Blood & Ash: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Detective Series (The Jezebel Files Book 1)

by Deborah Wilde

  I got another mumble and a thumbs up extended from beneath the covers. Good enough. After stashing a few of her protein bars in my leather jacket, I jogged down the stairs, emerging on the street to a beautiful spring day.

  Fat fluffy clouds drifted cheerfully across the bright blue sky and the remaining snow on the North Shore mountains glinted in the sunlight.

  Darting down the side street to where Moriarty was parked, I called Miles.

  “This number is unlisted,” he said.

  “Most people go with ‘hello,’ but you do you.”

  “You report to Levi. Go bug him.”

  “Nope. You’re my new bestie. Besides, I need the Head of Security.”

  He sighed. “For what?”

  “A way into Hedon.”

  He laughed and hung up.

  I hadn’t expected it to be that easy, but now I had his location. Thankfully, he wasn’t at House Pacifica, but at his townhouse. Naturally, Priya and I had amassed our own database on persons of interest, Nefesh and Mundane, in this city.

  I knocked on Miles’ door until he answered it with a growl. “How did you find me? Was it that coder friend of yours? The Pink Menace?”

  As Head of Security, I wasn’t surprised that Miles knew about Priya, especially since she worked for me, but he had met her exactly once and he remembered her enough to give her a nickname? Interesting.

  I ducked under his arm. “Nice boxers.”

  His physique was impressive but it was too jacked up for my tastes. I preferred someone more like–nope.

  Miles grabbed my collar and turned me around to face him. “What happened to your neck?”

  “Work-related injury. Hedon. How do I get in? Skip ahead five steps and spare me the useless arguments.”

  “I have to clear it with Levi.” Muscles exploded on muscles when he crossed his arms. “FYI? He’s going to say no.”

  “One little love tap during training and the boy gets pissy? I’m not asking for permission. You willing to live with the consequences of me not solving this case as fast as possible and destroying those smudges roaming our streets?”

  The silence stretched out. Was it possible I’d misjudged his concern for the greater good? No. Levi would never allow him into the inner circle if that was the case. This was Miles pulling attitude.

  “Wait here.” He lumbered down the hallway. Ten out of ten for those tight glutes of his.

  The foyer was devoid of all personal touches. There was nothing to clue me in to the personality or psyche of this home’s inhabitant. Maybe that was the point.

  Miles returned shortly with a dented token coin stamped with an H. It looked like a gag gift.

  “If you’re messing with me, I’ll set the Pink Menace on you.”

  “Try it.” He bared his teeth.

  I swiped the token away. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

  After a special bout of coaxing to get the fucker to start, Moriarty and I headed downtown. This early on a Sunday, there was plenty of available parking alongside Harbour Center, a tower which housed both the downtown campus of Simon Fraser University and a revolving restaurant with 360° views of the city.

  I stood in line behind the tourists waiting for their turn in the glass elevators that crawled up the outside of the building along the forty-plus floors to the restaurant. After the group ahead of me took forever to find the discount coupon for their admission, I finally reached the cashier and presented the token.

  She stared at me blankly. “Twenty dollars. Visa, MasterCard, cash, or debit.”

  I slid the token closer.

  “Visa, MasterCard, cash, or debit.”

  “It’s kind of hedonistic today,” I said.

  The woman leaned out around me. “Next!”

  The couple behind me tried to shuffle past but I stopped them. “I’m not done.”

  “Do you want me to call security?” the cashier said.

  Doubt slithered through me. I could have been wrong about the entrance being here since I’d learned it eavesdropping on some drunk Nefesh private investigators a couple of years ago and the woman was reaching for the phone.

  No. This was the right place.

  “One please.” I handed her the token, folding her fingers around it.

  She regarded me coolly, then replaced the receiver. “Elevator on the left.”

  An elevator that went up the outside of a building in order to enter a dangerous magic black market. I was positive I’d be in there alone, battling monsters whispered about in the dead of night that hurtled from the darkness to devour you.

