Grave Dance

I didn’t balk. I’d recently learned I was feykin, but she couldn’t know that. Could she? Plastering on my own smile, I said, “I guess so.”

She left the small gravel parking lot, no doubt headed back to the place where I’d found the pyramid of feet. As I turned to slide into the car again, movement at the tree line caught my eye. While my eyesight had recovered significantly, I’d been in touch with the land of the dead and the grave quite a bit, so at first all I could see was a moving man-shaped mesh of colors. But as the figure drew closer, I quickly realized that while male was the right gender, he wasn’t human, but fae.

He hunched, his stringy legs never fully straightening as he slunk closer. Even bent, he stood a head taller than me—and I’m not short. He had the same features as a human, but they were all slightly off. His wide eyes were dark, and overly recessed in his skull, but not from illness. His pale skin was the color of a worm’s belly, as if he had never been exposed to daylight, and his hawkish nose extended nearly a hand’s width from his face, almost hiding the thin lips and pointed chin.

Even now, seventy years after the Magical Awakening, it was rare to see an unglamoured fae. The fae had come out of the mushroom ring, as some put it, because they were fading from memory and thus the world. They needed human belief to anchor them to reality, but aside from the fae celebrities and politicians, a human was likely to see an unglamoured fae only in a venue that profited from showcasing the fae’s differences. Most of those places were little better than tourist traps.

I glanced behind me. Across the parking pit, two officers huddled around the van that had been established as a temporary headquarters for the investigation. Well, at least I’m not completely alone. Of course, just because the strange fae looked creepy and was near the place where we’d found feet masked in glamour, that didn’t make him guilty. It did make him a suspect, though. Or possibly a witness.

“Can I help you?” I yelled the question louder than needed, but I wanted to ensure that the officers also heard me. They would want to question the fae.

He paused, then hurried forward in a blur of movement. He crossed from the far edge of the parking lot to the front of John’s car before my heart had time to crash in a loud, panicked beat. The cops yelled something I didn’t catch above the blood rushing in my ears.

“Can I help you?” I asked again, not daring to look away from someone who could move as fast as this fae. I slid back a step, and then another, the movement far too slow.

“Are you daft?” he asked, his thin lips splitting with the words to reveal pointed teeth.

I blinked at him, startled, but not because of the implied insult in his words, or because of the threat in his expression. No, my shock came at the sound of his voice. The voice that emerged from that thin, awkwardly threatening body was a rich, deep baritone that made even such an angry question sound musical. He had the kind of voice that, in the old folktales, would have drawn children and young women from their beds. Unfortunately, most of those stories didn’t end well.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, taking another step back. Across the parking pit, gravel crunched under the cops’ running steps. Close. Maybe not close enough.

“Those feet were hidden for a reason.” The fae’s gaze moved over my head, and his eyes narrowed. “This is your fault, and you will regret your actions,” he said. Then, as the cops neared us, he turned, dashed back to the tree line, and disappeared.

Chapter 2

“So, the cops couldn’t find him?” Holly, my housemate and best friend, asked as her fork slid smoothly through the slice of triple-chocolate cheesecake sitting in the center of the table.

I nodded. “He issued his threat that I would regret leading the police to the feet, and then he ran. Once he reached the tree line, he might as well have been gone.” I’d been jumpy for hours after leaving the floodplain, but today, in the afternoon sun, my tension seemed foolish. “The only thing I regret at the moment is that the FIB took over the case.”

Holly shot a conspiratorial glance at the third person at the table, my other best friend, Tamara, and then leaned forward. “Did you-know-who show?”

I frowned at my fork. “You-know-who” would be Falin, the only FIB agent the three of us knew on a first-name basis. Well, actually, I knew him a lot better than just that. Even so, two days after we’d closed the Coleman case, he’d taken off without so much as a good-bye.

I stabbed the cheesecake with a little more force than the smooth texture required. “He’s probably working some far more important case,” I said, then swallowed the bite of cheesecake without tasting it. “Good riddance. He’d complicate things.”

Holly pulled the cheesecake away from me. “Okay, so I know we have to eat this before it melts—whose idea was it to meet for lunch at an outdoor café anyway?—but don’t scarf it. These kinds of calories have to be savored.”

Tamara murmured in agreement and brandished her fork. “Oh, I’m in calorie bliss over here,” she said. “And today was Alex’s location choice.”

