Chapter 44

Chapter

Forty-Four

I hit the Stop button on the recording, stuck my phone in my pocket, and scanned the grim faces gathered around our kitchen island. "So that's the situation," I said.

"The flippin' D.A. is behind the whole thing. I did not see that coming." Malcolm crossed his arms. "Are you gonna let Diaz hear this recording?"

"I don't know." I took a long drink of coffee, which I'd spiked with a hazelnut liqueur because it felt like the situation called for it. "Pierce doesn't say anything incriminating. What's Diaz supposed to do, go after the D.A. on my word alone? He probably wouldn't even believe me. He might be open-minded, but there's open-minded, and then there's your boss's boss's boss's boss is a serial-killing necromancer ."

"I see your point." He floated back and forth. "So what are you going to tell Diaz? He's already texted twice, and you can only stall so long. He'd show up on our front porch right now if he thought he could do it without anyone finding out he's talking to you."

"I know." I slid onto one of the tall kitchen chairs and scrubbed my face with my hands. "Pierce is right about the evidence. Everything points to the alleged perpetrators. I have magic trace and shadows on video and my own testimony, but it isn't enough. And it's not like Pierce will confess. Even if Diaz could get a search warrant for his home, odds are that's not where he practices. He'd never risk someone finding his workshop or sensing black magic in the house."

"What if you found where he practices?" Matthias asked. "At a minimum, that would be corroborating evidence. He had to have something of the Harpes' to summon them, right? Like bones?"

"Even if I did find where he does his magic, it wouldn't exonerate Oliver or anyone else, much less be enough for anyone to convict him of the assaults or the murders," I pointed out. "Unless he kept a diary of everything he did, which isn't likely."

"Serial killers tend to take trophies," Sean pointed out. "Would he have trophies of some sort that could connect him to the victims or the crimes?"

I shrugged. "Maybe. But again, he's a prosecutor. He would know that would be a dangerous thing to do, in the unlikely event someone did catch on to what he'd done."

"He's arrogant, though," Matthias said. "Most serial killers and psychopaths are. They think they're smarter than everyone else. Ninety-five percent of that whole conversation was Pierce telling you how smart he is. I wouldn't be surprised if he did have trophies he can admire. The question is, where are they?"

"Probably the same place he practices his rituals," I said. "And that's going to be tough to find."

"Could you bait him into lashing out in public?" Liam asked, his voice tentative. "Get him to show his magic in front of witnesses?"

"I could try, but he'd probably figure out that's what I was doing. I might end up just getting arrested."

Matthias's phone buzzed. He checked the screen and glanced up at me. "Pierce just released a statement that his office has upgraded the charges against Oliver Hensley to first degree murder with special circumstances. He's requested another bond hearing to ask that bail be revoked."

"Just Oliver?" Sean asked as I processed that information. "Or the doctor too?"

"Just Oliver."

My phone rang in my back pocket. The screen read RKD Calling . I swiped the green button and put the phone on speaker. "Yeah?"

"Shit just hit the fan over here at the Hensleys' house," Arkady said. I heard her boots walking briskly on pavement and a loud commotion in the background. "The neighbors and a bunch of the victim's friends have gathered on the sidewalk. The cops are here to make sure nobody throws rocks but they're not making anyone leave. Philippa Grayson's inside with Oliver and Gracie. Have you heard about the upgraded charges?"

"Yes." Rage made my voice clipped and my chest feel tight.

Was this my fault? Make your next move, and I'll make mine , I'd told Greg, right after punching him a couple of times in his ego and then turning my back on him. Maybe the timing was coincidence and he'd planned to upgrade the charges all along, but this felt like a retaliation and upping the ante.

"Also, Grayson kicked me out of the house," Arkady said. "Oliver and Gracie told her what happened last night, and she blew a fuse. She gets real quiet when that happens, by the way. That is not a sight for the faint of heart."

I could well imagine.

"So the Hensleys are still Team Alice since you probably saved their asses last night, but if Grayson has her way, you're off the case. I heard the words ‘restraining order' as I walked out the door. I got the impression she's suddenly gotten the notion from somewhere that you're not to be trusted, on top of being royally pissed that nobody called her after Oliver got possessed again and nearly killed his wife. The word clusterfuck was invented for this situation specifically. What do you want me to do?"

My phone buzzed with another incoming call. It was Diaz .

I got that skull-about-explode feeling again.

Sean, Matthias, Malcolm, and Liam watched me with a combination of wariness and concern, like they thought I might be about to do something unhinged like level the house or jump in my car and drive straight to Pierce's office, or both.

