Chapter 19

Chapter

Nineteen

We'd only traveled a few miles from Northbourne when Malcolm appeared in my back seat. "Good news and bad news," he said.

Matthias snarled.

"Sorry, sorry," Malcolm said hurriedly. "Do you want me to hang a bell around my neck, or what?"

"He'll get used to it," I said. "What's the bad news?"

"I followed Mr. Touchy for a while from a safe distance. And good thing I did, because he must have sensed or detected me. He tossed a black magic ghost grenade at the corner of Madison and Pine."

My stomach lurched. "Oh, no."

"What is a ghost grenade?" Matthias asked.

"Ball of magic designed to damage or discorporate a ghost," Malcolm explained. "I got a bit singed, but I'm okay."

"Thank goodness for that." I let out a breath and tipped my coffee cup up to get the last fortifying sip. "Did you manage to follow him after that?"

"I had to back off and I lost him about a mile later. The good news is, I did snag a little of the magic from the ghost grenade. Maybe you can figure out what kind it is. "

"And maybe track it. Thanks, Malcolm." I cleared my throat. "So, Matthias and I were just up at Northbourne."

Malcolm flitted into the console area, making Matthias growl again. "You did what? "

"Just to take a look," I said. "We didn't have any trouble. The atmosphere is grim."

"I already told you that." He returned to the back seat so Matthias would stop growling. "But I guess there's something to be said for seeing it for yourself. Find out anything?"

"Yeah. I asked who Charles's daytime representative is, and they said Christine Foreman."

"That's an odd choice. She's really young for that kind of responsibility. And isn't she part of Amira's line?"

"That's what I thought," I said. "It doesn't make sense. For every answer we get, I have ten more questions."

My phone rang. The screen read Bob's Bait and Tackle Calling . Hallelujah. I really wanted to focus on something besides Court nonsense for a change.

"Now we're in business," Malcolm said, rubbing his hands together.

I answered the call using my vehicle's hands-free system. "This is Alice."

"Hello, Alice." Cyro's new computer-generated voice had a British accent. "I'm relieved you're driving away from Northbourne unscathed. You like playing with fire."

I wasn't surprised that she knew where we were, but that didn't mean I necessarily liked that she casually kept tabs on my whereabouts. On the plus side, if something happened to me courtesy of Moses, the Court, or whoever else, she could alert Sean. On the other hand, I'd never liked to be watched, even if it meant I was being watched over.

Matthias's expression turned thunderous. Whether his fury resulted from the prospect that someone had eyes on us or might have a way to tap into Northbourne's security system, or both, I wasn't sure.

And by playing with fire she clearly also meant my visit to Merrum Manor last night, though she didn't say so. I assumed she knew I wasn't alone in the car.

"I don't actually like doing that," I countered. "But sometimes it's the only way to get answers."

"Alice Evelyn Worth," Malcolm muttered. "You live to play with fire. Don't even ."

I scowled, but that actually elicited a tiny chuckle from Matthias, so I let it slide.

"Any luck with that surveillance footage?" I asked Cyro. "Do you have something for me?"

"I'm not sure what I have, but I have something. I'll transfer all the files to your home computer, including the large video files. I'm going to send you a link to the smaller clips and still images so you can look at them now. I also created a map showing the route your client took from the parking garage to the murder scene with time stamps. As usual, once you download the files, the link will cease to exist."

"Thank you for this," I said with feeling. Yes, I paid for her time, but with little else to go on, these videos were worth their weight in gold.

"You're welcome. Stay safe." She ended the call.

Rather than wait until we got home, I pulled to the side of the road, turned on my hazard lights, and tapped the link she'd sent.

As we waited for the files to download to my phone, Matthias said, "Dare I ask who just called?"

"An expensive source of impeccably accurate information whose real identity I do not know," I said. "And whose name we don't say unless we're at home behind the wards."

"Ah. I understand." After a beat, he asked, "And the fact they know where you are and who's with you? That doesn't bother you?"

I thought about how to answer that. "I have mixed feelings, but they've become a sort of self-appointed guardian angel, and at the moment I benefit from that enough to outweigh whatever misgivings I have."

Matthias's narrowed eyes let me know he didn't share my assessment that Cyro's watchfulness was more beneficial than it was intrusive, but he let it go—at least for now.

Cyro had sent two video clips, eight still images, and the map she'd created showing Oliver's route from the parking garage to the alley.

I stared at the map for a long time.

Oliver had walked from the garage to the alley using the same route Malcolm and I had taken yesterday. Nothing too surprising about that. What had me befuddled were the time stamps.

"He didn't leave the garage until after seven thirty?" Malcolm peered over my shoulder. "Then basically walked straight to the alley, killed Madison, and got arrested?"

"Looks that way." I switched to the first still image. Cyro had taken it from the parking garage footage on Level 5. The camera was mounted above the elevator and showed a side view of Oliver's SUV parked in slot 512 from about fifty feet away. I couldn't make out much from that distance other than the passenger seat appeared empty. The time stamp read 18:18 .

