Circle of Death Read online

  She turned and found the young officer standing in the doorway, watching her closely. Though his stance was casual, there was a coldness in his eyes that sent another chill down her spine.

  “Ready to go?” he asked, pushing away from the door frame.

  She hesitated, then felt stupid for doing so. He was here to help her, not hurt her. She bit her lip and walked toward him. He didn’t move, forcing her to brush past him again. Once more her vision seemed to blur, and it was leathery, scaly skin she was brushing past, not the uniformed presence of the young police officer.

  “Want me to carry that backpack for you?” he asked, reaching for it.

  She stepped away quickly. “No. I’m okay.”

  He frowned again, then shrugged. “This way, then, Miss Brown.”

  He led the way down the stairs. Another officer, a blond-haired man in his mid-forties, joined him at the base. “Constable John Ryan,” he said to her, his voice as kind as his brown eyes. “Constable Dicks and I have been assigned to keep an eye on you for the night.”

  Her fear stirred anew. “You think the murderer might be after me as well?” She knew he was, but it was not something she wanted to say out loud—as if by voicing her fears she would invite the presence to step further into her life.

  “Just precautionary measures, that’s all.”

  His smile never touched his eyes, and she knew he was lying. He motioned her to follow the young officer. They stepped into the wind and rain and sloshed their way across to the nearest squad car. Constable Ryan held open the back door and ushered her inside.

  “It won’t be long,” he said. “Then you can finally relax.”

  Relax? Knowing death was out there, waiting for her? But she forced a smile, knowing he meant well.

  Constable Dicks climbed into the driver’s side and started the car. It took only five minutes to reach the motel. Dicks pulled up near the front office, and Constable Ryan climbed out and returned with the key.

  The motel was L-shaped and single-story. Her room was number thirteen. Some thought it unlucky, she knew, though up until now she had never considered it so. Dicks parked the car in the room’s allotted space and Ryan got out, quickly opening the door and inspecting the room. He came back moments later and opened the squad car’s back door. Kirby grabbed her pack and climbed out.

  The room was basically a small suite—there were two sofas and a couple of armchairs in the main room, along with a kitchenette, a table, and a TV. A bedroom lay to her right, with the bathroom next to it.

  She headed for the bathroom. She needed a shower, needed to wash the smell of death from her skin. She wished she could do the same with her memories.

  “Need anything to eat, Miss Brown?” Constable Ryan asked, picking up the phone. “I’m going to order some pizza.”

  The thought made her stomach turn. She shook her head, then closed the bathroom door. Leaning her forehead against the wood for a moment, she took a deep, long breath. She wanted—needed—to be alone.

  But she wasn’t, so she couldn’t let go just yet. Couldn’t allow herself to feel the pain. She had a bad habit of doing that—of repressing emotion, and not just hurt, Helen had once told her.

  She dumped her backpack against the bathtub and reached into the shower, turning on the tap. The water was icy, so she let it run while she hunted around for the little packets of soap and shampoo. She found several of both in the cupboard under the sink and shoved a couple in the shower. Out of habit, she put the rest into her pack. Never waste anything had been her and Helen’s motto for as long as she could remember.

  From the living room came an odd sound—a gurgling sort of cry that was quickly cut short. Goose bumps chased their way up her arm. There had been fear in that cry, and the recognition of death.

  Swallowing heavily, she opened the bathroom door and peered out. Constable Ryan sat in one of the two armchairs, but he didn’t react in any way to her reappearance, and there was something decidedly odd about his posture. Something that sent a chill through her soul—a sensation that only increased when her gaze met Dicks’s.

  “Something wrong, Miss Brown?”

  The coldness she’d noticed earlier in his eyes was deeper, almost inhuman. She clenched a fist, resisting the impulse to slam the door shut. “Did you call out? I thought I heard someone call my name.”

  The lie tasted lame on her tongue, and amusement gleamed briefly in Dicks’s blue eyes.

