Elron came to his feet. “Mother, Father, why are you here? Interrupting us so rudely, at that.”
I leaned back in my chair. He could fight this battle. My involvement would only make things worse.
“The wedding cannot go on like this.” Enor grabbed Elron’s arm. “Would you marry a woman who does not honor your heritage?”
He stared at her until she released him. “Neither of you comprehend the reality of this wedding. I am marrying a prominent witch. Her traditions must come first. We had already planned several ways to include my heritage, but as many elves do not even bother with a wedding, we didn’t see a reason to complicate matters unnecessarily.”
“We raised you better than this,” Erwin said.
“Did you?” Elron’s voice was deceptively quiet. “Where were you after Sylvia died? Where were you for the two hundred years after her death? Even by your measure, it is enough time to think about your son.”
Enor stiffened. “Communication was different then.”
“And that changes how you care for your son?” Elron stepped back. “Get out. I’ll deal with the two of you tomorrow. I was trying to help my wife-to-be before your interruptions.”
“Tricks delivered your note.” Erwin watched his son.
Now I was lost. What note and how did it factor into the wedding argument? The same tired argument that had gone on for days. It didn’t matter what we did. They’d never be happy because they didn’t want a witch in the family.
Elron stared at him.
“I know of this ‘hell beast,’ even with your inaccurate appellation.” The corner of Erwin’s mouth turned up. “Give elves representation in your wedding, and I’ll tell you.”
That settled it. The moment Tricks could legally leave them, she had a home here. I’d take her in without a second thought. Enor and Erwin’s objections could go straight to Narzel. She deserved a real chance to figure out what she wanted her life to be.
“Either you wish to help or you do not.” Elron walked past them and held the door open. “Our wedding is not some triviality to be bargained with for your amusement.”
Erwin glared at both of us.
I pushed away from the table and joined Elron. “Do they know why?”
He shook his head.
That changed things, but only so much. They weren’t generous, thoughtful people. It explained a lot about Elron from when we first met, but he hadn’t let the two of them define him. And maybe it wasn’t too late for them to change. They were old, not dead.
I stared at Erwin until he dropped his gaze. “The question was not a casual inquiry. Three people are dead. At two of the murder scenes, numerous people behaved as if they were drunk. There is no evidence they had been drinking. If the pattern holds, another person will die tonight. I’d like to stop that.”
“How were they killed?” Enor asked.
“One was dismembered, so it’s hard to say. The others were found with their throats slit, drained of blood. All of them have been found with Halloween decorations.” The police could get over me sharing information if it helped catch the killer.
She thought for a moment. “Who were the victims?”
“We don’t know. They seem to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that’s a guess.”
Erwin cleared his throat. “Were they bad people?”
“I don’t know. The police are still identifying them.”
Enor and Erwin exchanged a glance. He nodded slightly.
“You don’t understand.” Enor came over to me. “What you know as the hell beast did not kill these people. If it had, there would be no doubt to the identity or caliber of person.”
Erwin leaned around Enor. “I’m surprised you have not heard of this creature.”
“Father,” Elron said sharply.
Enor ignored them. “You may know this hell beast as a hell cat.”
“Oh.” I knew that story. I’d loved it as a child. “From pain, fire, and death, a witch is reborn. The hell cat often protects the innocent and brings justice to the evil.”
“New ones are especially prone to being unable to control their abilities and create a Dionysian effect in those around them.” Enor finished for me. “Many years ago, I knew one. They are rare. You have likely heard of the event that led to their rebirth. I’d guess this one is very new to be so visible.”
“Or it is fighting a great foe,” Erwin added.
“They’re black, with orange eyes.”
Like a certain cat I kept seeing.
“Is there any other way to identify a hell cat?” I asked. “If it’s been trying to stop the murders, it could tell me who the killer is.”
Enor shrugged. “They are as intelligent as you. If it wishes to communicate, it will.”
I met her gaze, and for the first time, there was compassion. “Thank you.”
“I know nothing of this killer.” Enor squeezed my hands. “I do not know much about hell cats, only about my friend.”
“This was enough. Thank you.” I gave her a quick hug.
Erwin muttered an apology, and the two of them filed out.
Elron closed the door behind them and leaned against it. “To answer your question, I don’t know about hell beasts, but I asked my parents.”
I wrapped my arms around him and rested my head against his chest. “It worked out well enough.”
His arms came around me. “Will they ever accept you?”
“I doubt it, but now they see me as more than a young witch ruining the next three hundred years of your life.” Hardly an insignificant period of time, but not exactly an eternity for an elf.
Elron chuckled. “If only they knew.”
“We’ll tell them when I turn 400. At an extra century, they’ll know something is up.” I grinned.
“Wicked.” The teasing tone faded from his voice. “We should elope. I doubt they’ll care once we’re married.”
Just the two of us, a ceremony, or even a simple legal document, and none of this nonsense. It was a seductive idea. “Do you really think anything will change their minds? I don’t. And Ethel would never forgive me for running off.”
“We would come back for the formal event.”
