Stray Magic Read online

  “But not impossible.”

  “No, not impossible. There is, however, one possibility you seem keen on ignoring.”

  I bristled. “Which is what?”

  “Your man could have gone willingly and of his own volition without any duress or control.”

  “I—” What? I’d considered the idea, and then promptly discarded it. I knew Julius, had worked alongside him for six years. You can’t work with someone, in so many life-and-death situations, without developing a sense of their character. Julius was human, yes, but he led our team because he believed in law and order—even among creatures of myth and legend. He wanted to make a difference.

  He might be a cliché, but he was no traitor.

  Shouting broke out on the other end of the line, punctuated by one of Novak’s furious roars. Jaxon shouted something. Tennyson snarled.

  Not. Good.

  “Cut it out, bless it!” I shouted at the phone, wondering if it would do any good at all. “Novak!” My voice bounced around the quiet suburban street. The last thing I needed was my incubus second-in-command getting into fisticuffs with a Master vampire who had a trailer park full of people under his thumb.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said to Kathleen. She rolled her eyes dramatically in silent concurrence. “You want to help?”

  Finally getting the hint, she took the Raspberry back and held it up. She pressed the forefinger and thumb of her free hand together, then placed both between her lips. I flattened my palms over my ears. Her piercing whistle still made my teeth ache.

  The scuffing on the other end of the phone ceased. Movement at the far end of the street caught my eye. We were in the middle of the block, houses on all sides, each end punctuated with a stop sign and fenced tree. A child-sized shadow was hovering near the western stop sign, watching us. As though realizing I’d seen it, the shadow moved forward, into the circle cast by a streetlight.

  “Kathleen,” I said, “turn around slowly. There’s a hobgoblin with a birthday present walking right toward us.”

  “Is that the start of some awful joke?” she asked.

  “I wish.”

  She turned, and we both stared as said hobgoblin shuffled down the sidewalk in our direction. Hobgoblins are difficult to describe properly unless you’ve seen one. They’re around four feet tall, but stretched thin and narrow, like they’d been built too short and steamrolled into a larger size. Their skin was grayish yellow, sallow, and hairless, except for the mat of dark green curls that sat like a crown atop their round, too-small heads. Eyes the same dark green glittered in the lamplight.

  In its long-fingered hands was, indeed, a birthday present. Sort of. The object was the size of a bowling ball bag and done up in shiny foil wrap, secured with a glittery silver bow. The hobgoblin held it close, as though terrified of dropping it, as it walked straight toward us.

  Kathleen lowered her phone hand without ending the call. I drew my gun and held it at waist level, aimed to the side. Our visitor saw it, catalogued it, and kept on coming. Hobgoblins, by nature, prefer the chillier forest climates of the north. I’d never heard of any local to the Mid-Atlantic states, and seeing one here now—at the house of my missing boss—set my internal alarms blaring.

  I gazed at the wrapped box, my stomach in knots. The hobgoblin’s presence was not a coincidence, and whatever he had in his box was not a gift I wanted. I waited until it reached the edge of Julius’s lawn, then pointed my gun at its head. It froze.

  “Who sent you?” I asked.

  It licked its lips with a forked tongue. “I am told to bring this box to this home at this hour,” it said in a voice as reedy as a dying accordion.

  “Told by whom?”

  The hobgoblin seemed confused by the question. “I am told to bring this box—”

  “Yes, we heard you the first time,” Kathleen said. Her eyes flashed red and her fangs had extended half an inch. Enough to terrify most humans and quite a few lower-level demons.

  The hobgoblin was unaffected.

  I would have been impressed, but all I could think of was Julius right now. “Come forward with the box,” I said.

  It did, stopping several paces away from us. At my command, it put the box down and retreated to the sidewalk. I half expected it to run. It loitered instead. I couldn’t wait for one of the neighbors to look out their window and call the cops, since the hobgoblin wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing.

  “Kathleen?”

