Spell Blind (7 page)
Authors: David B. Coe
Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Contemporary, #Urban, #Paranormal
“You know what I think, Mister Fearsson?” Her voice had gone cold. She wasn’t trying to charm a story out of me anymore. “I think that all the stuff they wrote about you when you left the force was true. You’re a drunk or an addict, or you’re just too unreliable to serve in the PPD. I think you deserved what happened to you.”
Others had said much worse to me. People I’d known for years, fellow cops who I’d respected. Her insults came too late and from too great a distance to hurt.
I put down what was left of the slice I’d been eating, took one last sip of Coke, and wiped my face with a napkin. Then I slid out of the booth and stood.
“Thanks for dinner.”
I didn’t wait for an answer. And she didn’t try to stop me from leaving.
I went back to my office, intending to do a bit of billing work from my last few cases. I’d let it pile up, and I was still stewing over my conversation with Billie. This seemed as good a time as any to tackle a few mindless tasks. My hands were shaking, I was so mad. But I knew that would pass.
The answer machine was blinking—two messages. The first was from Kona and had come in around the time Billie and I were sitting down to eat:
“Hi, partner. Just got a call from Pete. The Deegan autopsy didn’t turn up anything too surprising. Cause of death is ‘sudden, trauma-induced cardiac arrest,’ just like the others. It’ll be a day or two before the toxicology report comes back, but Pete’s convinced that Claudia was high on Spark when she died. Otherwise, nothing new. Our friend doesn’t change much from killing to killing. Let me know what you found out from Robby. Bye.”
“Sudden, trauma-induced cardiac arrest.” I’d never heard the phrase before Gracia Rosado’s death. Now it had become a morbid joke I shared with Kona. Basically, it was the medical examiner’s way of saying “something really bad happened and it killed her.”
The second message was from Howard Wriker, who wanted to know if I’d learned anything yet about the drugs Claudia had been using. I wasn’t ready to tell him or the Deegans anything. I felt no need to protect Robby Sommer, but the last thing Kona needed was for the Deegans to be breathing down her neck about Robby, when we had no solid proof that he’d been involved in any way with Claudia’s murder. Hearing his voice did remind me though, that I needed to tell Kona that Robby had been running a Spark den over in the South Mountain District. She couldn’t arrest him on the little evidence I had for her, but she could pass the word to narcotics and they could keep an eye on him.
I called Kona at her home. Margarite answered, gave me a big hello, and insisted that I join them for dinner this coming weekend. I didn’t bother reminding her that the full moon was coming up; even with friends, the phasings weren’t easy to talk about. I asked for a raincheck. She said the following week would be good, and passed the phone to Kona.
“You been with Robby all this time?” Kona asked without saying hello.
“No. A reporter who I met at the Deegans’ tracked me down at my office and asked me a bunch of questions.”
“A reporter?”
“A blogger, actually. But Wriker was afraid of her, so I assume she’s pretty big.”
“You mean Billie Castle?”
Why was I the only person who’d never heard of her? I guess I needed to spend more time online. Or not.
“Yeah. You know her work?”
“Of course. Who doesn’t?”
“Well, anyway,” I said. “She wanted to know all about the Blind Angel case and why the PPD hadn’t caught the guy yet, and what my firing had to do with it all.”
“What did you tell her?”
“As little as possible.”
I could almost see Kona nodding. “Good. How’d it go with Robby?”
“He admitted selling to Claudia. Seems they were an item for a while. But he denied having anything to do with the other victims.”
“You think he was lying?” Before I could answer, she said, “Never mind. Of course he was lying.”
“I doubt we can prove it, though,” I said.
“Yeah, so do I.”
“And speaking of things we can’t prove, you should tell narcotics to keep one eye on Robby and another on a Spark den on 23rd near the freeway and the railroad.”
“All right. Care to explain that?”
“Not really. Not now.”
We both fell silent for a few seconds.
“Listen, Kona, I know this is the PPD’s investigation, and I should stay away from actual investigating—”
“I never should have said what I did, Justis. It’s not like we’re tracking down leads or focusing in on suspects. We’ve got nothing here.”
