Veiled Magic (3 page)

“Look,” she said to the ghost, “I don't know what you're talking about. It is obviously important to you, whatever it is, but I don't know how to help you. You need to trust me when I tell you, the painting will be fine. Someone else will finish restoring it once the trial is over and it is released from evidence. In the meanwhile, it is time for you to move on.”

The spirit let out a soul-searing shriek. “Noooooo. Ricky knows. Ricky will help.” His voice petered out into muttered babbling, mixed with what sounded like a frustrated sob. Donata knew exactly how he felt.

“Mr. Farmingham, I'm sorry, really I am, but I don't know anyone named Ricky. I have to go now.” She got up and walked toward her altar and her magical supplies. “And so do you. The painting will be safe. Whoever ‘they' are, they won't be able to get it. You need to let it go and move on. The painting isn't your problem anymore.”

With practiced movements, she lit the sage stick and started to waft it around. As she concentrated on clearing the space, the ghost grew thinner and more transparent. Satisfied that he was safely on his way, she continued with the minor banishing ritual she used to help particularly stubborn spirits start on the next leg of their journey.

Donata squinted as a bit of smoke blew into her eyes. She liked being able to help ghosts, but sometimes they were just too confused. She could definitely sympathize with that.

“That's it,” Donata said, handing the recording to the Chief. “Sorry he didn't know the name of the guy who commissioned the robbery.”

The Chief gave her a satisfied look and tucked the tiny tape away in a pocket of his uniform. “What you got is fine,” he grunted. “More than I expected. No way Franco can weasel out of this one, no matter how expensive his lawyer is.”

Donata thought he was pleased with her, although with the Chief, it was always hard to tell. “So, am I done here?”

The big man puffed out a breath that ruffled his mustache. “In a hurry to get back to the office where things aren't so messy, Santori?” He gave her a measured look.

Donata shook her head. “Not at all, Chief. Just figured I'd get a head start on the paperwork, if you didn't need me for anything else here.”

“Huh.” He handed her the painting that had caused all the fuss. “Fine. Then you can take this back to the lockup with you—save me carting it over later.”

“Excuse me!” a high-pitched voice said indignantly. “You can't take that painting! It's valuable museum property. You might damage it!”

George Turnbull, the museum's curator, scurried over from the corner where he'd been hovering by the officer interviewing the security guard. A stout man with bristly sideburns who bore a startling resemblance to a muskrat, Turnbull had been getting underfoot since he'd arrived there.

Chief O'Malley turned on one heel with surprising grace for such a big man and put on a meticulously polite face for the curator. Donata tried not to smile. Her boss was notorious for getting around pompous bigwigs without ever letting them realize they'd been “handled.”

“Mr. Turnbull,” the Chief said.

“
Doctor
Turnbull,” the curator corrected.

“Of course. My mistake.” Chief O'Malley inclined his head courteously. “About the painting—”

“You can't possibly take the painting,” Turnbull said, full lips pursed. “We've only just acquired it. It's a valuable piece, you know.”

Donata and the Chief both looked at the painting dubiously.

“I'm sure it is,” the Chief agreed. “And I assure you, the police will take proper care of it, once it is entered into evidence. I'm afraid that's the law in cases such as this.”

The curator huffed. “Impossible. The insurance paperwork alone—”

“I understand completely,” said the Chief. “Although I expect that the insurance company would be more upset if the people trying to get their hands on it came back and ruined other more expensive artwork in the process.” He paused, and
Donata struggled to keep her expression from disintegrating.

“Wait. You think the men responsible for this will send someone else to steal the painting?” Turnbull's face turned red with alarm. “Even after the first thief died?”

The Chief nodded solemnly. “Oh, almost certainly. A dead man more or less means nothing to those kinds of people.” He smiled pleasantly. “Of course, if you insist on keeping the painting—”

The curator shook his head rapidly, making his bewhiskered jowls quiver. “No, no, Chief O'Malley. I quite see your point. Obviously, the station is the safest place for the painting.” He hesitated, obviously caught between fear and duty. “Just let me wrap it up for you in archival paper and put it in a crate. It ought to be safe enough to store that way, even if you don't have the proper temperature controls.” He walked away muttering, clearly relieved to have found a compromise that took the painting off his hands.

Donata glanced sideways at her boss. “Nicely done, sir.”

