Once Darkness Falls (Preternatural Affairs #7)

by SM Reine

  Malcolm twisted the wheel, taking us off of I-80 and onto 395. “The Union settled down in Reno months ago. We were here before we knew anything about the MOAD. Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I said. He seemed to want an answer.

  “We thought we knew what kind of shitstorm was coming to Reno, and we thought we were ready for it. We’d done a lot to prepare—wiring the surrounding area with explosives so we could blow the roads, buying the cell phone towers, rigging up surveillance. And we still weren’t ready for what happened.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “We’d been watching for something ethereal. There are gates in Reno, mate. You must have seen them downtown.”

  I’d been too busy getting chased by brutes to do much sightseeing. “Ethereal gates—so you mean gates to Heaven. For angels?”

  “No, for puppies,” Malcolm said. “But we didn’t run across any angels. We ran across a demon. A big fucking demon who wanted to destroy the whole fucking world, with herself inside of it.”

  “The Mother of All Demons.”

  It was meant to prompt him to continue talking about her, but Malcolm just shook his head. “You know what? I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t.”

  “It’s been bothering you, though,” I said.

  “Fuck yes, it’s bothering me. You know how many people I saw die? Can you imagine that?”

  I tried not to.

  “I’ve seen a lot of hell in my lifetime, mate. Lot of hell. Seen dead babies. Seen my best friends die. Still never seen anything like losing a whole city.” His eyes sliced to me, and the BearCat drifted again, too. “I want you to figure out what happened, Hawke.”

  I’d been doodling notes on my Steno pad, but at the hardness in his voice, my pen went still. “What happened?”

  “Demons.” He laughed suddenly. “Fucking demons.”

  “I’ve heard that you’ve been filing reports that haven’t gotten much attention.”

  “You talked to Bellamy.”

  “I can’t discuss my sources,” I said.

  “Fucking Bellamy.” He said that with as much passion as he’d sworn at demons. Apparently, his relationship with his aspis wasn’t going well. “Yes. I’ve filed reports. Something’s up at the base, but will the top brass listen to me? No. Malcolm Gallagher’s a drunk. Maybe he’s on coke too. Maybe he’s fried his brain. Chuck it all in the bin!”

  “What do you think is happening at the base?”

  “Fuck off,” Malcolm said without any malice. “I’ve learned my lesson about talking.”

  He parked overlooking the downtown. There was nothing to do but look over the inverted city. Now that I was looking for them, I saw the gates among the rotten black stone—a bunch of arches that looked like half a McDonald’s sign each, though I was willing to bet they’d be a hell of a lot fancier up close.

  I glanced at my watch. With the mountains looming over Reno, it wouldn’t be all that long until sunset, and there were already too many nightmares swirling through the city.

  We were in North Reno, so that meant that we weren’t too far from Ann’s apartment.

  I needed to ditch the drunk.

  “So, uh, are we actually going to drink at some point, or…?”

  Malcolm produced unlabeled liquor from underneath the dashboard. He tossed it to me. The cold bottle was only halfway full, so obviously it wasn’t the first time he’d been drinking while on patrol.

  I didn’t open it. “If you don’t want to talk about your reports, I’ll be able to look them up. You know that, right?”

  “No, I fucking don’t. I told you—everything got chucked in the bin. You won’t find my reports anywhere. Don’t you think that’s suspicious, Agent Hawke?”

  “Suspicious behavior in the Union? I can’t imagine,” I said.

  Malcolm barked a laugh. He rubbed a finger under his eye patch, as though itching the socket. “Isn’t it suspicious how we didn’t know that the Mother of All Demons was coming, even though our sensors should have picked up her energy levels weeks in advance?”

  “It’s possible that nobody was looking, if people were keeping their eyes open for angels,” I said. “Angels are harder to deal with than demons. The Union was trying to prepare for the worst.” And being incompetent at it. But incompetence wasn’t illegal, unfortunately. Everyone in the government would have been out of a job if that were the case.

  Malcolm made a second bottle appear. It was even emptier than the first. He’d given me the one with more booze in it—how touching. “Or else someone didn’t want us watching for the MOAD.”

