Once Darkness Falls (Preternatural Affairs #7)

by SM Reine

  I clicked on a video, playing it at ten times its usual speed.

  The camera tracked Allyson throughout the warehouse. Through her quarters, while she used the bathroom. That ended quickly—thank God.

  She walked around for a while. It looked like she yelled at some men.

  Then she went outside to talk with a blur that looked like Gary.

  I slowed the video.

  There was no audio on the external security footage. I couldn’t read their lips, either. But I did see that Allyson was showing Gary something that looked a lot like ribbons, and that they were excited about it.

  After that, the footage blacked out.

  “The hell?” I asked, probing my circle of power.

  There was no magical modification. The video was just gone. It hadn’t been able to record anything.

  “December fifteenth? I remember that night,” Krista said. “A demon managed to infiltrate the warehouse.”

  “A demon? What kind?”

  “I don’t think it had a breed. It was too strong.” The most powerful of demons were one of a kind, as I’d been unlucky enough to learn in my tenure at the Office of Preternatural Affairs. If one of them had gotten into the base, then I wasn’t surprised that it would have knocked out surveillance.

  “Why’d it break in?” I asked.

  “My understanding is that it stole artifacts relevant to the MOAD incident,” Krista said.

  Zettel had mentioned something about artifacts. He’d been afraid that I was investigating some missing swords.

  “Tell me what you saw that night,” I said.

  Krista shrugged. “I didn’t see anything. All I know is that we arrested the thief, but it escaped that same night.”

  I clicked through the files, but there was no case related to that theft. No reports filed. Surely Malcolm would have filed reports.

  “Huh,” I said. I returned to Allyson’s footage, firing up my spell again to restore the missing records. There were a few minutes of footage of Allyson’s whereabouts late that night. She had visited a detention cell flooded by light.

  “Why’s it so bright in there?” I asked, tapping the staticky image with my forefinger.

  “Like a nightmare, the type of demon we’d captured could only be contained by lights and electricity,” Krista said.

  That explained why we didn’t have footage of the demon. Even if it had been weakened enough to be contained, it had still been frying the cameras.

  It didn’t fry the cameras pointed at the walls, though. I saw Allyson walk into the cell, joining another human near the doorway. When he faced the camera, I realized it was Malcolm Gallagher. He’d been having a conversation with the demon. He’d smiled at it, laughed with it, gestured a few times.

  After I’d seen him buddying up to Neuma, I was afraid that I was about to see him release the prisoner.

  To my shock, he didn’t do anything. Allyson Whatley walked up behind Malcolm and whipped a pistol across the back of his skull. He dropped in an instant.

  Krista was watching from her bed. She stood with a roar of rage. “Oh my God! Why didn’t she get arrested for that?”

  Realization dawned, cold and brutal. “Because nobody is taking Malcolm’s reports seriously. He’s an alcoholic. Allyson and Zettel have been setting him up to get fired. Everything he reported about the demon thief—and being assaulted by Allyson Whatley—got swept under the rug.”

  Malcolm Gallagher wasn’t the one that Lucrezia de Angelis needed to “reorganize” out of the Union.

  It was Allyson and Zettel.

  I shoved the chair back from the desk, ready to call her right at that instant, have her come to the base and bring hellfire on their heads.

  But I couldn’t do that, either.

  “What are you thinking?” Krista asked.

  Zettel knew about Ann Friedman. If I tried to get his aspis arrested, he’d be able to follow the evidence on Ann back to me—and to Isobel, and to Suzy’s mutiny. Worse, Zettel was on a first-name basis with Lucrezia. If we started slinging evidence at each other, whom was she going to side with?

  No. I couldn’t report to Lucrezia.

  Not until I found Ann Friedman.

  My Steno pad was spread open so I could see both pages where I’d been taking case notes and writing the names of the suspects. I’d drawn the seal of St. Benedict in one corner—that mark that I had seen spray-painted on Ann Friedman’s wall. I had also seen it in the notes on the dead woman kopis down in the refrigerators.