  Instead, I was wedged in with a large, boisterous Greek family. Halfway up, after several people had stepped on my toes, I checked hopefully for any vents dispensing poisonous gas. Two thirds of the way up, when I was squished in the corner doing a partial backbend while the Greeks took their one millionth selfie against the Vancouver skyline with the superb view of the water beyond, I prayed for a ninja assassin dropping from the ceiling.

  And when we reached the top as the same saxophone muzak piece of shit looped around for the third time, drilling into my brain like a dental procedure without the Novocain, monsters might have been the better alternative.

  I stepped into the welcome area. Before me was a revolving door that led to the restaurant. The tourists went through it, their animated chatter falling away.

  Other than the door to the restaurant and the elevators, this space was all windows and sandstone tile with no doors or portals. I clicked my heels together three times. “Hedon. Hedon. Hedon.”

  Ah, well. It had been worth a shot.

  “Ash?”

  I stiffened, the smell of Old Spice and lemon candies causing a lump in my throat, and turned around slowly. “Daddy?”

  Adam Cohen’s hair was more gray than brown now, as was the stubble that he never managed to totally shave clean, but the way his eyes lit up at seeing me hadn’t changed a bit. “Little jewel!”

  He hugged me, his arms strong and safe and the entire world making sense for the first time in so very, very long.

  I wrenched free. “This is a trick. You aren’t here.”

  He scratched his chin, his expression crestfallen. “You have every right to be mad, my girl, but it’s really truly me.”

  “Yeah? Where have you been?”

  He shrugged with that lopsided smile that always preceded him dancing around the truth. “Here and there.”

  My heart clenched. This wasn’t my dad, this was the monster I’d been expecting. Every detail conjured up the instant I thought of it. “Good try. But you’re a little too pat. A little too exact.”

  “What?”

  “You. Adam. Or whatever you are. You’re not my father. So what do you want?”

  “You have to pay the price of admission.”

  “I did. The coin.”

  He laughed, the hearty sound cutting straight to my heart. “That was a test to weed out the unworthy. And the price is nothing so extreme as you’re imagining. A simple game.”

  “Rigged, I suppose.”

  “Not at all. Fall backwards into my arms and let me catch you.”

  “Let me fall, more like.” I toed the floor to gauge how painful my landing would be.

  He held out his arms.

  Whatever. I’d play this stupid game. Except I couldn’t make myself face away from this image of my father. A certainty filled me that if I did, he’d stab me in the back. Either literally or figuratively and disappear again. It didn’t even matter that this wasn’t my dad. He looked like him and he smelled like him, and I once more tasted the bitterness that no amount of spearmint chewing gum could get rid of in the months after he’d left.

  My throat closed up on me and my body tingled, alternating between hot flushes and clammy chills.

  “Don’t have all day, little jewel.”

  Swallowing hard, I forced myself to think of Meryem. I could do this for her. I had to. Millimeter by millimeter, I shuffled around so that my
back was to that atrocity. That grotesque joke that wasn’t my father but hugged like him. A hug that my heartbroken thirteen-year-old self would have killed to experience one last time.

  My vision narrowed, the memory of a concrete wall zooming up to meet me, and I jerked hearing the screech of twisted metal, a million shards of glass and hot metal pouring down on me like rain drops.

  I breathed my way through it and told myself what I always told myself when this happened, in hospitals, in near-misses at rush hour, in the dead of night:

  I am not a mark.

  I whipped around and threw the blood dagger I’d called up directly into Adam’s center mass.

  He looked down at it, eyes sorrowful and shocked, then wavered and disappeared. I tucked the knife against my back under my leather jacket with shaking hands and a heavy heart.

  A low grinding noise made me start. The revolving door had started up behind where Adam had been, slowly moving dividers that alternated between tables with bright linens from the restaurant and a foreign night with a crescent moon.

