Shrike (Book 2): Rampant (36 page)

Britannia are gone, and the past year feels like it was the slow build of a tsunami. We're all still picking up wreckage, all of us.

Magda's clothing line finds a new investor with no political ties Gina or Tasha can hunt out.

Taog and I pack our things at the end of March and head north, to a familiar place.

After all this time, I still have some unfinished business. 

It's early evening, and the sun has dipped toward the Irish Sea. I edge out onto an outcropping of rock and settle myself to look out over the twin crescents of white sand that form Achmelvich Beach, waiting for Taog to catch me up. The water is clear and bright turquoise that darkens into midnight blue as the bay opens into the sea. Taog steps over to me, his breathing still a bit laboured even after the weeks of antibiotics and Gwen-enforced bed rest.

He sits next to me. A white paper bag drops onto the rock between us, smelling of fish and chips and vinegar.

"We used to come here every summer," I say.

"Aye, you told me."

We eat quietly, looking out over the setting sun as the grease from the chips chills on my fingertips with the early spring air. The sun turns the sky vermillion, brushing the remaining clouds with molten gold and capping each cresting wave with silver.

I wipe my hands on my trousers and pull my rucksack to my chest. Unzipping it, I remove the blue glass bottle of ash and uncork it.

"You're sure."

"I'm sure." I look at Taog, clutching the bottle in my hands. "This is the last place I remember us being a family, the last place I remember Mum being Mum. She got sick one autumn right after I finished school. It happened fast. It got bad fast. But Da always stuck by her."

Taog knows well enough about the guilt I feel for not being there for her more, but he also knows well enough not to remark upon it. Mum remembered me, even if she couldn't express it. And Da understood, even if he shouldn't have.

And both Taog and I know that this bottle no longer simply signifies Mum and Da to me, not after the winter when so many bodies piled up in Edinburgh.

I upend the bottle over the cliff, and my parents' ashes pour out in a billowing cloud. The last rays of the sun catch it, turning the millions of tiny motes to glitter. 

"
Byddaf yn cofio i chi
." The Welsh words still feel foreign in my mouth. I will remember you.

We sit until twilight darkens the beach. 

"Do you want to go back? Magda's waiting." Taog means the caravan, but I just think of Edinburgh. I get to my feet and cork the blue bottle, nestling it back into my rucksack.

No, not time to go back. Time to go forward.

I shake my head. What I do care about is right here with me. I know Magda's down on the beach somewhere, bare feet impervious to the chill of a Scottish March. There's a decent chance she's spying on Taog and me with a smug smile on her face. 

Taog's fingers interlace with mine, and even in the falling dark I see the new small black tattoo on his wrist. A swooping shrike.

I squeeze Taog's hand against his chest, my head on his shoulder. He opens his eyes and looks down at me, brushing his lips against my forehead. 

We don't speak. We don't need to. 

We're home.

Emmie Mears is an author, actor, and person of fannish pursuits. Born in Texas, the Lone Star state quickly spit her out after a measly three months, and over eight states and three different countries, Emmie became a proper vagabond. She speaks four languages and holds a degree in history. She writes science fiction and fantasy and loves to weave in sociological and psychological threads through her novels...which was probably not what her university professors had in mind for using her degree. Emmie is the head of a pride of cats in the suburbs of DC, and she's pretty sure at least one of them thinks she's its mother. Slightly obsessed with Buffy and Supernatural, Emmie haunts the convention circuits and joins in when she can on panels and general tomfoolery. She is the author of SHRIKE: THE MASKED SONGBIRD (2014) and STORM IN A TEACUP (2015). Emmie is open to bribery in the form of sushi and bubble tea.

She spends most of her time causing problems and ruining worlds. 

Emmie is also the editor and Grand Pooh-Bah of
Searching for SuperWomen
, a geek hub focused on furthering the conversation about the role of women in geekdom and loving awesome things in the process.

She may or may not secretly be a car.

