Chapter 37 - Part 1: Smoke and Mirrors (Patreon)

Daniel held up both hands. "Hold on. It's nothing like that. We're friends."

"We're friends," I said, in case flat agreement carried more weight than his protest.

Tristan smirked around the cigarette he still hadn't lit and gave us a look that did the work of an entire paragraph. "Sure."

Daniel's mouth opened, already loading whatever came next. I got there first, before he could sink us any further.

"Why do you assume we're going to help you?"

Tristan struck the lighter and touched it to the end of the cigarette, taking his time about it. "Because we're after the same man. That's why you came here in the first place. I'm your best shot in this city and you both know it." He exhaled toward the ceiling. "Not like there's a long list of people qualified to help you look anyway."

"There's the Agency," I said. "More resources than one man with a scarred hand and a bad habit."

He laughed, short and genuine. "Please. AOR working with a demon? Way things are over there right now, you wouldn't so much as lift a finger without three departments signing off and a binding circle drawn under your feet first." He tapped ash into a chipped saucer. "And even if they'd stomach it, how do you plan on convincing an entire agency to drop whatever fire they're currently putting out to go looking for one missing man?"

He looked between the two of us. "Even Agent Clarke can't give you more than her lunch hours on this. Whatever she owes him, it's a part-time arrangement at best." He drew on the cigarette. "Work with me, and you're not down to one man anymore."

Daniel's brow creased. "Wait. How do you know about Faith?"

"Please." Tristan didn't even blink. "She's his ex. You're his oldest friend. That's not exactly buried treasure, that's just knowing how to ask around. Try a better question."

Daniel's jaw set. "Fine. Then tell me how do you know I'm not exactly a human?"

"Been watching you longer than a day." Tristan examined the cigarette between two nicotine-stained fingers. "Though if I'm honest, the kitchen window did most of the convincing. Blood bag, straight from the fridge, five in the morning, blinds wide open." He looked genuinely amused. "Close them next time. Even the type that doesn't mind sunlight ought to have some manners about it."

I turned to Daniel. He didn't strike me as careless, and it showed on his face that he hadn't expected to be caught at it.

"What," he said, palms out. "It was from a blood bank. I didn't hurt anyone."

Tristan's smile widened, easy, unbothered. "So. Work with me, or take your chances on your own."

I let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "And here I thought I was supposed to be the only demon in the room."

"What can I say." He set the cigarette down, smoke curling off the ashtray between us. "Shady deals are part of my charm."

*

"Fine," I said. "We work together. But you tell us everything you've already dug up. All of it, nothing held back."

Tristan spread his hands, cigarette pinched between two fingers. "Fine by me. Though fair's fair, I'll have a few questions of my own before the night's out."

"As long as they're not too personal."

"Everything's personal in this line of work. But I'll try to keep it professional." He leaned back against the desk and took a slow drag before starting. "Might as well begin at the top, even if you already know most of it. Recap never hurt anyone."

He ran through it clean, no glances down, no pauses to hunt for a name. "Engineering job. University. One lasting friendship." He nodded toward Daniel without breaking rhythm. "One ex-girlfriend. Everyone else, gone the second the degree finished. Workplace was polite. Nobody invited him for a pint after."

True enough. I hadn't liked socializing much either, not the human version of it. Mark—my old roommate—was the only name from that stretch of life I still bothered keeping in a contacts list, and even that was down to sporadic messages that meant nothing beyond habit.

Tristan lingered on Faith. "His girlfriend ended things with him a month before he vanished."

I opened my mouth, the protest already rising in my chest, but Daniel got there first.

"You're not suggesting Faith had something to do with it."

"I'm not suggesting anything." Tristan tapped ash loose. "Just putting it on the table. Even with what she's got access to, I don't read her for it. Wasn't cold enough."

He shifted his weight off the desk, and something in his voice dropped a register. "Went by the orphanage too."

"You think Liam went back there?" I asked.

"Not really. But when a trail runs this cold, you start looking at the whole shape of the thing, not just the last few steps." He held up a finger. "Here's the anomaly. No trace of where he came from. No name attached, no note, no family history. Kids don't just appear on a doorstep with nothing on them."

"Still not impossible," I said.

The name had been handed to me as fact, something my parents had supposedly left behind. A lie, apparently, dressed up as inheritance. Learning otherwise from a stranger's mouth in an office that smelled of stale smoke didn't sit any easier than it should have.

