Raines of Fire: The Alexa Raines Chronicles (3 page)

“You’re sure of it?”

“Yes.   She’s—not like the others.”

“I say you’re seeing things.  You promised us things from these Wiccans.  You failed to deliver.”

“I know.  I’m sorry.  But they were the ones who said they had
real magic.”

“
We know you tried.  And maybe one of them has some potential to learn The Craft, but we should move on before they suspect too much.”

“They won’t suspect anything.  I’ve got it under control.  And
she
is the real deal.”

The two—one dark as night, the other white as snow, both with jade-green eyes—looked at each other.  “You’re sure of it?  They only made three before they were wiped out.”

“I know it.  The question is whether she knows it.  And I don’t think so.”

The two exchanged shrugs.  “All right,” said the white one.  “But it has to happen soon.  Otherwise we
must leave to protect our anonymity.”

“Don’t worry.  I think I know how to get her.”

The park wasn’t hard to find—a swath of wide-open field crisscrossed with running and walking paths, and an impressive playground at one end.  This was ablaze with flashing red and blue lights.  Alexa got out of the car and sauntered over to the police cars.  “What’s going on?” she asked, flashing her badge.  It was just a cheap trinket she’d picked up from a thrift store, but she found that it helped when dealing with law enforcement.  “I’m the private investigator that Edgar Faust hired,” she added, before the officer—a chubby, baby-faced twenty five year-old man who looked as fit as a package of Oreos—could ask. 

“Oh,” he said.  “Uh, well—
“He stepped aside, or rather she stepped forward and he made room for her.  The body was covered with a canvas sheet, but even that couldn’t hide the fact that the ground around it was drenched with blood. 

“Who is it
?” Alexa asked.  The officer--“Doyle” was printed on his nametag—stammered something incomprehensible, but Alexa wasn’t listening any more.  She went up to the body and lifted the corner of the tarp.  And, for the first time in a very long time, nearly threw up.  For thousands of years Alexa had witnessed the ravages of war and the horrible atrocities that man was capable of.  What she witnessed now was a new low and threatened to overwhelm even her jaded senses.

The body had been skinned, the muscles sliced from their tendons.  The hair and face were separated from the skull, but had been carelessly slapped back onto the bones, so that she—at least, from what Alexa could tell of the body, it was a woman—looked like she was wearing a rubber mask the wrong way.  The woman had been strangled with her own intestines.  Alexa replaced the tarp before the scowling coroner could tell her to.  There was nothing she could get from this, except feeling ill. 

Whoever had done this was one sick puppy
, Alexa thought.  She stood up and went over to Doyle.  “Do you have any suspects?” she asked. 

“Well, I’m not supposed—“

A sign behind Doyle caught her eye, as did the man wielding it:  “REPENT YE HEATHENS”, painted in blood-red letters on a sheet of poster board tacked onto a stick, and a man dressed in a cheap suit howling something about the vengeance of the Lords.   Alexa turned back to Doyle.  The stiff smile on his face told her that yes, this strange man was a suspect.  “Who’s he?” she asked.

“I told you—“

“I’m sorry—“

“I fucking thought you were dead!” Felicia shouted.  “I mourned you for years.  Every time I saw someone with your hair, I had to make sure it wasn’t you.  And I still see you reflected in mirrors—I still smell your perfume—I still hear your fucking voice in my head—and I keep telling myself, ‘No, she’s dead, move on,’ and every time I think I might finally be over you, it’s bam, another reminder of what we had.  And now you’re here?”

Alexa was half-running after Felicia, who never broke out of an angry, stiff-legged walk.  They were headed away from the houses, towards the other end of the park, where there was a row of shops.  Alexa felt a few stares following them as they left the crime scene, but most of the onlookers were still more curious about the dead body, which was fine by her.  This part of the country, in her experience, didn’t look too kindly on girls who liked girls.

“Look, Felicia, I wanted to let you know, but—well, it’s.  Um.  Complicated.”

