Page 44 of The Turning of the Tables

“Be there in less than ten,” I replied, then grabbed the massive gear duffel and the van keys and yelled for Quincy as I headed to the parking lot in the back.

The answertohow can you have a hit-and-run in an alleywas that the hitting part happened before the running part—the victim just didn’t make it all that far, at least judging by the blood out in the street. Either the victim or someone else had opened the alley gate, and the man had staggered—trailing blood—about thirty feet before collapsing.

It had been called in as a witnessed hit-and-run, which provided a perfectly plausible explanation for the bruising, scrapes, and swelling that mottled the victim’s body. Half his face was a mess of road-rash, but the part we could see showed him as mid-twenties or early thirties, fairly attractive, a carefully trimmed goatee and otherwise smooth brown skin. He was a faun, dark horns curling up out of thick black hair, black fur on his lower legs under loose, dark blue denim shorts.

I felt guilty for thinking that at least this victim wasn’t going to put us all at risk of catching Arcanavirus. At the same time, the look I shared with Quincy over the body suggested that we were both thinking—and feeling—the same thing.

Maza was at the entryway to the alley, staring down at some of the blood spatter, talking on the phone to someone about how long he was or wasn’t going to keep this part of Broad Street closed. It was almost rush-hour on a Tuesday, and traffic coming out of downtown was going to become an absolute mess—because the smear on the pavement and the trail meant that we were going to be doing quite a bit of documentation, so it was going to be a while.

Maza’s dark eyes were unfocused, his black hair sticking out at slightly odd angles from running his fingers through it. There were dark circles under his eyes and a bit of an unhealthy pallor to his skin that suggested he hadn’t been sleeping—or probably eating—well.

He wasn’t the only one. I’d been doing better since my last phone… conversation with Elliot. It wasn’t like we’d actuallytalkedtalked, but the connection, and the fact that he kept texting me, made it feel like whatever we had wasn’t over. Which was probably not long-term healthy, since weweren’t going to have an actual relationship—Rule Two—but I wasn’t ready to let go of him yet.

And yes, I am fully aware that whatever it was we had going on was only going to make it harder for me to let go of him, but I didn’t want to actually think about that.

So instead I thought about the fact that a faun who had just been hit by—according to the witness accounts—an SUV had decided not only to get out of the street, which made sense, but to keep running down a dark alley. And that part didn’t make sense unless he had some reason to think someone was chasing him.

But the witness hadn’t said anything about the SUV stopping.

And it wasn’t my job.

The ME’s van pulled up shortly after Quincy and I had arrived, and we’d gotten to work on marking the blood in the street, picking up fragments of headlight plastic that had presumably broken on impact with the victim’s body, marking the blood trail, and indicating a couple of likely tire marks on the curb that suggested the driver had actually swerved into the curb—maybe even at the victim—rather than swerving away into the far lane.

There were no skid marks that suggested the driver hit the brakes.

Sure, that might mean that our victim had jumped or fallen or run out into traffic so suddenly that the driver hadn’t had the time to react by swerving or breaking, but that was being far more generous with humanity than I was inclined to be.

I wasn’t a detective, but I’m also not stupid. No sign of braking, tire scuff on the curbs, plus a victim who had just been hit by an SUV getting up andrunning—that said to me that whoever had hit him had been hunting him, targetinghim. Maybe he knew them and had made an enemy of them, or maybe they had just seen him walking and decided that he didn’t deserve to live because he was a Nid.

I was afraid it was the latter.

Don’t get me wrong—either way, it was horrific. But the idea that someone had an enemy fit better within the idea that there were reasons that bad things happened. Certainly, murder isn’t ever justified, but if this faun was a criminal, a bad person, then there was some sense that the loss of his life wasn’tasbad as if he were completely innocent.

The human mind will try to justify anything, to make sense of anything. It makes people feel better if they feel like some kind of order or balance is being maintained in the universe. But if the violence was arbitrary, a random act of hatred, thenanyonecould become a victim.Anyone—no, sorry, any Arcanid—could be run down simply for walking down the street.

And I didn’t want to think about the fact that it could have been Noah walking down Broad Street. It could have been Hart or Mason or Taavi. Or Elliot. People I cared about.

I’ve worked enough homicide scenes—or even non-homicide death scenes, like the homeless woman who was found dead on Brown Island a few weeks back—to know full well that justice and reason played very little role in the way people treated each other. Violence, greed, and neglect were all too common among both families and strangers.

After all, you were more likely to get murdered by someone who knew you than a complete stranger.

Which meant that this poor faun was more likely run down by someone who knew him than a random motorist who just happened to hate Nids. I guess that should have made me feel better, because it meant that the odds of Noahor Elliot being the victim of random anti-Nid violence was… Well, it was still shit.

I didn’t live under a rock, which meant that I was acutely, painfully aware of what the news had been covering over the past few years. I’d worked some of the deaths at the MFM riots in Richmond. I’d seen Hart limping and wincing in pain after the riots. And I’d seen his face after he’d taken down a ritual cult that practiced Arcanid sacrifice. Another cult.

At least we hadn’t hadanothercult since. Not a sacrificial one, anyway. Cults saw a pretty big boom worldwide after the Arcanavirus first hit a little over three decades ago. Most of them weren’t like the two that had done their best to turn Richmond into an Arcanid graveyard. Most were benign—people who, now that magic was actuallyreal, wanted to tap into it. People who wanted to find a way to make sense of it. To find a new way of understanding the world that accounted for something they’d been told for centuries didn’t exist or was the product of evil. Of Satan.

Most people had tried to adapt to their new magical reality. Chose new faiths that reflected a world with magic in it. Tried to modify their faiths and traditions to include something that they hadn’t had to accommodate before.

Of course, there were also those who refused to change their ways, their beliefs. People who decided that if the Bible said that magic and witchcraft were evil, then they were evil. The widespread presence of magic wasn’t a contradiction to that, but, rather, a confirmation of the widespread sinfulness and wickedness of the world. To them, the Arcanavirus pandemic was a curse from God, judgment spread across the world designed to eliminate the corrupt so that the pure could be separated and sanctified.

Those people scared me a lot more than the neocultistswho danced naked in the rain and offered up candles and berries under the full moon. Magic was real—whether we chose to accept it, embrace it, or reject it was up to us. But those who saw it as a curse, as judgment, were far more likely to reject the people who were changed by Arcana—to view them as less worthy.

And when some people are seen as less worthy, they become easier to discriminate against, easier to legislate into a second-class, easier to kill.

I looked down at the faun’s broken body, pooled blood congealing against the cracked pavement. His dark eyes, their pupils horizontal and dilated, were open, already filming over. He was lying on his back, one leg twisted in a way that suggested it was broken or dislocated, one arm curled in toward his chest. Blood stained his jean shorts, his shirt, his skin. I imagined some of the fur on his twisted leg was probably matted with it, but it was black, so you couldn’t see it.

Tierney looked up, his light eyes serious. “I’m going to check his pockets for ID.”