I must have told the dispatcher I’m in Tilden Park in the woods off the fire road. The dispatcher must have wanted to know which fire road. There is–she must have told me–a lower fire road, an upper fire road, and an upper upper fire road as you climb east on the mountain.
I must have told her it’s the fire road off Centennial Drive at the crest of the rise where, standing on the shoulder, you can see the whole bay all the way to the Golden Gate lying at your toes.
Or I could have told her how the fuck do I know which fire road? I can’t tell you because the second part of our conversation is more of a blur than the first.
Whatever I told the dispatcher must have been good enough because I hear police sirens down below in Berkeley. Sirens coming closer, climbing Panoramic Hill, speeding up Centennial. Sirens shrieking in my ears.
Footsteps crash through the underbrush. A woman’s sympathetic voice calls out, “Miss? Please talk to us, miss, so we can find you.”
“Here, I’m over here.”
Two dozen people dart around the trees, press themselves against tree trunks, and move toward me, pushing through the saplings. Men and women in the crisp black uniforms of the Berkeley police.
Everyone silent, hard-eyed. Handguns drawn.
Never have I been so happy to see so many guns. Though I must admit, guns make me nervous. I don’t like guns. I’m kind of afraid of guns, though I know these guns have come to protect me.
“Miss? Is the man with the spear with you?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Any idea where he is?”
“I last saw him on other side of Centennial.”
Now the grove bustles with human activity, and the dangerous magic, whatever it is, vanishes.
“Miss, would you please step back with me?”
A compact woman in a smart earth-tone pantsuit firmly takes me by my elbow and backs me away from the corpses. Her doe eyes are as sympathetic as her voice. Vivid red lipstick on her generous mouth doesn’t quite match her cropped brown hair or the no-nonsense pantsuit, but I like the contrast. “I’m Detective Maria Valdez, Berkeley P.D. May I take that?”
She gently pries the branch out of my fist.
Now I notice the tip of the branch. Look at that! Cracked and broken, the branch boasts a thin, sharp point. Well, well. I could have fenced a few rounds with the geezer, after all.
Valdez drops my branch in a clear plastic bag the size of a garbage-can liner and seals the top. She looks me over, lingering on my bloodied hands and arms, the streaks of blood on my shorts, the scratches on my legs. “Miss, are you injured?”
“No, no, I just dropped my phone.”
She nods but her eyes cool, a tad less sympathetic, and I realize how lame that sounds. Like a nonresponsive answer, the kind of answer that wins you no points for your college debating team.
“Miss, what are you doing here?”
I open my mouth, close it again. Hey, I’m in a tank top, shorts, and running shoes. What does she think I’m doing here? A flip answer rises to my lips as flip answers tend to do when I’m scared and nervous. I’m looking for Dr. Livingston. They say there’s gold in them thar hills.
But her cooling eyes and somber expression shut me up. This is a murder scene. A murder scene. On my first day in Berkeley! And I haven’t even been to class!
“I needed to stretch my legs, Detective.”
“I see. Have you got some ID?”
“I sure do.” I pull out my driver’s license from my butt-bag and hastily hand it over. Thank the Garden of Abracadabra, I had to go to the bank.
A man shouts orders, and police officers wind crime-scene tape all around the corpses and the fallen tree, the yellow tape incongruously festive in the foliage. The officers fan out methodically in a grid formation, looking up at the branches and down at the forest floor, searching, searching.
Two officers aim spray cans at the underbrush around the corpses, spraying fixative over footprints in the forest floor.
My footprints.
A slender, dark-haired man aims his camera at my face, snapping a head shot.
“Why are you paparazzi always following me around?”
“Because you’re such a fascinating creature.” He steps back. “Hold out your hands, please.” Click-click-click.
“Is this standard procedure? I’m an innocent bystander.”
“We like to get a visual record of everyone and everything around a murder scene. Give me a full-length. Give me some leg.”
I hold out my hands, posing this way and that. Acting flip, working off the fear and the nerves. But suddenly the photo shoot isn’t any fun. I feel like Lee Harvey Oswald in that fake photograph, grinning as he brandished that rifle in his sunny backyard. A frame-up.
The rotten-meat-and-copper stink reminds me in an acutely olfactory way that I’m the first witness to stumble upon a bizarre murder scene. First witness. Only witness.
“Thanks. You ought to be in pictures.” The photographer moves to the corpses, aiming his lens from every angle.