Felicia rolled her eyes.  The years had been kind to her—she was still the lithe, sensuous beauty that Alexa had fallen in love with, back when knowing another woman was something that only happened on VHS video tapes with soft lighting and bad music.  Alexa wanted nothing more than to kiss her, to take her to the nearest hotel room, to touch her and fuck her and make the ten years disappear and wash away her sorrow with pure ecstasy.  She settled, instead, for, “Can I buy you a drink so I can explain what happened, at least?”

Ten
years ago, Alexa’s work took her to a little town called Westpark, in Texas.  She’d been tasked with assassinating Big Jim Campo, one of the bigger dealers of the area who’d been expanding his operations to include prostitution and racketeering.  Felicia had been a stripper at the club he frequented when he was in Westpark.  She’d just started—that much was obvious when Alexa walked in, and saw her giving Big Jim a lap dance.  Or trying to—she hadn’t yet mastered the art of moving about in six-inch stiletto heels.  Still, she could tell that Big Jim liked this girl, perhaps because she was so new and sweet.  Alexa befriended Felicia, and asked her for a favor.  “Could you, y’know, maybe get me onto Jim’s good side?” she’d asked.  “I’m kinda hard up for money, too.”

After
Big Jim had been disposed of, Alexa called Michael Rollins and told him she was getting out of the business.  Michael, as expected, only said, “Very well, Miss Raines.” 

They rented a house together, barbe
cuing and sipping vodka spritzers and learning how the other liked to be touched, how to kiss, where to brush and where to press and where to pinch.  The local fertilizer plant was a good place to work—there was steady money, so Alexa got a job there, to blend in better with the locals—someone who always had money but no job would be too conspicuous in a town where the richest person had to shop at Piggly Wiggly’s.  And life was good, for a few years.  Felicia went to school and worked at a diner, they bought a car, and then everything blew up—literally.

There was an accident at the plant.  A stray spark, a plume of gas,
whatever it was that exploded, was bad—Alexa took three weeks to resurrect from this.  Michael had driven out to Texas in a marathon seventy-two hour drive to creep into the wreckage and steal her body from the ashes before the officials could begin their body count.  He kept her safe, in a converted shipping container outside Los Angeles, for three weeks, while her body reassembled itself, regenerated what parts had been lost, and finally, became alive again.  But by then, Felicia had already thought she had buried her lover.

“You wouldn’t do her any good going back to her, now,” Michael had said.  And Alexa had agreed.  Life went on for her.  She restarted Raines Adjustments, and Felicia passed from her mind like all of the other lovers she’d had
over the centuries.

Now, sitting next to her former lover at the bar, Alexa didn’t tell her that, of course.  “I couldn’t do that to you after three weeks of being presumed dead,” she said. 

“It never occurred to you that I
might
have needed you?” Felicia said.  “I lost you, two friends, and my brother in that accident.  I would’ve been ecstatic to see you.”

“I—I couldn’t know that,” Alexa said, feeling guilty for the first time in a long time.  She tilted the rest of  her drink—scotch, neat—down her throat, hoping that the burn would take some of it away.  It didn’t.  If anything, the guilt was more intense.  “So what are you doing now? Into Wicca?”  She hoped Felicia wouldn’t take the sudden shift
of topic amiss. 

“I used to be,” Felicia said.  “Then Edgar took over.  He—I don’t know, for most of us
Wicca was mostly a social thing.  We liked to have these gatherings, drink a bit of mead, relax and feel like we were one with the universe and all.  But Edgar changed it—he took it way too seriously, started questioning our loyalty and the strengths of our convictions, demanded that the rituals involve animal blood and ‘real’ spells—it was too much for a lot of people.”

“You stayed?” Alexa asked
while
swirling her finger around the glass, all the while gazing at Felicia with so many memories of lost love.

Felicia grimaced.  “My
girlfriend was really into it.”

“Was
she—“

Felicia nodded.  The first victim,
Marsha Bell, had been found in pieces—an arm here, a leg there.  They still haven’t found her head.  “I’m sorry,” Alexa said, and she was.  Felicia deserved some happiness after the way she’d had to leave. 

Felicia shook her head.  “
She’d only moved here from New York six months ago.  We only really knew each other for a few weeks.”

“Still,” Alexa said.  “You knew h
er, you liked her, and now she’s gone.”

