Bone Crossed (6 page)

“My mother is coming,” I told him. “The vampires are after me, and I have to get her to leave. She won’t do it if she knows I’m in danger.” Then, because I was desperate, I played dirty. “Not after what happened with Tim.”

His face stilled. Then he grabbed my wrist and pulled me with him so we were both standing closer to the garage.

He put his hand on the wall next to the door. “If it works, I won’t be able to remove my hand without breaking the spell.”

When Mom turned the corner, the graffiti was gone.

“You’re the best,” I told him.

“Make her leave soon,” he said with a grimace. “This is not my sort of magic.”

I nodded and had started to walk to where Mom was parking her car when I saw the door clearly. Covered by red and green paint, it hadn’t been as noticeable. Someone with some artistic skill had painted an X on the door. In case I didn’t get the right idea, instead of two mere lines, the shape was formed by two bones. They were ivory with grayish shadows and just a faint blush of pink—not painted by a couple of self-righteous and irate kids with spray paint. All it was missing to keep it from Jolly Rogerhood was a skull.

“You’d better hide that,” Zee said. “Magic won’t.”

I put my back against the door and folded my arms.

“So why don’t you think it’s running right?” I asked him as my mother walked over from her car, with Hotep on a leash.

“Because it is old,” Zee told me, taking the cue I had given him. “Because it was not well designed in the first place. Because air-cooled engines need constant tinkering.”

“I was—Hey, Mom.”

“Margaret,” Zee said coolly.

“Mr. Adelbertsmiter.” My mom didn’t like Zee. She blamed him for my decision to stay in the Tri-Cities and fix cars instead of finding a teaching job, something much more in line with the kind of work she thought I should be doing. Politeness done, she turned back to me. “I thought I’d stop by before heading home.” She couldn’t get too close though, because as soon as he caught my scent, Hotep growled and lowered his head aggressively: protecting my mom from the bad coyote.

“I’ll be fine,” I told her, curling my lip at the Doberman. I actually like dogs, but not this one. “Give my love to Curt and the girls.”

“Don’t forget to work things out so you can come to Nan’s wedding.” Nan was my younger half sister, and she was getting married in six weeks. Luckily, I wasn’t part of the wedding party, so all I had to do was sit and watch.

“I have it on the calendar,” I promised. “Zee’s going to take care of the shop for me.”

She glanced at him, then back at me. “Fine, then.” She started to give me a hug, then gave Hotep a rueful look. “You need to teach him to behave like you did Ringo.”

“Ringo was a poodle, Mom. A fight between Hotep and me wouldn’t end well for either of us. It’s all right. Not his fault.”

She sighed. “All right. You take care of yourself.”

“Love you. Drive carefully,” I told her.

“I always do. Love you.”

Zee was sweating by the time the car was out of sight. He took his hand off the building and the paint returned. “I didn’t do it for you,” he grouched. “I just didn’t want her hanging around longer than necessary.”

We both stepped away from the door to look at the painting that was now mostly covered by a big, fat-lettered red “LIAR.” The paint of the crossed bones was thicker than the spray paint, so even though I couldn’t see most of the color, I could see the outline of it.

“The vampires dropped Stefan in my living room last night,” I told him. “He was in pretty rough shape. Peter ... one of Adam’s wolves, thinks whoever did it was hoping Stefan would attack me and we’d both be out of the way. Stefan wasn’t in any shape to talk much, but what he did manage to convey was that Marsilia found out I killed Andre.”

Zee traced his fingers over the bones and shook his head. “This
might
be vampire work. But, Mercy, you’ve been putting your little nose so many places it doesn’t belong; it could almost be anyone. I’ll talk to Uncle Mike—but I expect your best bet for information about it is Stefan, because it doesn’t feel like fae magic. How badly is Stefan hurt?”

“If he were a werewolf, I think he’d be dead. You think this is magic?” It felt like that to me, but I was hoping I was wrong.

Zee frowned. “For an evil bloodsucker, he’s not a bad sort.” High praise from Zee. “And yes, there is magic here, but nothing I’m familiar with.”

“Samuel thinks Stefan will be all right.”

