What Man Defies Read online

  I pulled Amy’s photo from my pocket and held it up.

  He wrenched the door open, gasping. “Did…Did you find her?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” I painted on my best neutral face. It moved like hard plastic. “Can I come in, Mr. Newsome?”

  He swallowed thickly as he realized I wasn’t here to give him good news. “Yeah, sure.” He stepped aside and pointed to the left. “Living room is that way.”

  I made myself as comfortable as I could on the couch with the weight of my next words lying heavy on my shoulders. Craig Newsome, wringing his hands over and over again, paced back and forth behind the loveseat for nearly a minute before he finally drummed up the courage to sit down across from me. He stared at the coffee table between us as he muttered, “She’s dead, right?”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said.

  He buried his face in his hands, shoulders shaking as he tried not to cry. “I knew,” he stammered. “It’s been weeks, so I…I knew, logically. But I just wanted to believe, you know? Believe, out of all the millions of missing in this fucked-up world, that she would be the one who came back.”

  “I know.”

  He dragged his fingers down his face and finally looked up at me, tears brimming in his eyes. “What happened? Where was her body found?”

  And here came the really hard part. Because I was about to go off script from my old police procedure. “About that, Mr. Newsome,” I started. “Your wife’s body is still missing.”

  He balked. “Then how do you know she’s dead?”

  “Because I banished her vengeful ghost from a local store earlier today.”

  “Her what?”

  “Her ghost.”

  “I don’t understand.” He’d gone white as a sheet. “Aren’t you a cop?”

  “I was once. Now I do private work.” Technically true. “I also consult with the Kinsale PD on occasion. Right now, I’m working some angles on a case that the police aren’t able to pursue themselves.” Almost true. “The case in question involves a string of recent disappearances. Your wife is one of roughly three dozen people who’ve mysteriously vanished over the past several weeks. She is, however, one of only two we know for sure died after their disappearances.” A supposition. I hadn’t found a photo on O’Shea’s board for the ghost of the man at the market, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been abducted. A lot of people lived solitary lives in Kinsale. Guy might’ve been a loner with no one to report him missing.

  Newsome clenched the fabric of his pants. “So, she was murdered then? For sure?”

  “Either she was murdered outright, or she died as a result of being somewhere she couldn’t survive.” The stretches, perhaps. Maybe even the Otherworld. My first big step in this case would be finding out exactly where the victims were taken after they got snatched. Then, depending on the answer, I’d have to create a game plan for storming that place and rescuing the surviving victims. Assuming there were surviving victims. “Either way, your wife did not disappear of her own volition. She was taken by someone.”

  “Or something,” he said darkly. “There are things out there. Nasty things.”

  “Right.” But none of them were this methodical. “I’ll be looking into every possibility.”

  “You said you banished her ghost.” He bit one of his knuckles, hard. “Does that mean you’re a wizard? You do magic?”

  “I do magic, correct.” There was no need to answer that first question.

  “I see. So you can handle a paranormal then, if one of them is behind this?” He shut his eyes for a moment, still fighting the tears. They were on the cusp of falling. “You can kill them?”

  “I’ll try my absolute hardest to bring the perpetrator to justice, Mr. Newsome. I promise you that.” And while I would attempt to kill the perp, if it came down to a fight between them and me—because I wasn’t a huge fan of giving remorseless killers, human or otherwise, the kind of second chances that might let them walk free—I wasn’t gunning for another confrontation with a being beyond my weight class. Abarta was more than enough of a wake-up call. I had to play this smart. Only fight when it was unavoidable. Do all in my power to trick and trap instead of punch and kick.

  In other words, I had to channel my faerie half.

  Got to love that irony.

  “I’ll do anything I can to help.” Newsome set his jaw. “Anything at all.”

  “I just need to ask you some questions.” Last thing I wanted was a mundane human getting wrapped up in this mess. It was bad enough Saoirse had tagged along for the fight with Abarta, but at least she was a highly skilled veteran cop. Plus, she had a magic gun. This guy was powerless, inexperienced, and grieving. A liability. Nothing more. “Beyond that, I want you to go about your days as you normally would. If the perpetrator is targeting specific individuals, they might be stalking them ahead of time, watching their families even. I don’t want to tip them off too early that I’m onto them. Might cause them to act erratically.”

