by SM Reine
Isobel had her hands stretched out over the cremains and her eyes had gone blank. She stared at the wall without seeming to see it. “Erin Karwell? Erin…come on…” Her cheeks flushed. The muscles in her hands strained.
I felt her voice all the way down in my stomach.
Erin Karwell…
Magic built around us, pressing tight inside my chest as silvery mist lifted from the cremains. I smothered my nose and mouth with a hand, fighting not to sneeze at the force of magic.
Erin didn’t appear as quickly as the man in the temple had. I glimpsed ghostly legs, but they faded to nothing within moments. Then I glimpsed a sliver of face. Eyes without irises. A bald scalp.
The body formed slowly, painstakingly, blurred around the edges.
There she was. Erin.
Suzy stepped back, reflexively reaching for the pistol she wasn’t carrying again.
Erin looked down at herself, running ghostly hands over her breasts. They looked smaller than I thought I remembered. Maybe she’d had implants and plastic surgery hadn’t translated to her ghost. The hair wasn’t there either, just like it hadn’t been on the man Isobel had raised. She looked bald.
The ghost flickered. Her legs had never fully formed. When I stepped to the left, I could see that she didn’t have a back either, more like a flat picture than an entire body.
Guess cremains were enough to summon her soul, but only barely.
Her mouth moved. Isobel spoke for her.
“What’s going on?” she asked softly.
It was quiet in the morgue. Dead quiet. No pun intended. Isobel was whispering, but I didn’t have to strain my ears to hear her at all.
“Erin?” I said.
Isobel grimaced, pressed a hand to her forehead. The ghost vanished for a full second before reappearing. “Where am I?” Erin asked through Isobel. “What happened?”
“My name is Agent Takeuchi. I’m with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Suzy sounded hoarse, kind of freaked out, but I still almost laughed at her introducing herself as a member of the FBI. Like a dead woman was really going to ruin our cover. “I need to ask you a few questions. Can you hear me?”
Erin nodded. Her gaze drifted over the room, but just like Isobel, she didn’t seem to see any of it.
Was it really her? Was it her soul manifesting, or some faint residue still imprinted in her cremains?
“What’s the last thing you remember, Miss Karwell?” Suzy asked.
Isobel spoke. “I went to work. I was running late.” She flinched, mouth twisting and brow furrowing. “I went to work. I was running late. I’ve been running late a lot, so Thandy chewed me out.” She groaned and bent over at the waist as if someone had struck her. At the same time, Erin faded out of view then faded back. “I went to work,” Isobel whimpered. “I was running late.”
Damn. Erin was barely there. I wanted to grab Isobel, shake her free of the connection, but stood frozen at the end of the table. I needed to hear this. I needed to get past Thandy to what happened after that.
The door opened. An out-of-breath morgue tech rushed in, and stopped short at the sight of the ghost. “Praise Allah,” he breathed.
“Rob,” Suzy said, stepping toward him, trying to block his view. It was too late. He’d already seen her. “Get out of here. I told you to leave us alone. I fucking paid you.”
His mouth worked soundlessly. “It’s—the—what is that?”
“Rob. What are you doing here?”
“The cops,” he said. Erin was reflected in his wide eyes. “The cops are here. I know the alarms are disabled, and I didn’t call them, so someone must have…tipped them off…” He tried to move toward Erin’s blurry ghost. “Is that a ghost?”
Suzy swore in a language that wasn’t English. “I’ll take care of this,” she told me, seizing Rob’s arm, dragging him into the hallway. She left the door open. I could watch their shadows slide over the wall as she hauled ass toward the reception desk. Voices I didn’t recognize echoed back toward me.
We were out of time.
“Keep Erin here,” I urged Isobel. “Just a few more seconds.”
The sound of my voice finally drew Erin’s attention to me. Her ghost solidified and brightened. Her blank eyes penetrated me.
“Cèsar?” she asked through Isobel’s mouth.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, baby. It’s me. I’m here. You gotta tell me who killed you. I need to know what happened.”
