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

by SM Reine

  “I know. I’m watching. I can do it.”

  Good thing, too. The clock on the rest of the team’s “break time” was dropping rapidly.

  Suzy talked while she worked, conspicuously leaving part of the circle open so that she could move in and out without breaking it. “Once you’ve got the circle set up, it’s easy. You’ll just have to close the circle and place the target. Use this.” She tossed a crystal from the briefcase at me.

  “Put this on the body, right?” I asked.

  “Exactly.” Suzy grabbed a piece of chalk and continued to speak as she drew a few runes. “You won’t need an incantation for this one. I’ll build everything you need into the runes. Runes are your friend, Hawke. If you just memorize the runic alphabet in the company Book of Shadows, you can put anything together.”

  She spilled magic from her fingertips, flooding the runes with energy. My eyes watered. I sneezed.

  “With runes and practice, of course,” she added.

  “Runes, practice, and memorizing the whole company Book of Shadows,” I said thickly, rubbing at my nose with my sleeve.

  “Just the appendix. It’s kind of like trying to do a speech in sign language just by finger spelling the alphabet. Slow and difficult, but hey, at least you’re talking.”

  She sprinkled herbs over the circle. Clapped her hands.

  The power pulsed like a beating heart, and I sneezed again.

  We were out of time. The door had opened and the forensics team was on its way back down with Fritz at the rear. My future kopis looked incredibly bored, like he couldn’t care less about whether or not I could pull off the spell.

  Suzy was fast. She crouched over the body across the room before anyone made it down, like she was just searching for evidence, and I was left standing by the circle with the focus crystal. It looked like I’d just done all the work myself.

  And they say cheaters never prosper.

  “Ready?” Fritz asked, his tone as cool and detached as his eyes.

  “Almost done,” I said. I could fake it about as well as Suzy. I picked up the salt, stepped into the circle, sprinkled it over the hole in the circumference.

  The circle clamped shut around me.

  Invisible iron bands crushed my chest, and it was all I could do to keep standing. Forget making myself look like I wasn’t surprised by the force of the magic. For a few long seconds, it was all I could do to keep breathing.

  When it relaxed, my vision was murkier. Everything outside the circle was shrouded in gray mist. Everything inside blazed with light. The lines Suzy had drawn on the ground, the jars of herbs, even the salt looked to be on fire. A dome shimmered over the circle.

  Domingo had told me it was like that, but I’d never been able to cast anything like it.

  “Wow,” I said.

  Judging by how unimpressed the others looked, they couldn’t see it.

  What had Suzy said to do next?

  The crystal.

  I couldn’t walk over the line without ruining the spell. I had to pick up the ritual knife—something else Suzy had pulled out of Fritz’s bag of magic tricks—and use it to cut an invisible doorway into the energy dome. That was something I already knew how to do: Bury the point of the knife in the base of the circle, drag it up the magical wall, open it like a veil. The energy parted easily.

  When I stepped through the door I had cut open, the circle didn’t break. The energy continued to pulse around me. I took shallow breaths through my mouth to keep from sneezing as I approached the body.

  The colors weren’t as vibrant now. The blood was gray, the nurse’s skin was white. It didn’t look so grotesque.

  I placed the focus crystal on the body.

  Immediately, the whole room changed. Lights flickered to life where all the bulbs had blown. The equipment that we had brought into the room vanished, leaving a smoky haze where they had stood.

  Nurse Sullivan suddenly appeared on the stairs. He looked as real as any one of Isobel’s apparitions, so perfect and so detailed that I could even see the glassy plugs in his earlobes.

  “Nice,” Janet said. Everyone could see what I was seeing now.

  Fritz took a quick step away from the vision of Nurse Sullivan, betraying his usual composure. “Well done. That’s the best reconstruction spell I’ve ever seen.”

  High praise. It would have felt nice if it had been aimed at me.

  As I watched, Nurse Sullivan took cigarettes from his pocket. He was already holding a lighter. A Zippo with one seriously ugly flaming skull stamped on the side.

