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

by SM Reine

  “Oh yeah? What did you think?”

  “Awesome. I can’t wait for the next.”

  “Well, you’ll have to,” I said. “The new ones only come out whenever all the planets in the solar system align. The writer will probably die before he’s done.”

  “That’s not necessarily a problem. We could just have Belle summon the author’s spirit and force him to dictate the remaining books to us,” Fritz said. “We’ll hold the outlines hostage for outrageous royalties.”

  “You know what? You might be a genius.”

  Fritz gave a rare grin. He wasn’t a guy who smiled and laughed a lot, and I always understood why when he did it—his laugh completely spoiled his suave millionaire persona. It sounded kind of nasal. Sometimes he even snorted. It made him seem like he was an average dork, just like me, instead of a mining magnate.

  I liked him best when he was dorky and laughing, though.

  But Fritz’s practiced mask smoothed back into place within moments, and I remembered that we hadn’t just gotten together to talk about books.

  “Ward the room,” he said.

  “Come again?”

  “Ward the room against outside listeners. Wards are on the test tomorrow. You need to know this.”

  “Oh,” I said, “yeah.”

  I did actually know how to cast wards. I had some pretty good ones around my apartment. Domingo had helped me with some, but most were one hundred percent Cèsar Hawke originals.

  Now that Suzy and I had done a big spell together, I thought I could improve on my normal, clunky wards.

  Fritz watched as I pulled supplies out of the briefcase and arranged them in a circle one at a time. All the salt was messy, so I didn’t do the whole room. I didn’t need to. The magic would expand to fill the walls.

  It took about half an hour from start to finish. I remembered what Suzy had told me about the alphabet of magic—how you could cast anything if you wrote it in enough detail—and I wrote out the silence that I wanted to protect us, the privacy that I expected. Then I sealed the spell with a clap of my hands.

  My spell was so good that it even made me sneeze.

  Fritz looked pleased. “You’re getting better.”

  “Try sounding less surprised,” I said, blowing my nose on the offered handkerchief. It was embroidered with Fritz’s initials in calligraphy. Even his snot rags were expensive.

  “I’m proud, not surprised. Your abilities have been limited in the past.”

  Fritz Friederling: master of the backhanded compliment. “Can we talk about what’s eating you now?”

  “Lucrezia de Angelis is going to administer your test tomorrow,” Fritz said. “I thought you deserved warning.”

  I waited to feel shock, but it never came. It didn’t matter who was testing me at this point. I’d either pass or fail and deal with the consequences either way. “Huh. Tested by the vice president. If she’s got so much time to worry about me, then she’s getting paid way too much for her job.”

  “It’s not you she’s worrying about. It’s me. She discovered that I bribed the original proctor.”

  “Bribed?”

  “Yes, of course,” Fritz said.

  So even he thought I wasn’t going to be able to pass.

  “She’ll kill me if I fail, won’t she?” I asked, sinking into a chair across from the fireplace. It had the square lines and swooping metal frame of some kind of Scandinavian designer, though one much nicer than the guy who’d made all the IKEA furniture in my apartment.

  He looked surprised. “You think that Lucrezia wants to kill you?”

  “She tried to have me shot when she thought you’d died and we couldn’t bind as kopis and aspis.”

  “Those were more urgent circumstances. No, Lucrezia won’t have you killed for this. She’s scraped all of your activity on the network and realized that you didn’t see anything sensitive on my BlackBerry. You don’t know anything dangerous.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Great.”

  “You don’t sound as though you were genuinely worried.”

  I shrugged. “I escaped the OPA and the Union before. Figured I could do it again.” I didn’t mention the part where I’d already prepared supplies for my escape plan. I trusted Fritz, but he still worked for our somewhat evil employer.

  “Escape is a great thought, but if Lucrezia wanted you dead, you would be dead,” Fritz said.

  “That’s what you think.”

  A slow smile spread over his lips. “Maybe I’ve underestimated you.”

  “Maybe. So what’s the real consequence if I fail?”

