Page 85 of A Subtle Scar
“Yeah, sorry. It—I got held up.”
“No worries, but you want to come in. You were right about the pattern,” she said. “Hold on.” I could hear background noise—the station I was guessing, but she was walking.
A door closed, and Rice went on. “So we staked out those three heptagram points. The bad news is there’s another body.”
“Oh, fuck. I’m sorry. What else?”
“We got the people who were dropping her. Two women. They’ve had magic done to them, and I think you should take a look before I involve anyone else. The medics say they are stable for now. Madison says they are also under one of those marionette spells.”
That I had not expected. “Be there as soon as I can. I assume you have a press release scheduled?”
“Yes, but we are keeping it vague. For better or worse, it was the parking lot drop site they were hitting, and at four in the morning. Not a lot of witnesses, but we don’t want any rumors to spread.”
“Right. Anything on the body so far?”
“Nothing new,” Rice said. “She looks like the others. ME’s still working.”
“Okay. I’ll be there soon,” I said and hung up.
Before I got dressed in yesterday’s clothes, I looked at myself in the vanity’s mirror.
A sense of almost having been here before, having seen this already, flooded me. Last night couldn’t have been a trance, it had to have been a dream, just like I thought at the time.
I reached up to my cheek where stubble was growing in. I used magic in the shower to shave most days but had forgotten. I did it now, watching as the hair fell away. An outside of myself sensation hit me hard, and while I knew it was my hand on my cheek, my magic shaving off the hair there, it looked like a different person for a moment, and I couldn’t bring myself to recognize that man.
I was thrown back to that dream last night, Victor running.
Why do you keep chasing me?he’d asked. My clean-shaven, boyish mirror image looked back at me, smiled at me, the look on his face full of understanding and love, so much of it that I couldn’t recognize myself in that expression at all.
The whole thing lasted for seconds, maybe for a minute, and it left me slightly disoriented.
After, I shook my head, rubbed my face with my hands, and finally pulled my clothes on. I moved slowly, feeling still half caught in a dream.
“First I can’t get rid of them, and now they vanish,” I said when I left the bedroom behind in search of the two immortals who, unfailingly, managed to complicate things.
Charon’s house felt big, but there were things everywhere. I walked down the stairs, my path lined with framed photographs and paintings, some of Charon, one even of the Dragon Mother in her dragon form.
Downstairs, there was a whole collection of umbrellas in a stand, and piles of games and puzzles covering a table. I followed the sound of soft voices to the kitchen. There was lots of pastel green here, and two gods pressed against the retro-looking fridge to make out.
I cleared my throat. “Hermes, could you drop me at the police station real quick? Or I’ll call a cab, get out of your hair. Where are we exactly?”
Hermes pulled back. Charon was pressed up against the fridge, eyes glassy, lips puffy. “West Coast, baby. We’re all going, but after breakfast.”
My jaw dropped. “Wait. Did you say…fuck. Are you telling me it’s past noon in Brunswick?”
The two of them looked at me innocently, and Hermes shrugged.
Charon turned around and opened the fridge. “How about we start the day with some leftover pizza?”
I ran my hands through my hair. “Forget the pizza. Or have it later. I need to get there, now. They need a magical assessment because there was a new body and two survivors who are under a puppet spell as we speak. Seriously, just drop me there, get back to, you know. That situation.” I indicated their midsections. They had not bothered with clothes nor with getting off.
“Oh, but that’s good,” Charon said as he pulled the plates out of the fridge. “That means the police managed to do all of that even if you took the time to rest properly.”
“Yes, and they would have been ahead anyway. Since I found the spell and the sacrifices connected to it,” Hermes added. “It’s nearly solved, isn’t it?”
I pinched my nose. “We don’t have the people behind it, and they managed to find the women under the puppet binding because I realized the spell—the one I haven’t even confirmed, thanks to you two dithering around—is modeled after the Pleiades.”
They froze, and Hermes’s triumphant smile fell. “Oh.Oh.”
