Fire Within - By Ally Shields Page 0,24
substance and tossed the pieces into a three-foot blender. Pots hissed, tubing bubbled in the noisy and colorful landscape.
Ari’s attention was immediately drawn to the activity on her right. An old man with a long beard was standing in front of a steaming, bubbling pot. He shifted his weight from one foot to another and muttered under his breath. Every few seconds he punctuated his chant by dropping a pinch of powder into the fermenting broth. Ari briefly wondered if he could conjure something to stop the dreams, but she knew it wasn’t that simple.
She turned away and searched the room for Gillian, spotting her slim figure wrapped in yellow and purple. Gillian wasn’t blind to basic fashion, but she could argue forever about the negative effects of white lab coats on creativity. She looked up as Ari approached.
“Couldn’t wait for me to call, huh? Since you’re here, take a look at this.” She pointed to a jar on the counter in front of her and stood aside.
Ari looked at the squishy mass inside. “It’s a bunch of tiny eyeballs. So what?”
“Eye of newt,” Gillian said.
“What do you want with lizard eyeballs?”
“Technically, salamander. Ari, I’m surprised at you. As a witch, you should be familiar with Macbeth. ‘Eye of newt, toe of frog.’”
Stunned, Ari stared at her. “You’re trying to make a potion? Gillian, that’s an old wives’ tale. That stuff,” she point at the jar in distaste, “isn’t good for anything.”
Gillian’s merry laugh broke out. “Gotcha! You and I may know that, but the fake sorcerer we raided didn’t. This was one of his staple items. You should’ve seen his crystal ball. It was plastic.”
Ari rolled her eyes. Couldn’t the frauds at least do the research? And buy the right equipment? At least another charlatan was out of business. Since most of the human public couldn’t tell the difference, the frauds and wannabes did a lot of damage and ruined the reputations of genuine conjurers.
“Very funny, Gilli, but I hope some of this mess is from my crime scene.” Ari nodded to the collection of papers and test tubes covering the elf’s work space. “Learn anything?”
“Nothing earth shattering. Blood, anger, fear. The energy source analysis was a mixture, as expected.” She handed Ari a printed report. “Everything from vampire to lycanthrope to demon.”
“Demon?” Ari frowned.
“It was faint. Lots of halfling demons live peacefully in the city.”
“Yeah, I know. Rarely seen them, but I worked with one last year for a while. Interesting guy. Nothing like the full bloods. So, anything else?” Ari folded the source report and put it in her pocket. She’d give Ryan a copy. Not that he’d care.
“Give me a break,” Gillian protested. “We’re still filtering. It’s hard to filter out all the human scent. May take two or three more days. Your human cops were thorough—contaminated the entire scene.”
Ari grinned at Gillian’s complaint. Such tunnel vision. If it interfered with the sensory work, it had to be bad. “Is that the long way of saying you don’t have anything else for me?”
“Mostly. There is one puzzle. I processed everything in the parking lot. Handfuls of gravel from the sides. Even swabbed the leaves on the bushes, as you suggested. And I didn’t find what should have been there.” She paused and looked at Ari. “No odor or energy trace of a gun being discharged in the area.”
Ari’s mouth dropped open. “Are you saying a gun wasn’t used?”
“Well, I can’t go that far. But I can’t prove it was either. My finding is inconclusive. The time lag worked against us. After twelve hours it’s hard to pick up gun trace energy even with OFR equipment and skills.”
The “skills” she referred to involved a complicated process of enhancing potions, machine analysis, and magical beings specially selected and trained for their sense of smell and sensitivity to all types of energy, including magical. They could detect things not found by other methods. It usually brought good results, if swabs and collections were timely.
Inconclusive. Ari compressed her lips. Damn. Ryan’s bureaucratic snafu had bit them again.
Chapter Five
The drive to the rolling hill country where Rosalina lived took an hour. Not a long trip, but long enough to move from thinking about the lab report to worrying about the evening ahead. Plenty of time for her stomach to turn flip-flops. When pieces of the dreams began to play an endless loop in Ari’s head—his face, his voice, she began to talk aloud, sharing her fears with Mini, her intrepid car.