I shrugged. “I raised a shade to settle an insurance claim this morning. The family refused to believe their father had left a chunk of his estate to an illegitimate son’s widow, so I spent over two hours graveside while the shade verified the will line by line. I was cold. Besides, it’s not half as hot as it was a couple of weeks ago. The mid-nineties are practically a blessing in August.”

“Uh-uh,” Holly said, and made a production of sipping her iced latte. But though we were at an outdoor café, it was a café in the middle of the Magic Quarter—Nekros City’s center for all things magical and witchy. This café boasted the very best charms available for keeping customers cool and comfortable regardless of the temperature. And despite her protests, Holly wasn’t so much as breaking a sweat in her crisp courtroom-ready suit. “So, was there anyone else interesting ?” she asked, wiggling her eyebrows suggestively.

“Hardly.” I had to reach across the table to get to the cheesecake, but that didn’t stop me.

“Oh, come on.” Holly pushed the plate forward. “It’s been a month since I’ve seen you pick up a guy. You’ve always accused me of being a workaholic, but ever since your business picked up, all you do is raise the dead.” She set down her latte, pulled out her hair clip, and shook her red locks free. Then she smoothed her hair back again and twisted it effortlessly into a slick bun. She looked every inch the hotshot public prosecutor she was—less obvious was the fact that she was a witch in her own right. “I have court again this afternoon, but after that my caseload will be lighter. Let’s go barhopping tonight. You need to get out.”

I made a noncommittal noise and focused on my once again empty fork.

“She is out,” Tamara said, though I had the feeling her coming to my defense had more to do with her new disapproval of barhopping—a stance she’d taken about the same time the large diamond engagement ring had appeared on her finger—than with my current social habits.

Holly wasn’t exactly wrong. Business was good. Really good. In fact, it was better than it had ever been. But business wasn’t why I’d stopped barhopping. For years I’d chased away the chill that clung to me after raising shades with a stiff drink and a warm body—preferably a guy I’d never see again after our encounter. That prospect didn’t appeal to me anymore. Besides, somewhere between temporarily swapping life forces with a soul collector and discovering I was part fae a month ago, my body temperature had changed, and now most people felt blisteringly hot to the touch. There was a short list of guys who could touch me without causing us both discomfort. Actually it was a very short list. As in a list of two. That I knew of, at least. One guy had disappeared and the other . . . Well, that situation was complicated. It was time to change the subject.

I turned to Tamara, who, as well as being my friend, was the chief medical examiner for Nekros City. “So did the FIB take everything out of house?”

“Not yet. So far everyone is ‘cooperating.’ We’ll see how long that lasts. Honestly, though, I’m out of my league. I have seven left feet in the freezer, and I have no idea how they were severed from the legs. There are no tool marks, so I’m inclined to believe the dismemberment is connected to the snarl of magic clinging to the feet, but I’ve had no luck discerning any individual spells.” She shook her head, her lips thinning as her eyes moved past us. She was one of the foremost sensitives in the state. If neither she nor the anti–black magic unit was having any success, the spells must have been rare and powerful. She shook her head again. “Maybe I’m losing my edge. I also have three bodies on the slab with no clear cause of death. All the evidence points to their hearts simply ceasing to beat, but why? I still don’t know. I need to run some more tests.” Her gaze fixed on the cheesecake. “I paid for a third of that slice. I expect to eat my third, so don’t you hoard it.”

“Take it, girlfriend,” Holly said, pushing the plate across the table. “Sounds like you two need it more than me. All the cases I’m working for the DA are pretty dull.”

She updated us on the case she’d be trying in court this afternoon. As she spoke, a shadow caught my eye. We were in the outdoor seating area of a café on a busy corner in the Magic Quarter, so one more passing person shouldn’t have snagged my attention. Of course, this wasn’t just any random stranger.

“That’s him,” I hissed.

Holly fell silent and Tamara twisted in her chair. “Who? Where?”

“The fae from the floodplain. He’s over by the magazine rack.” I pointed at the newsstand across the street. The fae, with his strange slumped stance and hawkish nose, held a copy of what looked suspiciously like Fae Weekly—a gossip rag—but his attention wasn’t on candid pictures or exaggerated articles. His gaze locked with mine, and I swallowed hard.