Murder Between the Worlds: A Between the Worlds Novel (3 page)

She stood looking down at the unconscious elf for another minute before sighing and heading back out to clean up the mess in the hall. She’d rather just go back to bed, but the odds were that Bleidd wouldn’t wake before noon and it was easier to clean up his mess herself than listen to the other three roommates fighting over it. The lamp and table were broken beyond repair but the coat rack was mostly undamaged, having lost a few pegs off its wooden trunk but otherwise still being serviceable. She stood that back up by the door, dragged the assorted wreckage out to the garbage cans by the side of the house, and returned to begin the painstaking process of wiping up the blood and picking up the tiny shards of glass scattered across the floor. She had gotten most of it taken care of when she heard the sound of a key in the door and looking up realized that the hazy light of dawn was just breaking through the window.

She was standing up, feeling satisfied, as Syndra walked in, but her mood soured as soon as she saw the other woman’s face. Syn’s short blond hair was in its usual chubby ponytail and her uniform was spotless but her expression was so grim Allie expected her to break some horrible news. She didn’t have to wait long.
“Where’s Bleidd?” Syn asked without the teasing tone that normally colored her voice.

“In his room sleeping off a roaring drunk,” Allie responded puzzled.

“You’re sure?” Syn pressed.

“Sure?” she shot back, even more confused. “Of course I’m sure, I’m the one who put him there after he practically passed out in front of the door.”

“He was really that drunk?” Syn’s eyes were moving around the entryway, noting the missing furniture. “What time did he get here?”

“A little after 2. Well, that’s when he got in, I have no idea how long it took him to get up the walk and in the door,” Allie said, thinking of how totally out of it he’d been.

“He came straight home after the bar closed?”

Allie was getting annoyed now at all the questions, “I didn’t ask, but I assume so.
The Tiger
closes at 2 and it’s a 5 minute drive. Are you going to arrest him for drunk driving? What the hell’s going on Syn?”

“What’s going on? He’s the prime suspect in all those murders is what’s going on,” Syn replied grimly.

“That’s insane,” Allie winced, horrified, “Why? Because he found that body?”

“How’d you know about that? Never mind, he told you right?” Syn pushed past her, tossing her uniform jacket at the battered coat rack and heading towards the kitchen, forcing Allie to jog after her, “It’s a total fucking mess. They questioned him; they called me in after they cut him loose and questioned me. They’d been thinking it was just some run-of-the-mill nut job, some human nut job,” Syn paused digging through the fridge for a beer. “But now they’re looking at it not being a human. They called in the Guard, formed a joint task force. It’s a total fuck show and he’s right in the middle of it.”

“But why?” Allie asked, genuinely confused.

“His history’s against him…”

“You can’t be serious!” before Allie could build up any real outrage Syndra kept talking

“His criminal record, his attitude…”

“That’s ridiculous! Why would he report the body if…”

“I’m not saying it’s him. I’m telling you what they think!” Syn cut her off, her voice rising. “They hinted that maybe he was trying to throw them off track or some stupid shit. It didn’t help anything that he basically told the Guard to go fuck themselves. They thought it was really fucking weird that he wouldn’t answer any of their questions when elves are supposed to be straight up with each other. He wouldn’t tell them anything, but they knew from his address I knew him, and that was fucking fun to explain. So they asked me all kinds of questions about where he goes, what he does.”

Allie shook her head, as Syndra chugged half her beer in a few gulps before adding, “Al, I think I may have made it worse.”

“Worse? How?” Allie felt her heart sinking at Syn’s expression.

“I told them he’s a fucking alcoholic. Don’t give me that look, he’s my friend too, but we both know if there’s such a thing as Elven alcoholics he is one. I told them he goes to work and goes to the bar and that’s about it, but they got all in a twist about that. Seemed to think it proved he was some kind of deviant or something.”

Syndra looked miserable as she spoke and Allie shook her head again, not knowing what to say. All the roommates had become friends over the years, and Allie had no doubt that Syn would never purposely betray anyone in the house, but she was also a cop and her job came first. Syndra finished off the beer and threw the can into the garbage.

