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As they silently sat down at the table, Chase motioned to the coffee urn. “If you want, we have fresh coffee, and there’s also hot water for tea. Would you like a soda?” He glanced at the boy.
“Um…sure. Coke, please.” The kid’s voice was shaky, and he sounded surprised. I had the feeling he was waiting for the iron to drop in the fire.
Chase gave Delilah a dollar, who plugged it into the vending machine. She handed the kid a Coke. Lindsey fixed coffee for herself and her friend. When she glanced over at us, Delilah and I shook our heads. Delilah didn’t like coffee, and I’d tasted the coffee at HQ before. I knew better.
Chase motioned for us to gather round. He sat across from the boy but leaned back in his chair and stuck his hands in his pockets. I knew what he was up to with his casual stance. He was trying to diminish some of the authoritarian scare that cops held over kids.
“Why don’t you introduce me to your friends, Lindsey?” He nodded to her.
Lindsey gave him a nod in return. “Sure thing. This is Tracy Smyth and her son, Sean. Tracy, Sean, this is Detective Johnson—he’s the director of the Faerie-Human Crime Scene Investigation unit. Tracy is part of my coven, Detective. And Sean is in my training coven for teens.”
Chase leaned forward, shook Tracy’s hand, and gave Sean a friendly nod. “Thank you both for coming down. Lindsey said that you may have seen something this morning, Sean? Something frightening?”
Sean glanced at his mother, who tried to reassure him.
“It’s okay. Go on. Tell him what you saw, honey.” She patted his arm and he pulled away.
“Mommmm, don’t call me that in public.” He blushed. Ah yes, the teen years. FBHs had it hard when it came to hormones and puberty. The Fae were born with them already active. We grew up used to them raging through our systems. But that didn’t necessarily help us control them.
“Your mother is just concerned, son. Maybe cut her a little slack?” Chase flashed a smile at Sean, who shrugged, then cracked a smile of his own.
“Yeah, okay. Sorry, Mom.”
“Now, suppose you tell me what you saw.” Chase leaned forward and pulled a steno pad toward him as he took out a pen from his jacket. “And don’t worry. If what Ms. Cartridge has told me is true, you’re not going to get in trouble. You could help us a great deal if you’d tell us everything you witnessed. One of my officers was killed early this morning. He left a wife, and a daughter just about your age. If you noticed anything, you could make a great difference by helping us catch whoever did this.”
Sean worried his lip for a moment, then let out a long sigh. “I was out in the graveyard—”
“Which one?”
“The Wedgewood Cemetery. Part of our magical training is to learn how to use graveyard dirt. Usually we have some around the house, but we were out and I have Circle tonight and needed to finish my homework for it.” Sean’s voice started to even out a little as he spoke. He stopped to take a swig of the soda, then wiped his mouth.
“Homework. Gets you every time, doesn’t it, whether it’s school or magic?” Chase raised his eyebrows, and the kid visibly relaxed.
“Yeah, sure does. And Lindsey—Ms. Cartridge—works us hard. She’s tough—” He gulped and flashed Lindsey a sheepish smile. “Sorry, Ms. Cartridge, but you know you make us work hard. But you’re fair. Anyway, I was working by the hours, so I had to get up really early in the morning to do this.”
“What’s that mean?” Chase asked, glancing up. I couldn’t tell if he really wanted to know or was just trying to draw out Sean, but whatever the case, it worked.
Sean warmed up, leaning forward. “See, there are specific parts of the day that relate to some spells, and you have to do the work within that time period or you mess it up. I was supposed to do an early morning meditation on the ancestors, and the main spell component is graveyard dirt. That’s when I realized we were out of it. We live near the cemetery, so I thought I’d just run over there and grab a handful.”
“You know that dirt wouldn’t be consecrated and cleansed, Sean.” Lindsey frowned at him.
“I know, but what else was I gonna do? You’d think I was shirking if I didn’t do my best to gather what I needed. And you always know when we’re fudging our answers about homework.” Sean scowled, staring at the table.
“Yes, but you can always use a substitute. Remember, I told you that mixing valerian, mandrake, belladonna, and garden soil will work in a pinch.” She tapped the table with her fingernails. “Just remember that next time, okay?”
Sean ducked his head. “Sorry, Ms. C.”
Chase cleared his throat. “If we could leave the teaching till later?”
Lindsey blushed. “Oh, geez, I’m sorry!”
With a chuckle, Chase waved off her apology. “Not a problem. Okay, Sean, how about you continue? You decided to go over to the cemetery to grab a handful of graveyard dirt?”
Sean nodded. “Yeah. I threw on my jacket and ran over there. There wasn’t anybody there, that I could tell at first, so I headed in to find an old grave—I didn’t want to disturb anybody who’d recently been buried, and the older the graveyard dirt, the better.”
“Really? That’s interesting.”
As I watched them talk, it occurred to me that Chase was going to make a great father. He had a way with kids that I didn’t really understand, but could appreciate. Sharah’s baby was going to be well loved, at least over here Earthside. Being half-breed and a member of the royal family would bring its own set of problems back in Otherworld.
