Enigma (15 page)

His laugh was smug as hell, but he released her chin. “Let’s go get our crime on, cupcake.”

Chapter Eleven

Sathers’s house was utterly ordinary. It could have been any three-bedroom, two-bath on any cul-de-sac in the Southwest—except for the thread of magic that vibrated through Anna when she touched the front door knob.

“Locked,” she told Patrick with a frown. “And not just the deadbolt, either.”

Patrick dug into his jacket pocket and pulled out a heavy silver carabiner, the kind some people used for particularly heavy key chains. His was filled with a jumble of wooden and metal discs that matched the invisibility charm he’d pointed out on his motorcycle. With his other hand he retrieved a switchblade and flipped it open. “Help me find the one with three horizontal bars on it. It’s an unlock charm.”

They were all etched with symbols, runes and Greek letters. She separated the one bearing the letter
xi
and arched a brow. “This one?”

“Yup.” He jabbed the tip of the knife into his thumb without ceremony and smeared blood across the Greek letter. The bottom fell out of Anna’s stomach as the power inside Patrick suddenly focused, the shift so sudden it seemed to change the pressure in the air around them.

Patrick slapped the wooden disc against the deadbolt. The pressure gave with an almost audible
pop
, and when Patrick pulled his hand away, nothing but a fine coating of dust remained of the charm.

Frowning, he brushed his hand against his jeans. “That’s the problem with the good ones. They cost an arm and a leg, but they’re single-use. Damn, are they convenient, though.”

“I bet.” Anna turned the knob and pushed through the door. “Hurry up, before the neighbors get curious.”

Inside, Patrick squinted against the darkness. For all the bright sunshine outside, every window in the place was covered in curtains and blinds, and even Anna’s enhanced shapeshifter vision made it difficult to pick out the bits and pieces of furniture.

Patrick paused at the first interior door and frowned as he stepped over the threshold. “There’s a lot of magic in here, but it’s…obscured. I can feel it, but when I try to pin down the source of the spell, it gets fuzzy. Can you smell anything out of place?”

“Maybe.” Anna made her way through the darkness, her hand on the butt of her gun at the small of her back. “Old scents—people, food, that kind of thing. The fresher smells are herbs. Blood.”

His voice drifted back to her. “No death?”

It didn’t smell human, but it was familiar, somehow. “Chicken blood, I think. Lots of it.”

Patrick reappeared at the doorway. “Think we’ll find a magical workroom in the basement, or is that too clichéd for suburbia?”

“Who the hell knows?” Sometimes the cliché was exactly what you found.

Anna moved deeper into the house. All was quiet, with only the occasional soft tick of a clock or whir of an electronic fan to break the silence. But an uncomfortable feeling tickled at her brain—not magic, just the persistent, niggling suspicion that things were
off
.

She swung around as it clicked into place. The darkness had a heaviness, an inky depth. There was plenty of ambient light shining at the edges of the closed blinds, but it couldn’t penetrate the gloom inside the house.

“Obscured,” she whispered. It was a good word.

A light flared behind her, feeble and flickering, and Patrick bit off a curse. “This is my backup light. Three hundred fucking lumens. It should light this place up brighter than Christmas.”

Anna pulled her lighter from her jacket pocket. “Know any illumination spells?” She didn’t wait for the answer as she flicked open the lid and struck the flint.

The flame danced merrily in spite of the darkness, and Patrick laughed. “Maybe we should try a torch instead,” he said, turning back toward a sparsely furnished bedroom. “Bring that, would you? There’s something off in here.
Wrong
.”

“Besides the obvious creep factor?”

Patrick didn’t answer, and when she reached the doorway she found him standing in the middle of the room, eyes closed, brow furrowed. He crouched and extended his fingers toward a cheaply woven carpet, hissing sharply when sparks arced from the floor to his fingertips. “Shit.”

The hair on her arms and on the back of her neck rose. “Patrick?”