“But can’t they just do testing, DNA testing, to clear him?”

Syn winced and shook her head. “This killer’s really smart. He’s like a ghost, no physical evidence worth a damn left behind. No DNA. He uses bleach to clean the bodies up.”

Allie shook her head, “But surely there’s something? I mean if they know the girls were raped–don’t give me that look. Bleidd mentioned the police questioning him about it– isn’t there some trace of something, er, genetic, somewhere?”

Syn looked like she’d swallowed a lemon and Allie had the feeling she wasn’t going to like whatever was coming next. She was right.

“You aren’t getting the fucking picture here. Al. He uses bleach
everywhere
. Injects it
into
the bodies. Nothing left to test. What samples they can get show that there was definitely rape, but the quality is so shitty we can’t even tell what species the perp is. Everyone assumed human up ‘til now, because that’s, well I mean isn’t it always a fucking human asshole? But after this shit, all bets are off.”

For several minutes Allie was too horrified to speak and she watched as Syn grabbed and quickly drank a second beer. She almost wanted to join her. “How much trouble is he really in?”

“I don’t know,” Syn answered quietly, “Honestly. I can’t get a read on the Guards at all, except that they don’t like him, and the two detectives working the case have been on it for months now. Maybe they really think he did it…”

“Or maybe,” Allie finished for her, “they just want the case closed.”

“Yeah,” Syn agreed, sounding frustrated. “Maybe.”

“This is really bad, Syn.”

“No shit Sherlock.”

     ***************************

  “I still think he’s our guy,” Walters insisted, stubbornly.

Riordan shook his head as the group of Elven Guard looked on. They’d debated for hours after letting the suspect go. Then they’d called in Officer Lyons when Riordan realized her address was the same as the guy they’d just interrogated, questioned her, and debated some more.

“We don’t have enough to hold him.”

“Then we need to get enough,” Walters insisted.

“Does there seem to be a purpose to the murders?” the Elven Captain, Zarethyn, asked suddenly, breaking his silence.

“Purpose?” Walters snorted. “He’s a freak. You heard what Lyons said, he drinks like a fish, he’s got no life. He probably just likes to hurt little girls.”

“If we are seeking a motive for the killer it would seem logical to start by looking at what possible reasons the girls might be targeted,” The elf said calmly.

“Because being a crazy serial killer isn’t enough of a reason?” Walters scoffed.

“May we examine the last body?” Zarethyn asked ignoring the human’s attitude.

“Sure, “Riordan said, feeling tired, “She hasn’t been transferred out to the state coroner’s office yet. You might as well.”

He led the group down into the station basement which had a small section that acted as a temporary morgue when needed. The bodies were only held until a hearse could get there to transfer them out to the state office to be autopsied, but Riordan was sure #4 wouldn’t be much different from the first three. He walked over to the locker that held her body and paused for a moment of silent prayer before opening the morgue drawer and pulling the sliding table out.

“Do you want me to open the bag?”

The elf nodded, so Riordan made a note on the evidence tag and then unzipped the body bag. A strong bleach smell filled the room and he wrinkled his nose even though he’d been expecting it. Just like the others. To his surprise the red-haired female elf moved up to stand over the body holding her hands out about a foot above the dead girl.

“What’s she doing?” Walters asked, clearly unhappy.

“Checking for spells,” Zarethyn replied, unperturbed.

Before either detective could respond to that Aeyliss spoke, “Yes, there is magic here.”

“She was spelled?” Riordan asked, feeling uneasy

“No, but she herself was part of a spell,” the Elven woman replied.

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” the other blond, Jessilaen, said grimly, “that your murderer is using these girls, their pain and their death, in some way. Either to power a spell directly or to raise energy for some larger purpose.”

“So it is an elf then,” Walters sounded smug and Riordan shot him a cautionary glance.

“Not necessarily,” Aeyliss replied. “Humans can work magic as well, especially here in these lands. The traces of this spell are too corroded to be certain of its purpose or what type of magic it was, but I am certain those traces are there.”

