? ? ?
I’d succumbed to boredom and was playing a game on my phone when the door finally opened. John, my once-favorite homicide detective, was the first into the room. He carried a small laptop that looked even smaller against his bearlike bulk. His partner, Jenson, followed him. As the door crept closed, I felt more than saw a third figure enter.
Briar.
She was working hard at not being seen, and the spell that masked her magic was once again in place, but while it felt innocuous unless I explored deeper, it was still a spell, and in a group this small, it highlighted her location. I made a point of not looking at her, focusing on the two detectives instead. I knew she was there, but she didn’t have to know I knew.
John sat in the chair across from me and set the computer on the table, closed. Another chair waited for Jenson, but he only leaned against the table, arms crossed over his chest. Briar hovered near the far wall, hidden from sight behind her veil of spells. I looked at John. They all looked at me.
No one spoke.
I waited. If I’d learned anything from the summers I’d spent in my father’s house, it was how to keep silent. It was never a good idea to offer explanations to questions that hadn’t been asked just because a silence stretched too long.
“So why were you at the bank today?” John finally asked.
“Missing-person case.”
John and Jenson exchanged a look I couldn’t decipher.
“Did you find the person?” Jenson asked.
“He’s in your morgue.”
Jenson grunted, and there was silence a moment before John said, “Tell us what you witnessed in the bank.”
And that was the tricky question. I took a deep breath, but I didn’t hesitate. “I walked into a robbery in progress. I believe Remy Hollens was about to lock the door when I walked inside. He held a gun to me and had me click the lock before getting to my knees. He then turned his attention to the bank guard. There was a woman with a shotgun at the teller’s desk. She had the man behind the counter fill a duffel bag. There was also an older woman with an assault rifle robbing the hostages.”
John nodded, motioning me to continue. This was the hard part. I was fae, so I couldn’t lie, but I also couldn’t reveal everything I’d seen. I was still unsure I should reveal exactly what I’d done either. All three robbers had been dead already. The collectors would have ripped the ghosts out of the bodies if I hadn’t—I was sure that was what Death had been telling me—but they’d looked alive. It might be a tricky distinction for someone who hadn’t felt the grave rolling off the bodies.
“Someone caught the older woman’s attention and she started yelling. That drew the other two robbers’ attention. While they were distracted, the security guard drew his own gun. He fired and all three robbers collapsed, dead. Or maybe they collapsed as he fired. It happened really fast.” And I’d been otherwise distracted, so I wasn’t sure on that detail, but I was guessing none of the bank witnesses could have given any account other than what I just had.
John and Jenson exchanged a look again, and then John opened the laptop. He pulled up a video file and hit play without saying a word.
The screen filled with a quad screen of crisp black-and-white videos. There was no audio file, but I didn’t need one—I’d been in the room where it had been recorded. It was security footage from the bank. In shades of gray I watched myself enter the bank. A chill crawled down my spine as I saw Remy shove his gun in my face while I blinked dumbly.
The events unfolded on the small screens exactly how I remembered.
John hit the pause button, freezing the video version of me yelling a silent but clear no, and reaching a hand forward, toward empty space deeper inside the bank. Which was extra odd, as all the other patrons were running out the door.
“Care to revise your statement?” John asked, looking from the series of frozen images and then back up at me.
“I wanted to question the ghost that popped out of Remy’s body, but she moved on before I could.”
“She?”
I nodded. “Like the museum thief yesterday, today’s souls didn’t match the already-dead bodies they were wearing.”
Briar stalked toward the table, dropping her invisibility spell as she moved. It probably would have been damn impressive and shocking if I hadn’t known she was there, but I’d been expecting her to jump in at any moment, so I simply turned, focusing on her for the first time.
“Here’s the thing, Craft,” she said, sliding the laptop away from John. “That wasn’t the only weird moment.”
She used the trackpad to back up the video. John’s lips compressed, and Jenson scowled, but neither interrupted her. When it came to magical crimes, she outranked them.
“Here, you jump for no reason, and then nod,” she said, hitting play. She couldn’t see Roy in the video, but the clip was the moment he’d let me know he’d unlocked the door. “And here, before ‘someone caught the older woman’s attention’ as you put it, you focus right on the spot that is about to be the center of the robbers’ attention. And again, you nod.” She enlarged one panel on the screen, playing a closeup of me when the collectors first appeared. “And then, of course, there is this, right before everyone drops dead.” She cued up one more selection, and no big surprise, it was the moment I’d thrown open my shields.
I grimaced. In the black-and-white images, you couldn’t see that my eyes were glowing eerie green, but the change in light spilling onto my cheeks and the way my hair lifted in a sudden violent wind were dead giveaways to anyone who’d ever seen me raise a shade that I’d been using my magic. On the screen, it happened so fast. The guard lifted his gun, the maelstrom started around me, and then all three robbers fell, simultaneously. At least I finally knew that the guard shot after they were already falling, though he couldn’t have realized it at the time.
I looked back up at Briar. She hadn’t asked a question. Yet. I redirected before she could.
“What did the ME determine was the time of death?”
She frowned. “The field determination was inconclusive.”