Hotter Than Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Mystery (Preternatural Affairs Book 3)

by SM Reine

  Nurse Barrow’s fingers flew over that keyboard. It only took a few seconds for her to turn back to us and say, “He’s not here anymore.”

  “What do you mean, Tanner isn’t here anymore?” Suzy asked.

  “His body has already been transferred to the family’s church for a service.”

  “Which church?” I asked.

  The hospital lights flickered before she could answer. The nurse’s brow furrowed, and she rapped a finger against her keyboard. “That’s not normal,” she said. I leaned around to see that her monitor was flickering, too.

  A light bulb popped. Sparks showered over me, down the neck of my jacket, burned my skin. I leaped away from the counter slapping at my back.

  Everything went dark.

  Not just the lights, but everything. The computers, the beeping life-support machines, the clocks, the air conditioning system.

  The hospital was dead. And so were many of the patients inside, if the power didn’t come back fast.

  I held my breath waiting for it. Should have only taken a second or less before everything turned back on. Medical facilities should have had redundant power systems—everything they needed to survive several minutes off-grid.

  But it all stayed quiet.

  I pushed the button on my Bluetooth headset. Not sure what made me do it, since I didn’t have anything to report to OPA headquarters yet.

  There was no responding beep.

  The silence made me check my cell phone. Also powerless.

  “Don’t you people have a UPS?” Suzy asked Nurse Barrow. I could barely see either of them in the darkness.

  “Look,” I said, grabbing her arm to orient her, pushing my phone into her face.

  The nurses were suddenly moving. Doors were opening, people were rushing through the dark hallways. As curtains opened in the rooms, barred sunlight spilled over the floors, and I could see the fear in the faces passing me.

  I felt the thump in my chest, in the ground below my feet. Something had woken up—the generator, utility power, no way to be sure.

  But the lights came on.

  It had taken no more than a minute, maybe two, but that was a long minute for patients in critical condition to survive without power. Relief didn’t hit me. Judging by Suzy’s expression, it hadn’t hit her, either.

  “Damn,” she whispered.

  The clocks on the wall had stopped, even though they all must have been on batteries. They all said that it was four fifty-seven in the afternoon.

  Dread crawled up my spine bone by bone. My fingers reached the Bluetooth earpiece of their own volition. The beep when I pressed the button seemed to echo hollowly through my skull, voided of thought and feeling by the aching knowledge of what must have just happened in that hospital.

  OPA dispatch answered immediately, as pleasant as always. “How may I assist you, Agent Hawke?”

  “We need a team at Mercy General Hospital,” I said. “I think there’s been another murder.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THEY FOUND THE BODY in the boiler room.

  The security guard who’d located the victim stood aside to let us through. He was flushed red, sweating through his shirt. “Maybe you should take a seat,” Suzy told him.

  He nodded. Sank into a chair by the wall. Braced himself on the seat by gripping it with both meaty hands.

  Agents were cordoning off the end of the hallway. Nurses and patients hovered on the other side of the tape, trying to see what we were about to see. Crazy assholes. If I didn’t have to see what I was going into, I would never have looked.

  Suzy squared her shoulders and pushed the door open.

  A short staircase led into the basement. It had already been checked by the hospital’s private security; we knew that there was nobody waiting to surprise us downstairs. It still didn’t feel right to let Suzy take the lead. I stepped in front of her, heading down into that darkness.

  It was silent aside from the room humming around us. All the environmental equipment made it sound like we were inside a breathing, pulsing organism.

  The basement lights had blown when the power went out, and only one of them had come back. The lone bulb painted the cement wall in a sickly shade of yellow and made the blood look glossy black.

  A body waited about two feet from the wall. It was another man. He was wearing a nurse’s scrubs.

  “Look familiar?” Janet asked. She was putting on a lab coat and gloves. She reeked of cigarette smoke. Must have just had one before coming downstairs.

