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

by SM Reine

  “I haven’t been home. I don’t know.” She flopped onto my couch. One of the precarious stacks of paperwork slid onto her lap, and Suzy shoved it onto the floor.

  “Seems weird. Group funeral at the place everyone was murdered.” I gave the potion another stir. It was almost done. “Maybe I’ll go.” I hadn’t even given the idea consideration before the words came out of my mouth, but as soon as I said it, I knew it was right.

  “I’ve heard some pretty bad ideas before, Cèsar, but that’s got to take the cake. It’s our fault those people are dead. Whatever reason they want us there, it’s going to suck all kinds of pickled eggs.” She ticked the options off on her fingers one at a time. “They might want something from you, like you said. If not money, then information.” Another tick. “Or they’ll want to cry all over you, which is awkward as hell.” Yet another finger. “Or it’s a trap.”

  I barked a laugh. “A trap at a retirement home?”

  “You never know. Could be that someone’s grandson has Mafia connections and wants to bash your skull in for letting Gramps die.”

  Seemed pretty doubtful, but Suzy painted a convincing picture.

  She was right—going to that funeral could only lead to bad shit.

  The families weren’t the only ones who wanted information, though.

  Something weird was going on outside Mojave. Really goddamn weird. And it hadn’t ended with all those deaths, either. The ritual space in the basement had vanished after the fact, so somebody was actively attempting to obfuscate the evidence.

  There were going to be a dozen corpses’ worth of information on display at that memorial, and I happened to know a death witch who could talk to them.

  I ladled most of the sleeping potion into a couple of Thermoses. Enough to keep Suzy going for another week.

  The rest of it landed in my favorite mug. The side featured an empty transporter from the original Star Trek series. Once it was filled with hot fluid, the away team beamed in as the graphic heated up. Coolest mug ever, and I was sharing it with Suzy. Lucky lady.

  She took the mug and cringed at the smell. “We have got to work on the palatability of your potions.”

  “What are you talking about? I only serve the finest gourmet vomit-sludge at Chez Hawke.” I sat on the lazy chair with my own mug. I was having tea, not sleeping juice.

  Suzy would spend the night on my couch while I monitored her reaction to the potion. Sleeping draughts were touchy things. If I didn’t occasionally check on the dose, she might drop into a sleep too deep to rouse from. We’d been having sleepovers once a month so that I could make sure I wasn’t going to accidentally kill my partner.

  So far, so good. She was still alive and snarking.

  She didn’t take a drink yet. “Don’t go to that memorial, Cèsar.”

  “I can go armed in case the grandson Mafioso makes an appearance.”

  “I’m serious,” Suzy said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about that place. Can’t tell you why, but it feels like serious trouble.”

  “Could that feeling have anything to do with the mass murder that happened there last night?”

  “Whatever. Don’t listen. I don’t care.” She took a sip of the potion. “The company Halloween party’s coming up on Friday. Are you going?”

  “Not a chance.” Normally, I had no problems socializing with my coworkers. We practically lived at the bar after work. But once you add in costumes, I’m out.

  I only needed to see Janet dressed as Trinity from The Matrix once to have nightmares for the rest of my life, sleeping potions or not.

  “I don’t want to go either. Let’s do something else that night.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  Suzy shrugged. “Get drunk. Watch movies with the lights off so that trick-or-treaters don’t try to bother us. Whatever you like to do when you’re having ‘wild parties.’”

  Watch movies? She was speaking my language. “I did just get a few new shows on DVD.”

  “Great,” Suzy said. “Let’s binge watch a TV show on the night of the Halloween party. We can steal the candy jar from work before we leave and eat all the peanut butter cups and miniature bags of M&Ms ourselves.”

  That sounded like a perfect way to spend the night.

  I glanced at the calendar on my wall. The Halloween party was a few days after the Paradise Mile memorial.

  Suddenly, I wanted to tell Suzy that I wasn’t going to be available that night. That I wasn’t going to be around for some reason. But that made no sense. I didn’t have any plans.

