Page 8 of Silk Skullduggery (Haven Hollow #40)

For someone with no criminal record, I saw far too much of the inside of the Haven Hollow Police Department.

It had always been a well-run place, especially for a smaller town. The previous Chief of Police, Cain Morgan, had run an extremely tight ship. I hadn’t had any complaints about him, other than the fact that he knew we were lying about the supernatural side of things in Haven Hollow, and he’d developed a theory involving a cult operating behind the scenes and ruling from the shadows.

The worst part was, he hadn’t been wrong. The Council did have a lot of sway over things regarding anything paranormal, but it wasn’t nefarious. The Council was merely intended to keep the peace, keep the secrecy, and make sure both halves of the population were safe from each other. We couldn’t violate the rules of the Hollow to tell Cain, a mundane man, exactly who his neighbors were.

And that’s what had gotten him killed, in the end. I still felt guilty about that.

Of course, being dead hadn’t kept Cain Morgan away from work for long. Taliyah had needed his help with some serious cases and had hired Darla at the Spook Society.

Darla was one of the most powerful mediums I’d ever encountered. She had a sensitivity to ghosts that was unmatched, probably from spending a century as a ghost herself. Taliyah and the society had a contract for Darla to act as Cain’s channel, so the cop and the flapper had become strange roommates.

It was still strange to see Darla swanning around the precinct sometimes, with cop jargon coming out of her mouth in her nasal, New Jersey accent. But it seemed to be working out for everyone involved, so I was staying out of it. And maybe seeing him up and around, interacting with his nephews, made me feel a little less bad about Cain Morgan dying while he was trying to protect me.

I still didn’t like being here, though. It was all steel and glass but done in a way that seemed sterile and cold instead of sleek and modern. The chairs were uncomfortable, the air smelled like burnt coffee and body odor, and there were just too many people moving around and talking on the phone or typing. I just wanted to get in and out and get things over with.

One of the deputies actually asked me to take a seat to wait for Chief Morgan to see me, but I wasn’t spending one more second in this place longer than I had to. I just smiled brightly at him and sailed on by, and he was too shocked to actually stop me. Audacity could open doors that no other power in the world could budge.

Taliyah was typing away at the ancient computer at her desk. I was half surprised the thing didn’t have a floppy drive. She didn’t glance up when I came in, but she didn’t seem surprised or put out that I’d let myself in. No, by now she probably expected it.

The chair across from her was just as uncomfortable as I remembered, sticking to the back of my thighs where my skirt didn’t cover. I had to wonder if it was some kind of socially approved method of torture. Just make someone sit in the fake leather chair of doom, with the metal bar at the front that dug into their legs, and then glare at them until the confessions started rolling out.

Taliyah left me waiting for a few minutes, but I couldn’t find it in me to get worked up about it. She was all wrapped up in the glamour that made her still look human, like she always did when she was around people who’d known her before. But even the illusion that turned her hair gray-streaked-brown, and left lines around her mouth and the corner of her eyes, couldn’t hide the air of exhaustion following her around like the world’s worst perfume.

Taliyah looked tired, and considering she wasn’t human, not any part of her, that took some doing. So, even though I was eager to get out of there, and Maverick would be waiting for me to start my shift at the store, I just waited quietly. The only thing that might have given away my impatience was the bouncing of my crossed foot, and Taliyah was capable of ignoring far more obvious signs than that.

Finally, Taliyah sat back from her keyboard with a wince-worthy crack of her spine. She reached for the coffee cup at the corner of her desk and took a swig, grimacing at the taste. That didn’t stop her from taking a few more gulps of it before setting it back down, though.

“You said you had something to report.”

The words came out with no inflection, turning a question into a statement. It wasn’t meant as an insult, I knew that. Taliyah had enough on her plate that she didn’t have time to beat around with social niceties all the time. I could appreciate that.

“I assume you heard about the woman taken to the hospital last night?” I waited for her to nod in confirmation before I continued. “Well, I thought you might find it interesting that I found her lying down in the middle of the road when I was driving home.”

“Why is that interesting?”

I shrugged. “No obvious wounds, no signs of an attack, and she was conscious, just staring up at the sky like she was in her bed or something.”

Taliyah raised a brow at me. Glamour or real life, her eyes were the same; a pale, glacial blue. “Was she intoxicated?”

I thought about it and shrugged. “I didn’t smell anything on her, but I didn’t ask those kinds of questions either. It was pretty obvious there was something wrong, but when I touched her to help her off the road…”

Just the memory of that evil spell locked my throat up and wouldn’t let the words by. I shuddered, like I could still feel it brushing over my skin.

“When you touched her?” Taliyah prodded.

