Precinct 13 (25 page)

He shrugged. He even managed to refocus on my face. In the outer circle of his green irises I saw a faint glow when he spoke. “It’s a small town. A very small town when you’re magical.”

Valentine sneezed. “Ugh,” he said, waving his hands in front of his nose dramatically. “Your blarney stinks of overripe pineapples. Turn it off.”

So Jones was trying to use his magical powers on me just now? What was he trying to convince me of, exactly, I wondered?

Jones ignored Valentine. He kept his eyes locked on mine. “You’ve had quite a scare, Alex. You should go home and rest.”

I blinked. In my inner ear, I heard a soft strain of music so beautiful that my heart ached. Suddenly, I felt exhausted. The rush of excitement drained completely, leaving me feeling limp. All I wanted to do was go home and curl up under the covers.

Valentine’s voice sounded harsh in comparison, though I was grateful for the support of his arm around my elbow. “We get the hint, fairy princeling. We’re going.”

Valentine steered me toward the stairs slowly, as my legs seemed sort of sluggish and there was a lot of broken pottery to step around. At the foot of the stairs, I caught a whiff of cool, fresh air. The strange cobwebs in my brain cleared.

I hadn’t even realized how heavily I’d been clinging to Valentine, until I stood upright. “Hey,” I said, suddenly really angry to have been overcome by Jones’s magic.

Valentine squeezed my arm slightly—a warning.

Jones looked up with a dark expression in his eye. He started toward us. I remembered that he told me he had to keep in close proximity for his glamour to work. I swallowed what I wanted to ask, and tried to sound casual when I asked instead, “Hey, uh, what about the body from my morgue, the guy we’ve been calling the necromancer?”
Whose name you have probably
always
known
, I added silently, before continuing, “Where’s he? Or his body?”

Jones stopped, clearly relieved I didn’t call him out. “Oh. Well, obviously, we’ll see if his sister is feeling talkative,”
Jones said. He waited a moment, as if waiting to see if I would say anything else. When I didn’t, he turned away from us and headed over to where Stone seemed to be putting charmed cuffs on the woman in question.

“Try not to kill the prisoner this time,” I joked.

Jones shot me a look that made it clear he did not find my humor to his liking.

I stood for a moment trying to decide what had just transpired here, and what it all meant. My head was too foggy to make much sense of anything at the moment, however. Maybe it was a good idea to go home for a little while. I headed up the stairs. Valentine trailed behind me.

“I do believe the fairy princeling is jealous,” Valentine said once we were out of the mortuary’s back door. I noticed that the wood had been staved in by something very, very strong.

“Jealous? Of what?” I leaned against Valentine’s arm. My head was beginning to pound from the extended period without fresh air.

“Of you,” Valentine said. “Of your magic and your friends.”

“You
are
pretty cool,” I said with a fond smile.

“As are you.”

Valentine had a phenomenal sense of direction and knew exactly how to get to Robert’s place. Turns out, I hadn’t been terribly far from home. We walked the distance easily, though I was exhausted by the time we got back. The shock from the whole experience caught up with me in a rush.

I must have looked as droopy as I felt because, once inside, Val insisted that I shower while he cooked some late lunch. He promised not to burn the place down this time.

The hot water was heavenly on my bruised back and neck. I knew I should probably use cold to decrease the swelling, but I wanted the luxury of the heat. Scrubbing everywhere, I tried to remove any trace of the horror of the experience from my body and my mind. My skin was rubbed raw, but my hands still shook.

Nearly incinerated inside a coffin.
Gah
.

The reflection in the steamy mirror looked like a scared little girl with blue bruises on both sides of her neck. The impression of the zombie’s fingers was distinct. The burn on my cheek from the spent casing seemed like decoration in comparison.

I wrapped myself in my terry cloth robe and padded out to find the dining room decked out with Robert’s best linen and candles. “Oh” was all I could say, as Valentine pulled the chair out for me.

Valentine had also raided the china cabinet for Robert’s grandmother’s Wedgewood. He saw my expression and halted my reprimand with a raised hand and an innocent shrug. “I can’t resist pretty things.”

