Bewitched, Blooded and Bewildered (7 page)

It was late afternoon, and what had started as a bright, cold day was turning into a stormy, cold day. We parked the car on the street because Marie’s motorcycle was in the driveway—she rode a Harley, and Lex hated it. I think she did it to annoy him, but she’d need to trade up for something a bit tougher very soon because it wouldn’t survive an Illinois winter. As we walked up to the house, I wondered what the neighbors would think, but at least Lex and I were dressed like normal people at the moment, thanks to our morning meeting with the real estate agent.

Marie met us at the door and ushered us inside. The smell of blood hit us the moment we entered. I didn’t see any in the empty kitchen, but there had to be a lot of it, and close.

“Who called you in?” Lex asked.

“Friends of the family. It’s the mom’s week to carpool, and she never showed this morning,” Marie explained.

“Is this the summoner family you were talking about?” I asked.

“No. New case. Librarians.”

I cursed, loud and long, and Marie quirked a pink brow at me. The last thing we needed was for the hunters to snatch more librarians. And this was two families in two days. Talk about escalation.

“Are the neighbors likely to call the cops on us with your bike in the driveway?” I asked.

“It shouldn’t be a problem. I put an unnoticing ward around the place when I got here. It’ll keep the straights out of our hair for now. Walk with me,” Marie said to Lex.

“Sure. You wait here,” he said to me, and I nodded numbly.

The guardians—or ex-guardian in Lex’s case—went off to investigate the house, and I stood in the kitchen. I shoved my hands into my pockets and fought the urge to pick at things. Aside from the ominous smell of blood, everything looked normal. I inched forward and peeked around the corner into the living room. Still no blood, but the sliding-glass doors leading to the backyard were open. I spotted a massive wooden swing set, complete with a slide and a tower.

I jumped when my cell phone buzzed. Harrison again. This time I answered.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, voice laced with concern.

“Do you even fucking know what the hunters just did?” I snapped. “They grabbed two families! Two! I thought you said you were making progress with the hunter problem.”

“Catherine, please calm down. We
are
making progress—”

“There is an empty high chair in the other room. A
high chair
, Harrison. These people snatched a
baby
. That’s getting worse, not better.”

“I am sorry to hear that. Where are you?”

I knew the man was holding on to his patience with both hands, which only provoked me more. Having Harrison and his endless resources helping solve the hunter problem was the only good reason I could give for why he shouldn’t bite the dust, and he wasn’t frickin’ helping. Maybe I should just let Lex and Portia whack him.

“I have no idea where we are. Somewhere in Des Plaines, with Marie.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“Why? What the fuck are you going to do? Send in the crime-scene clean-up crew? Why are you even calling me?”

“Because I sensed that you were upset.”

“Yeah right, there was a great disturbance in the Force. Unless you can send your undead posse out to rescue these poor kids, you’re wasting my time.”

“Well I can’t help if I don’t—” he started, but then I hung up on him. The conversation was going nowhere, and besides, the only way I could tell him where we were was to go ask Marie for the address again, and then she and Lex would want to know why I needed it. Lex was twitchy enough about Zach as it was at the moment.

I turned my phone off, shoved it into my pocket, and went in search of Marie and Lex. I found them in the baby’s room, standing over the body of what I assumed was the mother of the family. The smell of blood was strongest here, and I inhaled a lungful of it when I gasped in horror.

“I told you to stay in the kitchen,” Lex said.

“What happened to her?” I asked.

The jacket of the woman’s cotton-candy-pink sweat suit was stained burgundy across her chest. Brown eyes stared sightlessly up at the ceiling, widened forever in an expression of terror. It reminded me a bit too much of my mother’s eyes when I’d found her body after her murder, though my mom had been drained of her blood. This scene was filled with the pools of blood that my mother’s death lacked.

“She was shot. Took four in the chest,” Marie explained.

“The baby?” I asked, afraid to look in the direction of the powder-blue crib.

“Not here. I think she was trying to protect him, so they took her out rather than subdue her,” she said.

“And there’s no way to track them?” I asked.

“Straights? No. If they were other magicians, maybe, but our tracking spells rely on having magic to track. It’s part of the reason why we’re having such a hard time locating these bastards.” Marie ran a hand through her short, pink hair. “I’ll have to notify the librarian council.”

“Too bad you can’t hire a bloodhound,” I said sourly. Then I paused. “Wait, your tracking spells are guardian magic, right?”

“Right,” she replied.

“What about a seer?” I asked.

“There aren’t any in the States that I know of,” Lex said.

“But Emily’s a seer,” I countered.

He shook his head. “She was a seer, now she’s…something else.”

“No, she’s still a seer because she still has visions. Has anyone asked her to take a look at one of these scenes?” I peered at the guardians, and from their sheepish expressions I assumed that they hadn’t. “This is a librarian family, right?”

“Yes…why, what are you—?” Lex began as I whipped out my cell phone and turned it back on. I had Emily in my Contacts list, and I called her home number first.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Emily, it’s Catherine Duquesne. Do you have a minute?” I asked.

“Of course I do. Is something wrong?”

I filled her in on the gruesome situation as quickly as I could, while Marie and Lex both frowned at me. I wondered if I was insulting their pride by calling in extra help. Or if I was confirming my journey to the dark side by calling in undead help, but Emily wasn’t a necromancer. And she wasn’t a chronicler. She didn’t answer to either of them, so it should be fine to call her in. I knew the Order of St. Jerome wouldn’t argue with investigating the murder/kidnapping of a librarian family, considering that the Order was made up of living and undead librarians. Plus I couldn’t feel guilty about asking for her help, because Emily was one of the nicest people I’d ever met. Calling in Zach would cause drama on several levels. Emily wouldn’t.