  Why did it feel like I was going to be gone?

  I shook off the strange feeling.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s plan on doing that.”

  I didn’t sleep well that night.

  I’d gotten to bed earlier than usual, so when I looked at my bedside clock to find the glowing numbers reading 11:59, I was confused. It felt like I’d been asleep for hours, maybe days, but the clock said I’d been out for less than an hour.

  My ceiling was shadowed with the pattern of my miniblinds. Black and then blue and then black again, in bars that cut across the white paint from wall to wall. The light reflected off of a windshield as a car passed. It tossed a glassy glow on my wall for three seconds before vanishing.

  It was so hot. The blankets were tight around me, tangled up like I’d been thrashing in fever dreams.

  Everything felt strange.

  It was because I hadn’t taken the sleeping potion that evening. I had to be able to wake up to check on Suzy. On any other night, I would have been deep underneath the warm tide of dreamless unconsciousness.

  The fact I’d woken up hot with my pulse racing just meant that I was struggling with the lingering after-effects of nightmare thrall again—no big deal. Normal job hazard.

  Get up, get the blood moving, and I’d be fine.

  Standing was hard. Felt like gravity had tripled. But I stood, jogging shorts and shirt dripping with sweat, and staggered toward the door.

  The doorknob turned under my hand. I pushed it open.

  On the other side, I found a hallway. Not my hallway. This one had a low roof, a door at the end, a trap door on the floor in between.

  Everything was made of old wood. The wallpaper on the upper half of the walls was peeling at the corners. The faded peacock feather pattern was strangely yellow.

  It was the servant’s hallway from Paradise Mile.

  There was light coming from the crack between the trap door and surrounding floorboards. Bright light. Like someone had picked up the whole house and set it on the surface of the sun so that the blaze of fire was leaking through the cracks.

  I turned to go back into my bedroom, but the door had shut behind me. It wouldn’t open.

  I was trapped in the hallway. No way to go but forward.

  “This isn’t right,” I said. “I’m dreaming.”

  The fact that I felt so confident about the nature of the dream was worse, somehow, than believing it was reality. That wasn’t how dreams worked. You’re not supposed to know that you’re in a dream until it’s over.

  But there I was, back in the hallway behind the drawing room at Paradise Mile Retirement Village, mired deep in an obvious nightmare. And I knew it was a nightmare.

  This definitely isn’t right.

  The floorboards creaked as I edged along the wall. I could feel the texture of the wallpaper under my hands, the trim at the top of the wainscoting, the uneven wood underneath my bare soles. I’d never had a dream that detailed before.

  Maybe it wasn’t a dream. Maybe the house in Paradise Mile had followed me back to Los Angeles, trapping me inside its ancient walls again, forcing me to face all the victims.

  “That’s stupid,” I said out loud.

  It felt like I was speaking. My voice sounded clear. But this was an impossible hallway, and it had to be a nightmare. There was no rational alternative.

  The light from the trap door seared my eyes as I inched past it. Heat br
eathed from the crack, warming my legs.

  What was on the other side?

  I didn’t think I wanted to know.

  My shoulder bumped into the door leading into the servant’s quarters. I grabbed the doorknob.

  It was unlocked.

  Herbert had told me not to bother the guy who lived in there. The apparition he called “the bad man.” But there was nowhere else in that hallway to go—definitely not the trap door with fire burning on the other side, and not the locked door that I was pretty sure wouldn’t lead back to my bedroom.

  I opened the servant’s quarters.

  My living room waited on the other side.

  I stepped through, leaving hardwood floors for ugly brown apartment carpeting.

  It was as quiet as it ever got in my apartment. I could hear the dillweed upstairs lifting weights, the lesbian couple next door arguing, cars passing outside. Normal noises.

