Spell Blind

CHAPTER 2

I drove out to Pinnacle Peak, battling traffic the entire way. It was midday-nowhere near what used to pass for rush hour. But these days in Phoenix, rush hour started at dawn and lasted until way past dusk. I had called ahead to let the Tylers know that I had good news about their daughter, but I didn’t want to explain the particulars over the phone. Especially because those particulars were not going to make them happy, and I wanted to get paid. It’s a lot easier to ignore a bill than it is a guy standing in front of you.

By the time I got there, the police had called to say that Jessie was in custody. As I expected, Michael Tyler didn’t take the news well, even if for now being in custody merely meant that Phoenix cops were keeping an eye on her while she was treated at Saint Luke’s Hospital.

“How could you let this happen?” he demanded of me as he yanked open the front door. “I hired you to find her, not to get her arrested.”

“I did find her, sir. She was in a spark den-”

“Oh, God,” Missus Tyler said, voice trembling, a hand raised to her mouth. She sank into a chair in the front foyer.

“She was in a spark den,” I started again, staring hard at Mister Tyler, “along with about twenty other kids. When I arrived, the guy who was supplying their drugs and taking their money lit the place on fire. I got your daughter out, and everyone else, too. But the fire department showed up, and so did the police. There was really nothing I could do.”

“I want to see her,” Sissy Tyler said. She stood again. “Right now, Michael.”

Mister Tyler glanced at his wife and nodded. Facing me once more, he started to speak, stopped himself, then started again. “I suppose I ought to be thanking you. It sounds like you saved her life.”

“I did,” I said. “And you’re welcome.”

“What do I owe you?”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars a day, comes to. .” I did the math in my head. “Thirty-five hundred, plus expenses. Let’s call it an even four thousand, minus the five hundred you paid me when I started.”

He nodded, cut me a check on the spot, and led me back to my car.

Holding out his hand, Tyler said, “I really am grateful, Mister Fearsson. Both of us are.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, gripping his hand. “I’m glad I was able to find her.”

I climbed into the Z-ster and started the slow drive back to Chandler, where I have both my house and my business. Along the way I stopped to deposit my check, relieved to know that I wouldn’t have to rely on overdraft protection to keep my rent check from bouncing.

As soon as I reached the office I tossed the newspaper and mail onto my desk, scrubbed my hands and arms up to my biceps, and washed down a couple of aspirin. Then I fired up the espresso machine.

My office isn’t much to speak of. It’s a single room on the top floor of one of those new sidewalk shopping developments that have grown up everywhere in recent years. It’s well lit, with a bank of windows overlooking the street. It was originally intended for a local lawyer, who insisted on oak floors. He took a job with a big firm in downtown Phoenix a couple of months after the place was built and I happened to luck into it. I have a desk, a computer and printer, a pair of file cabinets, a small john off the main room, a couple of chairs for clients, one of those mini refrigerators, and my coffee maker, some Italian brand, which I remember costing more than all the other furniture in the place. I like coffee. Sumatran mostly, the stronger the better.

The computer doesn’t see a whole lot of action. Mostly I use it for billing and writing up reports for the insurance companies. I’m not much for technology. Where most PIs these days rely on computers and cell phones and fax machines, I tend to do things the old-fashioned way, face to face, notepad in hand. It’s not that I’m afraid of the fancier stuff or anything like that. I carry a cell phone, and use it when I have to. But I’ll choose a handshake and a personal conversation over cell phones and social media any day of the week. I’m a purist at heart.

Of course, that begs the question, what is a purist doing with a seven-hundred-dollar espresso machine? I have no answer. My personal philosophy remains a work in progress.

My coffee was still brewing when the figure began to materialize in the corner by my doorway. It was insubstantial at first, a faint glimmering, like reflections of moonlight on a mountain stream. Gradually it grew more distinct, taking the form of a man, tall, broadly built. But always he kept that rippled, glowing appearance, as if he were composed entirely of luminous waters. If others had been there with me, they would have thought that a ghost had come to my office. And they wouldn’t have been too far off.

