Shadow Burns: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Preternatural Affairs Book 4)

by SM Reine

  That’s what you’d think, anyway.

  “Get off of me, you stupid gimp,” I groaned into the padded blue mats.

  Director Fritz Friederling twisted my arm behind me until the elbow threatened to pop. “What did you say?”

  “Uncle. I said uncle!”

  He laughed as he let me up. It wasn’t a pretty sound. Despite the fact that Fritz was some suave martial arts master who drove sports cars and owned enough gadgets to make James Bond jealous, his laugh sounded more like Bill Gates sucking down helium.

  Most of the time, he kept up the serious super-spy persona. Not a lot of people knew he had one dorky goddamn laugh.

  But I did. He laughed at me a lot now that we were training together.

  Fritz helped me get to my feet, of which I had two. Normal feet with normal toes and possibly a case of athlete’s foot.

  My boss and friend, on the other hand, only had one normal foot, which looked suspiciously pedicured. The other leg was prosthetic from mid-calf down.

  Fritz had several different prostheses depending on the occasion. I’d seen him with a business casual foot, a formal foot, even a “boating day” foot.

  Today was the “foot I can shove right up Cèsar’s ass” model: a cage of elaborate titanium, both sturdy and impressive to look at, with gears that made him almost as mobile as he used to be.

  “You’re cheating,” I said.

  Fritz bounced away from me, shadowboxing with vicious jabs that I knew for a fact hurt when delivered to one’s throat region. “Cheating? How am I cheating?”

  “You’re wearing an enchanted foot.” I could see the magic in the corner of my vision. There weren’t any spells that I recognized, but then again, I wasn’t much for exotic specialty magics like that.

  “They only prevent my leg from being disengaged in a conflict.”

  “You sure they don’t also bless you with some crazy-ass Irish jig powers that make you fast as a freak?”

  Fritz smirked. “Possibly.” A few more swift jabs at his invisible enemy, plus a roundhouse kick fast enough to knock someone’s head off. “It’s early. Let’s go another round.”

  “Sure you don’t want me to pull out a punching bag for you?” My face already felt like ground beef.

  “It’s a tempting suggestion. Punching bags don’t complain nearly as much as you do.”

  “A punching bag also doesn’t have to show up for work in an hour,” I muttered.

  Of course, Fritz wasn’t worried about that. He was the director of the Magical Violations Department. Training with him in the mornings was a free pass for showing up so bruise-riddled that I couldn’t interview witnesses without traumatizing them for life.

  I’d had to interview a kid last week. Some girl, about eleven years old, who had seen her alcoholic mother cast a curse on her stepdad. The child had cried when she saw my face. Suzy had been forced to finish the interview.

  Making kids weep doesn’t do good things for the ego.

  That titanium foot rushed at me again. I had no choice but to throw myself to the mats to keep from getting my teeth scattered across Fritz’s training room floor.

  “Good,” he said approvingly.

  I rolled to my feet and lifted my arms to block a few punches, retreating across the length of the hall. It was a big room—more than enough space for me to tuck tail and run without getting cornered.

  Turns out that richer-than-God demon hunters like to leave as much room in the budget for elaborate home gyms as they do Bugattis.

  When I managed to nail a kick in Fritz’s midsection, he stumbled across Macassar ebony floors and caught himself on a training dummy that had been sculpted by Buddhist monks. When he knocked me flat on my back, I found myself staring at rafters that had been wired with a Bose stereo system that could play Fritz’s awful jock jams at ear-splitting volumes.

  And when he decided he was done pulverizing me for the morning, I’d mop up my blood with towels hand-embroidered with Fritz’s “FF” logo. Because, hey, why not put the monogram from his Italian graphic designer on everything?

  Having all that space to escape meant I didn’t immediately end up flat on my back again. I focused hard on watching Fritz’s torso and trying to figure out how he was going to attack me next.

  I wasn’t getting anywhere near kicking his ass, but after a few months of training together, I was getting slightly better at escaping without broken bones. I deflected most of Fritz’s strikes now. But I was slowing down. My muscles were burning, and I desperately needed to eat another strength poultice.

