Page 3 of Blood & Ice

Chapter Two

The admission that her daughter was dead seemed to cost Aurea what little energy had been animating her.

She slumped in her seat, head bowed and hands clenched into bone-white claws on the tabletop. That was why she hadn’t looked at me. Not because she was afraid of my power. She was afraid of myjudgment.Aurea Grimsbane, headmistress and an allegedly badass head witch was struggling not to cry.

I sat awkwardly in my chair, unsure of how to respond. General human empathy dictated I should do something to comfort her, but I had no idea how it would be received. Aurea was one of the prickliest examples of witchkind I’d ever met. She wouldn’t respond well to being pitied. With that in mind, I steepled my fingers on the table and kept my voice neutral when I said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Her head whipped up, eyes wet and fever-bright. Her mouth twisted into a bestial snarl. “I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to find answers. You and that warlock uncovered a murder plot once, you can do it again.”

“I’m not a private investigator for hire,” I said. “And I sincerely doubt the case is in my jurisdiction. Even if I could take it, I wouldn’t. I have good reasons not to trust you. For all I know, you’re making me the fall guy for one of your schemes against the vampires.”

Aurea’s face didn’t fall. If anything, her expression became more resolute, her striking eyes growing colder by the moment. “I thought you might say something like that. That’s why I brought a contingency plan.”

Aurea reached into her coat and drew out a knife. It was maybe a half second later that I acted on instinct, pushing away from the table in one fluid movement, drawing my gun out of its holster. Drawing on magic would probably have been faster andmore effective, but underneath it all I was still a cop at heart. The training was hard to kick, new title, and responsibilities aside. There was a weapon in play, and an expert could get in my guard and really fuck up my night before I could fire a single shot. I’d seen too many men mutilated by knives to be comfortable having one in my vicinity.

Aurea glanced at my service weapon, then up to my face and back with a sneer playing on her lips. “Put that away, girl.”

“You first,” I said. “Drop yours and I’ll holster mine.”

Aurea laid the knife on the table without any backtalk. Upon closer inspection, I realized it wasn’t the steel blade I’d feared and expected. This one looked to be carved out of bone and had yellowed with age. Someone had done scrimshaw on the surface, etching it with written spellwork. I’d never actively tried to interpret faerie language, and it made my head twinge to interpret the text. The part of me that was Olwen tried to assert itself with a vengeance. I ground the foreign thoughts heartlessly beneath one heel.Iwas the one in charge here, not some faerie bitch I didn’t know and didn’t like.

You know,the more reasonable half of me thought.Olwen is you. You are her.

I know,I thought back.And I just so happen to also be a bitch. So shut it.

Flawless logic laid out, I could finally find enough wherewithal to find my voice again. “What is that?”

“Rhursa,” Aurea answered, eyes scanning my face expectantly.

The word’s meaning materialized in my head without conscious thought. It was the name of a species of wolf hybrid, well-known for the carnage they left in their wake. It roughly translated to ‘ravager.’

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

Aurea’s brow quirked. “You don’t know? I would haveassumed one of your chums in the Hollow would have informed you already. Perhaps you’re not as well-liked as you seem to think.”

I ignored the jibe. A year ago, a comment like that might have hurt. I’d never made friends easily and kept most of the ladies from the cocktail club at a distance. A certain amount of dispassion had to be used on the job, and I couldn’t afford to grow too attached to any of them. It would cloud my judgment, and in the heat of the moment that could be deadly. There was one person I’d allowed in, and he was waiting for me to get my ass in gear and stop a methed-up wolfman from going on a rampage. If the tentacle monster with it managed to hide out in a nearby lake, I’d have a hell of a time trying to get it back out again.

“This knife was made from the bones of your mother’s skull.”

“Excuse me… what?” There are comments that are shockers and then those that are real shockers.

Aurea continued like I hadn’t stopped her. “Rumor has it Janara removed… or her toady, Wren, removed your mother’s head shortly after the palace coup and set beetles on it to eat the flesh. Your mother’s blood was fresh at the time Janara anointed the tip of the blade. It’s a dangerous magic few dare to perform.”

The desire to throw up started somewhere around my toes and rolled up my body in a nauseating wave. I didn’t have any fond memories of my birth mother. I didn’t have many memories at all, except the ones passed onto me by Autumn Sidhe sorcerers but still—when someone delivers such information about your mother, even if you never knew her, it still hits.

As to what memories I did have of my fae roots, I liked to call it ‘the archive’. It was all the accumulated knowledge Olwen would need to ascend to the throne and bring peace to the courts. Blood magic was shelved in the furthest bookshelfin the restricted section. The grotesque mental image of Janara decapitating and then desecrating my mother’s corpse was so horrific that I bent double and actually was violently sick.

It didn’t matter that I hadn’t known my biological mother. What Wren had done was disgusting. She’d performed the spell on Janara’s orders. And here I thought my aunt couldn’t stoop any lower. It just went to show that you should never underestimate people or faeries.

Aurea waited patiently for me to recover. She didn’t flinch when I turned my streaming glower on her. There was a split second where I thought I saw pity in her gaze. Then I blinked and it was gone.

“I don’t do this out of malice,” Aurea said.

“Bullshit,” I said, straightening up, using the sleeve of my coat to wipe the sick off my face. It would wash off the leather, and it was a small price to pay to retain a modicum of dignity. Hard to be menacing when you had a chunk of half-digested pizza on your chin. As to the rest of the mess on the floor, I’d let it sit there and hopefully it would make Aurea uncomfortable—she deserved as much for hitting me over the head with this information like she just had.

“This is business,” she insisted. “If I thought Vivian’s murder had happened in-house, I would solve this without involving you. But she was murdered and it wasn’t in-house, Chief Morgan.”

“Do you have any ideas who did it?”

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