Mark Del Franco - Face Off

A sad smile creased Cress’s face. “I don’t have your confidence in that, Laura.”

“The Guild doesn’t dictate to InterSec. You’ll be cleared. Rhys is going to have to live with the fact that you are a good person.”

She compressed her lips. “Thank you for that.”

Laura squeezed her arm. “You are, Cress. Don’t let what other people think make you feel any different. The only opinions that matter are your friends’.”

A smile tweaked at the corner of her mouth. “Do I get to count you as more than one friend?”

Laura laughed. “I’ll be as many friends as you need me to be. Right now, though, you need a lawyer.”

“Resha is taking care of that,” she said.

Laura cocked her head. “Resha? I didn’t know you knew him.”

“He watches out for all the solitaries in the Guildhouse. He was the first person I called after Terryn,” she said.

Impressed, Laura shook her head. The seemingly inept merrow surprised her in interesting ways. “I’ll do whatever I can to help him.”

“You should go. Your glamour is fading,” Cress said.

The body signature was weakening, but she didn’t realize Cress could sense it. “Tell Terryn to call me as soon as he can.”

Cress placed her small hand on Laura’s forearm. “I need you to do something for me, Laura, that has nothing to do with any of this. I finished the autopsy on Draigen’s sniper before they escorted me out of the building but didn’t have time to write the report. There’s residual body essence on the corpse, but I’ve never met anyone who was at the arrest, so I couldn’t identify the signature.”

The Inverni Lord Guardian team had made the arrest. “I have.”

“That’s what I was thinking. You need to examine the body. Without me there, I don’t know how long the stasis field will preserve the body signatures. We need an imprint,” she said.

“I’ll have someone make the imprint, Cress, as soon as I get back,” she said.

Cress gripped her arm. “No! You need to do it. I don’t think it was a coincidence that I was banned from the building. They didn’t bring someone else in when they detained me. Something’s wrong there.”

Laura leaned forward and kissed Cress on the cheek. “Okay, I will, then. Call me for anything, and tell Terryn I want to see him ASAP.”

“I will,” said Cress.

Laura pulled the door closed behind her and hurried down the steps. She pushed more essence into the glamoured ring, but without a firm template, she had nothing to anchor the woman’s essence. Outside, the rain had turned into a downpour, and she exited the building by opening the umbrella into the nearest security agent’s face. “I’m sorry,” she called, as he twisted away from it. As she swung the umbrella to hide herself from them, the glamour faded.

Around the corner, Sinclair and the woman waited where she had left them under the awning of a small café. Without speaking, they swapped the raincoats and maneuvered the woman back onto the sidewalk. Wrapping the woman’s hand around the umbrella handle, Laura released the sleep spell. Sinclair slipped his hand into the crook of Laura’s arm and held his umbrella over them. The woman swayed. Laura steadied her. “Are you okay?”

She startled at the torrential downpour. “Wow, that came up quick.”

Laura held out her keys. “You dropped these.”

Surprise and relief crossed the woman’s face. “Thank God, you saw them. I’m lost without my keys.”

“No problem. Have a nice day,” said Laura.

“Everything go all right?” Sinclair asked, as they walked the block to Laura’s car.

“Yes and no. Cress is okay, but things are moving in directions I don’t understand. With any luck, Terryn will be able to clear it up for me. Do you need a ride?”

He shook his head. “I need to get back. I don’t think a limo driver showing up in a tricked-out Guild SUV would be good for my image.”

She chuckled. “Good point. We’ll talk later.”

He quirked an eyebrow at her. “Dinner?”

She twisted her lips into an amused smirk. “Okay, dinner. I’ll call you.”

She leaned toward him on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you, Jono.”

He smiled in surprised. “For what?”

Her hand closed on the notes in her pocket, but she didn’t give them to him. “Just thank you.”

MORGUES WERE ALWAYSin basements, Laura thought as she stepped out of the elevator. The dead didn’t need sunlight. The living didn’t want to be disturbed by their presence. Between the InterSec offices and the local Guild crime-liaison department, the Guildhouse’s morgue was larger than other fey facilities. The Guild and InterSec used separate staff to perform autopsies and forensics. What redundancies the situation created was balanced by less friction over who had priority on research staff.

Laura Blackstone had never had a reason to be seen in the morgue, which made transitioning to Mariel Tate necessary after returning from seeing Cress. Mariel didn’t attract undue attention there by her mere presence. Part of her job was following up on deaths. People did look at her, though. That was one of the points in making the Mariel glamour so attractive—to distract from whatever she was doing. It worked most of the time.

She pushed open the door to the cool room. That late in the day, no one was working, and the lights were dimmed. As she moved toward Sean Carr’s locker, she stopped. Her mnemonic memory worked on several levels, recording body signatures, data, events, and places. Things like places logged themselves into her memory like subroutines, something she didn’t consciously do and didn’t pay attention to most of the time. When she entered the cool room, on a subconscious level, her awareness noted several changes, changes that were filtered as normal and disregarded. Gurneys had been moved. Counters cleared. The lights, of course.

Except one thing flared out in her memory as out of place. In the kick space in front of the cooler sat a small granite plate. To the casual eye, it appeared innocuous, a forgotten piece of discarded stone on the floor and swept out of view. Laura saw it for what it was: a listening ward. Someone was keeping tabs on who entered the room. If that was the case, she didn’t want anyone to know she was looking at the body.

She retraced her steps and texted Sinclair to meet her. As she lingered near the elevators, she used her PDA to catch up on public-relations emails until Sinclair arrived. He made a show of looking up and down the hallway. “Not the dinner spot I was hoping for.”

“I need your help with something,” she said.

He feigned surprise. “My help? Me? If this is about changing a lightbulb because I’m taller than you, I’ll be very disappointed.”

She led him down the hallway. “Not a lightbulb, but I’ll keep that in mind. Follow me.”

“Anywhere,” he said.

Her fear that he was able to mask his truthfulness through some ability she didn’t know warred with her desire to believe him. The desire was winning out over the fear more and more lately. She was starting to think that wasn’t a bad thing. She stopped shy of the door to the examining room. Can you pull out your medallion for me? she sent.

He waggled his eyebrows. “Is that what we’re calling it now?”

Although it wasn’t the time for jokes, she realized that it was the perfect time for Sinclair. His joking was a mask, she decided, a way of glossing over the seriousness of a situation. She, of all people, knew about masks. She glowered playfully and held her fingers to his lips. There’s a listening ward in the room, she sent.

Sinclair threaded his medallion from beneath his shirt. The metal held an odd coolness, unwarmed by his skin. Essence burned both hot and cold depending on how it was used. Laura didn’t understand the spell that suppressed Sinclair’s fey essence, but she had been able to enhance it before. She pushed essence into the medallion. Her skin prickled as the spell expanded to cover her, too.