Black Magic Woman (25 page)

“Thank you.” Asher leaned down and pressed his lips to Daphanie’s clammy forehead, tasting the salt of fevered sweat, even though her skin felt chilled through. It frightened him.

“I’ll be back soon,” he whispered, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I promise.”

Then he straightened, gave Missy a last brief look of thanks, and followed the others out of the room. He didn’t care if he had to tear Manhattan down brick by bloody brick. He
would
find Charles D’Abo, and when he did, no power of man or Other would stop him from killing him.

That was another promise, one he made to himself.

*   *   *

“We should probably have a plan,” Graham said as they stood outside the small condo building gazing up at the third-floor windows. “One that goes a little further than just knocking on the man’s door, waiting until he answers, and then telling him to knock it off.”

The sun had just begun to set, painting the block with alternating splashes of golden light and dusky shadow. Asher wished it would just go dark already. He was guessing that the designation “3A” indicated that D’Abo occupied the building’s front apartment, which made it a lot trickier to go with his original inclination, which was to spread his wings, lift himself through the air, and launch himself through one of the available windows. He would have the man’s throat in his hands in a matter of seconds. Less than a minute after that and it would all be over. Daphanie would be free of him, and of the bloody curse.

Provided that he and the others were incorrect in suspecting that someone else was involved in the curse laid on Daphanie.

Damn it, so much for his preferred plan.

“I agree that merely asking the man to desist from bothering Daphanie is unlikely to meet with success,” Rafe agreed, jingling the change in his pockets as he gazed up at the façade of the building through narrowed eyes. “However, I have not yet discarded the idea of approaching him head-on with a brisk knock on his door.”

“Come again?”

Rafe looked back at his companions. “At the moment, we find ourselves in a unique position. D’Abo is by all accounts an intelligent, if fatally arrogant, man. He knows that a large number of people in the community heard him make threats against a human woman at a club last week, but since then, Daphanie has not seen him, nor sensed his presence, and no one else has reported seeing him near her. Unless he is the figure behind the attacks, he should be completely unaware of their occurrence. That gives us the chance to gauge his reaction when we ask him if he is behind it.”

“His reaction will be to deny it,” Graham protested. “You pointed out that he’s not an idiot, and besides, you’re the head of the Council. He wouldn’t admit it to you if he’d done anything.”

“Yes, but you will be able to examine his expression, his mannerisms. Men often end up betraying themselves in the little things when they take it upon themselves to lie.”

“What if he denies his involvement and he’s telling the truth?”

“Then we play to a different advantage. We let him know that we believe someone may be framing D’Abo for the attacks. An innocent man would appreciate the warning and might be able to provide us with some idea of who could bear a grudge against him strong enough to make him want to share that theory. It is a win-win situation.”

“‘This word … I do not think it means what you think it means,’” Graham quoted.

Asher couldn’t help agreeing, for more reasons than that
The Princess Bride
was one of his favorite movies.

The alpha persisted. “You’re forgetting about the third possibility. What happens if he is lying about not being involved, and we have reason to believe he is lying. Do we show our hand and expect him to experience a change of heart leading to a confession?”

“Of course not. If he is lying and we all agree that he is lying, then that casts matters in an entirely different light. If that turns out to be the case—”

Asher finished the thought. “If that turns out to be the case, I’ll kill him.”

Seventeen

Most Others possess senses infinitely superior to those of us humans. Vampires have acute night vision, naturally, and astonishingly good hearing. The sidhe of Faerie are said to have a sense of taste so acute that they can taste a drop of poison in a cask of wine. But it is usually shapeshifters who take the prize as the most well rounded of the super-sensers. Like their animal counterparts, most shifters have increased powers of hearing, sight, and smell. A famous story tells of how one particular Feline shifter in Lithuania smelled Napoleon’s army coming before the French had even crossed the Vilnus.
^*

—A Human Handbook to the Others,
Chapter Four

As it turned out, D’Abo had nothing at all to say about Daphanie’s troubles. It was hard for a man to speak when his tongue had been cut from his mouth.

Rafe and Graham had smelled the blood almost at the same time, before they had even reached the building’s second-floor landing. Asher saw them stiffen and exchange glances, heard them curse, and watched them sprint halfway up the next flight of stairs before he knew what was happening. He continued in ignorance until he skidded to a halt behind the others and saw Rafe finesse the door open with his elegant hands and a set of stainless steel lock picks. Clearly there was more to the Felix than met the eye.

He saw the blood the instant the door swung wide. It would have been impossible to miss. The place looked like the set of a horror movie, one of the slasher flicks that owed less to the psychology of fear and more to the liberal application of corn syrup and red food dye. The apartment didn’t smell like sugar, though.

It smelled like death.

The three men stepped inside and shut the door behind them. Better not to alert the neighbors or the police until they’d had a chance to look around. The human authorities would only complicate matters.

The apartment opened out of a compact entryway no more than three feet long, leading directly into a small living room. The white and exposed brick walls were decorated with an eclectic mix of African and European art, personal photographs, and ribbons and smears of cast-off blood.

Charles D’Abo lay on his back in the center of the floor, his legs resting on a printed black-and-white area rug and his torso on the gleaming, golden hardwood. His eyes were open and staring, his lips parted as if in a silent scream. Blood had spilled from each corner, leaving him with a macabre red smile painted nearly from ear to ear.

“We’re late,” Graham growled, his nostrils flaring as he sorted through the mingled scents of blood, fear, and human waste. “The blood’s cold. He’s been dead for hours.”

