Hypnos Read online

  “Good afternoon, Chief Kirkland. We had a question about Ray. Have you chiefs gotten together and just given him blanket jurisdiction in Alameda county or something? Every time we go to make sure there aren’t any jurisdiction issues, it turns out he’s already cleared to be in the area to work.”

  I held out my hand and wiggled my fingers until Ethan handed over a ten dollar bill, which I put in my purse.

  “Thank you, Chief. I’ll talk to you about that tonight. I’ll make sure to tell her that. Have a good day.” Luke hung up. “Detective Davis has state-wide jurisdiction on the case, and he’s borrowed so often he essentially has a general state-wide jurisdiction. While he’s Chief Kirkland’s cop, he’s also enrolled as a state police officer.”

  Well, shit. No wonder my boss hadn’t had any complaints making the detective my co-lead. While rare, some cops got blanket jurisdiction because of their abilities or skills.

  “Lucky him,” I muttered. “Who did Kirkland sleep with to pull that off?”

  “I’d assume your boss or your boss’s boss. Chief Kirkland said the Oakland City Center case jurisdiction was FBI authorized. Then he laughed at you and asked how you liked your questioning session.”

  “I take it that’s what you’ll be talking to him about tonight?”

  “Yep. You know how much he likes to gossip. That plus he’s worried about his cop. You do have a reputation.”

  “I would like to remind you that my father gets angry if I toy too much with his cops. Be serious. What did he want you to tell me?”

  “Detective Davis is pissed he has a quad hovering over his shoulder.”

  “And he’s going to be murderous when he finds out he’s a permanent part of the sleepover party crew until we’re bumped off this case.”

  “You mean his protection.”

  “Yes, that.”

  Luke did a check of the SUV while laughing and spinning his keys around his finger. “I can’t wait to see his face. This is going to be the fastest case closed of a terrorism event in quad history. You two are going to crack this so you don’t kill each other. Once he realizes Commissioner Abrams is your father? It’ll be pure chaos.”

  “Leave my daddy out of this, Luke.”

  With a smug smile promising I’d hate him within the next sixty seconds, Luke showed me his phone. A text conversation between him and my father revealed we—Detective Davis included—would be having dinner with my parents at their place. “You said it yourself, Olivia. Your apartment is too small for our sleepover party.”

  “You are a cruel and terrible person, Luke Doloman.” I swiped up to read the full conversation, which included a photograph of me curled around Detective Davis. To add insult to injury, I was smiling like an idiot in my sleep. “I hope you’re happy with yourself. Do you know what will happen if my mother sees this?”

  Isaac grinned like a maniac on a sugar high. “Olivia Davis has a nice ring to it,” the drainer announced. “I like him. He has a lot of balls for a pure. He wanted to take me on this morning. And he would’ve if he’d been given a single chance.”

  Ethan peeked over my shoulder for a look at Luke’s phone. “He needs some work, but he did get you to eat, so he might be suitable. We’ll have to do some additional research.”

  “Don’t you even think about joining in on this insanity, Jamie.”

  “I prefer to let nature run its course, Little Miss Lured Him Into Your Bathroom.”

  “I hate you all, and I will save the worst case work I can find for you four traitors.”

  Luke smirked and returned his phone to his pocket. “But will we get invitations to the wedding?”

  I marched up the hill cursing the quad. “You four bastards need a mental health eval.”

  They laughed.

  Chapter Six

  I crested the hill to discover Chief Thomas hadn’t been kidding about his cops being on the scene. A parade of police and FBI vehicles parked along the road leading to a Spanish Mission styled mansion, one easily large enough to house the vineyard workers with room to spare. I whistled, wondering how many millions of dollars the owner had spent buying the place. “Luke?”

  “Yes?”

  I smiled, knowing the perfect way to nettle my co-lead. “Please call Detective Davis and ask him how many blind dates he has scheduled today.” I counted vehicles. “Two quads from the looks of it, a possible supervisor or extras, five patrol pairs, three forensics vans, and an ambulance.”

  The ambulance would be to take the body to the morgue, but the two extra forensics vans puzzled me. I would’ve sent one.

