Murder of Crows (The Twenty-Sided Sorceress Book 2) (6 page)

“I’m going to get you a shirt that says ‘does not play well with others’,” he muttered.

“I think I own that shirt,” I said, trying to smile. “Get Sky Heart one instead. Then we can be twinsies.” That got me a wry grin before he turned around and turned on the gas stove.

“So what are we dealing with?” he asked as he filled a kettle for tea.

“Besides a narcissistic cult leader?”

“Jade…”

“A spirit, I think. All I felt was this horrible freezing rage. Not like a hot anger, the kind that flares and burns out. This was real hatred, true rage.” I knew, because I’d felt something similar once.

Listening to your family die horribly while you could do nothing to stop it? Yeah. That’ll cause a feeling like the one I’d just touched.

“Could a spirit affect the physical world like this without an intermediary?” Alek took the other seat and unfolded the table between us.

I tipped my head back against the wall and shut my eyes, trying to recall everything I could about spirits and the way they worked. I sort of had one following me around, after all, so you’d think I would know more. But Wolf was special, a creature outside of reality in many ways. She would probably know all sorts of things about spirits, but if she could speak, she certainly hadn’t demonstrated it in the last forty years. I thought about my guardian more and sighed.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so. Wolf can’t do much about corporeal threats, only help with magic stuff as far as I can tell. I don’t know what rules the Undying follow, if any, but it seems likely that something or someone is enabling this spirit or using its power.”

“Not Sky Heart,” Alek said with certainty in his tone. “He is terrified but he will not tell me anything. He speaks in half truths. Carlos went away, but I do not think he went far.”

The kettle whistled and Alek prepared tea. I closed my eyes again and made myself remember the feelings I’d touched, the look of the scene, how the body had been cold, how it had smelled. Blood. But there hadn’t been that much blood on the ground. Killed elsewhere? I thought so. Redtail was a large man, weighed two-twenty easily. Not easy to move. And how did the killer stake the body and put a live crow into the chest so close to the trailers without someone hearing them? In daylight.

I could see why Jasper was convinced there was magic at work here. It was pretty obvious no normal human was doing this. Too many ways a human could fuck it up and wouldn’t be strong enough to manage it on their own. Even more than one human would have left a trace, might have caught attention.

“What did you smell?” I asked as Alek set down an earthen mug steaming with jasmine tea on the table and pushed it at me.

“Blood,” he said. “Like in a slaughterhouse. Earth. Feces, I think from the body. I sensed no power, saw no obvious drag marks. It is odd.”

“And the body was cold. Too cold. How did it get there? We know nothing.” I wrapped my hands around my mug, willing the steam and warm ceramic to push away the last of the chill clinging to me. “But the pageantry,” I said after a moment. “That feels human to me. It’s a statement.”

“But what is the killer trying to say?” Alek sipped his tea and a line formed between his blond brows.

“Hi, I’m totally bug-fucking crazy?” I resisted the urge to take my thumbs and smooth the line away.

“But not all powerful, or the killer or killers would strike more often, no?”

“Unsub,” I said. “We should call him or her the unsub. That’s what they do on TV. Didn’t they teach you that at Justice Academy?”

“Unknown subject,” he said, the corners of his mouth turning up in a faint smile. “Sure, along with how to use a toothpick and some gum to build a nuke, how to run counter-surveillance maneuvers, make crispy bacon, and kill someone with the five-finger death punch.”

I grinned at him. My friends and I were clearly rubbing off on him if he could make jokes like that in a situation like this. My grin died quickly, however, as I remembered something else.

“I don’t think Sky Heart can talk to Shishishiel anymore,” I said. “When I was little, I remember I could sense the spirit with him, like vast wings unfurling at the edges of my vision. Something has changed, and I don’t think it is just that I’m older now.”

“I know,” Alek said. “He was lying about consulting the Crow spirit.”

“What else did he lie about?” I asked. Alek had powers beyond just normal shifter powers, though I didn’t know what all of them were. He could do wards, like the one protecting us from eavesdroppers, and he was a walking lie detector. That latter part was a little annoying in a relationship, but it came in handy other times. Like now.

Scratch, scratch, scritch
. Our heads whipped toward the door. I summoned my power, preparing a nice bolt of welcome as Alek rose and moved into position. I stood up on the seat, wincing as it creaked under my weight, but keeping my eye and the summoned magic in my hand at the door over Alek’s broad shoulders.

One hand drawing his side-arm and holding it at his thigh, Alek swung the door open and turned sideways to make sure we both had clear shots.

It was Emerald, my half-sister. She held a towel that looked to be wrapped around something and looked up at us with huge, scared green eyes.

“Please,” she whispered, then she cast a furtive look over her shoulder. “The kids. You have to find them.”

After we ushered her inside, Alek offered Em the seat he’d been in but she shook her head, setting the bundle down on the table and unfolding it. Inside were three items. A teddy bear, hand sewn from the look of it. A hairbrush with dark hairs still caught in it. A braided friendship bracelet.

“These belonged to the kids. So you can find them.” Em looked at me, her green eyes wary.

“What kids?” I asked, forcing my breathing to normalize and my hands to stop shaking after the adrenaline hit I’d just given myself.

“This is where you live?” She looked around the trailer as though she hadn’t heard me.

“Phenomenal cosmic power,” I said. “Itty-bitty living space.”

