Incarnate (A Spellmason Chronicle) (16 page)

Detective Rowland laughed. “Sorry about that,” she said as she composed herself. “I’m used to watching creatures like you destroy my city or throw a bus or cars about. Not used to seeing one so . . . timid.”

“Then I suggest you learn the finer points of our differences,” I said, a snap of anger filling me.

“All right, all right,” Rowland said, holding her hands up. “I get it. What is it you want?”

“I don’t recall much of my life before I took this form,” Emily said. “I remember Kennedy was my president, and how Manhattan looked much different when I had been human, but beyond that, I am afraid my memory fails me.”

“It is that way with many of the other creatures I have taken in at Sanctuary,” I said. “Most have decided to leave the past just that—in the past. There are others, however, who have sought out who they were in life or have tried to track down their relatives on their own. Emily, however, has too little a recollection of her past to even begin such a task.”

“Is that important to you?” Rowland asked her.

Emily cocked her head at the detective. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve seen a lot of cases over the years, before I got busted down to the Spook Squad,” she said. “And when I see the looks on some of the victims’ faces, I can’t help but think that they’d be better off if they could just forget what happened to them. Start life anew, move forward without looking back. They could be happy.
You
could be happy, without ever finding out what happened. You sure you want to know your past?”

“My past is a blank,” Emily said, “but it
is
part of who I am. Who I was. Now I have this form, and all I can think is that I must be here for a reason. How can I figure that out without knowing who I was?”

“As long as you’re sure,” the detective said.

Emily nodded.

“Okay, then,” the detective said, pulling out her phone once more. “Why don’t you tell me what you
do
know?”

“My name is Emily Hoffert,” she said. “Although I do not recall who I was, I believe my life was taken from me.”

“You were murdered?” Rowland asked as she typed.

“Yes,” Emily said, her voice soft now, barely audible. I laid a hand on her shoulder and she reached up to squeeze it.

“Do you know how?” the detective asked.

“That I do not know,” she said. “All I know is that when I try to think back to my earliest memory, my stomach clenches and my mind fills with an unexplainable horror.”

My heart ached for Emily, but Rowland’s face betrayed nothing. She simply kept typing away at her phone until she was done, then looked up.

“Anything else?”

Emily had gone quiet and shook her head.

Detective Rowland turned to me.

“So just to be clear,” she said. “I’ve got metric tons of your kind tearing apart my city and you want me to take the time to investigate a decades-old murder?”

“That is correct,” I said. “I would consider it a gesture of good faith between our two people.”

“And I would be most thankful,” Emily said with a smile that exposed her fangs.

I leapt into the night air, hovering above Detective Rowland. “I will see what I can find concerning the Butcher and his people,” I said. “This has been a good meeting.”

“It has?” Rowland asked, craning her neck up at me.

I bowed my head to her. “History will look on it well,” I said. “A day when our people first came together. And, most important, no one had to die.”

“That is a plus,” I heard the detective say from far away as I rose higher and higher, Emily already catching up.

The detective wanted answers, and so did I. Hopefully we would both get what we wanted. I banked into a turn south and headed for Sanctuary, eager to get some answers if only to gain Emily some closure on who she had been.

Knowing the past was the first step to moving beyond it—or learning from it—and more than anything I wanted my near-constant companion to be granted some peace.

Alexandra

T
he press of tourists was thicker in the surprising midday heat of an early October morning when Caleb and I crossed Central Park West at Seventy-second Street. I made it as far as the park’s entrance before I doubled over with a yawn so powerful that it stopped me in my tracks. The sea of tourists and locals continued to wash around me as Caleb stopped and turned back, watching with bemusement.

“You okay?” Caleb asked. “Did crossing the street wipe you out?”

“I’m fine,” I said, finishing off my yawn with an uncontrolled stretch that ran through my whole body. “Just not used to being awake during daylight hours these days, what with so much happening during my night shifts.”

Caleb nodded. “Sleepy is the head that wears the crown,” he said, then took my hand in his before leading us into Central Park.

It seemed like such a normal couple’s activity—just a day out in the sunshine—that for a moment I allowed myself to forget the troubles of the arcane world that were taking over more and more of my life. For a brief moment all my worries about that or the more mundane but soul-crushing fact I hadn’t produced a lick of artwork in months were gone. The two of us simply flowed down the crosstown path until Caleb took the lead and wandered up a side trail to a small open circle nestled inside a ring of trees.

Benches surrounded the outer edges of the space, most of them filled with guitar players, drummers, and what looked like sixties-era flower children. Below our feet the pavement gave way to a mosaic of light and dark green tiles arranged in a radiant sun pattern with the word “Imagine” spelled out at its center.

“You brought me to a drum circle?” I asked, leaning down to scoop up one of the wilting flowers that had been laid on top of the mosaic.

