CHAPTER 6
IT TOOK ME FIFTEEN MINUTES OF QUESTIONING TO ascertain that nobody in the hall had actually seen how the attack on Solomon started. Two men saw the Steel Mary enter. He kept his face hidden. In the hall full of street bravos, nobody paid him any mind. The man crossed the floor and took the stairs up to the fourth story, where Solomon Red made his quarters. The altercation ensued there; my present pool of witnesses became aware of it only when the stranger and Solomon stumbled out of his rooms into the hallway and took a dive over the railing into the inner hall. According to Bob Carver, the man landed on his feet, holding Solomon Red by his throat. That got everyone’s attention in a hurry, given that Solomon Red was six feet two inches tall and weighed close to two hundred and forty pounds.
The fight itself was short and brutal.
“Did any of you wade into it?”
The four mercs at the table shook their heads, all except Ivera, who still had gauze up her nose. Bob Carver had twelve years in the Guild, Ivera and Ken both had seven, and Juke was coming up on her fifth. All four were trained, seasoned, tough, and worked well as a team. In the Guild they were known as the Four Horsemen. Most mercs were loners, occasionally working with a partner when they had no choice about it. The Horsemen worked the jobs that required more than two bodies and they were damn good at it.
“He’s good,” Bob said. “I stayed clear of him.”
“He didn’t do any fancy shit,” Juke added, rubbing her hand through her spiked black hair. She was probably going for frightening, with black hair and smoky eyes, but her features were too sharp and delicate and she ended up looking like a pissed-off Goth Tinker Bell. “None of the spinning whirlwind or whip qiang stuff. He slammed Solomon against the elevator and stuck the spear into his throat. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. That was it for the fearless leader.”
“It was a practiced thrust,” Ivera added. “No hesitation, didn’t aim, nothing.”
“What happened after he added Solomon to his butterfly collection?”
“The magic hit,” Ivera answered.
Did the Steel Mary sense the magic coming? That would be a hell of a trick. “And then?”
Bob looked to Ken. The tall, lean Hungarian was the group’s magic expert. Ken had a habit of sitting very still, so quiet you forgot he was there. His motions were small, in direct contrast with his lanky body, and he rationed out words like they were made of gold. “Extraction.”
“Could you explain that, please?”
Ken mulled it over, weighing the benefit to mankind against the terribly taxing effort of producing a few more words. “The man placed his hand over Solomon’s mouth.” He held his long fingers apart to show me. “He said a word and pulled his essence out of him.”
What the hell did that mean? “Define essence.”
Ken regarded me for a long minute. “The glow of his magic.” That made no sense. “Can you describe the glow?”
Ken halted, puzzled.
“It looked like a wad of bright red cotton candy,” Juke supplied.
“Glowing with Solomon’s magic. I felt it. Powerful.” Ken nodded. “The man held his essence in his hand, and then he left.”
“He just walked out of here?”
“Nobody was dumb enough to stop him,” Juke said.
And that was the difference between the Guild and the Order in a nutshell. If the cloak-man walked into the Order’s Chapter, every single knight would have to be dead before he came out.
“Her,” Ivera said.
Bob looked at her. “Iv, it was a man.”
She shook her head. “It was a woman.”
Bob leaned forward. “I saw the hands. They were man-hands. The guy was six and a half feet tall.”
“Nope, about six eight,” Juke said.
“It was a woman,” Ivera said.
I glanced at Juke. She raised her arms. “Don’t look at me. I only saw him from the side. Looked like a man to me.”
“Ken?”
The mage folded his long fingers in front of him, pondered them for a long moment, and met my gaze. “I don’t know.”
I rubbed my face. Eyewitness accounts were supposed to narrow the pool of suspects, not make it wider.
“Thanks,” I said, snapping my notepad closed. I had taken to carrying it, because it was necessary. It made me feel stupid. I could duck in a room for half a second and tell you how many people were in it, which of them were a threat, and what weapons they carried. But when it came to interviewing witnesses, if I didn’t write it down, it was gone in a couple of hours. Gene, a knight-inquisitor with the Order and a former Georgia Bureau of Investigations detective, whom I strove to emulate because he knew what he was doing and I didn’t, could listen to a witness or a suspect once and recall what they said with perfect accuracy. But I had to write it down. It made me feel like I had a hole in my head.
It was time to wrap it up. “On behalf of the Order, I appreciate your cooperation and all that.”
Juke gave me the evil eye. She was trying hard for an early version of me, but although Juke was good, by her age I had already dropped out of the Order’s Academy. I’d eat Juke for breakfast, and she knew it, but kept at it anyway.
“So you’re in the big leagues now. Investigating for the Order and all that. I feel like bowing or something.”
I fixed her with my little deranged smile. “Bowing not necessary. Don’t leave town.”
Juke’s eyes went wide. “Why? Are we under arrest and shit?”
I kept smiling. We stared at each other for a long moment and Juke glanced into her cup before tipping it down to her mouth. “Screw you!”
“Now come on, sugar, you know I don’t swing that way.”
“Whatever!”
Curran’s alpha-staring habits must’ve rubbed off on me. Curran. Of all the people, why did I think of him? It’s like I couldn’t shrug him off.