“I suspect since last night.” Rafe crouched beside the body and examined it impassively. “The blood is congealed where it’s puddled on the floor and the spots on his clothes are mostly dry.”

Asher bit back a scream of frustration. Every step he’d taken in this thrice-damned mess had ended up being three steps behind, and now here was their best lead lying dead and silent on his living room floor. It made him want to kick something. He contemplated the body, but he thought Rafe or Graham might start to question his sanity if he went around assaulting the dead.

He assaulted the sofa instead.

“Fuck,
fuck
,
FUCK
!”

“My sentiments exactly,” Graham said, his gaze flickering around the otherwise empty room.

“This is certainly not what I’d hoped for,” Rafe admitted, pushing to his feet, “but I think that—”

“Wait.” Graham held up a hand and his eyes narrowed. “There’s something odd about this. Look around you. What
don’t
you see?”

The other men frowned and reexamined their surroundings. The apartment appeared small, but comfortable, the decorating casual, the condition scrupulously neat. If it hadn’t been for the body and the spattered blood, Asher might have called it immaculate. There was no clutter, no discarded drinking glasses, no knickknacks collecting dust. It could have been the apartment of a banker just as easily as that of a voodoo priest.

Asher cursed. “You’re right. There’s nothing here. The man would have to keep
something
in his apartment, wouldn’t he? Especially something that vital.”

Rafe threw up his hands. “All right, I give up. I don’t see it. Metaphorically as well as literally. What are you talking about?”

“There’s no magic here,” Graham pointed out, gesturing to the one, lonely bookcase, its shelves packed quite unoriginally with books and two small but flourishing potted plants. “I don’t see a single ritual tool. Not even a candle. Some of the art looks African, but it doesn’t even look Afro-Caribbean. There’s no personal altar, no charms, no voodoo dolls. Just a lot of empty space.”

“In other words,” Rafe mused, “it looks like the apartment of someone not really all that interested in voodoo.”

“Exactly. It’s barren of magical items. I’m certainly no voodoo priest, but I’ve been in the apartments of a handful of witches in my day, and more than one summoner. Every one of them had an altar for her personal use. Every one of them scattered candles around like they thought electricity was just a passing fad. Every one had at least one piece of art with a magical theme, and every
single
one of them had bits and pieces of their craft lying here and there among the rest of their belongings. But the best-known voodoo priest in Manhattan, a man who runs his own temple with more than a hundred active members, doesn’t even have a biography of Marie Laveau on his bookshelf?”

Asher’s lips tightened. “And he winds up dead in said apartment with his tongue cut out. Someone wanted to make an example of Charles D’Abo.”

“Probably the same person who wanted us to believe that D’Abo was the man responsible for the break-in at Daphanie’s sister’s place.”

Graham shook his head. “See, that’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me. Why go to the trouble of planting evidence of D’Abo’s guilt, and then kill him? Why dispose of the cover he just established for himself?”

“Maybe D’Abo knew too much and was killed to ensure his silence,” Rafe speculated.

“Hence the missing tongue? I don’t buy it.”

“And your theory?”

“What? I look like Sherlock Holmes to you?”

“There is always the possibility that the murder was unplanned,” Asher said. “Maybe the killer didn’t come here to kill D’Abo, but they had an argument and things got out of control.”

“Out of control accounts for a dead body,” Rafe allowed, “but not the removal of a man’s tongue.”

Asher stepped closer to the body and tilted his head to the side, considering its position and appearance. “Are you confident we can rule out some sort of magical motivation?”

Rafe hesitated, then shook his head. “I’d never claim to be confident about matters of magic. I don’t know enough about any of it. The witches in this city have historically been reluctant to share their secrets with the rest of the Others.”

Graham snorted. “The witches in this city have historically been reluctant to
associate
with the rest of the Others.”

“I notice that did not prevent you from entering several of their apartments over the years,” the Felix pointed out.

Graham grinned unrepentantly. “Hey, that was strictly PM. Pre Missy.”

Asher tuned out their banter. Not because it offended him for the two men to express a sense of humor in front of a dead man; Asher was a pragmatist who realized that humor made an effective coping mechanism when finding oneself face-to-face with death, one he’d used a time or two himself. But because his instincts whispered that the body had more to tell them.

He paced a slow circle around the corpse, letting his eyes drift over it from several different angles. In death, Charles D’Abo lacked the energy that had made him such an impressive figure in life. The last time they had met, D’Abo had been healthy and arrogant and surrounded by obsequious toadies ready to serve his every whim and agree with his every pronouncement. Somehow the pride that had made him so obnoxious had also served to make him appear strong and vital and powerful.

Now, he just looked ordinary, like a million other light-skinned black men struggling through late middle age. Asher would have put his age at around sixty, perhaps a few years younger. His jowls had begun to sag and his hair to thin. His barrel chest drew attention from the fact that his belly hung over his waistband, and his brightly patterned, African-inspired clothing had hung loosely enough to conceal the fact that his legs were almost spindly and covered with a map of dark spider veins.

He really looked only slightly more like a voodoo priest than Asher did, the Guardian decided.

Another step between the body and the sofa brought Asher even with the dead man’s right shoulder. He paused to examine the way D’Abo’s arm had been bent at the elbow, fingers curled toward the palm and turned down against the patterned rug. The black-and-white stripes framed the hand in stark contrast, their regularity broken only by a tip of white protruding less than half an inch in the vee between thumb and index finger.

Bending at the knees, Asher crouched beside the body and reached out to nudge the hand aside with the backs of two fingers. Beneath where it had lain sat a small piece of white paper folded twice to form a square not more than an inch across.