To be precise, he was a runemyste, one of thirty-nine ancient weremystes who had been sacrificed by the Runeclave centuries ago, their spirits granted eternal life, so that they could be guardians of magic in our world. It’s easier to call him a ghost, but he gets touchy about that. This particular runemyste-my runemyste, I guess you could say-was named Namid’skemu. I called him Namid. He was once a shaman, what most people would call a medicine man, of the K’ya’na-Kwe clan of the A’shiwi, or Zuni nation. The K’ya’na-Kwe were known as the water people, and they were, in their day, a powerful clan, steeped in the spiritual realm of their people. Today their line is extinct. Unless you count Namid.

I saw only a small fraction of what Namid did to guard against those who would use magic for dark purposes, and I understood even less. But one of his duties was to instruct me in the ways of runecrafting.

I can’t say why Namid took an interest in me. As I’ve already admitted, I’m not the most powerful myste in the world; not even close. But I know that he was once my father’s instructor and I think that on some level he held himself responsible for my father’s descent into madness. I also know that he answers to a spirit council made up of his fellow runemystes, and from what I gather, they don’t allow members of their council to engage in magical charity or indulge their guilt. So apparently, like my dad before me, I’m weremyste enough to have earned Namid’s attention. I know for a fact that the magic is strong enough in me to have cost me my job. Namid would probably say that you couldn’t measure sorcery by degrees, that you either were a weremyste-a runecrafter, as he called those who used magic-or you weren’t. And he’d have been right. Being a weremyste was a lot like being a cop: once it was in your blood, that was it.

I nodded to the glowing figure. “Hey, Namid. What’s up?”

“Ohanko,” he answered, his voice fluid and resonant, like the rush of deep currents over stone. Ohanko was what he usually called me, although he had other names for me as well. All of them were in his language, and most of them he saved for those times when I’d really ticked him off. I only understood one or two of the others, but Ohanko I knew. It meant, roughly, “reckless one,” and I guess I had earned it over the years.

He stood there, staring at me. His eyes shone from his face, like bright, cold flames reflected off the surface of a wind-swept lake. I’d never actually touched Namid-not to shake his hand, or pat him on the shoulder, or sock him in the mouth, which I often wanted to do. I wasn’t even certain that it was possible. But I would have loved to try it, just once, just to feel what it was like. I imagined it would be like plunging my hand into an icy creek.

“Well?” I asked, uncomfortable under his gaze. “What do you want?”

“You need to practice your runecrafting.”

“Not today, Namid. I have a headache.” I grinned hoping to soften the refusal, and also to indicate that I was kidding. Namid’s expression didn’t change. He understood few of my jokes. He never found them funny. “Another time,” I said, knowing this wouldn’t satisfy him. My stomach had started to feel tight and hollow. I wasn’t sure why; I knew only that I got this feeling whenever Namid demanded that I work on my craft. “Later,” I said. “I promise. I’m wiped right now. I had an encounter with a myste this morning.”

“You will tell me about that when we are finished. Now, we work. You have much to learn.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not going to teach me all of it in one day. It can wait.”

The runemyste stepped to the middle of the room and lowered himself to the floor, his movements liquid and graceful. He eyed me expectantly. This was where he always sat when instructing me in the use of magic.

“No,” I said, sounding like a whiny kid. “I’m not doing this right now.” We’d had this argument too many times before. There was still a part of me that feared the powers I possessed. Though I had been casting spells for years, I understood little about the Runeclave and even less about Namid himself. And it was possible-likely, even-that I avoided these sessions because I’d seen what this same magic did to my father.

The phasings, those periods of each moon cycle when magic takes over our minds and bodies, turning us into crazed animals, are no picnic. The line between sanity and insanity, which much of the sane world takes for granted and thinks of as clear cut, feels disturbingly insubstantial to weremystes like me. Because while I consider myself sane most of the time, I also know what it’s like to be insane. I’ve been tipping over into madness every month for half my life. And as bad as the phasings are, the long-term effects are worse. Turns out-big surprise here-putting one’s mind through a psychic meat grinder every month takes a heavy toll. Most weremystes wind up permanently insane; a good number of them take their own lives before the descent into irreversible madness makes even that single act of will impossible. So, for good reason, I saw my magical powers as the source of my greatest weakness.

