Centaur of the Crime: Book One of 'Fantasy and Forensics' (Fantasy & Forensics 1) (21 page)

The three fantasy creatures crowded into my living room were silent for a moment. They traded glances with each other. Finally, Galen spoke up.

“Praytell, what is a ‘carriage’?”

I took a breath and closed my eyes. Shouldn’t have been surprised, really. During the brief time that I’d been in the city outside the palace, I hadn’t seen a single carriage. People had either walked, ridden on horses, or used…

“Wagons,” I said. “Think of a wagon, only an enclosed one, and pulled not by a horse or oxen, but driven by a machine.”

Galen nodded. The others looked skeptical. And just in time to punctuate that awkward moment, my stomach made a growling noise that would have done justice to a wildcat.

“Much as I dislike wasting time,” Galen said, “we’ve all been on the run since yesterday, you most of all. Perhaps a visit to your pantry might be in order?”

“That’s not a bad idea.” After all, between my summoning, the travel to the Grove of the Willows, and another trip to the Fayleene woods, I’d had at best a handful of berries, a flask of water, and a bit of tart.

Broiled mouse tart, that is. Can’t forget the mouse. My stomach rumbled as it demanded to be fed something it would recognize.

“In the meantime,” Galen continued, “I have an idea that I wish to try on my own. Mayhap I can solve part of the problem of going unnoticed in your world.”

“Shaw, Liam, let’s go find something to eat, give Galen some room,” I said, and I led the way.

My kitchen worked fine, but that’s all I can brag about. The dark, age-spotted wooden cabinets and a stove that had seen better days during the Reagan administration would’ve made your average gourmet chef turn up their delicate nose.

A single square window set in the opposite wall let in the late morning sunshine. I pulled the curtains closed as Liam came into the room. His little hooves made muffled clops on the floor’s faded olive-green linoleum.

Shaw just managed to squeeze through the doorway with a grunt. With a sinuous, leonine grace, he made his way around to peer over my shoulder as I pulled a package of taquitos from the freezer and popped the tray into the microwave. With that appliance humming away, I opened the fridge next.

I found some leftovers that hadn’t sprouted anything interesting yet—a platter of roasted chicken and a bowl of Greek salad—and set them out on the floor. Liam sniffed at the salad for a second before diving in with gusto. In contrast, I think Shaw would’ve taken my hand off at the wrist if I’d been any slower.

I heard a fizzy
pop
, like a magnum-sized champagne cork going off in the other room. This didn’t faze my two companions. Liam made happy-deer sounds as he dove into the salad bowl. Shaw was busy cracking the chicken bones in his beak. I squeezed between the two and stepped back out into the living room.

“I did it!” Galen said, with a jubilant expression. “Transformation’s an Archmage-class spell. I completed it properly on the first try!” He grinned from ear-to-ear as he stuffed a bottle of some smoky substance back into one of his jacket pockets. My jaw dropped.

From the waist down, he was completely naked.

Of course, that state of undress was normal for Galen. At least as a centaur. But now, it felt as if I’d just wandered into the men’s locker room while one of the linebackers was suiting up.

“Galen, that’s…you look…good!” I stammered out. My gaze flicked down low again. Very low. Yes, Galen still looked like a stallion in one respect, that much was sure. “Wait right there. Don’t move.”

I tugged open the hall closet. I rummaged around, found a bag full of pre-breakup clothes that my last boyfriend had neglected to take back. Luckily, he’d left a couple boxer shorts, some gym socks, and a pair of tennis shoes. I also found a pair of jeans that looked like they’d been washed by beating them between a pair of bricks, but they’d do.

“Here you go,” I said, hoping my blush didn’t show as I handed Galen the small pile. “If you’re going to pass as human, you need a few more threads.”

“Of course, how silly of me.” He quickly slipped on the underwear, pants, and footwear. Miraculously, the shoes fit. The jeans looked tight, and hung about two inches short above his ankles. “How do I look?”

“Passable.” Between the Byronic jacket, the sneakers, and the beat-up pair of jeans, it was
Heathcliff
visits
The Gap
. But let’s be honest. With his build and looks, Galen could pull off just about anything short of a poncho made out of trash bags.

