A Life for a Life
Chapter 1

“This is ridiculous.” Jess swore as she ran, dodging another fireball. She jumped behind some unfortunate person’s parked car, which rattled when the fire hit it in the side. No doubt that was going to leave a mark.

Jess was an inspector for Witch Inspectors to Serve and Protect, or WISP. They were the law charged with handling all crimes of a magical nature. It was basically a witch police force that had been around for over three hundred years. Jess’s talents specifically made her good at reading people so she fit right in at WISP.

This was supposed to be an easy job picking up some low-grade level, gray magic warlock dealing in crappy love potions. He’d be booked in a cell for the night, given a hefty fine, and then released again. No big deal. Instead the idiot went and found himself a Magic 8 Ball imbued with black magic. Humans thought Magic 8 Balls were just toys that you could pretend to predict your future with. But sometimes there was one with real magic. Dangerous magic.

Most witches and warlocks knew a real Magic 8 Ball didn’t tell you the future. What it did was cause violence. It wouldn’t give you the Yes-No-Maybe response when you shook it up. Ask it if that boy likes you? Bam, go tie him to a chair and beat him until he agrees to go out with you. Want to know if you’re going to get that promotion at work? Set the boss’s office on fire while he was still inside. Those were the kinds of responses one of those evil spheres would give and the magic would compel a person to follow through on the suggestion.

Those in the magic world knew to stay away from the things, but the occasional crazy person would actually go looking for one. The lure was that the more questions you asked it, the more a person’s power would start to increase. The hard part was resisting the impulse to commit the unspeakable acts that would eventually get you noticed. Most couldn’t resist for long, but the longer a witch possessed the ball, the stronger she became. Or he, which was why Jess was having a hard time bringing in what was supposed to be an easy mark.

“Alright, enough of this shit,” Jess said as she crouched behind the car. Her blond curls were escaping her ponytail and she brushed at them impatiently as she lifted her hand. Jess whispered a spell over one of the several rings she wore until it glowed blue. The ring had a simple silver band with a round, black onyx stone in the center of it. The stone swelled with the spell and created a perfect sphere that was more Jell-O-like in consistency than stone.

This was a WISP issued knockout spell. It was illegal for civilians to have such an item because they were tricky to create, with lethal consequences if gotten wrong. Luckily for Jess, WISP had a talented witch on retainer who made and stored knockout spells as well as other charms. Of course, the problem with this particular spell was that you had to put the sticky black sphere directly onto your opponent’s skin, which meant you needed to get very close.

Jess took out her special glove before pulling the Jell-O-like sphere off, leaving behind an innocuous-looking ring with a stone in it. She muttered a few more words and activated the spell, being careful not to touch it with her bare skin. It could just as easily knock her out as any criminal she was trying to bring in. Now she just had to get to Gary Marks before he got her with his fireballs. A nice distraction would work.

Jess closed her eyes and reached into the core of her being where her magic was stored. She imagined it as a living plant, one that varied in shape or color depending on what she was trying to accomplish, but always alive. It was like a garden in her mind, something she nurtured and took care of to keep it strong. Today, she imagined several green vines, envisioning them shooting out tendrils towards every car in the vicinity. The alarms of all of them were then activated. Being Seattle, parking was hard to come by and every spot was taken. The noise was almost deafening after the silence of before.

Peering over the car, Jess saw Marks flinch and glance around, no doubt considering the potential witnesses there were going to be any minute. He was closer than Jess thought, no more than fifteen feet away, but that worked in her favor. She didn’t waste another second, leaping over the car and running full tilt towards him. Marks turned toward her and opened his mouth to summon another spell but it was too late. Jess slapped the sticky black sphere on his face and watched it work instantly. Marks’ slight frame crumpled to the ground.

Breathing heavily, Jess looked around her at the people pouring out of the neighboring apartment buildings trying to see what was going on. With another burst of power, she silenced the car alarms and pulled her badge from her belt, holding it high.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she shouted. “I am with the Witch Investigators. Everything is fine now and you’re perfectly safe, but I need all of you to please go back into your homes.”

There was some grumbling but everybody went quickly back inside. Though witches and vampires had “come out of the proverbial closet,” so to speak, over thirty years ago, most humans gave them a wide berth and this was a human neighborhood. Jess didn’t blame them.

Supernaturals, or “sups”, had been hiding in plain sight around humans for centuries, but with everyone having access to cameras, even before cell phones became so popular, it became harder and harder to hide incidents of magic on the street. Small public brawls turned into media sensations when someone used magic to win the fight. Members of WISP could no longer utter a quick memory spell on an unsuspecting human and keep the problem quiet when the whole world saw it on the 5 o’clock news.

