The Divine Roses (Jake & Dean Investigations Book 3)
Page 1
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Epilogue
Author’s Note
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Also by Richard Amos
About the Author
Copyright © 2020 Richard Amos
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, duplicated, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Cover by Vanesa Garkova
One
Jake
“We really need to be somewhere, you know?” I told the tree creature thingy.
“You tried to kill me!” he protested in Dutch.
“For God’s sake! No, we didn’t. How many more times?”
Big night tonight and where were we? Stuck in the hands of a pod-born knob head who’d gone and mutated into a tree with big hands and a bad attitude.
Annoyingly, he was only about six-feet tall. Yes, he had a big bush for hair, was covered in pine-colored bark, and he had terrorized a hospital emergency department, but he was still pretty much mine and Dean’s height.
It was his long arms and big, people-catching hands that were the real problem—hands we were both stuck in the poxy grip of.
“You don’t call setting fire to me a murder attempt?” he yelled.
“It wasn’t real fire,” Dean added, struggling less against the wooden fingers gripping him than I did.
A flippin’ bird even landed on the thumb near my face, pecking at the solitary leaf sticking out of the bark that was now his skin.
“Liar!”
It wasn’t fire. It’d been a magical trap to make him think he was on fire. The plan was to keep him distracted by screaming the city down and get him with the other magical trap—one that’d put him in a frozen stasis.
Cruel, maybe, but he’d put a hole in the hospital wall just by tripping over a chair and falling into it.
The bloke’s name was Sem, and he was a complete liability, a danger to himself and others. There was no cure for pod-related transformations yet, but we could at least work to keep the streets safe as best we could—even if it meant freezing this guy’s backside.
Shouldn’t have eaten pod. Yep. He’d made a pod trifle with his friends. Of the four, he was the only one to live to tell the tale. The rest of them had died from melted insides.
Really nasty shit.
“You have no right to put your hands on me. I’ll go to the papers! I’ll ruin your agency for this!”
There was that bad, let’s call it snotty, attitude again. The idiot had been all indignant about us chasing him. Oh, never mind him being a walking disaster. Yep, that was fine. Put holes in everything. Yeah, no worries.
“Oh, shut your whining!” I retorted.
“What did you say?” He crushed me harder.
Arsehole.
Time to end this bollocks.
All ideas welcome, I told my brain. Whenever you’re ready…
I looked to Dean. He really was as cool as a cucumber, keeping his words to a minimum.
He was planning something.
Yay!
We’d chased Sem down to an old camping site on the opposite side of the Amsterdam-Rijn canal that flowed past Flevopark, confronting the git by the water’s edge. It was a sunny Friday afternoon, lovely blue skies, proper spring-like after yet another week of snow. I was waiting for something crazy to happen weather-wise. Since the pods had popped up, thanks to the supernatural council’s magical interference and general cocking things up by being shady knob heads, the weather’s behavior was often extreme—like the global snow incident.
A boat went past carrying some cargo. I couldn’t see the captain or whatever, and he or she were probably keeping their head down, sailing past and not getting involved.
Best way.
“I should squeeze the life out of you right now,” Sem said.
“Messy.” Come on, Dean.
“You’re not scared?”
“Erm, of course, we are. You think this is how we want to die? You think we actually want to die? I’d rather be at home with my feet up, spending some quality time with our daughter.”
“You’re a couple?”
“We are.”
“With a daughter?”
“Yep. I really want to be getting back to her right now.”
“What if this was her?” he asked.
Don’t go there… “But, it’s not.”
“But what if? What if she was suffering like me?”
“We don’t want to hurt you, Sem. But we have to stop you, to figure out a way for you to live your life.”
The freeze wouldn’t be permanent, and he hadn’t hurt anyone yet. Maybe me a little but I’d get over it unless he did it again. He might have to go to a sanctuary for pod-born—a revelation to us only three days ago. Apparently, a few had been built in Australia and the US to take on pod-born who couldn’t exist in cities, towns or whatever anymore. No one had known anything about their construction, being done in remote places, but now the whole world did.
There were a few frozen people in Amsterdam who would benefit from moving and being unfrozen, even if they were a long way from home. Good people in a fucked-up situation who deserved a shot at life.
“The sanctuary,” I said. “Maybe—”
Tighter grip. “No. I’m not going there. No!” He started to sob. “I just want to go back to my old life.”