A
crash
came from the kitchen. The sound of raised voices. Galen and I traded a glance and went back through the door.

The griffin and Fayleene had finished off the contents of bowl and platter. For an encore, they’d knocked over my kitchen garbage can and were fighting over the scraps. Shaw let out a feline snarl as Liam stood his ground over a small pile of wilted lettuce I’d tossed out a day or so earlier.

“What’s going on here?” I demanded.

Liam looked at me, abashed. “We finished your rations and were still hungry. Shaw smelled more food in the tall, skinny bin and turned it over–”

“The Fayleene is mistaken,” Shaw interjected. “My beak got stuck. I turned the contents of thy bin out by chance.”

I sighed. “Look, I’ll get some more food for everyone, okay? Just give me a minute. Liam, I’m guessing that you only eat plants.”

“The only proper food there is,” Liam asserted.

I ignored that.

“Right. Shaw, what do you eat?”

“My kind doth consume anything,” the griffin said proudly. He eyed the Fayleene as he added, “though in truth, we like meat. Ideally, in portions about the size of…a well-fleshed fawn.”

“Oh, my,” said Galen.

“Shaw,” I said firmly, “we do
not
eat our teammates. Talk, yes. Eat, no.”

“Fair enough,” Shaw agreed. His pink tongue flicked over the edge of his beak as he addressed Liam. “Fayleene prince, how doth it feel to look so delicious?”

Liam glanced at me, eyes wide.

“Shaw, I mean it!” I warned.

The griffin made a resonant chortle. “T’was spoken in jest, Dayna. Never would I harm a companion, e’en should they look so tender and edible.”

I grumbled under my breath about griffins having a strange sense of humor and went to the garage. The smell of parched dust greeted me as I opened the door and groped for the light’s pull cord.

The fluorescent bulb flickered to life. Like most non-native Californians, I’d never adapted to living in a house without a basement. So I’d simply turned the attached two-car garage into a double-sized storage space. Stacks of cardboard boxes lined the far wall at the edge of the light.

The dust-flecked hood of a large SUV glinted back at me in the bulb’s cool luminescence. I’d been storing a friend’s Ford Expedition during their summer abroad, and it looked like it was going to come in handy.

Something else along the wall gleamed pearl white. A gray, padded handle jutted out to one side. Here was something I could put to good use right away.

I reached for the handle and gave it a strong tug.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Here’s a tip for anyone planning to host a lunch party with a pair of heraldic beasts and a talking deer: buy snack food in the jumbo packs. I emptied fridge and pantry of everything from tubs of baby spinach to my old cans of Corn Niblets, which Liam gobbled up like candy.

It turned out that Galen had a sweet tooth of his own. After sharing out the taquitos and a microwave pizza with me, he cleaned out my last quart of Chunky Chocolate Coma in a dozen swipes of one of my soup spoons.

None of that compared to Shaw’s appetite. Neither frozen chunks of cauliflower nor uncooked scoops of corned beef hash fazed him. The griffin snagged one of Galen’s slices of pizza. He followed that up by eating the cardboard box the pizza had come in, and pronounced both as ‘delicious’.

That’s where the pearl-white object with the gray handle I had tucked in the garage proved handy. My trusty old chest freezer. I suppressed a shudder as I opened it. Remembered what my Dad had used our old Kelvinator for. But all I had in mine were frozen veggies and a huge pair of bone-in hams I’d won in a raffle last year. I hoisted them out, nudged the freezer closed with a bump of my hip, and shoved my way back inside with a ten-pound hock in each hand.

Even a griffin couldn’t eat rock-hard pork, so I tossed the hams into the sink to thaw. After that little chore, I proceeded to nuke all the microwave popcorn I had in the house. I stacked a miniature mountain of popcorn in a deep punch bowl and set it down by the television set. For the next hour and a half, I yakked non-stop as a commentator over my cable channels. I started out with news, and then channel-surfed as best I could to get them situated.