“Who’s wicked now?”
Elron scooped me up and carried me over to the sofa, both of us laughing. Maybe we were both wicked.
While we were wicked, someone else was evil. Which was why I was looking at yet another body, yet another person who hadn’t deserved to die.
Of all days, today. Halloween. Samhain. All Hallows' Eve. All different terms and aspects of the same day. A day close enough to death as it was without including murder.
My breath fogged the air around another family Halloween display. Sharp morning light cast long shadows across the lawn. Two skeletons held the body over an open casket. She was dressed in typical fall attire: boots, jeans, a long sleeve shirt and a vest. Her black hair was pulled back in a braid that hung to the ground. Her head tilted back, exposing the vicious slice that had ended her life.
Some blood splattered the cream vest, and the more pooled in the wound. Considering how she died, she was remarkably clean.
The last two bodies were clean too. Oddly clean. Draining the blood out of someone wasn’t a tidy task. How had the killer managed it?
I didn’t know. I didn’t know what good I was doing here either. The first thing I’d done was check for magic, and there wasn’t any more here than there had been at the previous scenes.
“Rodriguez, I can’t do anything. It doesn’t matter how many times I look. I’m not going to find magic.” I couldn’t look at the poor victim anymore. My eyes slid away from her, coming to rest on the discarded decoration: black plastic shaped like a body. The skeletons had been holding it before the killer used this yard as a body dump.
He held up his hands. “This one isn’t on me. Captain wanted both of us here. It helps if the department can say they did everything.”
“Uh huh.” That would sound nice at a press release. It wasn’t a good use of my time.
Rodriguez radio chirped, and he stepped away.
I walked around the crime scene, not that a different perspective would help. There wasn’t any magic to be found.
Near the front door, a woman held on to a squirming son. He begged to see the body again, which both the mom and officer refused. He pouted but said he had noticed the body on the way to the bus. He had missed the bus, which his mom noticed when leaving for work. Best morning of his life, rather the opposite for his mom.
“Michelle!” Rodriguez waved at me from the other side of the street.
I joined him and a group of groggy-looking adults. Two fey, a human, a shifter, and a brownie. The fey and brownies had gotten dressed for work, though I suspected they weren’t usually so rumpled.
Rodriguez introduced me and quickly got to the point. “One more time for my colleague. You all felt drunk or hung-over this morning.”
The shifter groaned. “I went through this with the other cop. I wasn’t drinking. I just told him the truth when he asked.”
“Ma’am, you aren’t in any trouble, but we’ve had a few instances like this lately. Did any of you drink last night?”
A chorus of no’s.
“Thank you.” I followed it up with the only other question that mattered to me. “Did you see a black cat with orange eyes?”
“I was asleep. It sure didn’t show up in my dreams,” the shifter said.
Everyone agreed.
I turned to Rodriguez. “Do we need them for any other reason?”
“No.”
I gave them a polite smile. “You’re free to go.”
Rodriguez stared at me. After they had returned to their respective houses, which were adjacent to the crime scene, he said, “Why did you send them away? Any reason you don’t care about the drunk people showing up around town?”
“They aren’t connected,” I said absently.
“What?”
“I’m sorry. That was poorly done.” I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. A full night’s sleep and I’d be a new witch. “The drunk behavior isn’t caused by the killer. It’s the ‘hell beast.’”
Rodriguez raked a hand through his hair. “Last I heard, we didn’t know what the hell beast was, or if it was the killer, so I fail to see how that’s helpful.”
“Elron’s parents had a use for once. They knew the common name for the hell beast,” I said. “Ever heard of a hell cat?”
He snorted. “Sure, in a movie. She was in leather, had cat ears, killed by the hero after setting fire to half the city and seducing the other half.”
“Not the same creature. Actual hell cats are rare. Or maybe they don’t announce themselves to the world, hard to say.” I gave him the summary of what I knew. “So the cat is hunting the killer or trying to stop the murders. Best guess is that it’s new and can’t control its abilities very well yet.”
He watched the medical examiner transfer the body to a truck. “Which is why we keep seeing a black cat, like the one helpful enough to point out the girl at the fountain.”
“It gets around.”
“Tracking the killer?”
“Hard to say.” I shrugged. “It’s impossible to deny the overlap in the cases, but I don’t know if the hell cat is thinking more like a cat or more like a human. I can go through the cases again, separate out the murders and the drunk incidents.”
“Deal.” He stared at the coffin. “I’d like to prevent the next murder.”
“I’ll meet you back at the office.” I tugged my keys out of my pocket. “There isn’t anything I can do here, anyway.”
On the way, I picked up tea and a scone. The rest of the drive passed in quiet contemplation. What we needed to break the case was physical evidence. It baffled me that we’d yet to find anything useful. It was all but impossible to be that careful, which meant we were missing something. There had to be a fingerprint, stray hair, or anything that would make these pieces fit.
In Rodriguez’s workroom, I spread out the reports again, and pulled all the files with the Dionysus effect.