  She took a single step forward and inhaled deeply. Her lips curled back in a sneer. “Blood,” she said. “The package reeks of blood, vampire, and hobgoblin stink.”

  I swallowed against the bile rising in my throat. “Explosives?”

  “None that I can detect by odor.”

  Bending to retrieve a blade from my boot, I knelt in front of the box. It had been professionally wrapped, each fold precise and each cut perfectly straight. My idea of wrapping a gift was tossing it into a dollar-store bag and stuffing some reused tissue paper on top. I hadn’t bought a bow in over a decade.

  I cut through the paper with precise motions, in case it was rigged. The foil paper slid away from a plain, brown box. I cut the tape sealing the box. The flaps popped open. My heart sped up, sending adrenaline signals to my brain. I fought them. I needed steady hands, needed my wits. Not a blinding headache and the shakes. I folded back the box flaps, screwed up my courage, and peered inside.

  A sea of white packing peanuts peered back at me. I poked the blade into the foam pellets. It hit something a few inches down.

  “The stench of blood is stronger now,” Kathleen said.

  I couldn’t smell it yet, so I trusted her. I brushed a layer of peanuts aside, then dug down until my fingers found plastic. I pulled out a round, Tupperware layer-cake container. The normally translucent top had been painted black to obscure the contents. The moderately hefty contents. I nudged the box away and put the container down on the grass, bottom facing up. And stared.

  “Shiloh?”

  I gazed up into Kathleen’s face. Her headlight eyes continued to glow, even though her fangs were gone. Her eyebrows were bunched, her mouth open. She looked horrified, which only terrified me further. I forced my expression into something I hoped passed for determined—my insides were quaking so hard I thought my guts would vibrate right through my rib cage—then looked down.

  The cake container looked so innocent. My mom had one like it, and had stored many a birthday cake surprise beneath its plastic cover. I knew I’d never be able to eat another Tupperware-stored cake again.

  I worked the tip of my blade between the bottom and its lid, then turned it until the seal broke with a sloppy hiss. The thick, cloying stench of blood was immediate. I swallowed back the urge to vomit. Forced my hand to lift the lid until it popped from its groove and flipped to the grass.

  Kathleen shrieked, barely a whisper over the roar in my ears. My vision seemed to telescope down, down, until the only thing I saw was the contents of the cake container.

  Tucked in a bed of romaine lettuce was Julius’s head. His eyes were open, chocolate brown, watchful and warm even in death. My irrational brain told me to close them, like they always did in the movies. He should rest. I reached out, my fingers shaking so badly I didn’t think I’d manage. Within an inch of touching him, Julius blinked.

  This time I screamed.

  And screamed.

  Chapter 4

  The first few minutes post-eyes-blinking passed in a blur. Kathleen must have kept her wits intact and used them proactively, because my next clear memory was gazing around Julius’s living room, wondering how the hell I got there. The wrapped box and cake container were on the coffee table, supported by neat stacks of magazines and a telephone directory. The hobgoblin was there, too, tied to one of the leather chairs with a twisted curtain. Its mate still hung on a nearby window.

  Kathleen’s voice bounced around the living room. I turned and found her pacing back and forth from the living room, through
the dining room, and back again, barking into her Raspberry. Cold, angry words I still couldn’t register as English. Until I realized it wasn’t all English. She’d been raised in France until the age of fifteen, when she started coming into her vampire abilities, and occasionally slipped into French when she lost her temper.

  I took a step toward her, then stopped. She hadn’t put the lid back on the cake container, and a dark brown crown of hair peeked out over the rim. I shuffled in that direction, intending to cover it. Trying to convince myself I hadn’t seen Julius blink. It had been a hallucination, or better still, a nerve firing in his not-quite-done brain. Not the awful, horrifying possibility nudging at the edge of my mind, making itself known.

  A few more steps had me within spitting distance. His face was angled forty-five degrees from my direction, eyes still open. Kathleen should have closed them.

