“Thank you,” she said.
“Do you mind if we catch up a little later today?” I asked her.
“That’s fine,” she said.
To Stotts, I said, “I was going to contact you about Nola anyway.” Wait, that didn’t sound good.
“Oh?” Stotts said.
“Nola has been working to get custody of Cody Miller.”
“The Hand?”
I frowned. “You know him?”
He took a drink of coffee before answering. “I know his case.” And his gaze said more than his words. He had probably been a part of that case. After all, Stotts dealt with all the magical crime in the city. And Cody, Nola had told me, had once been involved with some shady characters and forgery. But if Nola had made her mind up to look after him, nothing and no one would get in her way.
“She’s working to get him out on her farm,” I said.
Stotts looked over at Nola. “Isn’t he in the state hospital?”
“My farm is in Burns,” she said. “No magic for miles. We’re completely off the grid.”
Stotts grunted. “And you decided to put it upon yourself to do this because . . . ?”
“Because,” Nola said, “I do not give up on the people I care about. And I think Cody is a good young man who should have the chance to live a good life without the push and pull of magic, or the people who would use him for it.”
Oh, that did it. If Stotts had been looking at her with barely disguised interest before, he gave her a short but clear look of admiration.
“I don’t hear that every day,” he said, switching admiration for the more standard police skepticism. “Not in my line of work.”
Nola couldn’t hide it. She beamed. What was it with these two? They were getting along better than ice cream and spoons.
“What I was saying,” I said, “is Nola needs some help making sure she contacts the right people who can see that Cody can be released into her care.”
“Were you running into trouble with that?” he asked.
“Not at first. But about two weeks ago, I suddenly stopped hearing from anyone. I’ve mailed, called, e-mailed. I was told there was something about additional psychological testing needed. Is that something you could help me with?”
“I could at least look into it for you. Find out where they’re at in the process. How long are you going to be in town?”
“I could stay awhile. A few weeks, if I need to. I wasn’t sure how long this would take, so I have someone looking after the farm and animals for me.”
“Your husband?” he asked over the top of his coffee cup.
“No.” The light in her dimmed a little, like it always did when she spoke of John. “He’s been gone for several years now.” She tried to smile the light back up, but any fool could see the old pain in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Stotts said. “I lost my wife, Aryanna, just a year ago.”
Me? I felt like an idiot. And a jerk. A jerkiot. I didn’t know his wife was dead. Or maybe divorced? I glanced up at him. From the look in his eyes, it wasn’t divorce. Well, hells. I’d called that wrong.
“I’m sorry,” Nola said. Her gaze shifted to the ring on his left hand. She had noticed it, just like me, but unlike me, she had given him the benefit of the doubt.
“I would really appreciate any help you could offer to Cody and me,” she said. “I thought I’d go downtown today and see who I could talk to. Would you have time to meet with me?”
“I should. Well.” He stopped, like he suddenly remembered there was someone else in the room with them—me. “If you don’t think the job will take too long.”
“You haven’t told me what the job is,” I said.
“I’d rather discuss it with you in private. . . .”
Nola caught the hint and stood. “Let me clean up the dishes. You two take your time. There’s coffee in the carafe, if you want. I’ll be in the kitchen.”
She walked off, and I finished my cake. I watched Stotts out of the corner of my eye.
“You like her,” I said, pressing the moist crumbs on the plate together with the tines of my fork.
He held his breath for a second, the only indication of strong emotion I could feel off him.
“I don’t really know her,” he said, “yet.” Calm, cool, coplike.
“She’s my best friend,” I said.
“I got that.”
“And I will go to no ends to keep her safe. From anything. And anyone.” It came out cold. Matter-of-fact. A lot like my father. Except it was all me.
“Do you really think she needs your protection?”
I stuck the fork in my mouth and pulled the cake crumbs off with my teeth. “In this city? Yes.”
He made a sound in the back of his throat. At least on that point, he and I agreed.
“What do you want me to Hound?”
“I’ll take you there and you can see for yourself.”
“Illusion?” I asked. “Dead body?” I shuddered, really hoping it wasn’t a dead body. “Illegal Offload?”
He just gave me a level stare. That was the problem with cops, especially the ones who dealt with magical crimes. They wouldn’t tell you a damn thing for fear of contaminating your opinion before you Hounded the spell.
“Right,” I said. “So how long do we have before whatever it is fades?”
He shifted in his chair and rubbed his palms over his slacks. “I’d like to get to it as soon as possible.”
“Then let’s go.” He stood and so did I. We were of a height. I headed across the living room.
“What if I hadn’t been available?” I asked.
“I would have asked someone else to Hound it.”
“Do you keep a list?”
“Usually Pike—” He stopped, probably aware that Pike had been my friend and he was very recently dead.
I looked over my shoulder at him. “What about him?” It came out relaxed and easy. Not at all how I was feeling inside. Every time I heard Pike’s name, it felt like there was a fist behind it. I wondered if that would ever fade.
“Pike used to keep me up-to-date on which Hounds were available for jobs. Even though he took most of the jobs himself.”
I figured that’s what Pike had been doing all those years. Hounds had always worked for the police, the nonmagical police, but I’d just heard about Stotts’ particular branch of magic law enforcement this month.
