Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, & Magic

by SM Reine

  Staring at Erin, all I could think about was Ofelia. Erin didn’t look anything like my sister, who was dark-haired and tall, like me. Erin was a short redhead, ivory-skinned and lean. But I looked at Erin, and all I could see was Ofelia with her bloody neck and bruised, lumpy face, and I was filled with a burning hate at myself, hate at the world, hate for the tequila that had wiped my memory of what had happened here.

  The phone stopped ringing. Switched to a voice.

  “You’re late, Cèsar, and I’m going to have your nuts on a griddle for it. Little salt, lots of pepper, maybe some—”

  “There’s a dead body in my bathtub, Suzy,” I interrupted.

  Silence.

  I probably should have called OPA dispatch or something, but I didn’t want to talk to dispatch; I wanted to talk to my officemate. She would get it. She would know what to do, how I should react, the steps we needed to take to fix it. Her head was always clearer than mine.

  “You’re going to have to say that again.” She sounded so calm, but there was a hard edge to her voice. Suzume Takeuchi—Suzy to me—was usually unflappable. But I think I’d just flapped her.

  “You heard me. There’s a body in my bathtub. You gotta head down here with a Union unit. We’ve gotta pull this scene apart and figure out what the hell happened.”

  Another long pause, and then, “Did you kill her?”

  The question hit me between the eyes.

  Scratches on my arm, body in my apartment, no memories in my skull—it hadn’t even occurred to me that I might have forgotten about killing Erin.

  The idea was so ridiculous that I almost felt like I should laugh.

  Almost.

  “No, I didn’t kill her,” I said. “Who do you think I am?”

  If she answered, I didn’t hear it. I was distracted by the wail of sirens through the cracked bathroom window. They were distant but approaching fast.

  It wasn’t the Union, which was like a special forces arm of the OPA. The Union didn’t blast through residential zones with sirens wailing. They were covert ops. They rolled in with black helicopters and black SUVs and quietly arrested or assassinated the guilty.

  Since it wasn’t the Union, those sirens belonged to the LAPD. The mundane police force.

  Someone had called the damn cops on me.

  “I need a Union unit now, Suzy.” I set down the Louisville Slugger and went to my living room window. It was a beautiful spring day. The oak tree blocking half my view was budding. Some kids that lived in the complex were playing on the grass. I could see the flash of lights beyond them.

  Suzy seemed to understand why I was suddenly more urgent. “Okay, Cèsar, don’t do anything crazy. I’ll take this straight to Director Friederling. Cooperate with the police; we’ll be there shortly.” And then she hung up on me without saying goodbye because Suzy never said goodbye.

  I pulled on the first clothes I found—boxer briefs, a pair of gray sweatpants with my alma mater’s logo on the hip, a white t-shirt—and that was when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs outside.

  Every instinct told me to prepare to fight and run. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I shouldn’t have felt guilty. But I was the one with the scratches on my arm and bloody feet, and I knew what they were going to think. I wasn’t authorized to tell these people that I was with the Office of Preternatural Affairs. Officially speaking, the OPA and I didn’t exist.

  All the cops were going to see was a man who got drunk off his ass and killed a woman.

  But if I ran, if I resisted—like the burn of adrenaline in my veins wanted me to do—they were going to see a man who had killed a woman and was fighting them. It’d be as good as digging myself a nice, deep grave.

  I had to cooperate. That was what Suzy said. “Cooperate with the police; we’ll be there shortly.” Like I had any other option.

  Then my door was getting kicked open, there were hands forcing me to the floor, and I was handcuffed.

  And mostly, I was just thinking that I was definitely never drinking tequila again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The police station kind of smelled like piss. You know, ammonia. That chemical in urine that seemed to be impossible to scrub away once the puddle went dry. I could smell bleach, too—someone trying to clean up someone else’s mess.

