The Shade of Things (Magic After Midlife #5) Paperback

Chapter 1

“Mazel tov,” my ex-husband, Eli Chu, groused ahead of me in the forest, “you just set feminism back two hundred years.”

Excited as I was to be working a missing person case with him, I was less enthused about trekking through the foreboding woods in a rural area outside Vancouver. Had this lead taken us to a spot where the air was rich with the scent of pine? Nope. Was there a wave of verdant green stretching out before me? Nope. How about darting birds trilling and singing? Also nope.

“Clearing spiderwebs for me, a spider-hating person, has nothing to do with gender.” Grimacing, I squelched through a puddle, mud seeping through the canvas of my sneakers into my poor socks.

Sunlight fought to peek through the canopy, the uneven ground was a dull brown covered in slippery rotting leaves, and the air weighed down on us, muggy and sticky. Sure, our hands slapping against our necks to kill buzzing mosquitos had an up-tempo rhythm, but it was hardly birdsong.

The final indignity was all the damn spiderwebs.

Eli stepped over a rotting log with moss sprouting out of it like an old man’s nose hair and ants parading up and down the nubby bark.

“Stop a sec.” I put fist to palm. “Rock paper scissors?”

Eli hadn’t bought my argument that since I’d be taking point when we found the vampire, he should deal with the spiders. So it had come down to this: a children’s game.

“You’re on.” He leaned down, his brown eyes glinting. “One, two, three.”

My rock trumped his scissors. Good call, me, knowing how Eli would play this.

“Huzzah!” I snapped off a short, dead branch and handed it to my ex with a flourish.

He accepted it with a groan. “How did you know I wouldn’t throw rock as usual?”

“Because you hate spiders as much as I do. Using my years-long experience with your psychological profile, I surmised you’d expect me to throw paper to cover your rock and thus, go for scissors instead.” I tapped my head. “You can’t outsmart me, sucker. Now, clear away the eight-legged creepy-crawlies, my good man, and later I’ll protect you from the bloodsucker. The undead one.” I slapped my neck and wiped a smeared mosquito off my hand. “Unlike these assholes.”

Eli banged the makeshift broom against a tangle of branches before pushing them aside for us to duck under. “Stand down, Buffy. You were explicitly warned. Under no circumstances are we to harm Damien.”

“Unless it’s in self-defense. Then it’s still very much on the table.” I smiled grimly. As far as I was concerned, that covered an expansive range of circumstances.

“Stick to fact finding.”

I followed close behind Eli, positive that spiders were dropping down the back of my shirt. “I’ll give you facts. Vamps having blood donors is disgusting. I don’t care if they’re getting paid, it’s not exactly an equal power dynamic. And that’s with Ohrists. Ian Carlyle is a Sapien.”

Ian was under a vamp’s control and the only person with any potential insight into our case, which was why we had to find him.

“Ian isn’t a regular Sapien,” Eli said. “He also witnessed magic, allowing him to connect with Damien in the first place. How do you know he’s not with the vamp of his own free will?”

Sunlight bounced off a large web dotted with fly carcasses and presided over by a fat spider with bristly fibrous hairs covering its legs. Its many eyes tracked us.

I yelped, making swatting motions. “Kill it! It’s the size of a dinner plate.”

“It’s a bread plate at best.” Eli carefully brushed the entire web off the trees, tapping the end of the branch against the ground.

The spider scurried into the dirt, almost running over my foot.

“They shouldn’t be measured in dinnerware at all!”

Nature was bunk. In the city, I had a fighting chance at survival. Here? Forget about it. Give me a crowded sidewalk any day over this skinny dirt track fraught with knobby tree roots and unappealing animal life.

Assuring myself the little bastard was gone, I returned to the topic at hand. “Ian didn’t ‘connect’ with the vamp. He was enticed and backed into a corner where the only way out was opening a vein. I highly doubt free will was involved,” I said bitterly. “Damien has been preying on him for two years.” I stabbed a finger in the air. “Unlike with Ohrists, vamps don’t pay Sapiens if they use them as food on a regular basis. Hasn’t Ian suffered enough?”

