Chapter 36: Investigation - Part 1 (Patreon)

The man rounded the corner a half-second behind me and stopped, head turning left, then right, scanning brick and shadow like he'd lost something he expected to still be holding.

I looked him over from the dark. Late thirties, coat too thin for the weather, hands empty. Nothing in his posture read as violent. But then again, I looked like nothing much myself, and that had never once been the whole truth.

I stepped out of the deepest shadow and crossed my arms.

"Why are you following me?"

His head snapped toward my voice. He glanced past me, over his shoulder, back toward the street he'd come from, and then his mouth opened without producing a single word before he turned and ran the other way.

Not getting away that easily.

I went after him. Ten metres of distance closed itself in less time than it took him to plant his second stride, and the strangeness of that hit me even as I moved. I'd stopped noticing what my own speed looked like from the outside. From his side, I must have simply vanished from one spot and reappeared pressed against his shoulder.

My hand went for his throat on reflex and caught his arm instead.

He thrashed against the grip, shoes scraping wet stone, going nowhere.

"It's no use." I turned him and walked him deeper into the alley, past the reach of the streetlamp. "I want an explanation. Why were you following me?"

"I wasn't following you." His breath came fast, words clipped between gulps of air. "We were just heading the same way."

"Try a better lie."

He said nothing, jaw working, eyes flicking toward the mouth of the alley like he was measuring the distance to it.

"I have ways of making people talk," I said, and let the words sit there. It wasn't strictly a bluff, but as long as he didn't give me a solid reason, I doubted I would. That was almost a comfort, finding a line I hadn't crossed yet. He didn't need to know exactly where it sat.

Only someone who already knew what I was would take a threat like that seriously. He didn't look like he knew anything.

He swung at me anyway, a clumsy right hand aimed at my jaw.

It arrived slow enough to read, and I caught his other wrist and turned into the punch, guiding it past me and around, spinning him a full half-circle until his back met my grip and his own momentum betrayed him.

"Nice try." I held him there, arm bent behind him, and leaned in enough that he could hear the patience running out of my voice. "Now. Kindly tell me why you were following me."

*

"Fine, fine." His voice pitched up, hands spreading against my grip. "Just let go of me first."

I released him and stepped back a pace, arms still crossed.

He straightened his coat, tugged the collar even, ran a hand down the front like the fabric had been the problem.

"Private investigator." He said it with a small, sour twist of the mouth, like the title had cost him something. "Tristan Vance."

"I'm listening." I tilted my head. "Why would a private investigator follow an ordinary woman into an alleyway?

"Ordinary." He almost laughed. "You're a long way from ordinary."

"You couldn't have known that before you got caught." I kept my voice level. "So why?"

His eyes went past me, once, toward the alley mouth, then back.

"Don't even think about it," I said.

"Not planning to. Just checking we're still alone." He rubbed the back of his neck. "You were hanging around a place connected to my investigation. That's all I've got. Client confidentiality." He studied me a beat longer than the sentence needed. "So what are you, then? Vampire? Siren? Something out of the old sídhe stock?"

"I'm the one asking questions here." I let a smile surface anyway. "But I'll indulge you. None of those."

Something shifted behind his eyes, quick and quiet, like a lock finding its groove. He didn't say what it was.

"What's the investigation about?" I asked. "You don't have to name your client. I'm just curious."

"I'll tell you." He held up both hands, palms out. "If you promise to let me go. Unhurt."

"Fine."

"Promise." He said it flatly, no humour in it now.

I felt the annoyance climb up my spine. I hadn't planned on hurting him in the first place, but if a promise was the toll for a straight answer, I could afford it.

"I promise to let you go without harming you," I said, "as long as you answer my questions."

He stretched his arm out between us. "Shake on it, then."

I looked at the offered hand, then at his face. Whatever trick he thought he was pulling, my hide could shrug off worse than a handshake. I took it.

Heat bloomed across our joined palms, a thin gold light tracing the line of our grip before sinking into the skin and vanishing.

I knew that spell. Zellaris had drawn its diagram on the board more than once, the simplest shape a binding magic could take.

He wasn't just an investigator. Not a normal one, anyway.

*

"Fire away," he said, and settled back against the brick like he had all night for it.

"What are you investigating?"

"Can't really say. Confidentiality." He spread his hands. "Hope you understand."

"You said you'd answer my questions."

"I did." A small shrug.

"You want to play semantics with me?"

He shrugged again, both palms up. "You never said the answer had to satisfy you."

I sighed. Something old and stubborn stirred behind my ribs, some part of me that refused to be bested by a man who smelled of cigarettes and cold rain.

"What are you investigating?" I asked again.

He gave me a look, flat, faintly amused.

"I didn't say I wouldn't ask the same question twice." I let the smile show. "You can give me the same answer as many times as you like. I'll keep asking."

He exhaled through his nose, slow. "You're persistent."

"I've been told."

"Client wants a missing man found. That's the gist of it. Name's not mine to give."

I filed that away and didn't let it show on my face. Could be me he was looking for. Could be nothing.

"And the place I was hanging around," I said. "How's it connected?"

