Precinct 13 (6 page)

Officer Jones’s hands hooked on his belt. “You’re sure?”

“I’d tell you to test it for yourself,” Stone said, “but considering what it did to Jack, it would probably knock you out.”

“I don’t get it.” Jones crossed his arms in front of his chest. The stiff fabric of his uniform bunched up and caused his silver badge to reflect the fluorescent light. “How could the spell attach so easily to an
ordinarius
?” He looked like so many police officers I’d seen in my life, standing there; it was getting harder and harder for me to cope with the fact that everyone seemed to be talking about magic like it was real.

Finding a nearby chair, I swung it around. I let myself drop into it. “It would be really awesome if someone would tell me what the hell is going on. Or at least, you know, tell me that I’m not going crazy. Again. More.”

Surprisingly, it was Officer Jones who spoke first. His voice was still as gruff and abrupt as ever, but the certainty in his tone was reassuring. “You’re not crazy. Something very weird is going on here.”

I shut my eyes and let his words wash over me.
Not crazy.
I liked the sound of that.

I was just about to let out a sigh of relief when he added, “Something went wrong with that spell, at the very least it should have knocked you out. That’s what I was expecting when I smelled it on him. I can’t understand how you countered it.”

Squeezing my eyes tighter, I tilted my head until it rested against the back of the chair. A perfectly sane police officer did
not
just suggest that he knew that there would be some kind of magical booby trap inside that corpse. I should count to ten. Maybe when I opened my eyes again, I’d be sitting in the middle of an empty store.

One…two…

“I said we should have tried to defuse the protection spell before we handed it over to an unprotected human. What if it had been set to kill?”

That must be Stone with her weird use of “human.” I’d lost count. Better start over with one…Okay, breathe slowly.

One…

“She clearly took care of herself.”

Two…

“I’m not sure that’s Hannah’s point, Spense,” Jack said. “You kind of took a big risk with someone who is completely helpless.”

“Is she, though?”

Through my closed eyes, I sensed a shadow looming over me. I opened them in time to see Jones stepping closer to me. He knelt down, looking at where my arm was cradled in my lap. He inspected the snake as closely as he could without touching. At his nearness, the snake buzzed angrily. Jones seemed to sense the hostility and rocked back on his heels, putting a bit more distance between himself and the tattoo. He looked up into my face, and seemed to study me, as if for the first time.

“You’re
not
an
ordinarius
, are you? You’re not normal.”

Wow. A stab right to the heart of my greatest fears. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Jones squinted at me in that penetratingly suspicious way cops had that always made me feel guilty of something, even when I wasn’t. “Are you magic?” he asked.

“No,” I said quickly and perhaps a bit too loudly. I looked him hard in the eyes, and repeated myself very clearly, and as calmly as I could, “I am definitely not.”

“All right. Was someone else there when this happened?” Stone asked.

I shook my head.

Jones continued to scrutinize me, as if he didn’t believe me in the slightest. This close, the overhead lights reflected the amber highlights in his green irises. They flashed, almost glowing, and I tried desperately not to notice.

“Someone must have countered the spell,” Jones insisted. “Did anyone intervene or interrupt you in any way? Did you hear a curse?”

“Curse? You mean like swearing? I was defiantly swearing up a blue streak,” I said with a little, slightly hysterical laugh.

“Someone
besides
you,” Jones insisted, his tone clearly chiding me for not taking all this seriously.

I cleared my throat. “I was alone. I mean, I was the only living person in the room. Mrs. Finnegan didn’t start talking until later.”

“Who’s Mrs. Finnegan?” Jack wanted to know.

“Ruby Finnegan,” Officer Jones supplied over his shoulder. “She’s been in the morgue waiting for a transfer to wherever her family has their plot.”

“Minnesota,” I said absently.

“Was she one of ours?” Jack asked.

Jones shook his head. “I’m surprised she had anything to say. She was Lutheran. They normally stay dead.”

“I think she was still dead,” I said, remembering her glassy eyes. “She was just talking while dead.”

“What did she say, exactly?” Jones asked; he sought my eyes again and seemed to be searching for something. “Think very carefully.”

“I’m not likely to forget the details of this morning. It was kind of out of the ordinary.”

