Devon Monk - Magic in the Shadows

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?”

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.

The flutter quieted. So maybe he was paying attention to what I was thinking. Good.

And bad. My thoughts quickly turned to Violet, to her being pregnant with my dad’s child, my one and only sibling. I pushed that thought away and la-la-la’d like crazy. I didn’t want to tear Violet’s world apart. And destroying Beckstrom Enterprises would do just that. I’d never make a good day-to-day sort of manager of my father’s empire, not because I couldn’t do the work, but because I hated the company.

Almost as much as I hated him.

Okay, and yeah, I hated the paperwork and boardroom bullshit too. There was a reason I chose Hounding for a career.

Stotts stopped next to the curb, a park behind hedges and trees to my right.