  Newsome wanted to object, to demand to aid me in the investigation, his mouth opening to spew a bunch of lines I was prepared to smash to pieces and leave him to sweep up in shame. But before he spoke, he must’ve thought of the other victims, the ones who might still be alive, the ones who could die if he did the wrong thing while interfering in my investigation. Because his dangerous resolve disintegrated in a matter of seconds, his expression collapsing back into heart-deep pain. “All right,” he said at last. “What do you need to know?”

  Relieved I wouldn’t have to verbally smack him, I replied, “The day she disappeared. Can you walk me through exactly what happened?”

  “I already told the cops this.”

  “I need you to tell me. Not all the police are trained to recognize signs of the paranormal.”

  “Okay.” He took a deep breath. “We were out shopping at Marianne’s, the little grocery store on Twelfth. Amy paid while I finished loading up our bags. Then we each picked up two bags and walked out of the store. It was spitting wet snow, so Amy stopped to get her umbrella from her coat pocket, because she didn’t want the dry goods in her bags to get ruined. I kept on going until I reached the street corner. The moment I stopped, I looked over my shoulder to find Amy…” His next breath shuddered. “But she wasn’t there.”

  “How many seconds passed between you two walking side by side and you walking ahead to the street corner?”

  “Five or six. No more.”

  I chewed on that timeline. In five seconds, someone had managed to snatch a woman outside a grocery store and leave no evidence or eyewitnesses behind? “Were her grocery bags gone too?” I asked.

  Newsome nodded. “Everything was gone. Except the umbrella.”

  “The umbrella?”

  “It was lying on the sidewalk where she should’ve been.” He pointed to a coatrack in the corner of the foyer across from us. There was a salmon-pink umbrella hanging on one hook.

  “Can I see that real quick?”

  “Uh, sure.” Newsome rose and shuffled over to the rack, returning with the umbrella. “The police already looked it over for evidence. They didn’t find any prints that weren’t Amy’s.”

  “I’m not looking for fingerprints.” I took the umbrella. As I laid it across both my hands, I released my first glamour, sharpening my senses. Combined with my unglamoured magic, my heightened sight became highly attuned to even the faintest wisps of magic energy. I’d pushed that sense to the limit when Saoirse and I were breaking into Abarta’s decoy house, managing to drill through several feet of earth to find a single weak spell written into a doorframe. If I could do that, I could certainly find a pinch of magic from within the folds of an umbrella.

  I focused on the object, gaze slowly dragging across its length. At first, nothing jumped out at me, and I figured any lingering traces of magic had long dissipated this far out from the day of Amy’s abduction. The natural energy of the Earth eventually eroded free-standing magic energy. It could even erode wards and charms if y
ou didn’t do occasional maintenance to “refresh” them.

  But just as I was about to toss the umbrella as a dead end, I spotted one single lingering smear of magic energy on the handle, so faint I couldn’t tell its aura color, much less whether it had come from a human practitioner or some other creature. However, the fact that any amount of energy not attached to a spell had survived this long on an inert object indicated the initial burst of magic it had come from was substantial. Whoever was taking these people was no lightweight. This was a serious enemy.

  What’s the plan though? I wondered, perturbed. What are they doing with these people?

  Breaking out of my stupor, I offered the umbrella back to Newsome. “Nothing there,” I lied. “Now, if you could answer a few more questions…”

  Newsome obliged. We chatted for another fifteen minutes, during which I learned one more interesting fact: Amy Newsome was related to Rebecca Shriver, another of the missing victims from O’Shea’s board. Amy’s father and Rebecca’s mother were siblings, making the two women first cousins. Rebecca, according to O’Shea’s notes, had gone missing less than three days after Amy. Was there a connection? Or was that a coincidence? Could the abductor be taking people who were blood related?