I had to admit that in the candlelight the setting was gorgeous. It wasn’t like he’d allow any of it to break; Valentine did always take good care of the things he coveted. The thought made me ask, “How did you know to come? When I first tried to call I couldn’t get a signal.”

The soup that he poured into my bowl smelled of beets and beef. Borscht?

“You have my number in more ways than one.”

I remembered that Jack could call Sarah Jane with his mind. “So it’s telepathy?”

He shrugged, and sat himself down. “I call it instinct.”

The soup was good. I had several sips before I asked,
“Where were you headed? Did I take you away from something important?”

In the dim light Valentine’s eyes glittered darkly. “Nothing is more important than you.”

If that were true, he would never have left this morning. I didn’t want to push things, so I let him have his secrets. I groped for a safer subject and found work. “Why do you think Jones used his glamour on me?”

Valentine shrugged. “The fairy wanted us out of the way.”

“You don’t think it was something more sinister? You don’t think it was weird that he knew my attacker by name?”

He picked up the fancy bowl with his hands and took a big gulp of it. I smiled. It was so like him to be strangely uncouth while surrounded by expensive things. When he set it down, he said, “Stranger to me was his desire to cover it up. This
is
a small town. Moreover, as a princeling it would not be unusual for him to know all the magical in his region regardless of their—shall we say, orientation.”

“I don’t think he tells a lot of people that he’s a half-fairy prince.” I pushed the soup around in the bowl, thinking.

“How can they fail to notice?”

“Not everyone has dragon senses,” I reminded him. “One thing I did notice, though, is that Jones doesn’t seem to be a very good cop.”

Valentine snorted. “Now, that surprises me. Fairy love honor and justice, or at least pretending at it.”

“Jones is definitely heavy on the pretending, then.” I scowled.

“No,” Valentine said, picking up the bowl to slurp up the contents again. “You misunderstand. When a fairy pretends, it is a thing of beauty to behold. I would say he gives it his
whole heart, but fairy have none. Which is why they fake everything with a passion.”

“I don’t really understand,” I admitted. “All I know is that Jones is the worst cop I’ve ever seen and the rest of his team is no better or too busy squabbling with each other to notice that nothing’s getting done. As far as I can tell, I’m the only one trying to crack either case.”

“Either? You have two?”

I ticked them off on my fingers. “The missing necromancer/grave robber. The cow mutilations.” Then, I shook my head in frustration, and added another finger. “Maybe three; it depends on if the sister is working with her brother or against him.”

Valentine drew his brows together, as he ladled himself another helping of borscht from Robert’s grandmother’s soup tureen. He took his time filling his bowl, clearly admiring the way the silver glittered in the candlelight. “Perhaps the fairy is just lazy,” Valentine offered, but didn’t even buy his own suggestion for very long because he added, “Though he seems awfully young to have slipped into the indolent stage already.”

I nodded, even though I couldn’t say I easily followed Valentine’s assessment of fairy character. I had, at first, considered the possibility that Jones was one of those people who had grown comfortable doing the least amount of work to get the job done. But is it lazy to make your inhuman partner, who isn’t very good at talking to people outside the magical community, explain that there might be the equivalent of a spell bomb inside a corpse?

Or is it criminal negligence?

Or something worse?

There was something else niggling at the back of my
mind that I wanted to ask Valentine about. I took another spoonful of soup while I tried to formulate my thoughts in an organized way. “Even though I think they started that way, I don’t think the brother and sister are working together now. She didn’t have a high opinion of him, and she seemed baffled by his motivations. She said something about a wall.”

“A wall?” He was clearing the plate from me. I hadn’t even remembered emptying the bowl, but my stomach felt satisfied and full.

“Some number…fourth wall…or was it fifth? I didn’t understand it. But, she said that he thought that if he could break it, he would have a lot more power.”

From the kitchen, I heard the plates go next to the sink. “It’s an interesting theory.”

“You mean you know what she was talking about?”