  “Hey Krista,” I said, pocketing Malcolm’s thumb drive, “have you ever seen a necrocognitive work?”

  She pulled a face. “I can’t say that I have.”

  “Do you want to?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ISOBEL MET ME IN the morgue twenty minutes after I called. For once, she’d been easy to find—she’d been hanging out in the room she shared with Fritz. And she’d been smart enough not to ask any questions over the phone. Isobel knew as well as I did that nothing we said on a Union line would be private.

  The morgue was empty, and only a yellow bulb over the steel table offered light. In the dimness, Isobel looked almost as dark-haired as a half-succubus like Neuma. She gave the overlord a run for her money as far as sexiness went, too. It was hard to believe that Isobel was as dead as the bodies in the refrigerators surrounding us.

  She rubbed her hands together as if to warm them. “What is this about, Cèsar? What am I doing here?”

  I pulled the woman kopis out of a refrigerator and transferred her to the steel table in the center. “We need to conduct an interview.”

  “With her?” Isobel asked, eyes widening. Before I could answer, Krista entered, door whispering shut behind her. Isobel stiffened. “Who are you?”

  “It’s cool,” I said, holding my hands out in a placating gesture. “Krista, this is Isobel. Isobel, Krista—this is the only living woman kopis. She’s helping me with my investigation.”

  “It’s an honor,” Isobel said.

  “Likewise. I’ve heard a lot about what you’re doing for people here.” There was nothing fake about the respect in Krista’s voice. She meant it. “I’m eager to see how necrocognition works.”

  With that, Krista jerked the sheet off of the dead kopis’s body.

  However the woman had died, she’d gone through the wringer on her way out. The Mother of All Demons had fucked her up. She was bruised, cut open, battered, splattered in blood.

  She was also missing an arm. Everything below the elbow on one side.

  Even without the injuries, the woman kopis never would have been pretty. She wasn’t anywhere near as graceful-looking as Krista. Of course, the half-deflated dead look did favors for nobody.

  Isobel stepped up to my side to look her over. Grief creased her brow, even though she hadn’t known the woman. “Malcolm wants us to talk to her?”

  “She has information we need for the case.” I didn’t mention the part where I hoped that we’d find out where Ann Friedman had gone. Krista had been helpful, but the fewer people who knew about that lead, the safer Isobel and I would be.

  “Remind me of her name?” Isobel asked.

  I had written it down in my notebook. I double-checked. “Uh…Elise Kavanagh.”

  “Okay.” She blew a breath out of her lips, and then said again, “Okay. Elise Kavanagh, come to me. Rise and speak.” Isobel stretched her hands over the body.

  Whenever Isobel talked to the dead, she summoned something that resembled a ghost. But it wasn’t a ghost, not really. There was no consciousness inside the souls that she brought out of the bodies. It was just the memories of a person clinging together in a hazy shape without hair or clothes.

  The memory of Elise Kavanagh was much shorter than me, but muscular—the kind of strong that made me think she’d have beat me at arm wrestling, easy. Except dead people couldn’t win at arm wrestling. Take that, dead kopis.

  “What do you people want?” the dead kopis asked. She spoke t
hrough Isobel’s lips.

  “Wow.” Krista circled the ghost, looking the other woman kopis top to bottom. The two of them didn’t bear any resemblance. Muscular, sure, like all kopides were, but where Krista was tall and lean, Elise was stocky.

  “We need to talk about the Mother of All Demons,” I said to Elise’s apparition.

  The apparition of the kopis planted her hands on her hips. If I hadn’t been able to see the refrigerators through her chest, I’d have been afraid she was about to beat me up for my lunch money. “You’re Union, aren’t you?”

  “Office of Preternatural Affairs, actually.”

  “The fuck is that?”

  She hadn’t heard of us. I was hurt. “We’re the Union’s kissing cousins.”

  “I’m not talking to you,” Elise said.

  That was a first. I turned away from the apparition. “What’s happening here, Isobel? The dead can’t lie.”

  Isobel’s eyes momentarily cleared, and I understood that she was the one talking. “They can’t lie, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be stubborn mules.”