  My foot slipped off the mats. I’d reached the wall.

  “Break, break,” I said.

  Fritz took mercy on me. He stepped back with a wry smile. “That wasn’t terrible.”

  “Not terrible,” I panted. “I can take not terrible.”

  It was also hot in his training room. The giant east-facing windows made me feel like an ant under a magnifying glass. I stripped my shirt off over my head, tossed it aside, rolled my head around on my neck to try to loosen my stiff muscles.

  Fritz looked impervious to the heat. He worked out in sweats and a t-shirt, always.

  Apparently, my break only lasted as long as it took me to strip down. Fritz swung a punch as soon as I dropped the shirt.

  His fist flew toward me, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to dodge it in time.

  I braced myself for the hit.

  His knuckles stopped about a centimeter from my nose.

  “Hey,” I said, actually kind of offended. “I didn’t call uncle that time.”

  “Fritzy?”

  He hadn’t stopped for my benefit. He had stopped so that the girl standing in the doorway wouldn’t see him breaking the nose of his alleged best friend.

  It was Yelena Katzenberg, intern necromancer and student of nursing at UCLA. She was wearing one of Fritz’s designer button-down shirts, a pair of fluffy-toed stilettos, and a smile. That was it. Obviously she hadn’t had to drive herself in at the butt crack of dawn, since she’d already been up helping Fritz train all night long.

  “Oh God,” Fritz muttered. He turned so that she wouldn’t be able to see his expression. “Get her out of here, Cèsar. Make an excuse. I don’t care what.”

  I snorted. “Your piece of tail, your problem. Fritzy.”

  Because I was already walking away from him, I didn’t see the donkey punch coming. I just found myself on the floor again with no sense of time passing.

  Looked like the mats needed to be washed. Someone was bleeding on them.

  Hey, that was my blood.

  The ringing in my skull was a mercy. It meant I didn’t really have to listen to Yelena cooing over Fritz. Plus, my blurry vision meant that the sight of the girl draping her admittedly shapely limbs all over him wasn’t nearly as graphic as usual.

  “Has that witch been trying to beat on you?” she wibbled in some kind of weirdo baby-talk voice.

  “Don’t worry, darling, I’m fully capable of defending myself.” No dorky laughs from Fritz over Yelena; he sounded bored. Fun Fritz was gone and Director Friederling was in the house.

  “I don’t like how hard he works you. Let me rub your leg.”

  I was possibly going to barf on the mats, too.

  “That won’t be necessary. Don’t you have classes to attend?”

  A throaty giggle. “I could skip the morning class for you, Fritzy. Especially if you wanted a repeat performance of last night’s…you know.”

  Yeah, feeling really queasy.

  “Maybe tonight.” The man had a lot more patience than I did. Or else Yelena had a magical vagina and nipples that tasted like candy canes. “I have to prepare for work now. Why don’t you run along? My driver will be happy to take you to school.”

  Yelena pouted and whined at him, but she eventually left.

  I rolled onto my back. I’d been immobile for too long; my muscles were already getting stiffer. My kingdom for an analgesic or six.

  Fritz appe
ared over my head, offering a hand to help me up.

  I took his hand, all right. And then I used it to yank him down, roll on top of him, and beat the shit out of him.

  At least, that was the intent. I only got three good punches in before Fritz managed to toss me off—and halfway across the training room.

  My back hit a rack of free weights. It hurt, but God, it was worth it.

  Lucky for me, Fritz was laughing again. That nasally laugh punctuated with a snort. “Great job, Cèsar. Nice one.” He wasn’t being sarcastic. He meant it.

  “You’re welcome,” I groaned as I got back up again, stretching out my back.

  Fritz hadn’t gotten up. He was sitting with his legs stretched in front of him, grimacing.

  Carefully, he disengaged the prosthetic from the fleshy part of his limb, which was protected by an ordinary sock. Good thing, too. The sight of his stump made me nauseous.