Whatever the root of my reluctance to train, I knew that sooner or later Namid would get his way. He always did.

“Is your scrying stone here or at your home?” he asked.

“It’s at the house.” Maybe there was a way out of this after all.

I should be so lucky.

“You can scry without the stone. Bring out the mirror from in there.” He pointed toward the john.

“Namid. .” I stopped, shaking my head. Then I got the mirror from the bathroom.

I hate scrying. People think of magic, and one of the first things that comes to mind is gazing into a crystal ball. That’s scrying-or rather, that’s Hollywood’s take on scrying.

Except that scrying doesn’t require a crystal ball, or even clear quartz. All you need is a smooth, lustrous surface. I use a piece of polished sea green agate, about the size of my hand, with a small crystalline opening at the center that’s surrounded by thin, sinuous bands of blue and white. I didn’t choose it because there’s anything inherently magical about that piece of agate; I found it several years ago in a gem store at a Phoenix mall. I happen to think it’s a beautiful stone, and I know its patterns and colors as well as I do the lines on my father’s face.

Namid was right, though. In the absence of my stone, the mirror would work just as well. I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him and laid the mirror across my lap.

“Look. Tell me what you see.”

I gazed down at the mirror. “Is there really a crack in my ceiling?” I asked, peering up at the sheet rock above me.

The runemyste let out a low rumble, like the distant roar of flood waters.

“Sorry.” I stared at the mirror again, concentrating on the surface of the glass, trying to ignore the inverted reflection of my office. For a while I saw nothing, and I let out a loud sigh, glancing up at Namid, hoping he’d agree that this was pointless. But the runemyste sat as motionless as ice, his eyes closed. I turned my attention back to the mirror, trying once more to ignore the reflections and see only the glass itself.

“Clear yourself,” Namid whispered.

I nodded, and closed my eyes. Clearing was a technique the runemyste had taught me several years before, when he first started training me. It was a focusing mechanism that combined what many practitioners of magic call centering, with meditation, and we had worked on it enough that I could clear myself in mere moments. Once, early on, Namid had me visualize a time from my childhood when I remembered being happiest. I fixed on a camping trip with my parents in the Superstition Wilderness, east of the city. The runemyste made me describe for him every detail of the trip-what we ate, where we slept, what we did and saw. Gradually he steered me toward a single memory: a hike we took in the high country. My parents and I ate a late lunch on a crag that offered amazing views of the Sonoran Desert, stayed there for the sunset, and then returned to our campsite in the dim twilight, my father carrying me on his shoulders on the hike back down.

I remembered watching an eagle from that overlook. It was the first I’d ever seen, and it circled above the desert in front of us, the late afternoon sun lighting the golden feathers on its neck, the tips of its enormous wings splayed, its tail twisting one way and another as it rode the warm desert air.

“Whenever you need to clear yourself, I want you to summon the vision of that eagle,” Namid told me. “When you hold that image in your mind, it should remind you of that day, of that feeling of peace. It should drive away all distractions.”

And it did. At first, as I was still learning what Namid meant when he spoke of being clear, it could take five or ten minutes. But by now I could call the eagle to mind, and within a minute or two I was centered, my mind focused. As impatient as Namid was with me-as impatient as I often was with myself-I couldn’t deny that I was learning.

“When you are clear,” the runemyste whispered, “open your eyes again and tell me what you see in the mirror.”

For a few seconds longer I kept my mind fixed on the vision of the great bird. Opening my eyes at last, I stared at the surface of the glass again. It felt as if I was alone with the mirror, that Namid had vanished, or rather, that I’d left him behind, along with my office, and Jessie Tyler, and everything else.

