Witchling

CHAPTER 1

Seattle is gloomy most any day of the year, but October can be especially rough in the bad weather department. The rain pounded down from silver skies, slashing sideways against the windows to form rivulets that trickled down the glass. The water pooled at the bottom in puddles, collecting in the depressions where the weeds had thrust through the cracked pavement. Luckily, the door to the Indigo Crescent was elevated by a slight ramp, just enough to keep customers dry as they entered the shop. That is, if they didn't manage to slip off the edge and land their besandaled foot in the puddle like I had.

I shook off the rain as I entered my shop and punched in the security code. Thanks to my sister Delilah, the alarm not only kept an eye out for thieves, it picked up on spies too. And we needed that peace of mind, considering just who we were and where we were from.

My foot made a squishing sound as I limped over to my favorite chair and slid off my four-inch heels, picking up one of the strappy sandals. As I wiped off the designer shoe, it crossed my mind that being half-Faerie had its perks.

I hadn't spent a fortune on the shoes. In fact, they'd been a gift from the local Faerie Watchers Club members who liked to frequent my shop.

When they saw me coveting the shoes in a catalog, they'd shown up a couple days later with a bag from Nordstrom. I'd debated accepting the gift about thirty seconds; then desire won out, and I graciously thanked the club for their gesture while sliding into the shoes, which were a perfect fit, I might add.

I examined the sandal, deciding that it had suffered no permanent damage. After drying my feet and reuniting them with their favorite heels, I took out my notebook and looked over my to-do list. I had books to shelve and orders to fill, and I'd agreed to play hostess to the Faerie Watchers' monthly book club meeting. They'd be here at noon. Delilah would be out on a case the greater part of the day, and of course my other sister, Menolly, was asleep.

Might as well get to work. I switched on the stereo and "Man in the Box" by Alice in Chains echoed through the store. Later, I'd switch to classical, but for early morning when the store was empty and I was alone, it was all about me. Longing for something interesting to happen, I grabbed a box of new paperbacks and had begun to shelve them when the bell over the door jingled, and Chase Johnson dashed in. Not the kind of interesting I was hoping for.

He folded his umbrella, then dropped it into the elephant-shaped stand by the door. As he slid out of his long trench and hung it on the coat rack, I studiously kept my eyes on the book I was sliding onto the shelf. Great, just what I needed to make the day brighter. The letch of the year dogging my tail again. Appreciation was nice. Glomming, not so much. Chase was far from being my favorite human; he didn't even make the top-ten list, and I did my best to frustrate him whenever possible. Nice? Maybe not. But fun? Definitely.

"We need to talk. Now, Camille." Chase snapped his fingers and pointed at the counter.

I fluttered my eyelashes at him. "What? You aren't going to try to sweet-talk me first? I'm hurt. You could at least say please."

"Your attitude's showing again." Chase rolled his eyes. "And can you turn down that racket?" Shaking his head, he snorted. "You come all the way from Otherworld, and what do you listen to? Heavy metal crap."

"Eh, shut up," I said. "I like it. Has more life than a lot of the music I grew up on." At least he hadn't tried to grope me, although the lack thereof should have been my first clue that something was wrong. If I'd paid more attention to my intuition rather than my irritation, I'd have packed up my gear, turned in my resignation, and headed home to Otherworld that very afternoon.

I reluctantly set Grisham down on the table next to Crichton so they could have a nice little chat and slipped behind the counter, turning the stereo down but not off. The Indigo Crescent was my bookstore as far as anybody on the outside was concerned, but in reality, it was a front for the OIA—the Otherworld Intelligence Agency—and I was one of their Earthside operatives. Lackey, if I wanted to be honest.

I glanced around. Still early. No customers. Lucky me. We had leeway to talk in private.

"All right, what's going on?" I sniffed, aware of a pungent odor that was emanating from Chase. At first I thought he must have just come from the gym. I'd smelled a lot of things off of him in the past: lust, testosterone, sweat from his workouts, his ever-present addiction to spicy beef tacos. "Good gods, Chase, don't you ever take a shower?"

