Dead in the Water (Gemini: A Black Dog Series Book 1) (8 page)

The line, delivered with such clipped precision, didn’t strike me as Vause relaying a comforting thought as much as her admonishing a flaw in the child’s makeup. But she was right. It was now or never, and the cost to me paled in comparison to the loss of more children.

And yet the echo of a small girl trapped in my bones trembled at the thought of being resurrected this way.

“I’ll do what I can.” I held her black-lashed stare. “No promises.”

The gleam returned to her eyes. “Do you need a moment?”

“I— Yeah. I do.” I seized the opportunity with both hands. “I haven’t done this since…”

Not since the day she walked into the marshal’s office where I worked, pointed at me and left the building, clearly expecting me to follow. I went from Northeast Conclave marshal to Earthen Conclave agent overnight, and Vause had led the recruitment charge. The other magistrates, a circle of ten, had demanded a show of my powers. They documented my abilities and then ripped my body through the change without waiting for my protest.

No doubt if I failed to
shift on my own now, then Vause knew similar methods for drawing Lori into the open. I shivered at the thought.

“Very well. You will enter the interrogation room through there.” She pointed out a door to my left. “I’ll be overseeing the interview with her parents and Mr. Graeson from a second private room behind the opposing two-way mirror.”

Looking over my shoulder literally. Great. “Okay.”

After she left, my back hit the wall, and I sank to the floor. I banged my head against the glass until the base of my skull rang. It didn’t help. I kept Lori tucked so deep in my memories that pulling her out made me physically ill. But asking Vause for help would be worse. So much worse.

Come out, come out, wherever you are...

Minutes passed. A half hour elapsed. Maybe an hour. Sweat drenched my face and clung to my upper lip. The tapping of my foot sparked a headache, but I couldn’t seem to hold still. My skin itched and burned. That tightness reminded me of sun-drenched days and warm summer nights. I had spent every summer of my early childhood caravanning with relatives through the Great Smoky Mountains. I filled my lungs, aching for the sweet bite of spruce trees.

Just like that, my gut wrenched. My bones ached in time with my heartbeat, and my marrow tingled. The change compressed me, smashed me into a form that ought to be too small to hold an adult. I sat on the floor, legs crossed and trembling, and gazed into my reflection. My chest hurt. I don’t know how long I had been rubbing it, but finger marks reddened the fragile skin.

Mom used to say Geminis were born as sets of identical twins because we practiced mimicry even in the womb. The first talent we develop is the ability to read the powers of others. It’s a survival mechanism. We’re not a strong breed. We’re not much more resilient than humans in terms of strength and durability, which means it’s critical for us to surround ourselves with strong allies and to learn how to identify magic that complements those around us.

The second gift we receive, at around the age of three, is the ability to assume the appearance of our twin. In essence, we mimic ourselves through that connection. It’s a fail-safe, an emergency reset in case we absorb a power that doesn’t burn out or sprout appendages that won’t unsprout. We aren’t doppelgangers. We don’t create fetches, constructs of glamour and shadow that resembles a person or creature. What we do isn’t a complete transformation. It’s a temporary augmentation, a skimming of the best qualities of another fae that we then absorb into ourselves for a short time. And when we get stuck in our own bodies, we assume the form of our twin. After shifting back to ourselves from that point, we’re, well, ourselves.

Except my reset was as broken as I was. Lori was frozen in time. Never changing, never aging…

The change redoubled its efforts to compress me, squeezing my torso so hard I was amazed when my head didn’t pop off.

In the mirror, my ash-blonde hair lightened to platinum. The shoulder-length cut grew to the small of my back. My narrow face plumped with the roundness of childhood. My turbulent eyes rounded with innocence, and pink splashed my cheeks with enthusiasm. When I stood, I was the height I had been at the age of eight. The black slacks and dress shirt had vanished. So had my boots. A nightgown printed with fat moons and grinning stars brushed my ankles. My throat constricted as I stared at my own reflection. I lifted a child-sized hand and waved to myself.

“Hi, Lori,” I said in a breathless voice that sounded fresh off a playground.

But Lori was gone. There was only me and the magical imprint stamped on my brain from the last time we had practiced
becoming,
as Mom called it.

