Circle of Death (3 page)

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.

T
HE 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 down 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?”

“Until we uncover what the link is between the women on the list—and there is one, have no doubt of that—then we won’t know.” She glanced back at Russell. “Did you get anything personal from the house?”

Russ reached into his shirt and pulled out a plastic bag. Inside were two hairbrushes.

Camille smiled. “Such a clever boy.”

“Such a damn thief,” Doyle muttered dryly.

Russ raised an eyebrow, his expression amused. “Now,
there’s
a case of the pot calling the kettle black.”

Doyle grinned and didn’t deny it.

Camille drew one of the brushes out of the bag. She
unwound several strands of hair from the bristles, then closed her eyes and ran the lengths through her fingers. A shudder shook her slender frame. “This was Helen’s,” she said softly. “She could call to the storms, was a friend to the wind, and one with the air. But she was the weaker of the two.”

He shared a glance with Russell. Storm witches were pretty damn powerful. If she was the weaker, then what kind of power did Kirby have?

“They’ve been on the run for years.” Camille hesitated, frowning. “Running not from the past but the future.”

“She obviously didn’t see
this
future,” Russ commented.

Camille’s frown deepened. “I feel she did … but chose to accept her fate.”

Another shudder rocked the old woman’s frame. Sweat began to bead her forehead. The hair slipped from her fingers, falling softly to the desk. Camille leaned back in her chair and took a deep breath. “I can’t read much farther. There’s some sort of force blocking me.”