It turned out that my idea had been a pretty good one. All of my guests, Galen in particular, understood the principle behind the TV. To their credit, while they had plenty of questions, very little of what they saw on the screen truly baffled them.

“Does it not seem odd to you,” Galen said to me, “that you have so many things in this world, non-living things, that move you around and do your work?”

“Not as odd as this world’s absence of Fayleene,” Liam put in. He lifted his muzzle out of the popcorn bowl and ran his tongue over his nose to remove stray grains of salt. “Who manages and protects your forests?”

“Mind not thy forests,” Shaw replied. He sprawled out like a golden shag rug on my sofa. “What of the skies? E’en there, strange machines.”

“Strange or no, we’ve got to keep going.” Galen crossed his arms as he addressed me. “Dayna, where is this device you spoke of, the one that will tell us the identity of Benedict’s murderer?”

I paused for a moment before I spoke. “Um, yeah. I have a confession to make about that.”

Liam sighed. “Words like that always bode ill.”

“I do have a device that I want to use,” I explained, and I dug the bullets we’d retrieved from the Grove of the Willows out of my pocket, “It’s downtown, at the building where I work. If we’re lucky, it should tell me a lot about the gun that fired these. But no, it won’t tell us the identity of the murderer right away.”

Galen scowled. “Then by the blazing sun, why expend my power to bring us here in the first place?”

“Because we’re not here to solve Benedict’s murder!” That brought the wizard up short. “I know two things for sure. First, whoever murdered Benedict, they’re from your world, not mine. Second, they’re either on the Andeluvian court, or they’re using it to watch us.”

A pause, as the three exchanged glances. I didn’t move a muscle, didn’t back down. I waited until one of them could formulate a question. Shaw spoke up first.

“Thy statements are bold,” he said, with a ruffle of his feathers. “Thou hast a griffin’s heroic heart, but I hope thy reason is at work too.”

“It is,” I insisted. “Let’s take this in turn.”

They watched me as I began to pace. Couldn’t help myself. Motion of any sort seemed to help me. Like my thoughts needed a little push to come out right.

“How do I know the murderer is from your world? Because of how damned clumsy the murder attempts have been.”

“Evidently not clumsy enough to fail,” Galen muttered.

“Yes and no. That’s what puzzled me back at the Grove of Willows. A rifle’s designed to be used at a distance. If the shooter needed to stay within eye and earshot, then they should’ve brought along a regular handgun. The most slack-jawed hit man in Los Angeles would’ve known that.”

“You said murder ‘attempts’, Dayna,” Liam pointed out. “Was there another that I was not aware of?”

“Yes, but not on Benedict. The day before I came to Andeluvia, someone shot at me. Probably with the same rifle as the one used to kill Benedict. But they weren’t able to hit me, and I gave them
two
chances when I froze up. That tells me the shooter hasn’t been able to practice, or they don’t know how to use a rifle scope.”

“None of us know what a ‘rifle scope’ is,” Galen agreed. “So it stands to reason that a fellow denizen of our world probably wouldn’t, either.”

“And that brings me to my other point.” I stopped pacing for a moment and regarded the wizard. “You and I rode at a near gallop all the way to the Fayleene woods. And yet, a pair of dragons managed to arrive at the same time we did. I doubt that, even flying at full speed, a dragon’s that much faster than a horse.”

“That is correct.”

“Someone had to act fast to set those dragons on us. Someone who knew exactly where to send them, very soon after Albess Thea told us that we needed to speak with the Fayleene.”

“’Tis true,” Shaw said. “I heard Master Seer Zenos tell the court you were leaving, nigh upon five minutes after we parted ways.”

“And Zenos harbors no love for us,” Galen acknowledged. “But Dayna, if we’re not here to find the Good King’s murderer, why did you claim we would do just that, right before we left the court?”

“Because I was
bluffing
,” I said. “And because I was setting a lure. I wanted Benedict’s killer to hear. If he or she thinks I can unveil their identity, they’ll be desperate to stop us.”

Galen looked at me askance. “You are using us as…bait?”

“Bait has a tendency to get chewed up, Galen. No, if we know that the killer is going to have to come after us, we have a chance to turn the tables.”

