"Text me the address, and I’ll head over." I poked a dead body in Grandma's living room with my toe. His eyes were still open. I wanted to make sure he was dead. "You give the officer on duty a heads up. I don't want to have to go back and forth about needing the crime scene free of people."
"I'll meet you there." The chief cleared his throat. "Thank you, Pandora."
I didn't respond before ending the call. My phone dinged a second later with the address. Before walking back into the kitchen I walked over to the chest and flipped the lid. The gnome was dead. He took his own life with a little knife. I turned and walked back into the kitchen. Lucifer and Grandma argued heatedly in hushed tones. Grandma's fingers sparkled with magic, and Lucifer's eyes blazed red.
"Sorry to break up your little fight, but I need to head to work."
Both Lucifer and Grandma said no at the same time.
"Grandma, at this moment, I'm mad that you didn't tell me my whole childhood was a lie." I looked toward Lucifer. "I want a DNA test before I believe you are my father."
"Paternity tests are such a human thing." He stood and started walking toward me. I raised my hand for him to stop, but that wasn't all that happened. Purple magic shot from my palms. My eyes widened. I never could throw magic before. It would've been nice to have an hour ago.
"I'm not going to hurt you," Lucifer grumbled.
"I don't have that kind of magic. What have you done to me?" I paced the small kitchen. My phone buzzed, reminding me I was supposed to be on my way to a crime scene.
"Nothing. Today is your birthday, and all my children's full powers come in near their birthdays. I cringe to think about what other power Paldon, your twin, got today."
Wait, what did he say? "Twin?"
"Were you not listening earlier when your grandma said you looked like your twin? Do you need a witch doctor to check your hearing?" Lucifer walked back near the table. "Just call the human back, and tell him you're sick or whatever excuse humans use not to go to work. I'm proud of my employees when they lie about being sick."
I ground my teeth together. "My hearing is fine. I probably missed it because I was trying to wrap my head around being the devil's daughter. And no, I'm going to work. You stay here in case more of whatever came earlier comes back."
Lucifer waved his hand, and my body froze. "I'm going with you." He snapped his fingers, and the pandacorn reappeared in the house. "You stay with Ms. Cloven in case there is another attack." The pandacorn glared at Lucifer. "I know you were at Paldon's, already telling her about her sister." The pandacorn shrugged a shoulder and sat in the chair next to Grandma.
Fifty curse words left my mouth when Lucifer unfroze me. I stormed out of the house, but the devil was quick on his feet, so the locked car door didn't stop him from appearing next to me in the passenger seat. I gripped the steering wheel and took a couple deep breaths.
3
I gripped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles turned white. My dad sat next to me. The devil. When I was little, I had dreamed of one day finding my father. Every time I had asked my mom about my dad, she would change the subject. I figured my mom slept with a nice human and didn’t want to bring him into her world. The DNA test my best friend, Sasha, and I bought a few weeks ago was sitting on the counter at my house. With work being so busy, I hadn’t had time to take the test. Now I knew it wouldn’t matter. I was pretty sure the devil had never taken the test. I glanced from the road to Lucifer. His one hand was on the dashboard, the other on the door, bracing himself like I was driving a race car.
“Brake,” Lucifer ordered. “I haven’t lived for an eon to die in a car accident.”
I slammed on the brakes. When the light turned green, I turned down a side street. The city was quiet. Downtown New Orleans wouldn’t start buzzing until closer to dinnertime. Most tourists were sleeping their hangovers off. “I think it would take more than a car accident to kill you.” If the paranormal books I read growing up were correct, Lucifer was immortal. I should probably know this information, but I hadn't paid attention when I was younger.
“You are just as stubborn as your sister,” Lucifer said. “She’s going to be so excited when she finds out I found you. Maybe she and her mate will come to hell for another week. I need brownie points. She's mad I bought my grandkids dragons for their first birthday. The kids like them. Not sure why she is so upset.”
