Frostbite (Modern Knights Book 1) (7 page)

I pulled out the cashier’s check and tried to keep a straight face. “This is my annual salary?” I hoped I sounded nonchalant about it, but doubted it.

“Annual? No, Mr. Fisher, that should cover the first week.”

I whistled at that.

“Besides…of my last dozen wizards, only one lasted longer than a month.”

8

I
should have politely, very politely, asked permission to leave, gotten in Dorothy, and driven until her tank was empty. But the check in my hand was a heavy anchor holding me in place. Ultimately, I blame what happened on my ego. I had too high of an opinion of myself to really believe that I could fail him. And so I stayed in my seat, contemplating the six digits printed on the check. Let me be clear: six digits, decimal point, two zeroes.

“Two conditions,” I added, once I thought I could trust my voice. “If you ask me to do anything I find morally repugnant or illegal, I can say no.”

“You would turn down my offer over ethics?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes, I would.”

He nodded. “The condition is acceptable. I dislike getting my hands dirty as well. I will not force you to do anything you deem immoral. Your second condition?”

He caught me off guard. I had expected that one to be a deal breaker. “Two…I want your help with a personal issue. I want you to use your resources to find a girl. Sarai, she’s...”

“I’m familiar with the strange case of Miss Claremore. I rarely step into anything blind, Mr. Fisher. I take it, then, you didn’t kill her.”

“No, I didn’t.” My personal uncertainties and dark doubts didn’t need to be aired out in front of Valente.

“My resources are yours in the matter, though I would ask that you concentrate on the curse first.” He paused for emphasis. “The job is yours, Mr. Fisher. Will you accept it?”

“Let me help out here. Y-E-S.”

I really disliked it when my shadow and I agreed on something. It was usually a sure sign I was about to make a humongous mistake. “I’m your wizard.” Pause. “Might I ask why? What makes you want to hire me?”

“I could give you a number of reasons. First, I think you could say no to me. Yes-men are cheap and readily available; character is not. Second, you impressed Miss Deluce and she is not easily taken in. However, the most decisive factor is that there is something about you I do not wholly understand, a numinous element, if you will. I have survived a long time in a perilous business by using people who can do what I cannot. Be it fae-blood, gypsy-blessed, or demon-spawn, I employ the supernatural when I see it. If it won’t work for me, I make peace with it…or I kill it.”

I gulped. I doubted his backup plan for me included peace talks. “What don’t you understand about me?”

“You managed to shut out Miss Deluce. According to her, you are the only human ever to catch her in the act and force her out. That alone is remarkable; even my own discipline is not flawless against her and I have the advantage of knowing what she is capable of. You also managed to survive the curse once, which is what initially caught my attention. I thought perhaps you were a part of the curse at first.”

Curse? I really hoped he wasn’t saying what I thought he was. “The attack at the gas station?”

“Yes.”

“But curses are subtle. They bend probability. That was...”

“A nightmare, yes. But I assure you, it is a curse. I received a letter in the mail six months ago. The letter never should have been able to make its way to my hand, but it did.” Lucien produced a manila envelope and handed it me. “The postmark was from Oklahoma City.”

The top page inside was a photocopy of the letter. I scanned it over, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck rise as I read. It was written in a feminine, cursive script. The occasional tremor suggested the writer was either very old or very emotional. The word “curse” was used ten times. I suspected that was important. Repeated words and number patterns generally mean things in magic. The writer didn’t specify why she was cursing Lucien Valente beyond the most general accusations (“You take, you take, you consume until nothing is left”).

The last line made me shudder as I recalled the store room of the gas station: “I curse you with the Winter, heartless Winter, a hunger greater than your own.”

“That sounds vaguely familiar.”

“You think she is doing this?” I hesitated, then added, “How many have died?”

“Six. The pace is quickening. Three months passed between the first two attacks. There was less than a day between the last two.”

“Winter is coming,” I commented, mostly to myself. “Whatever she did, it’s only going to get stronger, more vicious, as we get closer to true winter.” I wanted to add, “If the curse is magic and not a demented psychopath,” but in that moment I knew. No serial killer could quick-freeze a person like that. There might be chemicals that could do it, but they would be easily traceable, the sort of work modern police detectives are best at. The detectives hadn’t yet arrested the villain; ergo, it wasn’t within their domain. It was magic – a heartless Winter curse. Worse, I had already volunteered to fight it.

“I suspect as much, but magic is not my forte. You survived it, so you are the expert.”

“The clerk died while I was in the store? I felt a presence, but...”

“So it would seem,” Lucien said. “The temperature change has given the coroner fits, but on the surveillance video, the employee went into the back mere seconds before you entered the store.”

I thought back to how cold the fridge handle had been, and my snap decision to go with coffee rather than soda. Had the curse been waiting behind the door, waiting to pounce? I muttered, “It’s not mature yet.”

“Yes, you already said as much.”

“No, I said it was getting stronger. This…this curse isn’t full grown yet. It needed the cold of the coolers to make it powerful enough to kill. It was scared to come out into room temperature.”

“Not even through the crime scene reports and already you see the common thread.” Lucien smiled. “There was a source of ice at each crime scene.”

I flipped past the letter and saw the rest of what he had given me in the envelope. Every report, every crime scene photo, even hand-scribbled detective notes were in my hands. “How did you get this?”

He shrugged. “Not everyone is as moral as you.”

I glanced over it all, moving quickly past the photographs. “It didn’t like it when I cast my shield spell. I think it was waiting for me behind the door until then. The air was so cold. But it felt the energy moving, my magic, and decided to run.” My mind returned to the first call afterward. “It growled, tried to run me off, to mark its territory. It’s getting stronger, but it still doesn’t like the idea of a straight up fight. Were there elements of an ambush at each scene? The victim had just turned a corner or opened a door, something like that?”