  I’d climbed into a bell tower to save Fritz from the fallen angel. He’d been hanging where the church bells were supposed to be with a chain around his legs so that a clapper could dangle from his ankles. The chain had cut off circulation to one of his legs. He’d never gotten it back.

  If I’d saved him faster, he’d still have that foot.

  The sight of his leg terminating a few inches below the knee was a pretty solid reminder of that horrible night. Not just failing to save the entirety of Fritz, but having to kill a confused old angel and cut the heart out of her chest.

  Bad night. Really bad night.

  “Is it broken?” I asked when he set the prosthetic aside.

  “No, the numbing spells just aren’t doing their job. It aches.” I could tell by the tightness in Fritz’s voice that it didn’t “just” ache.

  “I’m not offering to massage it.” But I did go over to help him up.

  His stump swept out, hooked behind my knees, and yanked me off of my feet.

  I hit the mats again. Hard.

  Fritz cackled as he bounced on one foot toward the butler waiting for him in the doorway. “Don’t drop your guard, Cèsar! Never drop your guard!”

  I cradled my head in both hands. “I’ll remember that.”

  He didn’t offer to help me up again. I did that on my own.

  By the time I retrieved my shirt, Fritz was toweled off and glued to his Blackberry, speaking in his most professional-sounding voice. Director mode again. Judging by his end of the conversation, Suzy was on the other end of the line.

  Fritz hung up as I limped over to him. “Take a quick shower, Agent Hawke. We need to head straight to a scene from here.” I was Agent Hawke again. The workday had definitely started.

  I groaned, wiping the sweat off my neck with one of the FF towels. “Don’t tell me it’s another case where Suzy’s going to have to shoot a guy in the face. I met my murder quota over the summer and I am done.”

  “No, the murder’s been taken care of in advance this time,” Fritz said. “Everyone at the Paradise Mile Retirement Village died last night.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  AGENTS WITH THE OFFICE of Preternatural Affairs are not technically supposed to have guns on the job. We have a separate branch specifically for violent confrontations called the Union of Kopides and Aspides—the Union for short.

  If something needs to be shot, the Union rolls in with unmarked SUVs, combat gear, and unregistered weapons, and they pulverize it for us. That’s their job. They get to use their elite training and the OPA witches get to remain largely paper pushers.

  It’s a nice idea, but that’s about all it is.

  Most of us in the Magical Violations Department have guns anyway. You’d be crazy to go after a coven without one. Sure, we’ve all got ways of dispelling offensive charms—even I can deflect most fatal curses—but witches don’t always attack with magic. Preparing rituals takes time. It’s too unwieldy.

  Why curse someone when you can just shoot them?

  So most of us have guns, and the OPA has a procedure for what happens if we use them on company hours.

  They also have procedures for what happens when people die.

  Suzy had killed someone, so she’d been given a stack of paperwork taller than I am to justify the discharge of her sidearm as well as the resulting death. I’d been planning to help her work through it that day. She’d earned that paperwork saving my life, after all.

  Unfortunately, now that everyone at Paradise Mile was dead, I had slightly more urgent work to do.

  “Looks bad, Cèsar,” Fritz said. He leaned his elbows on the open door of his Bugatti Veyron and studied the retirement village over the frames of his Bentley Platinum sunglasses.

  “You're telling me,” I said.

  The creaky old house was now swarming with investigators. In fact, the whole valley was filled with SUVs, vans, and assorted OPA personnel. We don’t typically have the budget to assign so many resources to a single case, but there had been a dozen people living their last miserable years at Paradise Mile, and processing that many bodies was going to take time.

  I was pretty sure that Fritz wasn’t referring to our staff when he said it looked bad, though.

  He probably meant the blood splattered on the inside of the second-floor windows.

  “I can release you to catch up on paperwork at the office.” Fritz said it casually, like he was trying to decide what to do with a pesky employee, but he was actually trying to do me a big favor.

