Chapter 33

Chapter

Thirty-Three

The moment we got inside the house, Malcolm zipped up through the floor from the basement to hover right in front of me. "Do you have him?"

I held up the crystal I believed contained Liam. "I have him. He feels strong."

Malcolm's expression made my heart ache. If Liam was still strong, he had a good chance of escaping from the crystal intact and thinking clearly. He'd likely emerge profoundly traumatized, though. The odds of him being the Liam we had known before were slim to none. Malcolm knew that better than anyone.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked. "We have options…"

"No." He shook his head. "We need to release him, and then he gets to decide what he wants. We don't have the right to make any choices for him."

"Fair enough." I turned to Matthias and met his bright amber gaze. "Arkady should be here in about forty-five minutes. That gives me enough time to help Liam. Are you all right in the meantime?"

"Not particularly." He flexed his hands. His joints popped. "Give me a project. "

I'd been giving this some thought on the way home as well, in between grumbling inwardly about Moses's games and wondering if Diaz was going to leak the information about the necromancer.

"Research the process of becoming a licensed private investigator in California," I said. "And prepare a report for you and I to discuss later."

Matthias tilted his head. "I will." He sounded thoughtful. Not exactly jumping up and down with excitement at the prospect of a career change, but definitely intrigued. I'd take it.

He headed upstairs to get his laptop. Meanwhile, I heard Sean in the office hosting another video meeting with Maclin Security staff. He'd started working from home more and more and doing installations and personal security less. He'd always enjoyed the field work far more than paperwork and running meetings, which were more his business partner's forte. All the threats around us must make him feel as if he needed to be close to home. If it didn't bother him, it shouldn't bother me, but it did.

Malcolm zipped back and forth between me and the basement door. "Alice," he prodded.

"Sorry. Got lost in thought." I grabbed a bottle of water from the kitchen and we went downstairs.

In the workshop, I created a strong ward in the largest circle. We didn't know what Liam's condition would be when I released him, so I wanted to give him plenty of space, in addition to a shield that would protect him if one of Moses's mages had bound him. My plan was to create the impression Liam and the other ghosts had discorporated during tonight's ritual and then they would be free.

While I finished drawing the spellwork, Malcolm floated over to look at Liam's crystal where I'd left it in a little wooden bowl on the table. "I can feel him," he said, his voice quiet. "I'd almost forgotten how he feels to me. Like being home."

I joined him by the table to put down my chalk and take off my boots and socks. "I'm sorry it's taken so long. "

"Don't you dare apologize." His expression turned fierce. "You risked everything to do this for Liam and me. As far as I'm concerned, you never have to apologize for anything ever again."

I raised my eyebrows.

"Okay, maybe not ever again," he amended. "But, like, for the rest of today you get a pass." He flitted. "This feels like a first date but a million times worse. I'm so nervous."

"Me too." I brushed his ghostly hand with my fingertips. "Are you ready?"

"Yes." He made a face. "No, but yes."

"I get that." I took Liam's crystal and a second one charged with energy from my house wards that would be his new anchor to the middle of the circle. I set the anchor in the spellwork I'd drawn and rose. "At the very least, he's going to be disoriented when I let him out. First priority is to give him time to get his bearings and calm down. Then we'll go from there."

"Okay." He squared his shoulders. "Ready, for real."

The ward I raised around us would both protect and contain Liam in case he came out panicked and tried to flee on instinct. The crystal buzzed and pulsed on my palm, as if the ghost it contained sensed something was going on. Maybe he felt my magic and the wards around us. He might even have recognized them.

I spooled earth magic and let it roll through the crystal in my palm, hoping it would reach him like a kind of warning of what I was about to do. I didn't have a release word for Liam like I did for Malcolm and his lockdown crystal, so I'd have to break the binding spell that held Liam inside.

The crystal buzzed three times. Was that a signal that he sensed me? I hoped so.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and broke the binding spell with a single blow of blood and earth magic combined.

With a shout, Henry Liam Ashe appeared in front of me, his eyes wild with fear and anger .

I knew from official records that Liam died of influenza at age twenty in 1910 while working at the brothel once housed in the manor my grandfather now owned. He looked the same as the last time I'd seen him: curly red hair and green eyes, wearing a shirt, vest, trousers, and cap, per the fashion of his day.

As I'd expected, he flitted away from me instantly and hit the barrier of the ward, ricocheted back and forth in the circle a few times, and then flitted around us in a whirlwind of ghostly panic.