  I asked Newsome.

  He looked surprised. “Rebecca’s gone too? I had no idea.”

  “Amy wasn’t in contact with her?”

  He cast his eyes at the floor. “They had a falling-out, during the purge. They, um, supported different sides.”

  “Ah,” I said stiffly, “I see.”

  I had the terrible, itching urge to ask which woman was a good person, and which was a fan of genocide. But I held my tongue because it would’ve been “unprofessional,” not to mention vindictive, for me to bring up such a question in an unrelated investigation. And I couldn’t guarantee Newsome wouldn’t gossip about me to all his friends if I gave him fuel for that fire.

  Then again, leaving the question unspoken wasn’t a huge problem. Because the sweat accumulating on Newsome’s temples and neck, and the subtle trembling of his hands, gave away the answer regardless.

  “Well, that’s all I need of your time today, Mr. Newsome.” I rose from the couch, back straight, shoulders tight, a few notches lower on the warmth and compassion scale than I’d been when he first opened his door. “I’ll keep you apprised of any major developments in the case. If we do eventually retrieve Amy’s body, we’ll turn it over to the medical examiner, and you can begin the funeral process.”

  Newsome didn’t stand to accompany me back to the door. “Thank you.”

  I tossed him a scrap of paper with Saoirse’s work number scrawled on it. I didn’t want to give him mine. “Call that number if you remember any more relevant details. I’ll see myself out.”

  Chapter Four

  On the way home to partake of a light dinner before I continued my investigation into the night, I took a detour to Christie’s teashop. My stomach was unsettled by the revelation of Amy Newsome’s history as a purge supporter—I hated how I felt a shred of satisfaction that she was dead and I wasn’t—and I wanted to wash the acid out of my gut with some soothing tea and mindless talk about this Friday’s Scrabble match with the Malcolm twins. Christie was always good at bringing me down from emotional extremes and slapping some sense into me when I was acting like a fool. That and she had some great tea blends.

  I came up on her shop from behind, courtesy of the route from the Newsome house, crossing the little narrow backstreet abutting two rows of shops. Skirting around a dumpster that had been turned sideways and now partially blocked the alley between Christie’s place and the antique store next door, I trudged up to the side door I usually used when I didn’t want to interrupt Christie during business hours.

  It was going on five o’clock now, so Christie should’ve been wringing up her last few customers of the day. I could sit in her office in the back and wait until she was done, then we could head upstairs for tea and talk. Not quite a ritual, but it’d become something close to one, especially in recent weeks. Christie hadn’t wanted me out of her sight for more than three days at a time since the Abarta showdown.

  Seeing the grievous iron wound in my shoulder had traumatized her.

  Yet another thing I have to regret.

  I rummaged around in my coat pocket and pulled out the key for the side door, brushing some fragments of ice away from the lock. As I went to stick the key in, a familiar silhouette passed in my periphery, and I turned to see Christie marching along the sidewalk of the main street. She had a couple well-used shopping bags on each arm, and they were full of what appeared to be paper cups, stir sticks, sugar, and other supplies. Christie must’ve run out of some stock unexpectedly and had to make a quick trip to her wholesaler.

  I shoved the key back into my pocket and jogged toward her. She noticed my movement and looked my way, her face brightening for a greeting. And then—

  She was gone.

  One second, Christie was on the sidewalk, smiling, a hand half raised, bags swinging to and fro. In between one second and the next, there was a ripple in the air behind her, so slight I’d have missed it if my faerie senses had still been glamoured. And the next second, a hand made of a silvery metal shot out from that ripple, grabbed Christie by the neck, and yanked her backward. Into a rip portal to the Otherworld. A pack of napkins fell out of Christie’s bag as she vanished through the veil and dropped into the snow where she’d been standing.

  There one moment, gone the next. Just like all the other missing people.

  Shit!

  Releasing my second glamour, I took off for the rapidly closing portal, the ripple in the air already fading. As I closed in, I snapped my fingers and shot a blast of magic at the tear in the fabric of space. The ripple effect intensified as the portal abruptly widened to the full width of the sidewalk, my own spell disrupting the other person’s attempt to seal it and cut Christie off from any chance of rescue.

