Whiskey Ginger_Phantom Queen_Book 1 Page 3

  What he meant was that I wouldn’t be protected. I didn’t look much like a Freak—unless you thought exceptionally tall, leggy redheads were particularly freakish—but I sure wasn’t a Regular. You see, magic doesn’t work on me. Never had. I mean, sure, I could see it. Hell, I could taste and smell it. But anytime someone pointed magic of any sort in my direction, it crashed against an invisible barrier, fizzled, and died. Sadly, that didn’t mean I was immune to glamour, and I’d never put it to the test against grammarie—a form of Faeling magic that allowed its user to do truly improbably things. From what I understood, grammarie disregarded not only logic, but physics.

  Which is why, deep down, I knew Ryan’s concerns were justifiable. Still, there was a whole other world out there, a world with different rules, ones that defied science and imagination. Who in their right mind would pass that up? Besides, I had another reason for wanting to go to the Fae realm, a reason I couldn’t talk to Ryan about. He was a friend, but he was also a Faeling—a creature out of a storybook, with questionable allegiances.

  My trust didn’t extend quite that far.

  Suddenly, the sound of wood sizzling and popping, coupled with the acrid odor of smoke, assaulted my senses. I could practically feel the fire singeing the fine hairs on my forearms. I punched Ryan’s arm. “What did I just say?”

  The sensations disappeared immediately as he rubbed his shoulder. “Okay, okay, fine…You know I’m only trying to protect you.”

  “I don’t need your protection, Ryan O’Rye,” I said, glaring.

  He flinched.

  “But,” I amended, “I do appreciate ye tryin’.” I strode past him, took up the ring, and tossed it to him. “The ring for a favor to be determined later.”

  Ryan caught it and hissed between his teeth as it settled in his palm. “But not entry,” he clarified.

  “Not entry.”

  He nodded, and the pain in his face faded.

  “Now,” I said, “where does a girl go to get a drink around here?”

  Chapter 6

  A series of heavy-fisted knocks at my door woke me up the next morning. I cradled my head as I blindly stumbled out of bed, the night before a faint blur. I remembered having a few drinks down at the bar before heading home, settling early on a whiskey cocktail with champagne in it that Ryan had dubbed The Fifth Horseman. I seemed to recall it tasting great at the time, but now even the faintest idea of it made me a little sick to my stomach.

  I bypassed the door for the bathroom in my desperation to find the Ibuprofen. Vampire gazes and Fae illusions I could handle. But hangovers? A girl could use some help. I tossed back a couple tablets and scowled, bleary-eyed, at the door, which refused to shut up.

  “I’ll kill ye,” I whispered at it, then shuffled forward, peering through the peephole. Jimmy Collins stood on the other side of the door, his dark face warped, but still recognizable. I cursed my luck; he would show up the morning after I’d had three or four too many, when I looked my roughest. Oh well, what was the quote? If he couldn’t handle me at my worst…

  Yeah, right, as if this was as bad as it got.

  I sighed, then unlatched and turned the various locks on my door—you could never be too careful in my line of work—and threw it open. “What do ye want?” I asked, staring from beneath my bangs—a tousled mass that completely obscured one of my eyes.

  Detective Jimmy Collins, Boston PD, stood self-righteously in my doorway, chest puffed up like he was about to deliver a sermon or sing from a hymnal—the man had the voice of an angel and knew it.

  “Oy, Jimmy, ye should sing me a song. But,” I said, raising a finger to his lips to interrupt whatever he’d been about to say, “it should be a quiet song. A lullaby. From out here. Goodnight, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy slammed his hand against the door to stop me from shutting it, ignoring my ridiculous suggestion. “We need to talk,” Jimmy said, his tone disapproving.

  “Well then you need to whisper.” I wandered back into my apartment, letting Jimmy invite himself in. “And close me curtains,” I added, before curling up on my couch in the fetal position, tucking my knees into the massive sweater I’d slept in.

  Jimmy sighed and did what I asked. I felt more than saw him wander around the room, closing curtains, only to settle into the loveseat on the other end of the living room. I cracked open an eye, then stared at him in surprise; he looked like he’d been up all night, his clothes disheveled and wrinkled, his eyes tired and bloodshot. He retrieved a little notebook from his suit jacket.