Witches had the idea to go public first. Already there were New Age shops on every corner and the Witch and Warlocks Coven argued the time had never been more right to announce their presence to the world. They were half right. Riots and protests occurred all over, with witches and humans on both sides. Groups, like the Humans First party, were created, spreading fear that anyone’s next-door neighbor could be influencing your mind right now. After a while, the world’s governments stepped in, passing laws against manipulation of any non-magical folks by those with magic. WISP itself had to go public, to show everyone that witches and warlocks weren’t being given free rein, but also had their own voice and protection from radical humans.

Things started to calm down after that and then vampires decided to jump on the bandwagon. That stirred things up again a little bit, but it wasn’t nearly as bad the second go-round. As Jess understood it, vampires wanted the option to be open and honest as well, but mostly it was to make it easier to feed. Blood distribution facilities sprang up around the world. Humans still didn’t know there were a lot of other supernatural types out there still in hiding, like Fae and shifters, but it was up to each species if they wanted to be known and only witches and vampires took that risk.

Using her gloved hand, Jess searched the unconscious man’s pockets until she found what she was looking for: the Magic 8 Ball. It looked normal, but to a sensitive witch like Jess, it pulsed with power, indicating that it was active. It called to her, begging to be looked into. Jess had it halfway turned towards her before she realized what was happening. Shaking herself, Jess placed the ball inside a magic dampening bag and sealed it shut. The Black Magic Unit could handle it after she turned it in.

“Alright, now what am I going to do with you?” Jess said to herself, staring down at Gary Marks. That was the problem with knockout spells—they left you with dead weight to deal with. Jess sighed. She’d been working long hours since her partner retired, leaving her with handling the caseload by herself, and hadn’t been tending her magic garden as much as she would have liked. That meant her magic levels were getting low, but she didn’t see another choice. Closing her eyes, she imagined a dandelion flower going to seed, so it was light and fluffy, and sent it around the unconscious man, making him nearly light enough to float away. Fortunately, he wasn’t a big guy so it didn’t take much magic.

She let him float about a foot off the ground down the half block to where she left her car. Opening the car door, Jess shoved him into the back seat, not being gentle about it, and released her hold on the spell with a relieved breath. She would get some people at the station to help her get him out.

The knockout spell would hold for a few hours so she didn’t worry about cuffing him and climbed into the front seat. As she sped off into the night, she couldn’t help mumbling to herself, “I need a raise.”

*

WISP was an organization outside of the regular human police department so rather than be located in the police precinct, WISP had its own building in downtown Seattle. The small department consisted of two main floors and a basement. The first floor was an open floor plan they liked to call “the pen”, with multiple desks laid out in a grid where the Inspectors, Jess included, worked. The magical community was fairly small compared to the human population of Seattle so about twenty Inspectors covered all magic crime in the greater Seattle area.

The second floor was divided into actual offices that were reserved for the higher-ranking officials and non-Inspector staff like human resources. The basement contained the holding cells, each one with a magic dampening spell on it so its occupants couldn’t cause trouble. The Inspectors rotated guard duty so there were always at least two witches or warlocks down there to keep an eye on things.

The next morning, Jess strolled in later than usual given her late night and while her desk neighbor, John, rolled his eyes, no one commented on it. Jess was one of the best Inspectors there so she was given a little leeway when her schedule didn’t stick to nine to five.

“How’s it going John?” Jess asked as she sat down and booted up her computer, which slowly turned on.

Magic tended to interfere with technology. Cell phones used to not work for supernaturals at all until someone figured out a frequency that could make it through the magical interference. The trade-off was that it took extra power to boost the connection and phone batteries died quickly. Although the computers at WISP were plugged into a special circuit also meant to boost the connection, it still took forever. Which is why Jess didn’t bother watching it and instead turned to John to wait for his answer.

“Just peachy,” he said but he was frowning at his computer screen.

“That good huh?”

John chewed the edge of one fingernail, a bad habit he had when he was thinking, and didn’t meet her eyes. He often acted like he was somewhat afraid of her. Jess tried not to take it personally.

Her magic made her an excellent investigator but made the people she worked with uncomfortable. Jess was a living lie detector—she could catch the smallest white lie—but even when someone wasn’t talking directly to her, she had a knack for knowing things about people. No one wanted to think their secrets were bare for her to see, though Jess tried to explain it didn’t work that way. Someone might say they’re “fine” and Jess would know they weren’t but that didn’t mean she would press them if they didn’t want to talk about it. There were a million reasons why someone might be having a bad day.