"You won't be satisfied if I say confidentiality."

I crossed my arms and waited him out.

"I saw you leave the house I was watching." He watched my face when he said it. "Not enter it. Leave it."

Daniel's house. So he'd been watching Daniel, and I'd walked right into his sightline. Not Daniel who hired him, then, not with that kind of money behind a job like this. Faith, maybe. But Faith had the whole Agency at her back; she wouldn't need to hire out.

"Is that enough?" he asked.

"One more question." I studied him, the wear on his jacket, the grey coming in at his temples. "Who are you? Really."

He tipped his head, almost admiring. "Bit rude, asking that when I know nothing about you." He pushed off the wall, unhurried. "Tell you what. You tell me what you are, I'll tell you about myself."

*

I laughed, and it came out easier than I expected. "You know what, I'll pass. I got the gist of it anyway." I looked him over once more. "Give me your business card."

He blinked. "My what?"

"Business card. You said you were an investigator." I let my head tilt a little, my voice dropping without my permission. "Maybe I'd like to hire a man like you myself."

He coughed, one hand going for his jacket pocket before he seemed to remember what he was reaching for. He pulled out a cigarette instead and didn't light it, just turned it between two fingers.

"Don't carry cards," he said. "But if you're serious, you can come by the office."

"And where would that be?"

"Cromwell Passage. Number four." He said it without a beat of hesitation, the kind of confidence that usually meant the truth.

I knew every street within three miles of here, knew them from years of walking this city long before any of this started. There was no Cromwell Passage. Not off this road, not anywhere near it.

"There's no such street," I said.

His jaw worked once. "And how the hell would you know that?"

I didn't answer. I let the silence sit there and do the work for me.

He held my eyes for a second, then swore under his breath and dug into his jacket. He came out with a card, real this time, corner bent, a brown ring soaked into one edge where a coffee cup had sat too long, a small black scorch mark scarring the other corner.

"That good enough for you?" he said, holding it out at arm's length like it cost him something.

I took it, turned it over once, and smiled. "You're free to go."

He didn't wait for a second invitation. He turned and walked out of the alley muttering something with more swearing in it than words, shoulders up around his ears, the unlit cigarette still in his hand.

I stayed where I was and looked at the card under the one working streetlamp. Tristan Vance. A phone number. An address that, I'd bet, was as real as the office he claimed to have.

A missing man. That was what he'd said. And I'd walked straight out of Daniel's front door in front of him, in this face, on this night, when the only man missing from London that mattered to me was standing in my own skin somewhere I hadn't found yet.

Somebody had paid him to look. Somebody with money, patience, and no name they were willing to put on it.

I turned the card over once more before I tucked it away. Whoever they were, they'd just handed me a thread. I didn't intend to let it go slack.

*

The walk back took twenty minutes. Nobody trailed me this time, or they'd learned to do it properly. I checked twice anyway, once at the corner where the streetlight buzzed and once outside a shuttered newsagent, and both times the street behind me stayed empty.

I found myself humming. Aria's tune, the one she'd hummed at me over breakfast three days running until it lodged somewhere I couldn't dig it out. I let it run under my breath the rest of the way to Daniel's door.

I used his key. The sitting room lamp was still on, throwing yellow light across the leather sofa, and Daniel lay across it with one arm thrown over his eyes and his shirt rucked up over his stomach. He'd taken the couch anyway.

I stood over him for a second. Idiot.

I crouched and shook his shoulder. "Daniel."

He came up swinging one hand before his eyes even opened, caught himself, blinked at me. "Wh—. What time is it."

"Late. You need to hear this."

He rubbed his face with both hands and pushed himself upright, the blanket sliding off his knees. "Can it wait until morning."

"You were supposed to sleep in the bed. You don't get a vote on whether it's important."

That got a huff out of him, half amusement, half complaint, but he was already sitting straighter, elbows on his knees.

"Besides." I sat on the arm of the sofa. "You're being watched."

He went still for exactly one breath and then sat up fully, feet flat on the floor. "The what."

"Someone hired a private investigator to look for me. My body, the real one. He was watching your house tonight. I caught him on my walk." I reached into my ring and drew out the card, held it out between two fingers. "We had a conversation. He gave me this."

Daniel took it, turned it under the lamp. Coffee ring on one corner, a small black scorch on the other. He read the name twice, mouthing it the second time.

"Tristan Vance." He looked up at me. "You're sure you didn't just find this on the pavement somewhere."

"When have you ever known me to joke about something like this."

He opened his mouth, some retort half-formed, and then closed it again. His thumb moved over the scorched corner of the card without seeming to notice it was doing that.

"You think we should contact him," he said instead.

"Maybe he knows something we don't." I took the card back and turned it face up so the phone number caught the light. "Somebody's spending money looking for a missing man in this city. That somebody isn't us, and it isn't Faith, because Faith would've told you outright instead of paying a stranger to sit outside your house."

Daniel dragged a hand through his hair, glanced toward the dark hallway and the stairs beyond it, then back at me.

"Right," he said. "Morning, then. We call him in the morning."

"Morning," I agreed, and didn't move from the arm of the sofa.