The man shouting orders shoves a bramble out of his way and heaves himself over to Valdez and me. He peers at me with the pouchy eyes of a man who knocked back way too many shots of Jim Beam last night. Silver threads his once-black, once-thick hair. Jowls dangle from his once-proud jaw and the thin line of his lip turns down in a permanent frown. He towers over me not from a height–my eyes meet his almost at the level–but out of the arrogant domination of his authority.
“I’m Lieutenant Phil Malaky. You the young lady who made the call?” His growl sounds as if all the shouting he does has worn out both his patience and his vocal cords.
“That’s me, Abby Teller.”
“You all right, Ms. Teller?”
“I’m a little in shock, but otherwise I’m fine.”
His eyes flick over my hands, my legs. “You need medical attention?”
“I dropped my phone,” I repeat inanely. Who am I, Lady MacBeth? “The twigs, the leaves, they’re murder.”
“Okay.” Malaky trades looks with Valdez. “You said in the call, ‘He’s got a spear.’”
“That’s right. A weed-digger, maybe. I couldn’t really tell, except that it’s got this lethal-looking point.”
Valdez pulls out a pen and a notebook from her jacket pocket and jots notes.
I describe the geezer, where I last saw him, what he said to me, how I bolted down the fire road. “You should send some officers across Centennial. Check it out.”
“We’re on it, Ms. Teller,” Malaky says in the same withering tone Daniel uses when he thinks I’m trying to tell him what to do. “You thought this man followed you?”
“I’m not really sure, now. I was spooked. And when I got here to the grove, there was some kind of magic.”
“Magic?” Malaky says.
“Yeah, dangerous magic.” I look around again, just to make sure. “It’s gone now.”
“I see,” Valdez says, jotting notes, her eyes and her sympathy growing colder by the minute.
Now a grandmotherly woman pushes through the forest, ducks under the crime-scene tape, and hikes through the underbrush to the corpses. A cap of silver curls frames her ruddy, apple-cheeked face. She crouches, peering through the thick lenses of steel-rimmed spectacles. She sets down a blue plastic toolbox, lifts the lid, pulls out and pulls on blue latex gloves. She gently touches the very stiff Brand, pushing his limbs this way and that, peering at the topside and the underbelly of this terrible deed.
“What do you make of it, Doc Eve?” Malaky calls to her.
She glances around at the scene. “Looks to me like the underbrush is mostly untouched. No signs of dragging three bodies in here. It’s as if they dropped out of the sky.”
“And the wounds?”
“Weirdest damn wounds I’ve seen in a long time, Phil.”
“Yeah.”
“Not bullet wounds. Not knife wounds, they’re too freaking neat.” She points her gloved finger at a set of puncture wounds riddling Brand’s cheek. “And they come in matched pairs.”
“Could this do it?” Valdez says. She holds up the evidence bag with the branch. My branch.
Doc Eve glances at the bag, glances at me, and instantly I see the shimmer of her power, feel the subtle pulse of it. She nods, almost imperceptibly. She sure sees me, though I’m not sure how my power appears to another denizen of the World of Magic. It doesn’t really matter, I suppose, because the connection is mutual.
“Not a chance.”
If at first I couldn’t bear to look at the corpses, now I can’t tear my gaze away. The puncture wounds–hundreds of them–are each the size of a hole-punch, smaller even, and perfectly round. And, as Doc Eve observed, in matched pairs.
“What about a weed-digger, Doc Eve?” I say to the medical examiner. “But, wait. Now that I think about it, I’m not so sure if the spear the geezer carried could have made such perfect little holes. And in matched pairs. I can think of two other things that could, though.”
Valdez and Malaky whip their heads around and stare at me.
“What about knitting needles? A pair of steel knitting needles gripped in a fist? I got the impression that the woman who took a poke at me with her knitting needles has a lot of physical strength.”
“What woman?” Malaky snaps. “Where?”
“Her name’s Barb. Lives in Emeryville, down in the flats. Ex-girlfriend of Brand, according to him.”
“Brand?” says Valdez.
“That guy.” I point at his corpse.
“You knew him?”
Oops. Is this a bad thing, that I knew a murder victim I stumbled upon in the middle of the woods? Yes. Very bad. Now that I’ve opened my mouth, though, I can’t seem to shut it.
“I didn’t exactly know him. I picked him up on the freeway yesterday, hitchhiking.”