  “You’ll be fired. Our organization doesn’t have use for witches too weak to become aspides.”

  “Guess I could get back into the private sector.” Chasing down cheating wives again didn’t sound all that bad. Sure, there were no benefits and self-employment taxes sucked, but I’d set my own hours and never had to deal with demons. That life was sounding pretty cushy right about now.

  Fritz went to the bar and grabbed two glasses. “Brandy?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “You might want a drink for this.”

  “What, it gets better?” I asked.

  He replied by asking again, “Brandy?”

  “Alcohol has never improved anything in my life. I’ll pass.”

  Fritz poured himself a snifter and warmed it in the palm of his hand. “Have you ever seen someone after they’ve been fired from the OPA?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone fired from the OPA at all. Government job.” I shrugged. “It’s hard to get fired as long as you keep your mouth shut.”

  “Four people have been fired from the Magical Violations Department in the last three years: Agents Spavin, Herd, Canalda, and Reed. Before Agent Takeuchi was hired, you shared a desk with Agent Herd for a month.”

  I laughed. “Right.” I’d never even heard that name before.

  My smile quickly faded when I realized that Fritz wasn’t laughing too.

  “We have contracts that compel witnesses to remain silent about the supernatural. What enchantments do you think we weave into contracts for our employees?”

  I tried to think back to the day I signed my contract. I couldn’t recall many of the details.

  Just like I couldn’t recall Agent Herd.

  “Upon termination, an employee’s mind is wiped, their existence is redacted from our files, and the memories of former coworkers are also purged.” Fritz spread his arms wide, nearly sloshing the brandy over the rim of the snifter. “Except for those in upper management.”

  Now I was feeling sick, thinking about all the things I’d forget if my employment was terminated.

  I’d forget killing the half-succubus back in the spring—that wouldn’t be so bad. But I’d also forget Suzy and Fritz, my closest friends. I’d forget Isobel. I’d forget the case I worked with Domingo that helped us get over all our old brotherly grudges. I’d forget all the magic that I had learned, wonderful and terrible as it was.

  And everyone would forget me, too.

  My mouth felt awful dry without that brandy. “Good thing I’m going to pass the test. Huh?”

  “Very good thing,” Fritz said.

  My preparations to leave the country weren’t going to do a lot of good if I didn’t remember they even fucking existed.

  I needed a Plan B, but the test was tomorrow. I didn’t have time for another plan.

  “There has definitely been an angel at the soup kitchen,” Fritz said, changing topics smoothly. I wasn’t sure if I was grateful for the distraction or not. “Angels are incredibly powerful. They leave a mark everywhere they go. That was why I wanted to go there.”

  “And you felt it?”

  “No. I felt something like an angel, but it wasn’t an angel. Not anymore.” Fritz looked grim. “Just like Roberto Tanner said.”

  “I’m not following you, Fritz. What’s an angel, but also not an angel?”

  “Do you remember Malcolm Gallag
her?”

  How could anyone forget Malcolm Gallagher?

  He was a one-eyed demon hunter we’d met on an investigation in Reno. Fun guy. Good fighter. He’d saved my ass a couple times and told me about what it meant to be an aspis before I even realized I was going to become one.

  “What about him?” I asked. “Is he an angel?”

  Fritz laughed. “No. We trained together when he first enlisted into the Union, and he had a lot of stories to tell about his life prior to recruitment. He joined late in life—not a teenage boy like many of our demon hunters, but as a man who had already spent many years fighting demons independently.”

  “A rogue,” I said. I knew there were quite a few kopides loose in the world who didn’t work for us yet. They were more dangerous than helpful. Unregulated. Violent.

  “He spent several months on the trail of a creature that killed human infants. Malcolm described the murders as gruesome, but he spent the investigations too drunk to remember many details. In short, the infants were abducted as newborns, drained of fluids, and left as husks.”

  “Jesus.” No wonder he was an alcoholic.

  “Imagine his surprise when he found the culprit and it was an angel.”