The next image was taken at 19:18, one hour later. Now Oliver's SUV was the only vehicle in the camera's view on that level and the video had switched to night vision because the sun had gone down. The passenger seat remained empty, and the SUV was not on—or at least had no lights on.

"What the hell?" Malcolm muttered. "He's just sitting there?"

"Apparently." I rubbed the tip of my nose as I thought. "I assume the video will show that he got into his car and then didn't get back out."

"But why?"

"No idea yet."

The next image showed Oliver walking toward the stairs from the direction of his SUV. The time stamp read 19:32 . He wore a suit with the jacket unbuttoned and appeared to be walking briskly judging by the length of his stride and the way his arms moved. I zoomed in on his face.

"He looks focused on something," Matthias said. "Like he's on a mission."

"Yeah, he does." I panned around the rest of the image and paused. "Is that a shadow on the other side of that concrete pillar?"

Matthias took my phone and studied the screen. "Maybe," he said finally and handed it back. "It could be a person, but I'm not certain."

Grumbling, I switched to the next image, which showed Oliver exiting the parking garage at the bottom of the stairs. The fifth image was from an exterior camera on the shoe store whose clerk had turned me away by pointing at the door. It showed Oliver on the other side of the street, walking in the direction of the alley. The time stamp read 19:41 .

The next image was also taken at 19:41. Instead of Oliver, it showed a pretty brunette in a leather jacket, tank top, and jeans getting out of a black Jeep in a parking lot I didn't recognize. The Eleventh Street bridge loomed in the background.

"Madison Fernell." Malcolm's voice was quiet. "Arriving right on time to walk from her car to Salty's Bar for her eight o'clock shift."

I rubbed my arms to ease the prickling from Matthias's anger and my own goosebumps. This wasn't the first time I'd watched surveillance footage of someone who had no idea their death was imminent, but knowing how brutally Madison would die gave me the irrational urge to shout at her to call in sick—to turn around and go home. But even if she had, the necromancer would have probably found another victim that night.

So far the pictures were giving us some answers, but not the ones I wanted the most. Maybe the rest would fill in the blanks and give us a direction to go.

The seventh image, time stamped 19:46, showed Oliver about to turn the corner into the alley. And in the final image, time stamped 19:49, Madison arrived at the alley from the other direction. Presumably, Oliver waited in the shadows, under the control of whatever deadly spirit had possessed his body.

At the bottom of the map Cyro had created, I found two final notes from her. The first read: First 911 call logged at 19:56 . The second: The only cameras in the alley, on the Finch and Sons' loading dock, had been nonfunctional for over a month.

The latter begged the question of whether the necromancer knew that, or even cared if cameras were present at the murder scene. After all, all they would catch would be Oliver, as long as the necromancer stayed out of sight.

I flipped back through all the photos, but none of them contained other people except the image taken by the camera on the shoe store. A young couple had walked under the camera just after Oliver passed by on the other side of the street. They had their heads close together and were laughing. I couldn't say for sure whether one of them was a necromancer, but my gut told me they were just passing by.

Son of a bitch. Given how much trouble we'd gone through to get this footage, I'd hoped for so much more than the damn near nothing it revealed.

"Why did Ferguson even bother to interfere with me getting the videos if they don't show anything of use?" I muttered.

I'd been mostly talking to myself, but Malcolm said, "Just to be a dick, apparently. Don't give up, Alice. We've still got the videos to look through."

I opened my video viewing app. The first clip from Cyro showed Oliver arriving on Level 5B at just after six. In the clip, we watched him walk from the top of the stairs to his SUV, wearing a leather cross-body messenger bag over his suit. He unlocked his SUV using his key fob as he approached and put his bag in the back seat. That was the last thing he'd remembered doing before he'd come to in the alley.

As we watched, Oliver shut the rear door, reached for his driver's door, and paused. Through the vehicle's windows, we could see him looking down, but not what had caught his attention.

"Blast it," I muttered.

"That's right where we found the nasty black magic," Malcolm said. "So something was there that he could see because he's looking at it. Spellwork, maybe? Drawn on the pavement?"

"I got traces there, but it didn't feel like an echo of drawn spellwork," I mused. "It felt more like residual magic from a presence."

Oliver opened his door, climbed into the SUV, and shut the door. And didn't move. The vehicle did not turn on. The eerie clip ran for several minutes, but nothing happened except two other cars driving past from upper levels toward the exit. I saw no one within the camera's view lurking around.

"May I?" Matthias asked, holding out his hand.

I gave him my phone. He ran the video back to when Oliver put his bag in the car, and then went frame-by-frame—the reason I had such a fancy app for looking at videos. Sometimes clues were damn near impossible for naked eyes to see without it.

Unless, of course, those eyes happened to belong to a werewolf.

Matthias found what he'd spotted earlier and held up my phone. A vaguely human-shaped blur appeared just outside Oliver's SUV in a single frame. Malcolm flitted.

I'd hoped to catch a glimpse of the necromancer. I'd never expected to see the spirit they controlled. Dread made my tummy roil.

"Is this good news for you and your client?" Matthias asked when neither Malcolm nor I spoke.