Valdez blows out a breath, exchanges more cop eyes with Malaky. “You picked him up, Ms. Teller?”
Malaky moves closer, so close I can smell his breath freshener, a chemical sweetness that can’t quite conceal those shots of Jim Beam last night. “What about the girls, Ms. Teller? You pick them up, too?”
“No, no, but I saw them with Brand, later last night. They were on their way to a party. Trish and Zarah.”
“Trish and Zarah,” Valdez says, scribbling in her notebook. “Did you go to the party with Brand and Trish and Zarah, Ms. Teller?”
“I didn’t exactly go to–.” I blink. “Do I need a lawyer?”
“Not yet,” Malaky says.
“Oh, hold your horses, Phil.” Doc Eve rises from her crouch beside the corpses, groaning, her knees cracking. She ducks under the crime-scene tape, pushes away saplings, and comes to me. She stands shorter than me by a hand-span and has to gaze up to meet my eyes. Her eyes are extraordinary, a peculiar crystalline blue, almost translucent. A medium’s eyes.
“This ex-girlfriend who took a poke at you. When did she do that?”
“Yesterday, just before sunset.” I point to the pair of angry red spots still visible on my skin above the neckline of my tank top. “A jealous woman, pathologically so.”
“Got that, Maria?” Doc Eve says to the detective in a sarcastic tone that escapes me. Valdez must get the message because her cheeks redden and she bends over her notebook, scribbling furiously. Doc Eve tells the photographer to come over and snap a shot of the marks on my chest. “You said two things, Ms. Teller. The second?”
I have to sigh. Berkeley is turning out to be a blast, all right. “Vampire bites. Multiple vampire bites. I wish to God I never saw the monsters feeding on those kids.”
Another exchange of cop eyes between Valdez and Malaky. A supercharged exchange. I didn’t know seasoned police officers could turn pale.
“Ms. Teller,” says Valdez, the warmth in her voice and eyes extinguished, “where did you see vampires feeding?”
“At a party. At the Garden of Abracadabra.”
Malaky flinches the way a man his age flinches when you say, for instance, “vicious divorce.” Not a good reaction.
Valdez hides hers by scribbling. “Ms. Teller, how did you get invited to this vampire party?”
“I didn’t get invited. I didn’t go to the party. I crashed the gate, looking to collect a rent check. On my way downstairs, I ran into the three of them. Not at the party. On their way to the party. Or some party. Brand said there were lots of parties at Abracadabra last night. He said the girls said–”
I bite my tongue. My story, however truthful, sounds more fanciful and chockablock with coincidence every time I try to explain. I don’t like feeling so defensive when I’ve got nothing to hide. What can I do? I give them my best award-winning smile.
“Hey, congratulate me. I got a new job last night. I’m the superintendent of the Garden of Abracadabra. The salary will pay for my tuition at the Berkeley College of Magical Arts and Crafts. I’m starting class this afternoon. That is, if you don’t throw me in jail first, ha ha.”
Another long silence between Valdez and Malaky.
“Congratulations.” Doc Eve winks. “Magical Arts and Crafts is one of the finest schools of Real Magic in the country. Now, Phil, Maria, if you’ll excuse me. Abby’s all right.” She ducks under the crime-scene tape and returns to her grisly work.
“Call Jack Kovac,” Malaky snaps at Valdez. “Tell him to get the hell up here, right now. He’s got to see the scene for himself. And talk to her.”
Valdez pries a cell phone out of her jacket pocket. She punches in a number, speaks terse and low. I hear my name and a mention of the college, but then she turns away, and I can’t hear the rest. She closes the phone. “He’s on his way.”
“Who is Jack Kovac?” I ask Malaky.
“The creep who runs the Supernatural Crimes Unit at the FBI.”
“FBI! I’ve never even jaywalked in my life. Now I’m talking to the FBI?”
“That bother you, Ms. Teller?”
“Of course not. I just thought you fine Berkeley police could deal with this.”
“Not if those are vampire bites. You think they’re vampire bites?”
I shrug. Why should I talk to the FBI? My father was murdered by the Horde. No one sought his killers. No one protected me and my mother. No one gave a damn, let alone the FBI.
I didn’t think Malaky’s eyes could grow much colder, but right now they could start a new ice age. “Ms. Teller, you will come with us.”
He doesn’t say please.
********
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