Missing powers, p.14
Missing Powers, page 14
She thought that the only way to make any more progress on the investigation would be to talk to the other warlocks in the coven. They should have a better idea of whether there were anything going on in Davyn’s life that had led up to his disappearance. He met with them regularly. They went to him for help and guidance. Surely if he were in the middle of some sticky situation, they would have some idea about it. Even if it wasn’t something that he had been open about. Reg didn’t see how the warlocks could be that close and not get an inkling of what the other coven members were up to. Especially when they had been attending coven together for years. Maybe even decades or centuries. It was hard to believe that Corvin and some of the others were centuries old, like they claimed. They certainly didn’t look like it. But something about their use of magic—or some dang good cosmetic potions—kept them looking as if they were still in the prime of their lives.
For Reg’s plan to succeed, she needed some help. She had spent a lot of time during the night trying to work things out to find another way, how to proceed with the investigation by herself, but she kept circling back to the original plan. The one that involved her calling Damon Knight.
Reg poured coffee into her largest mug and sighed.
“You see the lengths that I’m willing to go to in order to find you?” she asked Davyn aloud. It was the third day after his disappearance, and Reg knew they had passed a critical milestone. Seventy-two hours since Davyn had left the coven to return home.
It wasn’t like Damon was that bad. But there had been… misunderstandings. Miscommunications. Just plain lies. While Reg was willing to bend the truth when it suited her, Damon’s distortions had put her in danger. He had sabotaged the project right from the start. And not only that, but he had repeatedly tried to influence her with visions. She couldn’t trust anything that was in her head when she was with him. Anything she saw, heard, or thought might have been placed there by him.
She didn’t think he was evil, like Kareem or the Witch Doctor, but he wasn’t good for her.
But Reg went ahead and dialed his number anyway. She hadn’t deleted it from her phone, so maybe she had known all along that she wasn’t going to eliminate him from her life completely. Maybe subconsciously, she had known that sooner or later she was going to end up calling him again.
The phone rang a few times, and Reg tried to think of what she would say to his voicemail. If he weren’t available, would she even leave a message? What was the point? The thing with Davyn was time sensitive. She couldn’t wait around for Damon to free himself up.
“Knight Security.”
“Oh. Damon? It’s Reg.”
“Reg!” Damon sounded surprised, but not displeased to hear from her. Maybe it had been long enough that his wounded pride had healed. It seemed like a lot had happened since the search in the Everglades and the Spring Games. Maybe he felt the same way. “How can I help you today?”
“Well… this is sort of last-minute, so I understand if you can’t help me out. I don’t know if you heard that Davyn Smithy is missing?”
“Yeah, I sure did. Don’t tell me that you had something to do with that,” Damon teased.
“No, not me!” Reg didn’t laugh about it. She’d forgotten how Damon’s sense of humor and hers were frequently out of sync. “But I’ve been trying to help the police with their investigation. Psychic consultation.”
“Uh-huh. I’m not sure why anyone bothered reporting it to the police. There’s not much they could do, bumbling around as they do. How are you supposed to convince them of anything around the case that is… not conventional?”
“Jessup has been doing fairly well.” Reg found herself defending Jessup, despite the fact that she’d thought pretty much the same thing. “They’ve narrowed down the time he was kidnapped to about a seven-hour window.”
“And how does that help? I’m sure he wasn’t kidnapped by terrorists or for a million-dollar ransom. When the leader of a coven goes missing, I think it’s pretty obvious that there is magic involved.”
“Well, you’re right. But what I called you for was… I would like to talk to the members of the coven. Find out what they might know about Davyn and what might have been going on in his life that led to this. I think that someone must know something. The members of a coven are pretty close, aren’t they?”
“Sure. Of course. They might be able to point you in the right direction.”
“My psychic gifts will help me a little. Maybe I can read their auras and catch a stray thought here and there. But if any of them were involved or are protecting the person involved, they’re going to be pretty careful to block me, and I can’t force my way into their minds, since…”
“That’s against the rules and would get you into big trouble, even though you were trying to save a life.”
“Yeah. But your gift as a diviner—you would be able to tell when they were lying to me and when they were telling the truth, right?”
“Mm-hmm…” Damon’s answer was a bit tentative, more like a yes, but… “It isn’t as black and white as you may think.”
“You can tell when they’re lying. Even if they’re sociopaths. Can’t you?”
Mechanical lie detectors couldn’t tell that someone was lying if they didn’t feel guilty or show any emotional response to a lie. Reg was hoping that the same did not apply to a diviner like Damon.
“Yes. But like I told you before… everybody lies. Big or little. Everybody is going to shade the truth a little bit when answering questions. And my gift does not tell me why. Is someone lying because he is guilty? Because he wants to portray himself in a better light? Because he is a pathological liar? He wants attention? He’s protecting someone else?”
Reg hadn’t thought about all of that. But for a good number of those things, she would be able to use her psychic abilities to tell why someone was lying. Emotions were fairly easy to read, even without her gift. Guilt, embarrassment, attention-seeking—she could discern those.