You can connect with Emmie on
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Eva Jamieson
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However you felt about the book, please consider leaving a review on Goodreads or the site of your favourite retailer (or if you're feeling extra angelic, both). Reviews are golden to author-folk. Thank you for reading and for supporting me!

More from Emmie Mears…

The Shrike Series

Shrike: The Masked Songbird

Uncaged: A Shrike Story

Shrike: Rampant 

Ayala Storme Series:

Mediator Ayala Storme does PR by day and kills demons by night…but when the hellkin start spawning new monsters on human hosts, Ayala will have to challenge her own and redefine what really makes a monster.

Storm in a Teacup

Any Port in a Storm

Lightning Strikes Twice: A Stormeworld Novella

Taken by Storm (Coming November 2015!)

Eye of the Storm (Coming 2016!)

If you enjoy Gwen and Ayala, you'll love Mitzy Maddox! Turn the page for an exclusive excerpt from Kristin McFarland's debut novel, SHAKEN (October 2015)!

Order it here
!

Inspector Mitzy Maddox is one of the lucky few: she can see other people's magic, use her trust fund to buy any shoes she wants, and drink her way through a fifth of vodka in the time it takes a fairy to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

But when a serial killer surfaces in the Bay Area who drowns wealthy women in the bathtub and drains them of their magic, Mitzy discovers she can't use any of her gifts to track the murderer. With a tight-ass half-fairy for a partner and the less-than-legal help of a sizzling reporter, Mitzy sets out to find the murderer—and to discover how he's stealing his victims' magic.

Mitzy's got to stay afloat without her magic and her flask long enough to catch the killer— or she will be the next to drown.

SHAKEN by Kristin McFarland

CHAPTER ONE

The Nob Hill apartment smells like a martini and death.

As I enter, a few rainbow-hued, shimmering clouds of magic curl around me like dust rising under my footsteps before settling back into the wood floors and tasteful furniture. It's a gorgeous apartment, and one owned by old money; the wealth is palpable, and not just in the Nob Hill address. Whoever lived here—died here—had at least three generations of accumulated magic floating on the canned air. Nice. I probably know the victim.

A uniform glances at me as I cross the living room. I shoot him my best fake 'Sorry-I'm-late' smile. I squish a wriggly tendril of guilt, but it's after midnight, and I'd just finished a pre-bed glass of wine when I got the call. The guilt doesn't have much wriggle left this time of night.

He grimaces at me and points down the hallway. 

I pass a bland-faced, unremarkable man with a weird, steely aura—transmuter, probably—who leans against the wall with a shaken look on his face. He looks up at me briefly as I pass, but says nothing. He must have found the body. He doesn't look up as I pass.

The smell of alcohol is stronger in the bathroom, highly incongruous with the setting and almost enough to make me tipsy. The white tile floor and walls gleam, the mirror aglow under the blazing lights. It's all very posh, almost like a hotel in its sparkling cleanliness, only there's a dead girl floating in the bathtub.

She's up to her eyeballs in the largest martini I've ever seen.

I sniff. Stoli Eli and Junipero. That's a damn good martini… almost worth drowning in. A broken Stoli bottle beside the tub confirms my guess.

The inspector crouching beside the bottle looks up at me, irritation gleaming in her dark eyes. She stands, petite and elegant, perfectly pressed despite the fact that she had been eye-to-eye with a woman drowned in fifty-dollar-a-bottle liquor.

"Funny, Maddox." She does not laugh. "This is how I always thought you'd go."

"Oh, ha, ha."

Li almost smiles, a rarity. My partner, star of the department, honest, earnest, pain in my ass. She's special, or so everyone tells me: half Chinese, half old-blood Sidhe, raised in a bad neighborhood by parents who worked hard to make a new life in a world foreign to both of them. She also has the inborn work ethic of a brownie hopped up on Ritalin, so our boss, impressed by Li's willingness to chain herself to her hyper-organized desk (and, of course, her enthusiastic ass-kissing), thinks she should be some kind of role model for spoiled, slacker me. Mostly I just think she needs a life.

