The Voodoo Killings (40 page)

“Son of a bitch, Max, why the hell didn’t you warn me!” The bindings running through Max’s chest began to glow. Maybe if I threw enough Otherside at him, I could short-circuit it….

I started siphoning Otherside as fast as I could.

A shadow passed over Max’s face. “Kincaid, please do not hurt yourself. There is little point—” His face contorted as smoke began to rise from the ground around him.

Shit, he was going to burn alive.

I threw everything I had at him. It bounced off as if it was a drop of rainwater on a forest fire.

If I doused him with water, I might stop the fire. I looked for the hose, but it had been disconnected. Max had to keep a fire extinguisher somewhere. I ran for the kitchen.

“Kincaid!” Max fell to his knees as more smoke billowed around him.

I was out of time. I turned back to him.

“Tell Gideon I am sorry about not keeping my end of our bargain. Remember he is only to be trusted so far. There may be something in my notes to help with Cameron, though only if the sixth line is still dormant. I’m sorry, Kincaid, I’m sorry for—” His face contorted with pain as more smoke billowed around him. His skin began to peel like paper in a fire. “Time to see what the Otherside is like,” he said. He didn’t scream, just closed his eyes and evaporated in a plume of smoke and fire.

I stood there, vaguely aware of the air getting cold.

“K, we gotta go! Come on, snap out of it,” Nate shouted in my ear.

“He taught me everything I know,” I said.

“Yeah, and there are cop cars coming, K, two of them, and Aaron on his way too.”

How the hell had they known to come here?

A trap. Nate had been right. I’d been set on getting Max out…and the killer had known I would be. Yet again, I’d done exactly what he or she expected me to do….

“Tell Cameron to take off!” I said.

“He’s out of sight, hiding in the park.”

I started to follow Nate through the back gate. “Shit, Max’s notes!” I bolted for the house.

“K, no!”

“They’re the only chance Cameron has,” I yelled. Now where the hell would Max have put them? I checked the kitchen drawers, the office, his bedroom. Then I remembered Max once telling me where to hide my books if the police ever came by: the oven.

I slid back into the kitchen and opened the oven door. A neat stack of notebooks bound with thread was sitting on the bottom element.

I heard a loud knock at the front door. Followed by, “Police.”

I hefted the notebooks. My bike was outside the house and the cops would already have seen it. The door opened and I cursed myself for not having had the foresight to lock it behind us.

I ran for the bathroom and shut the door, locking it.

I heard footsteps in the hall. I wrote
Gideon Lawrence
across the mirror as fast as I could and crossed my fingers he was listening.

He materialized with the first bang on the bathroom door, took in the surroundings and gave me a wary look. I shook my head and shoved the notes at him, whispering, “No time—police. Max is dead and these are his notes, probably even has one on your deal with him. He always wrote everything down.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Hide them, read them, whatever you want, but I need all the notes on bindings and everything to do with a recent zombie named Cameron Wight. Deal?” Someone was trying to force the bathroom door.

Gideon nodded and took the pile before vanishing. Then the door crashed open and two men burst through with guns drawn.

“On the ground, hands behind your head.”

By the time Aaron got there, I was in handcuffs. Our eyes met. I couldn’t read a damn thing in his. It was probably best that way. We didn’t say a word as he led me through the house and stuffed me into the back of his car.

As soon as I was alone, Nate materialized beside me. “K, what the fuck—”

“Find Lee and tell her I’ve been framed.” I remembered what Max had said about the killer being someone I would never suspect. There was only one person who fit that description, however farfetched it sounded. “I think Aaron is behind this,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.

Nate’s eyes went wide and he started to say something, but officers were heading my way.

“Just make sure she knows. Get Cameron to call her from the apartment, okay?”

Nate swore, but the cops were almost to the car. He dissolved into fog, leaving me to face whatever the Seattle PD had in store for me.

CHAPTER 24

JAIL

Want to know how to mind-fuck a practitioner? Put them in a room with no windows and mirrors. Trust me, the luxury of having no ghosts to talk to wears off fast. There wasn’t even a reflective metal surface in here so I could get hold of Nate and find out what the hell was going on.