Clenching his jaw, he forced his hand closer to the carpet. She couldn’t tell where the shock came from this time—from some spell in the floor or within him or maybe both. It flared to impossible brightness, blinding her for a moment and leaving an inverted afterimage of Patrick flying backwards.

He hit the wall in eerie silence, broken only by the frantic thud of her pulse, and she almost tripped over the edge of the rug in her hurry to get to him. She whispered his name, half-expecting not to hear it because whatever magic he’d done had dragged an unnatural hush down on the room. She would have thought she was deaf, her eardrums blown out by the force of the magic breaking wide open, but she felt no pain, just a panic that clawed at her throat.

“Ouch.” The word rode a groan, and he squinted up at her. “Is my hair sticking up?”

A trapdoor in the middle of the floor peeked out from under the edge of the rug—except there hadn’t
been
an edge moments before, only a solid swath of carpet covering the entire room. “Holy shit, you broke the spell.”

Patrick rolled to his knees and stared at the outline of the trapdoor. “I’m lucky it didn’t break me. Remind me not to poke at magic strong enough to make my teeth itch.”

She could still feel it snapping—not through the room, but through him. “Something’s happening to you.”

“Maybe.” With another groan, he heaved himself to his feet and shook his right hand, as if trying to wake a sleeping limb. “The more important question right now? What the hell this guy’s hiding under that much magic?”

“Yeah.” Anna grabbed the ring on the door and pulled it open.

The stench of death punched her in the nose, and it sure as hell wasn’t a chicken this time. She clambered down the iron stairs into a stone room, ten by ten, with industrial shelves lining the walls and a raw wood table in the middle.

A man—three days dead, maybe, but no more—sat at the table, his head resting on a dried bunch of thyme, his milky irises fixed and staring. “No obvious trauma,” Anna said woodenly, her skin crawling from the backlash of the broken spell. Or maybe it was the room, sealed and stony, too much like the tomb it had become.

Patrick glanced at the body, then clenched his jaw and turned to the nearest shelf. “There’s magical residue. Different than what was upstairs. Different than anything I’ve ever felt, except…”

“What is it?”

He rubbed the palm of one hand on the leg of his jeans. “It’s almost a taste on the back of my tongue. Psychics don’t have it, but spell casters do, and so do shifters. This is both, and the only time I’ve ever felt that—” He glanced back at her. “I’ve never met Michelle Peyton, but I had a nasty run-in with that old cougar Seer.”

“Charles Talbot is dead. Michelle’s the only other Seer in this hemisphere.” One shelf was different from the others, stacked with metal file boxes instead of herbs and dried animal parts. Anna flipped open an unlocked box and caught her breath.

Drivers’ licenses, credit cards and other various forms of identification stared back at her, wrapped in Post-It notes and bound with paperclips. On the very top was a Florida license bearing the name Jason Rodriguez.

The picture was Oscar Ochoa’s.

Her lips went numb. “I think we found our fixer.”

“Shit.” Patrick had moved silently to stand behind her. “So Oscar Ochoa was going to run. Why?”

“I don’t—” Anna flipped through the next parcel of cards. There was another license, this one for Oscar’s girlfriend, Carrie. “Son of a bitch.”

“No fucking way.” Patrick snatched the rest of the documents out of the box and turned up a set of medical records and a child ID kit for Rosa Rodriguez. The curly haired little girl Anna had caught a glimpse of at Carrie’s house beamed up from the photo with a gap-toothed grin and Oscar’s eyes.

So he’d really planned to do it—take his woman and his kid, sacrifice everything to be someone else for them. Get the hell out of the shapeshifter world, with Sathers cleaning up the trail behind him.

It didn’t make him a great person. Suspicion surrounding his disappearance would have fallen on Alec, and would have likely cost him his council seat and ruined his life. Oscar obviously hadn’t given a damn about that, might have even welcomed it as a convenient cover for the truth.

No, Oscar hadn’t been a good person. He’d been an arrogant asshole, and he’d still loved his tiny little family more than anyone in the world had ever loved Anna.

