![]() | ![]() |
“That’s a lot of blood,” Jake said.
Air rushed from my mouth as I came into the bedroom behind him. The house was a Victorian era, its insides kept to the old fashioned style. I had glanced towards the door to the library as I passed, my hands itching to explore all the leather-bound books I could see through the gap in the door. Unfortunately, that would have to wait until later. The others would say it was inappropriate, I would say that I was searching for evidence. Evidence of a good book, but they didn’t need to know that.
In the bedroom, I came face to face with a woman, lying on the bed. Her head was bent to the right, her eyes staring in my direction, their glazed expression chilling. The shiver that crawled over my nerves made me look away.
“What can you see?” I asked Kate.
She stood beside the bed, her eyes closed. The forensic team stepped back as she gently swayed back and forth, the tight curls on her head reaching even higher than they already did. Most detectives hired a seer to help them to investigate a crime, but Kate was unique. She could tap into the past more than the future. By placing her energy into someone else, she could see what had happened to them in the last twenty-four hours. Her scenes were never one hundred percent clear and linear time didn’t exist in the dimension she accessed through her power. Which often made for a jigsaw puzzle that we had to put together.
“She’s been dead for eight hours. A man was here, his face is fuzzy. In fact, the whole scene...” Kate rolled her lips together as she frowned. “...it feels like I’m looking at it with drunken eyes. Everything’s a bit blurry.”
“So, she was drunk?” I asked.
Dave’s snort filtered into my ear. He was at the office, watching what was happening through the camera attached to my holster. I was the only one who could hear him, and yet, the others had already guessed when he was talking to me. Maybe they could see me glaze over. Dave’s less than witty jokes often made me tune him out.
Shuffling her feet, Kate squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t think so, it feels like... I can’t quite put my finger on it.”
“Gem,” Jake interrupted, waving me over to the corner of the room.
Leaving Kate to try and decipher what she was seeing, I tip toed around her. The police officers had been waiting to let us in. My contact was signing off the forensic team before he joined us.
“What’s that?” I avoided looking at the blood that was splattered up the wall.
Jake was right, there was tons of blood. It reminded me of my experience only eight hours ago. My tired brain was only just holding up, I did not need the metallic smell to slink up my nose and take me back to the moment I had died. Or, kind of.
“Are you okay?” Jake asked when I shuddered.
Nodding quickly, I pointed at what he held between his thumb and forefinger.
“This,” he said, finally answering my question. “...is an empty wand.”
Cringing, I stepped back. Empty wands meant that the life-force of the person who owned it had left this plane. For some reason, the concept had always freaked me out. No one loved the idea of death, but considering the last few hours, it was even more scary than usual to me. In fact, a lump came to my throat as I thought of those few moments I’d laid on the ground, blood pouring from my body.
“I’m just going to talk to Logan, I’ll be right back.”
Frowning, Jake nodded slowly as I reversed out of the room, almost bumping into Kate as she concentrated.
“Are you okay?” Dave said in my ear. “I can hear your heart beating twenty thousand times faster than usual.”
Tempted to rip the ear bud out, I gulped in a breath as I thundered down the stairs. My hands were shaking, my legs a little wobbly. My boots were heavy on the stone floor of the hallway as I went into the library and shut the door behind me. Leaning against it, I took several deep breaths as my head fell back, my ponytail brushing my wrist where I held it against the wood for support.
“Talk to me, Gem, I know something happened.”
The soft sound of his voice relaxed my muscles as tears came to my eyes. Blinking hard, I focused on the books around me. The room was light and airy, the ceilings high and the bay window allowed the sun to shine in. The wooden bookcases spoke to me, making me step straight over to them.
“I know you have an obsession with books, woman, but you need to get back upstairs. The others need you.” Dave’s voice was strained, or restrained really. I could tell that he’d gone from the caring work partner to the annoyed desk friend who got agitated when my mind went off on a tangent.
My emotions calmed as I ran my hand over the leather spines, my fingers tracing the ancient titles of books so old, they were probably produced in my ancestor’s time.
As I went to move across to another shelf, I passed in front of a mirror. Staring at myself, I put my hand on my chest, feeling the crude stitching right above my heart. Pulling my shirt up briefly, I quickly slapped it back down when Dave gasped.
“What the fuck? Gemma-”
One of my hands ripped the bud out of my ear while the other switched the camera off. Shit, how often would I forget that Dave could see everything that I could? The amount of times he’d screeched in my ear because I’d gone into the toilet without warning him was uncountable.
A smile spread across my lips as I took a deep breath, straightened my back and faced the door. I couldn’t dwell on what had happened, I had to plunge myself into the case. I’d explain to Dave that it was a flesh wound, he’d buy it. Well, he’d better, or I would fire him. I did have that sort of power.
“Gemma?” Kate called from outside the room.
Taking a deep breath, I shook off all the emotions that were bothering me. Being an agent meant that I had to shut off. If I took my emotions into work, I’d be a quivering wreck every single day of the week. I only allowed myself to cry when reading a book or watching a sad film. Once the release was over with, it was back to business as usual.