I entered the interrogation room, and the victim didn’t bat an eyelash. Circling the desk, I sat in the chair positioned across from hers, propped my elbows on the tabletop then pressed my fists into my cheeks.

“I’m Cam.” I started swinging my legs. “What’s your name?”

Elizabeth’s pale brown eyes lifted, but she didn’t speak.

“I live in Tennessee.” My elbow slipped. “Where are you from?”

“What are you?” she asked quietly.

“I’m fae, like you.”

Her head tilted. “You’re not really a kid.”

I pressed my palms flat to the table. “How can you tell?”

“Your eyes.” The fabric slid off the back of her head to reveal burnt-auburn curls. “They look old, sad.”

Perceptive girl
.

My toes skidded across the floor. “You’re right.” I sat up straighter. “This isn’t how I usually look.”

She leaned forward, and the blanket shifted down around her elbows. “Are you a shifter or something?”

“Kind of.” I played with the strap of my nightgown. “Have you heard of Geminis before?”

Flattened curls bounced around her shoulders when she shook her head. “What are those?”

I stuck out my arm. “Let me see your hand, and I’ll show you.” She hesitated. “I won’t hurt you.” Skin-to-skin contact worked for this particular trick. Blood was only required when I wanted to initiate a change. “I give you my word.”

Tiny white teeth pressed into her bottom lip, and she clasped palms with me. A hot rush of energy stung my fingers.

“Let me guess.” I screwed up my face like I required concentration. “You’re a…
phoenix
.”

A phoenix wearing a fifth-tier glamour, one who had, without a doubt, been touched by Charybdis’s magic.

“Am I right?” I prompted when the girl’s face crumpled.

Her species explained her perception. She had an old soul. She might have been reborn hundreds of times before this life. Perhaps it also explained how she had survived Charybdis. The wisdom of previous lives resided in that tiny head of hers. What it didn’t explain was her reaction.

“How did you know?” She touched her arm. “Can you see through my glamour?”

I always knew when glamour was in use, but I couldn’t see beneath it so much as guess, depending on species, what features a particular fae might want hidden.

Phoenix were flawless, human in appearance until they embraced their inner firebird. I bet myself a dunk in the lake Elizabeth hadn’t required glamour prior to meeting Charybdis.

“It’s just something all Geminis can tell.”

“That’s cool I guess.” She studied me. “So what do
you
really look like?”

“Like this, but older.” I wanted to smile at the chipped purple paint on my fingernails. “This is how my sister looked the last time I saw her.”

“When was that?”

Thirteen years ago. I had been splintered longer than Elizabeth had been alive. “A long time ago.”

“Did something happen to her? Is that why you’re so sad?”

“She…” Hot tears prickled my eyes. “She drowned when we were about your age.”

The little girl shrugged her blanket back up around her neck. “I almost drowned too.”

Yanking my thoughts away from Lori, I pushed out the right questions. “How did you get away?”

“I set the marsh on fire.” The blanket wriggled higher until her hair vanished beneath it. “The monster screamed, and it ran away.”

Adrenaline dumped over my head. “You saw it?”

An ID on the killer would crack the case wide open. The surveillance tip was good, but this would be gold.

“It was so pretty,” she whispered. “I just wanted to pet it.”

Pet it?
That was not what I expected her to say. “Tell me everything you remember.”

“We were on a camping trip with my Junior Conclave troop. There was swamp on either side of the path we were hiking, and Mrs. Dial said not to go out there or the gators would eat me.” The blanket shivered. “But I heard… I thought the gators were after it. I didn’t want it to get eaten.” Her fingertips vanished into the folds of material. “I waited until Mrs. Dial stopped to help a kid tie his shoes, and then I sneaked into the swamp. That’s where I saw it.”

“It?”

“A white horse.”

Chills swept down my spine. That piece of evidence was damning on so many levels. “Did you?”

“I didn’t see any gators, but I thought maybe its foot was stuck in the mud. That happened to my friend Jenny’s pony once when it got out of its pen.” Her breathy voice trembled. “I walked over, and it nuzzled my arm like it wanted a pet. So I did. I petted it, but its fur was sticky. I couldn’t get my hand back. I started yanking hard, and the horse got mad. It started walking toward the water.” Liquid eyes peered out at me. “It was a trick. The horse wasn’t stuck in the mud at all.”

