CHAPTER 1
Coming home at Yule time is supposed to be fun! At least that’s what people always say, like in all the media that bombards us from the first minute after Samhain until the end of Twelfth Night. I’ve always had a good deal of trouble believing that malarkey, especially when I have to deal with my dear relatives.
Once I turned off of Highway 169 and into Nowata proper, it was just a matter of minutes until I pulled into the driveway. I didn’t have to know how close I was to the house; my old SUV has driven the route so many times I could just close my eyes and take a nap. But if I did that, the old-fashioned brick streets leading up to the house, which I hate, would wake me up about ten feet into the block.
Don’t get me wrong; Nowata is a nice enough town and was actually a great place to grow up. In retrospect, that is. When you were doing the growing up it was a one of the most stiflingly, boring places in existence.
I definitely would not want to come back here to live. The only way would be for a humongous salary, or for a devilishly handsome and wonderful guy. Not that, given my social life over the last couple of years, the latter had any kind of a chance in hell of coming about. But a girl can dream, can’t she?
I had few friends in school. Most people were afraid of me, though they would never have admitted it. Something about being afraid that sweet little Megan might get mad and turn one of them or their little darlings into an obnoxious smelly thing. Some people spend too much time reading the tabloids and watching low budget movies that some of the cable channels churn out on a regular basis.
I banked around the curve and a familiar white two-story house came into sight. It sits at the intersection of two streets and the highway. I couldn’t help smiling when I saw it. My great-grandfather had built the place at the turn of the twentieth century; my grandmother had been born in it, and some years later, so had my mother. I think if Mom had had her wish, I would have been born under that roof, as well. However, my wonderful father intervened, so I had the advantage of coming into the world in a hospital.
Nowata is fairly small, only around ten thousand people. The town got its name because of a drunken sign painter; it was supposed to be called Noweta, which is, I think, Cherokee, and means running water or something like that. The problem was, nobody noticed the mistake on the sign until after the sorcerer they had hired to bless the settlement had done his thing, and that locked in the name that was on the sign. The early settlers couldn’t afford to pay him a second fee to redo it correctly, so the name stayed the same.
I pulled my car up behind my mother’s hybrid. She’s gotten very much into energy efficiency in the last couple of years. She even named the car some sort of Latin moniker that changes every couple of weeks. I’ve given up trying to remember it. Actually, I’ve ridden in her car and kind of like it. When it comes time to get rid of my faithful old Forester, I will definitely consider one.
I grabbed my backpack and overnight bag and headed inside. The blinking red light on the intruder alarm came to life as I stepped though the side door and into the laundry room. It didn’t go off. That didn’t surprise me in the slightest.
“Mom, why are you paying for this alarm when you never set it?”
My mother pushed open the accordion door that led into the kitchen. Mom is tall, nearly five-eight, her grey hair held back with a sixties-style hippie head band.
“So, my daughter the witch has finally decided to come home for the holidays,” she said. There are times I think that my mother is auditioning for the role of a Jewish Mother in a community theatre production of Fiddler on the Roof.
I rolled my eyes; this was a conversation that we had had before, and I was pretty certain that we would have again, many, many times. She does it deliberately. I know that, and I know she knows that I know. Also, it isn’t done out of any sort of malice or intent to hurt. Mom has just gotten it in her head that this is funny and that I expect her to say it.
“Mother, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, you know good and well I am not a witch; I’m a sorceress. There’s a difference,” I said. “Just remember your daughter is a sorceress!”
“You better be a damn good sorceress,” she said, throwing her arms around me in a tight hug, “with what your education and training cost when you could have gone into something high paying, like law or medicine. You’d think you would have taken after me or your father, rather than your grandmother.”
I chuckled. Grandma had been a very adept sorceress as well as a teacher. She’d written several books on magic that were considered seminal and still used in a lot of university courses. The royalties from one of them had been enough to pay for my education, so Mom and Dad hadn’t had to fork over a dime.