He nodded, though his face was puzzled. “Growled?”

I told him about the thing panting over the phone and the ancient language I couldn’t quite place. For reasons involving straitjackets and psychotropic medications, I had left that part out of my police interviews.

Lucien Valente sat pensively, slowly working away at his coffee. After a lengthy pause, he said, “Tell me what it all means.”

I had been mulling it over in my own mind in the silence. I had an idea, but was I on the right track?

“It’s plausible. But...”

“But what?”

“If that is what’s going on, then it’s not immature or getting stronger. It’s waking up. And that’s bad news. The last time one came out of hibernation was 1846 and that was just long enough to wipe out eighty percent of a wagon train.”

“The Donner party?”

Yeah. But that was just a midnight snack. For all intents and purposes, it rolled over and went back to sleep once its belly was full.

“But this one is awake.” I flipped back to the letter. “Somebody went poking at it with a stick until it was up and moving.”

“And it’s not going back to sleep until it’s destroyed Valente International…if even then.”

“Why wouldn’t it once the curse was fulfilled?”

“Colin, there’s a reason the spirit speakers didn’t call on them when the white man started stealing their land. Their people had to go to war to force them into slumber. If it gets fully awake, nothing short of a war is going to knock it back out. As soon as it gets done with the curse, my guess is it will go after the people that woke it up, followed by anybody around with enough magical juice to be a threat to it.”

“How did you learn so much about this stuff? I don’t remember ever reading about an ancient Native American spirit war.”

“Just because you want to believe I’m part of your subconscious don’t make it so, kemosabe.”

“Mr. Fisher?” There was no sound of impatience in Lucien Valente’s voice, but I suspected I had been talking to myself for far longer than I had intended to.

“Wendigo. In Native American lore, it’s a cannibal spirit of the frozen north. It gained power by counting coup…umm, eating a part of those it defeats. It’s usually pictured as either a dire wolf or a winter storm. There are two possibilities. Either the woman sending the curse woke up a real wendigo or she’s drawing power on the wendigo myth to enhance a lesser spirit or thought form.”

He held up a hand. “I don’t need the technical details, Mr. Fisher. I am convinced you know what you are talking about.” The waitress came back and Lucien paid the check before he spoke again. “You’re proving more enlightening than my last wizard already. He wouldn’t even admit that it was definitely supernatural.”

“Speaking of which, what happened to him?”

“Miss Deluce didn’t tell you?” Valente shook his head as if this neglect amused him. “You owe your freedom to the man, incompetent though he was. While you were being questioned by the police, the wendigo ate him.”

Second Interlude

S
pecial Agent Andrea Devereaux of the Behavioral Sciences Investigative Division didn’t dare to pull her head away from the sink long enough to investigate anything. The coughing was subsiding, but she still felt like she had been gargling pond water all morning long. When she was confident she didn’t have anything left to spit out, she poured a shot of Listerine and swished it around with a sense of determined desperation.

The trip to Oklahoma was not her favorite expedition with the BSID. She had been looking forward to a trip to the pumpkin patch with her nieces this weekend in New York, not a gruesomely weird case in Oklahoma. Picking up and leaving at the drop of a hat came with the territory of hunting serial killers and rapists. Andrea had dreams of becoming the FBI’s first female director and the BSID was a good career path for her to use to get there. But Oklahoma was making her seriously rethink her life’s direction.

The crime photos had been nasty, but not the worst she had ever seen. The trouble didn’t really start till they got to the lake to investigate the suspect’s vehicle. Andrea usually had a sharp memory, but she could barely recall the lake at all. A thick fog had settled over that part of her brain. When she tried, all she could think of was that thick leather bound book…and the terror that it conjured inside of her. It was insane to think that decorated Special Agent Devereaux could be scared of a book, but that one particular tome...

She must be getting sick. That was the simplest explanation: some bad food on the plane or an armrest she should have sanitized, but didn’t. But agents didn’t let illness interfere with their job. Andrea had absolutely bombed the interview with the suspect, Colin Fisher. Her questions, or what she could remember of them, had been all over the place. Without plan, without direction, Fisher had easily stayed ahead of her. He had gotten away with murder once from all indications…and her sickness was helping him do it again.

She stared long into the bathroom mirror after she spewed out the mouthwash. Her hazel eyes, a mixture of brown, green, and gold stared back at her, the same as they had from every mirror for as long as she could remember. Andrea hoped that whatever had gotten into her system was out of it now. She needed to be at her very best for the rest of this investigation.

PART THREE

Faeries, coworkers, and wendigoes, oh my!

“Finding a dragon is usually the easy part, just follow the path of razed towns and smoldering farms. The hard part comes after you catch up to her.”

- Jadim Cartarssi, Novice Dragonslayer

1

I
expected to have difficulty cashing Valente’s check. As it turned out, that was the easiest thing I did all day. All of my past experience with banks told me that an out-of-state driver’s license plus no personal account plus a check of that magnitude would equal nothing but trouble. It had started out that way, too…until the branch manager made one phone call. From the speed and grace he demonstrated after he hung up, I decided the bank must have belonged to a subsidiary of Valente International. In less than twenty minutes, I had ten grand in my pocket, along with a debit card electronically linked to the rest of it. I just hoped that the dead wouldn’t start asking to borrow money from me while I was trying to work the ATM.

Duchess was supposed to meet me at my hotel room the next morning with the items I had requested from Lucien, most notably, the original letter. I’ve had a little practice with psychometry and, in theory, the letter could be used as a magical tether tracing back to the person who wrote it. It was a Foresight task and I was reasonably proficient with those. It was the theoretical part that bothered me. I knew enough to connect the attacks with the idea of a wendigo, but I had never seen one, let alone killed one.