The Shadows and Sorcery Collection Read online

  I caught the attention of our usual server—a guy I grew up with on the Res, who escaped about the same time I did. “No worries. I’m not in a beer mood.”

  “Because we have so many options?” Shana laughed.

  Which was entirely too real. Senka Hollow was a bubble, and alcohol was pricy, no matter what flavor you picked.

  Ahiga sidled up to the table, a pen tucked behind his ear and eyeliner around his big, brown eyes. “Hey, girl. What you want?”

  He was two or three years younger than me. A baby, really. I wondered if he regretted leaving the Res, but I was never brave enough to ask him. Life was hard enough without adding tribal guilt.

  “Cider, I think.”

  “Good choice. It’s on sale.”

  “Apple season?” I guessed.

  “Almost over.” He made a note on his pad and flitted away.

  One of Shana’s best qualities — in my opinion — was her inability to beat around the bush. She extracted a manila folder from her bag and slid it over the table. “We figured out what the perp took from your brother’s pocket.”

  “Really?” I said, floored. I flipped open the folder and gazed down at a blurry, pixelated image of fingers and a dark, blocky shape. “If I’m supposed to be able to tell what this is, we’re going to assume my eyes are broken.”

  Shana laughed. “Nah, I can’t see it, either. Not without one of the tech guys standing over my shoulder, pointing shit out.” She sobered and tapped one long finger on the image. “It’s a camera.”

  “What?” I looked closer. “We don’t own a camera.”

  “You don’t, maybe. Your brother did.”

  “But they’re... We couldn’t afford that. I’d know if he bought one.” Rice and I shared a bank account, just like we shared everything else.

  Cameras weren’t completely archaic, but they were rare and expensive, like old smartphones that didn’t work.

  “Well, he had one. And that dude took it.” She closed the folder and leveled a hard, chocolate gaze on me. She looked like an avenging angel with a halo of wild, afro curls and a heart of steel. “What was on that camera, Relle?”

  I froze. Not because she intimidated me. Not because I thought Rice had done something wrong, or I’d done something wrong.

  But because her tone had triggered the truth in me. She had that effect on everyone; I’d never been able to keep anything big from Shana.

  I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “I might know. But I have no proof.”

  Shana mimicked my pose so that we were almost nose to nose. “Lay it on me.”

  “That camera might hold pictures of a shadow touched councilman.”

  Shana was a master of her emotions, so I didn’t see any visible reaction as she said, “Explain, please.”

  I told her about my visit to the offices of the Insurgentia, though I left out my harassment and illegal jaunt inside Josiah’s mind. I told her about Rice’s mission, and my conversation with Clare outside Collier & Sons.

  When I finished, Shana leaned back in her chair and drummed her fingers on the sticky table. Her beer and my cider were already half-empty, and the fries were gone. I motioned for Ahiga.

  We ordered our meals—a turkey club for Shana, a rack of ribs for me. And two more drinks. Our bill was going to be astronomical, but it wasn’t like we were short on cash. Law enforcement in the Hollow, whether human or fae, was high paid. Part of the reason we were so loathed. Not high-paid enough to justify the expense of an antique camera, but high enough to afford a couple beers.

  “So what now?” I asked when her silence became grating.

  Shana shrugged. “I don’t know. Without that camera, we don’t have proof of anything. Chances are if it did hold incriminating evidence, it’s long gone now.”

  “Your optimism thrills me.”

  She grinned wolfishly. “I know how to rev your engines.”

  “No backup files on his laptop?”

  “No. The team scoured the thing front to back. Whatever is on that camera is gone.”

  “What about his Com?”

  Shana stared at me.

  “You took his Com as evidence, right?”

  “Are you telling me your civilian, anarchist brother had a Com?”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “Yeah. If he needed me, I wanted him to be able to reach me. Was he not wearing it?”

  Shana shook her head. “If he had been, I would know about it.”

  We sat in silence for a few moments. Ahiga coasted by with our food, and we thanked him, but didn’t pick up our forks.