"Not impossible," Tristan agreed. "But there's usually a paper trail. A form somewhere, a CCTV frame of whoever carried the kid in. I talked to one of the old caretakers, still working there after all these years. Camera on that door happened to be down that exact day." He let that sit a beat. "Lot of coincidence stacking up in one place."

He went on. "Asked her about the boy himself. She wouldn't give me specifics. Just kept calling him wrong. Over and over, that word. Couldn't tell me what she meant by it. Like she'd talked herself out of remembering the details a long time ago."

Nothing about that matched anything I carried. Quiet, maybe. Kept to myself, certainly. But the staff had never treated me like something to be careful around.

"And then past five years old," Tristan said, "he's just a normal kid. Whatever that wrong business was, it stopped. No record of an intervention. No therapy file, no incident report. Either the woman's memory's gone soft with age, or something happened nobody bothered writing down."

Daniel shifted in his chair. "That's about when we met. He was odd, sure. Kept to the edges more than the other kids did. But wrong isn't the word I'd have used. Lonely, maybe."

I gave him a look he didn't catch, too busy holding Tristan's gaze. It had been Daniel, and only Daniel, who'd made that place bearable at all.

Tristan rolled the cigarette between two fingers, watching the smoke curl off the end. "Anyway. There's a shape to this if you squint. Man appears from nowhere as a kid, twenty-six years pass, then he disappears the same way. No trail either direction."

He set the cigarette down in the chipped saucer. "I've worked plenty of missing person cases. Messy business, all of them, but there's always a scrap left behind somewhere. A receipt, a text, a footprint in the wrong flowerbed. This one's got nothing." He looked at me directly. "Except that old magic sitting in his flat."

"So where does that leave you," I said.

"Three shapes it could take." He held up a finger. "One, he planned it himself and walked off clean." Another finger. "Two, somebody else cleaned up after him, made the trail disappear on purpose." The third finger came up slower. "Three, something I haven't got a box for yet. That's the one the magic residue points toward, if I'm honest."

He didn't say anything else for a moment, just let the three options sit in the room with the smoke.

Then his eyes came back to me, and stayed there. Daniel's followed a beat after, sliding sideways in the same direction, waiting to see what I'd do with any of it.

*

"I'd put money on the magic part," I said. "Whatever else this shape has, that's the piece that doesn't fit anywhere else."

"Yeah." Daniel leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Whatever his faults, running off without a word isn't one of them."

"Faults." I let the word sit between us a beat too long.

"You know what I mean," he said, not looking at me.

Tristan watched the exchange without comment, then flicked the last of his cigarette into the saucer. "Either of you got anything to add before I keep going?"

Daniel glanced at me.

I folded my hands. "I tried a locating spell of my own. It pointed me to a vampire den, so I went and looked through it floor to floor. No trace of him anywhere inside."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning either something in the building interfered with the casting, or he's somewhere the spell can't reach."

Tristan said nothing. He just leaned back and let the silence stretch, the cigarette forgotten between his fingers.

I turned the question over first, testing the shape of it before I said it aloud. Not the whole truth. Just enough truth to point him somewhere useful. "Is it possible the old magic you found in the flat was the kind used on souls? Not bodies."

"What makes you say that."

"I've made some progress of my own." I kept my voice level. "I can tell you his soul isn't in his body anymore. If it were, I'd have found him by now."

Tristan sat with that a moment. The cigarette rolled once between his fingers, then went still. "Makes sense with what I've got." He reached into his jacket and came out with a small quartz crystal, dull and unremarkable in his palm. "Didn't have the right kit on me when I went by the flat. This is a low-grade capture, whatever residue was left. Better than nothing, but not by much." He held it out. "Anything you can tell me from it?"

I took it. Turned it in the light, feeling for the shape of the essence stored inside. "Nothing I can pull out myself. But I know someone who might be able to. I'd need to take it with me."

"To Hell," Tristan said, flat.

I nodded.

"Then forgive me if I hang onto it a while longer." He didn't reach to take it back yet, just held his hand open, waiting. "I know a person who could cipher this properly. I'd rather it went through them first."

"Why not go to them already, if you had it captured this long."

"Because they're on the other side of the planet right now." He shrugged, unbothered. "Should be back before too long, though."

I set the crystal back into his palm and sat back.

"Right." Tristan pocketed the stone and reached for another cigarette he didn't light. "My turn for a question or two, if we're still keeping the score."