Shifty Magic (13 page)

"Behind the sofa," I whispered. "The smell's
strongest there."

Cooper gave me an odd look before heading
into the room and toward the sofa. His expression hardened as he
stared at the floor behind it. "Check the rest of the apartment,"
he ordered as I started toward the couch. He pulled out his iC,
snapped a picture, and then made the call.

After what I'd already seen tonight, his
efforts to protect me grated. Still, a look around was a smart
course of action, so I headed for the kitchen.

"Does anyone share this apartment with Ms.
Billings?" he called to Travis as he clipped his iC back on his
belt.

"No...no, sir. I mean...yes. Her boyfriend
moved in about a month ago. Keith Sanders. He's human."

"He's dead," Cooper said, his tone grim.
There was a pause and then the sound of Travis getting sick in the
hall echoed back into the living room.

I ignored the guard's distress and continued
with my inspection. The kitchen was clear. Sparkling clean, in
fact. No vamp blood in the refrigerator, nothing weird congealing
on the stove. I crossed to the bedroom, careful not to disturb
anything since the cops and feds hadn't had a chance to do a
sweep.

The bedroom was also neat and orderly except
for the king-sized bed in the corner. The sheets and light blanket
had been tossed back into a rumpled heap as if someone had left in
a hurry. The dresser had the usual assortment of his and hers stuff
on top of it, so I palmed the one item that I thought might mean
something, made a quick search of the bathroom and left.

I crossed the living room to the doorway and
checked on Travis. The guard sat on the floor looking like crap. My
gaze met Cooper's. "I need to see the body." A pained look crossed
his face, but he nodded.

Holstering my gun, I picked my way back
through the debris to the sofa. Laiyla's boyfriend looked to be
maybe eight years younger than her with boy-next-door looks, decent
muscles and short sandy-brown hair. From the bruising on his
knuckles and arms, he'd fought hard to protect the woman he loved.
In the end, he'd lost everything anyway.

Sadness and frustration fisted together in
the middle of my chest. Life was potential. Death meant the world
would never know what these two people might have done with their
lives, who they might have helped, what they might have
accomplished, the children they might have raised.

My sorrow compressed into a sharp pinpoint
of pain, and I clenched my teeth together. Is this what had
happened to my parents? Had some piece of garbage decided they
didn't deserve to live and ripped them from existence? Or had they
just decided that raising a baby wasn't for them, dropped me at the
nearest cathedral doorstep and gone off into the sunset?

The sting in my throat came back with a
vengeance, squeezing in like a vice.

"I shouldn't have let you see it," Cooper
said.

I looked up to see him watching me, concern
making a deep V between his dark brows.

"It's not your place to protect me," I said,
my voice rough. "I can take care of myself."

His brows drew tighter together.
"Sometimes."

I was too tired to get outraged from his
ridiculous protectiveness, so I held out the ring I'd found
instead. The diamond solitaire caught the light from the hallway
and glistened against my palm.

Cooper's worry for me shifted into a pensive
frown. "They were engaged?"

"Or at least discussing it. This was on the
dresser and not her finger."

"Explains the herculean effort he made to
protect her." He gazed thoughtfully at the body.

"To me one less vamp on the planet is
nothing but a good deal, but this...." I clenched my fingers around
the engagement ring. "This is all so wrong."

Cooper pivoted away from the sofa and made
his way past me to the front door. I followed him and took up my
post on the other side of Travis where the guard sat slumped
against the wall. The sharp, stomach rolling smell of the mess he'd
made a few feet down the hall made me anxious to get the interview
over with.

Cooper crossed his arms over his chest and
stared down at the guard. "Time to tell us everything, Mr.
Mason."

"I...don't know anything," the guard
stuttered, his tone as close to a whine as I ever wanted to hear
from a grown man.

"Start with why you wanted Laiyla to make
you a Cupid Potion and how you paid her for it," I said.

Cooper shot me a sharp, questioning look,
but I shook my head. There was time for explanations later.