A bearded hippie wearing just an open vest, no shirt, and what looked like forest-colored pajama/yoga pants locked eyes with me, and before I could look away, he was up off his bench heading for me.

“Oh, crap,” I said, turning to face Caleb to the exclusion of all else. “Incoming crazy, twelve o’clock.”

He looked over my shoulder and chuckled. “I told you I knew a guy,” he said, stepping around me.

Caleb opened his arms and the man came in close, giving Caleb a bear hug filled with such strength I feared all the vials lining his jacket would crack and melt him as the potions mixed. Despite my worry, I could not help but notice the genuine warmth radiating from the man giving him the hug.

Caleb broke away from the embrace a few seconds before the stranger and waited until the hippie clapped him hard on the back several times before releasing him. When the moment was over, Caleb turned back to me and extended his arm in my direction.

“This is the guy,” he said. “Fletcher, this is Alexandra, a good friend of mine.”

“Hello,” I said, giving him an unsure smile and a small wave.

Fletcher looked at my hand, shook his head at it, and started for me. “Oh, no, that’s not how we do it here,” he said. “Bring it on in.”

He stretched his arms wide, hands waving me in toward him, and despite my reservations at hugging a wild-eyed stranger, I found myself giving in to the warmth of the gesture. His arms closed around me and the embrace was comforting, the man himself smelling like an earthier and more pleasant form of patchouli. His beard itched against my cheek, tickling me while he tightened his bear hug. While the grip should have felt intimidating or overly familiar from a stranger, it simply made me feel safe.

“Hey, pretty mama,” he said when he pulled away. He held me at arm’s length by my shoulders. “So very groovy to make your acquaintance.”

Given the raw and powerful vibe coming off of him, I couldn’t help but smile. “Likewise,” I said.

Fletcher looked to the wilted flower still in my hand. He reached out with the index finger of his left hand and touched it. Leaning forward, he blew a sweet, gentle breath across my palm. The petals of the wildflower fluttered to life, their motion tickling the palm of my hand. I looked away from the flower and stared up at the man.

“E.T. phone home,”
he said in a mock croak, and laughed with a childish delight at what he had done. After almost a full minute of it, he regained control over himself and stroked his beard before gesturing with his arms out to both sides.

“Welcome to Strawberry Fields,” he said.

“Of course,” I said as recollection hit me. I hadn’t been up in this part of Central Park in more than a decade, having almost forgotten about its existence. “This is the memorial to John Lennon.”

Fletcher nodded, his eyes sparking. “Yeah, John was good people,” he said. “Always treated me kindly.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. “You?” I asked. “You
knew
John Lennon?”

He nodded again. “Yoko, too. You know, people give her a bad rap and all, but she’s really a sweet lady.”

I shook my head. “But Lennon died, like,
forever
ago, and you’re . . . what? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight . . . ?”

Caleb laid his hand on my shoulder, his eyes telling me to proceed with caution, but before I could, Fletcher was laughing again.

“Age is just a number, lady,” he said, grinning. The smile radiated a preternatural warmth from him, one that confirmed to me that we were dealing with something more than some young stoner hippie. If there was such a thing as Father Nature or whatever you’d call some sort of spirit of the forest, this guy glowed with an aura of it.

The smile slowly faded from his face. “Somehow I don’t think you came here to talk about me, am I right?”

“No offense, Fletch,” Caleb said. “Listen, I’m sorry I haven’t come by lately. I don’t want you to think I only show up when I need something.”

“But that
is
what you do,” the man said, his face going serious with a dark power that danced behind his eyes. I felt the weight of it, and by the way the color was draining out of Caleb’s face, so could he. A long silence passed between the two men as I waited and watched, each second becoming more and more uncomfortable.

“It’s all good, brother,” Fletcher said, with a laugh and a hearty clap on Caleb’s shoulder that broke the spell of the tension. “Just keepin’ ya honest.”

Caleb relaxed while the two of us watched Fletcher scan the entirety of the memorial circle.

“Let’s move off to the side here,” he said. “We’re a bit too much in the middle of everything. I’d hate to harsh the mellow of the mood here.”

Fletcher went off to the one side of the circle where there were no benches, only trees. I was relieved, since it moved us farther away from the rowdiest group of guitar players who were busy launching into their six hundredth chorus of “Hey, Jude.” With no benches nearby, Fletcher sat himself down cross-legged on the pavement and waited for us to do the same. When we had lowered ourselves, he leaned in, his voice dropping to a clandestine whisper.

“Lay it on me,” he said, slapping his hands down on both knees. “I’m all ears.”

“We came into Central Park seeking something,” Caleb said.

“Hey, man,” Fletcher said. “It’s all good. You need some herb, no worries. I got the hookup.”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s
not
why we came,” I said.