  Those brown eyes shifted, rolling sideways to look right at me.

  The world grayed out. I tottered on my feet, barely able to hold my balance.

  “Watch your step, kiddo.”

  It wasn’t Kathleen, and it definitely wasn’t the hobgoblin. But it also couldn’t be . . .

  Severed heads don’t talk.

  They can’t talk, not without lungs to force air through vocal cords. Right? I blinked hard, refocusing on the head in the cake container.

  Julius was looking right at me. “Shiloh.” His lips moved. Words came out. His voice sounded strained, forced through a broken bellows, not quite his own.

  “Not fucking possible,” I said.

  He blinked. His eyes rolled around, taking in as much as he could from his position on the coffee table. He looked like a sobering drunk who’d woken up with his pants down and didn’t remember who he’d gone home with.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  A couple of garbled words made it past my lips, none of which made any sense to either of us. I’d seen a lot of things in my life, even a couple of zombies out for a Halloween stroll, but never a talking severed head. And not of someone I cared about.

  “The others are on their way here,” Kathleen said.

  I jumped. The backs of my thighs hit the sofa. I fell hard onto the cushion. It would have been funny if the circumstances weren’t so bizarre. Julius rolled his eyes up and around in a vain attempt to see who was behind him.

  “How is this possible?” I asked her.

  “I suspected and Novak confirmed it,” she replied. “I believe he is now a revenant.”

  Warning sirens blared in my head. Necromancy was one of the rare black arts outlawed by . . . well, everyone. Few witches possess the power necessary to pull it off, and the few demons who did rarely stayed off anyone’s paranormal radar long enough to manage a spell. Bad necromancy made zombies—mindless, reanimated corpses whose only instinct was to replace their own rotting flesh with the flesh of those still living.

  Good necromancy—oxymoron much?—created revenants. Revenants were corporeal ghosts. Their bodies were reanimated, their spirit intact, only they were very much dead and could be controlled by the necromancer who reanimated them. The chosen victim was brought back to life within minutes of their physical death, always occurring in a violent manner so as to bind the spirit to the corporeal world and keep them from crossing over. It’s the point where amateur necromancers screw up—they bring back corpses too-long dead, without revenant spirits.

  I’d just never heard of a revenant head. It definitely narrowed down his cause of death.

  “Who’s a revenant?” Julius asked. “Kathleen?”

  “Not I,” she said. “You.”

  “I what?”

  “You’re a revenant,” I said.

  He gave up trying to see out the back of his own head and swiveled those confused, chocolate-colored eyes back toward me. “I am? I don’t . . . is that why I can’t feel my legs?”

  Understatement of the decade, thy speaker is Julius Almeida, ex-Army Ranger, ex-human being.

  I bolted off the sofa and barely made it into the half bathroom across from the front door. Bile and peanuts passed up and out as I clung to the toilet bowl, retching and crying. I sobbed until my throat hurt and my already achy head wanted to explode. He was alert and talking, but there was no coming back from being a revenant.

  My boss and friend of six years was dead. My heart ached for the loss.

  I fought for control of my grief. Job now, me later. I didn’t have a choice, did I? I was still second on this team, still acting leader. Not as though Julius could lead our team from the comfort of his lettuce-lined cake carrier, right? I flushed the toilet, then took a few minutes to wash my face.

  The hickey Jaxon noticed earlier stood out darker against my freshly paled skin. I looked stretched, worn, like I’d come off an eight-day bender. Swollen, bloodshot eyes added to the overall image. I hadn’t looked this bad since the fairy elixir mishap ten months ago.

  Never, ever drink a frothy “cappuccino” out of a teacup shaped like a rose. Ever.

  When I came back into the living room, Kathleen was questioning the hobgoblin. It looked utterly miserable, even more so when she threatened it with an iron spike from her hidden arsenal. Half a dozen flat, finger-width burns covered its face and neck where she’d already attempted to get answers. My only objection to her treatment of the little monster was I hadn’t been in on it.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “The creature is under the influence of another,” she replied without looking away from her prey. “It repeats the same line over and over, no matter what I do.”