  “Did anyone find that?” Suzy asked.

  Chekov shook his head. “We’ll look again.”

  We wouldn’t find it. I already knew the ugly flaming skull Zippo had gone missing, just like the pieces cut from Jay Brandon.

  Another trophy.

  Nurse Sullivan’s mouth opened in a silent cry. He pitched off the stairs, twisting as he fell, slamming the back of his head into the floor. The cigarettes flew from his hand.

  Another apparition had pushed him. This one was human-sized, draped in bleached white blankets. Stolen hospital linens. It was enough to hide the attacker’s head, shoulders, upper body, but it wasn’t enough to hide its feet—although cloven hooves probably don’t qualify as feet.

  “Definitely a demon,” I said.

  The killer was on Nurse Sullivan before he could get up. Human hands pinned him down by the throat. The demon wasn’t holding hard, but the victim couldn’t move.

  I didn’t want to see this. I didn’t want to watch him die.

  Movement on the stairs made me turn. Our murdering demon wasn’t alone.

  Another human-like figure stepped briskly into the basement wearing a baggy black sweater. The hood was lifted and I couldn’t tell if the wearer was male or female, fat or thin.

  The second figure lifted a hand into the air. My sinuses exploded, and I hit the ground on my knees, sneezing so hard that it felt like my nose was going to fly off my face.

  My throat clamped shut. I wheezed. Struggled to breathe.

  A hand gripped my shoulder. “Agent Hawke?” I couldn’t respond to Fritz. The magic was attacking me, plowing along the tracks of the spell Suzy had cast to crush the heart. “Agent Hawke? Cèsar!”

  His fist pounded into my back.

  The magic vanished. Air rushed into my lungs, filling me with dizzying oxygen.

  I blinked rapidly as my vision cleared. Everything looked normal again and the apparitions were gone.

  In fact, the magic was gone from the room, too. All of it. Every scrap of the circle that Suzy had cast, the apparition of the demon attacking Nurse Sullivan, the gray haze.

  I wiped my upper lip. I was surprised when my hand came away wet with blood.

  Hell of a sneeze.

  “What the fuck was that?” I asked.

  Suzy looked just as shocked as I felt. “In my professional opinion? I think we just saw a witch predict our investigation and prevent us from seeing what happened to Nurse Sullivan.” She lifted her eyebrows at me. “And Cèsar just got bitch slapped for being the one to look.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  SUZY AND I MET the hospital’s head of security upstairs, leaving Nurse Sullivan’s body behind. The change of scenery wasn’t much of an improvement. Sure, there was no blood, but the security manager only had bad news for us.

  At this point, I would have been a lot more surprised if he’d known anything useful.

  He informed us that Bubba Tanner’s body hadn’t been transferred to any church that actually existed in Los Angeles. They’d checked for us. In fact, there was no Compassionate Heart Ministry anywhere in California.

  Equally unsurprising: The hospital’s security footage was blank for the entire hour leading up to the power outage. The tapes weren’t missing. They had just been wiped clean, as though someone had yanked them out and gave them a vigorous magnet rubbing.

  “Do you ever miss the days of physical media?” Suzy asked, putting all of
the tapes into a padded briefcase. The hospital’s security manager watched us from the doorway, silently disapproving.

  We were still going to attempt to recover the footage. Officially speaking, the tapes were wrecked. Unofficially speaking, the OPA had some pretty cool spells that might be able to recover images.

  “No,” I said. “Not at all.”

  “Really? But there’s something so satisfying about this old stuff. It’s solid. It’s real.” She hefted one of the tapes in her hand. “This really looks like something important.”

  The last twenty-four hours of camera footage throughout the hospital had been backed up onto high-density tapes, but they still took up three cases. They were solid all right. Solid enough that we probably could have killed someone by dropping all the tapes on his head from twenty feet up.