Fletcher’s face fell. He looked almost hurt.

“My bad,” he said. “Continue.”

“My friend and I were seeking out the special cemetery,” Caleb said. “The one for those of a more supernatural persuasion.”

“Checking out a plot of your own?” Fletcher asked with a chuckle. “Not planning on dying, are you?”

“He’s tried,” I said. “Didn’t really work out for him.”

“Oh?” Fletcher raised one of his bushy eyebrows.

“Long story,” Caleb said, dismissing it with a wave of his hand. “Anyway, I thought I was leading us right to it, but I got . . . well, lost.”

“Nature can be tricky like that,” Fletcher said, erupting into a bout of laughter.

Caleb sighed. “It can also be tricky in that it attacked us. We were covered in vines that were trying to tear me and my friends apart, and green so isn’t my color.”

A darkness clouded the man’s eyes.

“I do not think an attack like that would happen unless nature was provoked,” he said.

“Well . . .” Caleb started, but I interrupted.

“That’s on me,” I said. “We’d been wandering lost for a bit and I thought we might make some progress if we cut a new path. I wouldn’t have done it, though, if I had known what might happen.”

Fletcher frowned at me from deep within his beard and jerked his thumb at Caleb. “
This
one should have known better,” he said.

Caleb shrugged. “What can I say, Fletch? I’m all about finding shortcuts. In fact, if I
didn’t
take shortcuts I never would have ended up finding you a few years ago trapped by that wizard who had taken up occupancy in Belvedere Castle.”

“Ugh,” the man said with a shudder that dispelled his growing menace. “Him and his cat, not to mention all those little blue creatures scurrying around . . . Don’t remind me!”

“So can you help us or should we go find ourselves a nice druid?” Caleb asked.

“Druids,” Fletcher said with another shudder. “Always disrobing in my woods, calling on my power. Like I have nothing better to do than help them frolic or engorge their phalluses in the name of nature!”

“We just need to check out a few things,” I assured him. “I need to make sure a certain family’s mausoleum is secure. And . . . there’s another, more sensitive matter . . .”

“Are you familiar with the Butcher of the Bowery?” Caleb asked.

Fletcher’s face went dark and he nodded. “It was a particularly bad time for those of us who lived through it,” he said. “But yes, I recall Robert Patrick Dorman.”

“We think he may be back,” Caleb said. “In the form of a gargoyle. Judging by a trashed town house we’ve been to. There are other gargoyles working for his cause every night.”

“We need to locate where his body rests in the cemetery, though,” I said. “So . . . can you do it? Can you get us to the cemetery? Please . . . ?”

Fletcher examined my face and I did nothing except meet his eyes. After an all-too-long examination of me, Fletcher nodded.

“I will grant you safe passage,” he said, “but first, I would ask a boon of you.”

I let out a long, slow breath, cringing a bit inside.

“And that would be . . . ?” I asked.

“Lately I’ve seen a surge of these winged creatures over this city,” he said. “Some of them even foolish enough to try to enter my woods, and while either I or the forces of this forest have driven them back, they still have managed to elude me. You want into the cemetery? Fine. I’ll grant you this, but in return I first want you to bring me one of these winged creatures.”

“In what condition?” I asked. “None of them will want to come willingly. And why don’t you just go get one yourself?”

“I wish to examine the nature of these creatures, but it is no matter how one is delivered to me,” he said. “As to why I don’t capture one for myself . . . I am afraid the park and the woodlands here are my domain. To venture into the rest of this city would prove impossible.”

“Fletch, if we could capture the Butcher, we wouldn’t need to go to the cemetery,” Caleb said.

“I didn’t ask for the Butcher,” he said, shaking a finger at him.

“No, you did not,” I said with a dark smile. “You just want
any
one of these misguided creatures. Fine. I’ve met enough of them that have wanted to take a swing at me. It’s time I return the favor. I’ll get you one. Pretty sure I can bring one of them down.”

“Really, now?” the hippie asked, looking me up and down. “You sure you’re up to that, lady?”

“I know a guy,” I said, standing up, brushing my pants off.

“Hey,” Caleb said, also rising. “That’s my usual line.”

“Sorry,” I said, heading for the path leading out of Strawberry Fields. “Better ready yourself for that trip to your secret cemetery.”

“I like your lady,” Fletcher said, laughing and applauding me as I went. “She’s got moxie, that one.”

“Or a death wish,” Caleb said, running to catch up with me.

I didn’t bother to correct him. Given the various factions out there either wanting my help or trying to kill me, I couldn’t worry about that. All I could worry about was how I was going to find and run down one of my problem gargoyles. Luckily, I
did
know a guy who might prove helpful.

Well, more
grotesque
than guy, really.