Felicia nodded, and took a large gulp of her rum-and-Coke.  “I liked h
er,” she said.  “I like a lot of people.  I only ever loved you.”

“Maybe we can have a little
time to get to know each other again once this business is over,” Alexa purred, letting her fingers graze the back of Felicia’s hand for a moment.  Felicia raised her eyebrows, and managed a wry grin.   At the same time, Alexa’s high-heeled shoe reached across the expanse between them, until it finally came to rest on Felicia’s leg. Felicia raised her eyebrows, and managed a wry grin, not exactly able to concentrate with Alexa’s foot caressing her. “All right, so Edgar called me to hunt down whoever’s killing the members of this—coven, I think?”

Felicia nodded wearily.  “Janet Madigan—the girl from this morning—was the third.  Louise
Bartoli was the second.” 

“Yeah,” Alexa said.  She’d gotten that much from the file.  Janet was a longstanding member, Louise had only been around for a year.  “What were they like?” she asked Felicia.  “True-believer types, or more like CEO Catholics?”
  Felicia could still feel Alexa's foot against her, but now she had dropped the premise of an accidental graze of her leg altogether, relieving herself of her shoe and pressing her nylon covered toes against her.

“CEO Catholics?  Oh—Christmas and Easter only, ha
-ha,” Felicia deadpanned.  “No, they were pretty committed to the group.   I don’t know that they
believed
, per se.  I think even Edgar has to know that there’s no such thing as fairies and magic.”

“
Oh my god, would you please stop that.” She playfully tried to push Alexa’s foot away, but she wasn't really trying all that hard. It had been too long since they had been together, and there was this magnetism that was drawing them towards each other, which neither of them were going to be able to deny to themselves for much longer.

“You’d be surprised at what people can believe,” Alexa said
, while gently running her fingers over the back of Felicia’s hand.

They sat for a while in silence, getting used to the feeling of having each other close again.  Felicia wound her fingers between Alexa’s.  Alexa could almost imagine that they were back in Texas, still living in that dingy house, waking up in the night to find her hands between Felicia’s legs, and Felicia already wet.  She realized, now, that the main reason it had been so easy to leave her past lovers behind was simply that none of them lived very long
compared to her. 

“So it seems that whoever it is targets those who are committed to the coven.  Are you safe?” Alexa asked.

Felicia shook her head.  “I—I run some of the fundraisers, and I host a lot of the meetings in my home,” she said.  “I don’t know that I believe as much as some of the others do, but I’m fairly involved.” 

“Shit,” Alexa said.  “Let me get you a bodyguard then.”

“I don’t need a bodyguard,” Felicia said, grabbing Alexa’s hand before she could pull out her phone. “I don’t want to be in your life again.  I refuse to be hurt again!”

“You’re not
in my life again and I will certainly not hurt you.  This is strictly professional,” Alexa said, even though it was a blatant and painful lie. They could both feel the sexual chemistry running back and forth between them.  “Beside if there’s another victim Edgar will probably fire me from the job.”

“I don’t need a bodyguard,” Felicia said
again, with a finality that stopped Alexa from protesting further. 
I don’t need anything from you
—that was what Alexa heard, and to her surprise, it hurt her. 

“Do you know where the—Janet Madigan lived?” Alexa asked, swallowing the hurt.  She could deal with it later.  Or not at all. 

“Yeah,” Felicia said.  “You want to go there?”

Alexa nodded.  “There might be a clue in her place that could help us,” she said. 

Felicia stood up.  “Well, come on, let’s go.  Sitting around here isn’t going to help you nail the bastard.”  Breaking the physical contact between them was the only way that Felicia knew how to distance herself from Alexa. Any more of this teasing and there was no doubt in her mind that they would throw caution to the wind and fling themselves into the same physical relationship from where they left off. She could already feel that Alexa wanted her, and she was damned if she would feel the same thing, as if they hadn't been apart at all.

Alexa stood up and paid for their drinks.  She was still reeling a bit from so much desire.  It screwed with
her head and made for bad decisions.  She couldn’t afford to be off her game.  But damned if she’d give up Felicia again.