“As for that stupid alarm, it’s been on the fritz all week. I’ve put in two calls to the alarm company, and they solemnly swear that they will have someone out here to look it over after the holidays,” she said. “Yeah, like I figure that’s going to happen before the end of January. Just watch, they’ll try to bill me for the time it’s on the fritz.”
“I’m sure you won’t let that happen.” And she wouldn’t, either. I know my mother all too well. During an ice storm a few years ago she was without power for four days. Once it was back on, she was in touch with the cable company and the newspaper demanding credit for the time that they were unable to supply her services.
I closed my eyes for a moment and let my senses slip into that hazy state where everything looks like it’s wrapped in a light fog and magic works. I could see that the alarm wards that I had laid were still working. Those should be enough until the alarm company showed up. Mom had tried to tell me that it was too much work for me to do something like this, but the very fact that she was having trouble with the normal alarm proved it wasn’t. Of course, I hadn’t mentioned to Mom that if there was a burglar, the wards I had laid would cause the stereo to go off at full blast, playing “Who Let the Dogs Out.” I figure rock and roll music would be a pretty good crime deterrent.
“So, let me look at you.” She took a step back and let her eyes roam up and down my five foot four form, like a drill sergeant trying to find an imperfection during inspection. I’m surprised she didn’t pull out a pair of white gloves and check behind my ears to see if I had washed there. “Well, it looks like you’ve lost some weight, but knowing the way you forget to eat and don’t cook, I’m hardly surprised. You need to eat a little more; I don’t think the starving waif look is in this year.”
If Mother couldn’t play the Midwestern Jewish Mother part, she wouldn’t be happy. Occasionally, I’ve wondered what she would have been like if we actually were Jewish.
I took off my leather flight jacket and hung it on the coat tree that stands in front of the floor-to-ceiling mural that decorates one wall of the kitchen. This was a gift to my folks after my father’s dozen-year remodeling project on the house was formally completed. I never cared for it, myself. It’s a little too postmodern for my taste, but it fit the house and my folks and that was all that mattered.
“Megan!”
I didn’t have to turn around to see the stern expression on Mom’s face; I well knew the disapproving look that I was getting. Like most women of her generation, Aline Elaine Yeager Thomas could communicate volumes with just the slightest change of inflection in her voice. And my dear mother was a Jedi Master when it came to that ability. It was a feminine skill that I apparently lacked, perhaps as a tradeoff for my other abilities. A tradeoff that, quite frankly, I’m glad I made, even though I never had a hand in it.
I already knew what the source of the problem was; it was resting in the small of my back, where it had been concealed by my jacket. I reached behind myself, pulled the clip-on holster free from my belt and pushed the snap into place to keep my police issue service revolver in place. Normally, I switch to a small twenty-two that I keep in my backpack when I come home. That had just slipped my mind tonight since I wanted to get out of town and up here as soon as possible. My relatives might drive me up a wall, but it was still the holidays.
“I’ve asked you not to bring that into the house,” said my mother. “You have a perfectly good lock box in the trunk of your car.”
“And I’ve explained to you that, even though I work for the Tulsa County District Attorney’s office, I am a duly deputized officer of the law and, as such, have to carry a firearm with me, on duty or off, and keep it where I can get to it,” I said.
“I just don’t like seeing you with a gun, Megan.”
As a compromise I walked behind the bar, looking up at the Moulin Rouge-type wallpaper that Daddy had thought fit the idea of a bar. I opened one of the drawers and put my gun inside it, making a big production out of locking the drawer and putting the key in my pocket.
The funny thing is, I have stuff in my backpack among my magical supplies that could, theoretically, be a lot more dangerous than a gun. Mom just has a thing about guns, themselves.
“Feel better now?” I asked. Hey, it’s her house; I hadn’t been more than an occasional visitor under this roof since I went off to college.
“Of course. Dear, I’m going to need your help with the angel food cake and getting the turkey ready to barbeque.”