Her glowing, delicate hands flew to her throat. Erin’s white eyes widened and her mouth opened.
Isobel began to scream.
Shit.
I grabbed her wrists, shoved her away from Erin’s ashes. Didn’t help. Isobel was trapped. All tangled up in Erin’s spirit.
And there was no fucking way that the cops wouldn’t hear it.
Footsteps beat in the hallway. I heard Suzy shout.
I shook Isobel hard. “Let go! We have to run!”
“You killed me!” she shrieked, beating at my chest, trying to wrench free. “You killed me!”
What she was saying sunk in. The room spun around me. Erin’s horrified mirage clutched at her heart where the bullet wound had been, screaming through Isobel’s lips as she stared at me, fraying around the edges. The ghost vanished with terror in her eyes, and Isobel kept screaming.
Terror pounded through me. The cops were still fighting with Suzy in the hall and getting closer. We needed to be gone. Now.
I lifted Isobel off of her feet, slammed her back into the wall.
“Izzy!”
Her scream cut off, mouth still open, eyes blank.
Slowly, she focused on me.
“Nobody calls me Izzy,” she whispered. She reached up to touch my face. Her fingers brushed along my jaw, up my cheekbones, to my brow, like she was identifying my features with her hands. “Oh my God, Cèsar. Oh my God.”
She didn’t have to tell me what she had learned from her connection to Erin. I already knew what she was going to say.
I had killed Erin Karwell.
20
Somehow, we escaped. Don’t even fucking ask how, because I don’t know.
Everything went from screaming to running in about two seconds flat. There had been gunshots. Suzy had been yelling, flashing her badge. Men had shoved guns in my face and grabbed my sleeves. I had punched someone. Maybe a couple someones.
Then Isobel and I had been running. We’d gotten into her RV. And then we were driving.
After that, all I knew was that we ended up outside Los Angeles. It was night outside the windows. Desert stretched to the hills. We weren’t on a road anymore. We were far from the LAPD, far from the OPA, far from Suzy at the morgue.
But there was no running from what I had learned.
I sat on Isobel’s creaky futon and stared at my hands. They looked bigger than usual. I wondered if the shape of them matched the dark imprints on Erin’s throat before her body had been reduced to nothing but ash. I hadn’t checked. I’d been too busy freaking out. I hadn’t believed it could have been me anyway.
I still couldn’t believe it.
“Erin.” Her name was a prayer on my lips. An apology.
I wasn’t that guy. I wasn’t someone who got drunk enough to black out. I wasn’t capable of getting drunk enough to shoot a woman.
And yet, somehow, I was.
Like Suzy had said, the dead couldn’t lie.
You killed me, she’d said. You killed me. God, those screams. They’d carved my heart right out of my chest and left me hollow on the inside.
Isobel stood a few feet in front of me. Just out of arm’s reach. She was staring at me as if seeing my face for the first time. She wasn’t driving, so that meant that the RV had stopped at some point. I wasn’t sure when.
“Did you lie to me?” she asked.
I didn’t understand the question. “What?”
“You told me that you didn’t kill Erin. Were you lying to me?”
She had heard what Erin ha
d said, hadn’t she? She knew what I had done. I could see it in her face. “I didn’t know,” I said slowly. “I didn’t think that I would have ever done…that. I wasn’t lying to you. I believed that to be true.”
“I don’t think I want you in my RV.”
I couldn’t blame her for that. I stood.
She pushed me back onto the futon.
“I didn’t tell you to leave,” she said. I stared up at her blearily, trying to understand. “We’re miles out of town. There’s nowhere for you to go anyway. So don’t even think about bailing on me.”
That was a lot of sympathy for a murderer.
I leaned back against the wall, stared up at the ceiling. “I should have turned myself in to the OPA.”
She sat next to me. The mattress sagged under our combined weight. She touched my leg and I pulled away.
Erin wasn’t going to smile again, never serve drinks again, and I’d ended that. It was me.
