Bound by Shadow (2 page)

There it was again. That same dare in her expression. Come in, Creed Lowell. Find out for yourself.

He felt his lips curl at the challenge.

A split second later, he drew even with her and paused to drink in her heady aroma of fresh rain and lavender. Then he moved past her into possibly the strangest room he had ever seen. The only normal things in the room, in fact, were the doors at the back and sides, and the broad staircase on the right, leading into dark reaches of the brownstone. Competing aromas blended—sage, he knew that one. And jasmine, and vanilla, and something like cherries or apples, all light, all swirling to form an unusually pleasant departure from the typical antiquated must of most old dwellings.

Andy had already flopped down on a comfortable-looking overstuffed sofa, camel-colored and covered with mahogany pillows. Four matching chairs formed a circle in front of the couch. A massive oak table sat dead center in the circle, laden with papers, pens, plates, cups, a couple of incense burners, two socks, one blouse, a nylon footie, and a high-heeled shoe. A red one. Creed could just make out that the knee-high table’s edge was actually a carved lip with a trench in it, lined with what looked like silver or lead.

Damn. That table’s big enough to hold a dance contest. Bet it weighs like a bastard, too.

There was no other furniture save for a few musical instruments leaning against the back walls. The walls themselves were covered with various antique mirrors hung at seemingly random heights, interspersed with spare sculptures that looked like Slavic runes. Wind chimes dangled from the ceiling. A lot of wind chimes of different sizes and lengths, but all the metal-pipe kind, some silver, some coppery-looking, and one, up near the door, a bright polished bronze. The bronze chime danced in the light breeze flowing through the front door, sounding again like distant church bells.

Creed studied the wind chimes and then the instruments, and thought he recognized the prominent body, intricate markings, and distinctive drone string and handle of a real
koliosnaya lira,
also called a Russian hurdy-gurdy. The thing functioned a little like a mandolin combined with a bass guitar, as far as he could remember from the few times he had heard one played. There was also a Greek cithara that looked so old the Olympic gods might have played it, and if he wasn’t mistaken, the third instrument was a good-sized Celtic harp. His eyes almost watered as he imagined the unusual noise all three would make in combination with the wind chimes.

As Riana closed the front door, the bronze chime rang again and the door at the back of the room sprang open. In came two more women. The first had hair as red as Andy’s and legs almost as long as Riana’s. She seemed taller because of the spiked heels she wore, along with tight-fitting leather pants and a loose white tunic shirt. As she came into the room, she pulled back her hair, fastened it into a ponytail with a leather tie, and slowed to stare at Creed. The second woman was a little shorter but no less fit, with cropped blond hair and bare feet showing beneath the frayed cuffs of her jeans. She held a bag of potato chips and a bunch of soft drink cans crushed against her black sweater. She, too, stopped to stare at Creed.

He had the uncomfortable sense of being probed and dissected. Both women narrowed their eyes. Their gazes moved from his face downward to his signet ring, which once more decided to quiver.

Christ. What is this, psychic central?

Was he sweating yet? Damn them. Damn Andy! What had she gotten him into?

“Riana’s cousins,” Andy announced. “I told you before, remember? The redhead’s Cynda and the blonde is Merilee. Cynda and Merilee, this is my partner, Creed Lowell.”

The women nodded at him in eerie unison, as if they were well accustomed to acting and moving in concert.

He returned the gesture, wishing he’d stayed in bed, wishing he’d never come to work, wishing he’d tied Andy up and stuffed her in her locker instead of letting her drag him to this bizarre brownstone full of—of whatever these women were.

“Sit down, Creed,” came Riana’s low, sexy voice from too close behind him. “We don’t bite.”

He turned slowly back to the beautiful woman with the bright jade eyes and let his expression say it all.

Yeah. Right.

She didn’t smile at him, but he thought he saw the barest shadow of mirth cross her hard-to-read features. His body responded so fast he almost couldn’t stop a menacing growl. As it was, his senses flared, showing him the brilliant colors of Riana’s natural energy. Lavender like her scent, and powerful. God. He had never seen such a halo around a human before. He wanted to touch it, thought it might feel solid. Hell, he wanted to touch her. Wanted to see if her skin felt as soft as it looked, if her lips really were that full and moist. Blood thrummed in his ears. His cock got hard in record time, and he had to close his eyes and think of his grandmother’s smile before things got totally out of hand.