I was perfectly capable of utterly unhinged scorched-earth tactics, but this situation called for a scalpel, not a nuke.

Make your next move, and I'll make mine .

"Leave the Hensley house and get back here," I told Arkady. "I've got another call coming in."

"Uh-oh," Malcolm muttered. "She's got that look ."

"And that tone ," Matthias said.

"Copy that, boss," Arkady said and ended the call before I could remind her we were partners.

I hit the green button again. "I heard," I said by way of greeting. "I'm still working on putting a case together, Detective."

For a beat, Diaz didn't reply.

When he spoke, his voice was quiet with fury and very deliberate, with pauses during which I imagined he was trying not to explode. "Do you…have any idea… how far …I stuck my neck out for you?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, as calmly as I could. "I do know. And I'm doing everything I can to make sure you didn't do it for nothing. Are you all right? No one's caught on that you were the source of the leak, have they?"

"No, but you've been giving me the run-around since last night and I'm through with it. You need to tell me right now what you know. Right the fuck now , Worth. Or I don't ever want to hear your voice again."

I'd run through this conversation in my head more than dozen times since I left Fields Park, envisioning how it would go if I told Diaz about Pierce and let him listen to the recording I'd surreptitiously made that ended up being of zero evidentiary value. I'd played out the possible scenarios of whether he'd believe me or not and how that might go for me and him. And no matter which way I looked at it, even if he did believe me—which was a mighty big if —the odds of him successfully going after Pierce were basically nil. He'd just end up torpedoing his own career and losing everything he'd worked for and believed in.

If he didn't believe me, he might actively interfere with any attempts I made to bring Pierce to justice, and I didn't want that either. Pierce had to pay for what he'd done, and Oliver and the others deserved exoneration in both legal and public eyes. How I was going to pull that off, though, I had no idea—yet.

Maybe Diaz deserved to make that decision of whether to go after Pierce for himself. But I knew that if he believed me that he'd go after Pierce with everything he had because it was the right thing to do. The fact he'd committed felonies to bring me the murder weapons and give me those autopsy reports proved it.

I didn't have any business making this decision for him, but I was going to anyway. Maybe I'd get to apologize for it later if he ever decided to speak to me again.

My brain kept going back to my words to Pierce: Make your next move, and I'll make mine .

He'd made his move, all right. So now I had to make mine. But what move did I have? Pierce had me backed into a corner.

A wash of clarity came over me.

When Valas's Colorado mansion collapsed on top of Matthias, Daniel, and me, I'd held up the rubble by magic, power, and sheer force of will. I'd done the impossible because it had to be done. To do so, I'd dug down deep into who I was and what I was capable of doing and pulled off a bona fide miracle.

And that was who Gregory Pierce, district attorney and necromancer, was calling out. Not so much Alice Worth, mage private investigator, but the woman who'd held up four thousand tons of rubble and then turned most of it to vapor and pebbles to save her own life and two others.

If he thought I was intriguing now, I looked forward to what adjective I'd hear from him the next time I saw him. I had a feeling it wouldn't be nearly as flattering.

At the moment, however, Detective Ernie Diaz was waiting for my answer. So were Sean, Matthias, Malcolm, and Liam, whose expressions had gone from concern to something more like curiosity. I supposed my moment of clarity had shown in my facial expression and the way my shoulders relaxed.

"I need to ask you a question," I said to Diaz. "It's justice you want, right? You want the person who killed these people to pay for what they did, and for those who are innocent to be exonerated?"

"What the fuck kind of question is that?" He nearly shouted it. "Of course that's what I want. What kind of games are you playing?"

"No games," I stated. "I don't play games with people's lives. I never have and never will. I became a mage PI for the same reason you became a cop: to help people and make sure those who do wrong face justice. But I stay on this side of the badge because sometimes justice takes a different path."

"What does that mean? I told you no more run-around."

"I'm not giving you the run-around." My chest ached because I was about to blow up our alliance. There for a while, I'd almost seen him not quite as a friend, but a colleague. Someone I could work with, at least in an unofficial way. "I just want you to know where I stand because maybe it will make a difference in the end."

"You're not going to tell me what you know, are you?" His tone became cold and dangerous. "Even after you gave me your word, and I risked everything for you. I knew I shouldn't have trusted you."

I flinched at that, but forged ahead. "You risked everything for Madison Fernell and the others. That's what matters. Because you're a great detective and good man."

"Fuck you, Alice Worth," he snapped. The call ended.

Sean put his hand on my lower back.

"Sorry, Alice," Malcolm said quietly.

I checked the time, scrolled through my contacts, and started texting .