“Then you won’t mind if I poke around a little, maybe check in with some of my kind?”
“Not at all,” she said. “Let me know what you find out.”
“Of course.”
“And partner?”
“Yeah.”
“Watch yourself. If you start getting close to this guy, he’s not going to like it.”
“Right. Talk to you tomorrow.”
I hung up and took care of some of that paperwork. I would have preferred to head home, but I wanted to make sure that Billie Castle was long gone before I stepped outside again.
By the time I headed for the Z-ster, night had fallen and the moon was up. It was well past a quarter full and bone white in a velvet sky. And though we were still several days away from the full, I could already feel it tugging at my mind, bending my thoughts, making me shiver in spite of the warm air.
Describing the phasings to someone who wasn’t a weremyste was like trying to describe color to someone who had been born blind. Words weren’t adequate. The closest I’d heard anyone come to getting it right was something my dad told me not long after my mom died. We weren’t getting along at the time, and his grip on reality, which had already become tenuous before Mom’s death, was slipping fast. But what he told me then in anger still rang true to this day.
“It’s like somebody reaches a hand into your stinkin’ brain,” he said, “and swirls it around, making a mess of everything. The thoughts are still there—your sense of who you are and how the people around you fit into your life—but they’re scrambled. There’s no order, no time or space or story line. The boundaries disappear. Love and hate, rage and joy, fear and comfort—you can’t tell anymore where one ends and the next begins. And the worst part is, you know it’s happened—you know that it all made sense a short while before, and that now it’s gone. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”
That was how it felt to me every time. You’d think after a couple of hundred phasings—three days a month for half a lifetime—I’d get used to it, or find some way to fight my way through. But each one feels like the first. I’ve tried to brace myself, waiting for moonrise the way I would a shot at a doctor’s office. It doesn’t do a damn bit of good. As soon as the full moon appears on the horizon, I feel those boundaries my dad talked about being sucked out of my mind.
That was the tug I felt now, with the moon shining down on me. It wouldn’t happen until the end of the week, but already it was reaching for me, testing my defenses and finding them as weak as ever.
I was still staring up at the moon when I reached the Z-ster, which is probably why I didn’t notice anything as I got into the car and put the key in the ignition.
“Ohanko.”
“
Geez!
” I said, nearly jumping out of my skin.
The runemyste was in the passenger seat, his watery form glimmering with the pale light of a nearby street lamp.
“Good God, Namid! You scared the piss out of me.”
“You need to use more care, Ohanko. Did I not tell you—?”
“Yeah, tread like the fox. I remember.” I shook my head. My heart was trip hammering in my chest. “What the hell are you doing here, anyway? I never see you unless you’re tying to get me to train.”
He shrugged, or came as close to a shrug as a liquid ghost could. “I thought to see how you were faring with your investigation.”
I stared at him.
“Have you learned anything?”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me that you’re checking up on me?”
“Does that surprise you?”
“You’ve never done it before.”
He said nothing.
Abruptly I could see again the scrying I’d done in my office: that ghoulish dark hand, framed against the hot glow of embers.
“Is this about the vision I had this morning?”
Before he could answer, I thought of something else: crossing the street after my conversation with Robby, feeling so sure that someone was toying with the idea of killing me. I still had the instincts of a cop, and normally that was a good thing. But maybe in this case, without realizing it at the time, I had been feeling things a sorcerer would feel.
“You’ve never done anything like this before,” I said again. “Unless that was you following me earlier today.”
He frowned, the smooth waters of his face roughening, like when a sudden wind scythes across the surface of a calm lake. “What happened earlier? Tell me.”
“I thought someone was watching me, an enemy. But I have no idea who it could have been.”
The runemyste’s nod was slow, thoughtful. He turned his head so that he was looking through the windshield at the street. “Good, Ohanko. Trust your senses.”
Great. More riddles. Just once I wanted him to give me a straight answer. “You wouldn’t tell me before what all this is about. Are you ready to tell me now?”
“No.”
“Come on, Namid. You’re interested in my case, though you never have been before. You’re following me around, which you never do. Clearly something big is going on. You have to tell me what it is.”