 A heavy pinkish swirl glints in her natural deep green, purple-edged magic: the masking spell she uses to hide her wings while she's on the job. And she's always on the job. She narrows her dark eyes.

"You're late."

"I know. What have we got?"

"Elaine Barry, thirty-two, found in the tub by her boyfriend about an hour ago."

Crap. I do—did—know her, by name at least. My parents are friends with Elaine's parents. Mom is going to be pissed.

"Boyfriend says she called him at about ten," Li continues. "The victim was probably pickling here since about eleven."

It's about twelve-thirty now, late for a call to Li and me.

"Accident or…?"

"Hard to say. That's what they pay us to do, remember?" Li almost smiles again, then jerks her chin at the medical examiner. 

"Could be drowning, but there's that." The medical examiner points to the broken Junipero bottle beside the tub. "And there's blood in her hair. We'll need an autopsy to say for sure."

"A struggle?"

He shrugs. "We won't know till we get her out of the tub."

I nod. Asking Doctor Kress to speculate is like asking a fairy to lighten up. Which explains why Tim and Li get along so well, when she's not ordering him around.

Li takes his arm, pointing at something. They step to the side, the deep green of her fairy magic, the dark blue of his personal magic, and the mixed pinks of their various cosmetic spells diminishing when they step from my line of sight. I exhale, trying to clear my head.

Without the others' immediate visible presence, the bathroom is coldly, blankly white. My own red aura recedes beyond my sight, easy to ignore. I glance around. The woman in the tub has no shimmer, even when I squint at her. It's odd—her magic, even her spells, are everywhere in the front room, but in the bathroom, nothing remains. The full-spectrum light bulbs make everything crystal clear, and there's not a thing to be seen, not a pink haze over her make-up bag or even a vanity haze over the mirror. The room was pure white. Magic likes full-spectrum light, glitters and stays visible—to my eyes, anyway—longer. There should be something there. I frown.

"Was she a Lacker?" I ask.

Li gives me that look she has that says she can't believe she has to work with me. "Who cares? She's dead. We're investigating all the same."

"There's no magic here but what we all brought in."

"So?"

"So where did hers go?

"How should I know?" Li lifts a mocking brow. "We're homicide, Maddox, not MC. You're not some special-ops magic scanner anymore. You're an inspector. We solve Lacker crimes the same as we do the normal ones."

Bitch, I think. "I'm aware," I say.

Turning away from Li, I step back into the bedroom. The magic is everywhere there, in the furniture, in the walls, a rainbow of old magic settled into every surface. The current—former—resident's magic is a pinkish patina on the murky brown of the older magic, coating it and complementing it. It's nice, sort of pretty in a girlish way. But girly or not, it's still everywhere. 

"What the hell?" I say.

Li and Tim stare at me like I'd said it at the victim's funeral, not at the scene of her very suspicious death. They exchange a look and Tim goes back into the bathroom. "What is it, Maddox?" Li says, exasperated.

"It's weird! That girl's magic is everywhere out here, but there's none left in her body."

The man in the front room peers around the corner to give me a sharp look, but says nothing.

"Well, maybe it dispersed when she died. Can't that happen?"

"No. It doesn't work like that. Magic is physical, it's not your soul." I drag out the vowel in soul. Li gets a pained look. She takes souls pretty seriously. It irks her that I can see so much more of people than she can, and it irks her that that more is physical. "Having no magic left in your body after you die would be like having no blood left in your body. It's freaky."

"So you're saying she was killed by—what?" Li tilts her head. "A magic vampire?" That smile plays around her lips again, almost but not quite daring to show itself. "Why don't you investigate that angle, and I'll finish interviewing her boyfriend."

I watch her walk through the apartment. Dead Elaine's opalescent pink magic doesn't seem to like Li's deep green, purple-edged fairy-human hybrid magic. The pink recoils a little when Li strides through. I don't blame it. I watch her small, neutral-color-clad form dart down the door before I pull the thermos from my purse and take a gulp. The warmth spreads from my belly and into my limbs. I sigh. Interviews with people who found a loved one dead are never pleasant, and I need all the help I can get.