By the time he positioned himself beside Andy on the couch, hoping in the distant reaches of his mind that she would shoot her friends to protect her partner if necessary, Cynda and Merilee had joined them around the table. Merilee dropped the chips in the middle of the table mess, then distributed soft drinks to everyone but Creed. She gave him a guarded but apologetic look, gestured to the cans, and started to ask if she should get him one, but he shook his head.

Meanwhile, Cynda shoved the shoe and socks and footie onto the floor beside her chair, along with a bunch of the maps and diagrams. Creed caught a glimpse of what looked like sketches of hallways and doorways arranged in a vaguely familiar pattern before Cynda pushed them farther away to make room for some dirty dishes. He was tempted to let the
other
come forward a little bit, to risk a few seconds of reduced control in order to get more information off that scrap of paper, but one look at the array of women staring at him killed that idea in a hurry. He settled for committing the details to memory, along with the rune sculptures between the ancient-looking mirrors, and some of the odd designs carved into the mirror frames themselves.

Riana kept up her determined surveillance. Creed fiddled with his ring but refused to shift under the woman’s fierce gaze as Andy moved aside some candles and notebooks to spread out the photos from one of her folders.

Andy had cropped them, removing identifying information. Only the strange markings found around the body were visible, along with the dead boy’s unusual wounds—and morgue markers showing the pitifully small size of the victim.

“Same rules as always, ladies.” Andy tapped the first photo with one square-tipped nail. The clear polish stood out against the lurid details of the photo. “Nothing leaves this house, and I’ll never put your names on a piece of paper, so you won’t get called as witnesses. These came in last night, and I need you to take a good look.”

Slowly, Riana’s attention turned from Creed to the photos. Cynda and Merilee also focused on the pictures, freeing Creed from the weight of their scrutiny. Before he could enjoy the relief, however, the photos pulled him back to the larger, darker issues at play in the universe.

What maniac had carved up a senator’s ten-year-old boy and left him to bleed to death inside a set of weird, nonsensical designs—and why?

“The FBI can’t find a match for the blade pattern,” Andy was saying. “And nothing on the markings around the vic. Some of the symbols were drawn in his blood, but others were there before the blood, scratched into piles of something white and grainy. Some kind of powder.”

“Sea salt,” said the blonde. Merilee. Creed glanced at her. She had an accent, too. Something Italian or Mediterranean, and an innocent face, but her blue eyes held the detachment of a longtime scholar of death. “I wonder if the salt’s processed. Store-bought, or if somebody harvested it, or purchased it straight from a harvest. It’s white, so it would have to be from France or Ireland, or maybe China or India. If it’s fresh and from the U.S., it would have to be from Maine, or up around Cape Cod.”

Creed had pulled his little notepad out of his gun belt, and he was writing furiously. He didn’t look at Andy, who would have a see-I-told-you-so expression.

When Merilee stopped speaking, he glanced up, impatient, anticipating, but the blonde only shrugged. “A guess. You’ll know when your tests come back—but some ancient cultures used sea salt in rituals, to purify. If it’s processed, then it’s just some player imitating stuff in books. If it’s fresh, somebody really intended to purify that space.”

Cynda, the redhead, leaned forward in her chair. “Purify,” she murmured, “or keep something pure inside the circle. Maybe use the elements to protect it.” Creed noticed her decidedly lilting accent, and that she didn’t reach for the photo in front of her. In fact, she seemed to be keeping her hands away from it on purpose, as if touching the picture might be dangerous. When Cynda looked up, she said, “You know elements can be locked, right?”

Creed shook his head, feeling clueless. He felt a bit relieved to see Andy looking just as confused as he felt.

“Someone who knows what they’re doing can call the energy of one of the elements, or two, or all of them, and force it into a stable pattern,” Cynda said. “We call it locking, but really it’s more like…stacking. Like the stones in an Irish fence.” She moved her hand in a straight line across the air, making Creed think of pictures he had seen of the Irish countryside. Miles of winding stone fence, nothing more than perfectly stacked stones, held together by form alone—no mortar.

He nodded, and saw Andy nodding, too.