  “Do you suspect someone?”

  “Of course not. I’m best friends with everyone in the Union. Drink, drink,” he said. “Don’t make me drink alone. Then I’ll be an alcoholic.”

  “You’re too late for that, Malcolm.” I realized what I’d said and then added, “Sorry, Commander.”

  “Don’t wanna be commander. Never should have signed up for the Union. Then I wouldn’t have ever had to get in the middle of this and I wouldn’t have seen…” He fell silent, glaring at the bottle of alcohol as though it held a foul-mouthed genie who’d insulted his mother.

  I knew that look. I’d seen it on Fritz’s face, and Isobel’s, and everyone else’s who’d ever lost someone.

  “Who died in Reno that you cared about?” I asked.

  He emptied the bottle. Dropped it on the floor.

  “I need to get a refill,” he said.

  Malcolm belched out the corner of his mouth and drove the BearCat into downtown Reno—further and further away from Ann’s apartment.

  “Don’t think any liquor stores are open down there,” I said.

  “But bars are.”

  “Bars? What kind of crazy fucker would keep their doors open after all this?”

  “A demon fucker. Literally.”

  Now this little pleasure ride was starting to suspiciously resemble real work, drunk commander aside. “I’m not sure going to a demon bar in post-apocalyptic Reno is a great idea.”

  “You kidding? Of course it is. We’re gonna meet the city’s overlord,” Malcolm said. “The Night Hag.”

  Most big cities on the Western side of the country had something called an overlord: one demon in charge of all the other demons who lived within their borders. Seattle had one. So did Portland. Weirdly, Vancouver (the Washington one, not the Canada one) had an overlord too, even though it was so close to Portland it might as well have been its armpit.

  If Malcolm was right, then Reno had an overlord too.

  Like Vancouver, Reno wasn’t a particularly big city as far as humans were concerned. I could see how it would have been a mecca for demons, though. Dry climate, hot summers, plenty of abandoned mines to hide in when it was too bright outside.

  Los Angeles didn’t have an overlord. Didn’t need one. It had the Office of Preternatural Affairs, and we handled everything that an overlord would. We were nicer about it, too.

  You know it’s bad when the OPA is nicer about doing anything.

  Reno’s overlord was living in a pit downtown that looked like it used to be a casino. Looked like a basement nightclub. Looked like the kind of dark, festering hole where Malcolm and I were likely to get killed. “Welcome to Eloquent Blood,” Malcolm said grandly as he stumbled out of the BearCat.

  I had no choice but to follow. It wasn’t like I would let a guy as drunk as that one go running around a nightmare-infested apocalyptic wasteland alone.

  The air outside the BearCat wasn’t any fresher than it had been inside. It was colder than it had any right to be, and that cold felt kinda sticky, like it was gonna weld to my flesh and burrow down into my marrow.

  Should have worn a jacket.

  I jumped down, checked the strap on my borrowed pistol, and felt the bump of my pocket that indicated the hexes. I was about as armed as it was possible for a witch to be.

  The hole in the ground was being guarded by some big fucker with tusks and wrinkled skin. He j
ust stood there, right out on the street like that. There wasn’t any reason to be afraid of being seen by mundanes at this point. Nobody downtown could have been surprised by the existence of demons.

  “This neighborhood looks familiar,” I said, quickening my pace to catch up with Malcolm. “Where is this?”

  “It’s the asshole of Hell,” he said.

  Now I recognized it. It was hard to tell between all the broken buildings that had been turned to obsidian by demon ichor, but I’d been there before with Suzy.

  The casino we were heading into used to be Craven’s.

  Now I really didn’t want to go in there.

  “Does David Nicholas still manage this place?” I asked.

  Malcolm didn’t look back at me. “Who?”

  “Nightmare demon? Really ancient, powerful, full of mind fuckery?” Malcolm had run across him too. If he didn’t remember David Nicholas, then I didn’t want to know what enemies he considered worthy of long-term memory storage.

  He shrugged me off. “Naw, only the Night Hag’s in here now.”