  Seemed like that was going to be a theme for the week.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been there. When Domingo got picked up for tagging in high school, that was where they had brought him: 77th Street Community Police Station. They were cool guys. They knew the neighborhood, they knew the kids, they knew who belonged and who didn’t. I didn’t know any of them by name anymore—it had been a long time since Domingo had gotten into that kind of trouble—but the cops walking me through the front door had the same honest faces that the old guys did.

  They marched me past some desks that looked a lot like mine. The desks were covered in paperwork and staffed by exhausted men just trying to make the world a better place, when the world didn’t want to be made any better. They were underfunded and overscheduled and stressed out, just like I was.

  But I wasn’t on the desk side of things now. The paperwork wasn’t my problem now. What had happened at my apartment—that was someone else’s bureaucratic nightmare.

  The holding cell had a bench and a toilet and a barred window. The one next door had a couple of gang bangers that looked like they had won a fight. The right side of one guy’s face was purple, and the other one was bleeding through the bandages on his ribs. Whatever had happened to them, they were in good enough shape to be in jail. That meant they’d won.

  The cops were polite about putting me in the holding cell and locking the door behind me. No manhandling or anything, just took off the cuffs and sat me down.

  “I need a phone call,” I said.

  One of my escorts said, “We’ll see what we can do.”

  I wish I’d told them in the car that I worked for the FBI—the currently accepted cover story for OPA agents—because I was hesitant to say it after having met my two new roommates. I mean, I was an intimidating guy. I benched twice my body weight, my body fat was less than ten percent, and I looked like a freaking tank in gray sweat pants. But two gang members with stylized crosses on their throats and “SUR 13” on their foreheads weren’t going to be hot on chilling in a holding cell with a Fed. The next couple hours of my life would be easier if I kept my cover story to myself.

  Once the cops were gone, there was nothing to do but read these guys’ life stories inked into their skin. I didn’t know human gang signs well. Give me a witch wearing chains of crystals and medallions, I could tell you his coven affiliation, status in the witching community, and even his favorite spells to cast. But a sad-looking Jesus, some elaborate crosses, eighteens and thirteens—I had no clue.

  They didn’t think much of my staring. They stared back. Hard.

  I wished I’d brought my last strength poultice with me when I’d gotten arrested.

  I didn’t belong in jail. I wasn’t this guy. I wasn’t the one with the tats bleeding from an alleyway knife fight. Even when I’d gotten caught up in trouble with Domingo, it’d been property crime. Not this violent crap.

  Bloody Face started cajoling me in Spanish. Whatever he was saying, it was probably offensive. I wouldn’t know. When my grandmother, who we called Abuelita, had come from San Salvador two generations back, she made sure all her kids spoke English. My parents, aunts, and uncles had never spoken Spanish, so I definitely didn’t. But I still had the looks, and these guys weren’t the first to think they could talk with me in “our” native language.

  It was easy to tune out words I didn’t understand. It faded into the background of distant voices. I stretched out on the bench, folded my hands over my chest, focused on the window.

  Sky was turning gray. Looked like rain.

  My memory of finding Erin in the bathroom swelled to the surface.

  Erin. Jesus, Erin.

  I had
ridden along on a couple of murder scenes when I was in training for the OPA. Everyone did their time with the Union whether they liked it or not, and it was always unforgettable. I remembered the stuff that they looked for in deaths related to demons. There were often runes and seals, finger painting with blood, that kind of stuff. Smarter demons, the ones more like humans, often liked to carve into their prey. The dumber ones just ate them.

  Erin hadn’t been eaten. She hadn’t been carved. There were no runes in my bathroom. Just a hole in her heart and hand-shaped bruises stamped onto her throat.

  It looked like any mundane murder I’d seen on those CSI TV shows. Nothing to do with demonic possession or magic or a hungry fiend whose master had lost control. It looked like someone had fucked her, choked her, shot her. All stuff that a human could easily do—anyone with a grudge.

