Blood Craft: The Shadow Sorceress Book Two Read online

  “Did you really have to tell her that?” I said, with a sigh.

  “It’s better if you don’t come back here, Amber,” Enzo said, his words catching me by surprise. I turned to face him.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. Now, out of respect to your mother, I won’t bar you, but if you darken my door again, I’ll be left with no choice but to ward against you.” His voice was cold and his words cut me to the core.

  Without answering him, I nodded and left. I’d seen it in his eyes, the distrust and fear. He’d been an ally, a friend, someone I could trust, but all of that was gone. Whatever he’d seen in my future had been enough to destroy a relationship that was as close as a family bond. Whatever he’d seen … I really didn’t want to know what it was.

  Chapter 17

  “You can’t seriously be considering doing as he asked,” Victoria said, surprising me outside the door to Enzo’s shop.

  “Why not? Have you got any better ideas?”

  “Yes, not falling for his crazy shit for starters. Shouldn’t we head down to the morgue and see what the lab has come up with? They have to have figured something out from that woman’s body by now?”

  “They don’t even have an ID yet, what makes you think they’ll have anything else?” I asked, an image of the woman’s eyes and mouth stitched shut popping into my head.

  “Can’t we try? Even you have to agree that going to meet up with some crazy, pretend voodoo priest is bogus.”

  I didn’t argue with her, the thought of going to see a voodoo priest gave me the willies, but it made me even more nervous to think I might go and see him with her in tow. Nic, on the other hand, would make a far better partner when investigating the weird crap and I’d heard some seriously weird stories about voodoo. As far as I was concerned, it was something I never wanted to get tangled in. We got back into the car.

  “Fine. Morgue it is. Maybe if I get a chance, I can swing by and find out how Graham is doing.”

  “Aren’t we doing a press conference or something? I don’t think you’ll have time,” she said, starting the engine.

  Facing Heddou suddenly seemed like a much better idea. Showing Victoria that I was a Shadow Sorceress was a better idea. I already knew the types of questions the reporters would ask, and what was I supposed to tell them? It wasn’t as though we had any real answers or information we could share with them.

  “You can’t really be that bothered by the thought of a press conference; in New York, they were practically a daily occurrence.” Her tone was snotty and superior.

  “Good for New York,” I said, the exasperation in my voice unmasked, but I cut myself off before I could really share with her what I was thinking.

  Telling her to go back to New York was one of those things that were better off unsaid. And anyway, enacting it in my head was so much more fun.

  We travelled in silence until she finally looked over at me, a sheepish expression on her face.

  “I don’t actually know where I’m going.”

  A grin crept across my face, and I started to laugh. The entire situation was beyond ridiculous. Something had happened to freak Enzo out, a man I’d always believed to be utterly unflappable, and I was travelling around town with an officer from the New York Elite office who had no idea where anything was in King City. How were we going to get anything solved when everything we’d come across so far seemed to point in the direction of us never figuring anything out?

  I gave her a quick rundown of where we were headed before I returned my attention to the streets. Everyone looked happy and normal. To look at them, you wouldn’t ever know that there was something horrible going on. It was one of the many strengths of being human, the ability to compartmentalise and pretend everything was as it should be.

  “What did he show you?” Victoria asked quietly, as though afraid of the answer.

  “Just a lot of jumbled images, I don’t really know. You?” I turned in my seat to face her and I could see the colour drain from her face.

  “The same….” There was a hitch in her words; she was lying. But what could have been so awful that she felt the need to lie about it?

  Whatever it was, she wasn’t going to share it with me. She turned the car into the underground parking garage of the medical examiner’s office and killed the engine. I didn’t hold much hope that they’d have found anything as I climbed from the car and waited for her to click the automatic lock.

  All I could hope was that whatever was inside the female body, they’d dealt with it properly and quarantined it appropriately. If they didn’t … well, I didn’t exactly fancy a repeat of what had gone on with Graham. I blinked back my tears as an image of him, unmoving and silent, popped into my head and Jon’s words replayed in my head.

  He had to make it through, and when he did, then he would come back to work … I refused to believe anything else.

  * * *

  “Her name is Marcy Colt—she broke her leg when she was ten, a severe break that required extensive surgeries, a plate, and several screws. We got her name from the serial number on the plate,” Callum droned, his tone bored as he read from the clipboard he held in his hands.

  “So what about everything else?” I asked, moving slowly around the shiny, sterile office.

  “The consultant was able to move the issue on without incidence.”

  It all sounded so safe, so cold and clinical. Callum Sydney was the best medical examiner King City had to offer, but that didn’t mean I had to like him. He spoke about Marcy as though she was nothing more than an inconvenience, just another body cluttering up his perfectly pristine lab.

  “Is he still here?” Victoria asked.

  “Mr Zeck is filling out his report,” Callum said.

  “Is there anything else you can tell us?” I asked, picking up a wickedly sharp blade from a small tray in the centre of the room.

  Callum rushed towards me and snatched it from my hand. “Please don’t touch anything; this is a sterile environment, everything you touch must be resterilised.” He set the blade to one side and then gestured for us to follow him through to another room off the main lab.