“Do you think you could help me out? You probably had other plans today, but he’s been missing for three days, and I’m worried we might not have much time.”
“You want me along while you interview members of his coven. In hopes that one of them knows something, and between the two of us, we can figure out who and why.” His question was flat and, Reg thought, implied that he didn’t think it had a chance of working.
“Well… yes.”
“Why not?” Damon surprised Reg with his quick reply. “Davyn is a good guy. The coven needs him. I think Black Sands as a whole needs him.”
“So… you don’t mind? You can get out of whatever you had planned today?”
“I’ll make a couple of calls to get jobs covered, but yes. I’m my own boss, so I can play hooky if I want to.”
Reg let out her breath. “I didn’t think it would be that easy to talk you into it.”
She could tell that Damon was smiling when he responded. A slight uplift in his voice. She could picture his face and the humor she’d seen in his eyes before. “Well then, where do you want to start? Do you have a list of the coven members?”
“Um… no. I was hoping that you would have some idea of who is in the coven. But I guess since you’re not a member…”
“Well, we know that Corvin is. We can always start with him. I know a couple of names, and he can give us the names of others. Or maybe Marta Jessup, since you’re working with her. She’ll have the full list.”
“I’m not sure how she would feel about me talking to the warlocks in the coven. She didn’t exactly ask me to, and I didn’t tell her that I was.”
“Ah, I see. Don’t worry about it. I’m sure it won’t be too hard to get them. We’ll start with what we have and work our way out. If nobody wants to share, I can get someone to do some research to find the rest of the members out. It isn’t usually too hard. Luckily, witches and warlocks no longer have to operate in secret. A lot of the covens have websites or online groups that are accessible. They frequently put events in the community newsletter.”
“Good.”
“You want me to pick you up?”
“Yeah, I guess that would be the best.” If Reg tired herself out with reading people or trying to reach Davyn again, it was probably best if she had a ride and didn’t have to port or drive herself. No point in driving tired and ending up in an accident.
“I’ll be there in fifteen. Have you had coffee?”
Reg looked down at her large mug. “Only one.”
Damon chuckled. “I’d better pick up some more on the way, then. I’ll be twenty minutes.”
“Text me when you’re here and I’ll come out.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Reg remembered not to wear a skirt to go with Damon. He had a big truck that was difficult to get into when hampered by a skirt, and Reg preferred not to have to lift it to her waist in order to climb up into the cab. She didn’t often wear pants, so it felt strange to be going out dressed like that. It felt like she was missing something.
“Corvin’s house?” Damon asked. He gestured to the takeout cup in the holder next to Reg. “That’s yours.”
Reg picked up the cup and sipped the coffee appreciatively. No matter how many times she made coffee at home, it never quite tasted like coffeehouse brew. “Perfect. Yeah, I guess we try Corvin first.”
She tried to decide how to engage Damon in small talk on the way there, but decided that just wouldn’t work. She had no desire to talk about the weather or other inconsequential things on the way.
“You should know going in there that Corvin has an alibi for the time that Davyn disappeared,” she informed Damon. “He was with the coven. Davyn left alone. So they all have alibis, unless we find out they were involved and are just covering for each other. Or covering for Corvin. But I can’t think of why they would do that.”
“If he charmed them into it.”
“I suppose… but once he’s not with them anymore, I don’t think they would stick to the party line. Corvin has to be there to influence them.”
Damon nodded. “I wasn’t sure if that would work or not. But are you sure of his limitations? Since you first met him, he’s grown a lot in his powers.”
“I guess. But I don’t think that has changed. He can’t charm someone if they aren’t in the same room with him.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“He’s tried enough times to influence me.”
Damon cocked his head slightly, which Reg presumed meant she’d made her point. “Do you know what powers he has acquired? The fact that he drained the Witch Doctor of most of his powers has always irked me. That immortal was very powerful. For Corvin to get him on the run…”
Reg remembered the moment when the Witch Doctor had fled Corvin, sending his essence into each of nine draugar. Francesca, a white Haitian witch, had bound each of the draugar into their kattakyn form, so that to all the world, they appeared to be nothing more than pure black cats. Then she and Reg had sent each of the kattakyns to new homes around the world. Binding the kattakyns was supposed to keep the Witch Doctor’s essence imprisoned for a thousand years. But one of the kattakyns, Horace, had already been separated from the piece of the Witch Doctor he had held, so now they weren’t so sure.
Damon didn’t know about Horace’s portion of the Witch Doctor’s spirit being lost. At least, Reg hadn’t told him about it.
Damon wanted to know what powers Corvin had taken from the Witch Doctor, and Reg still wasn’t sure of the answer.
“It’s hard to say. I think he is getting in better control of them, but I’m not sure what he is capable of. He wouldn’t exactly tell me. But I know… he’s getting stronger.”
“But he isn’t in full control of them. He hasn’t been pulling any of the same tricks as the Witch Doctor?”