Okay, I felt for him. Even if he and his mates were absolute pricks for doing what they did. They were victims. The thing with pods (crazy blobs of color that had caused merry hell around the world) was they’d got themselves a bit of a cult following. It was weird. Some people thought they could cure anything. Some thought they enhanced sexual pleasure, made a party a partaaayyy, or even made your plants grow better than any plant food or patience.
When would people learn? Pods were bad. Caused bad things to happen. Death or crazy transformation.
People. Ugh.
“I’m sorry,” I offered. “I really am, mate.”
“They’re dead.”
“I’m sorry.” His grip was loosening. Not enough for me to wiggle free, but it
didn’t feel like my ribs were about to pop anymore.
“My fault. I made them… I thought it would be fun. I didn’t think… I read… I read things would be fun, that we’d all get the best trip of our lives.”
I didn’t bother giving him more of the cautionary tale speech. It didn’t mean anything now. He knew he’d seriously screwed up. What was the point in making him feel worse about it? Yep, he was on that descent into horrible grief. The way back up was a long way off. Everyone had their own path when it came to dealing with loss. Something in Sem’s eyes told me he was going into it a whole lot deeper than even he was expecting to.
Sometimes I just got these feelings about people when it came to loss. A relatable thing after the stuff I’d been through over the years, I guess.
“They were my everything, my family,” he added.
Maybe he wasn’t that much of an arsehole, just a complete douche of the highest degree when running his gob.
“I know what it’s like to lose people, to feel like the world has been turned upside down. It’s crap—really crap. And that’s just the start of it.”
He pulled me closer to him. Still couldn’t get free, though. “I wouldn’t want to take you away from your daughter.”
“I wouldn’t want to leave her.”
Sem turned his head to Dean. “Both of you. Even if you did try and burn me.”
“We don’t want to kill you,” I said.
He faced me again. “Only put me in one of those places.”
“You can’t live in the city anymore. There’s no cure for this.”
He let out a sigh, the leaf on this hand growing bigger. The bird was still there, pecking at it some more.
Okay, then.
“No cure…” he muttered.
“Not yet. Maybe things will change in the future.”
Four years of pods, not long until it was five. No solution. No way of getting rid of them. I lived in hope, we all did, that we’d find a way one day. But when four years go by, the hope wobbles a bit. God, so much magic had been thrown at them, and it’d failed every single time. There’d been one bloke from the council who’d used some potion on a pod. He ended up with pod backsplash to his face, his skin turning to fire. His head was an inferno, but it wouldn’t kill him, just burned and burned and burned, and he’d screamed in agony until someone put him out of his misery. I’d nearly puked reading about it.
Science didn’t seem to work either. Same went for weapons. Nothing worked to get rid of them.
“Amsterdam is my home,” Sem whispered.
“Maybe one day it can be again.” Dean was watching me, giving me the sign with his eyes that he was ready.
“I’m screwed.”
“Not necessarily.”
“I don’t want to leave my home.”
This was going to go around in circles. Thank God Dean had given me the eyes.
A flash of white burst through the hand holding Dean, revealing all the bones of Sem’s tree limb. Looked like he’d just been given an X-ray!
Sem yelped in pain, his fingers springing open. “What have you done?”
Dean moved quickly, rolling across the grass, scooping up the icicle thingy that was the freezing magic trap. Always made me laugh how plastic and fake it looked. Well, it was made of resin with some of Mila Young’s special potion stuff inside it, swishing around like liquid blue window cleaner.
My sexy fiancé was swift, slamming the trap into Sem’s right foot before he could yell again. Pale blue frost spread across his bark, across the hand that still help me, dusting the leaf. The bird flew off, tweeting how annoyed it was. It’d been having so much fun with that leaf.
Weirdo bird. Go find a worm or something!
Then the cold spread to me, freezing me down solid.
Crap! I knew this was going to happen.
I waited, completely sentient as Dean threw a potion vial at my head. I thawed, the hand thawed, and Dean tossed another potion. A stinger—which did exactly what it said on the tin. The newly thawed hand reacted to the sting by dropping me.
I hit the ground, tumbled forward, and landed onto my back, shivering from head to toe, my hair soaking wet.
“This sun feels good,” I breathed, catching my breath as Dean reapplied the freeze.
“It does, baby.”
“You ain’t on my chilly level right now, treacle.”
He laughed, coming to loom over me. “How are you doing down there?”
“Be a gent and help me up, would you?”