“Depending on how much elemental force is used,” Cynda continued, “you can coat an object with a certain kind of energy—or even build a barrier as strong as an actual stone wall, though nobody can see it.” She pointed to the photo of the salt patterns. “Salt could have been used to lock a really strong elemental barrier, to protect something precious.”

“Protect, trap.” Riana had a picture of the wounds in her lap. She spoke without looking up, and she sounded infinitely sad. “Not much difference, unfortunately.”

The emotion in the woman’s voice surprised Creed. He’d taken her for a hard-ass. Some kind of psychic/private-detective/cowboy who kicked out teeth and took stupid risks, like letting a supernatural creature into her house when she didn’t fully understand its nature.

Then he looked at her again. This time, he considered her solid, secure posture, and the way she had taunted him with her expression.

Or maybe she does understand my nature, and knows just exactly how to kill me. Fast, bloodless. Probably painful. What the hell am I doing here?

He kept his mouth shut and his pen busy, and otherwise he sat very still as the women mumbled to themselves and each other, took sips from their soft drinks, scrounged up their own notebooks, and exchanged pictures. All but Riana. She kept that first picture in her lap. As her graceful fingers traced the edges of the dead boy’s larger wounds, she took a deep, even breath, the kind Creed sometimes used to center himself.

Was she finding her center, too? Did photos like this hurt her down inside?

If they had been alone, Creed might have asked her.

Andy picked up the potato chips and munched noisily. Creed grimaced. Nothing much disturbed his partner’s appetite.

“Did you bring me a sample?” Riana asked quietly, still absorbed by the photo and her rhythmic tracing of the wound pattern.

“Yep.” Andy stopped eating long enough to shove the other folder toward her. Creed saw the corner of a plastic evidence bag slide sideways through the flaps. “The M.E. trimmed some of the smaller wounds. Here’s about an inch. Is that enough?” To Creed, she said, “Down boy. He thinks I took it all up to Trace—and I only lifted one edge out of a dozen. They’ve got plenty of skin to analyze.”

Riana finally looked up, but only long enough to snag the folder containing the bag. When she extended her arm, Creed caught sight of a tattoo on the inside of her wrist. His ring heated up as he let the image sink into his mind.

A mortar, a pestle, and a broom, in triangular points around a dark crescent moon.

The woman didn’t seem to notice his interest in the blue-green mark. He sketched it in a hurry, pretending to be finishing his notes.

“Give me tonight with the sample,” Riana said. “I should have something for you this time tomorrow. A guess at the blade type, too.”

“Aww, you’re not going to show Creed the lab?” Andy’s disappointment didn’t keep her from cramming another handful of chips in her mouth and crunching loudly as Riana once more tore her attention away from the photos.

Her green eyes fixed on Creed, and she came up with one of those sultry almost-smiles. “Not on the first date, sailor.” She winked. “Maybe next time.”

Creed ground his teeth and thought of his grandmother.

Andy’s cell rang with the special ring Creed knew meant the captain was calling. She washed down her last load of chips and answered with a quick, “Andrea Myles.” Then she frowned. “Okay. Fifteen minutes.”

She was already getting to her feet as she closed the phone. “The press got a whiff of the Latch case. They’re mobbing the senator’s house and the nearby precincts. All hands on deck. Ri—Call me if you find something urgent.”

Riana stood as Creed did. Cynda and Merilee stayed seated, but they nodded at Andy and Creed before taking out notebooks and beginning to scribble furiously.

It was all Creed could do to stop looking at Riana as she shifted her necklace to center on her cashmere sweater and waited for him to follow Andy to the door. He wasn’t quite sure how he separated himself from her, or how he walked across the littered floor as the wind chimes began to ring. His head was spinning from Riana’s presence, from whatever real psychic talents she and her two cousins possessed, from the risk they might pose, even from the systematic way they attacked those photographs and sketched their theories.

Professionals. Seasoned. Fearless.

He had been working OCU for almost six years now, but until this moment, this day, Creed had never sensed the real workings of power, of supernatural energy outside his own. OCU crimes were committed by psychotics and psychopaths, by religiously obsessed nut-jobs of every faith. He was used to that. This brownstone, these three women—they were something else entirely. Something new.