  “You’re the necrocognitive,” Krista said. “Make her talk.”

  With a huff, Isobel shook her shoulders out, took a few deep breaths, and zoned in on the apparition again.

  I said gently, nicely, “I want to figure out who’s responsible for everything that went down in Reno so I can make sure that there’s retribution.”

  “I took care of it,” Elise said. “You guys didn’t do anything but make my job harder.”

  She made that sound like a bad thing. She was a rogue kopis, a loner. Probably responsible for killing lots of mortals all on her own. The OPA had issues, but rogue kopides were worse. “I’m supposed to find out if someone in the Union or OPA is responsible for the MOAD incident. The, uh, the whole thing with the Mother of All Demons.”

  “Yatai,” she said.

  “Right, yeah. Yatai. Did you meet her?”

  “She killed me.” Elise said it so matter-of-factly, like that was just a natural thing to have happened.

  It wasn’t natural.

  Not the part where Yatai killed her. Demons killed kopides all the time. That was as natural as babies being born, people having sex, or stealing wi-fi from the neighbor’s house when they left their router without a password.

  It wasn’t natural for an apparition to realize that they were dead.

  I’d only seen it once before. That had been a kopis too—a guy named Bubba Tanner, someone who’d dropped dead just because he’d gotten too close to a fallen angel. Maybe the residue of kopides were smarter than the residue of normal people.

  “I need you to walk me through events leading up to the MOAD incident,” I said. “The Union’s records of it aren’t complete. You’ve got a different perspective. I need to hear it so I can fill in some holes and make sure people who deserve to get punished meet their fate.” And hopefully so I can find Ann Friedman and clear my name.

  “You want me to fill in your holes? Okay. Yatai yanked the pocket dimension onto Earth and tried to go into a Heaven dimension where demons aren’t allowed.”

  “As far as you’re aware, did anyone other than you know about Yatai’s movements?”

  “Malcolm,” Elise said. “He was doing everything he could within his power to stop her.”

  That wasn’t helpful information, either. “Why here? Why now? Why Yatai?” I fixed her with a hard stare, which I’d learned as a private investigator. It had worked decently well on cheating husbands. “What drew the Mother of All Demons to Reno?”

  As I’d suspected, Elise didn’t look impressed. “Yatai realized that there were ethereal gates in Reno because her brother was already here working for the Night Hag—the overlord.”

  “I’ve met her,” I said.

  Elise’s pupilless eyes registered mild surprise. “I killed her.”

  “Then I met her successor.” Her hot, sexy successor who’d called me cute.

  “A successor.” She scoffed. “Right.”

  I glanced at Krista. At Isobel. Back to the ghost. It seemed like I wasn’t going to get any explanations unless I came out and said it—the dead version of Elise Kavanagh wasn’t a woman who seemed to know what to do with subtlety.

  “Do you know if a woman named Ann Friedman was connected to Yatai?”

  “I knew Ann. I killed her too,” Elise said.

  As soon as the words came out of Isobel’s mouth, she sucked in a gasp. She staggered as though struck.

  “Ann,” she whispered, and it was her voice, not that of a dead kopis. Tears rimmed her eyes.

  I’ve always been a sucker for crying women. I put my arm around her, pulled her to my chest. She buzzed with the kind of magic that made me itch all over, but I didn’t care. “Why’d you kill her? She was just a kid.”

  “Kids are adults who haven’t gotten old yet,” Elise said. “She fucked up. She killed people. She could have been a toddler and I would have taken her down.”

  The thought of that girl—that deranged, broken, young girl—succumbing to Elise’s attack was horrible. The stuff of nightmares. Worse nightmares than those David Nicholas could have ever inflicted upon me.

  Ann wasn’t the only one who had earned her death.

  Elise Kavanagh and her trail of victims, human or otherwise, were proof of how dangerous rogue kopides could be.

  She continued to speak. “Ann was the first to pursue the ethereal gates. She didn’t get there, but she exposed them to people like Yatai. But you know what? Ann’s dead. So’s the Night Hag, and Yatai. I cleaned up that mess. You’re welcome.”