He took me by the hand, pulling me to my feet.
“What got you free?” I asked through chattering teeth.
He held up his hand, wiggling his right index finger. A gold ring with a small strip of blue stones. Bit like a hand buzzer but brought more of the ouch.
“Nice,” I said. “Thank God you had that on. Although I think I might’ve been getting to him.”
“Poor guy.” He made a call to our cop friend Lars. “Yes. Flevopark. Thanks.” He hung up. “Pick up is coming.”
“Excellent.”
The police had a unit for collecting creatures like this to take them to the appropriate storage facility. Seeing as he wasn’t going to an island prison, he would definitely be sent to a sanctuary now.
“Hey!”
I knew that voice. “Sonny?”
Sonny the Snake, English bloke and pain in my derriere, waved and jogged over. He was shirtless, showing off his scaly, serpentine chest, his rattlesnake tail swishing behind him.
His snake bits came from his own tangle with a pod.
“You shaved your hair off,” I said as he slowed on the approach.
He rubbed his really short buzz cut. “You like it?”
Be nice. “What’re you doing here?” That was as nice as I could do. I still wasn’t over him being a prick back at Christmas, but he had helped us out with the necromancer case and was gunning for some redemption.
I was learning to be tolerant.
“I was just hanging out, catching some rays,” he said. “This is a great place to do it.”
“Were you now?”
“Yeah. When was the last time you felt sun this good?”
He had me there—the shit bag. “Guess you saw what went down here?”
“I did. Glad you’re both okay.”
“Thanks.” Ah, no scathing comeback. Good for me.
“How have you both been?” he asked.
We hadn’t seen him since the necro incident.
“Good,” I answered coolly.
Dean was a lot warmer. “Can’t complain. You?”
He shrugged. “Trying to survive.”
You see, it was that stuff that got to me—him being homeless, vulnerable. He didn’t really have a place in the world or any friends. But then he’d handed me over to members of the Conclave (namely Tessa and her triplet sons—now dead). Yes, he’d made a horrible mistake that’d nearly got me killed, and they’d hurt him, threatened him to help them. Fine. But he still had to walk that path of redemption. Maybe a few paths before I could really forgive him.
I didn’t want to be bitter like that, but I always came back to Lou, our daughter. He could have left her without one of her fathers, and that didn’t sit well with me at all.
Couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, though.
His skin was flushed red from the sun. “Have you been eating, Sonny?”
His left, yellow, snake eye twitched as he scratched at his scruffy beard. “Not really. Get what I can.”
I dug in my pocket. There were some euros in there. I saw Dean doing the same.
“What do you have?” I asked my fiancé as he fished out coins.
“Six.”
“And I have four. Ten Euros altogether. Here.” I offered them to Sonny.
He backed off slightly. “No way. I don’t—”
“Can we not dance around this? Take the money and get some food in you. Come on. Don’t faff about.” He stepped forward and opened his ha
nd. I dropped the coins into his palm. “If you need food, you come to us. Okay?”
“Jake…”
“Don’t go hungry. You hear me?”
“Thank you.” Were those tears in his eyes?
“No worries. You’re too bloody skinny. Now go and catch some more rays before it rains.”
He looked up at the sky. “Do you think it will?”
“I actually reckon the snow will be back to piss us all off. Go on. Go and eat and frazzle yourself some more. Do you have sun cream?” Suddenly, I was a saint. “If not, stop by the office tomorrow. We’ll give you some.”
He looked between us.
“You need to take care,” Dean said. “Eat and protect your skin.”
I swear, if Sonny was about to blubber and try and hug us, I’d freak out.
He didn’t. “Thank you both so much. You’re good to me.”
I shrugged. “If you say so.”
He nodded. “I hope you can forgive me one day. I really do. I like you two. You’ve given a shit when no one else did.”
I hadn’t expected that to get me right in the chest. “Make sure it’s decent food.”
He smiled, putting the coins in the pocket of his dirty trousers. “Thank you.”
Sonny walked away, coins jangling with every step.
Dean placed his arm across my shoulders. “That was really sweet of you.”
“Looks like I do have a soul after all.”
“Look at me, Jake.”
I did. “What?” I almost buckled under the scrutiny of his dark eyes.
“You definitely have a soul. And it’s beautiful.”
“Ah, you’ll make me blush.”
He leaned in and kissed me softly on the lips. “I’m so in love with that soul.”