Eli shook his head. “I don’t know, Mir.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Think about the circumstances leading him to Damien. Ian comes back from an alleged abduction, disoriented, distraught, and unable to do much more than repeat that he survived the human race.”

“And?” I took Eli’s hand to help me down a steep slope.

“Bear with me,” he replied. “According to the police report back then, what little the investigating officers got out of him made it sound like he’d been abducted by aliens.”

When Ian Carlyle disappeared five years ago, his brother swore that Ian vanished into thin air. Literally. The two had been rock climbing on their survivalist camping trip when Ian supposedly disappeared. Police’s initial determination was that Ian had fallen, but it was changed to foul play when no body was found. His brother had been charged.

Everyone was stunned when Ian showed up a week later, shell-shocked. The only intelligible thing he said other than his human race line was that it wasn’t aliens. Then he lapsed into silence, diagnosed with depression and PTSD.

We skidded down the last bit of the dirt hill and I recovered my footing.

Eli whacked a dead low-hanging branch out of our way. “Everyone wrote Ian off, and over the years, he became more and more distant from his friends and family. He lost his job, turned to drugs and alcohol to cope with whatever happened to him, and ended up living on the fringes of the Downtown Eastside.”

I tore a leaf out of my hair and ripped it in half. “I’m still waiting for the compelling argument that being fed off by a vamp is a step up. Or free will.”

“Since this wasn’t an alien abduction, Ian’s vanishing into thin air has a magic explanation. Hell, that’s why the deputy chief constable got me involved. At least with a vamp, Ian is with someone who believes him if he shares what happened while he was missing. He isn’t dismissed as insane. Plus, Damien won’t necessarily kill him.”

From the moment that Eli had asked me to come on board this case, I’d wondered why the Lonestars weren’t involved. After all, Deputy Chief Constable Esposito’s daughter Ryann was the head magic cop here in Vancouver. And if there was one thing I’d learned about the Lonestars in my tangles with them, it was that they didn’t mess around with their prime directive: keep magic hidden from Sapiens at all costs. These abductions seemed like a no-brainer for them to investigate.

I wiped sweat off the back of my neck with my T-shirt collar, praying there was an explanation that didn’t make the magic cops complicit. “The vamp might not kill Ian, but he might turn him.”

“He’d still be alive,” Eli said with a pointed look. “Wasn’t that your argument to Topher Sharma’s parents?”

I scowled, hating that he used my words against me. “I like you better when you play good cop.”

“Well, I am a saint.”

“You’ve been talking to your mom again.”

He winked at me. “Between the opioid crisis here in Vancouver,” he continued in a more serious tone, “and risk of overdose, Ian could have easily died from doing drugs. You said that vamps don’t feed off addicts, and that means Ian had to get clean to provide blood. It’s not a great situation, but it’s better than he had.”

“Fine,” I muttered. “That’s still not saying much.”

It chafed that our mission wasn’t to rescue Ian in addition to getting information to help with the actual case we were on—finding Teresa Wong, a second-year theater major who’d gone missing two days ago on Monday.

Like Ian, Teresa had a close circle of family and friends, no rampant or reckless credit card spending or unexpected bills, no criminal record, and no enemies. She’d just started her second year of university and, by all accounts, loved her program.

Also, like Ian, Teresa had vanished into thin air. She and her best friend had been thrift store shopping together, and when her friend had turned around to inspect some faux Fiestaware, Teresa had disappeared.

Eli shouldn’t have even been on this job since he was a homicide detective, but his superior, Deputy Chief Constable Esposito, had recalled Ian’s old case with its “vanishing into thin air” connection and looked up the records. He’d come to the same conclusion that this involved magic and assigned Eli to an off-the-books job.

My ex was one of the rare Sapiens who could see magic and was thus tasked with tracking Ian down and obtaining information to help Teresa.

