Murder of Crows (The Twenty-Sided Sorceress Book 2) (5 page)

Em looked up at him with a gasp. “Dad,” she said. I guessed she didn’t hear him talk negatively about the supreme leader very often.

“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘this time’? Has this happened before?” That would have been, you know, good to know. My frakking family and their frakking secrets. It was getting old.

He and Pearl exchanged a look, then both glanced at Em, then turned their gazes back to me. Again it felt like players on a stage, moving from cue to cue for an audience, only now it seemed the play was hitting the climax, but the actors couldn’t remember their lines. Jasper’s thin shoulders hunched and he looked a decade older as he opened his mouth to answer, though his eyes told me what his words would say before he spoke.

He didn’t get a chance to speak.

Screams tore through the quiet clearing and a woman ran toward the big house, crying out for Sky Heart.

We bolted from the cabin and across the gravel drive. My family’s house was close to Sky Heart’s, given their direct blood ties as well as status in the tribe. Close enough that I had made it onto the big house’s porch by the time Alek and Sky Heart came through the door.

Close enough to hear the woman’s first coherent words.

“He’s dead. It’s happened again. He’s dead. Dead.”

The body was staged just beyond the furthest out trailer in a recently cleared area at the edge of the older trees. There were a couple of large rocks and a tree stump that had been dug around but not cut from the ground yet and hauled away. It was next to that stump that the man’s body was staked out.

I felt an odd tingle on my skin as we crossed into the clearing and filed away the sensation for examining later. The air was eerily still and the sinking sun shot weak red-tinged light through the trees, spearing the corpse.

“Back,” snarled Sky Heart as other people tried to follow him closer. Jasper and two other men turned and held out their arms, pushing away the growing crowd.

Alek and I ignored them all and approached the body. He was middle aged, which meant he was one of the older residents. His face seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place a name to it. His eyes were open, clouded and reflecting only sky. There was a tiny trickle of blood dried at the corner of his pale lips.

The air was thick with the sweet smell of blood underpinned with feces and dirt. The man’s plaid shirt was ripped, his hands staked through with large iron nails but there wasn’t much blood on them. His nails were dirty and broken. My brain took in details, eyes looking everywhere but at the mess of his chest. Until his chest moved.

“Fuck,” I yelled, jumping back.

Alek, cool as always, didn’t even flinch, just gave me a sideways look before bending over the body. I moved back up beside him and forced myself to look, to really see.

His chest had been ripped open, like something from a B-grade horror movie, his ribs grey and brownish with drying blood, broken and protruding into the open air. Pinned inside his chest, where his heart and lungs should have been, was a live crow. Its beak was wired shut and its wings were stuck through with crude iron nails, but the poor thing still struggled, its feathers soaked and sticky with blood.

Alek reached into that nightmare and broke the crow’s neck.

“Were they all like this?” he asked Sky Heart.

Sky Heart nodded, fingering a small leather and bead bag that hung around his neck. “Yes,” he said. He looked in that moment as Jasper had described. Old. Tired.

“Is this how it happened before? Years ago?” I asked. It was a guess, going off what my parents had been talking about before this new murder interrupted us.

He jerked as though struck and looked at me, hate creeping into his pale eyes.

“Before?” Alek asked, rising to his feet.

“This is Crow business. Shishishiel will protect us. This is not for outsiders to interfere.”

“Yeah, ‘cause Shishishiel the great crow spirit dude is really doing a bang-up job so far, right?” I glared at him, refusing to be intimidated anymore. Jasper had been right about more than one thing. Something unnatural was at work here.

Killing a shifter isn’t as hard as killing a sorcerer. You don’t have to eat their heart, for example. Decapitation will do the trick, or just a large amount of physical damage all at once. Like exploding someone’s chest and removing their heart and lungs and stuff. That seemed pretty effective. Not an easy thing to do, however, to a man who could turn instantly at will into a bird and fly away. A man who would have hundreds of years of experience, be stronger and faster than a human, and who could tank a lot of damage.

“You will be gone from this place by nightfall,” Sky Heart said to Alek, though he pitched his voice loudly enough that I’m pretty sure the whole camp could hear him. “And you will take that woman with you.”

“Shifters are dying,” Alek said. “I will be going nowhere until that stops. You can either help or get out of my way. I obey the Council, not you.” He was standing up to his full six foot six height and had turned on his Alpha power, as I liked to think of it. Waves of it radiated off him like heat on asphalt and for a moment it was as though the huge white tiger that was his alternate shape lived just beneath his skin, his ice blue eyes the eyes of an apex predator, his muscles tensed and ready to make the kill.

Sky Heart seemed to shrink under that power, but he clutched the beaded bag around his neck and pressed his lips into a line. “I must discuss with Shishishiel,” he said loudly, and then added so quietly that I barely heard him, “please, give me tonight to think on this.”

I couldn’t recall a time in my childhood that Sky Heart had ever said please. Score one for Alek, I suppose. Or score one for how dire this situation was. That was a pretty uncomfortable thought. Shishishiel was a powerful spirit, but these murders weren’t stopping without additional help, that much was clear.

I turned from the staring contest as Alek nodded and forced myself to look more closely at the body.

“Who was he?” I asked.

“Mark, my husband,” the woman who had broken the news said. I hadn’t heard her approach but she stood, thick shoulders shaking and eyes runny with tears, not ten feet away.

Most of the People are named pretty generic names. It keeps it easy for records when they have to pretend to be further on generations of who they really are. There are a lot of biblical disciples in there, Matthews, Marks, Lukes, and Johns. For the women, flower names are pretty usual. Except in my family, of course. We all get rocks. The way the People often differentiated one John or Luke or Rose from another was using nicknames.

“Redtail,” I said, half question, half vague recollection from decades ago.