  Then again, the mansion was huge, so maybe the police or the quads wanted to get things done in a hurry so I wouldn’t have a reason to complain.

  I liked when people did things efficiently and with the goal of minimizing complaints from the bottom up. When I didn’t have a reason to complain, my boss didn’t have a reason to complain, and when he didn’t have a reason to complain, the uppers didn’t, either.

  “Why don’t I just ask where he’s at?”

  “Don’t ruin the only good part of my day, Luke. I’m going to head down and see which quads are here. They’re not mine, and the boss didn’t say where he was getting quads from to watch over Davis until we arrived.”

  “Technically, they’re all yours. You outrank every other supervisor in the state,” Luke reminded me.

  “But they’re not mine.” While I could boss every quad in the state around, I preferred to stick to my usual hunting grounds and work with the other supervisors rather than steamroll them.

  “One is probably his babysitter.”

  I pointed at the luxury SUV reserved for supervisors. “I don’t know if that’s a quad supervisor or not. Also, why don’t I ever get one of those?”

  “Because our entire resident agency has better than the baseline SUVs. You sacrificed your luxury SUV so we’d all have better ones.”

  Oh. Right. I had. “I should just buy myself a car one of these days.”

  “And deny Eddy the opportunity to drive you around several times a week? Don’t be silly, Olivia.” Luke patted my shoulder. “Have fun storming the castle. I’ll call Ray, and I’ll even be nice and ask him about his blind dates. I’ll even ask why there are two quads and a supervisor, but one quad is probably watching Ray. That makes that quad technically yours.”

  “That’s still not what I want to hear, and that doesn’t explain why there is a second quad here. I want answers, not even more questions to contend with today.” I headed down the slope, muttering curses under my breath. Halfway down, I slipped, landed on my ass, and skidded the rest of the way to the driveway.

  Stones, bristly underbrush, and sandy gravel tore into my skin before tingling magic enveloped me. The last few feet of the drop hurt a great deal less, and I’d have to thank Jamie for keeping my fall from turning into a headlong tumble down the hill.

  Unfortunately, someone had called in Santa Clara county’s FBI quad supervisor, Sergio Greene. He leaned against one of the nearby SUVs, the accursed luxury model, and smirked at me. “So nice of you to drop in, Olivia.”

  I held up the scanner, which had survived my fall without incident. “This scanner, plus our current location within Alameda county, says I have undisputed jurisdiction. Read it and weep, Greene.”

  “Olivia, you have state-wide jurisdiction. All you have to do is show up.”

  Why was everyone out to ruin the little fun I could find about my current situation? “Why are you here, anyway?”

  “I’m a gopher today. The boss asked me to show up and make sure nothing happened to, and I quote, your pet cop. I can’t believe you finally got a pet cop.”

  Beaming at my fellow quad supervisor, I waved my scanner at him some more. “And look what he gave me!”

  “I almost feel bad for telling you this, but you don’t get to keep it. I take it you’re working on the Oakland City Center case?”

  “I got a signature, and it leads here.”

 
“Well, you’ve got a pissy pet cop on your hands, a corpse, and a territory dispute to clear up, then. You know I respect the hell out of you, Olivia, but you look like hell. Want some backup?”

  “Do you have the case details?”

  “I’ve got the gist of it. The missing statuette is involved?”

  “If it wasn’t before, it is now. Or at least the property is. The corpse is of the statuette’s owner?” The death of the statuette’s owner complicated things.

  “Your pet cop, whom I’m assuming is the Oakland detective, confirmed her identity.”

  “Yeah. That’s my pet cop. Detective Davis. He’s in demand, and area jurisdictions beg to borrow him. One quad is his security? Other is yours?”

  “Good guess. His security quad is out of Union City, and they got here twenty minutes ago.”

  “He’s a pure, and my boss told me I should assign myself as his security.”

  “Harsh. That’s going to make an already tough case even tougher. The commissioner is going to have a field day with this. Good luck. You’ll need it.”

  Dad would have a field day with me at dinner. “I can handle the commissioner. Mostly.”