Only my mother would come up with the idea of barbequed turkey for the Yule holidays. I grabbed my overnight bag, which actually had enough clothes for a couple of days, and my backpack and headed for my room.
“Oh, Megan, dear, I hope you brought something extra special to wear,” she said, turning her attention to several bowls that were spread out like a scientist’s lab bench on the kitchen table. There were three cookbooks open, along with a couple of recipe cards, though why she needed any of those was beyond me. She had a photographic memory.
“So, what did you bring?”
Oh, great. I knew it; I had known just as soon as I got in the car that this would happen. My dear mother had long ago decided that her beloved daughter couldn’t find someone for herself, so she was going to play matchmaker. Of course, it wasn’t like this was the first time that had happened, and probably wouldn’t be the last until I was actually standing with someone in front of a minister and saying “I do.”
“Just a skin-tight leather miniskirt, some fishnet stockings and a see through blouse, Mother. Will that do?”
“I’m sure you’ll look lovely in them, dear,” she said, reaching for a bottle of vanilla extract and grabbing a new mixing bowl from the drainer in the sink. I knew good and well she heard; this time she just chose to ignore me.
Is it any wonder that I don’t care that much about coming home for a visit?
✽✽✽
My bedroom was located at the top of the stairs along the south side of the house, with my parent’s bedroom only a few steps away, a single bathroom being the only separation. This made up the entire top floor of the house. This wasn’t the same layout that my great-grandfather had built over a century ago; there had been a lot of changes since he pounded his last nail into place.
Of course, there were some things about the house that he had never known, and neither did either of my parents. And if I had my way about things, Mother would never know about them. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Grandma, I wouldn’t have suspected a thing about my family home.
Grandma had been very explicit when she started teaching me that there were things that it was best that some people not know. Not because they weren’t trustworthy or anything like that; it was just a matter of their own safety.
My room looked the same. No, my mother had not kept it exactly the same as when I moved out. She can be wonderfully strange at times, but that would be just plain weird. No, the furniture was still the same, in the same places, but that was because I’m a little obsessive/compulsive and put it in the most logical place. There were a few things different, but a lot still the same. It did feel good to come back here.
I dropped my bags on the floor next to the double bed that had stood there since I was ten years old. Looking out the window, I could see how the town had grown, not by a lot, but it was still a slightly different view than the one that I had while I was growing up.
For some reason, my eyes went right to the carport under my window. I could see the large black circle where I had tried to mark the house for any passing UFOs. I was seven; that’s an age where a lot of things make perfect sense, that years later you have no clue where the idea came from. It was also the place where one of my few boyfriends had snuck up to serenade me from. My parents heard but didn’t say anything until the next morning, and that had just been to critique his singing. Dad also added that if he were going to do it again, it might be safer if he used the ladder from the tool shed and that it was all right to tell him about the key under the rock.
Needless to say, I was totally embarrassed and said young gentlemen exited my life shortly thereafter, never to return. The last I heard he was running a smoking cessation clinic in New Mexico.
I pushed the memories away, made sure the door and the curtains were closed and turned my attention to other things. Over next to my bed, right in the area under one of the house’s gables (I had always wished there were seven of them after reading the Hawthorne book in school) I pressed a magnetic catch that was hidden by the paneling. There is so much storage capacity in this house that, if the place were ever put on the market, the real estate agent might have an orgasm after finding out about it.
Two doors popped open and I reached inside, the small light bulb coming to life when I touched it. I did a quick inventory. My matched set of deutonic pistols, extra wands, various magical supplies, and several grimoires were all exactly where I left them. Not that I expected to need them, but I always liked to check to make sure nobody had been where they weren’t supposed to be. Before I closed the doors I pulled out a flat manila envelope and checked the seal on it, which was unbroken.
I was just about to head downstairs when I felt something rubbing against my leg. I didn’t have to look to know what had happened. This was one of the reasons for coming home for a visit.