Matthias crossed his arms and studied me as I typed. Malcolm, meanwhile, flitted around the kitchen. "Start talking. Don't type. Talk. I don't like it when you get all quiet and crafty-looking. Tell us what you're thinking, or so help me, Alice, I will do something very unpleasant."

"I'm not sure this is the moment for threats," Matthias said, eyebrow raised. "Even in jest."

" Even in jest? " Malcolm put his hands on his hips. "I swear sometimes I think you're from another century."

I finished my text and put my phone face down on the counter. "When Arkady gets here, I'm calling a Team Alice meeting. I'll lay it all out for everyone at once and then you can tell me if you think I'm a genius or if this is the single worst idea I've ever had."

"Was that a genuine attempt to make us feel better?" Malcolm asked. "Because if so, you whiffed like a toddler playing T-ball."

"What is T-ball?" I asked with a frown.

Muttering, he disappeared through the floor into the workshop. Liam followed, leaving me alone in the kitchen with Sean and Matthias.

I had not had one spare minute until now to follow up with Matthias about what Bryan and he had talked about yesterday. The rest of today—and tonight—might be just as busy as the last few days, so I didn't want to put it off again. Arkady wouldn't arrive for at least fifteen minutes, even as fast as she drove.

"I'm sorry if it's a painful subject," I said to Matthias. "But I'd like to know what Bryan said to you in private last evening."

He clasped his hands behind his back, but he didn't adopt the formal, emotionless pose he'd favored before. "Bryan informed me that my geas has conditions I wasn't aware of."

"What do you mean? The fact Charles knew that you'd told us he found out about my ability to help shifters transition?"

"That was part of it." Matthias's expression darkened. "The more troubling part is how he knew. Bryan revealed that the geas doesn't just harm or potentially kill me if I violate it. It's designed to do the same to someone whose well-being I cared about very much at the time the geas was placed upon me."

"Oh, no." I sank onto the tall kitchen chair. "So Adri Smith?—"

"Went through the same pain and injuries I did." Muscles in his face twitched. I wasn't sure if he was fighting fury or grief or both. "Except she isn't a shifter, and she isn't a dhampir. She's human."

I thought of all those broken bones and the excruciating pain Matthias had chosen to go through to give us the information about Charles.

I started to tell him he hadn't known his decision would affect Adri—because who the hell would have thought that might happen?—but of course he knew that. I imagined how I would feel if I'd unknowingly done something that caused Sean that level of suffering. Matthias might not love Adri anymore, but I couldn't imagine he felt much better than I would in a similar scenario.

Damn the vampires. Damn Charles . He had to have known the provisions of Matthias's geas . Why hadn't he told him a violation would harm Adri too?

I answered my own question a moment later: because it would have been much more of a shock for Matthias to find out the hard way. It was sadistic and cruel and entirely on-brand.

"I'm so sorry," I said. "Does that mean you don't want us to try to unravel the geas? "

"For now, I would prefer if you didn't." He glanced at Sean. "I understand it puts you all at a disadvantage not to have access to what I know. My allegiance is to our pack, not the Court, and not to Adri. But trying to remove the geas could kill me and Adri. She didn't ask for this any more than I did."

"Yes and no. Adri took an oath to the Court of her own free will," Sean pointed out. "She knew what that meant and what vampires are like. I'm not unsympathetic, but she had to know she'd be at their mercy. Ultimately, as your alpha, the decision of whether to try to unravel the geas is mine. If the time comes when I feel we have no choice, we'll revisit the subject. In the meantime, I'll ask Arkady to examine the document for clues about the wording of the spellwork but not attempt to break it unless we tell her to do so. Agreed?"

"Agreed," Matthias said.

I didn't like that Sean had taken the decision out of Matthias's hands, but Matthias didn't seem to object. And at the same time I recalled Arkady's admonishment from days earlier that I had to let Sean be an alpha and lead us. That went for good times and bad, and in the making of decisions that had complicated, far-reaching, and potentially deadly consequences—like the one I was about to propose.

Arkady arrived not long after that, just as I finished brewing a fresh pot of coffee. She parked her Harley out front, stomped inside still muttering about Philippa Grayson, poured a cup of coffee, flopped on the couch, and propped her boots on our coffee table.

"Well?" she said, looking around the room. "What's the plan to un-fuck this bullshit salad?"

My text message to Charles's super-secret phone, sent the moment I got off the call with Diaz, had read Call me when you wake up .

That evening, a full ninety minutes before his normal rising time at sunset, and less than an hour after Team Alice had finished hashing out our plan, he called.

And then it was game on.