Travis seemed to sink into himself as he
buried his face in his hands. "I was worried my wife was cheating
on me," he murmured. "Such a stupid thing to get worked up
about."

"The Cupid Spell was for her?" If one person
already had feelings for another person, that particular potion
brought those feelings out in spades. If not, then it was no more
potent than a glass of unpleasant tasting tea.

I risked a glance at Cooper and my gaze
clashed with his. My cheeks tightened with heat, and I looked
away.

Dropping his hands to his lap, the guard
stared at the wall across from him with haunted, listless eyes. "I
was willing to pay for it, but Laiyla wanted information. A
connection I'd heard about. She wanted the name of someone who
could get her,..." he swallowed. "a Gaia Fertility Spell."

I sucked in a sharp breath. "That's just a
myth."

"A dangerous one," Cooper growled. "Over
fifty known deaths last year. Thirty the year before."

"That's what I told her, but she insisted.
After I made the call, I...was out of the loop." He looked up at
us. "Is she really dead?"

Two cops came up the stairs to our right.
"Take him to the Tryon Bird," Cooper told them. "I'll question him
there."

They got Travis to his feet, clipped the
restraining cuffs on him and led him away. They passed Stillman and
Miller on their way up.

"We were finishing at the abandoned
farmhouse when we got your call," Agent Stillman said, her usual
stormy eyes dull with fatigue. She glanced into the apartment.
"From the smell, this killing happened before the
practitioner's."

"Forensics will have to confirm," Cooper
said, "but it looks like the murderer accessed the apartment
without force. Then when he attempted to abduct Ms. Billings, the
boyfriend intervened."

"There's some residual magic here, too,"
Miller said. "But not the same kind as before."

Everyone looked at me. "What? I didn't see
anything," I said.

Cooper kept his speculative gaze on me for a
moment and then turned back to Miller. "Any details?"

"First impression, some kind of hypnosis
spell, but I'll have to get a more detailed reading to be
sure."

"ERT is on its way. You have ten
minutes."

Miller ran a square, broad hand through his
hair, sending the thin wisps into chaos. "I'll do what I can. No
promises."

Clapping the other man on
the shoulder encouragingly, Cooper gestured for me to walk with him
and headed for the stairs. "
Did
you see anything?" he asked in a low
voice.

"No, I swear."

"But you smelled something," he stated.

"The place reeked. It was the same nasty
stench, too. Like the one on the vamp."

That odd look he was giving me intensified.
"What do you mean?"

"Like...the closest equivalent I can come up
with is rotten flowers. Jasmine specifically. I didn't think it
meant anything then, but now I'm not sure."

We stepped out of the house into what would
have been a cool, peaceful night compared to the city except for
the flashing lights and sirens of the cop cars racing up the road.
We headed for Cooper's little electric car, and I waited for him to
unlock it. No bicycles for the FBI, but a shoebox on wheels was
perfectly acceptable.

"You sure it was jasmine?" he asked as he
opened the passenger door.

"Not exactly, but close. It's this weird,
cloying kind of sickly sweet smell like nothing I'm familiar with.
Stop looking at me like I'm a freak in the circus. It makes me
nervous."

Cooper palmed his iC. With a quick swipe, he
tracked it down the front of me about an inch from my body.

"What was that for?" I demanded, jumping
back.

"Still human," he mused staring at the read
out. "Weird."

I jammed my fists onto my hips and didn't
try to hide my exasperation. "Explain."

As his gaze met mine, curiosity and a
flicker of hope warring against sharp concern. A chill ran down my
back.

"Only one species of Were can smell demons,
Addison."

* * *

Cooper refused to tell me anything else until we got back to
my apartment. I understood that we were less likely to be overheard
there, but the delay made worry chew at my stomach like the
five-alarm hot sauce at Ally's deli. I wasn't much in the mood to
wait, but while I was peeling Wizard off of him and shoving the
mewling cat into the bathroom, I realized that a part of me didn't
want to know.