Eli, in turn, had insisted on hiring me to help him navigate the magic community. Neither of us had been privy to my boss Tatiana’s negotiations with the deputy chief, but she’d emerged from her office smirking while the poor man looked like a boxer who’d been KO’d in the first ten seconds instead of lasting the expected ten rounds.

“The other problem is that Ian being clean now may not even matter.” Eli snapped a twig underfoot, startling a tawny-brown owl, who flew away. “He wasn’t of sound mind after his abduction. He may not remember anything useful or even real, and he’s our only shot at finding Teresa. The Missing Persons Unit has nothing to chase down.” He kicked a rock, and when his hands unclenched, there was a moment where they shook. “That girl is only a few years older than Sadie.”

I placed my hand on his arm, my heart sinking at how tense he was. “If Ian doesn’t know how to find Teresa, then we put the screws to Damien when the sun sets and he wakes up.” Pep talks weren’t easy while traipsing through a forest with nothing to recommend it beyond being a perfect body dump for the mob, but I did my best.

A series of short howls rising and falling raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

Eli and I froze. My heart was hammering so loud that I almost didn’t hear him whisper, “Coyotes.”

Their cries echoed all around us, a chilling lament interspersed with barks and yips.

I swung my head from side to side, tensed for yellow slits to blink open and a furry body to leap out of the nearby trees and tear into my soft, delicious underbelly. Damn you, carbs, for being so tasty.

Coyote attacks were reported in these parts on a regular basis, so sue me for having a vivid imagination and a healthy dose of paranoia.

I wanted to devote my energy to tracking Ian down but surviving feral beasts had just shot to the top spot, so I threw my magic cloaking over Eli and me. Coyotes—be they real animals or shifters—wouldn’t be able to detect us.

We crept toward where the line of trees thinned out. It couldn’t have been more than fifty feet away, but I strained so hard to see any sign of marauding animals that by the time we cleared the forest, my face throbbed.

Eli clamped on to my wrist while we crouched in the tall grass, surveying the deserted house in the distance.

The once-elegant gothic manor hulked like a boxer down on his luck. The upper broken window and front door hanging partially off its hinges gave the impression of a bruised eye and a missing tooth while the sagging roof was like a head hunched into its shoulders.

“This can’t be where Damien lives,” Eli said. “He’d get fried by the sunshine pouring in through all the holes.”

“The description of the bloodsucker who lives here matches Damien,” I said, hands on my hips.

Eli snorted. “And you trust Tatiana’s information on this?”

I squirmed uneasily at the mention of my boss. Not because I doubted her, but because hearing her name reminded me that I wasn’t being wholly truthful with her. About a week ago, I’d discovered a bombshell of a secret tying my parents to her.

Not only had I kept Tatiana in the dark, I’d done the same to Laurent, her sexy wolf shifter nephew with whom I’d hooked up. To be fair, he’d been away in the interior of the province stalking a dybbuk, and it wasn’t exactly a conversation to have over the phone, but that wasn’t the real reason I’d been reluctant to talk about it with him.

Zev BatKian, Vancouver’s head vampire, had recently hired me to find the Ascendant for him. I snorted. If by “hired me” you meant “blackmailed me viciously and without remorse,” then sure. The ways he could destroy me and my loved ones were legion. He powered the ward around my house, keeping demons at bay. He was a master vamp whose minions had been forbidden from feeding off my ex-husband and daughter. And any Ohrist enemies would think twice about coming after me or my family while we were under Zev’s protection.

The new condition of all this protection was that he’d sworn me to secrecy about both this job and the magic amplifier in general until he decreed otherwise. Telling either Tatiana or Laurent was out of the question—for now—despite my wishes.

Sadly, in the magical world, I had to stick to those boundaries, or I wouldn’t be able to take care of the people who were important to me—including Tatiana and Laurent.

