Magic Graves (14 page)

I grabbed my crap and headed for the doors.

"Kate," the clerk called from the counter.

I turned. Nobody remembered the clerk's name. He was just "the clerk."

He waved an envelope at me. "Money."

I turned on my foot. "Money?"

"For the job. Client called. He says he'd like to work exclusively with you from now on. What did the two of you do all night?"

"We argued philosophy." I swiped the envelope and counted the bills. Three grand. What do you know?

I stepped out the doors into an overcast morning. I had been awake for over thirty six hours. I just wanted to find a quiet spot, curl up, and shut the world out.

A tall lean man strode to me, tossing waist long black hair out of the way. He walked like a dancer and his face would stop traffic. I looked into his blue eyes and saw a familiar smugness in their depths. "Hello, Saiman."

"How did you know?"

I shrugged and headed on my way.

"Perhaps we can work out a deal," he said, matching my steps. "I have no intentions of losing that bet. I will find a form you can't resist."

"Good luck."

"I'm guessing you'll try to avoid me, which would make my victory a bit difficult."

"Bingo."

"That's why I decided to give you an incentive you can't refuse. I'm giving you a sixty percent discount on my services. It's an unbelievable deal."

I laughed. If he thought I'd pay him twenty-six dollars a minute for his time, he was out of luck.

"Laugh now." Saiman smiled. "But sooner or later you'll require my expertise."

He stopped. I kept on walking, into the dreary sunrise. I had three thousand dollars and some chocolate to buy.

THE END

FATE'S EDGE

Sneak Peak of FATE'S EDGE, Book 3 in the bestselling Edge Series

The Edge lies between worlds, on the border between the Broken, where people shop at Wal-Mart and magic is a fairy tale-and the Weird, where blueblood aristocrats rule, changelings roam, and the strength of your magic can change your destiny...

Born to a family of conmen, Audrey Callahan left behind her life in the Edge for an unmagical existence in the Broken. Audrey is determined to stay on the straight and narrow, but when her brother gets into hot water, the former thief takes on one last heist and finds herself matching wits with a jack of all trades.

Kaldar Mar is a gambler, a lawyer, a thief, and a spy with some unusual talents that guarantee him lucrative work. When his latest assignment has him tracking down a stolen item, Kaldar doesn't expect much of a challenge-until Audrey turns up to give him a run for his money.

But when the missing item falls into the hands of a lethal criminal, Kaldar realizes that in order to finish the job and survive, he's going to need Audrey's help...

Praise for the Novels of the Edge

"[An] engaging urban fantasy series opener."-Publishers Weekly

"A thoroughly entertaining blend of humor, action, misdirection, and romance."-Locus

"Will leave you breathless."-SF Revu

Prologue

If she had only one word to describe Dominic Milano, it would be unflappable, Audrey Callahan reflected. Stocky, hard, balding-he looked like he had just walked out of Central Casting after successfully landing the role of "bulldog-jawed older detective." He owned Milano Investigations and under his supervision, the firm ran like clockwork. No emergency rattled Dominic. He never raised his voice. Nothing knocked him off his stride. Before moving to the Pacific Northwest, he'd retired from the Miami police department with over a thousand homicide cases under his belt. He'd been there and done that, so nothing surprised him.

That's why watching his furry eyebrows creep up on his forehead was so satisfying.

Dominic plucked the top photograph from the stack on his desk. On it, Spenser "Spense" Bailey jogged down the street. The next shot showed Spense bending over. The next one caught him in a classic baseball pitch pose, right leg raised, leaning back, a tennis ball in his fingers. Which would be fine and dandy, except that according to his doctor, Spense suffered from a herniated disk in his spine. He was restocking a warehouse when a walk-behind forklift got away from him, and the accident caused him constant excruciating pain. He could frequently be seen limping around the neighborhood with a cane or a walker. He needed help to get into a car and he couldn't drive because the injured disk pinched the nerve in his right leg.

Dominic glanced at Audrey. "These are great. We've been following this guy for weeks and nothing. How did you get these?"