  “So his Com is missing,” I remarked.

  “Appears so.”

  “It has to be in the apartment. Your guys obviously didn’t search hard enough.”

  “I can send a team back out.”

  “Or I could go home and look.”

  Shana’s thick lips pressed into a thin line. “You can’t do that, Maurelle. It’s a crime scene.”

  “I’m a cop.”

  “You’re not CSI. Don’t argue with me on this.” She keyed up her Com and waited as the line rang to dispatch. “Any idea where he could have hidden it?”

  I blinked innocently. “Of course not. I’m not my brother’s keeper.”

  Except I am. I was.

  And I knew exactly where he’d hidden that watch.

  11

  My Comwatch alarm broke into a series of obnoxious beeps in the middle of the night. I opened my eyes and blinked into the darkness of my old room, stuck in the twilight of waking. Cool night air floated through the open window, and the bed was so warm. The Com glowed bright on the nightstand. I wanted to ignore the fucking thing. Roll over, cover my head, go back to dreams.

  The door opened, and my mother loomed in the half-light. “What is it, shich'é'é?”

  “It’s my Com,” I croaked, pushing my sluggish body up. No ignoring the Com now. “Go back to bed.”

  She remained in the doorway, the angle of her head daring me to argue her presence.

  I answered the call. “Talk to me.”

  “SEB 277. Shots fired at the 10th encampment. Com-trace places you within range. Are you able to respond?”

  As a runner, I had special status in the Bureau that kept me from being a responding officer. I worked my own hours and cases, and checked in with dispatch every so often to let them know I was still alive.

  So if they were waking me up in the middle of the Senka-damned night because I was close enough to respond quickly, then this was big.

  “On my way.”

  My mother watched me dress, her enigmatic face telling me nothing. When I tried to pass her to exit the room, she blocked my way.

  “Move, Mama. I have to work.”

  “You don’t have to do anything, shich'é'é. You choose your path. Is this the path you choose? To spend your days and nights chasing the darkness while your family suffers?”

  “How do you suffer, Mama?” I snapped, shoving past her.

  “I am burying your brother without you.”

  I stopped in my tracks. The long hall ended at the front door. Mama never closed that flimsy piece of wood. Beyond the doorway, the desert waited beneath a blanket of stars.

  During Creation, the holy people chose perfect spots for the mountains, as if painting a work of art on the horizon. Then they placed the sun and moon upon the sky. After that, they took their time choosing exactly where each star should shine in the night sky, placing them carefully upon a blanket they would then hang upon completion.

  But Coyote, the Trickster, could never wait patiently for anything. He shoved his way in and grabbed the corner of the blanket. With one violent throw, he flung the rest of the stars into the sky.

  And isn’t it beautiful? I thought as I stood in my mother’s house and tried to not think of it as a prison. The blanket hadn’t been placed as perfectly as the holy people wished, but Coyote’s intervention had ruined nothing.

  Plans didn’t always execute perfectly.

&nbs
p; “My brother is gone,” I said without turning. “Do what you want with his body. He isn’t there anymore. And I have work to do.”

  The 10th encampment was a trash hole, one of the furthest from the Core, where the worst of the shadow touched resided. The pleasant aspect of the encampment being so far from the city is that these residents tended to remain where they were, living a kind of half-life subsistent on the desert and on each other. Which meant even though the 10th encampment was a cesspit, it wasn’t usually a problem. Distance had a way of containing problems in the desert.

  I roared into the camp and let dispatch know I was on scene. Requesting further information was moot, because flames licked the sky in the center of camp, silhouetting a crowd of people against the night. Clearly, I’d been invited to a marshmallow roast.

  Or a lynching.

  I slid from my bike and drew my gun, leveling it on the crowd as they turned to look at me.

  “Agent Maurelle Nez, SEB!” I barked. “Everybody down unless you want the sting of a bullet in your brain.”

  Most shadow touched knew my name. I’d heard rumor once they called me the Reaper. Whether or not that was true, I couldn’t say. Reaper or not, I was still one agent against what looked like hundreds of shadow touched. Not good odds, especially in the middle of the night and running short on sleep.