He grunted. “Just take the damn thing down to the station and get it stowed away in the evidence lockers. If we're lucky, we'll never have to see it again.”

Behind them, a stack of paperwork slid onto the floor. Donata looked around for an open window that might have created a breeze, but there wasn't one in a museum, of course. She bent down to replace it and almost tripped over the untied laces of her shoes.
For the goddess's sake
. She hated to admit it, but she'd almost be relieved to be back in her comfortable if dingy basement office. The real world was just too damn untidy.

*  *  *

“Sign here. Initial here. And here.”

She sighed as the attendant at the evidence lockers pushed yet another piece of paperwork in her direction.

“And here.” One ink-stained finger pointed at a blank space on the intake form. “Legibly, please.”

Donata put her signature at the bottom of the last sheet and handed the painting over to the officer behind the counter. “There you go. It's all yours.” She turned to leave.

“Hey, not so fast,” the attendant said indignantly. He pushed the painting back in her direction. “Haven't you ever brought in evidence before?”

She thought about reminding him that she usually spent her days in a room two hallways down, talking to dead people, but she figured he'd like her better if she didn't.

“Sorry, not my usual area,” she said. She tried aiming a smile at him instead. “What am I missing?”

The officer, a gangly twenty-year-old trying to look thirty, smiled back at her and snuck a look at her chest. Donata tried not to sigh again.

“The painting?”

He blinked, refocusing on her face. “Oh, right. Ya gotta take it out of the wrappings so we can both sign off on the
description. Otherwise there could be anything in there, right?” He looked down again.

“Oh, right.” She wondered if he'd notice if she smacked him upside the head with the crate the painting was packed in, but since she'd decided she might want to keep her job after all, she restrained herself. Instead, she slid the painting out onto the counter.

“Huh.” The attendant didn't look too impressed. “So, um, somebody tried to steal that?”

Donata snorted. “Hard to believe, isn't it?” She wrote on the description page:
Gothic landscape with six people, artist Caspar David Friedrich
—then handed the paper to the officer. “Will that do for you?”

He shrugged. “Gothic, huh. Sure, I guess so.” He turned the painting to get a better look and noticed the small area near the bottom where the restorer had started working. “Hey—we better not get blamed for this! It was messed up before it got here.” He shoved it over the counter at her and she had to grab it before it fell on the floor. “You gotta write down that it had that spot on it too . . .” The attendant stuttered to a halt. “Hey, Officer Santori? You okay? You don't look so good.”

Donata barely heard him, as her hand locked onto the painting at the section where the underlying pigment had been revealed by the restorer's work. Her fingers tingled, sending electric jolts of energy up her arm and into her chest. The world before her blurred, the scrawny, pimpled youth replaced by a swirling image of a long wooden table with robed men sitting down one side and a variety of creatures seated on the other.

The vision made no sense to her, but in the back of her mind, it somehow reminded her of a story her grandmother used to tell her when she was small. She couldn't remember the story itself, only the feeling of fear, and the nightmares that invariably followed. She shuddered at the memory, and the painting slipped out of her grasp and onto the counter with a clatter.

The attendant gaped at her. “You okay?” He gingerly put the painting back into its wrappings and shoved it into the crate. “You got kinda spacey there for a minute.”

Donata shook her head to clear it and forced herself to smile in his general direction. “Sure, I'm fine.” She shrugged. “Probably the aftereffects of two corpses and no breakfast.”

The young man nodded sagely, as though he spent his days in the field instead of in an evidence room. “Oh, yeah, sure. That'll happen.” He collected his paperwork and tucked the crate under one arm. “You go get something to eat in the canteen—that'll make you feel better.”

Somehow Donata doubted that eating in the precinct cafeteria could improve anyone's health, but she wasn't about to stand around and argue about it. Something told her she had more important things to do. Like maybe research what the heck a pentimento was.

*  *  *

Donata shoved her front door shut with one foot and walked through the tiny living room to plop her groceries down on the counter in her equally tiny kitchen. She could have gotten a bigger place, something with a little more light and walls that
weren't painted gunmetal gray, but this apartment was close to work and didn't take much in the way of upkeep. She kept meaning to put something cheerful up on the walls, but never seemed to get around to it.