  I glanced behind her. “What about him?”

  She followed my gaze to the cake container. “I haven’t . . . I don’t . . . .” As much as she pretended to be aloof and not involved, she cared. Cared enough that she couldn’t seem to question our dead boss about how he’d died. Not alone.

  I totally understood.

  “It’s fine,” I said, offering a wan smile. I wanted to put the lid on him, raid his fridge for beer, and drown my sorrows until the boys arrived on-scene. Instead, I walked back to the couch and sat down across from the cake carrier.

  Kathleen perched next to me, her thin hands clasped in her lap. Her lips were pursed so tightly they disappeared, leaving a dark slash in her face instead of a mouth. With the red sparking in her eyes, the effect was disconcerting.

  Not that preparing to question my dead boss was altogether normal.

  “Are you okay?” Julius asked me.

  The confusion and sincerity in his question, coupled with the papa bear instincts that had made him a good leader, threatened more tears. I blinked them away and drew in a deep breath. Held it a few seconds, then let out a long exhale. It helped. “Julius, what’s the last thing you remember?” I asked.

  He stared. “I’m not sure, Shi. Have I been missing?”

  “Yeah, you have been.” Side effect of being a revenant—selective memory loss. Only important things from a revenant’s life, often in the form of names and locations, were retained. He remembered us, which was a start. I had to begin slow, give him a focus point. “Julius, do you remember what you had for lunch yesterday?”

  He licked his lower lip, as though the flavor of food remained. “I think . . . noodles. Rice. Did I have Chinese food?”

  A question, not a memory. “Yeah, you did. What about after the Chinese food? Do you know where you went after?”

  “Out?” His eyes became unfocused as he searched his addled memories. “I’m sorry, it’s a blur. I can’t feel my legs.”

  “I know.”

  “If he doesn’t remember it,” Kathleen said in my ear, her voice barely a whisper, “it’s likely he doesn’t know who did this to him. Knowledge of personal identity, especially in the case of a violent death, will stick with a revenant spirit. However, the death itself can affect the recollection of specific memories.”

  “Makes sense,” I said.

  “What makes sense?” Julius asked.

  “Nothing.” />
  “Too true.”

  “This is a warning,” Kathleen said loud enough for Julius to hear.

  “From who?” I asked.

  She tilted her chin so she could look down her nose at me. Nothing could stop vampires—even half vampires—from acting superior when the mood struck. “Someone who wants us to know what we’re facing. Anyone can kill. Anyone can hand deliver a severed head in a box. Only a rare few possess the skill and knowledge to send back a revenant head in a box.”

  “Okay, fair point.”

  “The timing of this atrocity with the request from Tennyson is no coincidence.”

  “Someone knew we’d get involved.”

  Her look clearly said duh. “Given the scale of Tennyson’s demonstration and the sheer number of those missing, yes. Someone expected not only the Para-Marshals, but our team in particular, to get involved.”

  The downside of being a public face to Paranormal law enforcement was the loss of complete anonymity. Allies and enemies alike were more likely to know our faces, possibly our names. I’d changed my last name to protect my mom, and I rotated boyfriends to protect them from my job. We all did our best to protect the people in our lives. But it clearly wasn’t foolproof.

  “No one could have known,” I said, letting my train of thought run out loud. “No one could have known our team would be the one to get involved in this, unless the kidnapper somehow knew which trailer park Tennyson was targeting.”

  “Exactly. Which indicates a traitor within his line.”

  “Or the bastard is playing us himself.”

  She shook her head. “Unlikely.”

  “I know.” Tennyson wouldn’t risk the safety of his entire line by gathering them into one place and then betraying us. Not when a call into the Marshals’ Office would bring the full force of the DOJ and the federal government down to wipe them out. Putting the blame on him was just easier. What was the phrase? The devil you know . . .