  She offered us a box of gloves. Suzy took a pair. I didn’t. No way did I plan on touching this body.

  He was blond—I think he was blond. His jaw was square. Hard to tell when he was lying down, but he had probably been my height while standing up. Narrow in the shoulders. Another guy, like Jay Brandon, who looked like his favorite method of exercise was swimming or jogging.

  That was all I could tell about the way he had been before he died.

  His eyeballs had been plucked out. The sockets were empty. Fingers had smeared the blood up his forehead, pushed it through his hair. His earlobes had been ripped off, cut off, I wasn’t sure. Hard to tell from that angle.

  The blue shirt had been shoved up to reveal his nipples, and there was a pit in his stomach where the killer had gone under the ribs to remove the heart. That was where all the blood came from. This guy hadn’t been drained from his throat like the first one. Probably not enough time for that.

  Judging by the staining on his body, it wasn’t just his heart that had been cut out. His dick had been removed, too.

  “It’s so different.” Suzy yanked on her gloves. “But it’s the same. The cuts are similar.” She pushed her fingers between the victim’s lips, probing his mouth. “The teeth are gone again, too.”

  She sat back on her heels, elbows resting on her knees, and glared at that body.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked.

  “Fuck,” Suzy said. She stripped her gloves off. Wiped her hand over her forehead.

  She didn’t want to say it, so I did.

  “I think this is a serial killer.”

  The murder in the boiler room was a hell of a lot sloppier than Jay Brandon’s, and that was saying a lot, considering that the killer had dragged Brandon between rooms, hung him up by his ankles, and let him bleed out.

  Once I adjusted to the horror of what I was seeing—or at least the shock of it—I started assembling events in my head.

  This hadn’t been a fight. There was no real sign of a struggle. Whoever had taken down nurse John Sullivan had probably taken him by surprise and then overpowered him by sheer strength.

  It was only sloppy because the killer had been in a rush.

  He must have already been going to the boiler room for something. An illicit smoke break, I was guessing, since a pack of bloodstained cigarettes rested a few inches from his hand.

  The murderer had taken him on the stairs. Pushed him to the floor, flipped him onto his back, and held him down. Sullivan would have initially been too stunned from his fall to fight back.

  By the time his head cleared, it would have been too late.

  I imagined Nurse Sullivan screaming as a demon jammed its clawed thumbs into his eye sockets. I imagined the murderer keeping one hand on the nurse’s face to hold him down as the knife dug underneath his breastbone. I imagined the sickening pop as the heart’s ligaments tore free and how everything must have slurped as the demon withdrew his hand, organ and all.

  With all the blood in Nurse Sullivan’s hair, I thought that the killer must have been petting him as he died.

  He was just a victim. This was just my job. That was it.

  God, it was hot in that basement.

  “I think I found his earlobes,” Suzy said from behind the boiler. I could only see the right-hand sliver of her face lit up by her penlight, reflecting in her brown irises, painting her skin LED-blue.

  Janet from forensics immediately took a plastic bag
over to Suzy to collect the evidence. I didn’t join them. I could imagine what a pair of severed earlobes would look like, and that was bad enough on its own.

  “Double ought gauge,” Janet said. “I’m surprised they allowed this at a hospital.”

  My curiosity was too much. I leaned around and glimpsed Janet tweezing a piece of flesh encircling a glass ring into a bag.

  “Piercings?” I asked.

  “Big ones,” Suzy said.

  “What do you think, Agent Hawke?” I turned to see Fritz Friederling striding into the basement, leather briefcase tucked under one arm.

  Surprise rolled over me. Fritz didn’t come to crime scenes. He sat behind a desk, attended meetings, filled out paperwork. The only time I’d ever seen him on the scene of a crime had been to rescue Isobel and me from incubi, and that had been pretty dire.

  I couldn’t help but peer up the stairs to see if Isobel was following. She wasn’t. Fritz must have left her at the OPA offices, where she had been expecting to interview Bubba Tanner.

