“He’d like to identify them. Unfortunately he doesn’t care for the company I keep,” I said, and her lips formed a perfect O, but she didn’t look surprised. Since she knew the man, she surely knew his stance on the fae. I didn’t ask whether she thought Corrie had disapproved of my company due to the fact that I lived in a fae’s house or because I’d partnered with an FIB agent—the fae-phobic geezer had plenty of reasons not to trust me—but as long as she didn’t guess my heritage, I didn’t care. “Since you’ve worked with Corrie before . . .” I trailed off, and Lusa’s glossed lips stretched in a slow smile.
“I like the way you think, Craft. I suppose you’l want to know what Dr. Corrie and I turn up on the runes?” she asked, but obviously she anticipated that I’d agree because she didn’t wait for me to answer before saying, “So, we’ve got a tear into the Aetheric surrounded by odd runes, and a magical construct built from the same runes, that, when magical construct built from the same runes, that, when dispel ed, opened a hole into the Aetheric.”
Oh, I liked her theory—I didn’t think it was right, as none of the ravens Caleb, Falin, and the col ectors destroyed had torn reality, but I wasn’t going to correct her. After al , if she ran with that theory for her story, the attention for the holes would shift off me.
Lusa squinted, pul ing the paper closer to her face.
“These are incomplete, right?”
“I left the upper left-hand corner unconnected.”
“Perfect.” She folded the page in half. “Can I keep this?”
I nodded. I could always draw another copy. “You were going to tel me how you found the tear.”
“Yeah.” She tucked away the page of runes. “Fol ow me,”
she said, and careful y picked her footing as she and her designer shoes led me closer to the bridge.
We slid around the support pil ar that the fence butted up against, and then Lusa ducked under the bridge, her ankles wobbling as stones skipped down the steep incline.
Somewhere in the shadows under the bridge the river rushed by with an endless murmur. She grabbed one of the diagonal support beams to steady herself and then pointed beyond the beam.
“What do you see?”
I squinted, searching for what she was pointing at, but al I saw was inky darkness. “Nothing. Grave-sight has burned out my night vision.”
“Oh. I’d heard wyrd witches had trouble with their abilities burning out their senses, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. Wel , what you aren’t seeing is a tent city established by the homeless. I was looking into possible victims for the Sionan floodplain foot murders. That many people couldn’t have gone missing without anyone noticing, but there hasn’t been an abnormal rise in missing-persons reports. It didn’t add up.”
I nodded. I knew al this from what John had told me. She smiled and ran a hand through her brown hair, brushing it smiled and ran a hand through her brown hair, brushing it back from her face. “I went looking for people who wouldn’t be missed, and one of my searches turned up the fact that a homeless man who spent the night in jail for public intoxication seven days ago found al of his buddies missing when he was released the next morning. He reported it to the cops, but transient people disappear a lot.
No one looked into it. “
No one but a reporter on the trail of a story.
“When I interviewed Eddie, the homeless man, he swore everyone had to be dead. That they couldn’t have just relocated because they’d left everything behind: clothes, shoes, possessions—when you don’t have anything you can’t afford to abandon anything. I came out here to fol ow up. Stumbling over the tear was a very happy accident, though if you quote me on that I’l deny saying it.”
As she spoke, a car drove across the bridge and I jumped as a nearly deafening roar rumbled under the structure. The sound echoed against the supports, the bank, the columns, the water, and back again, like rol ing thunder.
Thunder.
Thundering.
My head snapped up. From underneath a bridge, a bridge didn’t look like a structure that joined two landmasses. It looked like a portal that the river passed through. A gate. The kelpie’s “thundering gate” wasn’t a gate at al . It was a bridge.
Maybe this bridge, if Lusa is onto anything with her missinghomeless angle.
I cracked my shields, slightly, ever so slightly, so just bits of my psyche crossed the planes of reality. The chil of the grave, of the dead, hung in the air, the grave essence reaching for me. Grave essence that emanated from something very close. And fresh.
I opened my shields a little wider. The shadows in my vision rol ed back to reveal the skeletal carcass of the vision rol ed back to reveal the skeletal carcass of the rusted and col apsed Lenore Street Bridge. Beyond the bent and sagging support beams—which I was careful not to touch, as I did not want to be responsible for a bridge col apse—I could see the remains of dilapidated lean-tos and weathered tents huddled on the bank. Grave essence leaked from amid the abandoned tents. Not a lot, just the smal est string that whispered across my skin like a northern wind. But essence meant a body—or at least part of one. And this one was human.
“Your eyes are doing that creepy glowing thing,” Lusa said, staring.
I slammed my shields shut. “Lusa, I suggest you find your cameraman. This place is about to be deemed a crime scene.”
Chapter 19