  An overlord who could take down David Nicholas wasn’t the kind of overlord I wanted to meet.

  But now Malcolm was walking up to the tusked guy, and they were exchanging words, and he was heading inside.

  “You going down too?” the bouncer asked me, jerking a meaty thumb toward the pit that Malcolm had called Eloquent Blood.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “There’s always a choice,” the tusked guy said in a menacing kind of way.

  He didn’t seem to think much of my choices.

  We slid down a hallway that was half collapsed to get to Eloquent Blood. It must have been a demon hangout long before apocalypse struck Reno. That much crusty sulfur didn’t build up on the floor in a couple weeks. It took years of demons dancing, sweating, and screwing in a place to get so filthy.

  We were met near the end of the hall by a woman wearing Union black: cargo pants, polo shirt, a ballistic vest with white letters stamped on the chest. She had big eyes surrounded by thick eyelashes and legs for days.

  She also moved funny. Not funny in the way that kopides moved, like their movements had been planned weeks in advance, but like she had minimal motor control. When she raised a hand to wave Malcolm over, it looked like she had to think about it hard in order to make the gesture halfway smooth. Her mouth pulled to one side. Her steps were unsteady.

  Cerebral palsy, I thought it was called. Not bad enough to land her in a wheelchair, but bad enough that the whole left side of her body wobbled.

  Bad enough that she shouldn’t have qualified to work for the Union.

  “Krista, baby!” Malcolm greeted her with a kiss that was too familiar to be professional. Familiar in the way that Isobel and I were familiar, but shouldn’t have been.

  Call me a bad person, but Malcolm didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d fuck a woman with cerebral palsy. He’d been hitting on Suzy last time we were in Reno. He liked dangerous, difficult women. How could a disabled woman be dangerous?

  I tilted my head to look past the baggy Union cargo pants, past the ballistic vest, to check what she was packing in the back door.

  Okay, it was nice. Very nice. Even Malcolm could overlook a few things for that ass. I would.

  “Krista, meet Agent Cèsar Hawke,” Malcolm said. “He works for the Magical Violations Department of the OPA. Cool bloke. Cèsar, this is Krista, the only surviving female kopis.”

  Shock jolted through me. My eyes snapped up to her eyes from her ass. “You’re a kopis?”

  “My whole life,” Krista said. She wrapped her mouth around the words carefully, but they still came out kinda lisping, kinda slurred. The left side of her mouth, like the left side of her body, didn’t work right.

  “You’re, uh…” I wasn’t sure how to say it in a nice way.

  “Female?” she suggested.

  “Disabled,” I said.

  Even her smile looked like it took concerted effort. And then she said, “I could still kick your ass.”

  “She could,” Malcolm said. “Guaranteed. She’s beat me.”

  I found that hard to believe, but all right. The kopis thing explained why someone with cerebral palsy was working for the Union in Reno, anyway. “What are you doing here?”

  “She was my insurance policy,” he said. “Night Hag wanted to make sure I’d come back.”

  He’d done that to a woman? A woman with CP? “That’s not cool, man.”

  “I volunteered.” Krista gestured toward the walkway leading down. “The Night Hag is waiting for us.”

  I was too deep to turn back, but I gave it serious consideration.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ELOQUENT BLOOD’S BAR WAS intact, even if the building above wasn’t. There was a lot of shattered glass where there used to be shelves, so they’d arrayed their booze on the floor instead.

  There weren’t a ton of patrons left to drink that liquor. Most of the demons in the area must have run off, leaving a bunch of faces I vaguely recognized—people who’d worked for Craven’s.

  The DJ was playing music from a stereo powered by a car battery, loud enough that I couldn’t hear anyone else talking. The speakers couldn’t handle the bass. They crackled and popped.

  It was insane seeing people—even demon people—dancing amidst the wreckage, but hey, what else were you gonna do when your home had been laid to waste? It wasn’t like they could escape. The Union had blown the roads.

  The Night Hag waited beyond the stereo and DJ. Nobody had to point her out to me. She was easily identified.

  First of all, only an overlord would wear a skeleton bikini. As in, a bikini made of bones all strung together with wire.