He blinked. "Twice a day. Smell something you like?"

I raised one eyebrow. "Not so much," I said, trying to pinpoint what the smell was. And then I realized that the odor coming off of him was fear. This was not a good sign. I'd never smelled this much worry off of him before. Whatever he had to tell me couldn't be good.

"I've got some bad news, Camille." He cut to the quick. "Jocko's dead."

"You have to be kidding. Jocko can't be dead." Jocko was a giant and an OIA agent, albeit just a tad vertically challenged. He barely cleared seven three, but there was nothing wrong with his biceps. "Jocko's strong as an ox. What happened? A bus hit him?"

"Actually, he's been murdered." Chase looked dead serious.

My stomach lurched. "Well, hell. What happened? Some jealous guy find out Jocko was fooling around with his wife and shoot him?" It had to be. No normal human could take down a giant without a big-assed gun, not even one Jocko's size.

Chase shook his head. "You aren't going to believe this, Camille." He glanced around the store. "Are we alone? I don't want any of this getting out until we know exactly what we're dealing with."

Usually when Chase wanted to discuss something in private, he was trying to get under my skirts, but I found it easy to resist his charms. Chase wasn't my type. For one thing, he was obnoxious as hell. For another, he was an FBH—a full-blooded human. I'd never slept with an FBH and had no incentive to start doing so.

Dressed to the hilt in black Armani, Chase stood six one, with wavy brown hair and a smooth Roman nose. He was handsome in that casual way that suave men have, and when my sisters and I first met him, we thought he might have a little Faerie blood running in his veins. A thorough background check had quashed that idea. He was human to the core. Good detective. Just lousy with women, including his mother, who was constantly calling him on his cell phone, asking him when he was going to be a good son and pay her a visit.

"Where's Delilah?" His eyes flashed.

I grinned. I knew just what he thought of my sisters, although Delilah startled rather than frightened him. Menolly just creeped the poor guy out, and she usually did it on purpose.

"She's out on a case. Why do you want to know? Worried she's going to jump out and say boo?" Delilah didn't mean to alarm people, but she walked so softly she could sneak up on a blind man and he wouldn't hear.

He rolled his eyes. "I really need to discuss this with all three of you."

"Yeah, okay, that makes sense." I relented and flashed him a smile. "You know we'll have to wait until after dusk. Menolly can't come out to play until then. So have you contacted the OIA about Jocko yet?"

Not that I expected much in the way of a response from them. When headquarters had assigned Delilah, Menolly, and me to live Earthside, we figured that we were one step away from being fired. While we were hard workers, our track record left a lot to be desired. One thing was for sure: none of us would ever make employee of the month. But, as the months wore on with no real word or major assignment from them, we'd begun to relax and decided that involuntary relocation wasn't altogether bad. At least we were having fun getting used to Earthside customs.

Now, however, with Jocko dead, we'd be responsible for cleaning up the mess. And if he'd been murdered, the OIA would want answers. Answers that we weren't likely to find, considering our lack of results in the past.

"Headquarters is blowing me off," Chase said slowly. His lip twisted into a frown. "I contacted HQ this morning, and all they said was to turn the case over to you. I'm supposed to help out in whatever way you need."

"That's it?" I blinked. "No guidelines? No lengthy bureaucratic regulations that we have to observe in our investigation?"

He shrugged. "Apparently, they don't consider Jocko's death a priority. In fact, the person I talked to was so abrupt that I almost thought I'd said something wrong."

While it wouldn't be the first time Chase put his foot in his mouth, HQ's reaction was strange enough to make me take notice.

I glanced at the empty aisles. Still no customers, but in a little while the place would be jumping when the Faerie Watchers book mavens arrived. Entertaining a pack of gawking, camera-happy fans wasn't on my top-ten list of favorite activities, but hey, it paid the bills and helped Otherworld-Earthside relations at the same time. And the women were nice, if a little giddy.

"Come on, let's talk. The FWC contingent won't arrive until noon, so I've got some time to kill."

"The Faerie Watchers Club?" It was Chase's turn to grin. "Oh come now. Don't tell me you finally gave in to them? Don't you just love being a celebrity?"

