Murder Between the Worlds: A Between the Worlds Novel Read online

  Many houses in the neighborhood had been abandoned decades ago as people moved closer to the Earth edge of town after the Sundering had ripped the fabric of reality and permanently fused the two worlds together. Of course the town had torn the abandoned homes down over the years, but it meant that the old Victorian that had once been surrounded by tightly packed neighbors now stood alone in the middle of a rough wood that was quickly reclaiming the empty lots. There were only three other houses on their street and none of them were exactly close, making the house a tempting target for thieves. And living by the wild wood meant that it wasn’t uncommon for fairy creatures to wander in either, like the pixies that had invaded the garden a few weeks back, or the ghostly dog that had gotten into the house and taken hours to chase back out.

  I should be grateful Syn’s working tonight, Allie thought grudgingly looking for the bright side, she’d be charging down the hall waving her gun and scaring everyone to death. Allie knew that Syndra had become a police officer because she genuinely wanted to help people but she often teased the other woman about joining the police force just for an excuse to wear the gun. And handcuff people, although that second accusation was more accurate than teasing given Syn’s personality and proclivities.

  She moved down the stairs trying not to anticipate what she might see, but was still unsurprised to find Bleidd’s tall, dark form sprawled out next to the broken remains of what had been a coat rack, side table, and hallway lamp. The clearly intoxicated elf was trying to get back to his feet without success and the tang of blood mixing with the waves of alcohol in the air told Allie he’d probably cut himself on the broken glass from the lamp. Certain it was unnecessary, her eyes nonetheless flickered quickly around the space by the door, but no one else was there. She had known there wouldn’t be anyone; in all the years they’d been roommates Bleidd had never brought anyone, friend or lover, back to the house. Allie suppressed a sigh, tried not to think about how much effort it took him to get drunk in the first place, given his tolerance for alcohol, and moved to help him. She had no doubt this was one of his worse episodes based on his current inability to stand. Even drunk and collapsed in the wreckage of the furniture Bleidd was beautiful in the way that all the elves were. His long black hair had escaped the ponytail he usually wore it in and hung loose around his face. His attempt at non-descript dress–jeans and a black t-shirt–looked incongruous on his tall, lean frame, as if he were trying too hard to be someone he wasn’t. There was an aura of Otherworldliness about him that guaranteed no one would ever mistake him for human, even without glimpsing the gracefully pointed ears.

  His green eyes fixed on her as she crossed the last few feet between them. He smiled widely, oblivious to the wreckage around him, and greeted her in Elvish.

  “Aliaine!” he said, drawing the pronunciation of her full name out into ah-lee-aw-ny-uh, as if each syllable was separate. “Are you heading out to work already?”

  She was really tempted to answer him in English so she could avoid the headache of trying to conjugate in Elvish, but wasn’t sure if he was sober enough to understand the native language.

  “No, Blay-the,” she said, intentionally drawing his name out as he had done hers, “it’s still night.” She spoke as patiently as she could under the circumstances and was rewarded with a befuddled look. He turned and peered intently at the nearest window as if he expected the darkness to disappear.

  “Truly?” he asked and simultaneously reached out to grab her, trying again to stand, this time by using her to pull himself up. Caught off guard by the sudden movement, Allie staggered and almost joined him on the floor.

  “Bleidd,” She grunted, fighting to keep her balance as his weight shifted wildly. He was a foot taller than she was and almost 50 pounds heavier, “Bleidd, stop.”

  He let her go so quickly that she fell back into the wall with a thump. It was enormously tempting to leave him to sleep it off on the floor, but she considered him one of her few good friends, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to leave him to his own drunken devices. He looked up at her, wide eyed, “Did I hurt you?”

  “No, but I think you hurt yourself,” she replied gently.

  He looked quizzical for a moment, and then seemed to lose focus. “Where are your pants?”

  She smacked his bloody hand away as he reached out towards her bare legs. How drunk are you, she thought, feeling really irritated, but she kept her voice calm when she answered.

  “In my room. Come on. You’ve cut yourself; let’s go see how bad it is.”

  His head dropped, his long dark hair falling across his face as he turned both hands palm up and studied them minutely. After a few seconds he looked up at her, surprised, “I cut my hand.”

  “Yes, I know, come on…”

  He talked over her, “It doesn’t hurt.”

  “My friend,” She said, as if she were speaking to a small child, “You are extremely drunk.”

  “Are we friends?” His voice was sad, but she refused to be distracted now. When he was drunk enough he often sank into self-pitying reflections about being Outcast. She genuinely felt for him, being cut off from his own people and society, but she’d heard the same story too many times to get sucked into it again now.