  “Maybe you heard the TV.”

  And maybe it was all in her imagination. Maybe she was finally going mad, as one of her many foster parents had insisted she would. But that parent had been a devout Catholic and had believed magic to be the devil’s work. And while she couldn’t actually raise magic—not in the same manner Helen had been able to—she could bend the energy of the air and the earth to her will. Which sounded more dangerous than it was, because in reality she could to do little more than create a net that had the power to bind one thing to another. Still, it was quite amazing that she’d lasted in that particular home for three months.

  But as she stared at Dicks, she knew it wasn’t imagination or madness. Something odd was happening in the room. The feel of magic was in the air.

  “I’ll just go have my shower, then,” she said, closing the door.

  There was no lock on the door. She bit her bottom lip and looked quickly around. There was a towel rack on the wall next to the door. Better than nothing, she supposed. She grabbed a sweater out of her pack and roped it between the handle and the towel rack, knotting the arms as tightly as she could. It wouldn’t hold for more than the time it took to scream, but for some reason, she felt a little safer.

  She stripped off her jacket and thrust a hand through her wet hair. What she needed was a drink. If nothing else, it would calm her nerves and perhaps help her forget, if only for a few hours—another bad habit of hers, according to Helen.

  But to get a drink, she’d have to leave the bathroom, and instinct warned her that might not be a good move right now. Over the years, she’d learned to trust that inner voice—and in doing so, she had saved both her own and Helen’s lives more than once.

  She wished it had spoken up earlier tonight and saved Helen for her.

  Tears stung her eyes. She wiped them away with the heel of her hand and noticed the steam was beginning to fog the room. She frowned and flicked the fan switch up and down a couple of times. It didn’t seem to help.

  In the other room, the doorbell rang. Constable Ryan’s pizzas had obviously arrived. Her stomach turned, and she wondered how he could eat after what he’d seen at her house. Maybe a lead-lined gut was a prerequisite for a cop. She walked across to open the window.

  Kirby, get out. Leave, while you still can.

  The voice sounded so close, the warmth of the speaker’s breath seemed to brush past her ear. Her heart leapt to the vicinity of her throat, and she spun, fists clenched against the sudden rush of electricity across her fingertips. But there was no one in the room with her.

  Now she was hearing things, on top of imagining them. Great. Just great. She took a deep breath, then reached up and opened the window.

  As she did, the screaming began.

  THE DOOR OPENED WITH A CRASH THAT RATTLED THE empty soda cans and coffee mugs lining the bookcase to his right. Doyle Fitzgerald glanced up to watch his best friend and sometimes partner drip in.

  “You’re wet,” he said, leaning back in his chair with a grin. Russell was more than just wet. He looked like the proverbial drowned rat—brown hair plastered to his face and accentuating his sharp features, nose and cheeks mottled red, clothes sodden and shoes squelching.

  “No kidding.” Russ stripped off his coat and threw it roughly into the corner. “It is supposed to be summer here, isn’t it?”

  They’d come to Australia from the U.S. a week ago and had yet to see any real sunshine. Not that it really mattered, Doyle thought grimly. Most of their work was done at night. “The lady in the coffee shop dow
n the road said you could get all four seasons in one day here.”

  Russell snorted. “The only season we’re getting at the moment is winter. Is the boss in?”

  He glanced toward the interview room. It was dark except for the occasional flicker of warmth from the candle Camille had lit earlier. “Yeah. She’s trying to do another reading.”

  “She’ll want to see this.” Russell undid the top few buttons of his shirt and dug out a manila folder.

  Doyle groaned. “Don’t tell me our murderer has finally found one of his marks.”

  Russ’s brown eyes were grim. “Yep. One point down, three to go.”

  “Damn.” They’d been sent here to stop these murders, but so far they’d had little success in tracking down the victims, let alone the killer. “Who did he get?”

  “One Helen Smith and her boyfriend, Ross Gibson.”