He faced me again, his eyes gleaming in the darkness. “You misunderstand, Ohanko. It is not that I refuse to tell you, but rather that I cannot. I do not know.”
Well, there you go. That’s a straight answer. Turns out I would have preferred another riddle.
CHAPTER 6
I know precious little about Namid’s life as a Zuni shaman. I’ve studied the A’shiwi, as the Zuni people call themselves; I’ve studied most of the native peoples of the Southwest. But the K’ya’na-Kwe clan has been extinct for centuries, and since the ancient A’shiwi clans left no written histories, information on the runemyste’s people is pretty scarce. And it’s not as though Namid spends a lot of time talking about himself. I’ve asked him questions now and then, but he’s about as forthcoming with information about his own life as he is about anything else.
In many ways I learned everything I needed to know about the runemyste the very first time I saw him. Most of my memories from those days are obscured by the residue of too many phasings, but this one remains as clear as fresh rainwater. I was at home—my old home, on the west side of the city, in Buckeye. I had started on the job only a few months before and was learning a good deal from Kona. We were in robbery detail then, although she was already angling to get us moved to Homicide. But I had yet to tell her that I was a weremyste and she was growing tired of having to explain to others why her new partner disappeared every few weeks. Friendship only goes so far, particularly when I’m nothing more than some dumb rookie cop, and she’s well on her way to a promotion for which she’s busted her butt some seven years. It was just a matter of time before she was going to dump me as a partner. No doubt I would have deserved it. Rule seven: Never keep secrets from your partner.
It was late, and the moon was full. I was in the midst of a hard, dark phasing, sitting on my living room floor, trying to resist the urge to grab my weapon and put a bullet through my head. Often my phasings are filled with delusions, and on this night my mom, dead some twelve years, was standing in front of me, telling me that I was exactly like my old man and that I’d wasted my life. And staring down at my hands, I could see that they were wrinkled and covered with age spots. The hair on them had turned white. Somehow there was a mirror beside me—at least I believed at the time that there was—and as I gazed into it, I saw that I was twin to my dad, my hair gray, my face slack. I remember crying, and screaming myself hoarse, begging her to go away. But she wouldn’t leave me alone. I thought about using magic to burn my house to the ground. Really, I did. Magic is stronger during the phasings, and I could feel the power churning inside me. I was itching to use it. I had to remind myself that burning down the house would be a bad thing. Which is why I’d started thinking about the weapon. Not that shooting myself was much better, but at the time rational thought wasn’t my strong suit. All I could think was that if I couldn’t get her to leave, I’d leave myself.
But before I could climb to my feet and retrieve my pistol, my mother vanished, replaced by what appeared to be yet another delusion: a translucent figure, shimmering and liquid, and yet seemingly solid.
I didn’t speak. I stared up at that face, at those glowing eyes, waiting for him to do or say something.
“Taking your own life would be a waste. You should reconsider.” His voice was like rushing water, musical and random, soothing and exhilarating.
“Wow,” I said, breathless. As delusions went, this was a good one.
“The moon-time is difficult for you, I know. I have seen it. But part of being a runecrafter is enduring the dark nights. What you call the phasings.”
“What are you supposed to be?” I asked. I reached toward him with an open hand, wanting to touch his watery skin. I wasn’t close enough, though, and I didn’t have the strength to stand up.
“My name is Namid’skemu. I am a runemyste. Long ago by your reckoning, I was a runecrafter—a weremyste—as you are. More recently I gave aid to your father. I would do the same for you, but you must swear to me that you will not do harm to yourself.”
“Namid’skemu,” I repeated. “That sounds Native American.”
“It is A’shiwi.”
“A’shiwi?”
He nodded.
“You’re Zuni?”
“I am of the K’ya’na-Kwe clan. The water people.”
“The water people are extinct.”
“Yes.”
I let out a crazed laugh. I was starting to sound like my dad. “So you’re telling me that I’m speaking to the ghost of some ancient Zuni?”
“I am no ghost,” he said, sounding angry for the first time. “I was once what you would call a shaman, as weremystes often were. I am now a runemyste, chosen by the Runeclave to guard against the use of dark magic in your world. And I have come to you because I see great darkness in you. I fear that you will not survive this night.”