  “What do you think?” Fritz asked again.

  Right, he’d been talking to me. “I think this is the same demon who killed Brandon.”

  “Are you sure? The methods of murder are drastically different.”

  No, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t be sure of anything until I had a confession on paper. Fritz knew that—he was testing me. And Janet was obviously listening in.

  “The specifics of the mutilation is different, but there are other identical markers. The power outage, the clocks stopping simultaneously, the physical profile of the victim. There’s no reason to think that it’s another killer.”

  “We could ask him,” Fritz said softly. I checked the open doorway at the top of the stairs again. Still no Isobel.

  I lowered my voice. “Jay Brandon didn’t remember anything. What are the odds this guy will?”

  “Then what do you propose?” Fritz asked.

  “I’m thinking it’ll take old-fashioned detective work. Just have to ask a lot of questions, comb the scenes for evidence, put it all together like a puzzle.”

  “Or you could behave like the witch that you are and reconstruct the scene magically.” Fritz thrust the briefcase he was holding at me. “This is for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “Look inside,” he said.

  The second my hands contacted the bag, I knew that it was powerful—the kind of powerful that made my sinuses tickle.

  I kept most of my magic supplies in duffel bags, like the ones that I took to the gym. Trust Fritz to think that he should stick magical supplies in a designer leather briefcase.

  It was stamped with a craftsman’s mark and the material felt like butter in my hands. Inside, I found compartments built specifically to cushion glass vials, which contained all the standard herbs I used as well as a few more obscure ones.

  “Check the back,” Fritz said. “I asked Belinda to put in a pocket sized for your notebooks. I know how much you love those Steno pads.”

  Now I felt even worse for throwing mental shade at him over the jock jams. “Gee, Fritz. You shouldn’t have. It’s not even our anniversary.”

  “Think of it as an early congratulations for passing your aspis licensing test. You’re ready to take the test, right? It’s coming up on Tuesday.”

  My mouth felt dry. “Oh, yeah. Definitely. One hundred percent ready.”

  “Good,” Fritz said. “Because once you pass the test, we’re doing the binding ritual the next day. I’m looking forward to the benefits of your protection.” He plucked a jar of salt out of the briefcase. “Furthermore, if you’ve studied the handbook thoroughly, you’ll already be familiar with the spell required to reconstruct the murder.”

  “Reconstruction spell,” I said. “Yeah. Right.”

  I hadn’t gotten that far in the handbook yet. It was probably in the truncated Book of Shadows at the end—the contents of which would, in fact, be included on the test. If a witch couldn’t cast those spells, then he wouldn’t be able to cast the binding ritual, either.

  But…Jesus, that was complex magic. It required a big ritual. Much bigger than anything I ever did.

  Domingo could have done it, easy. Suzy could probably do it in her sleep.

  I wasn’t my brother or my partner.

  Fritz’s hand settled on my shoulder, heavy and reassuring. He steered me into the corner and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Someone in the office has contacted the vice president.”

  “Lucrezia de Angelis?” As if there was another vice president that Fritz would be worried about.

  His expression was almost neutral, but his lips had gone so tight that they were white around the edges. “She heard about Belle’s visit. I don’t think the VP knows what Belle can do yet, but she’s asking questions about why we would have another witch consulting on cases. Some of those questions also involve your readiness to become my aspis.”

  My heart sank. Not just down to my stomach, but past my gut, down beyond my knees, six feet deep in the earth below the basement.

  I’d accessed OPA files above my clearance level on a job in Reno. Apparently, this was a problem. A big problem. The kind of problem that Vice President Lucrezia de Angelis believed might require crossing me off her list—permanently. Fritz’s solution had been to take me as aspis, claim responsibility for my knowledge and behavior, and save my life.

  If the vice president already doubted my ability to become his aspis, then she was probably thinking about what she’d do about me if I failed the test, too.

  “It was Janet,” I said. “She saw Isobel. Bet she has Janet spying on us now.”

