Cold Hard Steele (Daggers & Steele Book 2) (13 page)

I instructed our rickshaw driver to drop us off outside the cold storage warehouse. For a few extra coppers, I even convinced him to stick around for us on the return trip, which was further evidence that the stench of spilt animal intestines couldn’t hold a candle to that of fermenting wood pulp.

While Quinto haggled with his driver—probably over an illegal weight surcharge the driver was trying to tack onto the tab—Shay and I approached the front entrance to the building. Rodgers extricated himself from Quinto’s shadow and shot us a ‘go ahead, we’ll catch up’ hand gesture.

A chilly blast washed over us as we entered the warehouse. Rows upon rows of gutted hog carcasses hung upside down from ropes tied around their hind legs, their heads a bare eight inches above the polished concrete floor. Expecting a pungent aroma, I was pleasantly surprised when my nose didn’t detect much of anything at all. Even the farm-fresh odors of the pens had been isolated outside the warehouse. The floors were swept clean as well. I’d feared exposure to a meat-packing facility could’ve ruined me on pork products for as long as the memory remained fresh in my mind—probably on the order of an entire afternoon—but the place seemed to be run with an almost military efficiency. I wondered what it forebode about our encounter with the frost mage.

Steele shivered and a swarm of goosebumps cropped up along her arms. She might’ve gotten more on her legs, but I couldn’t tell from my current vantage point, and I doubt she would’ve appreciated it if I bent down for a closer look. Most women tended to have a thing about personal space and their reproductive regions.

Instead, I gave her a look. “I told you shorts were a bad idea.”

“Don’t sass me,” she said as she crossed her arms tightly.

I tried to ignore her—really I did—but seeing her standing there, neck tucked in, arms racked by the occasional shiver, evoked a damsel in distress response that pulled at my heartstrings. It’s a fault most of us males suffer from. I assume it’s an evolutionary trait related to reproductive success, since it certainly has nothing to do with self-preservation.

I sighed. “Do you want my coat?”

Shay squinted at me as if to make sure I hadn’t been abducted and replaced with an automaton, but her look of shock slowly faded into a demure smile.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” said Shay. “You surprise me sometimes.”

I curled my lip. “So do you want my coat or not?”

She shook her head. “No. Keep it. My dad always said, ‘if you’re going to be dumb, you’d better be tough.’ So I’m going to tough this out for as long as we’re in here.”

“Hah. I like that,” I said. “Makes me think I should stop cursing the gods for my middling intellect and thank them for making me tough as nails.”

“Don’t sell yourself so short, Daggers.” Shay’s smile widened a little more as I tried to understand what she meant.

Our touching moment was ruined by the crack of the door and Rodgers and Quinto stomping in. At roughly the same time, a parka-clad floor manager realized we weren’t supposed to be there and wandered over.

“Can I help you guys?” he asked.

“We’re looking for Tremulous Portent of Rime,” I said. “Know where we can find her?”

He glanced at Shay, then took a look at the rest of us. “Are you with the health department?”

“Nope. Police.” I flashed my badge. I felt like I’d been doing a lot of that lately. Hopefully I wouldn’t get carpal tunnel as a result. “We have some questions, and we think Tremulous Portent might be able to answer them for us.”

“Oh.” Parka guy scratched his head. “Alright. Last I saw her, she was in back organizing a shipment of beef tongues. Follow me.”

We did just that. For my partner’s sake, I hoped the trek to see the frost mage wouldn’t be as long as the cavernous interior of the storage facility indicated it could be, but to her word, Steele refrained from complaint the entire way, regardless of how chilly her elbows and knees might’ve been.

We found the icy enchantress barking orders at a dozen or so laborers hauling crates packed with ice and straw and stiff, oblong lumps of cow flesh I assumed were the tongues. She wore a chic, flowing robe of midnight blue that appeared to be equal parts form and function, as its thick folds and raised hood hinted at a nice, toasty interior.

The heavy cloth suggested an answer to a question that had been rolling around my skull for some time: did frost mages get cold? It seemed a cruel power to have if they didn’t also possess the ability to withstand it, like being able to summon crème-filled pies out of thin air but being prone to obesity.