  “No way,” I said.

  Fritz stared into the firelight, slipping his free hand into his pocket. “Angels are not children of God. Did you know that?” Obviously a rhetorical question—he had to know that everything I knew about angels could dance on the head of a metaphorical pin. “God didn’t create angels, so He’s at constant odds with them. Angels who disobey Him are given the most severe punishment imaginable: not damnation to Hell, but damnation to Earth as a fallen creature, helpless to their own dark urges.”

  “You are talking about angels here. Right? Because that’s not what’s in the Bible.”

  “The Bible is a human creation.” Fritz took a sip of his brandy and set it on the mantel. “Malcolm told me the truth.”

  “Yeah, I’d definitely trust an alcoholic demon hunter to know more about theology than the Bible.”

  He unbuttoned his jacket, slid into the chair across from me, rested his elbows on his knees. “For the moment, I want you to accept what I’m telling you as truth.”

  “Okay. Fine. It’s truth.”

  “Fallen angels are cast from Heaven as monsters greater than any demon. Unlike demons, which are driven by chaotic impulse, these monsters are cursed—fixated on a single idea. They have an itch they can never scratch, and yet they are compelled to eternally attempt it.”

  “Scratching an itch with dead babies is a hell of a thing,” I said.

  “Try to be sympathetic. The fallen angel that Malcolm hunted had a love for the innocent, so Samael hungered for the most innocent of all: infants. Imagine if you had no choice but to kill babies.” Fritz sat back in his chair, shaking his head. “No. Imagine that you had no choice but to kill young women just like your sister—for eternity.”

  Just the casual mention of it made me cold all over.

  I’d been the one to find Ofelia at the mercy of the Silver Needles. She’d healed some of the scars that resulted from her torture, but not all of them. Not the holes they’d dug into her cheek and down her neck. Definitely not the ones that her attacker had left on her soul.

  Nothing could make me do that to someone else. Nothing.

  Except that I had killed a young woman who reminded me of my sister. She’d been a half-demon trying to kill me, but I hadn’t known that at first. When I realized what I’d done, it had been a very special kind of hell.

  And fallen angels did that over and over and over.

  I sympathized all right. I sympathized a little too much.

  “All right.” I shook off my reverie. “So what’d that angel do to piss off God? This Samael guy, I mean.”

  “Malcolm wouldn’t tell me. I’m not sure he knew. Considering the punishment, I bet he spared an innocent soul that he was ordered to kill.”

  “Ordered by God.” I couldn’t keep the skepticism out of my voice.

  I lived in a world filled with demons, sure. I saw evidence of the battle between good and evil every single day.

  But this idea of an interventional God just didn’t sit with me. I’d never seen Him around. I’d seen a lot of people who deserved to be saved, and not a one of them had ever been touched by any deity that I could see.

  Now Fritz wanted me to believe God was bitter, vengeful, and at odds with angels.

  It was a lot to ask.

  “I want you to look at the evidence for this case again,” Fritz said. “Frame it in this light: The murderer is not sadistic; he is merely incapable of acting any other way. What impulse is he following? Why is he mutilating men like this? And what must he have done to earn this specific punishment?”

  I rubbed a hand over my jaw. “That would change the case completely.”

  “Good. We need to change our thinking if we want to find a fallen angel.” Fritz gave me an intent look. “These creatures are incredibly powerful. Roberto Tanner died just from being exposed to it. I’m also susceptible until we bind as kopis and aspis. If we’re going to hunt this creature down, you must pass the test tomorrow.”

  “I have to pass it anyway,” I said.

  “Consider this an added incentive.” He got up again, and I could tell I’d been dismissed. “I’ll see you after the test.”

  I stood, too. “I’m not gonna let you down.”

  “I know you won’t.”

  I dismantled the wards, grabbed my briefcase, and made it all the way to the door before a thought struck me. “Did Malcolm end up killing Samael?” I asked, glancing back at Fritz.

  He was staring into the fire again. The way that the light danced over his narrow features and slicked-back hair made him look faintly translucent, like he was something ethereal himself.