  Camille had done a reading the moment they’d arrived here and confirmed the list of possible victims they’d been given. Smith had been on it, but not Gibson. Doyle scrubbed a hand across his eyes. Was it simply a matter of Gibson being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or was the list inaccurate? And if it was, where the hell did that leave them? “Where did it happen?”

  “Essendon. They rented the place two weeks ago, but hadn’t got around to notifying anyone about their change of address.” Russ’s voice was grim. “Let’s go see the boss. I’ll be damned if I’m going to repeat everything.”

  He headed for the interview room. Doyle grabbed three mugs from the top of the bookcase and followed. Russ knocked softly on the door.

  “Stop making all that damn noise and just come in,” a raspy voice ordered.

  Russ cocked an eyebrow. “The old witch sounds in fine form tonight.”

  “The old witch has fine hearing, too, Russell, so mind your tongue and get in here.”

  Russ rolled his eyes and opened the door. Restraining his grin, Doyle walked through the candlelit darkness to the coffeepot.

  “That the police file?” Camille asked.

  “It’s as much information as I could get—which isn’t much, given the murder only happened a few hours ago.”

  “First impressions are better than nothing.” Camille snatched the folder from Russell’s hands and, after pushing her blue-rimmed glasses back up to the bridge of her nose, opened it and peered at the contents with a frown.

  Doyle filled the mugs, handing them out before sitting down at the table next to Russell. He sipped his coffee and watched Camille, an odd sort of trepidation filling his gut. The surprises hadn’t ended with these two murders, of that he was certain.

  “Damn it, this is the one thing we didn’t need.” Camille threw the file on the table, her voice filled with frustration. “Now that the killings have begun, they’ll proceed quickly. We’ve got forty-eight hours, if that, to save the remaining three women.”

  Forty-eight hours to do what they hadn’t been able to in a week, Doyle thought grimly. He picked up one of the crime scene photos and studied it. Even though he’d seen a hell of a lot worse in his time with the Circle, anger still burned through him. These people hadn’t just been killed; they’d been desecrated. There was nothing ritualistic about the destruction, either, despite the fact that Camille had foreseen that that was the method by which these women would die. This death was fury, pure and simple. But why? What had Helen Smith done that had angered their killer so greatly?

  “If we want to save some time,” Doyle said, “it might be worth trying to capture the manarei so we can pull whatever information we can from its mind.”

  “It’s doubtful a manarei would be given anything more than the necessary information to get the job done,” Russ said. “Although the point has to be made—if the person behind these murders is powerful enough to control one of the most dangerous shapeshifters around, why would that person risk using it in the first place?”

  Camille shook her head, her silver hair gleaming in the flickering candlelight. “It’s hard to understand motives when we have no idea who our killer is. Russell, did you get a chance to look at the house?”

  “Yeah, I got invited in with the forensic team. Brains consumed, bodies dismembered, although there was no obvious pattern to the destruction and certainly no sign of a ritual circle, despite the marking on the door. If I had to guess, I’d say it was done in anger.”

  She frowned and tapped a gnarled finger on the photo. “Nothing else? Nothing out of the ordinary?”

  Russell frowned. “Yeah. The living room looked as if the storm had raged inside for a moment. The whole place was sodden.”

  Camille’s gray eyebrows shot up. “What did the cops make of that?”

  “Both the door and the window had been left open.” Russ shrugged. “They figured it was probably that.”

  “But you don’t?” Doyle asked.

  Russ shook his head. “I’m not magic-sensitive like you, but the air felt … electric.” He shrugged. “Whatever happened, it still wasn’t enough to protect them.”

  Doyle grimaced. The only thing that really stopped a manarei was a silver bullet to the brain. But the manarei weren’t just powerful killers. They were hunters beyond compare, and they could assume the shape of anyone they killed. Which made them damn hard to track down.

  “Storm witch,” Camille muttered. “Damn it, I wish I knew why these women are being hunted.”