  “That’s cute. Do ye get those as stockin’ stuffers?” I asked. “Ye know, instead of socks? Little notebooks and handcuffs and mugs that say ‘Best Detective’?”

  He ignored me, which was a shame; I genuinely wanted to know. “Quinn MacKenna,” he began, “where were you last night between eleven and midnight?”

  I groaned. “Damnit Jimmy, is this payback for me callin’ ye late last night? I swear I won’t do it again if ye let me go back to bed.”

  “Answer the question,” Jimmy said, his tone cold.

  “I don’t remember,” I replied, honestly, baffled by the situation. “Wait, when did I call ye?” I asked.

  “You called my private number,” Jimmy said, lips pursed, “at 10:47.”

  “Well then,” I replied, doing as much mental arithmetic as my screaming brain would allow, “between eleven and midnight, I would’ve been headed to a friend’s bar. I got an Uber.” I decided to leave out the details regarding the other passenger temporarily appropriating my ride; I expected Jimmy might find it funny, which would only piss me off.

  Jimmy’s hard expression grew a little less severe. “Can you prove that?”

  “And why would I need to prove anythin’ to ye, Jimmy Collins? What is this even about? Ye never said.”

  Jimmy hunched forward. “Quinn, last night you called me and told me to go to a crime scene. A crime scene which I had no reason to know existed. A crime scene I am now responsible for. Which is why I’m here, now, in the wee hours of the morning instead of in my bed, fast asleep.”

  “Oh, please,” I said, exasperated. “Those vampires are a bunch of babies. It was just a little holy water. Their skin’ll grow back, I swear. Eventually.”

  Jimmy’s eyes widened in surprise. “Vampires?”

  “Oh, Jesus, Jimmy. Yes, vampires. Bloodsuckers. Freaks. Why do ye think I called ye in? I wanted ye to make sure they wouldn’t do anythin’ stupid. “

  Like take a bite out of the staffer I’d doused with holy water, for example.

  Jimmy reached into his pocket and tossed a small pile of photographs on the table. “They won’t be doing anything, stupid or otherwise, ever again, Quinn.”

  I glanced down at the photographs and pressed a hand to my mouth, my stomach rolling. “Oh, fuck me.”

  “Officially,” Jimmy said, snatching them up, “you never saw those.”

  It took me a solid minute to process what Jimmy had shown me, my eyes pinched closed as if I could put all those images in a box and toss it into the deep, dark recesses of my subconscious.

  Instead, I dwelled on them, the photos telling a story I didn’t want to hear, but felt compelled to listen to.

  Mike and his bandmates had been hung upside down and staked to the walls. Not only staked, I realized, but pinned. Like butterflies—their wrists and ankles stretched and held to the wall by thick slivers of wood. Pools of blood had collected beneath each corpse.

  I barely made it to the bathroom before throwing up.

  Jimmy waded in and held my hair back like we were in high school all over again. I wanted to tell him to stop and let me get sick in peace, but couldn’t get the words out. Oh well.

  Guess he’d end up seeing me at my worst, after all.

  When I finished, he flushed the toilet and leaned against the sink, looking nothing like the boy from my childhood. Back in high school he’d been thin and rangy, tall and athletic enough to play varsity ball—at least until he’d torn his ACL his
senior year and enlisted in the Marines. He’d put on serious muscle since; he was built more like a linebacker now than a point guard.

  For all that, his face hadn’t changed much—a few lines here and there and a battered look in his eyes that never entirely went away. But behind those eyes was a totally different person, someone I didn’t always recognize. That’s what happens sometimes, though; I’d become the kind of person who fought Freaks head-on with children’s toys, and Jimmy had become the kind of person who could look at a bloody crime scene without blinking.

  People change.

  I took the hand towel he offered me and dabbed my mouth and forehead. Not surprisingly, I felt a lot better. “Go fuck yourself, Fifth Horseman,” I muttered.

  “What?” Jimmy asked.