  “He’ll send you to your room without supper if he thinks you’ve abused one of his cops again.” Sergio snickered. “I’m so glad I’m not you.”

  “Gee, thanks. Anything else I should know?”

  “Your corpse? She’s probably turned into a haunter, so be careful in there.”

  That explained why the second quad was present. The last thing I needed was a fresh haunter. “Why do you think we have a fresh haunter?”

  “You’ll see when you get inside. And Olivia? Be careful. I’ll make sure Ethan’s aware of the haunter so he’s not taken by surprise. She’s strong enough to give my medium the creeps, but that’s not really unusual when they’re new.”

  Some days, I wished drowning Sergio was an option. I couldn’t really blame him for dumping the fresh haunter on my lap. Nobody wanted to deal with a fresh haunter.

  They always found a way to surprise quads, they rarely played by any rules, and many resented the loss of their life and wanted to take anyone they could with them.

  I got to my feet and dusted myself off. “I’ll be careful.” Marching to the house, I presented my badge to the cops guarding the manor’s double doors, which were open. A woman’s decaying body sprawled a few feet inside. Detective Davis crouched beside her discussing something with an older man in a lab coat.

  A ghostly figure hung in the air over the woman’s body, her eyes closed in slumber. Haunters took many forms, but few could make their presence known without the aid of a memento mori camera and someone with the right ability to use it.

  No one knew I could, a secret I’d kept since the day the nuke had destroyed New York City and forever changed my life. I’d acted as a conduit for the dead once, and I tried my best to forget that day. Some nights, I closed my eyes, and every detail haunted me just as the haunter lingered in her home and guarded her corpse.

  They’d moved through me with the relentless power of a rising tide.

  From the haunter, I felt nothing, a relief. Everyone perceived them differently, and I wondered what Detective Davis saw.

  Perhaps later I’d indulge my curiosity. “We meet again, Detective Davis.”

  He lifted his head and leveled a glare at me. “How’d you get here?”

  Yep, my pet cop wasn’t happy. “I used my scanner. I got a signature from the incident site and followed it to here. What’s the deal with our haunter?”

  “She’s the statuette’s owner, and she hasn’t budged since she manifested an hour or so ago. I think she died shortly before I came to talk to her.” Something about his tone bothered me, as though all the life had been sucked out of him.

  Ah. When I’d first danced with death on the so-called day of reckoning, when the horrors of World War III came to a head in New York City, I likely had had a similar expression.

  “Is she your first?”

  “My first?”

  I gestured to the woman’s body. “Homicide you’re responsible for.”

  Detective Davis’ gaze landed on her body. “Yes, she is.”

  Everyone faced death differently, and I wondered how the cop would emerge from the experience. I couldn’t do much for him, but I could offer him something. “We’ll make certain she rests easy. That’s what my quads do. It won’t bring her back from the dead, but you’ll find the burden is easier to bear after the killer is brought to justice.”

  Sometimes justice slipped through my hands, but I kept a drawer filled with unsolved cases I worked on every spare moment. Some mysteries would remain unsolved, but every now and then, I got a lucky lead and eased the burdens of those left behind.

  “You sound confident.”

  “I hate losing. What’s her name?”

  “Elizabeth Donalds.”

  In life, Elizabeth had worn her wealth to make up for her lack of beauty. She’d worn makeup, but while evidence of it lingered on her body, her incorporeal self lacked any.

  Some haunters wore masks. Others wanted to be seen for who they were.

  If she was one of the haunters who wanted to be seen, something as simple as addressing her directly might be enough to find out what prevented her from going to the other side to her final rest. “Hello, Elizabeth.”

  The haunter opened her eyes and met my gaze. “Hello, Olivia.”

  Well, that wasn’t creepy, not at all. Detective Davis froze, as did everyone else nearby.

  “How can I help?”

  “Can you? Help, that is? It won’t let me sleep. It eats my dreams. It will continue to eat until I become nothing. If it could. It can’t eat me here.” Elizabeth’s gaze dropped to her body, and she shrugged. “Not that it has much left to devour, I suppose.”

