of which would make me inconspicuous if someone saw me lingering about.
“Ouch. That hurts my feelings.”
“I didn’t know you had any.”
“See you around, England.”
I gritted my teeth at the stupid nickname and hung up on him. Wide awake, I stood and rummaged through my closet for something to wear.
***
I crouched on top of a five-story building overlooking the corner of Broadway and Blue. The river lapped lazily against a muddy shore, the water dark at night. Five people stood around a corpse, lighting a circle with orbs that glowed midair at regular intervals around the body.
It was difficult to see their faces, but as far as I could tell, none of them were Council representatives besides the dead man on the ground.
The others—the representatives for the shifters, fae, vampires, and humans—sent grunts to investigate this.
They may have worn fancy clothes, but they were grunts nonetheless.
I cast a simple spell to carry their voices on the air and listened as they mused about what foul play had taken place.
“It’s the same as the last one,” a woman said. “No hands, no tongue. They didn’t want him casting.”
A man held up a square of paper the length of his thumb. “‘One evil with seven faces,’” he read.
“He’s writing a message one body at a time,” said the woman.
Oh, that’s ominous.
We could try to find him for you so you could talk to him.
Are you just going to pretend that phone call earlier didn’t happen? I think he was excited to talk to you again.
I resisted the urge to shush the restless spirits. The people below me searched the rest of the body and came up empty for clues.
“H-how long of a message do you think it will be?” another man asked. This one sounded young, and I couldn’t see his face, but he sounded like he might vomit up his dinner. He took another glance at the body and turned away.
“Get a grip. This is part of the job.” The woman crossed her arms and shook her head at him. “As for the message, I don’t want to find out. Bag the body, and let’s get him back to the morgue for examination. We need to find out who did this before the election, or no one will want the position.”
They zipped up the body and transferred it efficiently to the back of an unmarked black van. I’d seen enough. One text on my phone summoned a driver to pick me up several blocks away, and I climbed in the back of a sleek SUV.
As I rode home, I wondered who would be bold enough to kill a Council member.
The Council was the only semblance of a government the supernatural community had, even though most of their bullshit was handled among themselves—shifter packs and fae courts and whatever else they got up to.
Still, they’d been known to make arrests or even carry out executions when someone from our world threatened its secrecy.
Blackwell was a ballsy choice, and I had a prickling hunch that this was about to get worse.
Why would Rook tell me about this? I berated myself for thinking of him.
Too often I circled back to him lately. Blackwell was the highest authority magicians in this city had, and if the killer was brave enough to take him down, who was the first victim?
The Council member’s murder went far beyond escalation.
Or did it? Was the other victim someone of power as well?
Worse, was this about to become a pattern? That’s what humans call a serial killer, right? A pattern of victims. As I watched the city pass by, I wondered what the next part of the message would be.