The centaur blinked. “How would shifting furniture around help?”

I shook my head, irritated with myself. “I mean, we’re on my ground now, where I’m familiar with things. If Benedict’s killer has to stick their neck out to stop us–”

“Then we but need to strike!” Shaw unsheathed his foreclaws and raked the arm of my poor, abused sofa for emphasis.

“Even so, Shaw. Now, I need suggestions. Surprise should be on our side. How can we move fast enough to capture Benedict’s killer? Or take them out of the picture, if it comes down to it?”

My three companions were silent for a moment. Galen rubbed his chin in thought while Shaw let out a rumbling, contemplative purr. Liam tapped his forehoof on the carpet and cleared his throat to speak.

“Dayna, only a very few know that we Fayleene can detect strong magic,” he said. “Could that be of use to us here?”

I looked to Galen for an answer.

“I can attest to the fact that crossing between worlds requires a tremendous amount of magical energy,” he said, with a touch of weariness. “As it is, I don’t have enough remaining to bring us back home for at least a few hours.”

“It’s hard for me to pinpoint anything all on my own,” Liam warned. “We Fayleene do this in pairs or groups when we need to find something specific, like a spring of magically charged water.”

Pairs or groups? Well, there was an obvious answer to that.

“Galen,” I said, “I want you to accompany me to my office. But could you create an enchantment that mimics what Liam can do? If we gave it to Shaw–”

The wizard smiled. “I understand. Together, they would be able to triangulate a position.”

Galen surprised me by pulling out a golden medallion. Specifically, the one he’d used to bring me to Andeluvia. He’d punched a small hole in the medallion and strung it on a leather cord. With a series of incantations and a dusting of some cumin-scented powder, Galen draped the medallion over the griffin’s neck.

“That shall do it,” Galen pronounced. “Shaw, your medallion will glow when it detects strong magic. Tap it with a talon when you’re ready to contact us, and we’ll be able to hear your voice.”

“There is one more thing,” Liam said. “Fayleene magic of this sort works best if I’m higher up. Are there any nearby hills or bluffs?”

I carefully drew back one of the window shades. Liam peered out for a moment. The slope to the side and back of my house curved up into Griffith Park, right below the observatory.

“I don’t think it’ll be a problem,” I said. “Just stay off the roads and biking paths, if you can.”

“Nay, not a problem for him,” Shaw put in. “What is thy proposal for hiding me?”

“That presents a substantial challenge,” Galen said ruefully. “I cannot transform either the griffin or Fayleene into humanoid form.”

“Thank goodness for small favors,” Liam said under his breath, with a shudder of revulsion.

“Shaw, we’re going to hide you,” I said. “What’s more, we’re going to hide you in plain sight of every person in Los Angeles.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Cardboard tube in hand, I pushed my way through the exit of the copy shop down on Los Feliz Boulevard. I walked the entire length of the parking lot, half-sure that the blazing afternoon sun had turned the asphalt tacky in the heat. As I approached the tuxedo-black SUV, I casually surveyed the nearly empty lot.

No one there to see. Good.

I tugged open the driver’s side door and slipped inside. The smell of warm fur and feathers greeted me. I’d left the engine running and the air conditioning on at full blast, which helped keep my companions comfortable. Halfway comfortable, anyway.

Galen, still in human form, fared the best. At least the passenger seat had been designed for his current shape. For Liam and Shaw, I’d folded down the back seats to get the maximum space available. The Fayleene prince managed to stake out a halfway comfortable spot behind Galen, though he had to lie down and watch that his unbroken antler didn’t stab anyone if he moved his head.

Shaw, to his credit, didn’t complain as he contorted himself to fit inside the SUV. But even lying down, his wings blocked my rearview mirror and his paws twitched, like those of a dog confirmed to a too-small kennel.

“Was this really necessary?” Galen asked, as he took the cardboard container from me. “I fail to see how this will turn the griffin’s form invisible.”

“It’s not the package,” I said, as I put the SUV in gear. “It’s what I have inside of it.”