“So what do we do now?” Riordan asked feeling frustrated and wishing elves would just say things straight out.

“We need an expert in ritual magic,” Zarethyn said quietly “Someone who may be able to recognize what the purpose of the ritual is or what style of magic utilizes these methods.”

“Okay, so we’ll find an occult expert and let you guys know what he says,” Walters said, a little too casually.

The Elven Captain looked at him sharply, “I think it best if we conduct this investigation jointly; one of us may see something another might miss.”

Walters scoffed openly, “So what all six of us are just going to walk around as a big group? That ain’t subtle and it isn’t going to convince people to help us. Seeing you four coming is going to freak most of our leads right out.”

The elves looked perplexed. “Why should we need to convince anyone to help us? If they are innocent but have knowledge of this crime should they not want to help find the killer?”

Riordan winced “It doesn’t work that way. People get scared, they get nervous…”

“Nonetheless,” Zarethyn said, with an air of finality, “we are a joint task force. We will investigate together. Find an expert and we will all go and question him and see if answers can be found that might be the start of a trail to this killer”

Later that morning as she drove in to work Allie couldn’t shake the general feeling of foreboding that had lingered since her conversation with Syndra. At first she drove on autopilot, the trees a blur next to the road, but as she left the house behind she found herself thinking of what the town must have been like 100 years earlier, before the Sundering. The event itself was still a mystery; no one knew why it had happened, only that one day reality had fractured; mortal Earth and Fairy had been permanently fused together. In some places Earth remained unchanged, in others Fairy dominated; where the two areas met there were the Borderlands, places that were neither wholly of Earth or Fairy. Ashwood was one of those places. It had been a small New England town before the Sundering, the kind of place that you would drive right through without ever realizing you’d been there. Most of the town had been farms–dairy, sheep, horses–and what passed for downtown covered barely a dozen blocks. After the worlds merged it became something more complex; the farms still took up much of the town but now they provided most of the food for the locals and downtown had taken on the air of a very small city. Since technology was effected by the seeping presence of magic in unpredictable ways and it was expensive to hire a magic worker to set up the protections constantly necessary to keep each electrical device running, most people got by with minimal household tech and used non-electrical means, like woodstoves, to heat their homes and cook with, saving their money to spend on technology like cell phones and computers. Iron also warped the effectiveness of magic and physically harmed most Fairy beings, making the iron stoves and cookware a line of defense for many people against the Fey creatures that wandered the land now. The old Victorian Allie and her roommates shared was unusual because it could boast most of the technological luxuries that mortal Earth had, since between them Allie and Bleidd were more than capable of handling the magical energy and spells needed to protect the electrical circuits.

The effect of the Borderland was strongest on the eastern side of town which opened up into Fairy through a wide swath of woodland that had once been a state forest. The elves, who were the rulers of the Otherworld although far from the only beings to exist there, had an outpost along the main road through the forest which acted now as the gateway fully into Fairy. On the other side of town the human government had a similar outpost that controlled travel into America. In between the two outposts the town of Ashwood sat as it had before, except that it was no longer totally on Earth.

The effect of the Borderland was weakest on the western side of town which was closest to the regular Earth end. The river formed a natural border here and the single bridge that crossed it was patrolled at all times since passage between American territory in the West and the realm of the local Fairy Queen to the east was strictly regulated. Next to the bridge was a small government outpost which acted like a border crossing, checking passports and residency passes and monitoring who entered and left the town. Even with the worlds twisted together like a patchwork quilt traveling from one to the other wasn’t easy. Someone trying to simply walk out of one world and into the next would find themselves hopelessly lost but nonetheless firmly within the world they had started in, unless they had magic to guide them. Only by crossing through the open borderland areas, which had formed around the towns and cities trapped between worlds during the Sundering, could direct passage be found, and so those areas were carefully maintained by a joint effort of both governments.