  I should have felt a thrill of victory as I stepped into Hedon, but all I could think of was Adam’s sad eyes, how he’d looked down at his solar plexus and my knife without blame, only regret.

  Go me.

  Chapter 10

  Imagine one person’s magic was a single melody. Listened to by itself or in small numbers, magic could sound beautiful. But all at once? It was a mess.

  That’s what Hedon was, a deafening cacophony of magic and noise that made no sense. Ever evolving, rumor had it that the black market had been carved by the most talented of Nefesh architects from spaces stolen from reality and stitched together. It resided in the pockets outside our normal world, accessible globally to those in the know, but existing nowhere.

  It defied all logic and I despised it, even without its foundational magic that bitch-slapped me so hard that I gagged and sat down on the lip of the weed-choked fountain in this tiny plaza, with no sign of where I’d entered. I closed my eyes, taking the shape of this magic that smelled of axle grease and vanilla ice cream inside me, letting us get acquainted. I couldn’t unravel or seize the magic from the market’s bones, nor did I want to, but if I didn’t push this waterfall down to a manageable dull roar and quash this nauseating overload, I wouldn’t be able to function.

  It took some time before I no longer wanted to vomit, but eventually I stood up on unsteady legs and took stock of my surroundings.

  Hedon possessed a drunken, listing quality, from the stalls and shacks thrown up haphazardly to the sticky velvet night that caressed my skin. This world was awash in neon, or rather the magic equivalent thereof: an electric blue ramen bowl floated above a simple kiosk while a pair of dragons made of light swooped and belched fire above a penthouse far in the distance.

  Two narrow crooked roads veered away from the plaza. I went left, wandering through a street crowded with people haggling for wares, the scents and smoke of grilled food making my stomach rumble, and the whizz of motorcycles over cobblestones vibrating up through my toes.

  The fashions were as over-the-top as the architecture. There was an androgynous person in a ballgown wearing a monocle and with a live frog on their shoulder manning a stall selling bones and beauty potions, an elderly Asian woman standing on stilts and wearing steampunk goggles as she dished out glistening noodles in rainbow colors, and a biker gang in gas masks and brass-studded body stockings hawking gold coins that evaporated into a deadly poison through body heat.

  I followed the road about six blocks to its end. No one that I asked about Queen of Hearts Productions was willing to give me an answer. They either ignored me, fearfully told me to go away, or became outright belligerent. I was about to double back and take a side street I’d passed, when a man with white hair, even though he was probably in his forties, and a white suit that even the 1970s didn’t want back, stepped away from the wall, grinding his cigarette under his white boot heel. “Looking for the Queen?”

  “Unless I’m late for a very important date,” I said.

  White Rabbit Man failed to get my reference, but come on. This Alice in Wonderland second-rate cosplayer couldn’t be serious.

  “Sure,” I amended, when he continued to stare at me, dead-eyed.

  That was the last thing I said before he knocked me unconscious with a blast of electricity.

  I woke up unceremoniously slumped in a hairdresser’s chair. My hand flew to my head but my locks were present and accounted for. Sadly, so were a pair of magic-suppressing handcuffs around my wrists.

  The salon’s red-and-white tiled floor matched the red walls and three stylists’ chairs in white. Only one other chair was occupied: by a plus-size woman in a stylist’s cape, her hair being encased in foils by a reedy hairdresser whose long nails clacked against the brush used to apply the dye. A person in black tactical gear with mesh obscuring their face stood in the corner standing guard. The same heart with a crown and scepter logo as the Queen of Hearts Productions was stitched on their upper arm.

  “You’re disturbing my beauty regimen, blanquita.” The customer’s Spanish-accented voice was honey over steel.

  I had the craziest urge to curtsey. And physically hold on to my head. No. It couldn’t be… could it? I stood up. “Sorry, I wouldn’t want missing kids to interfere with your dye job.”

  The stylist gasped, her plastic bowl of hair color splatting to the ground.