In short, terse terms, I explained what I’d learned from my magical examination of the woman. Taliyah listened attentively, taking notes while I spoke. Her face was set in the intense mask of the Chief of Police, completely focused on her task.

I finally paused, and Taliyah got up to grab me a bottle of water from the mini fridge in the corner. The chilled water felt amazing on my throat, which was raw, like it had hurt to spit the words out. After a few sips, I twisted the cap back on and met her eyes.

“I know you have someone who looks into these things, Fifi told me about the creepy magical coroner.”

It was a subtle change in topic, but Taliyah stiffened slightly around her shoulders.

“I do. Why?”

My lips pressed into a flat line. Maybe this wasn’t going to be as easy as I’d hoped. Still, a Depraysie never backed down. “I want to talk to them.”

There was no change in Taliyah’s expression. “Why?” she repeated.

I actually sputtered for a second, since the answer was so obvious to me. “To compare notes! I want to know what he found on the other two victims—and if they had any sign of the same curse or spell clinging to them. I don’t know if said curse would have degraded once the victim was dead, and that was why Maverick didn’t sense the same thing when he helped you examine the second man, but I can’t believe that two people in as many days found drained of life, and a third person wrapped up in a hideous siphoning spell, aren’t related.”

Taliyah mulled that over for a moment, and I wanted to shake her a bit. I didn’t, not just because she was technically royalty, even if she hated it, but because even I refrained myself from randomly shaking people, even if I might want to.

“He doesn’t like speaking to people, and there’s no need for you to talk to him,” she said finally.

I glared. “Are you kidding? I’m the town’s magical expert.”

“So?”

“So, you don’t want my help in figuring out why people are being cursed?”

“I didn’t say that. I just said that there’s no reason for you to go and talk to my medical examiner. I prefer to limit people from bothering him. Besides.” Taliyah picked up a manila folder that had been sitting on her desk blotter. “I have his reported findings here. Everything he detected with both victims.”

I took the folder with a glare, a little faster than was strictly polite. “You couldn’t have led with that?”

Taliyah gave me a cool, neutral look that made me grind my teeth together, which would have made Lorcan have a fit, I was sure.

As I flipped through the distressingly formal report, Taliyah went back to whatever report she was writing. The clack of the keyboard was as jarring as it was loud, but I did my best to ignore it.

I’d never gone through a formal coroner’s report before, and I was strongly suspicious that this wasn’t a truly formal one. It was pages and pages of cramped handwriting, nothing typed, with a few esoteric scribbles in the corners that could have been runes, doodles, or someone testing whether their pen still worked.

There were a lot of details: male, Caucasian, thirty-four years old, blah blah blah. I tried to skim, but trying to decipher the telltale doctor’s scrawl made that difficult. I sat there for a long time, with the chair digging into my legs and my bottled water growing tepid. Taliyah didn’t try to rush me, but she continued to answer phone calls and do her work as I read. The distraction didn’t help, but I didn’t quite have it in me to tell her to keep it down in her own office.

Finally, after long minutes of painfully dry reading, I came to the good part. I read it over three times before I turned back to Taliyah.

“So, he did find the remnants of some kind of spell that drained their energy. The spell fed off the man until he just collapsed in the street and died?”

Taliyah typed a few more words before sitting back and rubbing the bridge of her nose. “That’s what it looks like. Whatever the spell was, and no the examiner didn’t recognize it—”

“You can refer to him by name, you know? It’s not like I’m going to look him up and go pay him a visit.”

She frowned at me. “I wouldn’t put it past you. Anyway, the remains were still caked onto the victim when my examiner got possession of the body. The doctor said the spell had drained the man’s energy until his body just couldn’t function any longer.”

I turned the page, a little peeved that Taliyah couldn’t have just told me that instead of making me read the book report equivalent of Wand and Peace. “But what about–”

“—and because I’ve learned to bank on the fact that there are no coincidences in Haven Hollow, ever,” Taliyah continued, her cop voice running right over the tail end of my question. “I also had him take a look at the old man, the victim’s neighbor, who’d passed away.”

I leaned forward. “And?”

Taliyah, if anything, looked more tired. “And signs of the same spell were present on that man, as well. The curse had started to break down, since the victim had been deceased for more than a day, but the examiner still found traces.”

“Hmm.”

Her hand twitched, like she was going to reach for the report but then thought better of it. “I believe the term he used was that there were still ‘sticky little strands of the curse clinging to the body’.” She looked up at me then. “I don’t know if that means anything to you.”

Spell, did that mean something to me. “That’s exactly how the woman I found last night felt when I was trying to peel the curse off her. Like it was clinging to her like a spiderweb. The feeling it brought to mind was like walking through a web and trying to scrape it off afterwards.”