I’d explained the plan to everyone back at my place. I’m not sure that they really understood it, but they were willing to follow me for the time being. I’d gone to my study and tapped out an online order to the copy store.

And although Galen fumed at the delay, I refused to leave the house until I’d rinsed off and changed my clothes. Look, I’d been rolled in dirt and put through an effing forest fire. Just because the three males in my company didn’t object to my smelling like a cross between a camel and a chimney flue, didn’t mean that
I
had to put up with it.

After a thorough wipe-down with a facecloth, I rubbed on some sunscreen, stuck some items from the medicine cabinet in my pocket, and tossed my dirt-encrusted Anne Taylor outfit in the tub. I’d figure out a way to wash it later. I slipped on new underwear, a pair of jeans, a matching top, and some sensible running shoes. And to make sure the next part of my plan came off, I took along two spare medical scrubs I kept in my bedroom closet.

I took care to stay at or under the speed limit as I took us north, up the steep slopes of the roads into Griffith Park. I couldn’t imagine what I would say if a cop pulled me over. The SUV’s tinted windows were tinted dark enough to hide my friends from casual viewers, but I didn’t think for a moment that it would fool a close-up inspection.

It didn’t help that my passengers were alternately curious and frightened by the traffic around them. Between the questions and comments from my three companions, I almost missed the turn-off I’d been looking for.

I pulled off the paved street and onto one of the gravel-lined access roads used mostly by the park rangers. On a day like today, when the sun beat down like a sledgehammer, the odds of us running into an errant trail hiker was practically nil. I brought us to a halt along the back side of a thickly wooded ridge.

I opened the rear hatch. Both griffin and Fayleene leapt out with a sigh of relief, their hooves and paws crunching on the road gravel. They stopped in their tracks, and simply stared at the view. Below us, the metropolis of Los Angeles stretched off to the horizon in a pall of gray steel, silver glass, and concrete brown.

“How far does it go?” Liam asked. I heard an odd catch in his voice.

“A long ways,” I said.

“That’s more…humans…than I ever dreamt of,” the Fayleene prince said quietly.

“You’re not alone in thinking that,” Galen said, as he watched me uncap the cardboard tube and set a coiled-up cylinder of vinyl on the ground.

I unrolled the cylinder to reveal a brightly colored banner, complete with metal grommets and a pair of fastening straps at one end. I wove the straps securely to the leather cord that Shaw already wore about his feathered neck, creating a light makeshift harness. While I did this, each of my team craned their necks, trying to see what I’d had printed out.

“I don’t get it,” Liam said.

“Neither do I,” Galen said. “What is a ‘the-ater’?”

I grinned. I’d paid top dollar for a version of the banners that you could tow behind a small airplane. I figured that pretty well described what Shaw was, in practice. And in this town, that was all the inspiration I needed.

Bright red letters spelled out:
GRIFFINS GALORE III: COMING SOON TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU!!!

“It’s like…an announcement,” I explained. “It tells people to go to a building we call a ‘theatre’. To see a…well, a kind of show we call a ‘movie’. About griffins.”

Shaw blinked and then fixed me in his bright, golden stare. “Thou hast turned me into…an advertisement?”

“Sort of, yes.”

“Will this not make yet
more
people look upon me?”

“I’m counting on it. Trust me on this one. In this town, you’ll attract so much attention that you’ll be completely invisible.”

“Dayna, I have seen thy cunning mind at work,” he said, and his deep voice rumbled in my ear. “I shall have faith in thy methods.”

“Thank you, Shaw.” I reached out and rubbed the back of his neck. The griffin purred a little as I continued. “Okay, you and Liam are on patrol until sunset. Stay sharp, avoid people if you can.”

“And no talking with anyone,” Liam finished, with a roll of his eyes.

“That’s right,” I said, trying to stay serious. “Liam, are you sure you can find your way back to my house?”

He made an injured-sounding sniff. “Next you’ll be asking whether I can cross a field without crunching through the tall grass.”

And with that, he made a silent bound off the road. Liam ducked into the underbrush, moving like a fish through clear water. In a twinkling, his fawnlike spots and tan coat vanished.