  “Yes, good friends,” she said, sliding an arm under his shoulder and managing to get him more-or-less on his feet. She felt a sudden press of tangled emotions coming from him, and took a moment to strengthen her personal shields; the energetic barriers that protected her were her only line of defense against feeling the unwanted emotions of other people. Usually Allie was very good at ignoring her inborn ability, but sometimes, especially when she was touching someone, she couldn’t totally block it out. She had long ago decided that being an empath was extremely inconvenient. “Come on, help me out here, you’re too heavy for me to carry…”

  By alternating coaxing and pushing she managed to get him down the hall and into the first floor bathroom, where she let him slide gracelessly to the floor. The house was old and nowhere did it show more than in the bathrooms with their claw footed tubs and hand carved cabinets. Liz could probably live for a year on what she’d get selling the vintage fixtures. Allie thought, not for the first time. Well, she could think about that later; right now she was crammed into the narrow room with a drunken elf bleeding on the pretty tile floor–also not for the first time. She flipped the light switch by the door, wanting better light to see by in case he had any glass in his hand, and the room was filled with weak yellow light from the single wall sconce. Vintage, she thought, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

  He watched her silently as she quickly gathered the basic first aid supplies to deal with whatever damage he’d done to himself. She took his injured hand, turned it over, and after assuring herself the cut was glass-free was just about to clean it out, when he spoke.

  “I found a dead body.”

  “What?” She froze, blinking at him. That was so far out of the realm of anything she thought he might say that she found herself speechless.

  He cocked his head to the side, frowning, as if he was trying to decide if he’d misspoken, before repeating, “I found a dead body”

  “You found a dead body?”

  “Yes. A girl. A pretty girl. Dead.” He shuddered, something passing over his face that Allie didn’t want to think too hard about, “very dead.”

  Allie looked at him, feeling her mouth hanging open, but too shocked to do anything about it. She heard herself repeating, “A dead body?”

  Bleidd kept talking as if he hadn’t heard her. “I reported it of course,” his voice grew bitter “and they questioned me. Me. Of course. Don’t have any honor do I?”

  His eyes fastened onto hers fiercely, almost desperately, “They questioned me about it. But I would never. Never. It was terrible what was done to her, they asked me about it, raped, mutilated…”

  She tried to cut him off then, sensing that he was about to tell her in graphic detail about something that would
never get out of her head again. “Of course you wouldn’t,” she interrupted briskly, getting back to cleaning his hand and swallowing hard. It must be one of those murders, the girls being killed that Syn was talking about. What are they calling the guy? The parking lot killer, because that’s where they find the bodies.

  “She was like you,” he said softly.

  “Like me? What do you mean?” she felt suddenly frightened by the idea of any connection to this dead girl, like a tingle of foreboding crawling down her spine.

  “She wasn’t all human,” he said, starting to sound sleepy. “Not as much not-human as you but it was there, something in her that wasn’t…” He yawned widely. “Wasn’t… there was something of Fairy there.”

  Allie had finished cleaning his hand and was bandaging it now, her mind racing. “Did you tell the police this?”

  “Police,” he mumbled, the drink clearly catching up to him now, “not police. Elven Guard. Bastards. They won’t listen to me. They should see it themselves… anyway…”

  Well, Allie thought that explains this particular spectacular bender. The Elven Guard is the Fairy equivalent of police in the borderlands, but they are also the judge and jury by the law of Fairy. While the human police handled human crimes and suspects, the Guard handle any crimes or suspects involving non-humans, although the increasing number of mixed species people like Allie could end up in either jurisdiction and the occasional cross-species crime was a complicated matter. The important difference is that where the human police are only one part of the justice system, the Elven Guard is the system, at least for everyone who isn’t a noble. It is the Guard that had Outcast Bleidd and she doubted he would ever forgive them for it, although she was also unsure that they would see what he saw in the dead girl. Bleidd had lived, as an Outcast, among humans for over 50 years, longer than any elf would have done by choice and Allie knew he had developed certain perceptions that others didn’t seem to have. He was the only one that had ever known her for what she was on sight anyway.

  She wanted to ask him more, but he was trying to curl up on the floor and she knew if she didn’t get him up now there’d be no moving him until he sobered up. “Come on, “she said grabbing his other arm and pulling hard, “no sleeping on the floor. Get up.”

  He mumbled something incoherent but with an effort she managed to get him back on his feet. He wrapped his arms around her, continuing to mumble into her hair, but she ignored him, focusing on getting him to keep moving towards his room. She was just glad it was on the first floor. As she pushed open the door she felt the usual hesitance to enter his space, the side effect of the heavy wards he placed on the room. If he hadn’t keyed the wards to let her pass them she would have been unable to get into the room without breaking the spell that held the energetic shields in place. Ignoring the urge to leave she managed to get him the last few feet over to his bed before he passed out, but just barely. For a moment she stood over his inert form in the dark room, trying to catch her breath and wondering why he kept doing this to himself. It was like a slow suicide and it bothered her to think that her friend was so deeply unhappy with his life that living this way was better than facing it. Allie frowned at the thought and then picked a blanket up off the floor to cover him with while he slept, since there was no way for her to get him properly into the bed. She could worry about how to break her friend’s self-destructive habits later.