  I refused to think of that “anyone” as me. I was a victim here. It was the only possible truth, and the only one I would consider.

  Something touched my feet and I looked up to see Bloody Shirt making kissy faces at me. He was pressed up against the bars. Leaning toward me, harassing me with gestures instead of words.

  I propped up my knees so they couldn’t reach me. Shut my eyes. I still had a hangover and none of this was making me feel any better about it.

  Guess with what happened to Erin, I should have been grateful that I was alive to feel so fucking miserable.

  I told myself, Count your blessings, Cèsar, because the day is going to get worse before it gets better.

  Sometimes it sucked to be right.

  Yesterday had been so much better.

  I’d just wrapped up a four-month-long manhunt for a witch named Black Jack who had a quick hand for tarot and a quicker hand for curses. Most of those curses were dumb pranks—might mess with someone’s head, but nothing deadly. The numbers in the OPA’s budget were redder than blood, so he’d been on the observation list for years without anyone managing to justify the cost of hunting him down.

  Until he cursed some car keys and his ex-girlfriend drove into oncoming traffic.

  That had bumped his priority up real fast.

  The New Mexico office sent the file to us and Black Jack landed on my desk. Long story short, I bagged him just like I’d bagged a half a dozen other witches this year. Picked him up in a gas station. Slipped a mix of a sleeping and paralysis potion in his energy drink, knocked him out cold.

  That was the result of four months of hunting on my part and years of monitoring by other agents. Taking Black Jack off the streets meant that we’d be saving a lot of money on cleaning up his bullshit. It meant we might actually get merit increases on our paychecks next summer.

  Yeah, the big boss had been happy with me, and so was everyone else.

  That was why I had been at The Olive Pit last night even though I don’t drink. We were riding high on the knowledge that Black Jack was going to Italy for trial, never to be our problem again. Everyone had been there: Fritz Friederling, the director who had given me the job with the OPA; some hunters with the Union; all the other investigators in the Magical Violations Department; even the administrative assistants.

  Suzy had been there, too. The amount of alcohol that woman could put away was incredible considering she was five feet tall in heels. She had been exchanging crass jokes with Joey and Eduardo, the kind of stuff that I would never say in front of a lady, and playing drinking games that started with setting shots on fire and ended up with us all getting completely trashed.

  I hadn’t paid for a single drink. All the guys had been buying for me—the man who nailed Black Jack.

  They had given me shit over the way tequila made me cough and choke. Suzy had been pounding her tiny, delicately boned fist on my back and it had felt kind of like a jackhammer.

  Bad alcohol, great company. So I had been feeling good. Real good.

  Then Erin had arrived for her shift. She’d had a nasty black eye covered up with makeup. Big bruise. It covered half of her face. I remembered when my sister, Ofelia, was trying to cover up the evidence of her abuse, so I’d known immediately what was going on.

  I had cornered Erin by the kitchen. I’d said something like, “Tell me who’s messing with you, and I’ll take care of it.” Big words coming from a drunk guy, but I’d meant it.

  “Nobody’s messing with me,” she had said. She’d batted her eyelashes at me. Shot me a sweet smile. “I’m okay.”

  “Let me help you,” I’d insisted. And then I’d told her who I was, whom I worked for, how I could nail the guy that was hurting her. I shouldn’t have told her the truth, but I did.

  Then there was a haunted, hungry look in her eyes. Just for a second. Nothing more than a flash of it.

  “I’ll think about it,” she’d said.

  Suzy had found me, dragged me back to drinking. We’d played a few more games. I noticed at some point that Fritz had left and thought that was probably my cue to leave, too. Whenever the director thinks it’s time to get home and sleep, it’s time to sleep. But Suzy had talked me into staying.

  Erin brought me a drink toward the end of the night. When she’d dropped it off, she kissed me on the cheek, slipped me a note. “I’ll tell you after my shift. Maybe you can help. But not here. Your place.”

  When she’d left, I checked what she had given me.

