Page 11 of Wicked Deeds

Five hours sleep wasn’t much better than three.

I was staring at myself in the mirror, trying to ignore my dark circles, my long brown hair falling damp on my bare shoulders, when Madge announced Lizzie was at the gate.

“Let her in. Tell her I’ll be five minutes.”

I hastily threw on some clothes, dried my hair as best I could, and then followed the smell of coffee to the kitchen where Lizzie was perched on one of the stools at the counter, watching Maia make coffee. Maia was in her usual black, everything immaculately ironed, and her dark hair braided away from her face. Lizzie, in contrast, wore a daffodil-yellow sundress with bright-blue combat boots. She’d left her hair loose for once. It was nearly true silver, almost sparkling in the sun pouring through the windows.

I assumed it was some kind of nano effect, but required caffeine before I could form the words to ask.

Real coffee was one of the perks of dating Damon I would never take for granted. Maia tried to pass me the mug she’d just poured, but she had had as little sleep as me so I made her take it and waited for the machine to produce the strongest espresso it was programmed for. Damon usually made the coffee himself, overriding the programming. I knew how, but this morning I was happy to let the tech take care of it and save my brainpower.

We all drank coffee silently for a few minutes, Lizzie unusually quiet despite the sunny outfit. There were faint dark smudges under her brown eyes. Had she had an interrupted night as well?

When she yawned and stretched and I spotted the familiar sheen of a spray bandage on her left arm, I answered my own question.

I pointed at the bandage. “What happened there?”

Lizzie grimaced. “It’s fine.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Zee and I were doing another sweep through Dockside. Someone reported a ‘giant bug’ climbing a wall to the police.”

“And the police responded?” Most of Dockside was a no-go zone for cops. The city had essentially abandoned the area. Too much damage and no one willing to step in and spend the money to restabilize the docks and build the infrastructure to keep back the water. It had been tried on other parts of the city’s shorelines with varying degrees of success. Some areas had recovered, some were still teetering on the edge of might make it back, and Dockside had been declared a failure. So, no cops. Not unless a VIP got into trouble down there, and even then it would have to be someoneveryVIP.

“The police recorded the call in their system. The Cestis has been monitoring for key words and phrases, as usual. And ‘giant bug’ was one of them, so we got pinged.”

The Cestis operated independently of the other arms of the law when it came to magic users, but it also piggybacked off existing infrastructure where it could. I didn’t know the full extent of its resources, or how many witches Cassandra and the others commanded, but I knew they couldn’t hope to cover the whole country without using other agencies. They just had to do it discreetly.

“So, an afrit?” Maia asked.

Lizzie shook her hair, the effect somewhat mesmerizing as the silver sparkled. “Not that we could find. Of course, down there, it could have been someone having a really bad trip.”

“So officially it’s a figment of a Dockside-induced hallucination?” I said.

She nodded but her mouth had flattened into a dissatisfied line.

“And unofficially?”

“I’m not sure. We’ll keep looking. But it’s been, what, more than a month since you killed yours? It could have been a loner.” She ran her hand down her arm, stopping where the spray bandage started, massaging the skin above it gently, as though it was annoying her. Or the lack of success finding the afrit was.

Afrit, though not common, did sometimes turn up in the city. Anywhere there’d been imps or lesserkind who used them for various low-level tasks and mischief. They could climb walls, burrow underground, and infiltrate places imps couldn’t. The Cestis rooted them out and killed them where they could, but it was nearly impossible to find them all.

Without any other demonkind directing them, they seemed to live like large bugs, eating—I assumed—rats and pigeons and garbage and avoiding contact with humans unless something magical caught their attention.

“Right. A loner,” I echoed Lizzie as Maia rose to refill her mug.

Lizzie’s blue eyes were skeptical. My gut agreed with her. And wasn’t happy about it.

“So we just keep monitoring the reports?”

“Yes,” Lizzie said. She and Zee and Cassandra had spent more than a few nights working their way around Dockside since Callum and I had killed an afrit down there. Callum and Gráinne and I had, too, under the guise of training. None of us had found any trace of other afrit, but they could hide in places impossible for humans to follow and if there weren’t groups of them and they were mostly dormant, they didn’t leave a strong enough magical signature to trace easily.

Though I was much better at sensing even faint traces of demon magic these days.

“Do you want Maia to look at your arm?” I asked Lizzie. She was rubbing the spot above the bandage again.

“No, I’m icy. Scratched it on some chain link. Zee cleaned it out for me.” She moved her left hand around in exaggerated bends and swoops, demonstrating it was fully functional. “See.”

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