Silently admitting that I was a coward when
it came to enduring more hurt over my lack of family, I went into
my minuscule kitchen and started a pot of coffee. I didn't know
anything about where I'd come from other than a few sketchy
stories.

I was almost eleven when the attacks
happened, living in my latest foster home with two other kids. When
the family bugged out of the city about seven months into the
fighting, they left us behind.

We lived on the streets during the eighteen
months of cleanup following the routing of the terrorists. Once the
dust settled and life started to normalize, the cops managed to
snag me, and I was placed back into the system.

During those months of chaos and violence, I
got used to worrying more about how to survive than where I'd come
from. Introspection became a luxury. By the time I was thirteen, I
was one among thousands of orphaned and abandoned kids and
reconciled to never knowing my biological heritage.

A lot of new technology had appeared since
then and all of it told me I was human. Seeing the residual magic
was probably a hallucination brought on by shock. Cooper's
conclusion that I'd phased my fingers into a vamp's neck was
ridiculous.

I filled two mugs with coffee, black for
Cooper and lots of cream and sugar for me—a sure sign that I was
feeling stressed. With a large dose of reluctance, I took the
coffee and plodded to the mismatched pair of living room chairs
flanking the broken gas fireplace in the corner of the main room. I
never referred to the area as a living room. Such a lofty term
would only encourage the nine by eleven space to put on airs. Since
it had to share the limelight with the kitchen table, why encourage
snobbery?

"Let's get this over with," I said as I
settled into my favorite chair, a red and gold velvet club that I'd
salvaged off the curb.

"If you were officially with the FBI, I
could tell you everything." Cooper took a sip of coffee. "As it is,
I'm limited."

"Subtle. And the answer is still no. Now
what about these demons? Which aren't real, by the way," I said in
a stern voice.

A smile touched the curves of his mouth.
"You'd make a great agent."

"No, I wouldn't. Especially with all these
recent anomalies."

"
Because
of all these
anomalies."

I studied him over the rim of my Betty Boop
mug while I blew on the coffee. He was hiding something. I wasn't
sure how I knew that other than the churning, skittish feeling in
my gut, but I did.

Cooper settled himself onto my tan,
overstuffed easy chair and propped one ankle onto the opposite
knee. "They're not actually demons, although religion and mythology
have portrayed them that way for centuries. They're
inter-dimensional beings. Most come from the same few dozen
sectors, the areas interested in what our world has to offer. The
smaller entities are usually more interested in the natural
kingdom—"

"Imps and fairies and stuff?" I asked.

He nodded. "Generally not a problem. But
there are a few that are more sophisticated and fully
sentient."

"Do they all stink?"

"Only to a specific group of Weres. A secret
society that as far as we know died out about twenty years
ago."

Disappointment squeezed my heart. "That was
before I was born." So much for finding a clue to who my parents
were. I shouldn't have let Cooper's hope that we might be able to
be together color my common sense. "I'm not one of you. Why don't
you believe the scanners?"

"I believe what my instincts tell me."

I contemplated that while he drank his
coffee and watched me. "You think it's possible? Even without me
being able to shift?"

"I'd like to talk to a few people about it
first, but yeah. I think it's possible."

I kept my expression blank as a new spark of
hope flickered in my chest. Sometimes I wondered how bright I was.
When this turned out to be nothing, the pain would be agonizing.
"You're wasting your time, but if it'll kill your stupid theory go
for it."

"It's not just a theory." He set his empty
mug on the side table next to him, dropped his foot to the floor
and leaned toward me. Fathomless silver-green eyes filled with
decades of experience, loss, triumph and disappointment, gazed from
a face that looked barely old enough to vote. "I'm drawn to you,
Addison," he said, his voice soft and delicious. "Even before last
Christmas, I felt it."

I tensed as a savory awareness fluttered
over my skin. "Another thing you're imagining. We were under the
influence that night."

"That excuse doesn't work anymore. You know
there's something between us. You feel it too."