Free The Alchemical Detective (Riga Hayworth) by Kirsten Weiss Page B

work of minutes to get permission to walk his part of the shoreline.  She handed the phone off to Walt and left him talking to Mr. Gonzalez, about the film crew, the break-ins.
    Riga and the crew walked out onto the deck then took the wooden stairs, slick with ice, down toward the water. 
    It was colder now and the chill air burned Riga’s nostrils.  Patches of snow gleamed pale beneath the trees.  Riga glanced covetously at Pen, who wore a fitted black parka and a black felt hat with flaps that covered her ears.  She gathered her coat more closely around her, pulled her scarf higher around her neck. 
    Riga scanned the shore with every magical sense she’d once had, broadening her vision, reaching out with her senses, listening with her inner self. 
    Nothing. 
    She tightened her lips in frustration.  Still, if it had been a demon, it would have left signs that didn’t require magical senses to locate.  Riga paced the beach, walking methodically through the soft, damp dirt.  Closer to the water, the ground turned sandy.  Riga crouched beside the empty pier, near a patch of earth that had been roughly churned.  “Get a photo of this, will you?” she asked Griff, who followed closely behind her. 
    He sighed, adjusted the camera on his narrow shoulder.  “Video.  Not camera, video.”
    “What do you think?” Sam asked her. 
    She straightened.  “I think it’s too soon to jump to conclusions.”
    Walt strode up the beach and joined them.  He looked about as if to assure himself the crew was behaving on his neighbor’s property, and handed Riga her phone. 
    She inhaled.  If a demon had been there, its scent was long gone.  But something would have been left.  There are always signs, she reminded herself.  Riga closed her eyes and cleared her mind.  When she opened them, her gaze was drawn up the hill, away from the beach. 
    She walked to a circle of pines and Walt and the crew followed.  As Riga stepped into the circle, it felt like crossing a threshold.  The temperature dropped and the trees pressed in upon her, the air thickening.  Dark magic had been practiced here, and the feeling of it rushed in upon her.  Her stomach roiled.  Ladies, she reminded herself, don’t vomit on TV.  Not even on cable TV.  To give herself time to recover, she went to one of the trees.  A palms-width line of bark had been turned to charcoal and she broke off a piece, crumbling it in her hands.  She sniffed the bark, not daring to look at anyone, sure she looked greenish and ill. 
    The nausea subsided. 
    Riga drew a flashlight from her satchel and flipped it on.  She walked to the center of the clearing and the crew parted around her.  A charred line stretched across all the trees in the little stand, as if a flash of energy from the center had scorched them. “Could this have been the area where you saw that flash of light?” she asked Walt.
    “Yeah,” he said, “but I saw a flash of light, not a fire.  A flashlight didn’t cause this scorching.  There was a fire here.”
     “What do you see, Riga?” Sam asked.
    “This wasn’t a campfire.  A fire that burned hot enough to turn the bark to charcoal, would have singed the needles and pinecones and dead branches on the ground.  And it wouldn’t have caused this narrow band of heat.  This was something different.  Walt, I think your first instinct was right.  This was caused by a flash of energy.” 
    “What sort of energy?” Sam asked.
    “I don’t know.”  Riga put her hand upon the cold ground, extending her senses, and felt another wave of nausea, tinged with triumph.  She couldn’t differentiate the energies, couldn’t see what had happened here, but her magical senses were returning.  Even if these particular energies made her want to throw up, she was feeling something. 
    The back of her neck prickled. 
    She was being watched. 
    Riga stood up and clicked off the flashlight, then unfurled her senses outward, probing.