The vision began as a thin gray swirl, like a wisp of smoke embedded in the glass. Another appeared, and a third. Soon there were a least a dozen of them chasing one another across the mirror, reminding me of children skating on a frozen pond. The center of the image began to glow, faintly at first, then brighter, until I could make out the oranges and blacks and pale yellows of embers in a dying fire. And then a hand emerged from the cinders. It might have been dark red, the color of blood, but it was silhouetted against that burning glow. It wasn’t taloned or deformed. It appeared to be a normal hand, long-fingered perhaps, but ordinary except for its color. Still, I knew immediately that it was. . wrong; that it didn’t belong here. For one thing, those wisps of gray smoke acted as though they were afraid of it. They kept as far from the hand as possible; when it moved, they did as well, matching its motion so as to keep their distance.

This continued for a while, the threads of smoke and the hand gliding over the embers, until suddenly the hand seized the strands of gray, capturing all of them in one lightning quick sweep across the mirror. The hand gripped them, the wisps of smoke appearing to writhe in its grasp. When at last the dark fingers opened again, what was left of the gray strands scattered like ash. And when those remnants touched the embers, they flared so brilliantly that I had to shield my eyes. By the time I looked at the mirror again, the image was gone. All that was left was the inverted reflection of my office.

The runemyste was watching me.

“What the hell was that, Namid?”

“What did you see?”

“You know perfectly well what I saw. You always know. What did it mean?”

“What do you think it meant?”

I shoved the mirror off my lap and stood too quickly; my vision swimming.

“Damn you, Namid! Can’t you answer a simple question? Just once?”

“This is as much a part of your training as the summoning of that image. Scrying is more than seeing. Scrying is understanding what you see.”

I hated it when he was right.

This was what made scrying so frustrating. The images came to me easily. Even Namid, who was a miser when it came to compliments, had once told me that the visions I summoned from my scrying stone were unusually vivid. Interpreting them, though, was another matter. Scryings were never clear or unambiguous. Rather they were shadows, portents, hints at the future. Frankly, they were a pain in the butt.

“I don’t know,” I said, beginning to pace the room. “That hand bothered me.”

“It should.”

I halted, surprised by the response. This was as close to a hint as he was ever likely to offer.

“Why, Namid? What does the hand mean?”

Before he could answer, the phone rang. Neither of us moved, and it rang again.

I kept my eyes on the runemyste, hoping he’d tell me more. The phone rang a third time.

“Someone wishes to speak with you.”

A fourth ring and the machine would pick up. I strode across the office and grabbed the phone.

“Fearsson,” I said, facing the runemyste.

“Justis.”

I would have known that voice anywhere. Kona Shaw. But why would Namid care about a call from Kona? She called all the time.

“What’s up, partner?”

“If you have to ask,” she said, “you haven’t read the paper yet.”

Namid stared at me, those cold, impenetrable eyes locked on mine. I felt my gut begin to tighten again.

“Tell me.” But even as I said it, my gaze flicked toward the calendar, and I knew. We were two days past the first quarter moon; five days until the full.

“We’ve found another body.”

“Where?”

“South Mountain Park.”

“Same guy?”

“Officially, I don’t know yet,” she said. “But yeah, it’s our guy.” I could hear the shudder in her voice. Kona was as tough as any cop I’d ever met. In all our years of working together I’d seen little that fazed her, including having a weremyste as a partner. But the Blind Angel murders would have made Jack the Ripper squeamish.

“Listen, partner,” Kona said, “we’re going to need your help on this one. Just to make sure it’s him, you know?” Her voice was nearly drowned out by background noise-car engines, shouting, and at least one siren.

“You still at the scene?” I asked.

“No, I’m. . I’m in Paradise Valley.”

“What?”

“Read the paper, Justis. Or go online. This’ll all make sense when you do.”

“You’ve got to give me more than that.”

No answer, though I could still hear the commotion behind her.

“Kona?”

“Yeah,” she said. “This victim isn’t like the others. It’s. . it’s Claudia Deegan.”

