city of dragons 03 - fire magic (12 page)

“I was thinking that the people he worked with were probably pretty annoyed with him for getting arrested. It would have been gossip fodder that he had kidnapped me and all of that. It would have made the company look bad.”

Lachlan considered. “And maybe someone might have thought that the company would be better off with Alastair out of the way.”

“They would have known that he was single minded, and that he never would have stopped going after me.”

“Unless they stopped him.”

“That’s good,” said Lachlan. “That’s really good. It’s a place to start.”

“So what do we need now?” I said. “A list of his partners at the company?”

“We could probably whittle it down a bit,” he said. “We need to find out where they were the night that Alastair disappeared.”

“Well,” I said, “there’s a secretary that has access to everyone’s schedule. I used to call her to find out if Alastair would be free for events. I could try her.”

“Okay,” said Lachlan. “Let’s do that.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Twenty minutes later, we were in Lachlan’s car, heading down Atlantic Avenue to go and see Bertram Kingsley. He was the only one of Alastair’s partners who wasn’t at a big benefit dinner the night in question. The reason he wasn’t around was because he liked to spend weekends in Sea City.

He was perfect.

I watched the traffic, hoping against hope that this would turn out to be easy. We’d nail Bertram, find evidence, bring it to the police, clear our name, and I would never have to worry about being pregnant in Roxbone or anyone taking my baby away from me.

Lachlan was quiet. His sunglasses obscured his handsome face, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

I had meant what I’d said the night before about not wanting drama between us. I didn’t. But I was also getting the impression that Lachlan was not nearly as cool with the whole pregnancy thing as he was letting on.

We drove north, which was where all of the dragons lived, up near the border of Delaware. The south side of the city was where my hotel was located, and that was where the mages, vampires and drakes tended to congregate.

With the traffic, the drive took even longer than it usually would. We seemed to catch every red light.

But eventually we pulled into a housing development with beach front housing. We parked in a cul-de-sac and went up to one of the houses—which was tasteful decadence, just like all the dragon houses.

No one answer when Lachlan knocked on the door, so he knocked again.

We waited.

And then finally, the door was pulled open by a man that I sort of recognized from various work functions with Alastair. He was older, although how much I couldn’t be sure. Dragons had very long lifespans, and a dragon looked about the same at a hundred years old as he did at two hundred.

He looked us over. “Sorry, the maid went home sick. Can I help you?”

“Hi,” said Lachlan. “I’m Lachlan Flint, and this is Penny Caspian.”

Bertram squinted at me. “Hey, you’re Alastair’s mate.”

“I was,” I said.

“What are you doing here?” said Bertram. “Because I thought they arrested you for his murder.”

“We’re innocent,” said Lachlan. “We were actually wondering if we could ask you some questions?”

“Why would I do that?”

Lachlan’s face twitched. I could tell he missed his badge. “Maybe because if you refuse, you’re going to the top of my list of suspects?”

“Okay, so what?” he said. “Who are you? You cops?”

“We’re not working in an official capacity,” said Lachlan. “Not exactly. But we are the team who solved the Dragon Slasher case, so you don’t want to be on our bad side.”

Bertram rolled his eyes. “What do you want to know?”

“Where you were the night that Alastair disappeared,” said Lachlan. “That was, um, May twenty-seventh, late night.”

“I was at a benefit dinner,” said Bertram.

“No,” I said. “See, you weren’t, because I called and checked with Tracy, and she said that you skipped the Silborne dinner and came here.”

“I was at a benefit dinner here in Sea City,” he said. “For sickle cell anemia. At the Grand. And I stayed late and closed the bar. By the time I was on my way home, I was hearing the news about how Alastair’s house was burning down.”

I sighed. Seriously? This couldn’t be easy, could it?

“Nice going, though,” said Bertram. “Because that guy was on a self-sabotage mission, and he was about to take everyone with him, the company included. So, no, I’m not sorry he’s dead, and I know you aren’t either. But I didn’t kill him.”

* * *

“Just calling to check with you that you indeed had a benefit for sickle cell anemia at the Grand on May twenty-seventh?” I said into my phone.

