Solitary (2 page)

«Yes, yes, I know, thank you», she interrupted with a thankful smile, going forward through the corridor.

Soon she was knocking on the office door of Shim Stonehand, the detective head of the Magic Control Department, and entering without waiting for an answer.

Shim, sitting at his desk, absently closed a folder of documents he was reading, and looked up to her.

«Manda. How come you're here?»

«I came to see how you were», she replied. «I know you've had quite a miserable time».

«I've been put back to form», he said, showing her his perfectly normal left hand. Nothing showed that just a few days ago it had been no more than a heap of charred flesh. She didn't make him notice that she didn't know enough about the events to understand his gesture.

«I've been at the clinic this morning, I thought you might be there but they told me you weren't. I understood you were already back at work.»

«Elmond's clinic?» he asked.

She nodded, vaguely surprised by that question. When speaking about clinics in Tejarak, there wasn't much need for further information usually.

«I didn't go there at all. I don't find doctor Elmond really... likeable.»

«I can't blame you. But... don't tell me you went to a temple for healing?!»

«Indeed I'm not telling you. No, there's a new clinic which started recently, in the historical center.»

«Really?»

He nodded. «I don't know why they call it a clinic at all, actually. There's only one healer taking care of everything. Probably even cleaning the place. But he's good.»

«Just one? He mustn't have a lot of work if he is able to do everything.»

«He's busy as hell. I don't know how he handles all that. But he's good. He fixed me in a second, and you should have seen what a mess I was.»

«How a mess?»

«Like someone who had a fireball explode in his hand.»

«What was that happened to you exactly?»

«A fireball exploded in my hand.»

«Ah!»

A few instants passed before Amanda started to talk again, breaking the embarrassed silence she had fallen into.

«I brought something for you», she said, starting to rummage in her bag. After a while she pulled out a rectangular box, of a brown so dark it was almost black.

«Chocolates?» he asked unconvinced.

«Dark chocolate and rum», she pointed out.

«How nice», he replied in a polite tone. They had been knowing each other since she still needed diapers, and she'd never seen him eat chocolate. Still that didn't stop her from bringing some to him at any even slightly favorable occasion.

«You could at least taste one.»

«I could», he mumbled.

«One day I'll convert you to chocolate.»

«Unless I have myself killed in the meantime.»

«What's this sudden burst of pessimism?»

«No pessimism. I'm realist. I’ve been flying on an ambulance twice in less than a month lately. If I haven’t yet been able to get myself killed, that's just because I didn't try hard enough.»

«And knowing how near you could be to your last breath, you really want to leave this world without ever tasting a delicious rum-filled dark chocolate?» she mocked him.

«No. I'm sure you'll put one in my mouth on my deathbed.»

«Now that's an idea.»

«By the way...»

«About ideas?»

«About dead.»

«What a happy morning today...»

«We collected the books in the house of that Marsten, do you know who I'm talking about?»

«All too well». How could she have forgotten the man who had summoned a succubus who had almost killed her, not before using her in ways she really hoped she could delete from her memories?

«I was reading the report just now. It seems there was no spell for summoning incubi in there.»

«No?»

«What he was trying to do, according to my experts, was summoning a demon.»

«Really?»

He nodded seriously.

«Then we're lucky he only succeeded in summoning a succubus.»

«So it seems. But that doesn't sound right. How can you try to summon a demon and end up with a succubus instead?»

«Are you asking that to me?»

«No. I asked my experts, and they say there is a connection between demons and incubi which could explain that.»

«But?»

«But I never liked conditionals. I'm trying to obtain a permit to question Marsten directly, provided the bureaucracy allows me.»

«Since there is no trial involved, they shouldn't have a problem with that, should they?» Questioning deceased witnesses, just like using seers to learn about past events, was an activity subjected to strict controls, because results obtained that way weren't deemed valid evidence in a court case. There was no way to record or publicly show what the medium or the seer had learned, and regardless of the trust that could be put in them, there was still some uncertainty. For this reason, permits to proceed with this kind of investigations were granted very rarely, not to run the risk of voiding an entire trial.

«They shouldn't, indeed. I told you I don't like conditionals. I've started to think they see problems anyway, just for the sake of it. Anyway...» he literally jumped down from the chair and turned around the desk. By then he was quite trained in going up and down chairs which were completely unfitting for his size without looking clumsy or ridiculous.

«I'm glad you came but I have to get back to work», he said. «What are your plans? Maybe we can meet later for a coffee. I'll pay.»

«I'm free for the rest of the day. I'm going to do some shopping. What about coming for dinner at my place?»

He stood silent for a while, pondering something.

«I'd like to, but I can't.»

«I didn't say I am going to cook», she giggled.

«Fine. But still it will be for another time. I think I'll go to bed as soon as I finish here.»

«Right, right, you're recovering, you can never be too serious with things like that at your age...»

She stood up and went to the door, turning her back to his smile and his simultaneous reproachful gaze. «Don't bother to show me the way out, I know it. See you soon.»

«Don't bring chocolates!» he shouted at her back while the door was closing.

In spite of his reaction to Amanda's joke, Shim had to admit that maybe he was starting to feel the weight of his accumulating years. Or that he hadn't yet fully recovered from the meeting with Wilton Grange's undead, that aside from putting him in an awful situation had forced him to use very drastic methods to get rid of them.