"A very short tennis skirt. He hobbles past a tennis court every Tuesday and Thursday on the way to his physical therapy sessions." The hardest part was hitting the ball so it would fly over the tall fence. A loud gasp and a run with an extra bounce in her step, and she had him. "Keep looking. It gets better."

Dominic flipped through the stack. The next photo showed Spense with a goofy grin on his face carrying two cups of coffee, maneuvering between tables at Starbucks with the grace of a deer.

"You bought him coffee?" Dominic's eyebrows crawled a little higher.

"Of course not. He bought me coffee. And a fruit salad." Audrey grinned.

"You really enjoy doing this, don't you?" Dominic reflected.

She nodded. "He's a liar and a cheat, who's been out of work for months on the company's dime." And he thought he was so smart. He was practically begging to be cut down to size and she had just the right pruning shears. Chop-chop.

Dominic moved the coffee picture aside and stopped. "Is this what I think this is?"

The next image showed Spense grasping a man in a warm-up suit from behind and tossing him backward over his head onto a mat.

"That would be Spense demonstrating a German suplex for me." Audrey gave him a bright smile. "Apparently he's an amateur MMA fighter. He goes to do his physical therapy on the first floor and after the session is over, he walks up the stairs to spar."

Dominic put his hands together and sighed.

Something was wrong. She leaned back. "Suddenly you don't seem happy."

Dominic grimaced. "I look at you and I'm confused. People who do the best in our line of work are unremarkable. They look just like anyone else and they're easily forgettable, so suspects don't pay attention to them. They have some law enforcement experience, usually at least some college. You're too pretty, your hair is too red, your eyes are too big, you laugh too loud, and according to your transcripts, you barely graduated from high school."

Warning sirens wailed in her head. Dominic required proof of high school graduation before employment, so she brought him both her diploma and her senior year transcript. For some reason he bothered to pull her file and review the contents. Her driver's license was first rate, because it was real. Her birth certificate and her high school record would pass a cursory inspection, but if he dug any deeper, he'd find smoke. And if he took her fingerprints, he would find criminal records in two states.

Audrey kept the smile firmly in place. "I can't help having big eyes."

Dominic sighed again. "Here's the deal: I hire freelancers to save money. My full-time guys are experienced and educated, which means I have to pay them a decent wage for their time. Unless there is serious money involved, I can't afford for them to sit on a tough suspect for months, waiting for him to slip up. They get four weeks to crack a case. After that I have to outsource this kind of stuff to freelancers like you, because I can pay you per job. An average freelancer might close one case every couple of months. It's a good part-time gig for most people."

He was telling her things she already knew. Nothing to do but nod.

"You've been freelancing for me for five months. You closed fourteen cases. That's a case every two weeks. You made twenty grand." Dominic fixed her with his unblinking stare. "I can't afford to keep you on as a freelancer."

What? "I made you money!"

He held up his hand. "You're too expensive, Audrey. The only way this professional relationship is going to survive is if you come to work for me full time."

She blinked.

"I'll start you off at thirty grand a year with benefits. Here's the paperwork." Dominic handed her a manila envelope. "If you decide to take me up on it, I'll see you Monday."

"I'll think about it."

"You do that."

Audrey swiped the file. Her grifter instincts said, "Play it cool," but then, she didn't have to con people anymore. Not those who hired her, anyway. "Thank you. Thank you so much. This means the world to me."

"Everybody needs a chance, Audrey. You earned yours. We'd be glad to have you." Dominic extended his hand over the table. She shook it and left the office.

A real job. With benefits. Holy crap.

She took the stairs, jogging down the steps to burn off some excitement. A real job being one of the good guys. How about that?

If her parents ever found out, they would flip.

Audrey drove down Rough Ocean road away from Olympia. Her blue Honda powered on through the grey drizzle that steadily soaked the west side of Cascades. A thick blanket of dense clouds smothered the sky, turning the early evening gloomy and dark. Trees flanked the road: majestic Douglas firs with long emerald needles; black cottonwoods, tall and lean, catching the rain with large branches; red alders with silver-grey bark that almost glowed in the dusk.

A mile and a half ahead a lonely subdivision of identical houses waited, cradled in the fold of the hill, but meanwhile the road was empty. Nothing but the trees.