"Liam," Malcolm said, his voice calm and gentle, with none of the conflicting feelings I sensed through our binding. "Liam, I'm here. You're free. I'm here."

Liam came to a stop about six feet away from Malcolm. They stared at each other for a long time as a dozen emotions flashed across both their faces.

"Malcolm?" Liam asked finally. "How…? When…?" He flitted several times and looked down at himself, as if searching for the spell that had tethered him to his crystal. "I'm not bound anymore?"

"No." Cautiously, Malcolm floated closer. "Alice rescued you from the mages who captured you. You're free now. You're safe."

"This is some kind of trick." Liam backed away, his gaze flicking back and forth between Malcolm's face and mine. "It's a trick, isn't it?"

"It's not a trick, I promise." Malcolm held out his hand. "I'm here. You're really here."

"Where am I?"

"This is Alice's new workshop. You remember that cute werewolf, Sean? He and Alice bought a house together. Feel the magic around you. Nobody can fake Alice's weird magic and my wards."

I scowled. My magic was not weird .

Slowly, Liam floated over to Malcolm and touched his outstretched hand. "How long has it been?" he asked, his voice rough.

"A few months." Malcolm laced his fingers through Liam's. That gave me a little pang because I couldn't hold either of their hands that way. "I'm so sorry. We came as soon as we could."

"It's all right," Liam said, though it wasn't and we all knew it.

Now that he was free and calm, I wanted to give them privacy and space. "Liam, that crystal is powerful enough to serve as an anchor for you so you won't need to return to the manor ever again," I said as he and Malcolm continued to look at each other. "When you're ready, I'll do the binding spell for you. You're one hundred percent safe inside this ward in the meantime."

He nodded and forced a brief smile. "Thank you for saving me, Miss Alice."

I left them murmuring to each other and went upstairs. I found Matthias and Arkady in the living room, each working on their laptops at opposite ends of the couch. Arkady had her giant water bottle next to her and Matthias had a cup of coffee. The silence felt…almost comfortable.

"You got here fast," I said to Arkady as I went to the kitchen to fill my own coffee mug. "What happened to an hour?"

"I decided I could write up the report here just as well as I could at the office." She glanced up as I settled into a chair with Diaz's zipped document holder and the mysterious envelope that had shown up in my SUV. "What you got there, business partner?"

"One's confidential. The other, I'll let you know when you're done writing that report so we can get paid."

She toyed with the hilt of one of her knives. "You sure you want to keep me waiting?"

I pointed. "Type."

She harrumphed and turned to Matthias. "You believe this shit?"

He kept his eyes on his laptop screen. "I am not involved in this disagreement."

"Chicken. See if I back you next time." She went back to typing.

I took a drink of coffee, set my mug on the side table, and unzipped the document holder. "Oh," I said involuntarily.

"What?" Matthias started to put his laptop aside .

"It's okay. Sorry." I cleared my throat. "Extremely confidentially—as in, this does not go beyond this room—Diaz gave me copies of all the autopsy reports. He put a full-color eight-by-ten photo of Madison Fernell at the murder scene on top."

"Asshole," Arkady muttered. "He might have given you a heads-up on what was in the folder."

I could only speculate as to why he hadn't, and why he'd deliberately left a very graphic photo as the first thing I'd see. Possibly he'd wanted to jolt me with the image. Maybe that didn't say anything good about him, or maybe he'd wanted to give me a visceral reminder of what was at stake if we didn't succeed tonight. I didn't hold it against him. I wouldn't have made it through the autopsy of one of these victims, much less six.

The office door opened and Sean emerged, empty mug in hand. He noted Arkady and Matthias working on their laptops, gave me a satisfied look, and bent to kiss the top of my head before he saw the document holder and its contents in my lap.

"Oh, babe," he said, his voice and expression grim.

"Yeah." I took his hand because his touch gave me strength. "Are you done with your meetings?"

"Almost. I need a refill and about ten minutes, and then we can all talk." He squeezed my hand. "How's Malcolm?"

"Overwhelmed." I managed a smile. "He and Liam are downstairs. I can't imagine how they both feel right now. It's going to take a long time to work through it all."

"For sure." He headed for the kitchen and the nearly empty coffee pot. "Just enough for one cup," he said as he filled his mug. "At the rate we drink coffee around here these days, we need a full-time barista."