  There was a long metal table set up in the middle of the room and the white sheet over the top of it told me Marcy lay beneath it without Callum ever having to open his mouth. When he whipped back the sheet, I tried to look at her the way a detective might; the more emotion I allowed into it, all the harder it would be for me to divorce myself from my personal connection and what I needed to do.

  As it was, I still had nightmares about Joanna Sidwell and her children, their faces pleading with me as vampires fed on their insides. The last thing I needed was to add Marcy Colt to the list.

  “We found a strange substance inside both bodies—now, in Miss Colt’s case, it was untouched. A mixture of wild garlics and foxglove combined with feathers, and a white powder that we’re running some tests on.”

  “Where was it?” I asked, staring down at her face, the tiny purple marks around her lips and eyes the result of them getting stitched shut.

  “Just below her heart. A blade was used, but it didn’t kill them; we didn’t find the entry wound until we removed the stitches that held her to the ground. That was the other strange thing….”

  The sudden change in Callum’s voice drew my attention away from my study of Marcy’s face.

  “Stranger than everything else?” I asked.

  He nodded and turned away. I watched as he dragged out another long table on wheels, a long white sheet draped over the top of it. He tugged the cover from it, revealing a solid piece of black… Black what? I stared at it a little harder, my eyes struggling to pick out exactly what I was looking at, but it was utterly unfamiliar.

  “What is it?” I said, slowly approaching it.

  “It’s the section of ground Marcy was stitched to; the rest of the area consists of fresh grass and earth. This is different. From initial analysis I want to say it’s become obsidian, or at
the very least something very close to that….”

  “Is that even possible?” I asked, examining it a little closer, the urge to touch it washing over me in a wave that I fought with difficulty.

  “It shouldn’t be, and yet, you’re looking at it,” Callum said, and for the first time ever, he actually sounded vaguely interested.

  “We should go and talk to Mr Zeck,” Victoria chipped in, breaking my study of the solid piece of black rock.

  I nodded, drawing back, my own face reflected back to me in the shiny black surface. What the hell was going on? The sooner I could read Zeck’s report on whatever it was that he removed from Marcy Colt, the better; at least then we would have some clue as to what exactly we were fighting.

  “Fine, let’s go…,” I turned away from the black rock and something niggled at me, a tremor running down the back of my neck, causing the fine hairs there to stand on end. It reminded me of the feeling I got whenever I was being watched, and I cast a look back over my shoulder.

  Something shimmered beneath the surface of the rock, something dark and powerful, and it was pissed as hell. And then, just as quickly as it had arrived, the feeling was gone, slithering away like it had never been there at all and no matter how hard I stared at the flat, shining surface of the black rock, I couldn’t see anything in it.

  I shuddered. “Creepy” didn’t even begin to cover this case.

  Chapter 18

  Crossing the hall, I paused outside the door where Callum had told us Zeck was working. There was no sound from behind the door, and no matter how hard I tried, I still couldn’t shake the feeling of uneasiness that had washed over me. The black stone beneath Marcy’s body played on my mind. There was no way I’d imagined the thing I’d seen lurking inside it, but what that thing was? Well, I had no clue. I’ve never heard of it before, never mind come across it.

  Victoria took the lead, rapping on the glass door with her knuckles. There was a momentary pause, as though the world itself seemed to take a breath, and then a quiet voice called out.

  “Yes?”

  Victoria didn’t wait for the man, presumably Mr Zeck, to say anything else. Instead, she pushed in the door and strode into the tiny, cramped office. The overwhelming smell of cheese and onion wafted through the air on the breeze created by the door and I tried not to wrinkle my nose in disgust. Victoria held her hand out towards him, a gesture of greeting, but Zeck simply stared at it as though it was an alien come to abduct him.

  “Mr Zeck, my name is Victoria Tellon, and this is Amber Morgan. We work with the Elite, preternatural investigations, and this is the case we’ve been assigned to. I was hoping you could give us a little insight into what you might have discovered during your examination and treatment of the victim.”

  Zeck stood behind the desk and pressed his glasses back up his nose with his small, chubby hand.

  “I’m not sure what it is you expect me to tell you…” he said, the slight lisp in his voice making him seem even more pathetic than his food-stained, crooked tie and slightly yellowed shirt did. “You don’t mind if I keep eating, do you? It’s just, moving the spirit on really took it out of me….” He gestured to his half-eaten, sloppy cheese and onion sandwich, which seemed to be oozing across the papers on the desk.

  “No, go ahead,” I said. I didn’t mind. It was something I’d come to notice in myself; the more power I used to accomplish something, the hungrier I was afterwards. Clearly, Zeck was no different, even if his actual gift was more than a mystery to me. The other reason I didn’t care if he finished his sandwich was I hoped if the smelly, oozing creation didn’t exist anymore, the office would stop smelling like the inside of a biker’s armpit.

  Not that I’d know what a biker’s armpit actually smelled like. It was more of a hunch than actual knowledge.

  “Can you tell us what sort of spirit it was?” I asked, doing my best to look as neutral as possible as he scooped up the dripping sandwich and proceeded to cram it into his mouth.