  I’d only ever agreed to work for Fritz under the condition that I didn’t have to deal with dead bodies. Obviously, that had changed in a big way. I’d done more homicides than most cops now.

  But I wasn’t getting better at it. I’d nearly thrown up on a body during one of my last cases.

  It had been months and I was still hearing about it from my coworkers. In fact, I’d probably hear about it for the remainder of my tenure with the OPA. That kind of reputation doesn’t just vanish on its own, not when you work with the kind of assholes that I do.

  Fritz was offering me the easy way out.

  Nobody would even need to know why I’d gone back to the office. No sane person would choose to help Suzy wade through paperwork—bailing out wouldn’t make my reputation any worse.

  “I'll stay here. I’d like to walk through the scene.” It was even half-true. I needed to walk through the scene. Needed to see what had happened, where we had gone wrong.

  I wouldn’t like it, but I had to do it.

  Besides, I had to get used to all the blood someday.

  Fritz pushed his sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose. “Then let’s walk through the scene.”

  We had to put on plastic shoe covers before entering the front door. Never a good sign.

  The foyer wasn’t bloody, so it was being used as a meeting room. A few members of each team were comparing notes, swapping clipboards, showing each other photographs on their DSLR screens. Janet from the forensics department was there—unfortunately—but she only glanced at us before going back to her clipboard.

  Also a bad sign.

  Janet didn’t like Fritz and me, and she never missed an opportunity to remind us of that.

  If she was ignoring us, then it was a really bad sign.

  Fritz conferred briefly with another agent before heading toward the kitchen, like he knew where we were going.

  That’s where we started to need the plastic booties.

  Herbert had died in the kitchen. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find him crushed under all those cast-iron skillets, but the reality of what had happened was much more disturbing.

  He’d been slit open from wrist to inner arm on both sides. His jugular had also been severed. And I was pretty sure someone had gone out of their way to spray the blood from the artery around the room. It was splashed on the windows, the counters, the floors.

  “Damn,” I said.

  Fritz jerked the legs of his slacks up as he crouched to take a closer look at the body. He was still wearing the sunglasses, which did a pretty good job
of hiding his emotions. I could tell he wasn’t disturbed, though. His calm was a weight at the back of my mind. A hand pressing down on the nape of my neck.

  My boss and kopis had been through some crazy shit in his life. He didn’t talk about it much, but the fact that demons knew him by name and he fought like a tornado said enough about his history. That history also meant that Fritz had no problem getting all up in Herbert’s cadaverous business, blood puddles and all.

  “Sharp weapon,” Fritz remarked. “It’s very clean. What was it?”

  “We haven’t recovered anything, but it looks like it was probably some kind of knife.” Janet had entered the kitchen. Her blue latex-free gloves were eerily clean.

  “You sure about that?” I asked. “You thought that the fallen angel was murdering people with knives too, and those turned out to be claws.”

  “We’ve refined our criteria for determining weapons. It’s definitely a knife. Probably a butcher’s knife, the blade about six inches long, recently sharpened by a professional.”

  Well, I could see that. We were in a kitchen after all.

  I checked the knives mounted on the magnetic strip. None of them seemed to be missing.

  “Give me the timeline,” Fritz said, straightening. “Was this murder first?”

  “There’s no timeline,” Janet said.

  I frowned. “You can’t tell what order these victims were killed in?”

  “No, there just doesn’t seem to be an order at all. Follow me.”

  We took off our booties before leaving the kitchen, then followed Janet up the stairs in the dining room, past the chairlift, to the bedrooms on the second floor.

  A ladder bisected the hallway, forcing us to step around it to reach the bedrooms. It hung from the center of the ceiling, right next to a wall sconce shaped like an art deco seashell.

  An OPA agent in a suit stood at the top of the ladder, scrutinizing the rungs; another agent held the bottom steady. I felt like there was a joke waiting to be made about how many OPA agents it took to change a light bulb, but it probably would have been too depressing to be funny.

  “What’s up with the ladder?” I asked Fritz from the corner of my mouth.