Davy’s fists went white at the knuckles.
“Bea?” Pike asked, shifting the tension in the room.
“Me?” Beatrice smiled, and those dimples nipped her cheeks. She nodded, her wild curls bouncing. “I’m still pulling morgue duty for at least the rest of the month. And if I get killed there, at least you’ll have plenty of witnesses on the slab. If you can get them to talk!” She giggled.
My eyebrows shot up. Okay, she wasn’t all freckles and sweet strawberries and cream like she looked. I made a mental note: never underestimate Beatrice. Or anyone else in the room for that matter.
Jamar just shook his head and smiled. “Damn, girl. You gotta get a different job. You sound like you’re starting to enjoy sniffing corpses.”
Bea, still giggling, gave him a huge smile and shrugged, her hands up, like who could blame her.
“I’m working a new section of MLK Boulevard for the police,” Jamar said. “Mostly day work, looking for trap and trigger spells, illegal Offloads. Gang crap. Nothing I can’t handle.”
“They going to open that up for another Hound to work it with you?” Pike asked.
Jamar pushed his glasses back up on his nose. “I asked maybe a month ago. Don’t think they have it in the budget.”
Pike noted that and then waved his pen at Whiskey Guy. “Jack?”
Jack exhaled smoke. “City called me in for some piddly things. Public nuisance illusions, screwing with the art in the parks, stink spells in public halls, that sort of shit.”
“Okay,” Pike said.
And that left me.
“Allie?” Pike looked over at me.
“I have a job for the police. Tonight. With Detective Stotts.”
At the mention of his name, the body language in the room changed. There wasn’t a person in that room who liked Stotts. Interesting. Apparently his cursed reputation had proceeded him.
“Has anyone ever worked for him?” I asked.
Sid, next to me, rubbed at the side of his nose. “I Hounded for him. Once. Spooky shit happens around him. People die.”
“So I’ve been told,” I said. “But since I’ve been out of the loop with all this”-I waved my hand to include them all-“Hound bonding stuff, I was hoping someone here could tell me what’s so dangerous about working for him. Maybe give me a couple examples of what happened to other Hounds.”
No one said anything for so long, I figured the Hound bonding stuff didn’t include sharing the details with the new girl of how one another died. Or maybe they didn’t know.
Then Jamar spoke. “I heard about a guy, name was Piller, I think. He worked a serial murder case for Stotts. Some lowlife robbing old people, killing them, and dumping the bodies up in the coast range. Used a lot of Binding, Hold, and Influence spells. There was always a mark of magic left behind in the old people’s houses. The killer liked to leave a ‘note,’ you know? Anyway, on the third time out, Piller was Hounding back a spell-getting close, real close to the killer. But just before he could pin the guy, Piller walked off the Steel Bridge and died.”
“Walked off the Steel Bridge?” I asked.
“That’s what I heard.”
Bea piped up. “Remember Rosalee? She took a job with Stotts. Illegal tapping into the cisterns of magic beneath the city and Offloading the price of using that magic onto some unregulated S and M joints-killed a few politically influential customers while they were doing some back door ‘negotiations.’ ”
She giggled, and several other people chuckled. “I would have killed to see that! Anyway, Rosalee took her money and left the state the day after the job was finished. They found her dead at a truck stop in Nebraska.”
“That could be a horrible coincidence,” I said with little conviction.
Sid snapped his fingers. “Wasn’t Herm-Har-What was his name? The Swedish guy?”
“Herlief,” Dahlia chimed in.
“Right,” Sid said. “Herlief. He worked a couple cases for Stotts-maybe three or four. Did okay. Until his head fell off.”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
Sid put one hand over his heart. “I swear, it’s true. He was Hounding for Stotts. I don’t remember what the case was-” He looked around the room.
Jack stabbed his cigarette toward Sid, leaving a trail of smoke behind. “Magical coercion-someone trying to make people join something, give all their money to something…”
“Right,” Sid said. “So it wasn’t even dead body and kinky sex stuff. Herlief traced the spells back to the perps, and then the next day while he was getting coffee, a cable from a construction site snapped, whipped down, and bam!” He snapped his fingers again. “Severed his spine. Took his head right off.” He chuckled.
Okay, this was one sick group of people. Still, I understood the laughter-gallows humor. It could have been anyone of them, anyone of us, in those Hounds’ shoes.
As a matter of fact, tonight, it was going to be me.
“But no one actually died during their Hounding job, right?” I asked.
Pike shrugged. “It’s happened. Death is a risk when you work for the police. Any of them.”
And his understated acceptance of that did more to calm me than if he had told me there was no chance anything would go wrong. After all, Pike had been Hounding for the police for years. And he wasn’t dead yet.
“Okay,” I said, bracing myself for my next question. “Any of you ever seen a ghost?”
The easy smiles stalled out, and even Davy opened his eyes and leaned forward to give me a weird look.
“I have a possible client who says he’s seen a ghost,” I said with a straight face, because Grant might someday be a client, and he told me he’d seen a ghost once. I know, I was lying and justifying my cowardly behavior. But I didn’t feel the need to come off like one hundred percent wacko at the first meeting.
“He’s seen full-body apparitions and glyphing that appeared on a wall and then disappeared. He thought the glyphs were warnings.” I left out the Death glyph part.
Davy was the only one who spoke. “You Hounded a ghost sighting?”
“No. Look, I’m just asking if any of you have had any experiences involving ghosts.”
Everyone shook their heads. But it did not escape my notice that they had all become awfully quiet and sober at the change of subject. Strange. Ghosts could startle them to silence, but people’s heads popping off-that was comedy.
Or maybe asking about ghosts meant I was nuts. I mean, I had a reputation too. Besides my being the daughter of Daniel Beckstrom, it wasn’t exactly a secret that magic knocked holes in my memory. It didn’t take a genius to wonder if magic took potshots at the rest of my mental facilities.
Screw it. I so didn’t care what they thought.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
Pike gave me an I’ll-talk-to-you-later look. That, at least, was something.
“Anything else?” he asked the room in general.
More head shaking.
“Good. Anyone Hounding for non-police want backup?” No one answered, including me, because I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Looks like we have Sid, Jamar, and Allie doing police work,” Pike said, referencing his notes. “Who volunteers for backup?”
“I’ll take Sid,” Jack said, exhaling smoke. “I’m on call, but I already did a job today. Don’t think they’ll call me back until tomorrow.”
“That’s okay with me,” Sid said. “So long as you keep a low profile. And stay downwind with those cancer sticks, okay? They kill my sniffer.”
Jack just gave him a crooked-tooth smile. “You won’t even know I’m there.”
“Theresa,” Pike asked, “do you have time around your Nike duties to take Jamar?”
“This week, sure,” she said.
“Don’t know that I like that,” Jamar said. “It can get dicey in that part of town. Lots of drug movement over there.”
“You do your job,” Theresa said, “and I’ll do mine.”