  “Then you’d better do well with the reconstruction spell,” Fritz said.

  I licked my dry lips. “Okay.”

  I could tell by his expression that Fritz was thinking pitying thoughts in my direction. Both of us knew that I wasn’t a good enough witch to be aspis to Fritz Friederling, director of the Office of Preternatural Affairs.

  But I had to be good enough, because if I wasn’t, then I would be too dangerous to keep around.

  Fritz raised his voice and addressed the forensics team. “Everyone head out. Your legally mandated fifteen-minute break is overdue. Not you, Agent Takeuchi. You and Agent Hawke need to supervise the scene.”

  Janet and her cohort, Chekov, emerged from behind the boiler. She looked annoyed. “I’m in the middle of something, sir.”

  “No, you’re not. Head upstairs to take a break.”

  Her eyes flicked between us, but she couldn’t argue with Director Friederling. Not without giving away her new hobby as vice presidential stool pigeon.

  “Yes sir,” she said.

  Fritz gave me a significant look. “Fifteen minutes, Agent Hawke.”

  Fifteen minutes to cast a spell that was beyond my skill level.

  No problem.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE BASEMENT WAS EMPTY within seconds, leaving Suzy and me alone with a mangled body.

  “Okay,” Suzy said, jerking the briefcase out of my hands. “What bullshit does Director Friederling have you doing this time? You can’t tell me he cares about legally mandated break times. We’re never going to get audited for that crap. We don’t even exist.”

  “I need to cast a reconstruction spell before everyone comes back, Suze,” I said. “I’m so fucking screwed.”

  “You’re about to take the aspis test. Reconstruction spells are included. You should already know how to do them.”

  “Yeah. I should know them.”

  “But you don’t.” She didn’t look surprised. “They’re fucking with you again. Aren’t they?” All of her cynicism, her humor, her warmth had drained from her features.

  The same case that had gotten us assigned to special investigations had led to Suzy’s incarceration in a Union detention center. They thought she’d killed someone, and she’d spent a day locked up in the desert north of Los Angeles.

  Whatever had happened in there, it had chang
ed her. It had made her a little bit harder. And it had definitely wrecked her trust in our employer.

  I didn’t want to tell Suzy the details of what was happening with Lucrezia de Angelis. It would only endanger her, too. So I just gave her a Look. The same kind of Look I used to give my brother, Domingo, when I was begging-without-begging for him to get me out of trouble. He called it my bitch face. Domingo was kind of an asshole.

  Luckily for me, Suzy wasn’t.

  “You’re going to owe me big time for this, Cèsar. I own your balls. I’m serious.” As she spoke, liveliness returned to her features. She concealed her hard center like an Almond Joy concealing tooth-breakingly stale nuts under a delicious chocolate coating.

  “You already own my balls, Suze. You said you owned my balls for buying me a Coke from the vending machine last week. Remember?”

  “Yeah, but I really own your balls this time.” She ripped open the briefcase and looked inside. “At least you’ve got the good stuff. Let’s get this done.”

  I could whip out potions faster than a greasy Slytherin head of house. I could do small circles, too. They helped contain the energy when I brewed potions. Allowed me to make better poultices. That kind of thing.

  Complex spells were a lot more precise and much less instinctive.

  You had to know which cardinal direction you were facing to the exact degree. You had to know just how to balance the elements at the four corners to facilitate the flow of energy. You had to be able to draw runes within the circle without breaking the perimeter.

  Fuck anything up and you get to start over.

  For this kind of ritual, the circle was more than half of the magic. It was the foundation, the walls of the house, the roof. Once it was made, all that remained was filling in the rooms with the witch’s power. Tough stuff.

  Watching Suzy cast the circle of power was downright impressive. She made it as quickly as she could throw back shots of tequila at the company Fourth of July party.

  “You watching, Hawke?” she asked as she spilled salt around the edge of the circle. “You have to do this alone next time.”