I waggled my hand. "Moderately good news in that this could be some evidence to support his story."

"But…?" he prompted.

"But also very, very bad news," Malcolm said. "That is one juiced-up spirit."

Matthias frowned. "Juiced up, as in…?"

"As in, this isn't an episode of a fake ghost hunter show." I saved that frame at the highest resolution available. "In the real world, you're not supposed to be able to see spirits on cameras. Not unless they're full of power. And in this case, a necromancer's magic too."

"So you were hoping you weren't right," Matthias said.

"Yes and no. I like to be right, because then I know what I'm up against." I closed that video and opened the second one. "But I don't like to be right when it's a necromancer. Or a sorcerer. Or, you know, someone worse."

His eyebrows went up. "What's worse?"

Dark Fae , I thought, but didn't say, because they could hear when humans spoke of them and I had no desire to attract their attention ever again. Once was plenty.

"Don't ask," Malcolm told Matthias. "For real. Just take our word for it."

As unsettling as the first video was, it was nowhere near as difficult to watch as the second one. That video, which Cyro had gotten from the sandwich shop across the street from the alley's entrance, showed Oliver striding down the last block before the alley and then disappearing around the corner. Just two minutes later, Madison appeared from the other direction. Grim and silent, we watched her turn into the alley, her head down as she looked at her phone's glowing screen. The time stamp was 19:50:08.

At 19:54:36, a delivery truck passed the sandwich shop and turned into the alley. These must be the men who'd caught Oliver in the act, tackled him, and called 911.

"Stop," Matthias said, making me jump.

Again, he took my phone and went frame-by-frame, this time backward until he found a person-shaped blur similar to the one we'd seen in the parking garage, now at the entrance to the alley, just visible as a silhouette against the brick.

In the same frame, I noticed something else: a dark figure in a hat and long coat standing just at the edge of the camera's view on the same side of the street as the sandwich shop. In the next frame, both the spirit and the dark figure had disappeared.

"You son of a bitch ," I breathed.

The necromancer could have summoned the spirit back from a block away or more, but they'd come to witness the murder firsthand. And if they'd wanted to be completely unseen, they would have ensured they were. Instead, they'd allowed a glimpse of themselves for the benefit of anyone who bothered to look. My gut told me this was a game to them. Murder and framing an innocent man were a game .

Catch me if you can , that shadow said.

Rage made my eyes grow warm with blood magic.

No, I didn't feel good at all about being right on this. Not even a little bit. Not even for Oliver's sake, because two blurs and a shadow weren't going to be enough to exonerate him. I needed the necromancer themselves, preferably the spirit too, and a mountain of additional proof the DA and possibly a jury could see and understand.

"I'm sorry." Matthias's eyes glowed bright amber. His chest rumbled and golden shifter magic tingled on my arms. "We can't make it right, but we can do our best to make sure it doesn't happen again."

Malcolm touched my shoulder. Listen to him saying "we" all the sudden , he said in my head. You and I know damn well there's a direct pipeline from surviving abuse and being forced to harm others to wanting to help people.

My ghost sidekick and I were certainly proof of that.

He'd probably make a damn good PI , Malcolm added. You could train him, get him his apprentice hours. Put him on the payroll and give him a mission in life. Let him right some wrongs and maybe find some peace while he's at it.

I thought about my own mentor, Mark Dunlap, who'd taken me under his wing and trained me to be a mage PI though I had zero qualifications and enough baggage to fill a container ship. When he'd asked me at the interview why I'd applied to be an MPI, I told him I wanted to help people. He'd hired me on the spot .

After four years of estrangement, Mark and I had reunited on a case last year. Unfortunately, our newly rekindled friendship wasn't destined to last long. A blood mage named Spencer Addison tortured Mark to death trying to find out what we'd uncovered about his organization.

The pain of Mark's loss hadn't faded much, but I'd finally framed the one photo I had of us together and hung it on the wall in my office. At least I could look at it now without a bolt of pain going through my heart, so that was something.

Could I train someone to be a private investigator? Could I be a mentor to Matthias like Mark had been to me? I wasn't sure.

I'll think about it , I told Malcolm.

He let go of my shoulder and floated back. Matthias was still studying the video of the minutes before and after Madison's murder.

I sent a quick text message via my burner phone to Cyro asking if she could track the shadowy figure I'd spotted in the video to a vehicle or get a look at their face. I didn't have high hopes, though. That glimpse was deliberate, and so was the disappearing act.

"Well, let's get home so we can look at these videos and images more closely," I said.

"And get this black magic off me that I got from that ghost grenade," Malcolm added. "Before my leg falls off."

I was about to tell him to go ahead and jump home to the safety of our wards when my phone rang. Matthias handed it to me. The screen read Philippa Grayson . My stomach lurched.

I'd told Sean the truth when I'd said I wasn't clairvoyant and I didn't see the future, but I did have a detective's intuition—and a survivor's sixth sense for impending danger. Both told me the shadow and their pet spirit had struck again.

I took a deep breath, let it out, and answered the call.