"Ooh, a promotion for our part-time barista," I said with a wink at Matthias. He grumbled under his breath, but he seemed to take my teasing in stride.

For the next ten minutes or so, I went through the autopsy reports and photos and took notes on a notepad I kept on the side table. In particular, I looked for any clues to the spirits' or necromancer's identities, similarities in wound patterns, and anything that might fall in the category of the killers' signatures.

Profiling the victims didn't give me much to work with. Madison, the nurse, and the two young women killed last night had little in common in terms of physical appearance. The nurse was forty-one, while Madison and the two most recent victims were in their twenties. Two of the victims were brunette, one was blonde, and the fourth had red hair. Different body types, different heights, different ages. Three of the four victims were in or near bar districts when they died, but I wasn't sure if that was significant or not. I still believed the necromancer targeted the nurse at the private hospital to show no one was safe.

The male victims who'd died by their own hand, though not by their own choice, were also very different: a short man with dark hair and a tall man with blond hair. I felt reasonably certain the victims weren't chosen because of their appearance. I did, however, think women were the primary target and the men an afterthought.

The alleged suicides also felt like an escalation as well as a significant shift in modus operandi . With the first five known crimes, the necromancer wanted to enjoy forcing someone to commit a violent attack or murder and then face the legal, psychological, and personal consequences. By having the men kill themselves last night, though, the necromancer had apparently switched gears in terms of what kind of suffering they wanted to cause. Now the men's families and friends would bear the brunt of the emotional impact after these alleged murder-suicides.

If the necromancer chose the targets and controlled the spirits, which was my theory, women were the primary targets. That gave me some insight into the necromancer's motivations. The spirit who'd appeared to me had seemed gleeful about killing, and I'd gotten a decidedly sadistic and misogynistic feeling from what he'd said to me and that disgusting spectral lick of my face. A general hatred of women seemed to be a factor in the murders .

The choice of weapons also fit. Stabbing was up close and personal. Visceral. Bloody. Assertive and dominant. The slice and stab of a blade was a primal act of violence and penetration into unwilling flesh. It wasn't enough to me to say for certain I believed the necromancer to be a man, but statistically the vast majority of murderers were male, and the crimes had a distinctly misogynistic feel.

The autopsy reports and photos showed just how frenzied the killings had been. Each woman had more than thirty stab wounds. Madison had the most, at fifty-four, probably because her killer had longer to inflict wounds before being interrupted. The hardest pictures to see were those of the victims' hands and arms showing the injuries they received while trying to fend off their killers. They'd all fought so hard, but to no avail. According to the medical examiner, Madison had wounds that indicated the blade of the knife had gone right through the palm of her hand and into her forehead.

In the end, my review of the reports and photos accomplished a couple of things, but the price was terrible nausea and white-hot rage combined with sadness. I now had more insight into the perpetrators' mindset, M.O., and level of sadism, and a strong sense that hatred of women lurked at the root of these crimes, which was something I might be able to use later. I also had an all-consuming desire to send these spirits back to Hell where they belonged and have the necromancer cold and dead at my feet—preferably in pieces so their corpse could be torn apart by carrion birds.

The only way to exonerate Oliver and the other supposed killers was to turn the necromancer over to Diaz and the D.A. for persecution, but I didn't want the necromancer alive in prison, even if it was the black hole of the federal ultra-max supe prison in Colorado Springs.

I thought of the photos I'd just seen, and I envisioned doing monstrous things to this necromancer. And not only could I envision it, but I knew I was capable of carrying it out .

What did that mean? If monster was what you did, not who you were, did that mean I really was a monster, despite all my denials?

"Alice."

I looked up. Sean stood in front of my chair, his eyes golden. I hadn't heard him come out of the office or noticed him approach. Behind him, on the couch, Matthias watched me too. Even Arkady had closed her laptop to eye me. Apparently I'd been radiating fury and grief for a while.

"Well, that sucked to look at." I closed the document holder and set it aside with a sigh.

"Alice," Sean said again. He crouched in front of my chair and took my hands. "You didn't need to look through every page yourself. We could have helped."

I started to say Diaz had given me the file in confidence, but I didn't bother because that would have been the most transparent bullshit excuse. They all knew I'd done it because I didn't want them to have to see what I'd seen and read what I'd read.

"I fell on that grenade," I admitted, alluding to Sean's long-ago accusation that I did that continuously without considering that I didn't have to. "I had to know it all—all the gory details. I want to know who we're up against, what makes them tick."