  She stood looking down at the unconscious elf for another minute before sighing and heading back out to clean up the mess in the hall. She’d rather just go back to bed, but the odds were that Bleidd wouldn’t wake before noon and it was easier to clean up his mess herself than listen to the other three roommates fighting over it. The lamp and table were broken beyond repair but the coat rack was mostly undamaged, having lost a few pegs off its wooden trunk but otherwise still being serviceable. She stood that back up by the door, dragged the assorted wreckage out to the garbage cans by the side of the house, and returned to begin the painstaking process of wiping up the blood and picking up the tiny shards of glass scattered across the floor. She had gotten most of it taken care of when she heard the sound of a key in the door and looking up realized that the hazy light of dawn was just breaking through the window.

  She was standing up, feeling satisfied, as Syndra walked in, but her mood soured as soon as she saw the other woman’s face. Syn’s short blond hair was in its usual chubby ponytail and her uniform was spotless but her expression was so grim Allie expected her to break some horrible news. She didn’t have to wait long.

  “Where’s Bleidd?” Syn asked without the teasing tone that normally colored her voice.

  “In his room sleeping off a roaring drunk,” Allie responded puzzled.

  “You’re sure?” Syn pressed.

  “Sure?” she shot back, even more confused. “Of course I’m sure, I’m the one who put him there after he practically passed out in front of the door.”

  “He was really that drunk?” Syn’s eyes were moving around the entryway, noting the missing furniture. “What time did he get here?”

  “A little after 2. Well, that’s when he got in, I have no idea how long it took him to get up the walk and in the door,” Allie said, thinking of how totally out of it he’d been.

  “He came straight home after the bar closed?”

  Allie was getting annoyed now at all the questions, “I didn’t ask, but I assume so. The Tiger closes at 2 and it’s a 5 minute drive. Are you going to arrest him for drunk driving? What the hell’s going on Syn?”

  “What’s going on? He’s the prime suspect in all those murders is what’s going on,” Syn replied grimly.

  “That’s insane,” Allie winced, horrified, “Why? Because he found that body?”

  “How’d you know about that? Never mind, he told you right?” Syn pushed past her, tossing her uniform jacket at the battered coat rack and heading towards the kitchen, forcing Allie to jog after her, “It’s a total fucking mess. They questioned him; they called me in after they cut him loose and questioned me. They’d been thinking it was just some run-of-the-mill nut job, some human nut job,” Syn paused digging through the fridge for a beer. “But now they’re looking at it not being a human. They called in the Guard, formed a joint task force. It’s a total fuck show and he’s right in the middle of it.”

  “But why?” Allie asked, genuinely confused.

  “His history’s against him…”

  “You can’t be serious!” before Allie could build up any real outrage Syndra kept talking

  “His criminal record, his attitude…”

  “That’s ridiculous! Why would he report the body if…”

  “I’m not saying it’s him. I’m telling you what they think!” Syn cut her off, her voice rising. “They hinted that maybe he was trying to throw them off track or some stupid shit. It didn’t help anything that he basically told the Guard to go fuck themselves. They thought it was really fucking weird that he wouldn’t answer any of their questions when elves are supposed to be straight up with each other. He wouldn’t tell them anything, but they knew from his address I knew him, and that was fucking fun to explain. So they asked me all kinds of questions about where he goes, what he does.”

  Allie shook her head, as Syndra chugged half her beer in a few gulps before adding, “Al, I think I may have made it worse.”

  “Worse? How?” Allie felt her heart sinking at Syn’s expression.

  “I told them he’s a fucking alcoholic. Don’t give me that look, he’s my friend too, but we both know if there’s such a thing as Elven alcoholics he is one. I told them he goes to work and goes to the bar and that’s about it, but they got all in a twist about that. Seemed to think it proved he was some kind of deviant or something.”

  Syndra looked miserable as she spoke and Allie shook her head again, not knowing what to say. All the roommates had become friends over the years, and Allie had no doubt that Syn would never purposely betray anyone in the house, but she was also
a cop and her job came first. Syndra finished off the beer and threw the can into the garbage.

  “But can’t they just do testing, DNA testing, to clear him?”

  Syn winced and shook her head. “This killer’s really smart. He’s like a ghost, no physical evidence worth a damn left behind. No DNA. He uses bleach to clean the bodies up.”

  Allie shook her head, “But surely there’s something? I mean if they know the girls were raped–don’t give me that look. Bleidd mentioned the police questioning him about it– isn’t there some trace of something, er, genetic, somewhere?”

  Syn looked like she’d swallowed a lemon and Allie had the feeling she wasn’t going to like whatever was coming next. She was right.

  “You aren’t getting the fucking picture here. Al. He uses bleach everywhere. Injects it into the bodies. Nothing left to test. What samples they can get show that there was definitely rape, but the quality is so shitty we can’t even tell what species the perp is. Everyone assumed human up ‘til now, because that’s, well I mean isn’t it always a fucking human asshole? But after this shit, all bets are off.”

  For several minutes Allie was too horrified to speak and she watched as Syn grabbed and quickly drank a second beer. She almost wanted to join her. “How much trouble is he really in?”

  “I don’t know,” Syn answered quietly, “Honestly. I can’t get a read on the Guards at all, except that they don’t like him, and the two detectives working the case have been on it for months now. Maybe they really think he did it…”