  For a moment, I thought they were going to ignore me. Anticipation hung over the crowd, and I couldn’t be certain it wasn’t anticipation of my death. But then black shadows began to drop to the dirt without a word.

  “Face down, hands behind your head!” I braced myself for noncompliance. Somebody in this crowd was itching for a fight.

  As I treaded into the minefield of shadow touched, I heard sirens approaching in the distance. Nobody moved as I navigated their prone bodies, carefully avoiding limbs and heads with my steel-toed boots.

  Only one person in the crowd hadn’t fallen to the ground. He sat in a metal chair, so close to the fire that sweat dripped down his face. As I drew near, I recognized him in the halo of firelight: my new pal, Warren.

  “Relle. So nice to see you.” He grinned that wolfish, white smile and leaned back in his chair as if he were simply resting by the fire and not chained like a naughty dog. “Please excuse me for not following your instructions. I’m a little... tied up.”

  I snorted. Couldn’t help it. Didn’t lower the gun, though.

  Car doors slammed on the edges of the dark, an encouraging sound considering I was one officer among a mob of shadow touched. Backup had arrived.

  “Nez?” a deep voice boomed.

  “Present!” I called in a singsong. I leveled the gun on Warren. “What happened?”

  He eyed the business end of my Taurus. “Is that really necessary? Aren’t we friends?”

  “I don’t know you, and the shadiest people in the fucking Hollow have you chained before a bonfire bigger than my mother’s pueblo. Now answer my question.”

  He took a deep breath. “There seems to be a misunderstanding.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Is that right? A chains-and-death-by-immolation misunderstanding?”

  “Ah, no, they weren’t going to kill me, were you guys?” Warren directed the question to the prone shadow touched spread around the fire. Nobody replied. He turned his hundred-watt smile back on me. “See? Nothing untoward here.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  Warren’s gaze drifted to his thigh where a small, perfect hole oozed viscously. “Flesh wound.”

  “Looks like a bullet hole.”

  “Same thing.”

  I rolled my eyes and lowered my gun as Officer Jake Nesbitt sidled up beside me.

  Nesbitt was a big guy, all muscles and brawn but not short on brains, either. His blond hair was longer and curlier than the last time I'd seen him. Last I heard, he had an infant at home on top of the toddler and six-year-old. I imagined fatherhood left little time for haircuts.

  “Nez,” he greeted me, his hands resting on his gun belt. He had an easy grin plastered on his sun-darkened face, but his eyes missed nothing.

  “Nes,” I greeted back: an inside joke since we were young and dumb going through SEB training together.

  Nesbitt motioned behind us at the crowd. “Seems like you have everything well in hand.”

  “One-on-one-hundred isn’t good odds, even for me.”

  “Do we know anything?”

  I holstered my gun. “That was going to be my next question for you.”

  Warren cleared his throat. “Ahem. If I may... you might search the cabin over there,”—He flicked his gaze to a line of cabins skirting the edges of the darkness— “where you will find the victim of the man who put a bullet through my leg.”

  Nesbitt and I shared a quick look. I inclined my head toward Warren. Nesbitt snapped his fingers at a greenie with a high-and-tight and strolled away. The newbie shuffled quickly after him, anxious to prove his worth.

  Behind me, the other responding SEA and SEB agents were securing the scene. Nes and his rookie faded into the dark cabin. I activated the recorder on my Com and zeroed-in on Warren. “You wanna try this again from the top?”

  He smiled beatifically. “Give it a moment, babe.”

  I gritted my teeth, ready to ram my fist through his stupid smile. “I don’t like you.”

  “That’s a shame. I think you’re pretty badass.”

  Unfortunately, the compliment felt kind of nice. I fought the flush of warmth that followed his words, but it wasn’t a battle I was prepared to win.

  Before I could respond, a shout stole through the night. I reached for my gun—mimicked by the dozen or so other officers standing around the fire.