“Yes,” she sniffled. That made her Mary, or Marigold, I thought. Some things from childhood were so clear, other things faded away and lost. Sadly, the clear things were pretty much all the awful, hurtful parts.

I looked away from the grieving woman and tried to look at Redtail in a clinical way.
CSI: Magic edition
, right? I could do this. I concentrated, bringing up a little power, trying to figure out what I wanted to know, to see. There wasn’t a Dungeons and Dragons spell for figuring out how someone was murdered, was there? Nothing came to my mind.

I thought about how I could see my own sorcery, about how Samir used to demonstrate things to me and I could see and feel his power, familiar but different. Like how warm water and cold water are both water, but not the same to the touch.

So. Detect magic. That’s what I needed, for the moment. I pushed on my power as I closed my eyes, visualizing it in my head as coating my sight and giving me the ability to see what I should be able to only sense.

In DnD, detect magic can be dangerous. If there is too much magic or the spells used around you are too high of a level, you’ll knock yourself out. I hoped that real life wasn’t like that. With the warlock who had tried to kill my friends, I’d been able to sense his magic as a wrongness, like smelling rot or mold even if you can’t see it.

I opened my eyes and looked at the body. Nothing. Maybe I was failing to do what I wanted to do, magically. There were no other sorcerers around to cast a spell so I could see if it was working. I hadn’t been able to sense the warlock’s magic until I touched his victim. I really didn’t want to do that, but if it would help, if it would save lives, well… Part of being an adult is doing things you don’t want to do, right?

I swallowed bile and tried to not breathe as I bent down over the body and laid my hand on his arm. Fuck adulthood. His skin was cold. Very cold. Like he’d been frozen. A deep shiver twisted my spine, locking up my muscles for a moment, and darkness crept in at the corners of my vision. Then the world turned white, trees and sky and ripped up body disappearing under a blanket of freezing white light.

“Jade.” Alek’s voice and warm hands brought me back. I wasn’t touching the body anymore, instead I was feet away, Alek holding me in his arms as I lay half prone on the churned up ground.

“Rage,” I muttered. My tongue felt too thick, my mouth full of sourness, and an unnatural cold, deep hatred still rang inside me. “Something is really angry, and it isn’t normal.” I wasn’t sure I was making much sense.

Alek lifted me up. “You’re freezing,” he muttered. “I’m taking her to my trailer. We will talk later, after you have spoken to your Crow spirit,” he said to Sky Heart.

I let Alek carry me like a damsel in distress all the way back to his little home on wheels, my mind slowly un-fracturing as I tried to parse what had happened. There was magic at work, which I guess was pretty obvious from the whole exploded chest thing. It wasn’t sorcery though, not my brand of it. It wasn’t anything I had any experience with, which wasn’t saying much, alas. I’d spent the better part of twenty-five years running away from Samir and avoiding magic and magical things at all costs. I didn’t exactly have a talking skull or a giant library of musty tomes to research this stuff. Just impressions and guesses.

I pressed my face against Alek’s chest, his shifter warmth seeping slowly into my body. I was supposed to be at home with my friends, leveling up in anticipation of all of us getting killed by my psycho ex, not back reliving childhood trauma and playing amateur detective. It wasn’t fair. Sky Heart and the People had cast me out. They deserved whatever they got. It wasn’t my problem.

Whining about my lot in life and blaming the victims of terrible crimes? Weird.

I called up my magic again, letting it flow through me, this time for warmth and to purge all feeling of whatever it was I’d sensed on Redtail’s corpse. I’m not a stranger to self-pity parties, but the anger rising in me felt off, unnatural. My power shoved it back, pushing away the cold and the resentment until I felt more like myself.

Rage. Resentment. Hatred. All lingering strongly on the body of a man who had probably felt none of those things. I doubted it was his ghost or spirit.

I didn’t know much about spirits, but I knew some. Samir had been interested in all that stuff. He had multiple giant libraries full of musty tomes, though I’d ever only seen one in person. He had kept me away from the book learning, being uninterested in me gaining real knowledge. He had only wanted me to gain power, the way the witch in fairytales fattens the kids before nomming down on them. There were sort of such a thing as ghosts, but they were more impressions than really the dead still somehow living on. Strong emotions, big events that were usually traumatic, powerful people dying, that kind of thing, all that could create a spirit. How powerful the spirit was and what it could do depended on how powerful the event or person creating it was.

Alek set me down to unlock his door and I managed to stay on my feet. My body felt like I’d been punched repeatedly, but my magic had warmed me and cleared the cobwebs from my head. I was able to mount the handful of steps and enter the little cabin under my own power.

The trailer he lives in is very small, about a hundred and ten square feet. It’s efficient, with a kitchenette on one side, a small gas heater and fold-out table and seats on the other, a bathroom at the back, and a ladder, leading to a sleeping loft, built up against the inner wall. Books were piled on cubby-like shelves built into the walls alongside jars of tea and dry goods. The whole place smelled of cedar, beeswax, and bay oil. Cozy, especially given Alek’s size, but he moved about the tiny space with the ease of long familiarity.

I sank into one of the padded seats as soon as he’d unfolded it and leaned against the wall. Alek held up a hand and his face grew flat with concentration. A shimmering layer of power slipped up the walls, warding off the trailer. I knew no one would be able to overhear anything we said. Smart. That’s why they pay him the big bucks, I guess.

“It’s not Samir,” I said. “Not a sorcerer; that I’m pretty sure of. But we are dealing with magic.”

“You should warn me before you do things,” he said with a shake of his shaggy blond head.

“You were busy with your who-is-the-alpha staring contest. I didn’t want to interrupt. Besides, why else would I touch a corpse? The whole ‘doing magic now’ thing was pretty obvious, I’d think.”