“Do you think you’d be able to read anything if you came here? I’m sorry for asking this, because it’s…pretty bad, but if we can learn anything about who took the family, we have a better shot at finding them. I mean, the clock’s ticking, right? Most murders are solved in the first forty-eight hours or some-such?” I asked, looking to Marie for confirmation, and she nodded.

“I am willing to try. Can you give me directions?” Emily asked.

“I can’t. Marie can…one second.” I held the phone out to my sister-in-law, and she took it. She dutifully recited streets and roads and landmarks, and I had no idea how she managed it. Marie was new to the area, and she knew it better than I did. Then again, I don’t come out this way very often—more now that I had access to a car again, but not enough to know what streets go where in which suburb. Maybe guardians have a natural sense for directions. Or maybe the poor girl stayed up late studying maps of the Chicagoland area.

“They’ll be here in about forty-five minutes,” Marie said after she ended the call and handed me the phone. “We’ll keep looking around in the meantime.”

“Do you think the hunters might come back?” I asked.

“Probably not. They’ve been hitting each place only once,” Lex said.

“But how long will they keep that up? Sooner or later they’ll figure out to stay and catch the investigators too. Or plant bugs. You don’t think there are tiny hunter microphones around here, do you?” I glanced around the room, looking for pinhole cameras or suspicious places to hide a microphone.

“Well, if you two will get out of my hair, I’ll check,” Marie said.

She shooed us out of the room, and I took one last glance at the body of the poor librarian mother. She’d died defending her child, to no avail. As Lex and I walked down the hallway to return to the kitchen, I paused and looked at the family photos mounted on the wall. It was all disturbingly normal—a boy, a girl, the parents, grandparents, and now pictures of the new baby. Birthday parties, weddings, even a first communion. Christian magicians were rare, but not unheard of. Magicians were almost all some flavor of pagan, worshipping some aspect of the Lord and Lady.

“Are you okay?” Lex asked, his voice low.

“No. Not at all,” I said. “Look at this. Even if they live, they’ll never be the same. You don’t get over something like this.” He didn’t reply, and instead he drew me close to him and hugged me. Closing my eyes, I leaned into his comfort. “How are we supposed to fight them? They’re picking us off left and right.”

“We’ll figure something out. These aren’t the first hunters we’ve faced.”

“They’ve got the best guns though.”

The last time I knew of where we were being hunted on such a large scale was during the Burning Times, when witch hunting was popular for a few centuries. The straights killed anyone who looked at them funny—including a boatload of innocent people who had no magic whatsoever. They even printed wacky guides to finding and identifying witches, like the
Malleus Maleficarum.
I’d like to think that humanity had come a long way since then.

Guess I was wrong.

Emily arrived with her husband Michael in tow. As I understood it, Mr. and Mrs. Michael Black had been married for over a century. (If fifty was the golden anniversary, I wondered what one hundred was? Mithril?) They were both dressed impeccably in what I’d consider formal attire—though I’m the sort who wears “good” jeans to holiday events—and I wondered if they were perfect all the time. An eternity of being neatly pressed and freshly washed.

“I feel I must warn you that I’m not certain how much I will be able to find. My abilities can be very fickle,” Emily apologized.

“That’s fine. We’re grateful for your help,” I assured her. Well, I was grateful. I assumed Lex and Marie were as well. Marie seemed to play well with others, so I was fairly certain she wouldn’t go all territorial on us and start spouting things about “chain of command” or “jurisdiction”.

“I don’t believe we have met this family. Have we, darling?” Emily asked Michael.

“No, we haven’t,” he confirmed.

She nodded, her carefully styled bun bobbing up and down. Emily handed her handbag to her husband, and then she slowly walked into the living room. She held her hands out to her sides as though wading through the air itself. Shaking her head, she returned to the kitchen and ran the tips of her fingers over the island in the center of the room.

“Nothing here either,” she said. Her voice was low, almost a whisper, though it was loud in the strained silence of the room.

Emily’s eyes were somewhat unfocused as she walked past us, toward the front door. She paused for a moment, frowning in my direction, and I glanced down at my shirt as though I expected to find a clump of pet hair or a smear of dog drool. When I didn’t find anything immediately wrong with me, I glanced back at her, and now she stood in front of the door. She probably hadn’t been looking at me, but
through
me.

“It was night. The men came in through here. Four of them. Armed with large guns…rifles perhaps. I don’t know much about modern guns. Their energy is very cold, very focused. They see a mission, not a family. Not a home. They feel no remorse for what they are about to do.” Emily shook her head, her tone mournful, but then she turned and began walking toward the dining room and the bedrooms past it.

Emily paused in the doorway to the baby’s room. “Oh dear,” she breathed. Michael took a step toward her, but she waved him away. She bent down, careful to keep the toes of her black pumps out of the blood. Her hands hovered over the body, and then she closed the woman’s eyes.

“She was up late with the baby. He was fussing, and she was trying to soothe him. She heard the footsteps in the hall and knew something was wrong, and she put the baby in the crib. When they came through the door, she tried to fight them with fire…the fire in her blood.”

I turned to Marie. “Faerie-blooded,” she confirmed.

Ah. That was why she’d called me and Lex in. She was one of ours.

“They shot her, as you can see,” Emily said. “They were more interested in the children than in the parents.”

I shuddered, sick to my stomach. I fought the sensation back, determined to see this through. She rose and returned to the hallway, headed for the master bedroom. When she stepped through the door, she stopped with a horrified expression.

“It’s cold in here,” she whispered. Emily shivered, and Michael tried to touch her shoulder, but she shied away. “Not yet… There was someone else here.”

“The husband?” Marie asked.

“Yes, he slept, but this presence is wrong. It’s not human nor magician.”