  The client placed a stiletto on the floor and slowly repositioned her chair to look at me. Her thickly lashed large violet eyes sparked and her pouty lips compressed into a thin line. She had crow’s feet, making her older than I’d originally thought. Maybe in her early fifties. “¿Qué dijiste?”

  I swallowed at her hard tone, but awkwardly retrieved the flyer from my pocket and thrust it at her, the handcuffs jangling. “You’re kidnapping marginalized youth.”

  She took it between her thumb and forefinger like a soiled napkin, gave it the barest glance, and laughed huskily. “Sí. I’m diversifying my business interests into kids’ parties and abduction. Do you have any idea who I am?”

  “Someone with pretentions of royalty?”

  The stylist gasped, now on her knees cleaning up the fallen dye. “Show some respect for the Queen of Hearts, ruler of Hedon.”

  “I’m not good with authority. Ask my mom. Look, House Pacifica knows about the smudge and isn’t going to stand by and let you do this.”

  “Que es un ‘smudge?’” She waved away the stylist.

  The woman scurried through a red door, holding the towel she’d used to clean up the mess and leaving me alone with this glamorous lady who drove my instincts into high alert more than the creepy bodyguard in the corner did.

  The Queen ripped off the cape, revealing a red wraparound dress that hugged her curves and popped against her bronze skin. She waited for me to continue with the patience of a lioness stalking its prey in the high grass.

  I explained about the smudge, creatively rearranging details so as not to put Miles or the House in a position of weakness.

  “How did you see those things?” The last vestiges of her amusement fell away, her eyes darkening with cunning and the promise of retribution.

  “I didn’t. It was Levi Montefiore.”

  “Because of his illusion magic?”

  I nodded. Sure. Let’s go with that.

  “What do you want from me?” she said.

  “If it’s not you, then do you know who’s behind it? You don’t have to get involved, I just need a name so that I can stop them.”

  “They implicated me when they put my name on their flyer. It’s my business now.”

  “That doesn’t really work for me,” I said.

  A dozen pairs of scissors rose out of their disinfectant liquid to quiver in mid-air, their sharpened points directed my way. The guard’s hand was raised as if they were conducting an orchestra.

  I called up my magic, but I was as dead as a downed phone line. Stepping sidewa
ys didn’t help either, because the scissors repositioned themselves to follow me. “There’s a missing girl that is very much my business. And since she’s registered with House Pacifica, that makes it their business. Now, we can work together quietly, or I can reach out to all the other Houses and see which other ones this affects. Then we’ll come back en masse, barging into your affairs until we get the information we need.”

  The speech would have gone over a lot better if my hands weren’t cuffed in front of me, but I was gambling on the collective Houses being a sufficient threat.

  The Queen studied me for a long time, but I met her stare, steely-eyed and chin up. She nodded at the guard and the scissors glided back into their containers. I let out a pent-up breath.

  “I’ll do you one favor, but you have to choose,” she said. “You can either have someone connected to all this or the location of your papá.”

  “You’re the one who called up that fake Adam?”

  She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Call it a magic alarm.”

  “Or a magic mindfuck.”

  “I like to know who’s entering my domain for the first time. What do you choose?”

  “Even if you could find Adam, why offer this? Do you give everyone what they want? How big are the strings attached to that offer?”

  “You are very suspicious, chica.” She brushed a foil out of her face. “No strings. I’m very good at unearthing things that are in my interest, and you have become very interesting to me.”

  That was… disturbing.

  “This is a one-time offer,” she said.

  The decision should have been a no-brainer. Why would I even want to see my dad again? He couldn’t help me with any of this and, moreover, he’d made his feelings for us abundantly clear. But what if he’d run into trouble? What if the reason I’d never been able to find him was because he was dead? That he’d meant to come back and couldn’t? For years, I’d clung to that thought like an addict, and with her offer, the need to know roared to life, digging its hooks into me.

  I could finally have closure and put my past to rest. Or, I could be given a lead that would require further investigation, since she wasn’t promising to get me those actually responsible.