“I should really go,” I said. I could barely hear my own voice over the roar of shock in my ears. High blood pressure, probably. My adrenaline was still insane. I felt cold all over.
“Go where?”
“Just…go.” To the desert. Find that ditch where we’d abandoned Joey and Eduardo. Climb in, pull the dirt over me, never climb out again. It would still be better than I deserved.
Isobel slid her arm around my back. “You’re not going anywhere like this, Cèsar.”
How could she touch me, knowing what we knew now?
“I killed her,” I said.
A shadow flashed through Isobel’s eyes. She brushed the hair off of my forehead. “She didn’t come back right. The cremains were harder to work with than I thought. She didn’t really know what she was saying.” She looked thoughtful. “I really thought that it should have worked with her remnants like that. I’m not sure why it didn’t. If it wasn’t so dangerous to go back to Helltown, I’d ask Ann what she thinks, but…”
But the incubi there were watching for us now.
Maybe I should have let the Silver Needles have me.
“I’m not a real witch,” Isobel said. She was changing the subject to something easier to stomach than murder. Fine.
Dully, I said, “I just watched you raise Erin.”
“Yeah, but that’s all I can do. I told you that I didn’t enchant my RV’s engine—that was something my friend did for me as a favor because I can’t. I’ve never cast a spell in here because I don’t have whatever it takes. I can’t do wards. I can’t even light a candle.”
“The blister powder,” I said.
“Another present from my friend.”
“The cure?”
“Those are just herbs that counter the effects. It’s not magic.” Isobel shrugged. “I am a fraud—just not the way you thought. I have to fake my rituals because I can’t cast spells for anything.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m coming clean with you,” she said gently. “As clean as I get with anyone. I want you to know…I trust you. No matter what happened with Erin, I trust that you’re a good guy.”
“Don’t,” I said.
Isobel touched my wrist. “I’ve met a lot of bad people before, Cèsar. I’ve known career criminals. Not people who hurt by accident, but people who hurt by design, and those who enjoy it. You’re not one of those people.”
But I was. I had killed Erin.
Lord, the fear in her eyes when she looked at me…
“You’re right. You killed Erin Karwell. But that doesn’t make you a bad man,” Isobel said. “I know you’re not with the Needles. And come on, you were more worried about the safety of a teenager hiding out at the Temple of the Hand of Death than you were about being held captive. That’s not something bad men worry about. I’ve seen the goodness in you.”
“That another one of your witch powers?”
She smiled faintly. “I don’t need magic to know goodness when I see it, Cèsar.”
“You shouldn’t even be sitting next to me.”
She rubbed her thumb over my knuckles. “You won’t hurt me.”
I wanted to believe that was true. I wanted it to be true so badly that it hurt deep down on the inside. “I always thought that…” It was too hard to get the words out. It felt like I was choking on Erin’s name, like she had become permanently lodged in my chest. “You know why those incubi wanted me dead?” Dumb question. Of course she didn’t. But she was polite enough to shake her head. “It was because I saved my sister, Ofelia. That’s what made me an OPA agent, too. Saving Ofelia.” Like that could change what I’d done to Erin.
“What happened to her?” Isobel asked.
It was a question I’d gotten a few times before, from a few different people. I’d never answered it before. It wasn’t anyone’s business.
But fate, destiny, whatever, had entrusted Isobel with the testimony of the dead. She had followed me into a morgue to try to clear my name. She hadn’t run when she’d learned the truth.
If I could trust anyone, it was Isobel.
So I told her.
21
Sounds cliché to say it, but it was a dark and stormy night. The kind of night where the wind blows the trees sideways and tosses the ocean against the beach like it’s got a vendetta against the sand. It was Hurricane Raquel, a should-have-been-impossible tempest ravaging California.
All the sane people were hiding indoors. But my sister had still been out there somewhere. Nobody had seen her for days. Her last text message had been to Domingo, asking him to pick her up at the CVS a few blocks from her house, but she hadn’t been there when he’d arrived.