  He shook his head, a combination of mayonnaise and something lumpy trickling down his chin as he chewed.

  “No, that’s not what I do; I just open the door to the other side and move it back to where it belongs….” He spoke around the food in his mouth.

  “So how do you know where to send them?” Victoria asked. There was something in her tone of voice that suggested she knew more than she was willing to admit to.

  Zeck shrugged and popped the last of his food into his mouth. The sound of his lip smacking and wet chewing filled the room as we waited for him to completely finish.

  “I don’t, but everything goes through limbo, so that’s where I send them….”

  “But what if it’s demonic, or—” He cut me off with a shake of his head.

  “I don’t do demonic. That’s the work of an exorcist and, luckily, my job doesn’t fall into the description. I’m afraid I just deal in the much more mundane spirits…” he said, keeping his gaze averted.

  It seemed Victoria wasn’t the only one keeping secrets. Zeck definitely knew more than he was letting on, but there was no way for me to prove it. And how could I push him for information when I wasn’t even sure what I was pushing him for?

  “Is there anything at all you can tell us?” Victoria said, her sudden impatience catching me by surprise.

  “As I said, Miss Tellon, I don’t know anything. All I did was move the spirit on….”

  “And how did you do that?”

  The tension in the room intensified and I folded my arms and leaned back against the door frame. Whatever game was being played, there could be only one winner, and I was really hoping it would be Victoria. If she could get some information from Zeck about what we were dealing with, it would make everything a hell of a lot easier.

  “My methods are my own and, as such, are not up for debate. If I told you how I work, Miss Tellon, it would leave me at a very real risk of being undercut in this business. Suffice to say, everyone who needs to know how I work already knows.”

  I knew exactly who he meant; all of the consultants working for the Elite had to pass a standard show and tell test. Once the powers that be acknowledged their gifts and signed off on them, they didn’t have to explain it to anyone else. Zeck had walked us straight into a dead end, and from the smug look on his face, he knew it.

  “Will that be all, Officers? I have a lot of paperwork to finish up….”

  Victoria continued to stare at him and the hairs across the back of my neck rose in response. Was she going to flip her shit and punch him?

  “That’s all for now, Mr Zeck,” I said, touching Victoria’s arm gently.

  She shuddered, her shoulders rolling back as she drank in a deep breath. She spun on her heel and stalked from the office, leaving me to smile awkwardly at Zeck and hurry from the room after her.

  Catching up to her, I blocked the corridor, forcing her to pull up short or plough straight through me.

  “What was all that about?” I asked, folding my arms across my chest.

  “What was what?”

  “That thing with Zeck? Why were you so determined to unnerve him? All you did was make him clam up; we won’t get anything from him now about his process….”

  “We wouldn’t have gotten anything anyway. He knows how to play the game a little too well. Can we just get out of here? We’re not going to get any more information from here…,”

  I nodded. She was right, of course. Until Zeck and Callum released their reports, we weren’t going to learn anything new. The only thing we could do now was go and get the press conference out of the way. Simply thinking about it was enough to send my stomach into knots, but it wasn’t as though I had another choice.

  Chapter 19

  My cell phone began to buzz as soon as I stepped out into the mid-morning sun and I scooped it up out of my pocket, answering it without bothering to look at the screen.

  “Yeah?”

  “Amber?” Dex said, the familiar sound of his voice instantly
causing my shoulders to relax a little.

  Standing in the lab with all the bodies in their little metal drawers gave me the heebie-jeebies. It wasn’t a particularly cool thing to admit, especially considering the cases I investigated, but “cool” wasn’t exactly what I was aiming for. I’d settle for simply staying alive, and in my line of work, hanging around the dead was never a good idea.

  “Hey, what’s up?”

  “I heard about what happened last night. How are you?” There was a concern to his voice that I wasn’t expecting and it knocked me completely off guard.

  “I’m fine, how did you hear?”

  “News of rogues has a way of spreading like wildfire down here at the precinct. Listen, they’re making us do a press conference and I saw your name on the list. I was just calling to warn you,” he said.

  “Yeah, I’d heard,” I said, pausing awkwardly.

  “Listen, can we talk? I feel responsible after what happened yesterday and I want to help. I want to try and make this right, Amber. I won’t ever be able to take back what happened with Graham, but….” He trailed off, but there was no mistaking the guilt in his voice.

  I knew what it was like to feel like that. It sucked ass. At least in my situation the guilt I felt was justified. Dex had acted foolishly, allowing his ego to get in his way, but I also couldn’t blame him for it. It was a human reaction and one many of us had.

  “You really don’t need to,” I started.

  “No, I do, and don’t try and make me feel better, Amber, I know I screwed up. Please let me help. This is all new to me and I’m pretty certain I’ll keep screwing up if you don’t at least set me on the right path.”

  “Fine, I’ll see you at the press conference. We can discuss it then,” I said, cutting the conversation short—the curious glances Victoria was giving me set me on edge. The last thing I wanted to do was give her any sort of ammunition against me, and knowing the details of yesterday’s debacle was something she was better off never finding out.