The secret to her magic was that Jess had the unique ability to see souls. Not ghosts, thank the magic, but the soul residing inside someone. It didn’t matter the species, she saw everyone’s, in an array of colors that could change depending on what was going on in that person’s life. Most souls were yellow, but of varying shades and could be threaded with other colors that told Jess a lot about the emotional state of a person. Of course, if everyone glowed all the time it would make life difficult to navigate so Jess built shields in her mind to block her view, cracking it for a peek when she wanted to.

Not a lot of people knew about the soul seeing bit. No doubt it would only increase people’s discomfort around her so she tried to keep the knowledge to herself, but it was no secret that Jess could read people with uncanny accuracy. She might be called in to assist with someone’s interrogation, but she didn’t get invited to many barbeques.

Jess often wished she could harden her soul so she could hate everyone and not care what they thought of her, but it just wasn’t in her. Most of the people she encountered were good people, if not saints (a tinge of color to the normal bright yellow of a soul was normal) and that fact was crystal clear to someone like Jess.

A quick look at John’s soul showed his typical lemon color but with a slight teal tinge. Experience taught Jess this was often a sign of confusion or frustration. John was avoiding looking at her, which was typical of him, so Jess let her gaze wander around the room.

She watched two of her fellow inspectors struggle with a large wooden crate that seemed to be shaking. One inspector dropped his end and the lid flew open, revealing several spinning dinner plates and some dancing forks. Several of the forks shot out of the box and did a little jig on a nearby desk until the desk’s owner mumbled a brief spell and the forks stilled.

Probably a family dispute gone sour, Jess thought to herself. All that was missing was a famous mouse wearing a pointed wizard’s hat. She turned away with a grin and focused on John, who had begun tapping a pen against his desk.

Jess took the opportunity to pounce on his distracted state. “You still working on that burglary case?” Jess asked him. She was determined to break through his fear and get him to talk to her like a normal person.

“Yeah, but the victim’s story isn’t matching up. I was looking over her initial statement and comparing it to the follow up I had with her yesterday and some of the details are off. Big details,” John said, turning towards her with a great deal of reluctance that she chose to ignore.

“Like what?”

“Like she said she was at the salon getting her hair done when her house was broken into, but now she says she was eating lunch with a friend. And she claimed the magic box that was taken was empty—she was adamant about it—but now she says her grandmother’s charmed necklace was inside. Her story has more holes in it than swiss cheese.”

“Uh, yeah, something’s not right,” Jess agreed.

“What’s not right?” Inspector Malak Hishnaw asked, propping half his butt on the corner of Jess’s desk. Malak was a big and ugly man, built like a boulder but with a high forehead, black eyes too small for his face, and a ruddy complexion. Because of her abilities, Jess knew he was part troll, which was unusual because trolls didn’t like humans so it was strange to know one had mated with a human. Jess wondered but Malak had a tendency to punch anyone who asked too many questions about his past so she didn’t bring it up.

She glared at him. “Just the case John’s working on. Now do you mind?” Jess gave a pointed look at her desk. She didn’t like Malak. He had a cruel streak in him, but he kept his actions just this side of decent so he didn’t get in trouble. Jess had warned her boss about him, but he always said Malak was a good investigator and Jess should steer clear if she didn’t like him. His soul looked magenta to Jess, never a good sign. Too bad she couldn’t use that as evidence against him.

Malak smirked and walked away. He was well aware of her feelings towards him and liked to goad her whenever he thought he could get away with it.

When her computer was finally working, she logged into her email and saw a meeting request from the captain. Jess glanced at the clock; she had three minutes to get upstairs.

“Well, let me know if there’s anything I can do to help,” Jess told John. “I’m off to Teddy’s office.”

“Sure, thanks Jess.” He was already focused back on his computer screen, so Jess got up and headed for the stairs, taking them two at a time to get to her meeting. When she reached the captain’s office, the door was open and she heard two voices, a male and a female, quietly talking. She knocked and entered the room.

“Jess, come on in,” Captain Fontaine said, sweeping his arms wide as if he was going to give her a hug. He didn’t, of course, but Jess didn’t resist her grin.

The captain was a beefy man, going bald on top but still sporting a thick mustache that he liked to stroke when he was thinking. He was prone to going red in the face when he was angry, but was usually level headed enough it didn’t go that far unless you seriously screwed up. His full name was Thomas Mark Fontaine, but everyone called him “Teddy” because he was more like a giant teddy bear, especially when he gave one of his full-bodied laughs.