“Was it?” Jones insisted, like I was intentionally leaving something out.

“Yes,” I continued to insist, but it was getting much harder.

“I think maybe you’ve seen this sort of thing before,” Stone said quietly from where she stood to my right. “You shouted at me about something from your past, remember?”

With Jack to my left, Stone on my right, and Jones far too close in front of me, I was starting to feel surrounded.

“My past is off-limits,” I snapped at her. My fists scrunched so hard that my fingernails cut into my palm.

“Not if it has to do with magic,” Jones said. “Then you’d better tell us all about it.”

No way.

“I can’t,” I struggled to say, my throat tightening. “I’m not supposed to talk about any of that.”

“Not supposed to?” Jack looked at the two cops and then to me. “Who told you that you couldn’t talk about magic?”

I glared at him. Was he serious? I practically shouted, “Everyone! In case you haven’t noticed, spells and necromancer and glowing eyes are not part of normal conversation.”

“They are around here,” Jack assured me with a patient smile.

Stone nodded encouragingly. “You can tell us. We’ll understand. Magic is our job.”

Even Jones seemed to have a sympathetic look in his eye. “Please. This is important.”

That broke me.

For the second time that day, I told the truth, and, for the first time in a long, long time, I told all of it.

The two cops and Jack patiently listened to the whole story. Jack settled into his perch on the nearby desk, and Officer Jones pulled in another chair and resumed taking notes. At some point, Stone fetched me a cup of slightly burnt, industrial coffee and a cookie. The cookie was surprisingly delicious. However, it was the first thing I’d eaten since throwing up, so I probably would have thought cardboard tasted good.

“He mentioned me specifically?” Jones asked.

Around a mouthful of cookie, I said, “Yes. I mean, unless there’s another Spenser Jones in town?”

Jones shook his head.

“It’s not all that surprising, is it, Spense?” Jack asked. “You are the head magic copper, after all.”

“You’re bound to be targeted,” Stone agreed.

“I’d like to hear exactly what he said,” Jones insisted. “Do you still have the tape recorder? The pictures?”

“Oh,” I said. Standing up, I emptied my pockets onto the desk. Jones and Stone huddled together flipping through the pictures on my phone. Jack immediately reached for the toe tag.

“You’ve got good instincts,” he said with a bright smile, as he held up the tag. “This might be the big break we’ve been looking for.”

“The toe tag?”

But he didn’t answer me, as he was calling over another uniformed cop. If life were a TV show, the cop who approached us would have been typecast as “rookie.” His ginger hair was cut in a style last popular in 1952. He even had freckles across the bridge of his nose. “This is Boyd, he’s our psychometrist.”

I felt like I’d heard that name before.

“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said, with a nod.

Jack explained, “Psychometry is the ability to read impressions from objects. Since this fell off the necromancer after he awoke, we might be able to get a sense of where he was going or his plans.”

Boyd took the tag. I expected him to say something profound the instant he touched it, but instead he said, “I’ve got a bunch of stuff in front of this, but I should have results for you by morning meeting.”

“Brilliant,” said Jack. He raised a hand to slap Boyd on the back, but stopped short. “Uh, thanks.” As Boyd moved back to a desk filled with an odd assortment of objects, including the wheel from a mountain bike, Jack leaned into me and said quietly, “Not big on touching, that one.”

I imagined not. Did he get impressions from everyone and everything he touched? It must be overwhelming.

Officer Jones muscled between Jack and me to hand me
back my phone. Jack flashed him an irritated look before moving aside. To me, Jones said, “I wish you’d gotten more shots of the words. They may be other spells. Something that might be able to help us understand that thing.” He pointed, without touching, to the snake coiled around my arm.

“Forensics may have better pictures,” I offered. It still seemed very strange to be talking so casually about all this stuff and not having a psychologist taking notes. “I wasn’t expecting this to be important. I mean, beyond the whole ‘look, I’m not crazy’ thing.”

Officer Jones nodded distractedly. He was looking at my arm. He noticed I’d caught him staring and his jaw twitched. He glared back defiantly, as if challenging me to call him out on something. When I didn’t, he turned to Jack and jerked his chin in my direction. “What about that thing? Any ideas what stopped it?”