Tony turned the corner in his unmarked car, which was discreetly police modified with extra mirrors, a few extra antennae, and a bar of lights along the back window, hidden from the casual eye by extra-dark glass. He slowed when he caught sight of the damage. He pulled up next to us and opened the door.

“You decorating for Christmas early, Mercy?” Tony could blend in even better than I did. Today he looked like a Hispanic cop ... like the poster child for Hispanic cops, handsome and clean-cut. When he was playing drug dealer, he did it better than the real thing. I’d first met him playing a homeless man. There was nothing magic or supernatural about him, but the man was a chameleon.

I glanced at the building again. He was right. If you didn’t pay any attention to the words, it had a sort of Christmasy look to it. The green paint tended to be short top to bottom but long front side to side. The red paint was fat and closed up. It looked sort of like garlands with red balls hanging down.

There was even “Ho, ho, ho,” if you skipped around a little and deleted an “e” on the last “ho.” Our green painter had a limited vocabulary and occasionally mixed up a professional working woman with a garden implement.

“Not really Christmasy thoughts,” I told Tony. “But the colors are right. Actually, if the white wasn’t so dingy, it would almost look festive—like that little Mexican restaurant in Pasco—the one with the really
hot
salsa.” The fresh colors made the original paint job look tired.

“Your boyfriend still got surveillance video going?”

“Yes, but I don’t know how to run it.”

“I do,” said Zee. “Let’s go take a look.”

I glanced at him.
Vampires, remember? We don’t want the nice human cops to see the vampires.

He gave me a bland look that clearly said,
If the vampires were clumsy enough to get caught by the cameras, that was their problem.
I couldn’t object out loud, but if the vampires made themselves obvious, it would be
Tony
who was in danger.

Well, I thought as I led the way into the office, at least vampires looked like everyone else. As long as they didn’t display their fangs for the camera—or throw a car around—it was unlikely they’d be spotted for what they were. And if it was obvious ... Tony wasn’t stupid. He knew a lot about how the fae and the werewolves worked, and I knew he suspected that there were a lot more nasties still keeping quiet about themselves.

While Zee played with the electronics, Tony looked at me.

“How are you?” He smelled of worry, with a little of the metallic scent of protective anger.

“Really tired of answering that question,” I replied blandly. “How about you?”

He flashed his pearly whites at me. “Good for you. Do you think Bright Future did this?”

If our minds kept working this much in sync, I’d pity poor Tony.

“Sort of. I think this is Tim’s cousin’s work,” I told him. “She’s a member of Bright Future, but she didn’t do this under their banner. Everything was directed at me—not the fae.”

“You want to press charges?”

I sighed. “I’ll call my insurance company. I’m afraid they might force me to press charges in order to be reimbursed. I can’t afford to hire someone to repaint it unless I use my insurance, and I can’t take the time off work to repaint it myself.” I still had other things to pay for—the damage a fae who wanted to eat me had done to Adam’s house and car, for instance. And Zee had told me he was collecting the rest of what I owed him on the business. Fae cannot lie, and we hadn’t had time to work that out.

“How about Gabriel’s family,” Tony suggested. “There are enough of them, and they could work after school. It would be cheaper than hiring professionals and ... I think they need the money.”

Gabriel Sandoval was my man Friday, a high school student who came in weekends and late afternoons to do paperwork, answer phones, and do whatever else needed doing.

I had a sudden vision of the shop being overrun with little Sandovals hanging from ladders and ropes. I’d let them loose in the office for cleaning, and it was almost hard to recognize the place—for a bunch of kids they were amazingly industrious. “That’s a good idea. I’ll have Gabriel call his mom as soon as he gets here.”

“Here,” said Zee. He turned on the little security monitor and flipped a switch. The system that Adam had installed was slick and expensive. It ran on motion sensors, so we only had to watch it when there was something moving. Something first moved at 10:15; we watched a half-grown rabbit bop unhurriedly across the pavement out of sight. At midnight someone appeared at the door of the garage. It wasn’t two people with spray paint, so I was pretty sure it was whoever painted a pair of crossed bones on my door.