“Why yes,” said Sina Cox, who had hosted the event at the Grand, at least according to my web search. “We most certainly did. If you’re interested in donating after the fact—”

“Oh, I’m afraid I can’t do anything like that,” I said. “I’m actually calling to check on an alibi.”

“An alibi? Are you with the police?”

I remembered what Lachlan had said about lying. “I’m investigating a murder,” I said, dodging the question.

Lachlan,who was driving, made a face at me. “Put it on speaker phone,” he said in a soft voice.

I took the phone away from my ear and hit a button.

“…was murdered during the benefit, I assure you. What does this have to do with me?”

“I just need confirmation that Bertram Kingsley was, in fact, in attendance that night.”

“Bertram Kingsley? But he wasn’t there,” she said.

“He wasn’t?”

“No, and I remember because he had RSVP’d and I was relying on him to bring along one of his partners who he said was looking for some charitable donations for tax purposes, and neither of them came, so I was a bit annoyed.”

“He didn’t stay late and close the bar?” I said.

“Absolutely not. He never arrived.”

“Well,” I said. “Thank you very much, Ms. Cox. I appreciate it.”

“You don’t think Bertram murdered someone?”

“Thank you for your time,” I said, dodging that question too. “We’ll be in touch if we have any more questions.” I hung up the phone, my mind reeling. So, he’d lied about the alibi? He was still a suspect, then. Maybe this
could
be easy.

“He lied,” said Lachlan. “He wasn’t there after all.”

“He was so casual about it,” I said. “Didn’t seem the least bit ruffled.”

Lachlan nodded. “Almost as if it was a lie he’d practiced?”

“He did it,” I said, looking sidelong at him. “It was him, and we’ve got to prove it. How are we going to do that?”

“Well, it’s not going to be easy,” said Lachlan. “Assuming he’s actually guilty, and we’ve just found the murderer, then we likely won’t be able to link it to him with physical evidence, because we don’t have the arrow that killed Alastair.”

“We don’t have it, as in you and me, or the police don’t have it?” I said.

“The police have it,” he said. “But we don’t have access to the file or anything. I never even saw it, because they blocked me out of everything real early on.”

“Damn it,” I said.

“So, our best bet is going to be placing him at the scene,” said Lachlan. “And establishing motive, opportunity, and ability. So, I guess we need to determine if he knows how to shoot a bow and arrows.”

“Okay,” I muttered. “Well, that sounds like fun.”

“We can be sure he’s not going to tell us,” said Lachlan. “Is shooting arrows something that any dragons you know of ever engage in?”

“Not in particular,” I said, considering. “Some of my father’s friends liked to go hunting for deer, but they usually shifted into dragon form to do it.”

“Really?” said Lachlan, glancing over at me. “How did that work? Did they burn the deer to death?”

“No, they would catch them with their claws, I think,” I said. “Because we would eat them later, and the meat was not burnt to a crisp.”

Lachlan made a face.

“What?” I said. “Like you never ate deer in Texas? Isn’t your whole state all about hunting and guns and stuff?”

“Sure,” said Lachlan. “Sure, my father used to try to get me up at the ass crack of dawn to go freeze my ass off in a tree stand. I wasn’t interested, though. I started refusing by the time I was thirteen.”

This was interesting. Lachlan never talked about his parents or about being young. I had never heard anything about his past besides what had happened to his daughter.

“I just don’t see the point of killing things for fun,” said Lachlan. “Not that it really was much fun, anyway. It was mostly boring. And it was all macho bullshit. ‘Be a man, shoot a gun.’” He rolled his eyes.

“So, you ever talk to your father nowadays?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “Not often, though. We never did have much to say to each other. I always thought I was going to be a better dad than he was, but I was wrong. After all, he kept me alive.”

We were quiet.

“Lachlan, you shouldn’t blame yourself for what happened to your daughter,” I said finally. “It wasn’t your fault, and I think you know that.”

“Do I know that?” He shook his head. “Listen, I’m going to drop you at the hotel and then I’m going to go and talk to Bertram’s neighbors, see if anyone saw him that night, saw anything suspicious.”