It wasn’t all that weird. Ofelia was a hurricane all her own. She had a habit of flaking out and disappearing with friends for days only to return later in a whole new outfit with her head shaved, a new tattoo, and dark rings under her eyes. That was normal for Ofelia.
But this wasn’t normal. She’d been running with new friends. Instead of coming back from outings with tattoos, she was coming back with caked-on makeup that almost entirely concealed bruises. And now the hurricane had moved in and she hadn’t talked to anyone, not even Pops.
So I’d tracked her. Hacked into her Find My Phone account and zeroed in on the GPS. I wasn’t working for the OPA then—I was a private dick, paying my rent by catching vanishing parolees and taking photos of cheating spouses. I didn’t have access to any of the databases that I would later on. Searching for her phone was as fancy as I could get.
It was good enough. In a few minutes, I had an answer.
Ofelia’s phone had been dropped outside the gates to Helltown.
At the time, I didn’t know what it was. The neighborhood just looked like a piece of shit to me. One big gray blight on the face of Los Angeles. It didn’t occur to me that the cars and houses were just illusions.
I looked around for her phone and couldn’t find it on the street.
When I turned around, I saw people appear out of that empty road. They shimmered when they crossed the invisible barrier. It was a group of three slender men with long black hair, all wearing leather, all pale-skinned and perfect. And they’d come out of fucking nowhere.
I ducked into an alley, heart jackhammering, and watched.
The men melted halfway into the shadows while they talked. They didn’t look human because they weren’t. Abuelita had taught me to cast magic, but this? This was new. It was the first I’d seen of this world, a place filled with demons and haunts and things that bumped in the night.
One of them was holding something.
Ofelia’s phone.
I thought about attacking them right there. Oh man, did I want to attack. They had seen my sister. They knew where to find her. But I understood instinctively that they weren’t human and that throwing a few punches wouldn’t do shit to stop them.
Before I figured out what to do, they climbed into an Audi parked on the corner and drove off.
I wouldn’t figure out what I had seen f
or days, not until I was working for the OPA and Fritz Friederling debriefed me. But I can tell you now that they were incubi. They’d been coming out of Helltown.
At the time, all I knew was this: They had Ofelia’s phone.
So I got in my car and followed them.
They went to a beach house in this insane hurricane. It was built up on stilts. All the sand had been washed out from under it, but the house stood strong in the storm.
One of the incubi got out of the car. Went into the house. Then the car left.
I had to climb up and break a window to follow him inside. Looked like a normal vacation home. Any kind of place you would have found on a B&B website, pretty much. Generic furniture, generic wallpaper. Non-smoking signs.
But there was a glass bowl in the kitchen. That bowl was filled with needles as long as my fingers and sharper than knives.
I hadn’t known it at the time, but that was the calling card of the Silver Needles—the incubus mafia.
The man I’d followed was in the bathroom washing up. He was shirtless, covered in tattoos from his waist to his neck. There was an eagle inked on his spine. Its wings wrapped around his throat, touched his chin. Ofelia’s phone was on the sink next to him.
I slipped past him. Headed up into the attic. Not sure how I knew I’d find her there, but I did.
Ofelia was hogtied in the corner. There was a ball gag in her mouth. There was so much blood on her face and neck that I barely even recognized her.
She tried to speak around the gag and couldn’t. I peeled it out of her mouth. “Ofelia?”
My baby sister said, “Cèsar,” and then she began to sob.
When I untied her, I realized she was fully dressed. No torn clothes. Same outfit she’d disappeared in. All the wounds were on her face and neck and hands. They hadn’t touched her anywhere else. But her cheeks, her lips, her eyelids—they were riddled with tiny punctures.
The demons had used that bowl of needles on her.
She told me what had happened as I untied her. Turned out that the Silver Needles, despite being sex demons, didn’t rape their victims. They were the sickest kind of sadists—the kind that got off on psychological pain as much as the physical kind. They enjoyed the process of forcing people to give themselves up, so they didn’t use thrall to coerce anyone. They liked the victims to beg for sex.