“It comes,” Ivera murmured.
Mark trotted through the crowd toward me, looking well put together in a navy business suit.
The Four Horsemen glowered in unison.
Mark had a last name, but nobody remembered it. When someone condescended to add some moniker to his first name, it was usually “corporate asshole” or “that bastard,” and if the speaker was particularly displeased, “massa.” At least he got to keep one name, unlike the Clerk.
Officially the Guild’s secretary, Mark was more of an operations manager than an admin. Solomon Red had created the Guild and earned the lion’s share of its profits, but it was Mark who solved day-to-day problems and the way he went about that didn’t make him any friends. The universe created him with his “understanding” setting stuck permanently on zero. No emergency or tragedy, real or fabricated, made a dent in his armor as he raced to a better bottom line.
Part of it was his appearance, too. His skin was unstained by the sun and probably generously moisturized. His toned body marked him as a well-off man who paid attention to his appearance, rather than a fighter who used his body to make a living. His face was meticulously groomed. In a crowd of blue-collar thugs, he stood out like a prissy lily in a flower bed full of weeds, and he broadcasted “I’m better than you” loud and clear.
He came to an abrupt stop in front of me. “Kate, I need to talk to you.”
“Is this regarding Solomon’s death?”
He grimaced. “It’s regarding its consequences.”
“If it doesn’t directly relate to the investigation, it will have to wait.”
Bob narrowed his eyes. “Moving fast, are you, Mark? Wasting no time.”
Mark ignored him. “Do I have to make an appointment?”
“Yes. Give the Order a call tomorrow and they’ll make sure to coordinate something with you.” I headed toward the stairs to examine Solomon’s quarters.
Behind me, Bob said, “Tomorrow the front page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution will be screaming all about how Solomon Red voided his bowels and then his mercs had to chase the puddle of his blood and shit across the floor. Shouldn’t you get on that?”
“Mind your own business, and I’ll mind mine,” Mark said.
Solomon’s death created a power vacuum. Something had to fill it and they were already drawing the battle lines. They could draw all they wanted. You couldn’t pay me to get involved in it.
I walked up the stairs, past a desiccated Solomon. The Guild leader sagged on the spear shaft, reduced to a sack of dried-out skin over the skeletal frame. The man who’d built himself into a living legend had died with great indignity. The universe had a razor-sharp sense of humor.
The Biohazard team was filing out without Solomon. All of the disease had ended up in the puddle, which Biohazard took into custody. Solomon’s corpse was now a mere inert shell. Mark must’ve convinced them to let the Guild have the body for burial.
I climbed up to the third floor and entered the internal stair leading to Solomon’s quarters. A variety of weapons decorated the walls: bearded axes, slick Japanese blades, simple elegant European swords, modern tactical weapons . . . I came to an empty space between two bare iron hooks. Just large enough for a spear. My hope that the spear in Solomon’s neck belonged to the Steel Mary just went up in flames.
He could have anything he wanted, but he chose the spear. Why a spear?
The stairs led me to a hallway bordered by a balcony. Four floors below, in the main hallway, mercs mulled about, still shell-shocked. The front door of Solomon’s quarters hung ajar, its left side splintered. The Steel Mary must have shattered the wood around the lock with a single kick.
I stepped inside. Barren walls greeted me. No paintings broke up the malachite green paint. The plain, almost crude furniture supported no knickknacks. No photographs on the mantel over the small fireplace. No magazines on the coffee table. No books. The place resembled a hotel room awaiting a guest, instead of lived-in quarters.
I stepped through to the left into the bedroom. A simple bed, a simple desk with a flurry of papers. Chair overturned on the floor. Solomon must’ve been sitting here when the Steel Mary broke in.
A tape recorder lay on the desk. I picked it up and pushed play.
“Seven lines down. Sign,” Mark’s voice said. “Count three pages. Page six. Count three lines from the bottom of the page. Sign.”
What in the world . . . I rewound for a few seconds.
“It’s just like the old contract,” Mark said. “You should still have the tape of it in the box from last year. It’s the one numbered thirty-four. The only thing we did was change the dates and two paragraphs involving the new city ordinances. The first is on page three. Count two paragraphs down. It now reads . . .”
Solomon Red couldn’t read. And Mark had covered for him all these years. None of the mercs knew.
“Kate?” Mark’s voice called.
What now?
I stepped out of the room and looked down. Mark stood on the floor below. Next to him waited two men. The first was muscular and dark. He didn’t really need help in the menacing department, but he chose to amplify his badass status by wearing a long, sweeping black cloak edged with wolf fur. Hello, Jim.
The man next to him wore Pack sweats. For shapeshifters, sweats meant working clothes—they were easy to rip off before a fight. The man stood with the easy animal grace particular to the very strong. Even from this distance, his pose telegraphed violence, tightly coiled and reigned in, but ready to explode at the slightest provocation. The mercs sensed it and gave him a wide berth, like scavengers recognizing a predator in their midst.
The man looked up, tilting his head of short blond hair. His face matched him—powerful and aggressive. A square jaw, prominent cheekbones, nose with a misshapen bridge that had been broken but never healed quite right. Gray eyes glanced from under thick golden eyebrows and locked on me.
Curran.