“Excuse me, Mistress Rime?” said our parka-clad tour guide.

The frost mage kept her focus on her work. “Yes?”

“There are some policemen here—”

“Detectives,” I said.

“Um, right,” said our guide. “Detectives, then, here to see you. They want to ask you some questions.”

Tremulous Portent turned her head toward us, allowing me a good look at her face. It was more or less what I expected—hard, cold, and featuring fierce eyes the color of waves breaking upon a windswept shore. As she studied us with her frigid gaze, I feared perhaps the cows weren’t the only ones who’d lost their tongues.

“Take them to my office,” she said after a pause. “I’ll see them as soon as I’m able.”

23

I sat in one of Rime’s office chairs, idly spinning one of the stilettos from the murder scenes between my fingers. We’d been waiting well over fifteen minutes and still hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the enchantress.

Steele sat next to me, tapping her feet on the ground impatiently. Rime’s office was about the same temperature as the rest of the storage facility, but luckily for Steele, Quinto was less willing to accept her ‘better be tough if you’re dumb’ philosophy than I was. After ten minutes of asking and pestering and warning her about the dangers of pneumonia, Shay relented and accepted the big guy’s coat. It draped over her like a circus tent, but it appeared to have done its job. She’d stopped shivering, at least.

A creaky door opened and the midnight blue-clad sorceress admitted herself. She whisked over to her desk and sat down in a flutter of cloth, her hood pulled down to reveal a golden blond braid bobbing to and fro. Her face had warmed substantially since we’d first met, but the added warmth couldn’t hide the small crow’s feet that creased the corners of her eyes or the wrinkles that radiated out from the edges of her mouth when she smiled.

“I’m so sorry about that, officers,” she said. “Those beef tongues just arrived, and there was some confusion as to whether they were headed out on a ship to the southern coast or if we were keeping them in storage for a gala event downtown later this week. You’d think this stuff would be straightforward to figure out, but problems never fail to crop up. But that’s neither here nor there. And you—you poor dear!” She finally took note of Steele in the oversized coat. “You must be freezing. I should’ve sent an understudy up here as soon as I as saw you in those shorts. Here, let me warm it up for you a bit.”

Tremulous Portent of Rime gestured subtly in the air with her fingers, as if she were conducting an invisible orchestra, and the air temperature increased a good ten to fifteen degrees.

“Nice trick,” I said.

“Well, it’s more than a trick, I daresay,” said the enchantress. “But it’s useful, that’s for sure, both in practical terms and to my bottom line. You should see me at parties. I can do really cool things with fog.”

“You do parties?” I asked.

Tremulous Portent shook her head. “I don’t
do
parties. I
party
. There’s a difference, Officer…?”

One of my brows rose of its own accord, and I had to wrestle it back down to avoid looking foolish. “Oh, uh, Detective Daggers. These are Detectives Steele, Rodgers, and Quinto.” Introductions flew all around. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Mistress Rime—”

“Just Rime is fine,” she said with a smile. “Or Deborah works, too, if you prefer.”

I shared a look with Steele. Was Tremulous Portent of Rime
hitting on me?
Couldn’t be. She was a good two or three decades younger than the sort I usually attracted.

“Alright,” I said. “You’re not nearly as…abrasive as I was expecting.”

“Oh.” The sorceress straightened in her seat. “Are you referring to the incident at the loading dock? That was a combination of stress and having to exert a firm hand with those laborers.”

“No, it’s not that,” I said. “My experience is that individuals with—how should I say this?—
skills
similar to yours aren’t necessarily the most congenial of folks.”

The city’s magically-inclined had a well-earned reputation for hard-assery. In Steele and I’s first case together, we’d run across just such a fellow—an old, grizzled fire mage by the name of Perspicacious Blaze who’d turned out to be as stiff and unrelenting as the steel he’d forged with his magic. Most other magic slingers I’d encountered over the years had similarly been total jerks.

Rime waved her hand in the air. “Oh, nonsense. I’ll admit some of us are a little stuffy or standoffish, but most of us are friendly. You clearly haven’t spent enough time with us fun-loving sorcerers and sorceresses.”

