Spell Blind Read Online Free PDF Page A

stream. But now he was clouded, roiled, like a river after a hard rain. His eyes were the same, though: intense and bright. He’d never shown much interest in any of my cases, but it seemed this one had caught his attention.
    I put my hand over the mouthpiece. “What is it?” I asked.
    He said nothing.
    “Damn you, Namid! Would you tell me?”
    He turned with deliberate grace and stared down at the mirror that still lay on my floor. After a moment he faced me again.
    It wasn’t much, but as I say, Namid wasn’t one for giving hints. This was more than the runemyste had ever done before.
    “Justis?” Kona said.
    I removed my hand from the phone. “I’m here.”
    “I’m going to be tied up here for a while longer, and Margarite’s got my car today. Can you meet me at the Deegan place? We can go downtown from there.”
    “All right,” I said.
    “Great. One hour.”
    I hung up and glared back at the runemyste, who was still watching me.
    “Would you please tell me what this is about?”
    You’d think by now I’d know better than to expect an answer.
    Namid began to fade from view. “Tread like the fox, Ohanko. Be wary.”
    “Thanks a lot,” I said, watching as he vanished. “Damn ghost!”
    But he was gone.
    I went to my desk and retrieved this morning’s paper, which was folded beneath the day’s mail. The story was right there on the front page. Top headline.
    “Claudia Deegan Found Dead. Senator’s daughter may be latest ‘Angel’ Victim.”
    I almost called Kona back then and there. I had just gotten through tracking down a runaway and dealing with the life crises of the rich and famous. Involving myself with the Deegans would be ten times worse. I didn’t want any part of this case.
    Or did I?
    The PPD had been trying to solve the so-called Blind Angel murders for just shy of three years now. So had the Feds. The FBI came in with a lot of fanfare and press after the third or fourth murder and did their best to take over the investigation. After a while, though—after months stretching to years of being unable to find the killer—they began to lose interest. They cut the size of their task force in half, and then did so again and a third time, until they had basically ceded the investigation back to the Phoenix police.
    If Claudia Deegan was this wack-job’s latest victim, she would be number thirty-one, that we knew of. I had worked the case when I was on the job, and Kona and her new partner, Kevin Glass, were still part of the investigative team. Being a weremyste, I had realized from the very beginning that magic was involved: I could see the residue of power on the bodies. And it didn’t take me long to figure out that every killing occurred around the same time in the moon cycle. I was convinced that our killer had taken a life every month for the last three years at least, and that there were still bodies out there as yet unfound.
    Of all the cases I’d been working at the time I left the force, this was the one I most regretted not seeing through to the end. The idea of having another crack at it had definite appeal. On the other hand, as much as I missed being a cop, I didn’t miss the jerks who had forced me off the job, who had assumed that my descents into psychosis each month were signs that I was a drunk, or an addict, or both. Even now, there were people in the department—men and women in positions of power—who would have loved to humiliate me all over again, to pay me back for disgracing the force.
    In the end, I think that if Namid hadn’t shown so much interest in my conversation with Kona, I might have called her back and told her I wasn’t coming. As much as I wanted to find the Blind Angel Killer, I didn’t need the kind of heat this case was going to generate. But for whatever reason, the runemyste had made it clear that this was a job I had to take. I remembered my scrying, and that evil red hand. Namid seemed to think it was all related, and who was I to