His image was oddly shadowed, unrecognizable. The miscreant kept his face out of camera range—impressive since there was a camera placed just in front of the door to catch the face of anyone breaking in.

The only thing the camera got a clear shot of was the gloves he wore—the old-fashioned kind: white with little buttons on the wrist. There were odd glitches in the pictures, jumps where the camera turned off because there was no movement for it to follow. By the timers, it took him forty-five minutes to paint the bones on my door—of which the cameras caught about ten minutes. Part of the missing time covered how the painter got there and how he left.

I didn’t think he knew the cameras were there, and he still avoided them. Some supernatural creatures just don’t film well: by tradition, vampires are among them. The height was right for Wulfe, who would be my first choice in any vampire magicking. Since Wulfe was the vampire who knew for certain that I’d killed Andre, he was also my top suspect for the informer who had told Marsilia about my crimes.

The camera caught movement again.

“Stop it,” Tony said.

Two figures, still indistinct, froze on the edge of the lights of my parking lot, and the little numbers on the lower right of the screen read 2:08 A.M. Time had jumped almost a half hour from when the bone painter had last been there.

“What was that all about?” he asked. “The person at your door?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. I almost said that his guess was as good as mine, but it wasn’t. “Maybe someone was trying to break in, but didn’t make it.” Impossible to tell what he’d been doing from the camera shot. “It doesn’t matter, though, because he obviously wasn’t the one who graffitied all over.”

Tony stared at me. Cops were almost as good as werewolves at sensing lies. He turned abruptly and opened the door to examine it. Like Zee, he traced the crossed bones with a light finger.

“Who have you been ticking off besides Bright Future? This looks almost like something the old Mob might do—classy, but designed to frighten the hell out of whoever received it.”

I sighed, shrugged. “No one wanted me to get Zee out of the murder rap. But it’s not the kind of thing a fae would do—too visible. And a werewolf who was ticked off that badly would just attack. I’ve got some people who’ll look into it for me better than the police can.”

Frowning, Tony made an irritated noise. “Is this another one of your ‘It’s too dangerous for you mere human cops?’”

I rubbed my arms, but I wasn’t cold, just chilled. I was under no illusions. Marsilia could have just killed me, but she was playing. But no matter how playful the cat is, the mouse is just as dead in the end.

And the end would be whenever she decided. The only question was how many people—how many of my friends—she decided to take down with me.

Maybe I was panicking prematurely. Maybe she would settle for a punishment. Stefan was hers, there was no reason for the gut-deep feeling that he wouldn’t be the last to suffer for my sins. I didn’t know Marsilia well enough to make that kind of prediction.

“Mercy?”

“I don’t know what the crossed bones mean.”
Other than bad
news.
“Zee tells me it is magical but probably not fae magic.” Zee was out, anyone who cared to would know that he was fae, which was the reason that the garage was mine now, instead of his. There was a lot of prejudice against the fae. “He has a few contacts who’ll take a look at it for me. I know a few other people I can ask, too.” Adam had a witch on the pack’s payroll for cleanup. She was good, but it would cost me a lot to hire her if Uncle Mike and Stefan didn’t know what it was. This was shaping up into a real macaroni-and-cheese month. “However, none of them will come within a hundred miles of a police investigation. Do you have anyone on the KPD who is an expert in magic?”

Tony held my gaze for a minute before giving up with a sigh. “Hell no, Mercy. You should have seen the brass’s faces when they watched that video—” He stopped and gave me a guilty look. It was a video of me killing Tim ... and all the stuff before that. He shrugged nervously and looked away. “There are a few who know something about fae or werewolves, but ... if they know anything more, they keep it quiet for fear of losing their jobs.”

He sighed and came back into the shop. “Go ahead,” he told Zee. “Let’s watch Tim’s cousin paint the shop.”

Once the two shadowy people moved fully onto the parking lot, Courtney was unmistakable. Instead of watching the whole process, Zee fast-forwarded it until the pair walked off with bags of empty spray-paint cans almost two hours later. He stopped the images when Courtney was close to the camera and impossible to mistake, her pretty, rounded face hard and angry. Zee flipped back and forth a little until we got a clear view of her companion’s face, too.