  “Nothin’. So,” I said as I settled with my back against the tub, “what now?”

  “Now you show me your phone, so I can cross you off the suspect list.”

  “And then?”

  “And then you help me figure out who did this.”

  “Alright.” I turned on the bath faucet. “But first I’m goin’ to shower. And ye, Jimmy Collins, are goin’ to take a nap on me couch before ye fall over.” I waved away his protest. “There’s no point arguin’. Besides, whoever or whatever did this won’t be found before dark—that’s when the Freaks come out to play. Ye should know that by now.”

  “You think it was a Freak?” Jimmy asked. “Not some religious nut targeting vampires?”

  “Religious nut?” I asked.

  “They were crucified upside down, Quinn.”

  I felt my stomach shift uncomfortably.

  “What part of I’m about to take a shower do ye not understand, Jimmy?” I asked as I wobbled to my feet, turned on the hot water, and threatened to remove my sweater. “Or is it police procedure to interrogate a woman while she’s less than decent?”

  Jimmy rubbed the bridge of his nose, then walked out.

  “Fetch me a towel, too, while you’re out there!” I called.

  He groaned.

  I grinned.

  Chapter 7

  I used a second towel to dry my hair as I walked Jimmy through what had happened the night before. Well, some of what happened. I glazed over a few things, like the exact nature of my exchange with the vampires. The legality of what I’d done was questionable at best, and I wasn’t in the mood for a lecture, let alone a trip downtown in the back of a cruiser.

  “So, when you left, they were all alive?” Jimmy asked, when I’d finished.

  “Aye. I mean, they were huddled in a corner whimperin’, but they were alive.”

  “And why were they whimpering, again?”

  “We had a water gun fight. I won.”

  Jimmy gave me his best cop stare—a flat, no nonsense look—like the one a mother gives when she asks a question she already knows the answer to, like “did you do the dishes?”

  “Quit playin’ bad cop with your eyes, Jimmy. Ye know it won’t work on me. Besides,” I added, “t’isn’t me ye should be tryin’ to pry information from, all I did was give a few vampires a much-needed christenin’.”

  Jimmy scratched at the coarse goatee he’d grown since becoming a detective. It made him look distinguished, not to mention older; with his ridiculously smooth skin, he always looked ten years younger when he shaved. “Well,” he replied, finally, “it doesn’t help that you’re my only lead. I mean who else can I turn to who can help solve my multiple vampire homicides? God…did I just say that?” He rose and started pacing the room. “I hate you sometimes, you know that?”

  I smirked, knowing he didn’t mean it. If he did, he’d have dipped out the moment he knew I wasn’t his suspect. Of course, I could handle a little hatred if it meant he planned to keep marching around in my apartment; even after pulling an all-nighter, the man looked like he could save children from a burning building, his pent-up energy riding the air like a living thing. Like a fire I wanted to huddle around. I started to say something to that effect, but then realized I hadn’t brushed my teeth after my brief encounter with the toilet bowl.

  “Anyway,” I called from the bathroom, once I’d had a few moments to collect myself, “there was a kid goin’ to check on the vampires, one of the concert employees, who should’ve seen ‘em after I left. I made sure he was soaked in holy water, just in case.”

  “Yeah, I talked to him,” Jimmy replied, flipping the pages of his notebook. “He’s the one who pointed me in your direction, actually. Said I was looking for a giant, soulless ginger…woman who thought it was fun to try and drown people.” Jimmy chuckled. “Luckily my partner wasn’t there to hear your description, or we’d be doing this at the precinct.”

  “Ooh,” I said as I ducked out, foaming at the mouth with toothpaste, “would ye have handcuffed me, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy glanced up from his notes and frowned. “Not unless you were under arrest.”

  I blinked, then scowled at the impish expression that appeared on his face. “I see how ye are,” I said, pointing at him with my toothbrush for good measure.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “the concert employee said the door was locked and his key wouldn’t work. By the time he got security to open it, the band was…well, you saw. I got there a few minutes after the first two uni’s called it in, which made them extra suspicious, I might add.”

  I rejoined him in the living room. “So why d’ye ask what I was doin’ between eleven and midnight?”