I frowned. My family circle had been so small. Now my supposed dad—I wasn’t ready to admit he was my dad—was talking about my sister and her kids. “Why a dragon?”
Lucifer frowned, his face slightly panicked. “I tried to get them unicorns, but unicorns are not as nice as fairy-tale books make them out to be. Maybe I should just buy them unicorns anyway. Do you think that will make Paldon happy?”
I couldn't stop my eyes from rolling. Yes. It was on the tip of my tongue, but if she was my sister, I didn’t want her to be mad at me. I knew about dragons but had never heard of one being someone's pet. “I thought all dragons were shapeshifters.”
Lucifer tapped his fingers on the armrest. “Draco and Thorn pissed off a witch over a hundred years ago. She cursed them, and they’ve been in their dragon forms ever since. I told them if they played dragon for my grandkids for the next eighteen years, I would have the witch reverse the spell, or they could spend the rest of their immortal lives as dragons.”
I turned down the street toward the crime scene. Three cop cars lined the street in front of an old Victorian home. Next to the line of cop cars stood the Chief of Police, pacing while running a hand through his hair. My stomach turned the closer we got, something felt off. Lucifer, “ Does the air feel thick to you?”
There was an empty spot next to the chief’s car. I pulled in and looked at my passenger. His eyes blazed red. “Lucifer, your eyes.” The devil took a couple calming breaths. His eyes were still glued to the house I needed to go into.
I had forgotten about the chief for a second and screamed when he knocked on my window. I quickly rolled down my window, and the chief bent down to look at me and raised his eyebrow at the passenger in my car. “When did we start bringing friends to crime scenes?” my boss asked.
“Chief, meet Lucifer.” Lucifer snapped from his trance and turned to me.
“Pandora,” Lucifer snapped in a low voice. “You don’t go around telling people who I am.”
The chief’s eyes widened as he watched us.
I shrugged my shoulders and yanked on the handle of my car. The chief backed up, but his eyes never left Lucifer. His hand rested on his gun, ready to pull it out at any second.
Pointing to the chief’s hip, I said, “Not sure your gun will take him out, Chief. Can we get on with this? It’s been a long morning, and it was supposed to be my day off.”
“You never told me you knew the devil,” Chief whispered as if Lucifer couldn’t hear. I talked a little about the supernatural world only when it involved a case. Otherwise, we rarely mentioned it.
“I didn’t know him until this morning,” I admitted. “He just showed up and dropped some news I’m not ready to talk about.” I pointed to the old Victorian house. “Has the place been cleared?”
The chief stared at me for a long second. “Yes, but I’m going in with you.”
Lucifer huffed. “We don’t need some human helping us. And I didn’t just pop in. You were upstairs when I made my appearance. It was spectacular.” He crossed his arms, daring me to reply.
The doors opened, and my old partner walked out and glared in our direction. It wasn’t the first time he had sent me a look of annoyance. My ability didn’t make it easy to work with others, and when I asked the chief to work alone, Detective Mike Harris took it personally. His solve rate went from ninety percent while working on cases with me to thirty percent. Over our short three months of working together, he had never asked how I could solve the cases so fast. He liked working with me because I did all the work and he got high close rates.
I heard the mumbles of a
couple cops as we walked by. They all thought I was sleeping with the chief because he brought me in for every case. I glanced around the scene and didn’t see my direct supervisor, Lieutenant Curly. He had never asked how I could solve a case so fast either. My gut told me the chief had told him to not ask and let me do my job since the he was the only one who knew about my ability.
“Where’s Curly?" I asked as we started down the sidewalk of the old home.
“You don’t know where we are?” he asked.
I looked up and down the street for a clue. “No. Should I?”
Chief ran a hand through his hair. “Yes, this is Curly’s house.”
His answer took two seconds to click. My boss had been murdered, and the chief thought it was done by someone in the magical community. Could this be connected to the case I solved the week before or the attack on my grandma and me this morning?
