Page 55 of Mystic Justice
I remembered Snicklesnack, her pale skin and her tear-filled eyes. She had said the vampyr had apologised and now that made more sense. I said firmly, ‘If you have to collect another tail then you must deliver any imps you attack to the Crone straight afterwards.’
Volderiss raised an elegant eyebrow. ‘You want him to add kidnapping to the mix?’
‘I want the imps to survive,’ I snarled. ‘I want them to be healed, to have their tails re-grown. Amber DeLea can do that. If it’s tails you need, I can’t stop the operation – but you won’t take their lives.’
‘Fine,’ Volderiss replied tightly. ‘Gideon? Do it.’
‘Yes, sir,’ he said respectfully.
I spoke again. ‘As to Moss Hollings and Joe Bogan, I want you to close your bar, Merrick.’
Gideon snorted derisively before he could stop himself. ‘Forgive me,’ he said hastily, eyeing Krieg, ‘but I pride myself on being open seven days a week. Everyone knows it – it’s one of my unique selling points. Botany only closes on Christmas day.’
‘Someone is targeting people linked to your bar. If you close it, perhaps I won’t wake up to a new corpse tomorrow.’
Gideon shook his golden hair. ‘The killer will already have their victim in mind, so closing the bar will do nothing but ruin my bottom line. Unless you bring me an order forcing me to close, Botany stays open.’
‘People will die and it will be on your head,’ I hissed.
‘No,’ he disagreed. ‘It will be on this necromancer’s head.’ He gestured to my phone where he’d watched the scorched runes appear. ‘Do your job, Inspector, and I will do mine.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
After Gideon showed me the back room, I called Elvira and Bland to follow me out to Krieg’s car. Loki fluttered into the car, resting on his favourite spot on the back-seat headrest.
‘I Gideon,’ Loki said, gyrating his groin obscenely. ‘I shag all. I asshole.’ He whistled in a derisory fashion. ‘Asshole. Pooped in his coffee,’ he confided, making me grin despite myself.
Gideon had made some noises about feeling bad about the imps he’d attacked, but he’d made no apologies about routinely fucking his way through his young and vulnerable staff. He may be trying to stop someone more evil than himself but that didn’t absolve him of leveraging his position of power over his staff to get laid. Still, Betty was a consenting adult and unless she came forward about feeling pressured – which, frankly, wasn’t the vibe I’d got – then it was just an ill-advised work relationship. Those happened the world over, whether I liked it or not. And I did not.
‘Anything?’ I asked Elvira, once we were within the confines of the vehicle.
She sighed. ‘No other witches in the other staff.’
‘And no red flags,’ Bland added. ‘The staff we interviewed included one other dryad who was obviously devastated by Moss’s death. She said they frequently worked the back room together where plants are grown. There’s something else cagey going on there. I could feel it.’
‘Me too,’ Elvira agreed.
‘They’re growing illegal plants for the black coven, not just for the front of house,’ I explained grimly. ‘But that’s not the focus of our investigation, so let it lie.’ The fewer people who knew about Gideon’s undercover role the better, even within my own team.
‘Right you are. The rest of the staff are all wizards,’ Bland continued without missing a beat. ‘Low grade, levels one and two only. All of them had alibis for the times of Hollings’s and Bogan’s deaths, though not many had them for both.’
‘And regular customers?’ I asked.
‘Well, that’s a little more interesting,’ Elvira said. ‘The most frequent regulars are the temporal guards from the bombed-out church.’
I raised my eyebrows. St Luke’s, known locally as the bombed-out church, housed the most important portal in the UK. It was one of a handful of portals the world over that allowed direct access to the Third realm – the realm that let you play with time as if it weren’t linear.
Because of the place’s importance – and its danger – it was guarded round the clock by black-ops wizards who were trained killing machines. Each temporal guard was hand selected while in his or her prime and given a maximum of two years’ work. After their time was up, they were thrown back into circulation to continue government-sanctioned killings, or they became private mercenaries or bodyguards.
I frowned. ‘Trying to kidnap or kill a temporal guard would be madness.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Elvira huffed. ‘But what if one of the guards has a screw loose and decided to go on a killing spree?’
I considered it for a moment. ‘It’s possible, but they undergo regular psychological evaluations, and seer touches. And it’s notable that none of the deaths so far have been done using the IR. If a wizard was responsible for drowning Moss, there wouldn’t have been bruises on the back of her neck that showed she’d been held down.’
‘They could have tossed a centaur into the air, though,’ Elvira argued, playing devil’s advocate.
I was a level five wizard: I’d never tried to toss something that big up into the air, and nothing I’d thrown had ever travelled thousands of feet. ‘It’s not likely. How far haveyouthrown something?’ I asked. She was level five too.