  My kitchen was still in disarray from all the potions I’d been brewing. I’d been so eager to sleep that I hadn’t bothered cleaning up. Would have given Pops an aneurysm if he’d seen how I was living, but that was one of the best parts about being an adult—not worrying about the expectations of one’s former custodial grandfather.

  Suzy was on my couch where I’d left her. It had to be eighty degrees in my stuffy apartment, but she was still burrowed under sheets from the tip of her nose all the way down to her toes. She was sleeping peacefully with the help of my magic. Turns out that Suzy snores kind of like a tractor with a bad engine.

  When I glanced over my shoulder, the only thing through the doorway was my bedroom.

  No hallway. No trap door.

  “Well,” I said, because I wasn’t sure what else to say about that.

  How’s a guy supposed to deal with a hallway that doesn’t exist between his bedroom and his living room, anyway?

  A shuffling sound drew my attention to my front door. Sounded like a body bumping against the other side, then sliding away.

  Someone was outside my apartment.

  It was probably one of my junkie neighbors. Nothing new, nothing to worry about. If Suzy hadn’t been resting on my couch, I wouldn’t have even given it a second thought before crawling right back into bed.

  But she was on my couch, trapped in the oblivion of my potion, and she was trusting me to take care of her.

  So I looked.

  I went up to the door, bent down to the peephole, and looked.

  The other side was red. Bright red, like the floor and wall and ceiling were all painted a uniform shade of incandescent cherry.

  I’d seen that shade of red before when I looked through the keyhole of the servant’s quarters at Paradise Mile. “What the fuck?” I whispered.

  And then the red blinked out, turning to black.

  My eyes flew open.

  I jerked upright in bed, heart slamming against my breastbone. I was drenched in sweat again. Tangled up in my sheets like I hadn’t ever gotten out of bed in the first place.

  I tried to get out of bed so fast that I tripped on my own sheets. I slammed into the floor on all fours. Kicked the tentacles of my blankets away, stripped them off my waist, struggled to the door.

  Flinging it open, I found my living room on the other side.

  No hallway. No weird light. Just my dingy apartment with its IKEA furniture and Suzy sleeping like the little angel she wasn’t.

  I raked a hand through my hair, leaving it standing up in sweaty spikes.

  It really had been a nightmare. Just a nightmare. Everything was fine.

  I’d escaped Paradise Mile. I was safe.

  And my bedside clock still read 11:59.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ON FRIDAY, I WENT to work like normal, answered a lot of emails, and told Fritz that I was going to spend my weekend finishing up the paperwork from the Paradise Mile case. Don’t call me, I’ll be busy. That kind of thing.

  On Sunday, I went back to Mojave.

  The official word was that the Paradise Mile was closed. I hadn’t been assigned a new investigation yet, but Fritz said he’d probably have something for me on Monday.

  Whatever the OPA thought, whatever we were telling the families of the victims, the case wasn’t closed for me. And I only partially thought that because I couldn’t stop dreaming of that goddamn hallway.

  “Shouldn’t we have brought more stuff with us?” asked Isobel Stonecrow, the woman sitting in the passenger seat of my car.

  I turned onto the dirt road leading into the Paradise Mile canyon. “More what?”

  “More…” She gestured vaguely at nothing. “Just more. More weapons. More staff. More body armor or something. If you think a demon’s responsible for these deaths…”

  “It’s just a funeral.” I massaged my dry, tired eyes with my fingertips. “We’re not getting attacked today.”

  My car bounced through a pothole and Isobel winced. “If you’re certain.” Her teeth clacked against each other audibly as the dirt grew rougher.

  I hadn’t had an excuse to borrow one of the SUVs from the OPA’s motor pool, so we’d been enjoying a bumpy, janky ride all the way out to the desert. Isobel was tolerating it well. She hadn’t complained once.

  Optimistically, I thought that driving my old sedan was kind of like having a massage chair working on my sore muscles.

  Less optimistically, I regretted not taking next model year’s Corvette from Fritz’s house. He’d been nagging me to take one of his cars for weeks, claiming that my sedan was a death trap and that I should be driving something safer. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to take him up on the offer. Call it pride or whatever. I was starting to think Fritz was right.

