Page 23 of The Deer and the Dragon
She’d won the battle against my reluctance to let anyone in, and one chip at the stone of my heart at a time, she’d become my family.
I looked at my sister now and the phone glowing in her hand. “Can you text it to me?”
Nia’s mouth twisted into a corner as she looked at her phone, then up to me. Her face shadowed under the kitchen lighting as she tilted her head, no longer interested in food as a much darker question consumed her. She was too smart to believe that I had innocent intent. “Why do you need his address?”
“I just do,” I said.
The Fosters and I had made plans to make the most of summer while it lasted. I’d planned for us to sit outside, sipping beers and playing card games. But though I remained physically present through what remained of the meal, my mind was elsewhere. I ate Darius’s take on Mexican food with polite enthusiasm, but Nia knew the instant the story came on the news that she’d lost me.
Her husband relaxed once he’d eaten, carrying on happy conversation about a sports team that I didn’t care about. His pleasant voice accompanied us through dinner, allowing me to retreat into silence as my mind raced, ignoring him completely. No matter how much I loved Nia and liked the man she’d married, I couldn’t bring myself to care about football even in the best of times. These were not the best of times.
He asked about dessert, but she went in for a hug instead, saying, “I know you have to get going.”
“Thanks, Nia,” I murmured.
“Don’t be stupid” was all she said.
I considered myself intelligent most of the time.
I’d been a good student. I’d developed the social intelligence necessary to navigate complex situations, whether playing chameleon when on a client’s arm or trying to be cool at a hipster coffee shop. I was something of a wordsmith. But no amount of education or savvy had prevented me from barreling toward what would undoubtedly be a very poor choice.
Perhaps I should have gone home and collected myself.
No, Idefinitelyshould have waited and formulated a plan before launching into action. Still, when the cab driver asked for an address, I repeated the one glowing from my phone screen. He’d happily complied, pointing the taxi south. It was a farther drive than I’d anticipated, and a far heftier cab fee than I was used to seeing. He eyed me as if I might bolt, but I handed him my card with a confident smile, perhaps hoping to convince us both. I compensated him well in a tip for the drive he’d have to make back to the city. He thanked me heartily as he let me out onto the cold street with nothing but yellow police tape to stop me.
I pulled out the folded piece of paper that had become a staple of my back pocket and examined the complex shapewithin the circle. It might have been an oversized arrow with acute angles folding in on one side, save for the proportions. If the circle had been a clock, its tips would have hit the three o’clock, six o’clock, and ten o’clock. A pointed eye at its center drew the attention, somewhat like the evil-eye ward I’d seen on many a necklace and bracelet. The final piece, puncturing the arrow and plunging into the eye, was a flame where the fletching should be at precisely the twelve o’clock position.
The sigil.
The third witch had been right. She hadn’t needed fancy bells or whistles or payment. She hadn’t made a theatrical show of hums or chants. She’d bounced the toddler on her hip, sent me a link, and hung up. Truth needed no frivolity. It had been all I’d needed.
In the absence of crystals and tarot readings and the Prime Creator, I’d meditated and failed spectacularly. I couldn’t clear my thoughts. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t relax. And so I continued on my fruitless endeavors. I tried and failed, and tried, and failed and tried. With an inexplicable tenacity, tinged with desperation for something to work, I attempted every day for nearly an hour until one day I opened my eyes and…there it was on my wall.
It had stolen my breath.
It was beautiful and terrifying and filled me with a roil of complex emotions, all questions with dissatisfying answers. The shapes, the lines, the arrow’s feather-like fletching.
Was I supposed to be happy? I guessed so. I was pleased that I’d found it, of course.
Should I be scared? Maybe. The sigil certainly didn’t look friendly.
Did I have a right to be angry? Perhaps. It had been painted above my door without my knowledge or consent, after all.
I looked up from the elaborate shape scrawled on lined paper to the house.
I possessed only two clues. The sigil and the knowledge that the man who’d tried to kill me had been marked. The psycho killer’s home was my best hope at finding answers.
I’d expected a police presence at the long-dead Richard’s home, but the neighborhood was void of any sights or sounds of life. I folded the sigil and tucked it back into my pocket, then snuck around the house only to find the doors locked.
I didn’t really have a contingency plan for locked doors. The man was dead, after all.
The ground-floor windows were also, unsurprisingly, locked. Unfortunately for those who wished to deter breaking and entering, I was both acrobatically inclined and clinically insane. The second was perhaps more pertinent as I clutched the rainspout with my hands and knees, shimmying toward the gutter on the back of the late, great Richard’s house. I’d come this far, after all. I wasn’t about to leave without exhausting all of my options.
Fortunately, given his surgical career, the man was loaded. This meant the man had not cut corners on his home. His rainspout was secured down at every possible joint and made of the sort of reinforced metal that would matter only if the sky were raining bullets. I hadn’t climbed rock walls since college. Despite my muscle memory, I had little to no grip strength.
“Don’t be a chicken,” I grunted to myself, forcing resilience where none existed.
I was seconds away from plummeting to a broken ankle at best and broken back at worst before I flailed for the second-story balcony. It was so close. I tightened my knees on the gutter, fixing my sneakers on the tiny grip afforded by the joints, and grabbed the balcony’s rods with both hands at once, trust-falling into the second floor.