Sometimes Allie wondered what had happened to all the people, in both worlds, in the areas that were missing from the new reality, but she didn’t think anyone would ever know. Those places had simply ceased to exist in the reality that they now lived in.
Maybe there’s a whole other world now, an inverse of this one,
Allie mused
, where all the Earth bits here are Fairy and all the Fairy bits here are Earth.
It was a strange thought, but also oddly comforting, to think that the missing pieces of the world hadn’t been obliterated by the melding of the worlds. Allie had a hard time imagining what the world had been like before, without magic but also without Borderlands and with powerful, unified governments.
It must have been nice
, she thought,
to just be able to drive straight from one place to another, without going through check points or needing residency passes…
Of course it was still that way in large sections where one world dominated, but here in the Borderlands it was easy to forget that.

Downtown started just past the bridge and hovered on the edge where magic was weakest. The town’s one real sit-down restaurant, the Tiger, was also the only bar and did a brisk business thanks to the booming tourist trade. It was quite trendy for tourists from both worlds to come to a Borderland town to get a taste of the other side without going all the way into the foreign world. There were three hotels, one of which specialized only in fairies and catered to both Otherworldly tourists and the different traders who came in to sell their goods which would then be resold out to Earthly markets or passed on into Fairy. Besides the hotels, Main Street was dotted with expensive boutiques, fast food restaurants, specialty stores and the sorts of places only tourists shopped in. The residents of the town mostly stayed with the smaller stores on the side streets, unless they had to go to town hall or the police station, which doubled as a small jail. The town had a strong streak of self-sufficiency which meant that they tried hard not to rely on outsiders for anything they didn’t have to. The police station handled all minor criminals, at least the human ones, and it wasn’t often that someone had to be sent out with the State Police Officer stationed in town to be dealt with by the full court system. What had been a small walk-in clinic before the Sundering was now a small hospital and handled all but the most serious cases in-house. Past Main Street and the cluster of side streets the town opened up into a small warehouse district to the south and residential areas to the north.

Allie’s store,
Between The Worlds
, was a specialty book store on Sherwood just off of Main Street. When her grandmother had died Allie had inherited the store and Liz had gotten the house, with the understanding that each would help the other; old Elizabeth McCarthy had been a big believer in family standing by each other, and she had wanted to be sure that her two favorite grandchildren would not forget that. Liz gave Allie a place to live and Allie made sure the taxes on the house were always paid, as well as keeping up with things magically.

Allie pulled into the small parking lot next to the store and parked her car at the far end by the dilapidated wooden fence that rimmed the property. The single-story building itself was old brick with huge plate glass front windows and a recessed door with cheerful little bells over the top. Most people thought the bells were quaint; only a few realized they were but one of the many magical protections Allie had placed on the store. She was not an especially powerful witch but she was very good with simple magics and charms.

Walking through the Monday morning chill Allie paused for a minute at the back door, pretending to search for the right key as she concentrated on lowering the building’s wards to prepare for another day of business. It might have been silly to put so much effort into the wards when the odds of a beak in were so slim–certainly there wasn’t a huge amount of cash in the store and most burglars weren’t going to waste time with books–but Allie took a certain pride in her magical skill and enjoyed the effort of protecting the store. Those who weren’t deterred by the magical protections usually wouldn’t risk the store’s antiquated surveillance system, a remnant of her grandmother’s time.

As she entered the back hallway Allie felt the familiar rush of welcoming that she always felt in this place. She had all but grown up here; rushing to get to the store after school as a child anticipating her grandmother’s warm hug and stories, getting her first official job here as soon as she was old enough to work. She had read every single book in the store, some of them several times. Over the years since her grandmother’s death a decade before, she had been slowly shifting the focus of the collection into more occult books. Her grandmother, although a skilled witch, had always been vehemently opposed to carrying any magical books that went beyond bare basics, but Allie had slowly built up a loyal customer base by stocking exactly the books her grandmother had forbidden. It was those customers and the regular flow of tourists looking for outré souvenirs that kept the store profitable.