"We all do." Arkady put her laptop aside, leaned forward, and rested her elbows on her thighs. "You're not the only person here who can ‘read' crime scenes, you know. I was PsyOps. Matthias here can analyze scenes with the best of 'em. Don't be an asshole and keep all the bad shit to yourself. Maybe we have ideas and insights too, you know."

"That's a fair point." I sighed. "I'm still getting the hang of this team thing."

"You're getting better." Sean squeezed my hands and rose. "What did you learn?"

I gave them a rundown of my notes and thoughts.

"I didn't get anything from the reports that will make it easier to track down the necromancer per se," I finished as they thought about what I'd revealed. "But insight into how a perpetrator's mind works is an advantage. If nothing else, when we face them, I know what buttons to push."

"We may need every advantage we can get." Sean held out his hand. "Can I have the other envelope, please?"

I handed it over. Matthias shut his laptop and put it on the coffee table, his gaze fixed on the envelope. Arkady scooted to the edge of her seat.

Sean slid the stack of papers out to skim through them and confirm what I'd told him about the envelope's contents.

"We have no reason to think this isn't what it seems to be?" he asked me, glancing up from the page.

"No reason," I said. I hadn't spoken to Moses yet, but my gut told me this was the real deal. "I think it's exactly what it looks like."

"I'll get right to the point, then. Matthias has waited enough." Sean met and held Matthias's gaze. "We've come into possession of what appears to be a copy of your contract with the Vampire Court."

Arkady blinked twice. As far as I could recall, that was only the second time since we'd met that I'd seen her appear startled. She and Carly were the most stoic people I knew, though for much different reasons.

Slowly, Matthias rose. He'd so steadfastly and even angrily defended his NDA about the contents of the contract and all but asked us not to try to get hold of it or find out what it said, and now we had the real thing in hand. No doubt he was keenly aware of our concern about how he'd react.

Arkady stood too and moved to the side so she could watch all of us. Clearly she wondered if Matthias would be angry.

To my surprise, Matthias turned his glowing gaze on me. "Alice, did you go into debt with Moses Murphy to obtain this document?"

Instead of angry, he sounded and appeared very, very worried—almost to the point of looking sick.

"No, I didn't," I said, my voice firm. "There's a note on the document telling me I'm expected to create some wards at a business Murphy owns in the city in return for the copy of your contract. And I didn't ask for him to get it for us; he took the initiative."

Matthias absorbed that. "But how did Murphy know you wanted a copy of the contract? And why would he give it to you in exchange for making wards? He has his own mages for that kind of work."

"I'm kind of wondering that myself." Arkady had flushed in anger. I'd never seen that reaction from her. Usually her fury was cold, not hot. "What the hell's going on here, Alice? I knew you had dealings with Moses Murphy, but this is a whole other level. That contract should not have been possible for him to get. Northbourne is locked down tighter than an ant's asshole. So that packet of paper there cost him a goddamn fortune . No way in hell do you pay for that with wards." She took a step toward me, her expression darkening. "No way in hell does Murphy risk making an enemy of Charles Vaughan and the Vampire Court for wards ."

Before I had a chance to reply, Malcolm drifted up through the floor from the basement. He'd either felt Matthias's shifter magic sizzling or heard the tone of our voices change.

He scanned our faces. "Uh, guys? What's going on?"

"Alice has some explaining to do," Arkady told him, her flinty gaze never leaving my face. "Something about Moses Murphy."

Malcolm started to reply to her, then apparently changed his mind. You gotta tell them , he mouthed to me before disappearing back into the basement.

Torn about what to do, I looked at Sean.

"Your secrets are safe with them," he said. "And they're in no more danger if they know versus if they don't. I think you know that."

I did know. If I'd believed Matthias and Arkady were any safer being near me but not knowing the truth, I would be deluding myself. If things went sideways with Moses— when they went sideways—they'd be his targets regardless. They had to know the truth so they understood the situation clearly.

I'd wanted Moses to be dead before I had to bring anyone else into our confidence. But like most things in my life, that hadn't gone according to plan at all. And then he'd forced my hand by giving us the contract.

Nothing to do but say it. Matthias and Arkady were waiting, and if I didn't spit it out, Arkady looked ready to turn me upside down and shake me by my ankles until I talked.

"My real name is Ava Selene Murphy," I said. "I am Moses Murphy's granddaughter."