High Stakes Trial Read online

  “Yeah,” chimed in the basilisk. “I wanna see my name on the computer!”

  You will, I thought uncharitably. Juvie would get to know this kid before he was old enough to drive. I was certain of it.

  My heart hammered. I couldn’t draw a full breath. But I was still responsible for these imperial kids for the next three hours.

  I slid open the paper drawer on my printer and pulled out a stack of clean white pages. Automatically, I tapped the paper twice on the long side, turned it, and tapped three times on the short side. My fingertips sensed the minute alignment as each sheet slipped into place. The cumulation of order relaxed the tiny muscles between my ribs, just enough that I could fill my lungs.

  “You will see your names on the computer,” I said, with all the fake good cheer of a nurse holding a foot-long hypodermic. “But first, you need to write your own indictments!”

  The words sounded crazy, even to me. As soon as they were out my mouth, I pictured the kids proudly showing off their lists of crimes to their parents—not exactly the type of treasure to be stuck on refrigerator doors for all eternity.

  I didn’t care. I needed time to read my own indictment. So I handed each child a sheet of paper and ordered them to sit in a circle on the floor around my desk. “Okay, kids. I want you to make a list of all the rules you’ve broken in the past month. Rules at school. Rules at home. Everything you can think of. The longest list wins!”

  They dove into the project with the enthusiasm of sparrows attacking a loaf of bread. I managed to wait a full minute before I opened the indictment that still glowed on my screen. My fingers shook as I scrolled down.

  One count of murder in the first degree.

  One count of murder in the second degree.

  Murder in the third degree.

  Manslaughter.

  Assault.

  Thirty-seven counts of revealing imperial secrets to mundane eyes.

  I clutched my hematite bracelet, trying to slow my rampaging heartbeat. I forced myself to take a deep breath, to hold it for a count of five, to exhale for a count of—

  Before I could complete my calming regimen, the door to the clerk’s office swung open. I pasted on an automatic smile, but froze when I saw an EBI officer, a gargoyle in full uniform.

  The Empire Bureau of Investigation was the closest thing the Eastern Empire had to a police force. Their main focus was keeping our magical world secret from the humans around us, but they were also responsible for maintaining the peace and investigating open cases.

  And they arrested imperials who’d been indicted for major crimes.

  “Sarah Anderson?” the officer asked.

  At the same time that the gargoyle unsnapped the handcuffs from his belt, the door behind me opened. I only had a moment to glance at the Staff Only sign before Angelique Wilson bounded into the room.

  “Sarah!” my boss hissed, every fiber of her cat-shifter body trembling on high alert. The Acting Director of Security for the District of Columbia Night Court was clearly enraged.

  “Mom!” shouted the shifter child who’d cut short our courtroom stay. She ran to her mother’s side, brandishing her handiwork. “Miss Sarah has us writing up ’dictments! Did I take three desserts from Geoffrey, or only two?”

  “What in the name of Great Danes is this?” Angelique yowled. I wasn’t certain if she meant her daughter’s list of venial sins, the gargoyle’s jangling handcuffs, or the printed indictment she brandished, my name shouting from the top of the page.

  The kids looked confused. They had no way of knowing that Angelique routinely cleaned up her swear words by referencing the most vile creatures she could think of—dogs, of course. The larger the breed, the more violent her reaction. If we were starting with Great Danes, I was pretty much doomed.

  “Sarah Anderson,” the policeman repeated, choosing to ignore all five staring kids and Angelique. “You are under arrest for the murder of Judge Robert DuBois.”

  He didn’t need to read me my Miranda rights. Those were for humans.

  “Please,” I said. “I’m responsible for these children.”

  Angelique’s fingers curled over her daughter’s shoulder. “Absolutely not,” She said. “You’re not getting anywhere near these children. Not with a mastiff-loving indictment hanging over your head.”

  The EBI gargoyle looked almost as confused as the kids, but that didn’t stop him from snapping his cuffs around my wrists. He was rougher than he needed to be, barely shoving my hematite bracelet out of the way.

  “Angelique—” I said.