  “I really like flash drives,” I said, taking all three of the cases from her. “There’s something to be said for being able to carry terabytes in your pocket.” Suzy fought me on the last case, but I managed to wrench it from her grip.

  “I can carry those.” A combative spark flitted through her eyes. The one that drove her to prove she could be as good at anything as a man, even if it was something physical and the man in question was at least twice her body mass.

  “I know you can,” I said. “You’ve already helped me a lot today, Suzy. Let me carry the tapes.”

  Surprisingly, she let it go.

  We walked to the parking garage and loaded the cases into the SUV. Suzy wasn’t big on sleep in the middle of the case, so she’d be heading into the office to analyze them. I planned to head home.

  The magic had wiped me out. I didn’t just feel physically exhausted—I was burned out to my core.

  It was kind of a good ache, though. Like the DOMS I used to get when I first started lifting weights.

  Suzy slammed the trunk shut, but I didn’t immediately climb into the driver’s seat. I leaned against the door in a way that I hoped looked more casual than exhausted. “Thanks for everything today. I wouldn’t have been able to do that ritual without you.”

  “Don’t wimp out on me, Hawke. What are you up to tonight?”

  It was already eight o’clock. Time flies when you’re dealing with murder victims. “Working from home? Watching TV? Sleeping?”

  “All wrong answers,” Suzy said. “I’ll be at Canyon Creek at ten waiting to get trashed, and you’re buying.”

  “It’s Sunday. Nobody from work is going to be there.”

  “Nobody but us,” she said.

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Awesome, because I need a designated driver.”

  I could tell when Suzy had gotten her mind set on something. Considering that she had probably just saved my job—and my life—that afternoon, she could insist on a week of foot massages at her desk and it wouldn’t be thanks enough. Buying drinks was nothing.

  “All right,” I said. “Canyon Creek at ten.”

  Since sleep was off the menu, I took my laptop home to work. I’m not a workaholic like Aniruddha or Suzy, but it felt irresponsible to kick back when a serial-killing demon was circumcising men in the greater Los Angeles area. Even if it was just for a few minutes.

  Home wasn’t fancy, but I didn’t have to wear pants there, so it was better than going into the office.

  I’d been forced to move into a new apartment after killing a half-succubus at my old one. After all that blood, I hadn’t been able to get the cleaning deposit back, and my landlord definitely hadn’t written me a referral. Renting gets tough when you slay demons and wreck the carpet at one apartment. Apartment managers are so damn picky about tenants.

  So my new place wasn’t as nice as the last one. That said a lot because the last one had been kind of a dive.

  The carpet smelled like decades of cigarette smoke and cat piss, the holes in the walls had been patched with the wrong color of paint, and I was becoming convinced that the drywall was actually rice paper. Furnishing it all in the very best from IKEA didn’t do much to distract from the constant thumping of music, the arguments from the lesbian couple that lived upstairs, the screaming of children in the parking lot.

  But it was as good as it got now that nobody else wanted to let me rent.

  So here I was in my personal shithole, sitting on a hard couch that was named something with a lot of umlauts, trying to relax in my Batman boxers while people screamed on the other side of the wall.

  At least I was saving a lot of money on rent.

  Shithole or not, the first thing I did when I got home was make another sweep for cameras. The OPA kept surveillance on all of its staff. Not officially—nobody talked about it. But I’d seen footage from Suzy’s apartment and I found a new camera in my apartment every week now that I knew to search.

  Today, I found the camera tucked under the kitchen counter. They weren’t getting lazy. They wanted to make it easy to find so I’d stop looking after that one.

  I stood in front of it and scratched my balls for the benefit of the guys watching on the other end. I really dug around in there to get that itch. Felt good after a day with Los Angeles’s summer heat adhering my testicles to my leg. I hoped that my voyeurs were enjoying it.

  Then I smashed the little black box under my thumb.

  The second camera was sneakier. They’d put it in a light fixture. I dropped it down the garbage disposal.