I shook my head, averting my eyes, feeling ashamed that he had read my thoughts with such ease. “This is getting weird. I need something to drink.”
I forced myself up, staggered into the kitchen and splashed water on my face. That helped some, but the tirade from my mom’s ghost still echoed in my head. I knew that I couldn’t kill myself; my new delusion had convinced me of that much. But I wasn’t going to make it through the night if I didn’t do something. Still leaning against the counter in front of the sink, I reached up into the topmost cabinet and pulled out a bottle of bourbon.
When I turned to get a glass, he was standing right in front of me. I should have been startled, but I wasn’t. Somehow I had known he’d be there.
“That will not help you through this night,” he said pointing at the bottle.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “It’s helped before.”
“That is an illusion.”
I laughed. “You’re one to talk.”
“You believe I am an illusion.”
“Delusion is the word I’d use. But, yeah, I do.”
“You are wrong. I am as real as you are. Your father knows me.”
“My father’s a loon,” I said, not meaning it kindly. “So we’ve had the same hallucinations. Not very surprising. I bet he’s seen Mom yelling at him, too. Doesn’t make her ghost real.”
“I am not a ghost,” he said again. “And you must ask him about me when you can. I assure you I am real, and I can help you, just as I did him. I can teach you to harness the powers you possess, to become a skilled runecrafter. But you must learn to endure the moon-times without resorting to alcohol and without doing harm to yourself.”
I glared at him, but then I put down the bottle, walked back into the living room, and dropped onto the couch. Sleep. That’s what I needed. Come morning, I’d feel better. The phasing still had one more night, and even the days of what my new ghost-friend called the moon-time were difficult—trouble focusing, forgetfulness, fatigue. They were better than the nights, though. And this hallucination would be over.
“You cannot escape me,” he said. I opened my eyes and found him standing in front of the couch.
“Stop doing that! Leave me alone.”
“Why do you refuse the Abri?”
I frowned up at him. “The what?”
“The drug that can keep you from suffering during the moon-time. Why do you not take it?”
Blockers. That’s what he was talking about. My gaze slid away again; I had no easy answer. I could have said I didn’t take them because my father hadn’t taken them, but I’m not sure I was even ready to admit as much to myself. At that point, we didn’t get along, and I blamed him for everything I hated about my life. I also could have said I wasn’t ready yet to give up wielding magic, but I was still learning to cast spells, and back then I wasn’t sure I believed I would ever become much of a runecrafter. The truth was, I sensed the runemyste wanted me to say that I was determined to retain whatever powers I possessed, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of being right. Even then I was a stubborn son of a bitch.
“You are a runecrafter,” he said after some time, his voice as soothing as the sea at dawn. “You have some talent with magic. With my help you can become a more accomplished crafter.”
“You’re an illusion,” I said, closing my eyes again.
“And you are a fool.”
“Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.”
He said nothing and at last I opened my eyes again, thinking that perhaps he’d gone. When I saw him standing over me, as patient as the tide, I knew a moment of profound relief. I realized then that I wanted him to be real. I wanted to believe I could be a powerful sorcerer, that there was more to being a weremyste than these miserable nights around the full moon. But after suffering through the phasings for so long, I had lost hope. That month’s phasing hadn’t been the first time I considered putting my pistol to my head.
He still stared at me, and now he said, “You are trying to learn something of a theft. It has been many turns of the moon since last you learned anything of importance, but still you try. There is a single token from this theft that you possess; a knife with a broken blade. Get it now.”
I started to say something, then stopped. He had described a robbery Kona and I had been struggling with for the better part of six months. His understanding of the case was crude, but detailed enough to be convincing. This proved nothing, of course. My delusion, my knowledge. But that broken knife was in the house, just as he’d said. Kona and I were certain it had been used to jimmy a window or door and had been broken in the process. But we’d yet to figure out where the thieves had entered the building. We had stopped by the warehouse again the day before. We wandered around for a while, but found nothing new. When we were done, Kona asked me to return the knife to evidence. I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I wasn’t all that dependable in the middle of a phasing.