  “Children,” she interrupted, taking only a moment to shoot me a glare as sharp as her manicured fingernails. She pointed to the shredder beside the chronically malfunctioning copy machine. “I want every one of those lists destroyed. Hop, hop! What are you, Bassetts? Get a move on!”

  The kids scurried over to the machine. I suspected this wasn’t a good time to warn them against getting their fingers caught, but if anyone amputated a limb, Angelique would certainly add that to my list of crimes.

  “Ms. Anderson,” the gargoyle said.

  “Angelique—” I tried one more time, even though I wasn’t sure what I intended to say.

  She turned her back on me.

  My old boss, James Morton, would never have left me to the tender ministrations of a gargoyle with a badge. But James wasn’t there. He hadn’t been for ten months.

  Officially, he was on sabbatical. But a handful of us sphinxes knew the truth: James had gone rogue. Wounded physically and psychically in the same battle where I’d been forced to dispatch Judge DuBois, James had disappeared from the Eastern Empire.

  I’d looked for him. As a sphinx I had to. I had to make sure a vampire under my care was safe from harm.

  But I’d tried harder than that. I’d tried like a woman who’d once drunk a vampire’s blood. I’d tried like a woman who’d let a vampire drink from me. I’d tried like a woman who’d once truly believed that he and I could… that we had… that we were meant to…

  But those days were over. I’d killed that relationship the instant I plunged an oak stake into Robert DuBois’s chest.

  “Let’s go,” the gargoyle said, pulling me back from my memories of that disastrous night.

  As Angelique distributed a ream of clean paper to the gleefully shredding children just to keep them occupied, I grabbed my purse and let the policeman lead me downstairs to the processing room. We imperials hid our jail in subterranean chambers beneath the courthouse, the better to avoid prying human eyes.

  At the booking desk, I handed over my personal possessions—my purse and my cell phone, my hematite bracelet and my coral ring. The jewelry formed my insignia, the physical focus for my sphinx powers. I felt more naked without them than if the bored gnome sergeant behind the desk had ordered me to strip off my clothes.

  As I fretted, the disinterested earth spirit chomped on her gum, taking her time as she typed my personal information with two broad index fingers—name, address, date of birth. I tried not to shudder at the multiple typos that made their way into my record.

  It took her three tries to get a clean set of my fingerprints, and that was after she removed my handcuffs. I stood beside the height markings on the wall while she took my mug shot. Holding a plaque with my case number, I looked straight ahead, then turned to the left and the right on command.

  “Let’s go,” she said when my mortification was complete.

  “Go where?”

  “You want your phone call, don’t you?”

  I followed her down the hall, to an ancient wall-mounted telephone with a dial. I gave her a dubious glance, but she said, “Go ahead. I’ll wait back here.” She took an ostentatious step away and produced a nail file from her pocket. The rasping sound set my teeth on edge.

  At least I knew who to call—Chris Gardner. He was the closest thing I had to a mentor as a sphinx. The closest thing I had to a boyfriend too. At least that’s how I’d come to think of him in the inter
vening months since James’s enraged departure.

  As a former reporter for The Washington Banner—Chris had taken a buyout just last month—he knew more than his share about legal bureaucracy, imperial and mundane.

  Plus, I had his phone number memorized.

  I glanced up and down the hallway, but I couldn’t see a clock. It had to be two, maybe three o’clock in the morning. Chris would be sound asleep beneath his navy blue comforter. He’d have his alarm set for six, so he could take his usual morning run.

  I hoped he wasn’t in the middle of an especially good dream.

  Using my body to shield the phone from the gnome’s sight, I dialed Chris’s number. I don’t know why I bothered to hide the outgoing call. The EBI probably monitored every word said on the line.

  One ring. My throat constricted as I tried to think of how to reassure Chris, to ease his pounding adrenaline as he startled awake.

  Two rings. My palms grew slick.

  Three. My belly flipped, a nauseated little twist as I wondered why he wasn’t picking up.

  Four. I scrambled to compose a message, an explanation of what I needed, why I was calling in the dark hours before dawn.