  I reached the end of the alley and skidded to a stop across the snow. Energy wafted off me in a dense white mist as I demanded my magic help me fight an unknown foe threatening one of my friends. The beast within me woke up, itching for a brawl.

  The view on the side of the portal was like a disturbed pond, the shapes and colors hard to parse. I made to raise a defensive shield and plunge through to the other side—when a metal fist came flying through the portal, right at my face. I brought up my shield in the nick of time, but it might as well have been tinfoil for all the good it did. The force of the punch threw me back ten feet, and I only stayed upright because a helpful streetlamp pole slammed into my back. My iron wound was not amused. I had to grit my teeth to stop a cry from slipping out.

  While I was busy regaining my bearings, a woman stepped out of the portal.

  She was six feet tall with flaming red hair tied back in a series of elaborate braids. One of her arms, hand to shoulder, was an ornate silver prosthetic thrumming with so much magic that it made my eyes cross if I stared at it for more than a second at a time. On her belt were two large hunting knives, both charmed to inflict extreme pain and maximize blood loss. And on her face was a red-lipped smirk topped with sultry green eyes that made you feel like you were both an object of desire and a subject of ridicule.

  My attention kept drifting back to that arm, even though it made me dizzy. I was pretty sure I’d seen it before, but the exact memory wasn’t surfacing. That likely meant the memory belonged to my largely forgotten childhood. Which was bad. Because all the important and memorable stuff from my childhood related directly to the secrets of the fae and the innumerable dangerous mysteries that lurked in the shadows of Tír na nÓg.

  The woman’s arm was an ancient power object.

  Oh, great. Here we go again.

  The woman gave me a quick scan, and smirked. “Ah, it seems I’ve stumbled upon the notorious Vincent Whelan.”

  “Notorious?” A low wave of dread rolled through my gut. “Who’ve you been talking to?�
�

  “Only so many candidates to choose from.” She winked. “Make a guess.”

  “I don’t have time for games. Where’s my friend?” Christie was in the Otherworld, and practically anything in any realm could kill her. And even if she somehow managed to survive, some experiences in the Otherworld could warp a human being’s soul into a monstrous and ruined thing. “I want her back. Now.”

  “Your friend?” The woman glanced over her shoulder, eyebrows rising. “Oh, whoops. I just snatched the next name on my list. Didn’t realize she had you in her entourage. My bad.” She shrugged. “But what’s done is done. You can always make new friends, Whelan. My job, on the other hand, has the kind of reward you can only get once.” She raised her metal arm and wiggled her fingers at me. “So tootles. And better luck next time.” She went to step back into the portal.

  I dropped to the ground and slammed my right fist into the snow, discharging my accumulated magic. It zipped underneath her faster than she could move, and a massive spike of ice sprang out of the snow and blocked her escape route. Dozens of smaller spikes pierced through the snow in front of the large one, and the woman dove to her right to avoid getting skewered, landing in the street in a hard but controlled somersault. She jumped back to her feet, metal arm now glowing along its decorative etchings, and I could feel it sucking energy from the air.

  The arm was a conduit. A medium that allowed you to absorb all types of free-standing energy and bend it to your will, even if it didn’t suit your nature. Conduits were extremely rare and difficult to produce, and I’d never seen one larger than a baseball. Whoever had made that arm had skills far beyond any human practitioner, and beyond most faerie magic scholars as well.

  If I make one mistake, that arm is going to take me out.

  She swung the silver arm back, the sigils on the hand flaring brighter, and I prepared for all manner of spells to explode from the conduit. Which is why I missed the woman yanking one of her knives from its sheath and launching it at my face. I dodged at the last millisecond, the blade nicking my left temple before it cut through the air behind me and rammed into a brick wall, down to the hilt. Pain flared out from the wound, more than there should’ve been from a minor cut, but it was nothing compared to the pain of an iron wound. So I ignored it.