“When was the attack?” Lucifer asked.
Did Lucifer think this was the person who died because I brought my grandma back to life? Someone close to me would die soon. Lieutenant Curly and I weren’t close. Sadness washed over me. Another person would die soon because of me, and I couldn't do anything to stop it.
“He radioed for backup at around eight fifty this morning. When backup arrived, he was dead.” He turned from Lucifer to me. “Something feels off, and we need to catch the person behind this. I need your help.”
The demons and trolls had arrived at Grandma's a little after eleven. Curly didn’t die because I brought my grandma back to life. Now it was time to figure out if this was a case of the supernatural kind or a human gone crazy that looked like something from another world.
I walked up the white wooden stairs to the front door. Each stair creaked under my feet. I reached for the door handle and twisted. The door opened. With my first step inside, I noticed the air was even thicker. The metallic smell of blood filled the air. The front living room was crisp white and clean, not what I expected a single forty-year-old bachelor pad to look like. “Which way?” I asked the chief. He pointed to the back of the house.
The sense of uneasiness followed me with each step I took. When I turned down the hall, little bloody footprints covered the floor. From a human perspective, they looked like a child's feet. As someone who knew what went bump in the night, I knew they weren’t. They looked like the prints covering Grandma’s white carpet. “Demons.” I hadn’t realized I said it out loud.
“You are correct, daughter.”
Chief stopped and looked at me. “Daughter?” His voice sounded panicked. “You introduced him as Lucifer. Are you telling me you are the devil's daughter, and his demons attacked your boss?” I had never seen someone turn pale so fast.
“Alleged daughter,” I told the chief.
Lucifer snorted. “Those aren’t my demons.”
Chief went to ask another question, and I shook my head. His lips pressed together as we reached the other living room.
Blood coated every surface of the room. Next to Curly’s body was a green liquid. Something I had never seen before. It would be hard to get to the body and not disturb the crime scene. I stood next to Lucifer and examined the room. “How am I going to get to the body without touching anything else?” I pondered out loud.
“You don’t need to.”
I looked at Lucifer waiting for him to continue. “I need more than that. I always need to touch the body.”
“Try to get your information by touching the blood. You shouldn’t need to touch the actual body. If you use your powers to the full extent, you could visualize the body and get your information.”
I knelt next to the puddle of blood on the ground and closed my eyes. My fingers touched the blood, but nothing happened. When I went to rise, Lucifer put his hand on my shoulder, keeping me in a kneeling position. "Visualize like you do when you touch the body. Open your mind, picture the fires of hell, and pull magic to assist you." I visualized what the fires of hell might look like. I figured they would be similar to the ones I kept seeing in Lucifer's eyes.
It worked. I was in Lieutenant Curly’s place before the attack. He sat on the leather chair, reading a book called True Crimes. His gray cat sat on his lap, purring. Everything looked fine until a purple portal appeared in the corner and three demons climbed through. They were speaking a language I didn’t understand. When I looked back to Lieutenant Curly, I expected him to be in shock, but instead, he looked in their direction and spoke back to them.
The three demons weren’t happy with what he said. The taller of the three stepped toward the lieutenant and pulled out a flaming sword. Lieutenant set his cat to the side and stood up. He chanted a few words that I understood. He was trying to shift, and when he couldn’t, his eyes widened in shock. The demon smiled, and its smile was evil and filled with hatred. All three demons now had their swords drawn, and they attacked. Curly worked with lightning-fast speed to fend the demons off. He was running toward his gun when three more demons appeared, and they all attacked at once.
Each one stabbed Curly, not stopping even when his body dropped to the ground. They continued to sling his blood across the room. Hateful was the only word to explain the way the demons attacked. They had no compassion for the man they killed. The tallest of the three demons stood over Curly’s body and poured a green liquid.