Em gave me a blank look and then glanced toward Alek where he leaned on the kitchen counter with an expression that asked if I’d always been nuts or not. I guess the reference was lost on her. Probably one of the few kids in the entire United States who hadn’t been raised on Disney movies.

“What kids?” Alek repeated, gifting me with a slight shake of his head.

“The fledglings. Like me. There are three others. They’ve all gone missing,” Em whispered, glancing around again.

“The trailer is warded, no one can hear us,” I said.

She hunched her shoulders, the news not relaxing her like I thought it would, and cast another look toward the door.

“Should we go invite Pearl inside?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how I felt about her using Emerald to talk to us, but maybe she thought we’d be more sympathetic to a kid. Or maybe she worried that I wouldn’t listen to her after what they’d done to me. Or she was a coward. I mentally filled in the bubble for option D: all of the above.

“No,” Em said, her hands coming up like a suspect surrendering to the police. “Please. Grandfather is already angry with dad over him leaving and bringing you here. I can’t get mom in trouble, too. I’m a fledgling, nobody will be too mad at me for being curious about you.”

“The kids are missing?” Alek said, his voice taking on a slight growl now.

Right, the kids. Probably more important than family politics. I swallowed my opinions on my mother and tried to look attentive and open.

“Grandfather says they are dead, that the evil spirit got them because they didn’t obey, but mom thinks they are alive. She said with these things that your magic could find them if they are. Can you?” She put that last question out there with a defiant jut of her chin.

Pearl was right, but I wondered how she knew that. She had clearly spent more than just a night or two with my biological father if she knew things that sorcerers were capable of and how our magic might work.

“Yes,” I said. “I probably can. You said they are fledglings, so they haven’t shifted yet?” She’d said other fledglings, which meant she hadn’t, either. It made me a little sad and a lot angry. Her fate in the Tribe was unknown, then.

“No, they are too little. I will be Crow any day now, dad said so.”

“I hope he is right,” I said softly.

“When did the children go missing?” Alek asked.

“Thomas and Primrose disappeared two weeks ago, after Night Singer got killed. Peter,” she said, then stopped and took a quick gulping breath. “He went beyond the boundary stones a couple days ago. Said he could hear Thomas calling to him. They are cousins and almost the same age. That’s Peter’s hair brush.”

“Boundary stones?” I thought of the tingle I’d felt when approaching Redtail’s body.

“Grandfather set them, to protect us from the evil.”

“Bang-up job he’s doing, too,” I muttered.

“Grandfather and Shishishiel will protect us,” she said. She spoke the words with the strength of a zealot, but the quiver in her chin and the desperation in her eyes turned them from conviction into prayer.

I hurriedly asked another question, not wanting an argument. “Your parents said something about this happening before, do you know when? And what happened?”

Em shook her head and wrapped her arms around herself. “I’ve heard some of the elders talk about it, but they always shut up when they notice me. It was a long time ago, like a hundred years or something, I think.”

A hundred years. Long before my time as well. I sighed and looked at Alek. “Without more answers from Sky Heart, I don’t see how we can help.”

“You can’t find them?” Em asked. Her face closed off again, eyes narrowing, lips pressing together into a pale line.

“I can try,” I said. “But we don’t know what we are facing out there.”

“We will look for them,” Alek said. I raised an eyebrow at him and he shrugged as if to say “what else can we do?”

“Okay,” Em said, edging toward the door. “Can I go now?”

“Yes,” Alek said, cutting me off before my mouth was half open to ask more questions. He pressed himself to the side and let her squeeze by him.

“She was our best source of information,” I said.

“She’s a kid and she’s terrified. We have a direction to go in now. Perhaps if we find these children, Sky Heart will allow us to help.”

Fat fucking chance of that. I didn’t say so, there was no point. Alek was right. Finding the kids was something I could help with, something tangible to do besides sit around and wait until more people got killed.

If the children were alive. Visions of little bodies gutted and splayed with crows struggling in their bloody chest cavities swarmed my mind. I shoved them away. The evil spirit, as Em had called it, liked to be dramatic. If the children had been murdered, they would have been left where the tribe could find them, wouldn’t they? I hoped that wasn’t my brain engaging in wishful thinking mode and trying to put order and sense where there was none.

“Fine,” I said, looking at the three sad items that represented three lost and probably dead kids. “Let me finish my tea and then we can go look for them.”

“No,” Alek said, sinking down into the seat across from me. “Not tonight. First light. We should not go wandering around unknown woods in the dark. Alive or not, one night should make little difference, no?”

I hated that he was right, but he was right. I had known these woods well over thirty years ago. But forests are not static, they live and breathe and change. Stumbling around half-familiar land in the middle of the night was a good way to get hurt, even without an evil spirit that could incapacitate a shifter running around.

The woods weren’t the only thing around me that was half-familiar and yet irrevocably changed. It took me a long time to fall asleep, even with Alek’s familiar warmth and his musky vanilla and clove smell making me feel safer. His calm presence didn’t banish my resentment, my old anger. Laying there in the dark, I wasn’t sure anything could.

We slipped out of the trailer as soon as the sky lightened. It would get warmer later, but the morning air was crisp and cool, and dew dampened the grass and ferns, glittering like tears in the early morning sunlight. My hair was in a tight braid down my back and I put on a kerchief over my head to protect from branches and brambles. Jeans, a Half-Life tee-shirt, and sturdy hiking boots rounded out my outfit.