  “There has to be some sort of connection between all four,” Russell said.

  “Obviously,” Camille snapped. “But what is the question.”

  Doyle reached for the folder. “We’re obviously missing something.”

  “Yeah, a motive.” Russell’s voice was dry. “And the name of the person pulling the manarei’s strings.”

  Doyle grinned. “I meant specifically with this murder, moron. What do we know about this Helen Smith?”

  “Not a lot. She was placed into the foster care system at the age of six when her adoptive parents were killed in a crash. She was eleven when she was sent to a government-run facility for troubled teenagers.”

  “No relatives?” Doyle asked.

  Russell shook his head. “None listed, though I dare say she has some somewhere.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not much. She moved around a lot, from what I can gather. She’d just taken a job as a chef at a local vegetarian restaurant. Shared the house with a girlfriend, one Kirby Brown. It was Kirby who found her, apparently.”

  “You get a chance to talk to this woman?” Camille asked, voice sharp.

  “No. The cops have her under protection at a local motel.”

  Camille made a sound of disgust. Her dislike for the police stemmed from her brief stint on the force. She never talked about it much, but Doyle had gathered over the years that it wasn’t so much the rules she disliked as the unwillingness of those in charge to see beyond the material aspects of a case in order to solve it.

  But the police force’s loss was the Damask Circle’s gain. Camille had been quickly pulled from the ranks of general investigators and now helped Seline Whiteshore run the huge organization. That Seline had sent her here with them spoke of the seriousness with which she viewed this situation.

  “They do their best, given the limited resources and expertise they have.” Though Russell’s voice was mild, there was a flash of annoyance in his brown eyes. He’d been a cop himself before he’d crossed the line between the living and the dead, and even now, he readily defended them.

  “What do we know about this Kirby Brown?” Doyle asked, before Russ and Camille could get into yet another argument on the merits of the police.

  “Very little. She paints houses for a living and portraits for fun, and she has apparently known Helen most of her life.”

  “Photo?”

  “Yeah, in the back of the folder. I took it from one of the bedrooms.”

  He shuffled through to find it. The two women could have passed for sisters. They had the same build and the same dusky-brown
hair, only Kirby’s was highlighted with streaks of pale gold. Their eyes differed, too. Helen Smith had the eyes of a storm witch—a smoldering, ethereal gray. Kirby’s were a vibrant green. Even though it was only a photo, those eyes seemed to cut right through him and touch something deep in his soul.

  Frowning, he slid the picture across to Camille. “What if it was a mistake? What if the manarei went after the wrong woman?”

  “Aside from the fact she’s not on the list?”

  “We don’t know how accurate your list actually is,” he replied.

  “Oh, that’s a brave comment,” Russell murmured.

  Camille cast them both a withering look. “That list is all we’ve got, so you’d better hope it’s at least partially accurate. And Helen Smith was on it.”

  Kirby Brown wasn’t. And yet, looking at that picture, at those eyes, he couldn’t escape the notion that she was the key they were searching for. “But what if the cops were right? What if the only reason Kirby Brown isn’t also dead is the fact that she’d arrived home late?”

  Camille picked up the photo and studied it for several seconds. “Well, it’s possible. There’s certainly power in her gaze, and our killer might be after something as simple as that.”

  Doyle frowned. “Meaning what?”

  Camille looked at him, her expression surprised. “You mean to say you’ve been around magic more than half your life, and you didn’t know it’s possible to siphon powers?”

  “I certainly didn’t.” He frowned. “How is something like that even possible? How can you siphon someone’s psychic abilities like they’re nothing more than blood?”

  Camille snorted. “Boy, there are things in this world that can suck the energy from a person until they’re nothing more than a husk. There are even creatures that feed on souls. Why wouldn’t it be possible to siphon psychic energy or abilities?”

  He shrugged. Put like that, it almost seemed reasonable. “So the real question is, why these particular girls?”