“I can come with you for that,” I said.

“No, you get some rest,” he said. “And we’re already nearly back here, anyway. Maybe we can do dinner at my place tonight, if you want? I’ll come get you later.”

“Your place?” I said.

“I’ve, uh, acquired some furniture,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “I’m intrigued. But I’m going to meet with Ophelia tonight.”

“After that, then,” he said. “Late dinner. You can snack beforehand if you can’t make it that long.”

* * *

Ophelia was lighting candles which sat in clusters of fat, white wax drippings on tall stands throughout the room. The room was cozy enough, with an overstuffed couch swathed in blankets and tapestries and a thick rug in front of the fireplace. There was a fire going in there, even though it was still nearly ninety outside. She also had the air conditioner going full blast. There was a cauldron over the fire. A real, honest-to-goodness cauldron.

I went over to it and peered inside, half-expecting to see green goop bubbling up—bits of snails and frog legs and snake tongues.

But what was inside was white liquid. Steam was rising off of it.

“Milk?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, lighting the final candle. “It’s a good symbol for the mother.” She pointed. “Can you get the lights?”

I crossed the room and flicked the switch. The room was bathed in darkness, and the flickering lights of the candles were the only points of light. “Does it matter if it’s dark?” I whispered. I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to whisper, but it seemed appropriate.

“Maybe not,” said Ophelia, her voice also quiet. “But this sort of magic, it’s different. It’s discovery magic. It’s linked to intuition and the unconscious mind. When you went to your ancestors’ tomb to find the magic artifacts for the talismans for your friends, you sensed which were the right ones, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s discovery magic?”

“It’s similar,” she said. “You are a magical being. You do it simply by existing. But I must rely much more on ritual and ceremony to access that part of myself and merge it with magic.”

“That’s why some mages do spells or incantations,” I said.

“Yes, it’s kind of a shortcut to accessing the magic. You practice the way that you find it and you use the words to invoke that same action.”

“Huh,” I said. This would have been helpful to know when I was trying to teach Felicity magic, but she seemed to have figured it out on her own.

“Anyway, I will be doing a bit of that this evening,” said Ophelia. “And I will need things from you.” She picked up a pair of scissors. “A lock of hair.”

“Okay,” I said.

She reached out and snipped some off. Then she tossed it into the cauldron. She stirred, whispering something over the steaming liquid. Then she turned back to me. “Fingernails.”

“Fingernails?” I said.

She handed me a pair of clippers. “Clip them all and collect them in your palm.”

I wrinkled up my nose. “Okay.” I started clipping my nails. When I was done, I had a palm full of half-moons. “Done,” I said.

She held out her hand to me.

I poured them into her hand.

She deposited them into the cauldron and stirred again, mumbling as she did so. She stood there, illuminated only by the light of the fire and the candles, stirring the cauldron, and she seemed… taller suddenly.

I felt as if the room grew hushed and Ophelia’s whispers grew louder. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but the sound seemed to echo against all the walls, multiplying as if the whispers were chasing each other into corners and out again, flitting everywhere, mixing with the smoke.

“My will be done, so mote it be,” Ophelia muttered, more clearly, more loudly. “My will be done, so mote it be.” Her voice was getting stronger, deeper, more commanding. “My will be done, so mote it be.”

She stood large and imposing in the corner, the hollows of her face emphasized in the firelight. She was frightening.

I swallowed.

Then she plunged her hands into the cauldron.

I flinched. Wasn’t that hot?

She didn’t seem bothered. She turned to me with dark, commanding eyes. “Lift your shirt and bare your stomach,” she ordered in her echoing voice.

I obeyed. I didn’t know what else to do.

She placed her dripping hands on my stomach. “Child of the dragon, reveal yourself,” she said.

And then all the candles in the room blew out at once, snuffed out, filling the room with smoke.

Ophelia shuddered, her eyes rolling back in her head. She cried out in pain. She fell back onto the floor, and she convulsed there.

I screamed. “Ophelia!”

She was seizing, like an epileptic.