Free His Father's Eyes - eARC by David B. Coe Page A

seemed to be toying with him now. Was he camouflaged? Had he found some other spell to make himself invisible to Howell, and thus to me?
    By this time, Howell was terrified; I could tell from his labored breathing, the tremor in his hands. He took a single purposeful stride toward the door and bounded off of something unseen, the way he would if he had walked into a wall.
    Fucking hell! he said, the words choked, like a sob.
    A blinding flash of green light made me squint and turn away, even as I heard Howell’s truncated scream in my head. When I peered at the stone again, it was nothing more than sea-green agate.
    “Damn it,” I muttered, forgetting that I was camouflaged myself. My oath drew a frown from an older gentleman who was walking past me. He kept going, though, and I ground my teeth together, vowing to keep silent from now on.
    I left the men’s room and positioned myself in a corner of the gate area. There I cast the seeing spell again, hoping that Howell might have seen something—anything—between the gate and the men’s room that would tell me more about his killer. But he walked straight from the plane to the restroom, interacting with no one, his gaze sweeping over the crowded airport but settling on nothing in particular. Considering all the trouble I had gone through to cast the seeing spells I had little to show for my effort.
    I walked to a deserted spot where I could remove the camouflage spell, and then found Kona again. She was speaking with another detective from the PPD. I hung back until she was finished with him.
    “What have you got for me?” she asked.
    “A sock.” I slipped her the sock, which she stuffed in her blazer pocket.
    “Seriously, Justis.”
    “Seriously, that’s about all I’ve got.”
    “You mean, after all that mojo you were going to do, you didn’t find out anything?”
    “Just that our killer casts a mean camouflage spell and can move around a men’s room without making much noise.”
    “So you didn’t see him.”
    I shook my head. “I saw what Howell saw, which was nothing at all. The guy snuck up on him, toyed with him for a few seconds, and then killed him with a spell.”
    “The killer could still be here, then,” she said. “He could be watching everything we do, and we wouldn’t know it.”
    “Or she. And yeah, that’s exactly right.”
    She scanned the gate area, her expression curdling. “Honestly, I don’t know how you live every day with this magic shit. It would drive me up a wall.”
    “Who says it doesn’t do the same to me?” I surveyed the airport as well. “But let me try something.” It wasn’t a spell I had attempted before, but Namid would have been the first to tell me that such things didn’t matter. If I could hold the elements in my head, I could cast it. It seemed easy enough, though I couldn’t figure out how to do it with only three elements; I’d need seven: me, the other sorcerer, his camouflage spell, my eyes, the gate area, his current location, and the removal of his spell. There were a few unknowns in that list, but I hoped I could conjure around those. I repeated the elements six times and released the magic on the seventh.
    Nothing happened.
    “Are you all right?” Kona asked, watching me, the corners of her mouth drawn down in mild disapproval.
    “I was trying a spell. I hoped I might be able to strip away whatever magic our killer is using to hide himself. If he’s still here.”
    “I take it the spell didn’t work.”
    “Or he’s long gone.”
    “Right. Look, Justis—”
    “You have work to do,” I said, keenly aware in that moment of the fact that she was still a cop, and I wasn’t. Not that I’d needed the reminder. “I’ll get out of your hair.”
    “I appreciate you coming all this way.”
    “No problem. I think I can help you with this, if you want me to keep working on it.”
    “I do. And with your new-found notoriety, the higher-ups are more willing to have you