Is that seriously what the news guys are calling the case? Not that it mattered—my answer was the same.
“No comment,” I said. I gave a quick nod to her cameraman, whose name I still didn’t know, though I’d seen his face often enough over the last few months that I probably should have known his name as well. Then I tried to duck around Lusa.
Not that she let me.
Lusa was a petite witch—a full head and shoulders shorter than me, even in her heels—but she was 110 percent ambition and excessively tenacious about following a story. She sidestepped, blocking my path, and shoved her mic at me again.
“What can you tell the people of Nekros about the attack in the Quarter today?”
I sighed. I didn’t want to appear dodgy on the six o’clock news. “Nothing more than anyone else here could tell you. I’m not sure where the beast came from or why it was on the street. We were lucky it was only a glamour.”
“Yes, lucky. Do you think this was a targeted attack?”
Possibly. It was very possible the killer was upset that I’d revealed the mound of feet in the floodplain. Tamara was also on the case. She could have been the target. But I wasn’t about to speculate on the news.
Instead I said, “I think we need to wait for the NCPD’s analysis.”
Lusa hurried on to her next question. “What can you tell me about what appears to be Aetheric energy slipping into the street? Witnesses say the . . . tear is in about the same place as where you unraveled the glamour.”
“Maybe something to do with the beast?” I gave her the same line I’d fed Nori, though Lusa seemed to swallow it as more credible than the FIB agent had. Hitching my purse strap higher on my shoulder, I stepped around Lusa. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to check on my friend.”
This time Lusa let me go, and I hurried toward the ambulance idling across the street. Holly sat in the back of the vehicle, two paramedics hovering over her and Tamara at her side. Holly’s eyes were still a little too wide, as if the shock of the attack hadn’t quite passed. A flame of freckles dusted her nose and cheeks, bright against her paler-thannormal skin. She usually hid the freckles behind a complexion charm, but the medics had taken the charm to avoid possible magical interactions with the healing spells.
“How’re you feeling?” I asked as I approached.
“They say I won’t even need stitches,” she said, but I could tell her frail smile was held in place by will alone. “You know, I’ve used the expression that I felt like I’d been mauled after particularly bad days in the courtroom. I was wrong—this is worse.”
“Just wait until tomorrow. You’ll be stiff and sore too.”
“Gee, thanks, Alex. You always give me something to look forward to.” She shook her head, but her smile looked at least a little less forced.
When the paramedics finally released her, with instructions to rest and watch the bite on her shoulder for signs of infection, Holly allowed Tamara and me to help her down from the ambulance—which was a testament to how shaky she still felt.
“You’re not still planning to make your trial?” Tamara asked as she grabbed Holly’s purse.
Holly shook her head. “No. I’m calling it a day. I already contacted Arty about covering for me.”
Of course she had. She’d probably still been bleeding when she’d had someone bring her the phone. I shook my head. If Death hadn’t been there, hadn’t warned me . . .
But then again, if the spell truly had been targeting me, Holly might not have been injured if I hadn’t run back for her. Had Death been here for Holly, the beast, or me?
Holly was in no condition to drive, so we deposited her in the passenger seat of her car. I’d dropped my shields and peered across planes during the attack, and though it had been nearly an hour since I’d dispelled the construct, shadows still ate at my vision. Which left only Tamara to drive—we’d have to come back for the other cars later.
I slid into the backseat of Holly’s car, but as we pulled away from the curb, I noticed Lusa standing not far away, interviewing one of the pedestrians who’d been on the street. The man pantomimed thrusting his hand out like he was shoving it through something—or, more than likely, into a beast. Then he splayed his fingers as if to demonstrate suddenness and pointed to the hole.
Oh, I didn’t even want to know what kind of fallout I’d be dodging from this one.
“No comment,” I said, and hit the END button on my cell phone. It immediately buzzed again. “I need an antireporter charm,” I muttered. Yeah, and if I managed to create that, I’d make as much money as if I created a spell to reduce chocolate to zero calories. Of course, I was searching for a way to break glamour, and that charm appeared to be just as improbable.
“What do you think I should do, PC?” I asked, looking at my Chinese Crested.
The mostly hairless gray dog glanced up at his name. Then he grabbed a stuffed penguin and dropped it at my feet.
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to help, buddy.”