“Hello, Misha,” I said, and reached down to rub under my favorite cat’s chin.
The fact that Misha had been gone for over ten years didn’t matter; sometimes you get lucky and things you love stick around.
# # #
I had just finished sifting the flour for the angel food cake for the fifth time. I may not be that good of a cook, but I had mastered this one recipe. There were no boxed angel food cakes ever served in my mother’s house; every one of them was made from scratch. It doesn’t take all that long and the results can make your mouth water.
That was when the doorbell rang.
“Would you get that, Megan?”
We weren’t expecting guests until the next day, when the holidays officially began. A few people had wandered by to say hello and wish us the best of the holiday, but not that many. So when the bell rang, I looked at Mother rather suspiciously, knowing what she had planned for me. I wondered if this was part of the set-up.
When you’re in law enforcement, you to tend to look at everything suspiciously, even your own family. But, given my mother and some of my assorted relatives, I don’t think there is anyone in the world who would blame me.
It had started snowing about an hour before sunset. Just a light dusting, but enough to be visible in the air for a while. Knowing Oklahoma weather, most of it would be gone by noon the next day. Either that, or we would end up with a snowstorm. I hadn’t bothered to check either the local TV weather report or online, figuring that no matter what, I had to make the trip.
The doorbell rang again, so I headed for the side door. It’s been years since anyone came knocking on the front door at my parents’ house. The side door is closer to the driveway and to the less traveled street, where visitors could park without having to worry about a semi taking the turn off the highway too quickly and smashing into them,
and that has happened on at least three occasions that I knew about.
Standing outside the door was a man in Nowata Police Department uniform; dark blue trousers, heavy jacket, a thick black belt around his waist with gun, mace and handcuffs. I didn’t remember any parking tickets, and I had never really done anything as a teenager that the cops would have been interested in; honestly, I was actually pretty dull growing up.
“Good evening, is Mrs. Thom, uh, hi, Megan.”
With the porch light at an odd angle, half of his face was in the shadows, but yes, there was something vaguely familiar about him. It hadn’t been that many years since I had gone away to school; of course, even a short time can change some people’s appearance.
“Yes?”
“Okay, gotcha. It’s obvious you don’t recognize me.” He said, a rather infectious grin splitting his face.
“Megan; don’t just stand there,” yelled Mother, standing in the door of the kitchen. “Invite Officer Lake inside and close the door. It does happen to be snowing outside, in case you hadn’t noticed!”
Lake? As in the Lakes who had been friends with our family for as long as I could remember? In fact, according to Grandma, her best friend in school had been a Lake.
I looked at him again, and then it dawned on me.
“Niall?”
“Took you long enough, shorty,” he said as I closed the door behind him.
Niall was my age and we’d shared several classes in high school. Several “friends” had tried to fix us up as we were growing up. I mean, I liked him and he was fun to hang around with. The two of us had not been part of Nowata High School’s “in” group, so you would have thought that the two of us would have suited each other quite well, but there never was a real solid spark. We went out occasionally, but there never was a connection.
Of course, it had been a half dozen years since I had seen him. I will definitely say that he had gotten better looking. Not that he was bad looking before, but his face had a more chiseled look to it. I couldn’t tell much else; the uniform jacket and mandatory Kevlar vest hid any details.
“You’re a day early for Yule dinner. I told you it was at two o’clock on Saturday,” laughed Mother. She had a grin on her face that told me Niall was part of her Yule plans for me.
I arched an eyebrow at the news that Niall would be joining us. This was a bit of information that Mom had forgotten to share with me. She was very good at forgetting to let me know things like that, and then trying to look innocent. She wasn’t that good, at least in so far as I was concerned. Not that I was objecting, other than with any plans she might have for the two of us. I like eye-candy as much as the next girl, and Niall definitely fit that bill.
“I haven’t forgotten, Mrs. Thomas, and I’m looking forward to it,” he said.