“I’m here,” I said as I came out of the library and took the stairs two at a time.
Taking my hand, Kate squeezed my fingers. “They want to turn the case over to us if we can find any magical residue.”
Going back in the room, I greeted Logan Hill, the primary human detective that dealt with filtering out human or paranormal crimes. He had a good heart, but his head was hard. Very hard. If he had his way, all criminals of every species would be put out of their misery... his words, not mine.
“Miss Abbott,” he greeted.
His tall frame was mainly skinny, except for a pot belly. His middle-aged red cheeks were the tell-tale sign of a man not only under a lot of stress, but a man who enjoyed a glass of wine or ten.
“Logan, thank you for the call. Have you got any evidence that we need?”
Reaching up, I discreetly put my ear bud back in and switched the camera on. No matter how much I wanted to block Dave out, he was the one who recorded everything that was said or viewed at a crime scene, typing up the report in live time. Which saved me a hell of a lot of paperwork. I loved the guy really, even if he was swearing in my ear at the same time as Logan was talking.
“We found the wand and assumed we’d need you. Other than getting the human evidence we needed, we’ve left it as we found it.”
“It?”
Gesturing to the female, who was almost naked bar her underwear, he screwed up his nose. “Yeah, the body. The room. All of it. The undertaker is on standby. When you’re done, let him know and he’ll take the body for an autopsy.”
“What did you find?”
It was quite unnerving to think that the man had closed his emotions off so much that he couldn’t even associate the body as a previous living thing. Would I become like that? Had I already become like that?
“Ask him if there were any symbols anywhere,” Dave said in my ear. “Have they taken anything at all?”
Clearing his throat at the same time as rubbing his thinning blonde hair, Logan ran his tongue across his top teeth. “We found the bedroom door ajar, and the front door wide open. The neighbour noticed the door when she popped to the shop. When she came back, she approached and called out. Obviously, there was no reply, but she noticed the bloody fingerprints on the doorbell. That’s when she phoned us.”
“We saw those on our way in,” I said, going closer to the body. “Did you see any symbols? Anything been taken for forensics?”
Shaking his head, Logan came closer. We stared down at the bullet wound in the woman’s chest. I’d noticed it immediately, which was why I’d had my little freak-out. It was uncannily familiar to my own wound, except it wasn’t stitched up.
“The blood has spurted directly behind, meaning she was shot at close range.” Logan jabbed his finger near the bullet wound, not quite touching her blue skin. “She has a wedding ring on, but according to our records, she’s not married. My team found the wand and the grimoire, so they reported to me instantly.”
It wasn’t always immediately obviously if a corpse was a supernatural creature, but there were often several clues. In this case, a wand and grimoire gave plenty of weight to the species of the woman on the bed. Most witches kept those items very close to them.
“I don’t worry too much about wedding rings nowadays. People wear rings on all fingers.”
“My thoughts exactly,” he said, scratching his thin jaw.
“Kate?”
The seer had opened her eyes, her chest heaving slightly. The dark brown of her irises looked black in the dim room. “I’m going to have to write it down. It felt as if I was drugged for the last twenty -four hours, which can’t be true.”
Rubbing my arms as goose bumps exploded over my skin, I gestured for her to go back to Paranormal MI5. We needed her memory as fresh as possible.
“My people will send you their report in the next few hours. I’ll leave you to do the rest.” Shaking my hand, Logan left Jake and I at the crime scene.
Dave’s deliberate clearing of his throat reminded me that he was there. “What was that about?”
“Later, Dave,” I hissed as Jake came over.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
Flinging my ponytail over my shoulder, I took a deep breath. “Yes, let’s just get on with it.”
Going over to the door, Jake nodded his head, his jaw set as he waited for me.
My feet were reluctant as I went to the centre of the room. Closing my eyes, I felt into the ley line. The magic that poured through the energy lanes of the earth was protected by Essex witches only. Our DNA had been connected to the earth when our line was born. The first ever witch on earth was an Essex witch, although they weren’t called that way back then. Ever since, we’d sworn to protect the magic. If we allowed anyone direct access to it, the purity would be tainted, maybe even drained.
Other witches were able to draw from the pure magic in Mother Earth, but they couldn’t take from the ley line. Warlocks took their magic from the impure magic created when the first evil witch broke from the witches, became a warlock, and used the magic for evil.
“I love when you do this,” Dave whispered in my ear. “I wish I could experience it, just once.”
As a witch who couldn’t harness Earth’s magic, Dave had always had to stem his desire to drain everything and everyone of magic for his own use. I had a degree of sympathy for him. Without my link to the ley line, I was nothing. Well, that’s what it felt like, anyway. I might be a kickass agent, but that was all I was good at. Except reading. I was an expert in that.
Concentrating, I let the pure magic of Mother Earth run into my veins. Once the energy was inside me, I pushed it outwards, searching for other energy sources relating to magic. The Magic Sweep as I called it, was a way for me to pick up the magical imprint of other magical beings that had been in the room. As soon as my magic brushed against it, I was able to store it in my aura until I got back to the office. Dave would then run a scanner over me, taking the imprint and running it through the magic DNA database.