  Secondly, she was sitting on a throne welded together from the wreckage of cars, fences, and casino signage.

  Thirdly, she was, hands down, the sexiest woman I’d ever seen. And I’d seen a lot of sexy women. The fact that I wanted to fuck her the instant I saw her could only mean that she was a succubus.

  I should have known better than to eyeball a succubus after my history with the breed. But I also should have known better to head into apocalyptic downtown Reno with a drunken Union commander, yet here I was, and there she was. She looked damn fine. Even better than Krista. That was saying a lot.

  “Night Hag?” I muttered to Malcolm. No wonder he wanted to visit with her.

  “It’s a title,” he said.

  The overlord was pale-skinned with black hair, black eyes, and ethnic kind of features. Not really sure what ethnicity—probably as white as I was, which wasn’t very white at all. Suzy tended to slap me upside the head if she heard me claiming such things, though. “You collect comic books and eight-track tapes, Cèsar,” she’d said to me once. “You couldn’t be whiter if you rolled in flour.” And she’d slapped me again when I’d argued that I was whole-wheat flour rather than bleached flour.

  But I digress.

  The Night Hag’s lips were a shade of red that made me think of a woman’s lady parts all flushed with blood. When she smiled in greeting, it was a sultry, “I’m gonna fuck you” kind of smile.

  If I’d been Krista, I would have volunteered to be the insurance policy, too.

  “Hey, Neuma,” Malcolm said, giving her a little wave.

  “Mal!” She scooted forward to sit on the edge of the seat. Couldn’t tell if that was because she was excited to see him or because the throne had so many spikes that sitting any other way would stab her. “You took forever. I thought you were gonna abandon your pretty kopis here forever to be my pet.”

  Now that was a thought.

  Actually, more than a thought. It was suddenly my new fantasy.

  “Been a busy day,” Malcolm said. “Had to save this guy from some of those ichor demons dragging their lumpy assholes all over Virginia. Neuma, meet Cèsar. Cèsar, Neuma. She’s the Night Hag. Now we’re all friends, hurrah.”

  Her eyes flicked to me, and I was rocking half a stalk in a
n instant. Just like that. Bam. I hadn’t been so hard up for it since middle school. Too bad I didn’t have a science textbook to hide my junk. I’d have to hope that the darkness would take care of that for me.

  The corner of her lips tilted into a wide grin. “Cèsar, huh?”

  I wanted to say something witty, but I’d gone all stupid and dry-mouthed.

  “He’s a witch with the OPA,” Malcolm added.

  Her smile faded. “That’s a damn crying shame.” Her attention returned to the commander. “Got what I want?”

  I had a few things she might want.

  Cool your jets, Hawke.

  “I can’t get you into Dis,” he said. “The portal we brought into town is locked tight.”

  Krista sucked a breath in beside me.

  I understood why.

  Dis was a big city, but not an Earth city, like Los Angeles.

  It was in Hell.

  What the fuck was the Union doing bringing a portal to Hell into Reno? That was a boner-killer if I’d ever heard one.

  Neuma pouted. “And here I was thinking you were a commander.”

  “I thought I was commander too. Turns out I have the pull of a goldfish cracker. Bureaucracy! Sorry, ma’am.”

  Not that I’d ever talked to an overlord before—thank fucking God for that one—but I couldn’t imagine that they liked being disappointed like that. I braced myself for Malcolm to get splattered in an instant.

  Neuma only grabbed a bottle of rum from among her throne of wreckage. “Damn.”

  Malcolm shrugged. “The kind of security they’ve got on that thing, you’d almost think it was an interdimensional portal or something. I’d have gotten you in if I could. Really.”

  “I know you would,” she said. “You want to get in after her as much as I do.”

  I couldn’t resist. “Her?”

  Speaking out loud got Neuma looking at me again, and I forgot how to talk.

  “Man, Malcolm, you have good taste,” she said. “Your witchy friend is cute as a button! He your aspis?”

  “Some other lucky kopis took this one off the market,” Malcolm said. How the hell was he managing to speak, much less banter?