  My fears were true. Ann’s actions had drawn apocalypse to the region.

  Isobel was trembling in my arms, even as she spoke with Elise Kavanagh’s cold voice.

  “I’m dead,” the kopis said again, more thoughtfully than before. “Things will be changing. Look through the evidence—look for people taking advantage of the fact that I’m gone. Start with Gary Zettel. He hated me and he’ll be thrilled I’m gone.”

  I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “I’m working on it.” I took Isobel’s arms gently, encouraging her to look at me. “I think I’ve gotten everything from the territory’s last kopis I’m gonna get.”

  “Okay,” Isobel said, and she waved at the apparition. It began to dissolve.

  “Hey,” Elise said as her legs faded away. “I need you to do me a favor.”

  My eyebrows climbed my forehead. “Okay. Give it to me.”

  “Take care of Malcolm. He always drinks too much, but he drinks even more when he’s dealing with a bad case. And when he loses people he likes. He pretends he doesn’t, but…” She lifted one shoulder in a shrug.

  It was the one flicker of softness I’d seen in the apparition the whole time we’d been speaking. When she talked about Malcolm, it was with something that resembled affection.

  That flicker didn’t do anything for the thousand bad impressions Elise had given me, but it did make me feel horribly guilty, since I’d been thinking of turning Malcolm over to Lucrezia.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said.

  That seemed to satisfy the apparition. She nodded once, sharply.

  And then she was gone.

  Isobel didn’t last ten seconds after Elise Kavanagh’s apparition faded. She bolted from the morgue, leaving me alone in the cold darkness with Krista and a dead body that was missing an arm.

  I let Isobel go. It wasn’t my job to chase her down when she was having bad days.

  Not anymore.

  Krista and I pulled the sheet over the body. The woman kopis—the living one—took a lingering look at her dead counterpart, the way that I might have looked at a first printing of Action Comics #1.

  “They’ve tested my blood,” Krista said. “The genetic similarities among kopides make it seem as though we’re all distantly related. You could say that this person and I, though I’ve never met her, are virtually cousins.”

  “I wouldn’t go claimi
ng some murderous psychopath as cousin. Just saying.” Although, to be fair, my brother was on the murderous side of things too—but not a psychopath. Just greedy.

  Krista settled the blanket over the woman’s chiseled face, pushed the drawer back, and shut the refrigerator.

  The click of the lock echoed through the morgue.

  “What that kopis said about Zettel is surely a personal grudge,” Krista said.

  Someone with a grudge against Zettel? I couldn’t imagine. “Yeah, probably.” Or else Elise Kavanagh had confirmed more than one horrible fear of mine—that Zettel and Allyson were both up to pure evil.

  Worse, I didn’t have a way to keep Zettel from lashing out at me.

  I couldn’t go after Allyson without facing revenge.

  “Did you learn anything from that conversation?” Krista said.

  Not enough and way too much. “I’ll need to parse what I heard before I can decide.” I started backing toward the door. “I better see if our consultant’s okay. Track her down.”

  Krista’s eyes narrowed with skepticism. She’d seen me holding Isobel, after all. “The consultant. Right.”

  I didn’t have to go far to locate her. Isobel was in the hallway outside the morgue, staring up at the ceiling. She didn’t react to my approach, so I took a minute to look at her. It had been a long time since I’d gotten to look.

  She was still wearing business casual, like the other time I’d seen her at the base. It was no shock how comfortable she looked in it. Before she’d become Isobel Stonecrow, she’d been Hope Jimenez, Attorney at Law. She’d defended a lot of bad people and won every time. She was as comfortable in suits as Lucrezia de Angelis was in nut-crushing stilettos.

  Still, it was weird seeing her like this—with Isobel’s feathered hair ornaments, in a Union base, dressed as a sexy lawyer. It was like time had lost all meaning. Past and present melded into one sloppy lump of a reanimated human being.

  “I was down to my last month,” Isobel said suddenly.

  I frowned. “What?”

  “The last month before my contract expired. It came up faster than I’d expected.”