Moving down the hall she picked up the mail she’d tossed on the shelf lining the back wall a few days before, quickly sorted out the bills from the junk, which today included yet another invite to the local coven’s Ostara celebration, and checked the answering machine. There were three messages: two asking to reserve books and one hang up. Doors led off the short hall to a back room full of boxed books that needed to be catalogued before they could be put out, or waiting to be shipped out to fill online and phone orders, a small bathroom, and a tiny kitchenette. Allie stepped into the little kitchen and put some water on to boil for tea before heading out into the main room with its maze of floor-to-ceiling book shelves to find the two books to put on hold. It was looking like a long day and she pushed her worry about Bleidd out of her mind as she got to work.

   ******************************

The early spring weather had turned cold and cloudy, and after the morning rush to catch up with orders and get new books sorted and put away Allie found all her motivation drained. Someone walking in the front door would see the entire left side of the store lost in book shelves, but the right side was open to the back counter, with only a scattering of chairs and couches for the people who wanted to sit and read a bit before buying. Her grandmother had wanted the store to welcome everyone, to invite people in; Allie was constantly talking about changing it but could never quite bring herself to go through with it. As she was standing there wondering if there was a way to at least rearrange the seating area, she saw a familiar red head walking past the front window towards the door and felt her mood lifting. The little bells over the door echoed her feeling, ringing out cheerfully as the front door swung open.

“Morning Adain,” she greeted one of her best customers warmly and was rewarded with a wide smile in return.

“Mornin’ Allie. Have you gotten m’ order in by any chance?” Aidan’s lilting accent betrayed his Irish roots but Allie was one of the few people who knew that the handsome young man was actually a member of Fairy; he went to great pains to pass as human. Not exactly illegal, but certainly a dangerous game to play in a world that tended to assume nefarious motives for such deceptions. Allie understood his reasoning perfectly, which was why he trusted her with his secret, just as she trusted him. After all, if it got around that he was a leprechaun no one would ever believe it wasn’t like in the modern fairy-stories and he’d be harassed endlessly by stupid people. And she knew he liked mortal Earth too much to give it up, despite the risks.

“Not yet–you know I’d have called–but I did get in another one that might interest you…”she led him over to the shelf where she kept all the books on warding and protective magic and pointed to the new arrivals. The little bells over the door rang again and she left him to flip through his options as she headed back to greet the newcomer, who turned out to be one of the town’s resident ceremonial mages looking for an obscure book on ancient incense blends for invocations. The rest of the morning passed in a blur as the steady stream of customers kept her busy.

By late afternoon the rush had died, no one had come in to shop in several hours, she was feeling the lack of sleep and stress and was wondering if it was worth the risk of missing potential sales to close early. She leaned on the long sales counter watching traffic and listening to the only radio station that came in play what passed for pop music. She thought for the hundredth time that she needed to get a CD player, but it was so hard to keep them working even with magic that it never seemed worth the money.

She had just decided to close early and go get some sleep when a group walked past the front window and Allie felt herself tensing. She knew before the six people had entered the store that they weren’t customers.
You should have closed early after all
, she thought with a sinking feeling.

The first two men were in plainclothes but they might as well have been wearing uniforms; their demeanor screamed cop. They walked in checking the store out with open suspicion. The first was tall and lean, his light brown hair just starting to recede, but with a jovial air about him that made her think he probably smiled often. The second was shorter and stocky, the kind of guy who hit the gym every day and didn’t smile very much at all. His dark hair was in a military style crew cut and his suit was perfectly fit and pressed; he looked like someone who expected perfection from everyone around him and Allie guessed he was difficult to deal with. It was the other four though that made Allie’s stomach clench with something close to real fear. The Elven Guard walked in a rough formation, two by two, and their faces gave away nothing at all. She could see why Syn had said they were hard to read. They were all tall and beautiful, typically Elven, and they wore the tunics and dark, heavy cargo pants that were the uniform of the Guard. Each had a short sword belted at the waist where their human counterpart wore a holstered gun. Although it was true elves could not bear iron any better than the other Fey Allie knew from Syn that most guns now were more plastic than metal and she suspected the Guards’ insistence on swords was as much for intimidation as effectiveness. Each had a small badge clipped to their belt. Two were fair, one had dark hair and the last, the only woman, was red haired; each wore their hair long, which seemed to be the Elven style, but pulled back in a braid.