  Nothing charms a woman less than taking her for a ride in a car held together with duct tape and wishes.

  “Are you okay?” Isobel asked, surprising me. I was the one shaking her apart in my car. I’d been thinking of asking her the same question.

  “Why’s that?”

  “You don’t look good.”

  Suzy had said something similar when I’d seen her on Friday afternoon. Actually, she’d said, “You look like the shit I stepped in outside my townhouse this morning,” and then brandished her dirty shoe at me, but that was Suzy for you.

  “Just having a hard time sleeping.” I rubbed my eyes again. They were so dry. My hands felt heavy, too.

  Isobel made a sympathetic sound. Wonder if she would have been as sympathetic if I’d told her the whole truth: that I kept dreaming circles around the house in Paradise Mile, walking through that same hallway for nights on end, glimpsing red nothingness outside my front door’s peephole.

  Suzy’s assessment was closer to accurate than Isobel’s. I looked and felt like shit, and I was probably insane for going back to that house.

  We reached the mouth of the canyon to find news vans waiting for us. No more black SUVs, no sign of OPA control at all. Just news vans with satellites mounted on their roofs and a lot of reporters trying not to squint from the intensity of the lights beating down on them.

  If the media was there, then the OPA hadn’t just closed the case. We’d decided that we had nothing to do with it. Otherwise, we never would have let the press get within miles of the canyon.

  Isobel looked as alarmed by their presence as I felt. We’d have to drive right through them in order to get onto the property.

  “We have to turn around,” she said.

  I might have agreed if we hadn’t already been close enough that the cameras could catch us. Running away would draw a lot more attention. “Just keep your head down.”

  Isobel was already pulling a jacket over her head, concealing her face from the cameras as I slid toward the barricades.

  The media had left just enough space for me to creep through their vans. I eyeballed the nearest vultures as I passed them. There was a guy in a trench coat and fedora holding a microphone the size of my face. A freaking dinosaur who thought he was doing journalism back in the forties or something.
r />   Another reporter tracked us with a camera, turning to keep us in his sights.

  Checking to make sure Isobel’s face was still buried, I gave the reporters my statement for the press in the form of an upthrust middle finger.

  They didn’t look bothered. Too bad.

  Sawhorses had been erected to keep the press a safe distance from the house. I presented my crumpled invitation to a woman standing beside a gap in the barrier. She was kind of a pretty lady, maybe in her forties, waifish, with red hair down her back.

  She read the name on the invitation and smiled.

  Whoa. Those were some nasty teeth she had going on there. They were crooked, pocked with cavities. Flashing them made her a lot less pretty.

  “Parking is to the right of the house.” She stepped aside.

  When I saw the other cars waiting for the memorial, I felt another twinge of annoyance at myself for refusing to borrow the Corvette. There was a sports car that could have easily been in Fritz’s garage. There were also minivans, a semi without a trailer, a couple of sedans. Even an old car with wooden paneling that looked like it should have been driven by gangsters—like, uzi-in-a-violin-case gangsters.

  I parked next to a banged up old truck that made my beater look awesome, then got out to look around.

  The grieving families had done a good job cleaning up the retirement village. Standing outside the house, I couldn’t tell that anything bad had happened there. The windows were bloodless and opened to the morning air. Definitely an improvement.

  Isobel finally lowered the jacket from her face, so I opened the passenger door for her. She took my hand and stepped out.

  Until that day, I would have said that I liked seeing Isobel in her work “uniform” the best. She pretended that she was a native princess in order to make her powers seem more mysterious. Apparently, her clients were impressed by it. I was only impressed by the fact that she was bold enough to go to work wearing nothing but an animal-skin loincloth and a headdress.

  And I really do mean nothing.

  Not that she had anything to hide. Baring those shapely thighs, breasts, and everything in between was a goddamn public service.