  “Chris,” I said after the beep. “I don’t know where you are. I don’t know what’s going on. There was a grand jury, about DuBois. I—You’re my one call. I need—Chris? I—”

  The machine cut off. I stared at the telephone handset, suddenly thinking of everything I should have told him, starting with details about the indictment. He’d need to know each individual count as he worked to get me a lawyer.

  When I turned around, the gnome was eyeing me with pity. “Go on,” she said, pushing her Juicy Fruit into the pocket of her cheek. “You can make another call.”

  “Really?”

  “This is the real world, hon, not some TV show. You get a reasonable number of calls. And I’m pretty sure you’ve got a good reason to make another one.”

  “Thank you,” I said, with real meaning.

  But when I turned back to the phone, I realized I didn’t actually know who else to call. A year ago, I would have reached out to James. But that was clearly impossible now. I was pretty certain he’d be first in line to lock me up. Maybe first in line to throw the switch on the electric chair, too.

  My best friend—Allison Ward—was human. Plus, she wasn’t talking to me. That was a disturbing trend among my acquaintances, I realized. But even if Allison and I had spent last weekend giggling over umbrella-topped drinks like besties, I could hardly ask her to spring me from a supernatural jail she knew nothing about.

  I didn’t have any family to speak of. My mother had died when I was still in college, and I’d never known my father. I was an only child, and I didn’t have any aunts or uncles or cousins.

  I did have a few imperial friends—the griffin bailiff in Judge Finch’s courtroom. The sprite court reporter. But they were working upstairs. And asking them to track down a lawyer for me was beyond the limits of our working friendship.

  What the hell was wrong with me? Why didn’t I have a single person I could reach out to in the middle of this crisis? And where the hell was Chris? Why wasn’t he answering his phone in the middle of the night?

  “Hon?” the gnome asked.

  I shook my head, forcing myself to focus past the trembling that threatened to take over my limbs. “Th—” I started, but my voice broke. “Thank you,” I said again. “I’ll just wait for him to get my message.”

  The gnome shrugged. “It’s your funeral.”

  I sincerely hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  The gnome walked me to my cell. I closed my eyes as the door clanged shut. When I reluctantly opened them several minutes later, there wasn’t a lot to see. A metal bed jutted from the wall, covered by a thin mattress. A toilet sat in the corner. Otherwise, the tiny room was empty.

  I lay back on the mattress and closed my eyes, but I wasn’t tired. This was still the middle of my working day. I was supposed to be awake for five, six, seven more hours.

  Automatically, I reached for my hematite bracelet, my fingertips seeking its soothing touch. When I brushed bare skin, though, I shuddered. I couldn’t squelch the reflex to twist my absent coral ring.

  My sphinx brain craved order. It demanded simple, neat organization. Alas, the only thing to straighten inside my cell was the thin cotton sheet on the mattress. I pulled it into alignment, tucking in the corners with military precision.

  After that, all I could do was pace. One, two, three, four, five steps to the front of the cell. Turn around, neatly, cleanly, with forced efficiency. One, two, three, four, five steps to the back. Turn again.

  Over and over, I walked the length of the cell. The counting soothed my frazzled nerves. The rhythm began to unknot the tension in my shoulders.

  As I walked, I assured myself that Chris would appear in the morning. Once he got my scrambled message, he’d figure out what to do. He had the resources to track down my indictment. He could find me an appropriate lawyer.

  It would have to be a sphinx, of course. Essential fairness required imperials to be represented by lawyers of their own species. It wouldn’t do to have a fire spirit representing a water elemental; the potential was too high for cases to be reversed on appeal due to inadequacy of counsel.

  Chris was the Sun Lion, the strongest sphinx in the Eastern Empire. He’d been the Director of Archives since he was fourteen years old; there wasn’t a sphinx in the continental United States he didn’t know.

  And so, I tried to relax as I paced. I tried to tell myself all would be well. I tried to believe this was all a terrible mistake and that Chris would make everything right in the morning.