“You came by to pay me the ten dollars you owe me?” I asked.
Niall looked at me uncomprehendingly for a moment. Then his face showed the memory.
“Are you talking about that highly illegal bet that we had over the Nowata High School homecoming game during freshman year?”
“Highly illegal my ass; besides, it was your idea back when we were fifteen. I bet you that they would lose and they did; and you never paid up. So pay up!” I said.
“It was a tie, no loss, no bet.”
“No win, I won.” I had ridden him about that from our freshman year through high school graduation. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the wide grin on Mom’s face, listening to the two of us.
“I came by for another reason. As much as I would have liked to make this a social call, it’s not,” he turned to her and said, “I need to talk to Megan and it can’t wait.”
Mom’s grin lasted only a few seconds more. I suspect she had the same thought I did.
“Since the statute of limitations would have long since expired on any outstanding wants or warrants from my youth, I’m guessing that this is a professional call,” I said.
“Give the lady a gold star,” he said.
I motioned him over toward the fireplace that dominated the central part of the great room. It was a black and silver thing that was considered futuristic-looking when it had been designed in the 70’s; now it was just called retro.
“So what’s the problem?”
“Are you still working for the Tulsa County District Attorney’s office as a Forensic Sorceress Investigator?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. I actually was a journeyman sorceress. I didn’t have all that much experience, just a couple of years. “Don’t forget, this isn’t Tulsa Country, it’s Nowata County by several miles, with Rogers County in between.”
He grinned, considering that at one time another friend and Niall had gotten thoroughly lost and thought they were safely across the county line when they found out that the county line was thirty feet south of where they thought they were.
“I never have liked dealing with murders.”
Murder, I sighed. Happy holidays, everyone.
✽✽✽
Just to make sure that all the Ts were dotted and the Is crossed, I got on the cell phone to my boss, Assistant District Attorney George Bernhardt. I didn’t want some defense attorney coming back and getting any evidence I might find thrown out of court on the technicality that I wasn’t authorized to operate in Nowata.
That out of the way, I got my backpack from upstairs and followed Niall out to his cruiser. Seeing a police car parked in front of someone’s house, no matter the circumstances, is always an inspiration for the neighbors’ curiosity, especially in a town as small as this. So I had a feeling that Mom’s phone might be ringing over the next few hours.
“I wish we could afford to have a forensic sorceress on staff,” said Niall. “That’s going to happen, I suspect, when we can hire a decent number of officers and the equipment gets upgraded to something newer than the middle of the last century.”
I looked at my watch and replied. “If I’m not mistaken, that will happen about half past the third Tuesday of next week.”
“Exactly.”
As we rode along it felt for a few minutes like it was eight years earlier and Niall had come to pick me up for an evening of jocularity and hijinks, which usually consisted of video games, “B” rated movies and pizza.
The police station was actually only a few blocks from the house. Close enough that in the summer it was only a couple of minutes’ walk. But late December was a whole other matter.
However, we drove right past the station and headed east, past the high school and out toward what passes for an industrial park in a town this size. That translates as a large section of land with roads laid out, blacktopped ones in this case, along with one or two buildings with a lot of distance in between.
“You want to know what we found?” asked Niall.
I shook my head. The standard information: sex, approximate age, height and such as that, couldn’t hurt. I just preferred not to know it before we got on site. It was just a personal idiosyncrasy with me. There were times when that sort of information came with the call before you even left the office, and in this case, it would come in just a few minutes.
“Too bad that you guys don’t have any forensics on staff,” I said.
“Yeah. I’ve taken a couple of basic courses, and so have a couple of the other guys, but we mostly have to wait for CSU people out of Tulsa. The main thing they tell us is to preserve the scene,” he said. “It’s a shame that, of the people we’ve got available, nobody’s got The Gift.”