The second option was the most likely, actually. At one hundred and three years, he was a bit more than a kid for his people. Quite too early to start feeling the problems of the third age. Unless all the humans he had to deal with every day had started to transmit to him by osmosis some of their humanity, just like they had done for the taste for coffee. In truth, that dark and bitter drink disgusted him a little, yet he couldn't do without drinking it, especially when, just like now, his eyelids where struggling to stay up.

While going toward the coffee-maker he met Celendlinis Delmenar, the head of the first homicide squad. The elf didn't even look at him and walked by, head high, pretending not to see him at all, even though it was more than obvious that he had seen him quite well.

Shim ignored him.

The relationship between them had become even harsher further to his return to work. Although Shim usually did his best to keep a polite attitude toward his colleague, as hard as it was for anyone who didn't have the patience of a god, when he had returned to the precinct and had been informed of the news, he hadn't been able to persist in that behavior.

Celen had spent the previous week boasting about how he had dispatched the undead responsible of a massacre at the precinct – killing the coroner, doctor Crew, first, followed by twelve officers, before anyone could stop him. The truth was quite different. The elf had only had the remarkable timing of hitting the creature with a spell in the very moment it had ceased living by its own accord – if his could be called life anyway – due to the death of his creator. Actually there was no way for him, or even for Shim, to be aware of this detail. It hadn't been the statement in itself indeed – after all it could even have been made in good faith – to upset the dwarf. Quite simply, he couldn't really understand how Celen could rejoice for having killed the undead when he knew all too well that there would have been no need to kill him if the corpse had been moved – as per his explicit request – to the morgue of his department. No undead could have come to life in there.

As long as the rumors about the braggart attitude of the elf had only reached him trough other people, Shim had done his best to just ignore them, as difficult as it was.

When, however, he had accidentally seen him telling the great story of how he had defeated the killer monster single-handedly, he'd been no longer able to resist and he had spat on his face what he thought of all that, recalling the thirteen dead people that should have been on the elf's conscience.

That could have ended there, if the elf hadn't replied that he had had nothing to do with the missing transfer, and that probably Crew was to blame for delaying it. Then Shim, who had no need to know how things had gone to be absolutely sure of that, had climbed on top of a desk and knocked him out with a straight punch of which a boxing champion would have been proud, soliciting the applauses of the beholders.

From then on, or better from the moment he had come back to his senses, the elf had no longer spoken to him, leaving him to wonder why – considering the result – he hadn't punched him much earlier.

Celen went on his path, steadily intentioned not to have that meeting ruin his day.

Apparently he didn't think that having to survey the scene of a homicide was enough in itself to ruin a day. After all, that was his job.

A short time later he was on the roof of the building, where some officers had been waiting for him, ready to leave on board of their carpets. The elf sat on one of the vehicles and said they could leave.

It didn’t take them long to reach an elegant villa in the suburbs, in the eastern part of the city. The whole area had already been enclosed by the patrol who had answered the first call, so to prevent any stranger to walk in.

The carpets landed directly within the perimeter. Celen left his vehicle and moved swiftly toward the corpse, lying face down on the entry alleyway, not far from the gate facing the street. The body was that of a woman, slender and fair-skinned. Her long blond hair covered it like some kind of transparent shroud. The clothes she wore where much too thin for the season, and on her left foot she had a simple, heelless sandal. The one she used to have on her right was nearby, probably slipped away while she was falling.

An unnaturally pale bloodstain spread around her head like a halo, flooding the cracks between the stones paving the alleyway. The elf examined it with live interest.

Right then, one of the two officers who had already started to inspect the scene approached him with a small purse in his hands, probably belonging to the victim. He fished out of it a small rectangle of some rigid stuff and gave it to the elf, who examined if, frowning for a while. That explained the color of the blood, but in turn it made a whole new series of questions arise.

«Odd,» he murmured, rather to himself than for the benefit of the others, «a fairy with an identification card.»

«Evidently she had obtained citizenship», one of the agents replied, kneeling over the body. Fortunately for him, Celen was deep in his thoughts and didn't stress out how useless and obvious that unasked for information was.

The fact that a fairy, or any other creature coming from Faerie actually, asked for citizenship in any place of the prime plane was quite rare. Usually those beings were less than inclined to conform to laws that weren't theirs, as well as to mingle with mortals, if not at their own conditions, mostly inexplicable to anyone else. As far as he was concerned, Celen had never seen anyone belonging to the fairy Kingdom sporting a valid identification card.

«I thought fairies were immortal», added the same officer, challenging his luck and losing miserably.

The elf answered him with such an acrid tone that his words could have dissolved the corpse, not even leaving the bones. «They are», he hissed. «They can't die of old age, or illness. Violent death is a different thing. I thought you learned such things at academy.»

The agent seemed to become suddenly much smaller.

«No... I...» For a second he was about to tell him that maybe courses of that kind where planned for lab technicians, and that he didn't belong to the crime scene investigation unit, being just a simple patrol agent. That, however, should have already been clear by his uniform, and pointing it out would probably make the elf even sourer.

The elf solved his problem by starting to ignore his very existence completely and moving to one of the small columns the gate was hinged to.