  But hours passed, and Chris didn’t arrive. Guards walked down the line of cells, shoving trays of lumpy oatmeal and lukewarm coffee through the bars. Other guards picked up the untouched food. Prisoners called out, protesting injustice, demanding to be freed. A lucky few were taken from their cells, presumably escorted to private rooms where they could consult with lawyers.

  Lunch came, a dried-out sandwich that might have been turkey. I left the tray untouched.

  I was tired now, so tired. I’d walked a thousand miles, pacing my cell from end to end. I’d been awake for centuries.

  I stumbled over to my bed. Facing the wall, I curled up on my thin mattress, pillowing my head on my arm. I closed my eyes and started counting by sevens, trying to trick my brain into forgetting where I was.

  Finally, I slept.

  I woke sometime after sunset—at least that’s what I gathered when a vampire guard strode through the cell block. Meekly, I asked if I could make a phone call. The vampire, though, wasn’t as easy-going as the gnome had been. He ignored me and stalked away.

  Sometime earlier in the evening, a dinner tray had been passed through the bars of my cell. I wasn’t tempted by the gelatinous mass of something that might once have been stew.

  Hours had passed since I’d tried to reach Chris. Would the guards have let him into the cellblock if he’d come to the courthouse? Maybe he was waiting in the courtroom upstairs. He might have tracked down a sphinx lawyer and, even now, they were sitting on a hard wooden bench, watching Judge Finch wrap up mundane court activities for the night.

  But if he wasn’t there…

  Had Maurice Richardson gotten to him? The vampire had plenty of reasons to hate the Sun Lion.

  I shook my head, trying to drive out graphic images of exactly what an enraged vampire could do to an unsuspecting sphinx.

  Maybe I was fretting over nothing. Chris could be busy with some obscure sphinx business. He might even be facing his own legal challenge. He’d been present the night I executed Judge DuBois. Maybe he’d been indicted too.

  He could have succumbed to something mundane. He could have been hit by a bus.

  I spun out another dozen scenarios. In every single one, Chris lay dead or hurt or dying, and I was powerless to help him. I caught myself rocking back and forth on the edge
of my metal bed, my arms folded around my belly as I struggled not to keen.

  “Let’s go,” the vampire guard said, making more noise with his ring of keys than was strictly necessary.

  “Go where?” I asked. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to step outside of my cell.

  “Courtroom,” the vampire said. I hoped he wasn’t being paid by the word. “Arraignment.”

  “But I don’t have a lawyer yet!”

  “I don’t make the rules.”

  But his suddenly expressed fangs made it perfectly clear he was willing to enforce them. I did my best to straighten my clothes, and I followed him upstairs to the courtroom.

  Lawyer or not, it was time for me to answer to the imperial court.

  3

  Eleanor Owens, the griffin bailiff, took over from the vampire, marching me into the courtroom and leaving me to stand alone beside the defendant’s table. I craned my neck, trying to search the gallery for Chris even as I was reluctant to turn my back on the judge.

  There were plenty of imperials in the seats; it was a busy night at the courthouse. But I didn’t see a single sphinx—not Chris, not a lawyer he might have sent, no one.

  A nervous dryad sat at the prosecutor’s table, shuffling papers and running twig-like fingers through her tangled hair. Judge Finch peered down at both of us from the bench. She’d already transformed into her vampire persona.

  “Counselor,” she snapped, making the dryad jump. “Will you read the charges?”

  The dryad cleared her throat and rattled her papers one more time. But then she recited the claims I’d seen in the indictment—murder in the first degree, second degree, third. Manslaughter. Assault and revealing imperial secrets. None of it had changed.

  Judge Finch’s eyes glowed like embers as she turned her attention to me. I stood accused of killing a judge. Killing a vampire judge. Could I possibly trust her to treat me fairly?

  Her voice was dangerously soft as she asked, “How do you plead to these charges, Sphinx Sarah Anderson?”

  I wanted to protest. I wanted to demand a lawyer. I wanted to march out of the courtroom and back to my desk and pretend that none of this had ever happened. I wanted to know what had happened to Chris.