The first few were easy enough. I’d seen the cat at the first murder and near the drunken revelry. That same night, the cat was defending the girl from the spider. Next came the second murder, with the girl by the fountain and the drunken restaurant employees.
The same night as the third murder, the cat was at Halloween Essence. Rather sweet of the cat to guard people from the curse, and good for the investigation. That night made it clear the cat wasn’t directly connected to the murders.
It also meant the cat was our best witness. If only I knew how to make a cat talk.
Both the cat and the killer had been heading south along the highway, which didn’t help me all that much. The entire metro Atlanta area was in a roughly southerly direction. They could be going anywhere.
A knock on the door pulled me out of my reflections. Officer Montoya poked his head in. “Rodriguez, do you have a minute?” His eyes landed on me and he stiffened. “Oaks, I didn’t see you there.”
“It’s good to see you again.” I gave him a genuine smile, which only made him back up. He wasn’t my favorite officer for a magical emergency, but that didn’t make him a bad guy or bad at the rest of his job.
Rodriguez closed a file. “What do you need?”
“The accident with the impaled vampire? You said you’d take a look at the wood.” He edged back again.
“Sure.” Rodriguez stretched. “Michelle, you want to check my work? Sad case, and we want to make sure it was truly an accident.”
“I could use a break.”
Montoya’s face went carefully blank.
Poor man. If I knew how to put him at ease, I would. Given our last interaction, I suspected he’d only be happy if I wasn’t around. That wasn’t going to happen. He’d have to get used to me or move to a different department.
Actually, he needed to get used to magic. I didn’t know of any departments that were free of magical problems.
Montoya took us over to the garage, where a Toyota Corolla had a two-by-four embedded in the windshield. The entire front of the car was crumpled, with other two-by-fours piercing the hood. A table beside the car held the sawed-off end of a similarly sized piece of wood. One side had a clean cut, the other splintered and coated in blood.
I walked over and checked the inside of the car. The wood came through the windshield and ended in a sawed-off cut. From the angle, and the blood, it could easily have staked a vampire to the front seat of their Corolla.
Bad luck for the vampire. A few inches in any direction and the vampire would’ve been annoyed but fine.
Switching my vision to see magic, I examined it again. A lingering healing charm coated the front seat. The wood was completely ordinary. The section of the wood on the table had remnants of the healing charm, but that was it.
Rodriguez check the car and joined me next to the table. “I don’t sense anything concerning, do you?”
“Nope.” One piece of wood went through the hood and into the wheel well. “How did this happen?”
“Loose wood in the back of a truck.” Montoya shook his head. “The truck lost control on Old Canton Highway about a week ago. The Corolla was behind them. From the skid marks, the truck tried to stop. The Corolla ended up hitting a tree, likely after the driver became incapacitated. Both drivers were dead when we arrived. Medical examiner put the time of death at an hour before we were notified.”
“Sad,” I said.
Montoya nodded. “The vampire lived with others down in Kennesaw. They want to know what she was doing; said she’d been secretive lately. She didn’t have her phone with her. It pinged once from a tower near Ball Ground, but it hasn’t show up again, and we can’t turn it on remotely.
“We got a call from a local family. They claim their son was dating her.” He shrugged. “His friends confirm that, but no one has heard from him since the night she died. They met taking classes at Kennesaw University.”
“I hope you figure it out.” It was the best I could do. Nothing here was magical, so it put it firmly out of my area. Unless more vampires ended up dead on late-night drives, it was a tragic accident.
Rodriguez patted Montoya on the shoulder. “If anything comes up, if I can help, you know where to find me.”
“Thanks.” Montoya nodded at me. “You didn’t have to come. I appreciate it.”
“Not a problem.” If it smoothed things over for the next time we worked together, it was worth it. Plus, I felt like I owed the department for all the time I’d spent looking at crime scenes devoid of a drop of magic.
Rodriguez and I took our time going back to his workroom. I wasn’t looking forward to staring at pictures of drained bodies. Not when I was useless.
“How do you find a hell cat?” Rodriguez mused.
“Put out a can of tuna?”
He nudged me. “Be serious.”
“We don’t. If it wants to talk to us, it will find us.”
“So helpful.”
I shrugged. “If we find it at another magical mishap, or murder, we can ask it to talk to us. No guarantee it will.”
Rodriguez stopped. “They’re a type of witch, right? Don’t you have some sway with them? All witches in this together? Soon-to-be premier, come talk to me?”
“I don’t think I could force the hell cat to talk to us. And even I could, would you trust the information we got? I wouldn’t.” Besides, I knew better than anyone that being in the witch community came with as many headaches as being outside of it. Assuming a clan would accept them. Hell cats were a reminder of a painful death and new purpose. Some clans weren’t that open-minded.
“It could be key to cracking this case.”
Given what we’d seen, I wasn’t so sure. “Or the hell cat is following the killer and doesn’t have enough control to stop him yet.”
“So we have nothing.”
“It’s not that bad. We know the hell cat is mostly on our side and the murders are truly non-magical.” There, a nice silver lining. “The killer will make a mistake at some point. They always do.”