Well, I’ll give him this; he knew the proper terminology. I ‘d heard sorceresses’ and witches’ powers called a lot of things, the majority of them not being words that you would call particularly flattering. It was something that I’d gotten used to when I’d been a preteen, desperately wishing that I was “normal.” I remember the night that my grandmother explained there was no such thing as normal, other than a city in Illinois and a setting on a clothes dryer. It wasn’t long after that that she was able to show me the true wonder of magic, again, something that I didn’t have a lot of choice in. Genetics can be a royal pain.
Niall pulled his car up next to a long metal prefab building at the back end of the industrial park. The sign indicated it belonged to L&M Industries, which told me absolutely nothing about what went on inside. Not that I needed to know, yet.
There was a low fence around the place, mostly for keeping out things like coyotes, raccoons (hah!) and the occasional deer and other assorted animals that were prevalent in this part of the state.
There was another police car and small SUV parked over near what I assumed was the company’s loading dock. I spotted another officer standing on the dock, talking into a cell phone.
“Hey, Dimetri,” Niall yelled as he climbed out of the car. “You better not be talking to your wife, otherwise word of this is going to be all over town inside of fifteen minutes.”
The other officer laughed. “Nope, I was just talking with the Medical Examiner. They said it would be at least another two hours before they could get over here.
Somebody did a header down on 169 and that’s got priority.”
“It figures,” Niall muttered. “Megan, this reprobate is Dmitri Scoggins, the newest addition to our fine crime fighting family. Dmitri, this is Megan Thomas, a forensic sorceress for the Tulsa County District Attorney’s office. She’s an old friend and has agreed to help out tonight.”
Dimetri arched an eyebrow at Niall’s announcement, but still extended his hand to me. “Pleased to meet you.” he said.
When Niall led me inside, I could see why he needed help. I could recall the occasional murder in this town over the years, but most of the time, when someone died around here, it was by accident or natural causes. The few murders had been crimes of passion, spouse killing spouse, friend killing friend.
This was neither of those. This one looked strange. The room actually felt bigger than the building looked from the outside. A good portion of it was filled with industrial equipment. At this end there were racks of tools and various mechanical parts, all of which were scattered hither and yon.
The dead man seemed to be in the center of the chaos that had descended on the place, but not a part of it. He lay on the floor on a carpet of packing peanuts, his arms neatly folded across his chest. Some of the peanuts had assumed a distinct dark color as the victim’s blood had stained them.
I looked over at Niall. “That’s the way we found him,” he said.
The cause of death was obvious; his throat had been cut. I could see signs of arterial blood spray on the floor and several of the wooden crates that were scattered around the area. The murder weapon looked to be a bowie knife. I knew that by just looking, due to the fact that the selfsame weapon was buried in the man’s chest, plunged into his heart right up the hilt.
“Now that’s something you don’t see every day,” Dmitri said.
“That’s putting it mildly.” I began to unpack a few things from my backpack: chalk, rubber gloves and an athame, along with a handful of M&Ms from the stash I keep in there, since my stomach was rumbling and I hadn’t eaten before leaving the house.
“Any idea who this guy is?” I asked as I rearranged a few items that I might need later. Okay, some of it was for show, to let an old friend see what I had made of myself in the world.
“MacDonald Taylor. He’s one of the engineers who work here,” said Dimetri. “Last time I was by here, he was also doubling as a line supervisor; they had to lay a few people off. Problem is, he shouldn’t be here.”
Well, duh, who should be laying here with a knife plunged into his heart? I didn’t ask that question; instead I said, “Why not?”
“Because he was supposed to be heading for New Orleans. That’s what he said yesterday morning when we had coffee over at the Royal Diner. I think he was going to spend the Yule holidays with some cousins.” Dmitri pursed his lips and slowly rubbed his chin; his color didn’t look real good. I had a feeling that this might be his first murder crime scene.
“So much for Mac’s plans,” said Niall.