Taliyah made a face. “That’s vivid.”

I couldn’t help the smirk that twisted my lips. “Not a fan of spiders, then?”

Taliyah’s expression was mild, but she did roll her eyes. I liked it when bits of her personality leaked through the mask of the Chief of Police. Taliyah was the hardest woman I knew, and I figured that was a good way to be when you were in her line of work.

“I’m not scared of them. But that doesn’t mean I want to be picking their webs off my face or out of my hair.”

I couldn’t argue with that. Cobwebs could cling like nothing else.

Still, the implications of similar magic being on all three victims weren’t great. “The deaths are connected. And it seems like the woman I found last night was marked to be victim number three.”

“And she’s only still alive because you managed to stumble across her.” Taliyah lifted a pen off her blotter and started tapping it against the desk.

That was an uncomfortable thought. Of course, I’d also had to pry the woman up and off the road, which wasn’t the safest place to have a magically induced depression nap, so I suppose I’d saved her life either way. It still felt weird, thinking that if I’d left a little earlier, or later, or taken a different route, someone wouldn’t have woken up this morning.

It was all a little too butterfly effect for me, so I brushed it off and decided not to think about it.

Taliyah dragged a notebook towards herself and clicked her pen. “What was the woman’s name again? I’ll need to have a talk with her.”

“Why’s that?” I asked, smirking as I decided to play her game.

“She’s the only link to two murders that I have a chance of getting some answers from. If she has a connection to the other victims, that might give us motive as to why they’re being targeted.”

“Her name?” I blinked. “I didn’t get her name.”

Taliyah looked up, incredulous.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I snapped. “I was focusing on things like ‘are you dying’, and ‘why are you lying in the middle of the road’. We weren’t at a social gathering, for spell’s sakes.”

Taliyah dropped her head forward into her hands and rubbed her eyes like she couldn’t handle my ineptitude.

I crossed my legs, one foot bobbing angrily in the air as I tapped the report folder against my leg. “She was taken to the hospital by an ambulance. I’m sure they have some record of her.”

“That’s fine.” Taliyah drew a deep breath and let it out through her nose. “I do appreciate you looking into this, Wanda.”

Well, she had a very strange way of showing it, even if her comment mollified me a little. I was a witch, not a detective. I was in charge of figuring out the magic, not the motive or the suspect or that sort of thing. It was nice to be appreciated, though.

“I’ll go to the hospital and talk to the victim.” She was back to tapping her pen against the desk, like she needed some outlet to burn off her pent-up energy. “What about the spell? Is this anything you’ve encountered before?”

I thought back to that horrible, sticky mass of want that I’d peeled off that poor woman and shuddered. It had been so hungry for her life. The spell had wanted to drain every last drop, every hint of vitality in her body. Leaving nothing to keep her heart pumping or her lungs breathing. I was shocked she’d made it as far as she had into the road, to be honest. I wasn’t sure I could have done the same.

That feeling of magic clinging, leeching off a person’s life. It wasn’t anything I was going to forget in a hurry.

“No. Never experienced anything like it before.” I fought the urge to scrub my hand down my arm, just in case any of that malevolent power had stuck around. “I’ve seen some terrible curses. Even a hex can cause serious damage if used at exactly the right moment. But this? This is on a whole different level.”

More to the point, curses were intensely personal. A hex could be summoned with mild annoyance. It was the kind of thing teen witches might use to bully others, or I might use against someone who cut me off in traffic. Petty spite was enough to power them.

But a curse? A curse took real anger, a desire to hurt. It wasn’t the sort of thing a witch brewed up on a Tuesday night because she was feeling bored. It was the kind of thing that was done to an enemy, to someone that had wronged you, deeply. It was well thought-out, planned.

I didn’t want to sound cruel, but I just didn’t know what three mundane humans could have done to a magic user that was so unforgivable that they’d be slapped with something that drained their life away. It was cruel, and it was drawn out to a degree that felt more than just vindictive. I just didn’t see a magic user going to those lengths because of some lawn care dispute or run-in at the local convenience store.

Curses took effort, especially ones that were powerful enough to linger even after the victim was dead. Someone had been motivated, that was all I could say.

“I can look into it,” I offered. “There are some people I can talk to.”

Taliyah nodded and even offered a tiny smile. “Thank you, Wanda. Let me know what you find.”

I got to my feet and headed for the door.

“Wanda.”

My hand on the knob, I glanced back over my shoulder.

Taliyah quirked an eyebrow at me. “The report stays here.”

I gave her a cheeky shrug and dropped the file back onto her desk. “You can’t blame me for trying.”

“Oh, yes I can.”