  Nesbitt appeared in the doorway of a cabin, his face stricken. “It’s Councilman Weston. He’s dead.”

  12

  I groaned and rubbed my eyes, thinking maybe if I did it hard enough, I’d be back in my mother’s pueblo under a quilt that smelled of hominy and spices. Alas, unlike Warren, I couldn’t bend space and time. I was here, I was awake, and this shit just kept getting better. Or worse, depending on what end of the sarcasm spectrum you rested on.

  “Did you kill the councilman?” I asked.

  Warren jerked as if I had slapped him, eyes widening. “Why the hell would you think that?”

  I pointed at his leg.

  “Oh, that. Misfire. The kid that shot the councilman missed the first shot. I was the unlucky recipient.”

  “Fucking fuck, Warren. Let’s take this from the top, okay? Spell it out for me like I’m a moron. Slow and steady. How did we get from you taking an accidental bullet to this?” I slashed both palms down, indicating his current predicament of chains and bonfire.

  “Oh, that’s not too confusing. I was asleep in my bed.” He lifted his chin toward the cabin, where an officer was stringing crime scene tape. “I awoke to that old man busting through my door. Yelled something about being chased and for me to get him out of there. But then the kid came running in, shot once, hit me, shot twice, hit the dear councilman between the eyes. And the kid left.”

  “Kid?”

  Warren shrugged. “Small. Skinny. Not normal-adult sized.”

  “Did you get a look at their face?”

  “Not a perfect look. Kid was quick.”

  “Why did the councilman seek you out for help?”

  “Nothing like a spot of time travel to get a man out of danger.”

  “Do many people around here know that particular, um, quality of yours?”

  Warren shook his head. “No. I didn’t know that dude was a councilman until they tried to blame me for his death, but he knew a lot about everyone else. Made it a point to know all, I think.”

  “Random killing or premeditated assassination?”

  “Assassination is a scary word. But accurate.”

  I clenched and unclenched my hands to channel some of the building aggression in me. There was no doubt in my mind it was the Insurgentia. Councilman Weston had been their t
arget from the moment they heard about Rice's death. I didn’t know what to do with the information. On the one hand, my loyalties didn’t lie with the rebels. My loyalties ran deep to the SEB and maintaining the safety of the Hollow.

  On the other, if Weston had ordered the hit on my brother, then fuck the Bureau and praise the rebel who had the gonads enough to kill the asshole.

  “How did we get from bed to the chains?” I prompted.

  Warren winced. “See, the councilman is much loved around here. He keeps the camp in food and such. They call him Papa West. So, he died in my cabin, execution-style, and the kid vanishes. Frolics off into the night like a Senka-damned ninja. The camp then decides I was the one to kill the councilman, regardless of the fact there isn’t a gun anywhere in my cabin.” He said the last loudly, earning some chastised looks from the shadow touched who were being interrogated nearby. “Yet here we are. You have impeccable timing.”

  “You leap-frogged me from an earthquake. Just returning the favor.”

  He grinned, and then cleared his throat. “Mind moving me a little further from the fire? I think all the hair on my head has been singed off. I’d like to keep my skin, if at all possible.”

  I leaned over and grabbed both arms of his chair. It took some muscle, but I managed to drag him into the shadows beyond the firelight. By the time I’d accomplished the move, I was the one sweating.

  I stepped back and brushed off my hands. “Better?”

  “Much. Thanks for the show.” He winked, and then waggled his eyebrows at my tank top. Even chained to an office chair and bleeding from the leg, he looked good enough to lick.

  Licking was not on the agenda, so I rolled my eyes.

  A pair of crime scene techs sidled up with bolt cutters, relieving me of Warren duty. As they cut my time-traveling pal free of his chains, I categorized the recording I’d made of his statement and sent it through to be processed. Then I tracked down Nesbitt.

  I found him on his Com near the crime scene, stress wrinkling his usually good-natured brow. He tapped his Com to shut down the call and sighed. “Shit’s hitting the fan already. Fucking council is losing its mind.”