Besides, the horrified expressions on the faces of her mother and two older sisters the first time they came over—and their subsequent refusal to visit—almost made it worth living in a stark, gloomy apartment on the wrong side of town. Not everybody wants to live in some swanky high-rise, after all. She loved her family, and she knew they loved her, but these days, they didn't have much in common. They lived in two different worlds, in more ways than one. The fact that she was helping people mattered a lot more to her than where she lived.

Anyway, it wasn't as though she did a lot of entertaining.

She changed out of her uniform into jeans and a well-worn sweatshirt, hanging her shoulder holster on its hook by the door. Its presence always made her feel more like a real cop, even if she never got to use it in the pursuit of her duties.

An urgent meow reminded her that dinner was late, and she put down a dish of wet food for her gray cat Grimalkin while simultaneously rooting around under the counter for her wok. Cats don't care about excuses like excursions to museums and weird-ass visions—they just want to be fed now, thank you very much.

Donata's stomach grumbled in chorus with the cat's munching, reminding her that it would like to be fed too. She arranged the ingredients for a Chinese stir-fry on the counter and started chopping vegetables and throwing things in the wok. But she must have been more tired than she'd realized after her unusual day because she kept misplacing utensils and knocking things over.

Across the kitchen, Grimalkin lifted his head and glared with green eyes at the top of the stove. A low growl emanated from his sleek form.

“Seriously, Grim,” Donata scolded, “you've got wet food. You don't need my chicken too.”

The cat stalked out of the kitchen, tail raised high.

“Unbelievable,” she said to herself, somehow spilling peanut sauce all over the stovetop. “My own familiar won't even have dinner with me. I really need to work on my social life.” She turned to tempt the cat back with a piece of chicken and out of the corner of her eye saw a bowl sliding slowly toward the edge of the counter.

“Ha!” she said, grabbing the bowl before it could go over the edge. “That's enough of that!” She stood back and glared at the counter near where the dish had been, folding her arms over her chest. “Come on—show yourself.”

Nothing happened, and for a moment she thought she'd been imagining things. Then Grimalkin walked back into the kitchen and hissed again before sitting down next to her feet.

“Aha. I knew it!” Donata narrowed her eyes. “You'd better come out on your own, buddy. You
really
don't want me to go get my broom.”

A long-suffering sigh sounded from the top of the counter, and a figure appeared where a moment ago there had been empty space. It looked like a small, perfectly shaped man, about three feet tall, with a long brown beard, brown overalls, and an indignant look on his face. He squinted in the bright lights of the kitchen.

“No need to get nasty, missus,” the little man said, putting his hands on his hips. “I wasn't bothering you.” He looked around at the mess. “Much.”

“Right,” Donata replied. “Like screwing with my cooking isn't bothering me.”

He shrugged. “It hardly looks like a four-course feast.” He peered at her with his eyes screwed up. “You look more Italian than Chinese—shouldn't you be making spaghetti or something?”

“I hate tomatoes,” she said shortly. “Not that it's any of your business.” She looked back at him evenly. “So, what are you? Gnome? Leprechaun?”

The little man gave an indignant snort. “Hardly. I'm a Kobold, of course. Don't tell me you've never seen a Kobold before.” He hopped down off the counter, helping himself to a carrot as he went.

Donata cursed to herself. There were five major Paranormal races: Witches, Dragons, Fae, Ghouls, and Ulfhednar. Of those, only the Witches were living openly among Humans. But in addition, there were the so-called “minor races”—too many of them to count. Kobolds were among the more volatile of the various “little people.” Originally Earth spirits who lived underground, they moved into the cities when Humans overran their lands.

Kobolds tended to be invisible unless they chose otherwise, and mostly stuck to the darker, deeper spaces like subways and basements. Although they were drawn to Humans, they rarely let themselves be seen. The good news was, they were mostly harmless. If they liked you, they could be quite helpful: finding lost objects and cleaning the house. Of course, if they didn't like you . . . well, her mangled, half-cooked dinner was evidence enough of what happened then.

The bad news was, once one decided to attach itself to you, there wasn't much you could do about it. They didn't take well to efforts to remove them and could become quite the nuisance when peeved. Donata eyed the Kobold standing in front of her and resolved to get rid of him as quickly as possible—before he decided to move in for good. This apartment wasn't big enough for any roommate, much less a Kobold.

“What do you want?” she asked. “I haven't done anything to you that would justify you turning my kitchen into a disaster area.”