  Her phone number.

  Then I’d tossed back the fireball she’d given me. I’d felt hot and excited at the thought of having Erin in my apartment. Suzy had been talking to me but I’d barely even seen her lips moving, much less understood what she was saying. My head was filled with liquored haze and the buzz of knowing I’d be taking a beautiful woman home.

  After that…well, I guess Erin had come home with me, and I think we might have had sex.

  I knew I hadn’t helped her.

  I couldn’t remember that part.

  You always thought if you got in trouble working for the OPA, it was going to be when you crossed someone like Black Jack. You thought it was going to be having a curse slipped under your desk or a demon assassin crawling out of the darkest alleys of Helltown.

  I’d never thought it would be like this.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  They got the other guys out of the holding cell before they came for me. I was alone with my view of the drizzly spring day for about an hour. Just me and my thoughts and a determined sparrow shrieking. It was kind of nice. Meditative.

  Then life was moving again. There were people at my door and the halls were sliding past me. More desks, lots of guards, locked doors.

  They dropped in an interview room.

  It was hot in there. It couldn’t have been more than sixty degrees outside, but it was ninety between those four unremarkable walls, and I was immediately sweating. Hard to say if the discomfort was meant to be a technique to loosen me up or if the LAPD just didn’t have a budget for fixing the A/C. Either way, I didn’t like it. I still wanted my phone call.

  Instead, they were gonna interrogate me.

  You couldn’t call them “interrogations” anymore, though, because we didn’t “interrogate” people. That was too aggressive. That assumed too much guilt. We interviewed suspects these days.

  Whatever we called it—whatever the LAPD called it—I knew exactly where I was and what was about to happen to me. And I knew it wasn’t going to be fun or pretty.

  Back at OPA headquarters, we had several interview rooms. One of them had a silver-reinforced door and silver chains and a silver chair, just in case we crossed paths with a werewolf and needed to “interview” them. One of them was warded against magic, nullifying any witch that might sneak a charm in with her. Another had crosses and the pendant of St. Benedict engraved into the concrete floor—that one was for the demon-possessed perps.

  But this place was almost hilariously normal. One-way mirror. Table in the middle with two chairs on one side and a single chair on the other—that was for me. The door wasn’t magicked or silver or anything. I got a good l
ook at the completely normal lock as they guided me inside. They didn’t even have wards to nullify the magic in the poultice I had consumed that morning.

  Two detectives came in to talk with me. I wondered how many were on the other side of the window. I wondered if they were scared of how big I was, how messy Erin’s body had been, how little they could find about me with a background check.

  “You like to drink, Mr. Hawke?” asked the first detective. Her name was Kearney.

  “I’d like a water, yeah,” I said.

  That wasn’t what they meant, but they got me a glass of water anyway. Tasted like it had been sitting in a plastic jug for months.

  “You drank a lot last night,” Kearney went on. She was an intense woman with a square jaw and no waistline. Fists clenched on top of the table. “When we tested you this afternoon, your blood alcohol level was still above legal limits for driving.”

  I didn’t want to talk about my drinking habits. I didn’t have drinking habits.

  “I need my phone call,” I said again. Felt like I’d been saying nothing else since they’d brought me here.

  “Where do you work?” asked the other detective, Ramirez. He was a skinny man with gray hair.

  I didn’t even have to think about the fake answer. It was habit now. “I work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  They didn’t look surprised by that answer, so someone had already found my fake FBI badge.

  “What do you do for the FBI, exactly?”

  “It’s classified.” So much more classified than they could ever know. They lived in a small world, an ordinary world. They didn’t know anything.

  Identifying myself as an FBI agent was usually enough to get me out of any degree of trouble. It didn’t work that day. Not after Erin, and not with Kearney shooting daggers out of her eyeballs at me. “I’m sure that must be stressful,” she said. “Working for the FBI, doing secret work. You have to unwind somehow. Who can blame you?”