  Now with some semblance of privacy, I got a stockpot of energy potion brewing. It bubbled cheerfully on the stove, occasionally belching smoke tinged a faint shade of rose that stained the walls behind it. I might have cared about the discoloration if I hadn’t lived in an apartment that was only a slight upgrade from a cardboard box.

  “Anyone watching in here?” I muttered as I moved into the bedroom, making another camera sweep.

  I didn’t find anything. Either they hadn’t bothered because they expected no action in my bedroom—sad, but probably true—or they’d just gotten really good about tucking them away.

  Fortunately, I didn’t need to find this one to blow it away.

  With a wave of my hand over the wards on my door, I blasted all the electronics in the room. The lights went out. I waited three seconds before allowing the electricity to return—well after the wiring on the cameras would have fried.

  I really didn’t want the OPA seeing what I had in my bedroom.

  “All better,” I said.

  I lifted the mattress to make sure my supplies were still in place: the suitcase I’d packed with a couple outfits, a lot of extra-strength poultices and energy potions, some emergency herbal supplies. The more mundane stuff was a Camelbak, dried food, first aid kit. Everything I needed to leave the country if Lucrezia de Angelis decided to kill me.

  There was a matching evacuation bag at my brother Domingo’s house, and another I’d buried at a rest stop south of town.

  If shit hit the fan and I had to bug out, I was ready for it. Very ready.

  By the time I returned to my laptop, the data recovery team was emailing me updates on the security tapes. I kept Outlook open in the background while I poked around in the OPA databases.

  “Demons and witches,” I muttered. The pot on the stove hissed and burped another pink cloud.

  Why would a demon and witch work together?

  There were a few unlikely possibilities. It wasn’t easy for demons to get to Earth, after all. If they weren’t corporeal, it took a witch to evoke them. Witches could also facilitate demonic possession. But the demon we’d glimpsed had obviously been physical, so it didn’t seem likely to be evocation. With the cloven hooves, it probably wasn’t possession, either.

  Since I knew exactly jack and shit about demons, I decided to research the witch side of things. I was good with witches.

  I also knew that the magic used to attack me in the hospital wasn’t easy. I could sometimes block spells cast by other witches, but I couldn’t set a trap that would shatter spells in advance. And controlling demons wasn’t exactly Magic 1
01 material, either.

  Whoever I was looking for, he would be strong. That meant he was probably already on the OPA radar.

  Once upon a time, I’d been forced to call around local covens to get an idea of which witches might be strong enough to cast the spells I was investigating. Now I had access to OPA databases with security clearance nearly equal to Fritz’s. That meant I could look through our ranking system instead.

  We had records of literally thousands of witches throughout North America. Anyone that the OPA had ever investigated, had under surveillance, or knew existed.

  The database included Black Jack, a witch that I had apprehended the previous year. He was ranked as a five. Stronger than me, but not strong enough to keep me from arresting him. I felt a little smug about seeing that.

  I sorted the list by highest to lowest ranked and started skimming.

  At the top, there was a cluster of Faulkners, most of whom were located in Colorado or had no address at all. The best of them was a freaking twelve. I hadn’t even realized the numbers went up to twelve. The notes said that he was most likely “stronger than we are capable of measuring.”

  Someone that strong probably wouldn’t waste time murdering random blond men in LA. Call me sexist, but I didn’t think a male witch would help a demon circumcise other guys, either.

  I worked my way down the list, ruling out witches that hadn’t traveled to the United States recently, or had unrelated magical specialties, or just because my gut said it wasn’t them. I’ve got a pretty damn good gut. Saved me from a lot of big trouble in the past.

  And now my gut was telling me that this witch wasn’t in our database.

  I’d only gone through a few pages, but I clicked over to the sister list of kopides anyway. It was much shorter. There weren’t many kopides in the world, much less in the United States; we were talking global numbers in the hundreds rather than the tens of thousands of noteworthy witches.

  There was no reason to think that a demon hunter should be involved, but I still took a quick look at kopides in the Los Angeles area.