One by one, the demons jumped back through the portal, and my body slumped as I pulled myself out of the vision. The same demons who attacked my boss came after Grandma and me next. It took me a few minutes to open my eyes. Chief was used to the wait. A very impatient Lucifer kept grumbling that it was taking me too long to come out of the vision.
I slowly opened my eyes and looked at my supposed father. He knelt in front of me, his eyes blazing red. “You need to practice magic more. This should have been easy. One of your sisters will be here tomorrow.”
I wasn't sure why, but I nodded, and a smile appeared on the devil's face. Cooper leaned against the wall, watching every move. “What did you see, Pandora? Is this supernatural or human?”
“Supernatural. The demons who attacked Curly attacked my grandma and me next. One thing I didn’t know was that Lieutenant Curly was a shifter, and he knew the demons who appeared in his house. When he chanted the spell to shift, it didn’t work.”
Lucifer stood up and went to step into the room, and I grabbed his suit jacket. My fingers barely curled around the fabric. My body was weak from the fight earlier today, bringing Grandma back to life, and the last vision. Lucifer brushed my hand off his suit. “I won’t ruin your perfect crime scene.” He stepped into the room and through the blood, but his shoe prints didn’t show. He walked to the center of the room and tilted his head back. It seemed like an hour, but it was only a second before he walked back.
“The demons didn’t come from hell.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll send you some help to solve the case. This should be a fun one. Wish I could stay and watch, but I have a date.”
A date? You have to be fucking kidding. Someone close to me is going to die, and I have to solve the magical demon case? And the demons didn’t come from hell.
“Wait!” I screamed before he vanished. “Who are you sending? I can’t have a nonpolice person work the case with me. I already saw the heads turning when you walked in with me. And Chief has been the only person to ever see me do my thing."
Lucifer pulled at his diamond cufflinks. “Someone from the FBI’ll be down tomorrow to help with the case, and he is good at all things supernatural.”
Chief stepped forward. “I don’t like the idea of the FBI snooping around our case. Pandora can handle this. She’s handled most of our cases.”
Lucifer turned quickly and grabbed the chief’s shirt. The chief’s feet dangled in the air. “Don’t question my motives. Agent Brone will be here tomorrow to help.”
“Agent Brone?” my chief asked.
Lucifer nodded, and before he could vanish, I threw my arms around him in an attempt to give him a hug. “Thank y
ou for your help.” Before I let go, I reached up and yanked a couple of his hairs out.
The devil smiled as I stepped away. “See? I don’t need your silly human test to know when I find my children. Simple touch tells me more than you’ll get from a test.” And with that, he disappeared before our eyes.
Chief looked from the blank spot to me. “I’m sorry to put more on you, but I’m going to announce you as interim lieutenant. I need someone to run the department.”
This was one of my long-term dreams coming true. Why did everything have to happen at the wrong time? This case needed to be solved, and I couldn’t do it and run the department.
“You can do it.”
I nodded. “Who is Agent Brone?”
Chief let out a sigh. “One of the most respected and feared agents. He’s sent in to solve cases no one can figure out. Now I know why. I would bet my pension you’re about to meet one of your father's friends.”
“Possible father,” I shot back.
4
I glanced at the clock on the stark-white wall. My head throbbed as I watched the second hand tick. When I came back from the crime scene, I sat down at my desk. Lieutenant Curly’s door was closed, and I wasn’t ready to walk through that door yet, even though his assistant had already hit me up to sign a bunch of documents. The chair beside my desk screeched as Mike Harris pulled it back. He was the last person I wanted to talk to.
“Pandora.”
“I can’t do this right now, Mike.” I figured he was upset with me for getting the promotion, and I didn’t want to deal with it. I had heard the rumors over the years. I was sleeping with my boss. Maybe I was the one committing the crimes and framing people. There was no way I was convicting the right people.
He tapped a pen on my desk. “You deserve the promotion. But you know this means you’re going to have to let people do their jobs and stop solving other people’s cases.”
Fated Mates of the Underworld, Books 1-3 Page 16