I would have done just about anything in the world for Kona, and I won’t deny that I still lay awake at night thinking about the Blind Angel murders, even though I hadn’t been on the job for a year and a half. But getting involved in an ongoing police investigation was dangerous enough for an ex-cop; getting involved in one that promised to be a media circus was more than I cared to deal with.

I would have told Kona as much, but abruptly I wasn’t paying attention to our conversation. Namid had crossed the room to where I stood, and was staring at me. His color had changed. He had been translucent, his waters as clear as a quiet stream. But now he was clouded, roiled, like a river after a hard rain. His eyes were the same, though: intense and bright. He’d never shown much interest in any of my cases, but it seemed this one had caught his attention.

I put my hand over the mouthpiece. “What is it?” I asked.

He said nothing.

“Damn you, Namid! Would you tell me?”

He turned with deliberate grace and stared down at the mirror that still lay on my floor. After a moment he faced me again.

It wasn’t much, but as I say, Namid wasn’t one for giving hints. This was more than the runemyste had ever done before.

“Justis?” Kona said.

I removed my hand from the phone. “I’m here.”

“I’m going to be tied up here for a while longer, and Margarite’s got my car today. Can you meet me at the Deegan place? We can go downtown from there.”

“All right,” I said.

“Great. One hour.”

I hung up and glared back at the runemyste, who was still watching me.

“Would you please tell me what this is about?”

You’d think by now I’d know better than to expect an answer.

Namid began to fade from view. “Tread like the fox, Ohanko. Be wary.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, watching as he vanished. “Damn ghost!”

But he was gone.

I went to my desk and retrieved this morning’s paper, which was folded beneath the day’s mail. The story was right there on the front page. Top headline.

“Claudia Deegan Found Dead. Senator’s daughter may be latest ‘Angel’ Victim.”

I almost called Kona back then and there. I had just gotten through tracking down a runaway and dealing with the life crises of the rich and famous. Involving myself with the Deegans would be ten times worse. I didn’t want any part of this case.

Or did I?

The PPD had been trying to solve the so-called Blind Angel murders for just shy of three years now. So had the Feds. The FBI came in with a lot of fanfare and press after the third or fourth murder and did their best to take over the investigation. After a while, though-after months stretching to years of being unable to find the killer-they began to lose interest. They cut the size of their task force in half, and then did so again and a third time, until they had basically ceded the investigation back to the Phoenix police.

If Claudia Deegan was this wack-job’s latest victim, she would be number thirty-one, that we knew of. I had worked the case when I was on the job, and Kona and her new partner, Kevin Glass, were still part of the investigative team. Being a weremyste, I had realized from the very beginning that magic was involved: I could see the residue of power on the bodies. And it didn’t take me long to figure out that every killing occurred around the same time in the moon cycle. I was convinced that our killer had taken a life every month for the last three years at least, and that there were still bodies out there as yet unfound.

Of all the cases I’d been working at the time I left the force, this was the one I most regretted not seeing through to the end. The idea of having another crack at it had definite appeal. On the other hand, as much as I missed being a cop, I didn’t miss the jerks who had forced me off the job, who had assumed that my descents into psychosis each month were signs that I was a drunk, or an addict, or both. Even now, there were people in the department-men and women in positions of power-who would have loved to humiliate me all over again, to pay me back for disgracing the force.

In the end, I think that if Namid hadn’t shown so much interest in my conversation with Kona, I might have called her back and told her I wasn’t coming. As much as I wanted to find the Blind Angel Killer, I didn’t need the kind of heat this case was going to generate. But for whatever reason, the runemyste had made it clear that this was a job I had to take. I remembered my scrying, and that evil red hand. Namid seemed to think it was all related, and who was I to argue?

Yes, I had been a cop, and that would always be in my blood. But I’m still a weremyste, and I will be until the day I die. And for better or worse this was where my magic was leading me. I could tell that much from one glance in a mirror, be it a looking glass or a scrying surface.