Patrick’s voice came from behind her, low and raw. “I saw what Julio’s father was willing to do to keep his bloodlines pure. Did Jorge Ochoa do this?”

She’d already said no once. Now, with Oscar’s new identity nestled in her hands, she had to reconsider the question. “It wouldn’t make sense. Kill him if he had to, yes, maybe even frame Alec for the whole damn thing. But not—” An image of Oscar’s flayed face swam in front of her eyes, and she squeezed them shut. “Not like that. Not his own blood.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time a hired killer crossed the line,” Patrick said as he turned and pulled out his camera. “But there’s still the other missing wolves.”

“It doesn’t feel right. Not for a wolf.” Which was a rich damn distinction to make, considering the fact that he’d seen Anna’s own goddamned mother pretend she didn’t exist.

He paused snapping pictures long enough to look back at her. “I trust your gut. I walked in on Julio’s father and uncle trying to beat his cousin down, and that was some brutal shit. But it was…” He shrugged and looked away. “Efficient. Methodical. Asserting dominance and clinging to their natural order. I can buy that peeling off someone’s skin is a whole different level of unhinged.”

Anna tossed the cards in the file box, locked it and tucked it under her arm. “So what do you think we’re up against? Oscar wasn’t a random victim, not if our murderer took the time to off this guy to cover his tracks.”

“Yeah, but if this guy is the fixer, why is
he
disappearing? Using magic to erase someone is a specialized skill set. What are the chances the killer has it too?” Patrick returned to the body and bent low. “He was working on something when he was killed. Erasing himself, maybe?”

Whatever spells Sathers had been working on were obviously undone, since plenty of records and memories of Ochoa still existed. And Oscar would have known better than to pay good money for ephemeral magic. He’d have demanded the best, a fetish object that he could keep in his physical control. The kind that would outlive the caster.

Maybe the kind that
had
.

Anna shivered as realization washed over her. “What if he hadn’t locked the spell down yet, and now it’s spinning out of control? Dragging him in?”

“We need to move the body so I can see what’s under his face. I’d do it, but…”

“I’ve got it.” Sathers was still, cold, but there was no zip of energy as Anna grasped his shoulders and eased him back in his chair.

Patrick rose to get a better angle for a photo, clearing her view of the desk. Plenty of herbs, both whole and charred, littered the surface, but moving the body revealed a bundle of peppermint wound with three locks of hair. The whole thing was wrapped in bay leaves and twisted with twine.

And it was vibrating.

Anna shrugged out of her jacket. “That look like a fetish to you?”

“Maybe it would if it were sitting the fuck still. This is—” He whirled so fast she started, and there was suddenly a gun in his hand where the phone had been a moment ago.

She sensed nothing new, but she dropped one hand to the butt of her own pistol anyway. “Can we get the hell out of here yet?”

Patrick growled. “Wrap that fucking thing in your jacket and let’s go.”

“That was my plan,” she said shortly, more disturbed by his agitation than anything. She dropped her jacket over the bundle of herbs and wrapped it tight. “Did you hear something?”

“No. But I—” His head whipped to one side again, and he hissed. “That spell must have fried my magical senses, because I swear to
Christ
, Anna. Everything I know is telling me that there was a Seer working magic in this room. And that I’m standing in here with two wolves now.”

Enough to terrify anyone, and all she needed to hear. “
Move.
” She edged him toward and up the stairs. When he reached the top, she handed him the file box but kept one hand wrapped firmly around the jittering, leather-wrapped bundle. “Leave everything open, unlocked, I don’t give a fuck. Just get out.”

They did, but with Patrick clutching the box under one arm and his gun in the other, herding her toward the door. He didn’t seem to breathe until they were squinting in the afternoon sunlight. He tucked away his gun and stared at the house. “I don’t say this often, Lenoir, but I think we’re in over our heads.”

“No shit.” They needed someone who could handle the fetish. Someone who could handle a murderer who seemed capable of walking through even the strongest wards to kill again. “We need Michelle.”