Audrey glanced at the clock. Thirty two minutes so far, not counting the time it took her to stop at a convenience store to get some teriyaki jerky for Ling and the time she spent driving around to different pharmacies. Getting to work would mean an actual commute.

She loved the job with Milano's investigative agency. She loved every moment of it, from quietly hiding in a car to watch a suspect to running a con on the conmen. They thought they were slick. They didn't know what slick was.

To be fair, most of the suspects she ran across were conmen of opportunity. They got hurt on the job and liked the disability, or they got tangled in an affair and were too afraid or too arrogant to tell their spouses. They didn't see what they were doing as a con. They viewed it as a little white lie, the easiest path out of a tough situation. Most of them went about their deception in an amateur way. Audrey had been running cons since she could talk. It wasn't a fair fight, but then in the world of grifters "fair" had no meaning.

Ahead the road forked. The main street rolled right, up the hill, toward the subdivision, while the smaller road branched left, ducking under the canopy of trees. Audrey checked the rear view mirror. The ribbon of pavement behind her stretched into the distance, deserted. The coast was clear.

She smoothly made the turn onto the smaller road and braced herself. Panic punched her in the stomach, right in the solar plexus. Audrey gasped. The world swirled in a dizzying rush and she let go of the wheel for a second to keep from wrenching the vehicle off the pavement. Pain followed, sharp, prickling every inch of her skin with red hot needles, and although Audrey had expected it, the ache still caught her by surprise. Pressure squeezed her, and then, just like that, all discomfort vanished. She had passed through the boundary.

A warm feeling spread through Audrey, flowing from her chest all the way to her fingertips. She smiled and snapped her fingers. With a warm tingle, tendrils of green glow swirled around her hand. Magic. Also known as flash. She let it die and kept driving.

Back on the main road, in the city of Olympia, in the state of Washington, magic didn't exist. People who lived there tried to pretend that it did. They flirted with the idea of psychics and street magicians, but they had never encountered the real thing. Most of them wouldn't even see the side road she took. For them it simply wasn't there - the woods continued uninterrupted. Every time Audrey crossed into their world, the boundary stripped her magic from her in a rush of pain. That's why people like her called that place the Broken - when you passed into it, you gave up a part of yourself and it left you feeling incomplete. Broken like a clock with a missing gear.

Far ahead, past mountains and miles of rough terrain another world waited, a mirror to the Broken, full of magic but light on technology. Well, not exactly true, Audrey reflected. The Weird had plenty of complex technology, but it had evolved in a different direction. Most of it functioned with the aid of magic. In the Weird, the power of your magic and the color of your flash determined the course of your life. The brighter you flashed, the better. If you flashed white, you could rub elbows with blueloods, Weird's aristocratic families.

The Weird, like the Broken, was a place of rules and laws. That's why Audrey preferred to live here, in the no-man's land between the two dimensions. The locals called it the Edge, and they were right. It was on the edge of both worlds, a place without countries or cops, where the cast-offs like her washed ashore. Connecting the two dimensions like a secret overpass, the Edge took everyone. Swindlers, thieves, crazed separatists, clannish families, all were welcome, all were dirt poor, and all kept to themselves. The Edgers gave no quarter and expected no sympathy.

The road turned to dirt. The trees had changed too. Ancient spruces spread broad branches from massive buttressed trunks, their limbs dripping with long emerald-green beards of tangled moss. Towering narrow hemlocks thrust into the sky, their roots cushioned in ferns. Blue haze clung to narrow spaces between the trunks, hiding otherworldly things with glowing eyes who prowled in search of prey.

As Audrey drove through, bright yellow blossoms of Edger primrose sensed the vibration of the car and snapped open with faint puffs of luminescent pollen. By day the flowers stayed closed and harmless. At night, it was a different story. Take a couple of puffs in your face and pretty soon you'd forget where you were or why you were here. A couple of weeks ago, Rook, one of the local Edger idiots, got drunk and fell asleep near a patch of those. They found him two days later, sitting up on a tree stump butt naked and covered in ants. This was an old forest, nourished by magic. It didn't suffer fools, gladly or otherwise.