“There,” I told Jake, pointing at the edge of the bed, right where the woman’s head was. “Someone stood over her.”
My muscles shook as the negative energy of the magic entered my aura. Clenching my hands into fists, I resisted the urge to push it out. I had to disconnect from it, shut down.
“Take it easy,” Dave whispered as I swept through the rest of the room.
Jake moved to where I’d indicated, checking it over for any clues that might have been missed. My energy touched the bathroom door handle, but it was only the woman’s energy. I had felt it as soon as I’d come into the house. She lived here, that much I could tell instantly.
“That’s it,” I said, releasing the link to the ley line and imagining a tight white light around myself.
The protection would help me to stay disconnected from the magic that wasn’t mine.
“So, one person...” Jake was crouched beside the bed, sniffing the edge of the mattress. “I can smell them.” His wolf traits came in handy when he wasn’t being stubborn.
I had to admit that my mother had given me two very good agents to work with. As much as I was a lone wolf - yeah, I made a pun - I did appreciate that Kate and Jake had strengths that I didn’t.
“I feel sorry for any woman who dates Jake,” Dave said. “Can you imagine having someone smell you all the time?”
“Shut up,” I whispered.
“Is he making that joke about me sniffing people’s arses again?”
The pair were incredibly immature when they got together. Kate and I had often left them in a room alone because their bromance was starting to grow.
“No,” I muttered, suddenly desperate to get back to the office and clear my aura so I could go home and sleep. “I’ve got to get this evidence back. Can you catch up to Kate?”
Rubbing my arms as I left the room, I acknowledged Jake’s affirmation with a wave before I closed my eyes and whispered a relocation spell.
Dave jumped when I landed in front of his desk. “I wish you’d warn me before you did that.”
His cheeks burned pink as I leant forward and looked him in the eye. “Please, get this magic off me. I’m weary.”
The crease of his usually smooth forehead warned me of his impending lecture.
“I told you that you needed sleep.” Getting up from his seat, he grabbed the techy looking scanner and came around the desk. “Once I’ve done this, shall I give you a shoulder massage? I know you want my hands on you.”
Rolling my eyes, I held my hands out to the side. “Don’t start that again.”
Dave had a habit of insinuating that I was in love with him, even though I wasn’t. It went in phases. One month, he wouldn’t shut up about it, the next, he went into himself and didn’t say much about anything. It was this swinging back and forth that confused the hell out of me, but also intrigued the fuck out of me. How could someone be so different from one moment to the next? I’d quickly realised that I didn’t know the man at all.
When his tall thick bulk was in front of me, he looked down and winked. His shaggy hair was thick and slightly wavy. As his hazel eyes stared into mine, I tried to look away. He was reading me, trying to work out why I’d been acting weird that morning. I could tell from the probing stare.
“Just scan me, please,” I whispered.
My chest squeezed as his free hand reached forward. It hesitated before he coughed and pulled away, raising the scanner in his other hand. Swiping it all around me, he smiled sadly when it beeped. I released my held breath when he clicked the absorb button and the harsh energy left my energy field.
“Thank you.”
Going to turn away, I paused when he stopped me with a hand on my wrist. “Gemma, if whatever happened this morning is going to affect your work, you know you have to speak to someone about it. I’m worried for you.”
Looking up at him sideways, I tensed as his thumb stroked the pulse in my wrist. The skin burned where he touched it. He was unintentionally taking some of my magic. He realised when I swallowed hard.
Jerking back, he shook his hand. “I’m so sorry. I hate it when that happens. I’ve even considered wearing gloves around women. The witches I date are getting fed up of me accidently stealing a bit of their magic.”
Although he laughed, it was awkward. Grabbing his hand when he went to walk away, I stopped him. “No, don’t ever hide who you are. Just... take precautions.”
He blinked, his gaze clashing with mine before he looked at the floor. “I may not have known you for long, but man, I admire your drive to be exactly who you are.”
Letting him go, I retreated to my desk. He had hit a raw nerve. Just because I wore my book T-shirts, didn’t mean I showed exactly who I was. In fact, I was starting to doubt whether I really knew who I was. My brush with death - if that’s what I could call it - had brought up some questions that I had never asked myself.
“If you want to go and get some sleep, I’ll run this through the magical DNA system. We can handle the evidence until you’re back tomorrow.” Dave smiled as I picked up my satchel from where I’d left it under my desk.
He had switched back into his happy-mode. I, however, was still well and truly in a zoned out mood. My body and brain needed sleep. Using the ley line was always tiring, let alone when I hadn’t slept at all.
“Thanks, Dave.” I patted my bag to check that my latest book was still inside. I would need it to help me sleep. “I’ll be in first thing tomorrow.”
As I flashed away, I caught his slight look of surprise. When my feet landed in my kitchen, I sighed to myself. I never went home straight after a crime scene. My work ethic was the strongest in the whole agency. I never took a day off. Ever.
Today was different though. Today, the dead witch had some thinking to do.