  Fritz swirled the brandy in his glass. “The fallen angel died. Apparently, in the end, it was a mercy killing.” His look chilled me all the way to my guts. “Let’s give this angel the mercy he deserves, too.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I SAT IN MY car for almost a half an hour before I went into the office the next morning. I just fucking sat there, hands on the wheel, and stared at the wall of the parking garage through the cracks in my windshield.

  I’d drunk too many energy potions that morning and my nerves were frayed electric wire. Goosebumps kept sweeping down my shoulders, over and over, like I had a fever and was standing in front of a cold breeze.

  After talking with Fritz, sleep had been an impossible fantasy. I’d stayed up until dawn reading that goddamn manual for aspides, poring over the spells, worrying that I wouldn’t be able to do any of it when the time came. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like to forget the last two years of my life.

  Jesus, I needed to sleep for a few days before this test.

  There was another energy potion in my briefcase. Another three, actually. I’d made extras while I was studying. I uncorked one and threw it back. Ice raced through my veins, numbed my fingers. The cracks in my windshield seemed to sharpen until they might shatter.

  Only twenty minutes until I was due at the testing room. There was no time left to wait, no time to sleep, no time to study.

  Time to face Lucrezia de Angelis.

  I got out of my car and headed down the floors of the parking garage.

  Somehow, I got all the way into the Magical Violations Department. It wasn’t the weekend anymore, so everyone was working, mostly on pleasantly boring cases. Misbehaving covens, dumb teenagers sacrificing pets to demons, witches selling over-powered libido potions to old people. That kind of thing.

  Suzy came out of the photocopier room. “Hawke! Look what I found!” She shoved papers in my face.

  I pushed her arm down. “Not right now.”

  “But I’ve found another one of the murder victims. Same victim profile—athletic blond guy, and he’s missing parts. Leubold Chambon.”

  “What? Wher
e?”

  “Torrance,” Suzy said. “Three months ago. I’ve been trying to find the owners of the other body parts in Sister Catherine’s closet, and I got this out of the LAPD’s files. The case never made it to us because there was no sign of preternatural involvement.”

  Three months ago. That meant the killer had been up to this crap longer than I’d expected.

  I checked my watch. There were still ten minutes until I was due at the testing room. “Okay. I want to see.”

  Suzy had already put the files on my desk. She pulled them apart, arranging the pages so I could see everything at once: the black and white crime scene photos, the report from the LAPD, the head shot of the victim from when he’d been alive. He was blond and blue-eyed with a weak jaw. According to the report, he had stood just under six feet tall.

  “Just like the other guys,” I said.

  “This one was missing his lower jaw,” Suzy said. “I don’t think the killer liked his overbite.” She pushed one of the crime scene photos at me. It was easy to look at them when they weren’t in color. The blood was gray. His upper jaw glistened white with exposed bone.

  Leubold Chambon was also missing strips of skin—big rectangles of dark gray on light gray flesh. “Tattoos?”

  “Bingo.”

  Sort of like the way that the killer had cut off the nurse’s earlobes. “Uniformity,” I muttered.

  “You think Sister Catherine wants them all to look the same?”

  I’d hung photos of the other two victims on our cubicle wall, and now I looked at them again. They did look a lot alike. “Maybe the murderer wanted them to be the same person.”

  “We could just ask her,” Suzy suggested. “It’ll make it easier to figure out what happened to all of the other bodies.”

  I grimaced. “I don’t think Sister Catherine has any clue what happened to the other bodies, because I don’t think she killed them.”

  A pair of white heeled pumps appeared on the carpet outside our cubicle, interrupting the conversation. My eyes traveled up those pumps to slender ankles and muscled calves encased in nude pantyhose. Her white skirt suit brushed the tops of her knees and was tailored to flare over her hips, making it look like she had more curves than she really did. Her wrists and neck were long, swanlike, and I had the brief mental image of sliding my lips up to the curve of her jaw.