Page 7 of Bent Out of Shade
“Go,” I said. “But be back by dinner.”
“Thanks.” She hugged me and her father, her spirits instantly restored, and hopped through the door in the fence connecting his yard to mine.
“Her mood swings are bad enough,” I said, “but she jumps between them so fast. I get she’s acting out because so much has happened, but it’s exhausting.”
Eli wrapped the hose up on its mounted holder. “Careful, babe. If she gets really pissed off, she could null your magic.”
“You’re loving this, aren’t you? I’m the one she could go all Mr. Hyde on while you, the one who passed down her magic gene, is exempt?”
He spread his index finger and thumb apart. “A little bit, yeah.”
I made the sign of the evil eye. “I hope you go into one of your food comas after dinner tonight and can’t perform.”
Eli gasped. “That’s cold.”
“Truth hurts, baby.” I ducked through the door in our fence and headed into my house, beelining directly for my office. A bland space with functional furniture, it wasn’t used for much more than a dumping ground. When I’d brought work home as a law librarian, I’d done it from the comfort of my living room sofa.
I kept meaning to transform the office, along with the rest of the beige void I lived in, but with so many more pressing issues, I hadn’t even gotten around to painting a single room. The only thing I’d done was install a giant whiteboard on one wall. At the top, I’d taped a photo of my parents with “Who killed them?” written above it.
I sighed. My murder board was another reason for Sadie’s current mood. I’d told her the truth about my parents’ deaths at our last therapy session. Her anger at me hiding magic from her was nothing compared to the thundercloud that had descended upon learning that I’d lied to her about her grandparents dying in a fire.
After two days of Sadie slamming my office door closed so she didn’t have to see the board, I learned my lesson and kept the door permanently shut. She was working through the whole sordid story in her own time; I’d seen her standing in here studying the board the other night, but we had yet to discuss it.
Sitting down in my creaky chair, I pushed that aside to focus on the facts of Mom’s and Dad’s deaths. A line led from their picture to a grainy photo of Calvin Jones with bullet points written underneath. Ohrist. Hired my parents to cause Tatiana’s car crash and steal Ascendant.
Calvin hung on to the amplifier for two years before Tatiana tracked him down. She also killed him in retaliation for her car crash, but before he died, he mentioned a buyer he had lined up for the artifact.
We’d discounted the buyer being involved in my parents’ murders because they wouldn’t have waited two years to get the Ascendant from Jones. Especially not if it was a demon.
I uncapped a blue dry erase marker and drew a line from Calvin to a new box that I labeled “demon accomplice?” along with: long life spans, murders happened almost thirty years apart, ability to manipulate ohr/fire, difficult to track down.
Calvin could have snapped my parents’ necks from a distance and then a demon set the fire, since Nav didn’t believe it likely that the demon had done both, but did Jones have any children or grandchildren? Had they been tasked with keeping the truth of the original murders suppressed and killed McMurtry?
After adding “kids?” to the board, I popped the cap on and off the marker. Calvin had died years ago. Any role in my parents’ murders couldn’t be proved, and even if it could, it’s not like he could be put on trial. He didn’t need to bequeath some grand plan to keep his name clear.
I struck an X through Calvin’s name. Was this all down to some demon agenda? Around the time my parents died, McMurtry was taken into the demon realm and infected with a demon parasite, which cured his terminal cancer. That Lonestar was the link that spanned almost three decades, before he too was executed. I gnawed on the marker cap. If a fire demon had teamed up with an Ohrist, why kill my parents? Mom and Dad didn’t have the Ascendant, Calvin did. Also, a demon wouldn’t have bothered to cover up the murders.
Cursing, I threw the marker onto the desk.
The only other photo on my murder board was taped to the right side. It was an old picture of Arlo Garcia, the Banim Shovavim currently being tortured in the Kefitzat Haderech. He’d earned a special damnation at the hands of three Banim Shovavim–hating angels—Senoi, Sansenoi, and Sammaneglof—for using the Ascendant.
I’d managed one visit with him, but the KH had made it clear no further ones were permitted. I rubbed my temples. Very clear.
Arlo had been Tatiana’s client, hiring her to find and steal the Ascendant. She’d spent three years tracking it down, finally snatching it from a shadowy group called the Consortium. They’d used it to open a portal to Gehenna to let dybbuks out, in aid of their experiments on Sapiens to turn them into hosts. Luckily, they hadn’t had a full-strength Banim Shovavim on the job, and so those malevolent spirits weren’t unleashed on the entire world.
Even though Arlo’s name hadn’t been erased, I’d crossed him off my list of suspects. That left the Consortium as the only other human players on the board, but my gut said they weren’t part of this. Plus, I’d done a bit of surreptitious digging into them with the help of Ryann Esposito, the head Lonestar in Vancouver.
Officially, she wasn’t allowed to go after the Consortium. It was too big and too powerful, and Lonestar leadership had deemed it a Sapien problem, but Ryann and I had channeled our mutual frustration into a covert investigation. Sadly, we hadn’t learned anything beyond what we already knew. The other reason that organization didn’t work as a possibility? I’d been with McMurtry when he was killed. Even if the murderer hadn’t known who I was at the time, anyone with half a brain would have found out my identity and my connection to all of this and gone after me to shut me up.
Yet, no one had.
Why was I allowed to live, and why were great pains taken with the other murders to cover them up? I kept circling back to those questions.
I’d reached out to the gargoyles who played intermediary between supernaturals, hoping to find someone with answers. The one in Northern BC back when my parents died was no longer alive, however, if a new gargoyle had taken the old one’s place, maybe they’d been brought up to speed on past events.
Harry, a speakeasy bartender and the go-to gargoyle here in Vancouver, was looking into this for me. Generally, I pestered him for meetings with Zev BatKian, but for better or worse, I’d graduated to making direct contact with the bloodsucker.
Sighing, I rubbed a smear of blue marker off my hand. My leads were slim, and the group working on this with me was comprised of a mouthy golem, a wolf shifter with a somewhat dimmed yet not depleted death wish, an elderly woman with powerful magic and a massive thirst for vengeance, and me.
Yeah, I couldn’t see anything possibly going wrong.