It was true that magic cannot be used in high-stress emotions, so people generally believed it wasn’t that common to find magic at crime scenes. But I had seen enough with my own eyes and heard enough from other Hounds, and Zayvion, to know there was more dirty magic being used in this city than any sane person would feel comfortable knowing about.
And it was Stotts’ job to make sure any sane person didn’t have to worry about it.
Maybe it was my job to do that now too.
My only problem suggesting other Hounds work with Stotts was that he was cursed.
And the last thing I needed right now was a curse. On me or on the Hounds I had sworn to look after.
I pulled my coat off the back of the door. There was a half wall separating the kitchen from the entry hall. Nola, true to her word, was at the sink, washing dishes.
“Nola?”
She glanced over, caught sight of me shrugging into my heavy coat. She turned off the water and dried her soapy hands on the kitchen towel she’d wrapped around her waist in a double V. She even made a dish towel look cute.
“I’m going to Hound a job. I’ll try to be back in a few hours. Before one o’clock, for sure. If you need me . . .” I was going to tell her to call my cell, but it had died over a week ago and I hadn’t gotten a new one to replace it yet.
Stotts picked up where I left off. “You can call me. Here’s my number.” He walked around the edge of the half wall and stood a little closer to her than I thought absolutely necessary. He handed her his card.
Smooth.
Nola took it, looked it over, and tucked it in her back pocket. “Thank you. I will.”
I made some noise opening the door.
I held the door open for Stotts so he could walk through, which he did.
“Bye, Nola,” I said. “Lock the door behind me, okay?”
“I will. Allie?”
“Yes?”
“Be safe.”
I gave her my best invincible smile. “Where’s the fun in that?”
Chapter Five
The fun in being safe was that it didn’t hurt.
Driving over to the job Stotts wanted me to Hound had been a mostly comfortable-silence sort of thing. He didn’t dare ask me anything about Nola—he probably knew I was not about to give up my best friend’s secrets. And I couldn’t ask him anything about the job without getting more than a noncommittal grunt out of him.
So I pulled my journal out of my coat pocket and caught up on the last day or so of things that had happened. Even with my quick note-taking ability, I filled three pages, covering my dad’s funeral, Pike’s wake with the Hounds, my dad in my head, Nola showing up, and eventually the date with Zayvion. I noted the Necromorph in the alley and my nightmare with Dad too.
Stotts didn’t ask me what I was doing. He just drove and kept his mouth shut. Maybe he thought I was taking notes for the Hounding job.
The rhythmic sway of the rosary on his rearview mirror seemed less ominous in the daylight, although the chatter and static from the police radio set in the dash reminded me of just how serious working with Stotts could be.
He turned a corner, stopped at a light. “I heard your father’s body was buried yesterday,” he said.
Wow. Now that was a conversation starter.
“He . . . it . . . yeah,” I said, giving up on how to classify the dead-undead body of the man still very much alive in my head and dreams.
“Private ceremony?” he asked.
“The news channels weren’t invited.”
“Were there a lot of people there? His friends, business acquaintances? Wives?”
It sounded like a fairly innocent question. I hadn’t been there to see my dad buried the first time. From what Nola had told me, it was a pretty big event. Flowers, lots of people, the media, all his ex-wives except for my mother, in attendance.
The second, final burial had been quite a different thing. No flowers, no weeping widows except for Mrs. Beckstrom the Last—Violet. Everyone else seemed to be a part of his other, hidden life. Members of the Authority, including people who were a part of his public life and Beckstrom Enterprises. And all of them seemed to exhibit something between grim satisfaction and outright pleasure to see him thrown in a hole and covered with dirt.
And now that I thought about it, it was a little strange that the media had not picked up on the funeral. At all. Nothing on the news about the body being stolen in the first place, nothing about him being reburied. The only people in the city who seemed to be aware of it happening were the people who were there, graveside.
And, apparently, Detective Stotts.
Wasn’t that interesting?
“How did you know there was a burial? I didn’t see you or any of the police there.”
“It wasn’t a secret,” he said. “I was at the warehouse. I saw your father’s body there, watched the coroners take it away. I wasn’t invited to the burial, but it’s not a big stretch to think his body would be laid to rest.”
Oh, right, he’d been at the warehouse. I’d forgotten most of what had happened there—thanks to magic eating through my memories.
“I just wondered if you were alone,” he said.
“I didn’t know most of the people at the burial,” I said, which was true. “Violet was there. I think some of the people who worked for him—for Beckstrom Enterprises—were there.”
“People who work for you, now, right?”
And that was one of the questions I’d been trying not to think about for days. I was the heir to the Beckstrom fortune, which meant I had the final say about who was going to run the business and what was going to be done with the money. I was under no illusion that my father had run a clean operation. As far as I was concerned, that money had blood all over it.
“I guess,” I said.
I’d been thinking about setting up a charity. And maybe setting up a medical fund for the Hounds. It bugged me that I wanted to use my father’s money after pushing it away all of these years.
The flutter at the back of my eyes started up again, sparking little pricks of pain.
I so did not want to know his opinion on this. If I wanted to use his dirty money for a good cause, I would. Even though I’d been telling my father to stick that money up his assets for my entire adult life.
The flutter grew stronger, and I pressed at one temple.
I took a moment to envision disbanding his company. Lobbing a financial bomb at it and watching it sink for good.