  I relaxed. While a fresh haunter, she’d already accepted her death; unless we provoked her, she didn’t worry me much.

  Like Detective Davis, Elizabeth sounded tired.

  “I can’t make any promises, but I’m going to do my best. Anything you can tell us might help.” Some haunters reacted poorly to honesty, but I got the feeling she wouldn’t be one of them.

  I waited for her to decide.

  “In life, I was a linker. I can show you. I can link to your body. I feel you. I can help you help me. But that is all I can do. If you mean your word.” The haunter’s gaze challenged me, asking how far I would go for her sake. “The shadow named it Hypnos.”

  “It? The shadow?”

  “The shadow comes and goes. Perhaps a man? The shadow could be in the shape of a man, I suppose. It is Hypnos. It is the dream devourer disguised as a fish.”

  “Ghostly?”

  “Ghostly enough.”

  Well, that was all the confirmation I needed.

  Detective Davis cleared his throat. “Elizabeth?”

  The haunter glanced at the cop. “It wasn’t your fault. You did your best, and I do not doubt that at all. Do not blame yourself for what another did.”

  His eyes widened, and he sputtered.

  “Does this Hypnos use a form of hypnosis?” I asked, hoping to buy Detective Davis time to regain his composure.

  “Yes, Hypnos. Hypnosis. He who uses hypnosis to become a god. Or monster. Maybe both. My life woke it. For that, I’m sorry.”

  Between Elizabeth and Detective Davis, I’d have my hands full convincing them they weren’t guilty for the crimes of others. Detective Davis would be easy enough to set straight; I’d hand him over to my father and let him handle the mess.

  He was good at putting the backbone back into his cops.

  I offered the haunter a smile. “You have nothing to be sorry for.” Hoping I wouldn’t regret my choice, I held out my hands in invitation. “Show me your memories, Elizabeth. I’ll safeguard them well. Will you let us help you to the other side?”

  “I don’t wish to linger here, but I don’t want to be devoured.”

  “Show me, and
then go find peace in your eternal rest.”

  Some haunters only needed to be told they could go. A memento mori photographer could force a haunter to cross to the other side. They could also guide the willing through a single eulogy and a photograph.

  If she went on her own, I’d face some difficult questions later.

  Most believed the camera served as a conduit between the living world and the next life. I wasn’t sure what I believed, but the New York bomb had done more than transform me into a water elementalist.

  I couldn’t do everything like the hated warlocks, but I could do more than I should’ve been able to.

  Detective Davis shot a questioning glare my way. Before any of the more seasoned quad members could interfere, Elizabeth rested her hands in mine.

  The world faded away to a dark, rippling sea. Water caressed my skin and woke my magic. I breathed the water in, the magic in my blood filtering the air from the water without allowing it to drown me.

  I relaxed, and revitalizing warmth spread from my chest.

  Elizabeth held my left hand. “You’re beautiful. A sea full of stars.”

  I glanced at our hands. She remained human, but I’d become an inky void sprinkled with sparkling lights. “Well, that’s different.”

  “It’s this way.” Elizabeth pointed with her free hand towards a pulsing blue light. She tightened her grip on me. “I fled back to my body while it was busy trapping its new victims. I’m sorry for that. I would have saved them, too, if I could. I could barely save myself.”

  Yep, she had a guilty conscience, the kind that made good people haunt the living world trying to find closure—or escape a fate she might view as worse than death. “You retreated,” I soothed. “Show me what happened.”

  The haunter waved her hand, and the image of a black koi mottled with gold sliced through the water. “It began its life as my statuette, pure gold, one of a set of twelve. My father adopted me and eleven other girls, and he gave us each a statuette to remember him by. I was the first he adopted, and I’m the eldest. I was born in early March. He loved Greek lore for all he’s Chinese, so he had these made for us. When I was little, I just thought it was a pretty toy. It wasn’t until I learned more of the world that I realized he’d given us each a treasure. The base bore my Chinese sign, the dragon. We were his living zodiacs. None of us share any of the same signs. He claimed his love for us was written in the stars.”