Still, I was sick and tired of Zev using me to fulfill some unknown agenda and angry that I was left with no real choice but to accede to his demands.

I sighed. Those were problems for future me.

Eli shredded a couple of long grass stalks. “Ian’s last known address was a shelter and the residents there are transient. Yes, the employee I interviewed remembered him going off with someone who matched Damien’s description, and when you suggested we look into the vamps and got a connection, I was hopeful. But looking at this dump?” He brushed grass off his hands. “I’m second-guessing that employee’s memory. That or we were too quick to ascribe the mystery person Ian went off with to a vampire.”

“It’s the only lead we have. Damien does have a Sapien donor, so that’s another point for this being the right place.”

We snuck through the unkempt weed-choked grass to the rotted front steps. Really the house was best viewed at a distance. Like from the moon.

The first tread creaked under my foot, and the house seemed to shiver, exuding a gust of stagnant air. A family of mice peeked their heads up through a jagged hole.

Eli tested his weight on the unvarnished stairs, which were slippery with moss, but when the stairs held, he quickly joined me on the porch, once more taking shelter under my invisibility mesh. He pulled out a penlight. “Can anyone see this light if we’re cloaked?”

I shrugged, peering inside. “The floorboards are all twisted, and I’d rather not break an ankle, so let’s chance it.”

Eli cast the light around the entrance hall.

The interior walls were cold to the touch. The tattered remnants of wallpaper were sun-bleached almost colorless save for dark spores of mold that blossomed like a Rorschach test. Rusted wires hung from the ceiling, but any lighting had been stripped.

For all the general decay, the blackout curtains over the windows were nearly new. I jostled Eli’s elbow. “Dead giveaway.” I gave an exaggerated wink. “Or should I say undead giveaway.”

My partner groaned.

The stairs leading to the second floor listed dangerously so we headed downstairs first. The stairwell was narrow and twisty but at least the treads were solid. It led to a damp basement, which was just as deserted as the rest of the house.

Most of the space was taken up by an enormous ballroom, where sheets thrown over furniture cast menacing shadows. The warped floorboards with inlaid mother-of-pearl beckoned to be waltzed upon, to be spun, dazed and flushed, by an attractive partner across the room.

Leaving footprints in the thick layer of dust, we wandered through pillars still bearing faint traces of gold gilding. Thanks to a series of warped glass doors, which led out to a wild overgrown garden, there was just enough light to make out the ceiling boasting ornate crown molding.

I could almost hear strains of music over the musty air blowing through the broken panes.

Eli tugged on a crystal knob, but the glass door was stuck fast. “We’ll have to check out the top floor, but it looks like this place has been deserted for ages.”

I shook my head. “Why hang blackout curtains in a deserted house?”

“Or even just hang them in the entrance hall? Did you see a coffin with a sleeping vamp there? Because I sure as hell didn’t.” Eli was getting testy, but it wasn’t directed at me, and I didn’t take it personally. He toed at the dust, erasing a footprint. “We’re clearly the only ones who’ve been down here.”

I frowned, teasing out a thought. “Oh! That’s it. Come on.”

Grabbing his sleeve, I tugged him back up the stairs and into the entrance hall. “Look. The floor is dust-free.”

Eli frowned. “So?”

“That means it’s been walked on. Damien has been here, which explains the blackout curtains. Hopefully Ian is with him.”

“Then where are they now?”

“If I’m right?” I led him outside, turning to examine the rotting door barely holding on to the frame.

Eli prodded me impatiently. “If you’re right, what?”

After a moment, a front door zoomed out toward us like a 3D stereogram. The solid modern structure clicked into the frame, almost slyly, as if saying Little old me? I was here all the time. Even so its reveal didn’t give me the rush of watching a stage magician’s showy flourish. It was more a quiet delight that I had access to secrets. Like finding an old book in an archive that you needed or digging up a piece of information at just the right time.

Eli gasped.

“They’re still here.” Grinning, I pushed on the handle running vertically along the right side and swung the door open.