I’m no medical examiner, not by a long shot, but once I had the gloves on I made a quick inspection, enough to see that the body hadn’t gone into rigor. That narrowed down the time of death a bit. A quick inspection of the eyes and lips told me that no obvious poisons were the cause of death. Yeah, I know, he had a slit throat and a knife in his chest, but procedure requires checking for everything.
“So how did you find this little Yule present?”
“The watchman found him. L&M closed at noon to give everyone some extra time off for the holidays. They manufacture parts for small airplane engines and, according to what I’ve heard, business has actually picked up in the last couple of months,” said Niall. “The watchman was supposed to check the inside of the warehouse twice a night, randomly, and the outside four times. The rest of the time he stayed in a small office at the front of the building, my guess, either surfing the net for porn or playing Fortnite.”
“I’ve got him stashed in his little “security office” so we can talk to him later if we need to,” Dmitri said.
“So, I take it you know him?” I asked.
“Devon Mitchell, 27. He’s a tech writer for them, does the repair manuals and other assorted things,” said Niall.
I took the chalk and drew a circle around the body six feet across. I avoided any of the blood-soaked peanuts and had to stop a couple of times to move things out of the way. In spite of what they show on television, no crime scene I have ever been at is neat; there is always a sense of chaos and dislocation about it, the norm knocked off its pedestal, waiting for the pieces to be picked up.
Once I had that done, I began to focus my energies and direct them at the body. I’ve been through a lot of crime scene investigation training, and there’s one thing I knew for sure; there’s always evidence.
The world around me turned misty, sort of mixed with a green glow light like I was looking through night vision goggles. Niall and Dmitri stayed to one side; they were dark figures, though I did notice them moving while I concentrated on the body that lay in front of me.
Given the circumstances, I wasn’t trying to do a complete examination, not to mention the fact that I didn’t have the supplies for that sort of a look. Right now I just wanted to see what popped out at me that might give us an idea of why this man was dead. I ran my athame over the body, hoping to feel some sort of disturbance; there was plenty, more than I had actually expected.
But everything seemed centered on his chest, his throat (both obvious places) and his left-hand back pocket. That was something that would bear looking into. The hilt of the knife had an odd glow to it and I caught a whiff of a nasty odor that I thought was coming from it.
Given the formula I was using, odors were not something that I expected to have to deal with. It wasn’t impossible that they would be here, but it definitely was unusual, not that unusual wasn’t the stock in trade of this job.
That was when I saw a tiny glowing line around his mouth. It almost wasn’t there; somebody had removed something carefully.
The fog around me dissipated, leaving my stomach growling rather loudly. Niall turned toward me and all I could do was shrug and sit down in the molded plastic chair that was outside the circle I had drawn. I could hear my heart racing and feel sweat rolling down my face, which was fine, since it was actually fairly chilly inside the warehouse. I didn’t want to even think about what I looked like.
“I’m hungry,” I said and grabbed for my backpack. I swallowed the remaining contents from the small bag of M&Ms; I should have had more than one in there but had not had time to restock.
Magic has a price; no, not your soul, though there are plenty of people who, even after all these years, still claim any witch or sorceress is an agent of the devil. If I had sold my soul to the devil, I somehow think I hadn’t got that good of a deal. No, it takes energy to manipulate magical forces, so anyone doing it needs to replenish that energy, and your body tells you what you need. Me, it’s milk chocolate M&Ms. There was one guy in my class who felt an overwhelming urge to eat prawns, and another girl who said the only thing that would do for her was caviar. She went corporate and, the last I heard, was making six figures.
“Megan? Are you okay?” asked Niall. He handed me a bottle of water that had come out of the employees’ break area. The look on his face was one of genuine concern, not something I was used to from some of the cops I work with, but nice to see, anyway.
“Yeah, just give me a minute. That sort of impromptu examination does drain someone. Never let anyone tell you different.”
“Just sit there till you feel better,” said Dmitri. He seemed genuinely worried about me, but also as though he understood what had happened; not bad, since I had only met him, what, fifteen minutes ago.
“You know someone in the Craft?” I asked.