The Witch Doctor had been able to raise and control nine draugar, something that was unheard of. Draugar were something like zombies. Reanimated corpses, but nothing like the ones she had seen on TV. They could look just like regular men or grow into giants. Or shrink down into kattakyns, making it harder to detect them. They could kill in either form and had terrorized Black Sands until Corvin, Francesca, and the others had banded together to defeat the Witch Doctor.
“No zombies that I’m aware of,” Reg said lightly. “And I think I would know.”
“Would you?” Damon glanced away from the road to look at Reg.
“Yes. I did last time.”
“You don’t think that he would be able to cloak them from you?”
“No.”
But Corvin had been hiding something from Reg. She had felt the walls he had built. But just like she wasn’t able to keep him out of her mind completely, he couldn’t keep her completely away from reading him either. Raising an army of draugar would have been too big of a thing for him to hide from her. She would not only feel the same dread she had felt when the Witch Doctor was raising them. She would have known that Corvin had something to do with it.
She was pretty sure, anyway.
Damon looked back at the road. Of course he could sense the difference between the absolute truth and Reg trying to shade the truth a little. And she honestly didn’t know what Corvin was capable of. But she was as sure as anyone could have been. More than anyone else could have been.
“But you don’t know what other powers he has. What else he might be hiding.”
“Well… no. I know he tries not to let everything leak out. I can tell he is stressed out. That’s what I think it is, anyway. He’s been kind of crabby lately, not quite like himself. It’s been since the announcement that he could rejoin the coven.”
She worried over the dark aura surrounding Corvin. Did it signify depression? Some other dark mood? It wasn’t anger. She had seen the red glow around him when he grew angry. Sadness? Anxiety?
“He’s always seemed pretty crabby to me.” Damon grinned.
Reg couldn’t help but give a short laugh at that. “That’s just because you guys rub each other the wrong way.”
“I don’t like predators. There are predators in any community, and there are protectors. I am one of the protectors.”
Reg shrugged. She didn’t know how to argue with that. She herself had referred to Corvin that way many times. It felt like a betrayal to let Damon call Corvin a predator without defending him, but how could she? By definition, he was. It wasn’t all he was. But his hunger for magical gifts compelled him to prey on those who were weaker.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
They arrived on Corvin’s street and Damon took a minute to find a space he could park his truck in. The lot wasn’t as wide as Sarah’s property and there were more vehicles parked on the street. But it wasn’t the slums; Corvin still lived in a very nice house. Reg had been there once or twice before.
She was glad that she hadn’t decided to go there alone. All of the talk of Corvin’s increased powers had put her on edge. She had been able to protect herself from Corvin on most occasions recently, but if he became as strong as the Witch Doctor, she didn’t think she would be able to resist him. Not for long.
There was no need to ring the doorbell. Corvin was standing at his open door by the time they made it up the sidewalk. His eyes were dark. As Reg had noticed, he and Damon did not get along.
“What is this?” he demanded. “Selling cellular plans door to door? Missionary outreach?”
“I think you know why we’re here,” Reg countered.
Corvin stood there looking at them, glowering. Reg didn’t know if he was waiting for a full explanation or just trying to intimidate her. She gestured behind him.
“Shall we?”
Corvin grunted and stepped back, allowing them to enter. Reg and Damon crossed the threshold.
Reg took a deep breath and looked around. What had she been expecting? Booby traps? For Corvin to slam the door and magic her away to where Davyn was trapped? She had sort of expected things to be a mess, for it to look like there had been a fight or some other kind of violence. Corvin’s demeanor had been so different recently that she was expecting there to be some sign of it in his house. A mess. A corkboard with newspaper articles or ancient texts pinned to it and red yarn running from one to another, showing wildly unlikely connections between them—some sign of a disordered mind.
But everything was as it had been the last time she had been to Corvin’s house. Dark, heavy furniture. Not as neat and orderly as Davyn’s house. More lived-in and bachelor-esque. But certainly not the disaster area she had imagined it might have devolved into. Corvin sat down on a large wingback chair that made Reg think of a throne. He didn’t ask them to sit or if they wanted drinks. He just crossed one leg over the other and continued to glare at them.
Reg and Damon each took seats anyway.
“We’re trying to figure out what happened to Davyn,” Reg told him. Of course he already knew that, but she felt like they needed at least a short introduction before diving straight into the questions. Corvin might not be up for small talk, but just diving straight into an interrogation seemed rude.
“Why don’t you just leave that to the police? They’ve already been around asking questions. You’re not exactly law enforcement, Regina.”
“I’ve been retained as a consultant on the case,” Reg informed him, her voice even.
“As an investigator?”
“As… a consultant.”
“As a psychic.”
Reg nodded. “Well, yes.”
“Psychics don’t conduct interviews.”
“Well… psychics do readings. I can talk to people and see if I get any impressions… the more people I can talk to about Davyn, the better the chances are that I might get some impression or some answer that the police can follow up on.”
“You’re not going to get any impressions from me.”