He stared at me, his big brown eyes hopeful. When I didn’t move, he nudged the penguin closer with his nose, and the crest of white hair on his head—the only hair he had aside from the puffs on his tail and feet—bobbed with the motion.
“Oh, all right.” I tossed the toy across the room, and PC took off, his nails clinking on the hardwood as he scrambled for the penguin. When he reached it, he stood there, squeezing it so it squeaked. Then he took off again, prancing around the one-room apartment with the toy. What he didn’t do was bring it back—we hadn’t quite got that retrieve and return thing down. I shook my head. Little goof.
My phone buzzed again, and with a sigh I hit the button to turn it off completely. I wasn’t likely to score a new client without my phone, but clients weren’t the ones calling right now. Tossing the phone on the counter, I turned back to my computer. I’d spent the last hour searching the Web for spells and charms that could detect glamour. So far I’d run across some sketchy-sounding potions that used exotic—and probably fake—ingredients, and I’d found a couple of folklore-based glamour-piercing tricks, which, assuming they worked, would be even less feasible than my using my grave-sight whenever I left the house. After all, walking around peering through a stone with a naturally bored hole wasn’t exactly inconspicuous.
But I didn’t like the fact I’d run up against glamour two days in a row. I wasn’t a big believer in coincidence, and with first the glamoured feet and then the construct, plus the fae from the floodplain showing up in the Quarter . . . Yeah, I’d feel better with a glamour-piercing charm.
Not that I was finding one.
I closed the search browser. I was just going to have to fashion my own charm. Yeah, because I have such a successful history of spellcrafting. At least none of my charms had exploded recently.
As I closed my laptop, the electronic buzz of my TV turning on hummed through the room. My spine stiffened. I’d reactivated my wards when I came home, and the door that separated my over-the-garage efficiency from the main house hadn’t opened. I should have been alone.
I whirled around, groping blindly for a weapon as I turned. My fingers landed on the hard plastic of my cell phone—which wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was better than nothing.
Thankfully, it was also unnecessary.
Roy Pearson, a thirtysomething former programmer—being deceased complicated the whole holding-down-a-job thing—knelt in front of my television. He was focused, his gaze locked on where he slowly depressed the channel button one click at a time. I might as well not have been in the room for all he noticed.
“Roy, you can’t just materialize in my bedroom and turn on my TV!”
The ghost looked up, his concentration faltering, and his finger passed through the front of the TV’s control panel. With a frown, he shoved his thick black-rimmed glasses higher on his nose and his perpetually slouched shoulders sagged more than normal. “Sorry. I wanted to see if I was on again.”
I dropped the unneeded phone-turned-makeshift-weapon back onto the counter. “Shock news doesn’t age well. I think your interview probably got trumped today,” I said as I walked across the room to change the channel for him.
A few days ago I’d helped Roy give Lusa at Witch Watch an exclusive—and heavily censored—interview about his part in the Coleman case a month ago. Roy had finally been able to tell the story of how he’d died, and I’d completed my part of a bargain with Lusa that kept a damaging tape of me from being aired—win-win situation. The interview had been broadcast several times already, and one national newspaper had run an article about it, including a half-page photo capturing Roy looking spectral and spooky, me beside him, my eyes glowing pale green and my hand locked with the ghost’s as I channeled energy into him so he would appear on camera. But despite all the press the interview had garnered, I had the feeling that the construct attack and the tear into the Aetheric would eclipse Roy’s story.
Lusa appeared on the screen as I flipped to Channel 6. She was back in the studio, but a digitally imposed box beside her head rolled footage of the small hole in reality surrounded by crime tape. My picture popped up on the screen, and I groaned.
“What did you do this time?” Roy asked, staring at the screen.
“Hopefully nothing that will start another media circus.” Once upon a time I’d actually liked Witch Watch—that was before I started appearing on the show semiregularly. I’d better find out what’s being said.
I bumped the volume up and listened to Lusa’s report as I sketched a plan for the spell I intended to cast.
“—are still debating jurisdiction over the tear, but the Organization for Magically Inclined Humans has officially confirmed that what we’re seeing is pure Aetheric energy slipping out of the hole. Rumor has it that billionaire Maximillian Bell, founder of the controversial spellcrafting school for norms, Spells for the Rest of Us, made an offer for the property and has attempted to buy access to the tear. The possible implications and dangers of raw magic slipping into reality are actively being debated all over the nation, so for now, the tear is being contained within a circle and the area is off limits to civilians. In other news—”