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I decided to let it go. After all, he’d clearly made the choice to be with me…and that choice had to have been a difficult one. I’d never been part of a close-knit family and community the way Calvin was, and so I didn’t have much frame of reference when it came to living my life against other people’s wishes.
What I’d told him was the truth, though. I’d never betray his secret, would take it with me to the grave.
“So…what now?” I asked, and he bent and kissed me again, more gently this time, before he straightened once more and glanced around the clearing.
“We solve this crime,” he said.
13
Backstabbers
Right.Calvin and I had both come to the clearing with the same purpose in mind — to discover Lilith Black’s killer.
“I didn’t sense a darn thing,” I said, my tone now plaintive, and he smiled and shook his head.
“I couldn’t pick up anything, either,” he replied. “Or at least, nothing specific. There’s the scent of lots of different people here, but trying to tease out any one individual feels almost impossible.”
Frowning a little, I stepped away from him and walked clockwise around the remains of the bonfire, hoping that maybe if I trod the same path as those who’d been here the night before, I might be able to pick up something of their energy. After I’d made my circuit, I paused and glanced over at Calvin.
“Still nothing,” I said. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I almost wish this place really was haunted by Lilith’s ghost. At least that way, I could talk to her and maybe get some answers.”
“She’s definitely not here?”
“Not that I can tell.” I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and looked around once again. “It’s always really difficult to say who will move on to the next plane and who’ll get stuck on this one. Sudden, violent death isn’t always the key. Even when people lose their life that way, they don’t always stick around.”
Calvin seemed to absorb that piece of information, his own forehead puckered with a frown. “Any theories as to why Lilith seems to have moved on so quickly when Lucien didn’t?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “I mean, I suppose it could be something as simple as him having actual power and her being a total fraud. His will was strong enough to keep him anchored here, since he desperately wanted to communicate to me who his killers were.”
“It’s still kind of amazing to think she was faking the whole thing,” Calvin said. “All those followers. You’d think one of them would’ve been able to see through her act.”
I shrugged. “People believe what they want to believe. All it takes is someone telling them the story they want to hear, and they’re willing to suspend a heck of a lot of disbelief. So many people desperately want to believe that witchcraft — magic — will come along and cure all their ills. It’s just not that simple, though.”
He gave a faint nod, as if absorbing my comments. “But it’s real, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes.” There might have been a lot of things in the world I wasn’t entirely certain about, but magic definitely wasn’t one of them. “It’s not always as showy as some people want to think, but it exists.” I paused there and slanted a look up at him. “I’m surprised you’d be even a little skeptical, considering — ”
“Considering I’m a coyote shifter?” he cut in, grinning so his teeth flashed in the moonlight. “I guess I can see why you’d think there might be a bit of cognitive dissonance there. I suppose the whole shifter thing has been a part of my people’s history for so long that I don’t really think of it as magic. It’s just…what is.”
“How did it happen?” I asked next, genuinely curious. After all, an entire tribe of people who could change their forms and morph into coyotes wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you ran into every day.
“The legends say that one of the San Ramon Apaches’ chiefs fell asleep in the lair of a coyote one night while out hunting, but we don’t really know for sure.” Calvin looked away from me then, gazing off into the distance, as if searching for that long-forgotten spot. “It was many, many years ago, long before the colonizers came to this continent.”
So, at least five hundred years. I had to remind myself that Calvin’s people had lived on this same land for generation upon generation. Back then, they wouldn’t have called themselves the San Ramon Apaches, since even I knew that was a name bestowed upon them by their Spanish conquerors.
Well, whenever and however it had happened, clearly, the San Ramon people had learned to live with their peculiar talent. At the moment, I was just glad that Calvin had decided not to allow it to be a barrier between us anymore.
And, as he’d said a few minutes earlier, we had a crime to solve. I was very, very glad that he’d said “we”; unlike the case of Lucien’s murder, Calvin didn’t seem inclined to tell me to butt out this time.
Probably because he knew I wouldn’t listen anyway.
“I wish we had something more to go on,” I said, and his expression hardened, signaling that he’d recognized the change of subject.
“I do, too.” He looked around the clearing, then let out a disgusted-sounding breath. “But there were just too many people in this spot recently to have any one individual come through clearly. Same problem when we first swept the crime scene — there were so many footprints, so much physical evidence like cigarette butts and discarded tickets, that kind of thing, that I doubt we’ll be able to make much sense of it. My deputies took all the evidence back to the station to have it analyzed, but I have a feeling we won’t find much.”
I nodded, then glanced around as well. It sounded as though the crowds at Lilith’s ritual had left behind something of a mess, but clearly, Calvin’s deputies — and then Tansy and whoever she’d brought with her to finish cleaning up the place — had made sure there wasn’t much remaining to clutter the scene.
And I seemed to be having the devil of a time picking up any useful vibrations. This sort of thing had happened to me before, so I knew I couldn’t force it. Sometimes I could walk into a house and practically hear an argument someone had had there the day before, and other times I couldn’t feel anything more than any regular person might. With focus and meditation, I’d managed to strengthen my psychic powers over the years, but they weren’t foolproof, by any stretch of the imagination.