Anyone who thought Teddy would be a pushover, though, was sorely mistaken. His mind was sharp and he rose through the ranks not by being likable, but by solving case after case. He was a well-respected man in the organization.

As Jess entered the office, she noticed another woman standing near the captain’s desk. She was short and willowy, barely hitting five feet and with long, wavy brown hair that stopped just above her waistline. As she turned towards her, Jess was shocked to see bright green eyes that contrasted with her light mocha skin tone. She was dressed professionally but classy in navy blue slacks and a white blouse. It was hard to tell her age, but Jess guessed it was similar to herself, late twenties or early thirties at the most. Though she was tiny and almost ethereal looking, she was also gorgeous. Jess turned questioningly to the captain.

“Jess, this is Charlene Morgan. She just transferred up here from New York and she’s going to be your new partner. Inspector Morgan, this is Inspector Jessica Baker,” Teddy said, gesturing to the petite woman. Jess looked at Charlene with interest.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you,” Jess said sincerely, holding out her hand to shake. Charlene looked surprised but pleased as she shook Jess’s hand. Jess could understand why. No doubt Charlene expected to have to work to be taken seriously with looks like hers but being a nearly six-foot blond with a centerfold figure herself, Jess tried not to judge based on appearances. But what a pair the two of them were going to make.

Her previous partner and mentor, James Maddock, retired a few weeks ago and Jess had been going solo ever since. Though she had been apprehensive about getting a new partner, she liked having someone there who had her back. Plus, it might be nice to have someone to talk to again when she was on a long stakeout.

“It’s nice to meet you too. Call me Charlie.”

“Good, have a seat. I’m throwing you guys right into it,” Teddy continued. He waved his hand at the chairs as he walked around his desk and sat down. He had three folders on his desk, which he handed to Jess. She passed one to Charlie and opened another.

“There have been three murders in the past month. The first one was four weeks ago, the second two weeks ago, and this last one three days ago. All three victims were Norms, but it’s looking like the murders may be magical in origin so you ladies are taking over the case. That being said, I would like you to work with the original cop on the case, a Norm named Detective Mathew Jacobs.” Norms were what they called humans without magic. Jess winced.

“Do we have to? You know how the Norm cops feel about WISP,” Jess complained.

“It can’t be that bad. We’re all professionals, aren’t we?” Charlie pointed out. Jess narrowed her eyes.

“Maybe it’s different in New York, but I’m telling you, they don’t like us here,” Jess said, annoyed. Charlie put her hands up in a placating manner.

“I was just saying,” Charlie answered mildly. Jess huffed and turned away.

“Jacobs’ superiors speak highly of him and he’s a homicide detective so he’s got more experience with murder than you do. Plus, he’s worked hard the past month on these homicides so I don’t want to take the case from him. But he doesn’t know magic and he needs help. You will work with him,” Fontaine commanded, his fatherly gaze stern. Jess tried not to pout like a child. Seeing Charlie’s calm and cool exterior didn’t help.

“What makes them suspect magic?” Jess asked after a moment. She was skimming the file and saw only that the cause of death was a slit to the throat by a serrated blade.

“All three bodies were severely emaciated. The first two were homeless, a man and a woman, so it was noted as extreme malnourishment but otherwise not deemed very important. The third guy was a journalist posing as a homeless person to get the inside story of what it’s like to live on the streets. His fingerprints were in the system and we brought the wife in to identify the body.” Teddy paused and leaned forward in his chair.

“She said it looked like him but he had been about fifty pounds overweight the last time she saw him just four days before the body was found. She was completely flabbergasted as to how he could have lost so much weight in such a short amount of time. They’re going to run a DNA test to be sure, but his prints were a 92% match so Detective Jacobs is pretty confident it’s him.” He leaned back again, lacing his fingers together across his large stomach and giving them a moment to process the information.

“So, we’re looking for a spell that what? Sucks all the fat out of a person?” Charlie asked.

“That’s up to you guys to replace out,” Teddy said, pointing two fingers at them with his hands still locked. He stood up and placed his palms flat on his desk while peering at both of them.

“Contact Jacobs and look at the bodies, see if there’s any magical residue. You can go from there. And try to get along with the detective please.” Teddy looked at Jess as he said this, who managed not to roll her eyes. Recognizing the dismissal, the two women stood and with a nod to the captain, walked out.