Confirmation of his hunting pattern was as good as confirmation of species. I knew what he was, or what he pretended to be. How could Charybdis be both the humanoid fae in the surveillance video and the horse? Kelpies—and she had just given me a textbook description of one—weren’t shapeshifters. “Is that when you set the marsh on fire?”

Elizabeth stared into her lap. “I couldn’t let go of it.” Her eyes filled with tears. “It couldn’t let go of me either, but the fire scared it, and…” She raised her left hand, the one she had touched earlier with sad eyes.

Magic peppered the air, and her personal glamour vanished. Her hand did too. She had been amputated at the wrist. Her fair skin was puckered and pink where it disappeared into a bandage capping her arm.

Dull shock roared in my ears. She had survived, but gods it had cost her. “Can you show me where you found the horse?”

“No.”
A violent sob wracked her body, and she dissolved into tears. “P-p-please don’t make me go back.
Please
. I don’t want to see him again. Please.”

Heart breaking, I rushed around the table and wrapped my arms around Elizabeth. At first, we were of a similar height. Then pain radiated down my limbs as the bones elongated and skin stretched. I smoothed her hair and rocked her while jagged magic buzzed through my body, transforming me until the world took on a different perspective. Lori was gone—my hold on her had slipped. I was Camille now, but the girl didn’t care. She just wanted to be held and told everything would be all right.

As much as I wanted to speak the words, I kept them in where they couldn’t make me a liar.

The door burst open behind us, and a couple smelling of burning leaves charged into the room. The woman’s hair smoldered, red and glittery, as she scooped up Elizabeth and cradled the girl against her chest.

A thin crimson rim flickered around the irises of the brown-eyed man who must be Mr. McKenna. When he spoke, smoke poured from his mouth. “She’s suffered enough.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “She has.”

The couple exited with their daughter nestled tight in a blanket I was now willing to bet was flame-retardant. I stood there, expecting Vause to bustle in behind them and critique my performance in her detached way. When she failed to appear, I sat back down and braced my forearms on the table that was much easier to reach now.

I must have dozed off, because when a deep throat cleared, I jerked upright and wiped drool off the corner of my mouth. Time had passed, but I wasn’t sure how much. A minute. An hour. However long it had been, it hadn’t been long enough to rid my eyelids of their sandpaper texture. “What?”

Graeson set a paper cup of steaming chai on the table and scooted it toward me with a finger. “Drink that.”

After our morning spent inhaling carbs together, I didn’t argue. I wrapped both hands around the paper cup and let the warmth thread through me. I brought it to my lips and moaned while knocking back the best latte I had ever drank. He watched me lick my lips with unsettling attentiveness. I tapped the rim with my fingertip. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I know,” he said, a world of meaning saturating those two words, but I was too exhausted to ring the intent from them.

With the cup drained, I searched for a trash can but came up empty. “Where’s Vause?”

“Otherwise occupied.” He took the opposite chair, the better to lock stares with me. “This is why you were grieving.”

There was no point in lying. He would smell that too. “Yes.”

His jaw clenched. “Vause had no right to ask you to do this.”

“We got our ID.” I wasn’t ready to discuss Lori with him yet. “Now we know Charybdis is a kelpie.”

Kelpies were water spirits who most often appeared in the guise of a black or white horse. They lured victims to them by faking injury or some other
poor me
ploy. Once there was a foal born of a kelpie father and siren mother that ensnared victims with its song. Regardless of the mechanism, the stories always ended the same way. Kelpies coaxed their victims onto their backs, carried their riders into the depths of the lake or river where they hunted, and then feasted on them.

The problem being Charybdis was roaming, which wasn’t normal kelpie behavior. Neither was wasting a kill. The only damage these victims had sustained was the loss of a hand or forearm. He was allowing them to touch him, hauling them into the water to drown them, and then leaving the bodies. Why?

“Don’t stonewall me,” he growled. “For gods’ sake, Ellis, look at me.”

Compassion waited for me in his gaze, its weight pressed me down until I couldn’t have lifted my head if I wanted. Instead I picked at the cardboard cuff around my cup. “How much did you see?”