“No,” Jack said. “We still don’t even know why it didn’t kill her.”

“It wouldn’t have killed her,” he muttered.

“I don’t know how you could be so sure,” Jack said.

Jones laid a finger beside his nose. “What’s important is how it ended up on her.”

They both looked at me.

I shrugged, and sat back down. I looked at the crumbs on the paper napkin, wishing I could ask for another cookie. “Like I told you before, I tried to wash it off, but that didn’t work so I dumped some formaldehyde on it.”

“That makes no sense,” Jones said. “Chemicals shouldn’t have bothered it.”

“Formaldehyde is used in preserving the dead,” Stone offered. “Perhaps…”

Jack interrupted. “Before, you said you were swearing. Did
you
curse it?”

“I…Maybe? I was a bit freaked out. I might have called it an evil bastard or something.”

“A hex,” Jack said to his colleagues as if he’d just explained everything. “She’s a natural.”

“A natural what?” I asked.

“Not a natural what, just a natural. Or maybe you’ve heard the term ‘switch’?” Jack asked.

With his British accent, I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly. “Witch?”

“Switch,” he repeated, more slowly. “Like the thing you flip to turn on a light.”

He mimed with his finger wagging up and down.

“You think I’m a light switch?”

“No, a magical one,” he said.

Both Jones and Stone were standing over me, watching the conversation with interest. I looked to them for further explanation. “What’s he talking about?”

“A switch is someone who, in the presence of magic, is able to utilize it. It’s like magic makes them ‘turn on’ their own abilities,” Jones said. “They can also act like a circuit breaker to enhance the flow of magic, by letting it pass through themselves, or they can, with practice, learn to shut it down, close it off.” To Jack, Jones asked, “But are you sure? I never smelled even a whiff of
sensibilitatem
on her.”

I fidgeted under their scrutiny, playing with the rim of the disposable coffee cup. I was beginning to think anytime someone started using Latin-sounding words, something I didn’t want to know was about to be revealed.

“If she stopped that booby trap with a casual curse, she
might be more than a switch,” Jack insisted. “She could be a witch.”

Jones frowned sharply. “A witch? If she’s a witch, where’s the familiar?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “But this was more than some augment gone haywire. Curses are witch purview.”

The two men seemed like they might argue over my head for a long time, so I raised my hand, like a kid in class. They stopped and looked down at me.

“Yes?” Jones snapped.

“I already explained this, I can’t be magical,” I said, setting the still-full coffee cup on the desk. The acrid smell of it threatened to turn my stomach again.

Jones put his hands on his hips and looked smugly at Jack, as if to say: “See.”

“Well, why the hell not?” Jack asked me.

“Why not? Well—well, because.”

“Because why?” he pushed.

“Because I take very expensive medication not to be, okay?” I snapped, a flood of shame brightening my cheeks.

“Oh.” Jack’s voice was small, confused, but he seemed unwilling to let my confession stop the conversation. “Okay. Well. Still? Because that could be why Spense can’t smell your magic.”

“Of course still,” I said. “You’re very strictly advised not to randomly stop taking the pills just because you feel better.” I didn’t want to look at any of them. I hated admitting this part of my life, my little “break.”

I was always one of those kids who got labeled with an “overactive imagination” because I always thought I saw trolls under bridges, fairies in the garden, gargoyles on the rooftops, and all those fanciful things.

Things started to get rough when my mother died and my father remarried. I was sixteen, going through puberty, still so caught up in grief, and along came this other woman my father loved, it seemed sometimes, more than me.

My father had always tolerated my silliness before. Gayle, the stepmonster, as I came to think of her, convinced everyone that my imagination was a product of hallucinations and pathology. Next came a parade of diagnoses: delusional, bipolar, and schizoaffective disorders…even, briefly, schizophrenia. There were drugs, combinations, therapies, and stints in and out of hospitals.

Somehow I survived long enough to graduate high school.

I learned to ignore what I saw and to never, ever talk about it. There were several years that things were mostly okay. I went off to college, even got accepted into medical school. I met Valentine and he made my magic feel like a gift, rather than a curse.