Valentine came back out and leaned his hip against the doorjamb. “Her brother is a ‘Tinker Bellist’—so named after the fairy in
Peter Pan
who could be healed if enough people believed. It’s the idea that the more people accept the reality of magic, the stronger magic becomes. The assumption is based on the supposition that magic was easier to tap before the Age of Reason and, in fact, the whole movement to equate magic with superstition and madness was a conspiracy by those who would seek to contain the power.”

“So what’s the thing with the wall?”

“It’s a theater term. To break the fourth wall is when the actor intentionally destroys the illusion of distance between himself and the audience. He addresses them directly, reminding them they are watching an actor playing a part. I suspect, in this case, it means using magic in public, making it impossible for regular people to deny or ignore.”

Given everything that happened in this town, you wouldn’t think there’d be many people like that left.

Maybe that was the point.

“Do you think it’s true?” I asked. “Does it really work that way?”

“I don’t know,” he said. Valentine began moving around the room, snuffing out the candles with his fingers. “But I do know that there is something special about this place. You spent years in the company of a powerful demon and you never saw her for what she was. In fact, it didn’t take much for the doctors to convince you that you made it all up. I could never have revealed myself to you in Chicago, but here…? You’ve been here, how long?”

“Four months.”

“Yes, hardly any time at all.” Leaning toward the tall taper in the center of the table, Valentine blew a thin breath of air. Ice crystals, like a miniature snowstorm, streamed from between his lips. They swirled and danced around the flame before dousing it. “Now you not only see the magic you used to ignore, but you can
use
it.”

“And you think that’s because a larger percentage of the population in Pierre believes magic is real?”

Valentine sat down across from me. “I didn’t say that. It is, however, one possibility.”

So the necromancer might be sending zombies into the diner just because it was the single most disruptive place to do so. Also, picking the recently deceased, someone the townsfolk would remember, would only heighten the inability to ignore the dead elephant in the room, as it were—only it was dead grandpa. Before I moved here, I researched the size of Pierre. There were only about fifteen thousand people living here. “What would happen if everyone in town believed?”

“Well, those who subscribe to the Tinker Bell Theorem say that a hundred percent buy-in could cause a kind of magical pulsar, with massive bursts of energy going off regularly.”

“Which, presumably, a skilled magician could use to his or her advantage?”

“Absolutely.”

“Do you believe in it? The Tinker Bell Theorem?”

“It’s difficult to prove one way or the other,” he said with a lift of one shoulder. “There are very few places in the world without skeptics. But there
are
communities where magic appears stronger. Is it the conviction of the practitioners or some other harmonic convergence? Perhaps, as some believe, the magic is in the earth itself, and some places have the right kind of mountain ranges or lakes or rock formations. I don’t know.”

Even so, I thought this theorem seemed like a strong possibility for a motive. It might explain the zombies and possibly even the attack on the rancher’s cows. Jones was concerned that word of the cow mutilations not get out to the public. Yet it had.

Could that have been the work of the necromancer as his sister suggested?

“Okay,” I said, desperately trying to remember my forensics classes. “That could be motive, what’s the other thing we need?”

“Opportunity,” Valentine supplied with a crooked smile that showed a bit of sharp canine.

“Seems to me opportunity decreases dramatically when you’re dead.”

“For normal people, yes,” Valentine observed dryly.

“Is being dead an advantage in magic?”

Valentine lifted a shoulder. “If you die under the right circumstances, it can be. Vampires are stronger than living men. Zombies are more—”

“Tenacious,” I said with a shiver.

He inclined his head. “Just so.”

I chewed my fingernail, trying to puzzle it out. Valentine continued to clean up around me.

Yet somehow I didn’t think we were on the right track. When I met the necromancer, he didn’t seem particularly powerful, like he’d achieved some altered state beyond death. He was just plain dead.

Well, not exactly. I looked at the snake on my hand. This had sprung out of him. He hadn’t turned into it, though, the way a human might become a vampire or a zombie. I supposed, like the severed head said, it was a part of him.

No, from the moment everyone saw it or interacted with it, they called the snake a
spell.
It might have started out as his, but it was clearly mine now. I stroked the head, remembering how it had helped me, tried to save me from the spiders.