  “That’s the slimmest window we could come up with between when the band was last seen and when they were found. Our forensics team couldn’t give us a time of death. Not even a ballpark. I’ve never seen them look that confused—not even on the Lollipop case.”

  I winced at the reference. That had been the first, and only, time Jimmy had ever called me in to help on one of his cases in a hands-on capacity.

  And the last, if I had anything to say about it.

  But, considering the fact that I’d accidentally roped him into a case with its own host of unanswered questions, I supposed that made us even.

  “That makes sense,” I admitted, finally. “Half the blood they had in ‘em wasn’t theirs to begin with, and they probably had the vitals of corpses even before they got shish-kabobbed. Speaking of, ye may want to warn your people not to let daylight hit their skin, or they may be in for a wee bit of a surprise.”

  Jimmy’s eyes widened in surprise. He checked his watch. “It shouldn’t matter right now. We loaded them and shipped them to the morgue before dawn.” He scribbled something in his notebook. “Still, I’ll call our medical examiner. Better to be safe than sorry. Anything else I need to know?”

  “That’s pretty much all I can tell ye,” I confessed. “My experience with fangers is limited. I learned most of what I knew from watchin’ movies.”

  “Seriously?”

  I shrugged. “They’re surprisingly spot on. Except for Twilight. Sparklin’ vampires are a load of fuckin’ gobshite.”

  “Well, can you give me anything else to work with? Like who might have wanted them dead? You said you didn’t think it was a religious killing.”

  “Not even a Shepherd could’ve done ‘em that fast, no. And they wouldn’t have gone about it like that, anyway.” Shepherds were basically the Vatican’s take on special forces—priests and other do-gooders who took on evil when it graduated from metaphorical to literal. I’d never met any of them, but I’d heard rumors of an old, rundown safehouse somewhere in Boston.

  “So who, then?” Jimmy asked.

  “There was a fanger outside, in the alley, come to think of it. Quite a bit older, judgin’ from how he acted,” I said. In my experience, the older a bloodsucker was, the more likely they were to be irredeemable assholes. “He didn’t seem too pleased by the fact that Mike and his vampire band had decided to go around tellin’ people they were vampires,” I explained. “Too much exposure. That’s a big no-no for us Freaks, ye see.”

  “Right…” Jimmy stared down
at his notebook as if unsure what to write.

  “Do ye need me to spell ‘vampire’ for ye, Jimmy? I know ye were shit in school,” I offered.

  Jimmy threw one of my couch pillows at me. I caught it and tucked it to my chest, drawing my knees up, my plush bathrobe parting to expose my freshly-shaven legs. Jimmy’s eyes followed the motion, lingered on my thighs, then flicked back down to his notebook. He cleared his throat. “What’d he look like?”

  “He was a fuckin’ giant. Six inches taller than me, at least, I t’ink. Dark hair. Pale, but that isn’t surprisin’. Dark clothes. Honestly, other than the height, he looked pretty much the way most of ‘em look.” I shrugged.

  “So I should put an APB out for ‘vampire’ and wait?”

  “Aye, although, personally, I don’t t’ink he’s your Freak.” I realized Jimmy was staring at me. I’d forgotten how intense his gaze could get when he listened, really listened—how sometimes the brown of his irises disappeared altogether.

  “Whoever, or whatever,” I went on, choosing to ignore my flushed cheeks, “murdered the band was able to take out a room full of vampires without leavin’ a trace in the space of time it took to go get security to bust open a door…”

  I could see Jimmy was struggling to comprehend what I was getting at, so I tried to put it in terms he could understand. “Vampires are fast, right?” I said. “They’re fast, ruthless hunters that can’t be killed easy. Whatever killed ‘em didn’t simply do it quick. It did the job thorough. Then it hung ‘em, like trophies, like it wanted ye to know what they were.” I let that sink in for a moment. “I t’ink ye should leave this one alone, Jimmy.”

  “Why? Because they were Freaks?” Jimmy asked, a vein in his temple throbbing. “Because it’s dangerous? That’s not how the justice system works, Quinn, and it’s sure as shit not how I work.”