I snorted. "Oh sure, I love belonging to the Anna Nicole Smith set. All Earthside Faerie live in tabloid land, you know." In fact, yellow journalism had gotten a huge boost when we showed up, our presence infusing new blood into the Enquirer, the Star, and numerous other tabloids. "Hey, it could be worse. I could have the Guardian Watchdogs breathing down my neck."

"Heaven help us from that," Chase said under his breath.

A vigilante watchdog group, the Guardian Watchdogs considered anybody who wasn't an FBH to be an "alien." They called themselves the "earth-born" and lumped everyone from Otherworld together as a threat to society, a threat to their children, and a threat to morality in general. Wouldn't they be surprised to find out who was lurking in the shadows long before we'd ever opened up the portals on our side? Earth had its own tidy measure of vampires and Faeries, along with a few other creatures that didn't show up in the storybooks.

The Watchdogs took it upon themselves to keep track of any incidents involving the Sidhe and their kin and then exploited them for their own ends. They were a whole lot scarier than the Faerie Watchers Club, who just popped a dozen flashbulbs in our face every time we turned around and asked for an endless string of autographs.

"Say, you don't think they could have had something to do with Jocko's death, do you? The Guardian Watchdogs, that is?" I asked as I led Chase to. a folding table that sat beside a shelf filled with obscure foreign novels. Pushing away the remains of my morning egg-sausage muffin and venti mocha, both of which I'd become thoroughly addicted to, I motioned for him to sit down.

"I don't think so," Chase said. "They're pretty much all talk and no action, other than their never-ending protests and picket signs."

I settled into my chair and propped my feet on the table, crossing them at the ankles while I made sure my skirt was covering everything Chase might want to see. "Do you have any idea who killed Jocko? And how did he die?"

"New shoes?" Chase asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah," I said, not about to tell him where they'd come from. "So do you? About Jocko?"

Chase let out a long sigh. "No. And he was garroted."

Garroted? My feet hit the floor as I straightened my shoulders. That didn't track right.

"You're sure you told headquarters how he died? And they blew you off?"

"That's what I said." He leaned back and slid his hands in his pockets. "But I've got a weird feeling about this. I don't think we're dealing with humans, and there's nothing that I can tell you that would explain why. Just a hunch."

"If he was garroted, you're probably right. Sometimes the dregs from Otherworld slip through the portals. And not all of my kin in OW play by human rules." I frowned. "Maybe somebody has a grudge against giants, or got drunk on a bad batch of goblin wine? Or maybe somebody was just in a bad mood and decided to pound on the bartender? Could be this is just a case of some OW thug taking out his frustrations while he's Earthside."

"Could be," Chase said, slowly nodding. "But I don't think so."

I squinted, staring at the table. Chase was right. I knew I was howling at the wrong moon. "Okay, let's look at this logically. Nobody Earthside has the strength to garrote Jocko. At least no one who's human. Did you find any sign that one of the Sidhe might have had a hand in this?"

"Not that I noticed. Of course, I might not know what to look for. I did, however, find the cord used to strangle him. Here." Chase tossed a braided leather thong on the table. It was spattered with blood. "There's a feeling I get when I touch this… I thought you might be able to ferret something out."

It occurred to me that Chase had a touch of second sight. Picking up the braid, I closed my eyes. The faint scent of sulfur hit my nose as a dark miasma slowly began seeping out of the woven strands, oozing over my fingers like burnt oil. I jerked away, dropping the rope back on the table as I drew a sharp breath.

"Bad news. Big bad news."

"What? What is it?"

I swallowed a lump that had suddenly risen in my throat. "Demonkin. That rope has demonic energy infused into the fiber of every strand."

Chase leaned forward. "Are you sure, Camille?"

I folded my arms and leaned back. "Positive. There's no feeling in the world that even comes close to demon energy. And this rope reeks of it." Which clinched matters. We weren't facing some disgruntled Faerie or dwarf, or any of the other numerous inhabitants of Otherworld who could easily be captured and deported.