“Get it,” Namid said, his voice like white water on the Colorado.
I retrieved the knife from my jacket pocket, pulled it from the evidence bag, and held it out to him.
“What do you see?” he asked, making no effort to take it from me.
I glanced at it, lifted it closer to my eyes. “Son of a bitch!”
“Tell me what you see.”
I wasn’t even sure how to describe it. A faint glimmer of yellow light danced along the edge of the blade, like fire. It was brightest at the broken end, but it radiated all the way up the hilt. How had I not seen this before? How had Kona missed it?
“It’s glowing,” I said at last.
“What color?”
“Yellow.”
“That is magic, or to be more precise, the residue of magic.”
“What?”
“Yellow is not a strong color. Had the conjuring been done by a more accomplished runecrafter, the color would be red or green, perhaps even blue. And it would have vanished long ago. Someone with true craft can mask his conjuring. You are searching for a crafter with the most rudimentary skills.”
“You’re making it do that. What am I saying?
I’m
making it do that. I’m imagining all of this.”
“No. You see it because you are a weremyste. Your magic allows you to see what is left of spells conjured by others. It is part of your gift.”
“Then why haven’t I ever seen this before?”
“Because you did not know to look for it. And I was not there to show you. You will never fail to see it again.”
I shook my head. “I’m not a sorcerer.”
“Not yet. But you have power. If you did not, you would not see anything more than a broken knife.”
Despite what Namid had shown me, I was slow to believe he was anything more or less than a product of my own psychotic imagination. I’d seen my dad lose his mind, the process slow and painful, and I had known for years that this was my fate, too. I knew my dad was a weremyste, and that I was as well, but I had never given much thought to what that might mean. I certainly hadn’t ever believed that much good would come of whatever powers I possessed. Magic had been the source of too much pain in my life for me to see it in any other way.
After some time that first night, Namid left me, no doubt fed up with my stubborn refusal to acknowledge that he was real. But he appeared again the next morning and we resumed our argument. At first, I took his return as evidence that my descent into permanent insanity had already begun. But Namid was persistent to the point of relentlessness, and with time I came to believe that he was real and that all he’d been telling me about magic and my own gifts was true.
Even more, everything he said about the warehouse robbery turned out to be dead-on accurate. The knife hadn’t been broken jimmying anything; it had been part of a talisman—a small statue of a Maori god—that the warehouse manager kept on his desk. Namid told me as much, and I confirmed it when I examined the idol more closely and found the rest of the blade imbedded in the stone base on which the figure stood. Namid also told me where we could find the man responsible for the break-in. Within a week, Kona and I had arrested Orestes Quinley, a small-time thief and weremyste, who’d stolen a bunch of stereos and TVs to cover the theft of that talisman. Turns out there are more weremystes in the Phoenix metropolitan area than one might think. They’re not in the yellow pages, of course. Finding them can be tricky. You have to rely on word of mouth and, since most weremystes use blockers, and since those who don’t aren’t eager to be found, it becomes a matter of finding the right mouth, as it were. But there is a network of sorts, one that I’ve tapped into in recent years. Early on, though, I had to take a lot on faith. So did Kona. She was pretty skeptical about all of it, although Orestes’ confession helped.
As I came to spend more time with Namid I began to sense an ulterior motive of a sort in the lessons he gave me. He himself had told me that he worked with my dad, and though he never admitted as much, I was convinced that he held himself responsible for my father’s premature descent into insanity. I believe Namid felt that he had failed one Fearsson. He wasn’t about to fail another. That was why he worked me so hard and so often. He wanted me to hone my power. From what I understood, as a runecrafter grew more proficient, he also developed some resistance to the long-term effects of the phasings.
But on this night outside my office, with the phasing still a few days off, and Claudia Deegan’s murder on my mind, I was more concerned with what Namid had said to me in the car. In the years since he appeared to me that first night and kept me from killing myself, I had never known Namid to be wrong about anything. Until tonight I’d never heard him express even the slightest uncertainty.
I do not know . . .
It was like being a kid again and finding out my father wasn’t stronger and smarter than every other man on the planet.