Max was dead and I was in jail. I leaned my head against the white wall. “You’d think I’d have learned by now.”

I felt the telltale chill in the air. I knew who it was without opening my eyes.

“We really need to work on this whole try-not-to-get-yourself-killed situation.”

I opened my eyes. There, lounging on the bench beside me, was Gideon.

“No one wants to kill me. They just want me in jail.”

“I fail to see the difference.”

“I take it this is where you tell me I’m an idiot?”

“Oh no—I can see why Max took you on as an apprentice.” Gideon took in my cell, lingering on the bars. “You know, I’m sure
there’s some sort of sentiment I should express in situations like this, but after four hundred years it escapes me.”

I shook my head. “Do I even want to ask how you got in here?”

He shrugged. “A piece of advice, Kincaid? Stop telling them you’re innocent.”

I glanced over at my sociopathic ghost. “Why? Because the evidence is stacked against me?”

He shook his head. “No—because they already know you didn’t do it.”

“They might know I’m innocent, but one thing about the living is what they know and believe tend to be two different things.”

“For the moment they’ve all conceded you probably didn’t kill anyone. Since you can’t exactly float out of here, I assumed you’d be interested in what’s been going on.”

“Aaron’s not going to let me leave, not if he can help it,” I said.

“Right now he’s claiming you know more than you’ll admit to. He has a point.”

Silence passed between us as he let that sink in.

“The world of the living revolves around reasons. Cause and effect, loyalty, why we’re on this godforsaken planet,” he said, giving me a measured stare. “The unfair nature of life makes people uncomfortable. They’d much rather push logic to the side and find someone to blame. That’s the way it was four hundred years ago, and I’ve seen nothing to convince me anything’s changed.”

“No offence, but if you’re trying to cheer me up, you’re doing an abysmal job.”

“Because this is an area where I have an unfortunate amount of experience—loyalty, friendship, love even.” Gideon shook his head. “They all play a distant second to the quest for a scapegoat. No matter a lack of evidence, no matter what they know in their hearts to be true. At this moment they doubt you’ve done any wrong, but give them time.” Gideon glanced up at me again. “They’ll persuade themselves you’re guilty, and that’s when the fun really begins.”

Silence passed between us once again, then Gideon said, “Look, I’m not very good with condolences, but for what it’s worth, I’m sorry about Max.”

“Is he a ghost?” I asked.

Gideon shook his head. “No, Max made peace with what he was a long time ago. No need to become a ghost.”

I nodded, relieved. I didn’t think Max would appreciate being a ghost. “I’ll need those notebooks back at some point,” I said. “If I ever get out of here.”

“Stupid business, all this raising of a Jinn. There’s a reason no one’s succeeded in over five hundred years. They’re dangerous.” He looked around my cell again. “I’ve been in worse places than this.”

Yeah, right. I ran over Max’s words in my head. “Max told me the Jinn killer is someone close, someone I’d never suspect. It has to be Aaron. He’s the only one who had contact with Neon.”

“
That
one is hard to read,” Gideon conceded. “It is within the realm of possibilities he is behind this.”

I shook my head. “I still can’t believe it.”

“Think for a moment, Kincaid. Attempt to use that still-corporeal brain between your ears. What do you know that they don’t?”

“I know someone is trying to make a Jinn. Why and how, I don’t know—”

“If you ever bothered listening to anyone around you, you’d save yourself a mountain of grief.”

“
Fine
. I know that someone is trying to make a Jinn. Not Lee’s original murdering ghoul, but someone new.”

Gideon closed his eyes. “What else do you know?”

“This is pointless. Why don’t you tell me what the fuck I’m missing—”

“If I do, you won’t learn. Self-sufficiency is a virtue, Kincaid. So what else?”

“Very few people succeed and no accurate binding set exists. It’s considered incredibly dangerous by everyone, including people who are for all intents and purposes already dead.”

“Why all the dead bodies?”

“They’re experimenting, trying to get it right. They figure they’ve got the control bindings figured out. After seeing Max, I’d agree. They know their victim needs to have a high degree of affinity for Otherside—”

“I think we can assume there were two people involved, otherwise someone would have been babysitting Max. With the woman dead, there’s one left—no doubt a man. He’s confident; he thinks they’re close.” Gideon changed his line of questioning. “What is a Jinn?”

