Page 2 of Mystic Justice
Dirty water rushed into her lungs and fire licked her insides until it felt like her chest was packed full of burning coals. She coughed to get the water out, but with the next breath even more rushed in.
The world around her muted.
Terror left her, replaced by calm.
She wasn’t going to survive this.
No one was coming to rescue her.
Chapter One
In my time as a police officer, I’d seen more than a thousand corpses. Three hundred of those were suicides, and 250 ofthosewere men. The body in front of me was female, and though she’d drowned there was no suggestion it had been suicide.
From what I could see, she was trussed up like a pig at a country fair. Her arms and legs were tightly bound; only her neck and her ankles would have been free to move, and that hadn’t helped her a damn. Other than that, her dark green skin told me our victim was a dryad. And that was about all I could see through the leaves.
My partner, Detective Channing, approached the scene dressed in the uniform of the Connection: black suit, white shirt. His collar was so stiff it looked like he’d starched it and his black shoes had a military shine. ‘Whoa!’ he said as he joined me.
‘Whoa’ was right. Our victim had been found by some hobbyist fisherman at the edge of Grosvenor Lake. What made the scene unusual was that a weeping willow tree had moved a few feet into the lake and was now cradling the body in its long branches.
Weeping willows were often found by the water but not actuallyinit. Their long tendrils usually fluttered and floated on the breeze but this one was wrapped up tight, its branches making a solid cocoon in which it held the deceased. So far, no amount of asking nicely had persuaded it to let us in.
Loki was perched in some of the higher boughs of the willow, observing the scene. He was unusually quiet. Maybe my caladrius was being reverent; stranger things had happened.
I could see some of the corpse through gaps in the willow’s branches. Despite the dense foliage I glimpsed lurid pink hair, but I hadn’t been able to get near enough to verify death or search the body. I could have used the IR to blast my way in but doing that would risk the integrity of the scene and could damage evidence.
‘I’ve contacted the dryad grove and asked them to send someone over,’ I told Channing. ‘They’ll be able to get the tree to relinquish its hold on her. In the meantime, summon a sub-wizard in case we need to wipe the witnesses’ memories. They’re Common-realmer MOPs.’
A mop isn’t just a cleaning device: MOPs are members of the public, and the fact that they were Common realmers told my partner that they were wholly human. They didn’t know about the existence of magic and we needed to keep it that way. That was one of the core duties of the Connection: to keep us hidden by any means necessary.
Channing nodded. ‘On it.’ He pulled out his phone.
A few days earlier the brass had decided that the Connection needed to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. All of our work phones now had an app that some joker had named SPEL, which stood for Supernatural Police Evidence & Log, and it had officially replaced our police notebooks – our PNBs. The truth was that I hadn’t quite relinquished my PNB; maybe there was something comfortingabout paper and pen, or maybe I was a bit of a dinosaur, but my notebook was still sitting in my breast pocket. Channing, though, had gone full app and he knew where everything was after doing a deep dive into it during his down time.
He used the app to summon a local subterfuge wizard who was skilled in mind-wiping then he looked up at me. ‘We’ve got Dwayne Witterhall. He’s inbound. Twenty minutes.’
I suppressed a grimace: I wasn’t one of Witterhall’s fans. Something about the man made my skin crawl, though I’d never once seen him put a foot wrong. All the same, I was watching him, waiting, because instinct told me he wasn’t on the side of justice no matter the badge he routinely carried as a ‘police consultant’.
When I arrived, I put police tape around the scene as best I could – given that half of it was a lake – and summoned the medical examiner (ME) and the Scene of Crime Officers (SOCO).
‘Thanks,’ I muttered to Channing, vaguely embarrassed that I hadn’t mastered the app. ‘Let’s speak to the witnesses.’
The wits were wholly human, but luckily the PC who’d attended the scene was one of ours. As I approached, she stood to attention. ‘Inspector Wise. Detective Channing,’ she greeted us in a soft Scottish brogue.
‘PC Frost,’ Channing replied with a warm smile. ‘Good to see you.’ I spotted the interest in his eyes and no doubt Frost saw it too.
‘This isn’t a social engagement, detective,’ I reminded him sharply. The last thing I needed was Channing getting flirty in front of the wits.
‘Right.’ He blinked and toned down the smile but couldn’t quite vanquish it. Channing had a crush and I didn’t really blame him: Frost was beautiful with her blonde hair, blue eyes and perfect features. All the same, this wasn’t the time or place for flirting.
I pointedly turned to the human witnesses and quirked an eyebrow, tacitly asking for information. I pulled out my PNB, pen poised, and Channing readied the app to type in information as we received it.
Frost began, ‘This is Mr Fred Cornel and his grandson, Kai Cornel. They were here for an early morning spot of fishing. When they arrived at the lake they found the body weirdly tangled in the tree.’ She frowned and gestured to the bizarre cocoon.
‘Like some sort of sick topiary,’ said the grandad. Though he spoke gruffly, his skin was pale and he kept fiddling with the white tuft of hair on his chin. He must have been in his late seventies; his back was bowed and when he’d shuffled forward a few steps to speak to us, his knees and ankles obviously protested.
Sitting with his grandson by the lakeside should have been the perfect day for the old man but murder had ruined it. Murder ruined a lot of things, not to mention the life of the dryad cradled tenderly by the willow tree.
‘What time did you arrive?’ I probed.