There it was again—that same inviting smile I’d gotten before. I was sure everyone else noticed it, too. Under other circumstances, my three colleagues would’ve egged me on mercilessly regarding Rime’s advances, but given her supernatural abilities, I think they were at a loss as to how to proceed—as was I.

Thankfully Rime bailed us all out. “So, what can I help you with, detectives?”

I handed the stiletto to Steele and gestured for her to take over. I didn’t trust myself not to dig the hole any deeper than it already was.

“Well, Ms. Rime, believe it or not, we’re here to talk to you about weapons.”

That seemed to do the trick. The enchantress lost her playful flair. “Weapons?”

“Yes,” said Steele. “You see, we’ve been investigating a couple of homicides recently, and we’ve found something curious about the murder implements.” She placed the stiletto on the desk in front of Rime. “The weapons, when found, were both ice cold.”

Tremulous Portent tilted her head as she picked up the dagger, the ornate one with the inlays from Terry’s murder. “Really? But they’re not now? Well that
is
interesting, isn’t it?” The witch turned the knife over in her hands, peering at it in a way that made me think she saw things the rest of us couldn’t. “And you say there’s another of these?”

I dug around in my coat pocket and procured the second stiletto, which I placed on the desk in front of her. Seeing as her demeanor had shifted from playful to businesslike, I figured it was safe to chat again. Besides, I suspected I wouldn’t get pounced upon with so many witnesses around.

“Both daggers were found plunged into the hearts of the victims,” I said, “and both remained icy for several hours after we discovered the bodies.”

Tremulous Portent hummed in acknowledgement as she looked over the second stiletto.

“Have you ever seen these before?” I asked.

“Can’t say I have. I don’t have much exposure to weapons, as you might imagine.”

I snapped my fingers. “Bummer. I had to ask though. Based on what you’ve seen so far, do you think an enchantment could be at play here?”

Shay sighed.

The enchantress scoffed. “No, Detective, I’m afraid not. Enchantments, though they make for excellent tales and legends, don’t exist in real life. At least not to my knowledge, or the collective opinion of the AMP.”

“The what?” I asked.

“AMP,” she said. “The Association of Magical Practitioners. It’s our professional organization. Its members are in common agreement that enchantments aren’t possible. Their existence would break multiple laws of magic.”

“Hold on a second,” I said, holding a finger up to my temple. “There’s laws of magic?”

“Oh, Daggers,” said Steele. “Of course there are. There are physical laws of nature. Why wouldn’t there be laws to magic as well? But like with scientific principles, just because laws exist doesn’t mean we understand how they work. You could write a thesis about a single line or two of contested magical theory. In fact, people do it all the time.”

Rime raised a brow. “You seem quite knowledgeable on the subject, Detective Steele. Are you a practitioner of the arts?”

Shay shrugged. “I studied at H. G. Morton’s. Paranatural Ocular Postsensitivity. But really I’m just a dabbler.”

Quinto chuckled. “She’s selling herself short, ma’am. Detective Steele’s abilities are quite an asset to the department.”

A hint of color crept into Shay’s cheeks at the comment, but neither Rodgers nor Quinto could’ve seen. They stood behind us.

“I see,” said Rime. “Well, you might as well be speaking to me in trollish when it comes to that stuff. My talents lie in thermometry.”

“And mine in punditry,” I said. “But what about the daggers? You don’t think there’s any way they were magically chilled?”

“Well, I didn’t say that,” the sorceress replied. “It’s entirely possible these weapons were chilled via thaumaturgic means, but there’s no way they could’ve been maintained at a depressed temperature for hours without being isolated in an insulated environment. Not unless a mage retained a thermometric hold on them, and for that the mage would’ve needed to remain in relative proximity to the weapons.”

I furrowed my brows. “Ok, I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t
completely
understand all the terms you used, but are you suggesting someone with magical abilities actively cooled those weapons during
and
after the murders? How close would they have had to be to the action to make that feasible?” I turned to Shay. “We checked the closets at Terry’s and Creepy’s, right? I’m certain we did.”

“Really, Daggers?” Shay blinked her long lashes at me. “That’s what you took away from that statement? You really weren’t paying attention when we stopped at Feltznoggle’s, were you? Rime, we visited a weapons expert on our way here who indicated the daggers might be hollow.”