“My ex. Things just didn’t work out for the two of us, but I saw her like this more times than I really wanted to,” he said. I didn’t ask any more questions; there are some things best left unsaid. Sometimes people think they can handle being married to a magic user and find out differently. Oddly enough, I’ve heard the same thing about people who are married to cops and lawyers.
I took another swallow from the water bottle. The cold plastic felt good in my hands. I was going to need some solid food soon, but that could wait.
I pushed myself up out of the chair and walked over to the body. Getting down on both knees, I got as close as I could to the man’s face without touching it.
“Get me a pair of tweezers and an evidence envelope. They’re in the side pocket of my backpack,” I said. Niall handed them to me and squatted close, putting his hand on my elbow to steady me. I smiled at him for a moment; this wasn’t the first time he’d had my back.
Very gently I reached forward with the tweezers, skimming over the edge of the man’s lip, and plucked two gray fibers from the skin. I dropped them into the envelope right away. If they fell on the floor, it would be next to impossible to retrieve them.
“What did you find?” asked Niall.
I repressed a grin. It somehow seemed inappropriate; I mean, a dead man and all. Yet it did appeal to my sense of the ridiculous, in an odd sort of way.
“I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I would be willing to put twenty bucks on those two threads coming from a piece of duct tape. Given what we got here, that just adds icing to the cake to prove this was a murder, not an accident,” I said.
Niall shook his head. This sort of thing came with the uniform, but it wasn’t what you expected in a little town out in the wilds of deepest darkest Oklahoma. I’d probably seen more dead bodies then him; Tulsa has a lot of murders, but a lot of what I did dealt with robberies and events of a less lethal variety.
“Who would want to kill Mac?” asked Dmitri.
That was one of those questions that everyone asks, and most of the time there isn’t that much of an answer. Personally, I was glad that I wasn’t going to be the one who had to inform his family. That is the sort of job that I stay away from if I have any choice in the matter.
“Isn’t there some way of recreating the last few hours of what happened in a given place?” asked Niall.
Somebody had been spending too much time at the checkout stand at the supermarket reading the tabloids. Oh, I admit that I’ve looked at a few of them myself, then usually had to get a double order of brain bleach to clear some of the images out of my mind.
Although, in this case there was something to what Niall was asking. I’d read in a couple of professional journals about a method that would allow recent events in a given location to be examined. Problem was, it was very expensive. You don’t want to know what materials were necessary and the current price of them; plus, I didn’t know exactly how it was done.
I somehow didn’t think that the police department budget would spring for importing someone to do it. Of course, there was also the matter of how legal the whole thing was. There had been speculation that this sort of magic might be considered an invasion of privacy. I had a feeling that when it did come down, the ACLU would be hip deep in the whole matter.
“I wish I could do something like that. I’m missing a bracelet somewhere in my house and would love to see where the cat hid it,” I said.
“Felines are sneaky; I remember that one you had, Misha. I’m still convinced he could read people’s minds,” said Niall.
Actually, Misha could, but I didn’t mention that to him.
“However, there’s something that I can do. At least, I hope it will work.”
I took a roll of string and a coin with a hole in it, and then extracted one of the threads I had collected. Very carefully I wound the thread through the coin and then hung the whole thing from the string.
The first time I had seen this done, the sorcerer in question held the item over the body and then made a lot of fancy-dancy gestures. There were a dozen or so people watching. That’s a little too theatrical for my taste, although I can understand why some people think they need it. Even if there had been more than just three of us here, I wouldn’t have tried that stuff.
I drew in on myself, touching my power. This time the only mist I saw was around the coin, green like before, and then it faded.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly what I wanted to see.”
I motioned for Niall to follow me. Dimetri got stuck with waiting for the medical examiner, when he finally showed up. That meant I had a feeling he would be spending the next couple of hours with a corpse as his only companion. Not the way that I would prefer to spend the holidays.
“Let’s go for a ride,” I said.