I sighed and recited what I’d read in the text and Lou’s notes. “A powerful, enslaved animated dead, one capable of great destruction and great deeds—”

“My god, have you learned nothing from the accounts of King Solomon’s Jinn? Capricious, angry, unwilling victims, tortured into an existence of servitude, hell-bent on vengeance if they could only get past those damned control bindings. The
only
thing all accounts agree on is that the Jinn turn on their masters as soon as the opportunity presents itself.” He gave me a pointed look. “They’re a monster to beat all undead monsters, including me. So what does that tell you about the killer?”

For the next minute all I heard was my own breath. “He’s desperate. A person smart enough to make it this far knows how dangerous Jinn are. He really thinks this is his only option.”

Gideon nodded. “Desperation. A sentiment you are all too familiar with. I would venture you know the killer better than any of these officers.”

“I’m not desperate.”

Gideon arched an eyebrow at me. “And I suppose you were just dying to crawl into the proverbial bed with me in exchange for bindings that let you see Otherside without killing yourself?” He snorted. “No, you agreed to my deal out of complete and utter desperation, which is what your killer feels. No one would attempt to create a Jinn without feeling that way.”

It slipped out before I could censor myself. “Did you ever try raising a Jinn?”

Gideon’s eyes glittered black as he regarded me, reminding me I shouldn’t misinterpret tentatively converging goals for friendship. “I didn’t live long enough to get that desperate. Then again, when I was alive, you didn’t need proof to torch someone, just a passing inclination. Nowadays? Who knows?”

He glanced up at the ceiling and we spent the next few minutes in silence, me with my own thoughts and Gideon with whatever the hell passed for his. Then I heard footsteps.

Gideon regarded me. “Remember what I said about them not caring that you’re innocent.” He vanished as I heard the far door to the cell wing open.

—

“Why don’t you stop treating me like the enemy?” Aaron said.

I slumped in the metal chair. It was uncomfortable and wasn’t helping my mood.

Neither was Aaron. I didn’t know what was worse, Aaron pretending he was clueless or the seemingly good cop act. I figure it was fifty-fifty.

“Kincaid, please tell me what you were doing at Max’s. I’m on your side—”

Did Aaron really think I was that stupid? Or was it for show? I turned to the one-way mirror and gave it a good long look. I knew it’d make every last one of them squirm.

“How’s Morgan doing? You know, your new practitioner? I’d have thought you would have brought her in to question me.” Okay, that was low, even for me, but I was near my breaking point.

Aaron hazarded a glance at the mirror. Subtle, but I was watching for it. Did they know she was missing? Or had someone figured out she was involved and Aaron didn’t want them to know he was connected to her? “Like I told you, she volunteered information about the case.”

“And I have a fantastic bag of magic beans for sale, if you’re interested.”

There was a rap at the door. Warning number one. Aaron was supposed to keep things professional. Let’s see how long we could go before the captain burst in.

“Maybe you can help me with a little bet I have,” I said.

Aaron sat back and crossed his arms.

“See, most people bet you dumped me to save your job. Understandable. Nate, on the other hand, figures you’re not that bad, but he wouldn’t know a normal relationship if it hit him over the head with a guitar.”

“Is there a point to this?”

“Not really, but let me finish. I figure the truth is a little more complicated. I figure you just think I’m too stupid to realize when I’m being screwed.”

Aaron’s hands clenched on the table. “I’ve tried, I’ve really tried, Kincaid. I don’t deserve this.”

Knock number two…

Aaron’s eyes narrowed as he got his composure back. “There was another murder. Same MO. Two people were seen running from the scene. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

I did my best to look surprised.

The door opened. I watched Aaron bristle as Sarah waved him out. He didn’t so much as shoot me a glance as he left.

To my surprise, it wasn’t Sarah who came next. It was Captain Marks, carrying a large folder.

I’d never seen the man in person. He was smaller and less intimidating than he seemed on TV. He sat down and watched me for a few moments.