After some time that first night, Namid left me, no doubt fed up with my stubborn refusal to acknowledge that he was real. But he appeared again the next morning and we resumed our argument. At first, I took his return as evidence that my descent into permanent insanity had already begun. But Namid was persistent to the point of relentlessness, and with time I came to believe that he was real and that all he’d been telling me about magic and my own gifts was true.
Even more, everything he said about the warehouse robbery turned out to be dead-on accurate. The knife hadn’t been broken jimmying anything; it had been part of a talisman-a small statue of a Maori god-that the warehouse manager kept on his desk. Namid told me as much, and I confirmed it when I examined the idol more closely and found the rest of the blade imbedded in the stone base on which the figure stood. Namid also told me where we could find the man responsible for the break-in. Within a week, Kona and I had arrested Orestes Quinley, a small-time thief and weremyste, who’d stolen a bunch of stereos and TVs to cover the theft of that talisman. Turns out there are more weremystes in the Phoenix metropolitan area than one might think. They’re not in the yellow pages, of course. Finding them can be tricky. You have to rely on word of mouth and, since most weremystes use blockers, and since those who don’t aren’t eager to be found, it becomes a matter of finding the right mouth, as it were. But there is a network of sorts, one that I’ve tapped into in recent years. Early on, though, I had to take a lot on faith. So did Kona. She was pretty skeptical about all of it, although Orestes’ confession helped.
As I came to spend more time with Namid I began to sense an ulterior motive of a sort in the lessons he gave me. He himself had told me that he worked with my dad, and though he never admitted as much, I was convinced that he held himself responsible for my father’s premature descent into insanity. I believe Namid felt that he had failed one Fearsson. He wasn’t about to fail another. That was why he worked me so hard and so often. He wanted me to hone my power. From what I understood, as a runecrafter grew more proficient, he also developed some resistance to the long-term effects of the phasings.
But on this night outside my office, with the phasing still a few days off, and Claudia Deegan’s murder on my mind, I was more concerned with what Namid had said to me in the car. In the years since he appeared to me that first night and kept me from killing myself, I had never known Namid to be wrong about anything. Until tonight I’d never heard him express even the slightest uncertainty. I do not know. . It was like being a kid again and finding out my father wasn’t stronger and smarter than every other man on the planet.
For the first time I’d bumped up against Namid’s limitations, and I found it unnerving. I think he did, too. Along with his certainty on all matters relating to magic, Namid had also been fearless. He was a runemyste. He’d been chosen by the Runeclave because even in life his mastery of the craft had been exceptional. As a member of his council, his powers were beyond anything I could imagine, although as I understood it, he and the other runemystes were forbidden to use their magic directly on our world. Still, I couldn’t imagine there was much that Namid feared. There could be no denying, though, that he had been scared tonight, or as close to scared as a runemyste could get.
Mercifully, Namid didn’t stay with me long. The last thing I needed was a thousand-year-old ghost commenting on my driving. But long after he left me, I continued to think about our conversation.
I got home and cleaned my knee, first with water and soap, and then with hydrogen peroxide, which was no picnic. Usually these things look better once you wipe away the dried blood, but this one looked like hell even after I’d cleaned it up. I wished I had hit Robby harder.
Then I did something stupid. I went online, found Billie Castle’s blog, and read her piece about the murder of Claudia Deegan. Most of what she wrote focused on the Deegans and the history of the Blind Angel killings, but she got me in there near the end.
Sources close to the probe indicate that Justis Fearsson, a private investigator and former Phoenix Police Department homicide detective, has been brought in to work on the case. Fearsson, who worked on the Blind Angel murder investigation before being forced to leave the department for undisclosed disciplinary violations, has denied having any connection to the Deegans, and refused to speculate as to why the case had not yet been solved. Others with connections to the PPD were less reticent.
I wasn’t mentioned again in the story, but my name was hyperlinked. Clicking on it, I was directed to another page that had some basic information about me-my service record, my office address and phone number, and a poor reproduction of the picture from the phone book. Considering the way my conversation with Billie had ended, I’d gotten off easy. But I had a feeling I’d be appearing in future articles at “Castle’s Village.”
I was tired and thought about turning in early. But my mind was churning. For the past few months, I’d managed to put the Blind Angel case out of my head. But with all that had happened today, it was front and center again, and I knew that sleep wouldn’t come easily.
Instead, I put on a pair of jeans that wasn’t torn and stained with blood, grabbed my bomber jacket, and left the house.
When I lost my badge, I also lost access to many of the sources a cop uses for information. But there was a whole other network in the city that had nothing to do with the PPD and everything to do with magic. Parts of that network were in neighborhoods that even I didn’t like to visit at night; others were only available after dark. One of these was a place called, appropriately enough, New Moon.
The Moon was a small dive in Gilbert, not too far from my home in Chandler. It was open most nights, except when the moon was full, and it catered to weremystes and people who liked to pretend that they had magical abilities, or who just enjoyed hanging out with those of us who really did. Not much happened there. It wasn’t like weremystes got together to plot a magical takeover of the world, or something like that. But at times there was something to be said for being able to talk about magic and the phasings with people who understood from their own experience, and who didn’t shy away from me like I was already nuts. We tolerated the wannabes and groupies because they listened and they didn’t judge us, and because they tended to buy rounds for everyone as a way of compensating for their lack of actual magical ability.
The bar was also where I went when I needed information about what was happening in the streets: new weremystes in town, rivalries among sorcerers, unexplained magical attacks, that sort of thing. My visits to the New Moon hadn’t turned up anything about the Blind Angel Killer back when I was on the force, and I didn’t expect this visit to be any different. But it was a place to start.
There were only about ten cars in the gravel parking lot and about the same number of people inside. A few of them tore their gazes from their gin and tonics and beers as I walked in, but they showed little interest in me and were soon focused once more on their glasses and bottles. I didn’t recognize any of the customers. It had been a while since I’d been there.
I stepped to the bar and sat. The Diamondbacks were on TV, getting clobbered by the Giants.
“Jay Fearsson, as I live and breathe.”
I smiled, as much at the New York accent as at the greeting. Sophie Schaller was about as unlikely a candidate to be tending bar in a place that catered to weremystes as a person could imagine. She was a Jewish grandmother from Brooklyn, who had moved out to Phoenix for the warm air and sunshine. She had to be in her late sixties; maybe even older. Most weremystes her age were already crazy, or they were dead. But she’d once confided in me that her phasings were milder than most, and I believed her. Her mind still seemed as sharp as the day I met her.