Shards: Book One of the Anderian Series

Chapter 3: A Lead

Two hours and a long shower later, I curled up on my couch with a sketchpad on my lap and my laptop on the cushion next to me. This was the fourth sketch I'd started, and while it was more accurate than the others, it still wasn't just right. Not that my memory of the echo had faded or was flawed. The glimpse of him had been too brief to capture both him and the thing inside him.

I added flecks of white to the blue in his eyes, and to the side, I drew another set—these glowing amber. Even if he hadn't referred to the entity inside of him as a beast he had to control, I would have recognized it as something separate from him.

The tip of the pencil hovered over the page, just above the deep v of his upper lip as I tried to bring it to life. Most people wore a mask. Jac's earlier behavior was a good example of that. To the outside world, he was the cool, collected detective, but I'd riled him up today and the facade cracked. That wild part of him he hated reared its head, but it was still him. Just as much as the other. We were all just carefully curated collections of personalities.

But the killer... If that animal inside him broke free, the man who caged him would cease to exist. It would eradicate him. The thought caused an overwhelming sadness to wash over me—a sadness that made little sense. Why would I mourn the loss of a murderer?

I swapped out the pencil for a deeper red to better capture the fullness of his mouth. Maybe murderer wasn't the right word. He'd thought about the people he'd killed. There had been mention of battles fought—death came with war—and he wore a weapon he knew how to use and was willing to use. He had been willing to kill Molly, but he didn't want to. She'd impaled himself on her sword to stop him from taking her to the Synod.

Synod. The extent of my knowledge was it was a council for a supernatural race nearing extinction—the Andarie. For all my acceptance of myself as different, I stayed away from the supernatural world as much as possible, but this case was going to take me into the thick of it.

"Shit."

I threw my pencil down. Nothing I did could capture his otherworldliness. His eyes were the wrong shape, somehow slanted at the corners but wide and thick lashed, but I drew them too small and deep set. The black of his hair was a shade so dark, I couldn't replicate it—nothing was deep enough or rich enough, and his mouth... women would hate him for it while wanting it on their bodies. The only thing I was certain was accurate was his only "imperfection." A pale white scar running beneath his left eye.

Andariens were ridiculously impervious to injury, and their healers were among the most powerful, bringing back creatures even after they had expelled their last breath from their lungs. As long as the soul remained tethered, they could heal the flesh and draw the soul back into its shell. For one of their kind to sport a scar—that injury had to have been enough to  kill him, or it was magical in nature. That was the end of my knowledge of the Andarie—of anyone's knowledge of the race. They were secretive bastards, and I knew of only one place in the city to find them.

"Shit," I repeated, drawing out my phone and hitting the call button.

June answered on the second ring. "Bria you bitch."

"Hey love," I crooned, not at all offended by her tone. Snark was the succubus' love language. "Sorry, it's been awhile."

"Awhile. Three months. Three months. If Evan hadn't seen you pumping gas two weeks ago, I would have suspected you were dead."

"You know it's a lot harder than that to kill me, right?" I asked, now offended, though I shouldn't be.

If it wasn't for June, I would know very little about the supernatural world—less even than I did currently. I would either have accepted the world's view I was insane or have gone insane feeling completely alone. But she'd pulled back the curtain on a community I'd long expected to have existed, and two things became clear very quickly: