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

by SM Reine

  “Actually, we don’t.” I kept my tone level, same way I talked to any crazy person, living or dead. “Want to enlighten us? Tell us what you did in the basement and how to fix it?”

  He gave a wet sob. Black fluid trickled afresh from the hole in his forehead. “I had to do it. He said he could break me from the contract, but he didn’t want me—he wanted her. She’s the only one he took for himself. He didn’t care about me at all.” Nichols took a step toward Isobel, but he stopped when I pushed her behind me. “Ander smelled you on this guy. You were screwed the instant someone called in to report ghosts.”

  It sounded like he was getting personal with Isobel, like he already knew her. “What’s he talking about, Isobel?” I asked. “Who’s Ander?”

  Before she could respond, Nichols said, “Isobel? Is that your name now?” He looked so confused.

  She screamed and hurled herself at him, brandishing the antenna from the car.

  “Jesus, Izzy, stop!”

  She didn’t listen to me. She slipped out of my reach before I could seize her arm.

  The antenna came whistling down, and she smashed it into the man’s shoulder. It made a pretty solid noise connecting with his pale form. Like, clavicle-breakingly solid.

  I wasn’t exactly an expert, but I was willing to bet that ghosts wouldn’t have had clavicles to break if they existed.

  Nichols dropped to his knees. Isobel whipped the antenna across his face, snapping his head to the side.

  “No hope! No!” he cried.

  He seized her wrists. Dragged her down with him.

  They scuffled in the grass, Isobel raining blows on his face, Nichols tearing at her hair.

  I tried to rip her off of him and earned a kick in the shin. Couldn’t tell whose foot that had been. I didn’t back off. Dead or not, Nichols was a lot bigger than Isobel—he could hurt her.

  She managed to roll on top of him, pinning him down as he beat at her shoulders with his fists. She panted as she wrenched one of the feathers out of her hair. The tip glinted with metal like a quill, though it had a needle instead of a nib.

  That didn’t look like an ordinary hair decoration.

  Nichols tossed her off of him. The sound Isobel made when she hit the ground got every one of my protective instincts raging.

  It wasn’t in me to stand back while a woman got her ass kicked, even if she seemed up for the fight.

  I put the orderly in a headlock. He felt real enough. Solid and bony. His skin was slippery, like a fish without scales. “You’ve got to talk now,” I said to the struggling man in my arms. “How do we get out of here?”

  If he planned on answering me, I’d never know.

  Isobel got to her feet. Her cheek was a brilliant shade of red where Nichols had landed a blow. She lifted the needle-tipped feather and snapped her arm forward with all the speed of a striking snake.

  The point buried into Nichols’s chest with a thunk.

  And he died instantly.

  His glassy eyes rolled into the back of his head. He went limp. The sudden weight made me sag, and I dropped him to the grass.

  Nichols didn’t move when I checked for a pulse. There was nothing there. To be honest, I didn’t know if there ever had been. But he was definitely a lot deader now than he had been a few minutes earlier, and he was the only person who might have known what had happened in the basement of the house.

  I rounded on Isobel. “What the hell was that for? I had him under control!”

  “He attacked us,” she said, breathless. “I had to do something.”

  “You mean, stake him like a vampire?”

  “Don’t be silly. Vampires don’t exist.” She was regaining her composure now that he was gone. She straightened her dress, gently probed her facial wounds with her fingertips, slowed her breathing. But there was still fear in her eyes. “He was already practically dead. I just…shuffled him off the mortal coil.”

  “And how did you do that, exactly?”

  “I’m a death witch,” Isobel said, moving to return the feather to her hair. “The other priestesses who worshipped the Hand of Death taught me a few things.”

  I caught her wrist. Pulled her hand away so I could see the feather. It glinted with magic, but not any kind of magic I’d seen before. “This banishes ghosts?” I couldn’t keep the skepticism out of my voice.

  She gave me a flat look. “What do you think you just saw? Do you have a better explanation?”

  All right. That line of conversation wasn’t going anywhere.

  “It sounded like he knew you,” I said.

  “I’ve never seen him before in this life.” Isobel returned the feather to her hair. “We still need to find a way out of here, Cèsar.”

  She whirled and stalked toward the rear of the canyon again.

  I gaped after her for a long moment.

  Isobel knew what was happening here—or, at least, she knew more than I did. That wasn’t hard. I didn’t know anything aside from the fact that I was seriously regretting my return to Paradise Mile.

  But she wasn’t talking to me. I was pretty sure she was outright lying, actually.

  Who was Nichols? How had he known Isobel? Why had she wanted him dead so badly when he might have been able to save us?

  And why the fuck wasn’t she telling me anything?

  She disappeared into the fog. I had no choice but to rush to catch up.

  “Don’t walk away from me like that,” I said. “It’s dangerous. You hear me? You need to stick close.”

  Isobel didn’t respond or even look at me. Her cheeks were damp, but she tried to scrub her tears away when she caught me watching her. My annoyance melted away at the sight of it.

  Fuck, but I was weak for a crying woman.

  We didn’t have far to walk before reaching the back wall of the canyon. It seemed to loom out of nowhere. Everything was overwhelmed by empty gray mist one second, and then we butted up against creeper-covered stone the next.

  There was no back road out of the canyon.

  Isobel made a little choking noise at my side. Her momentary bravado had vanished again.

  “Don’t worry. I can climb this.” I dropped my jacket.

  Her voice went shrill. “What? And leave me behind?”

  “You can climb, too.”

  “I have the upper body strength of a hamster.” Isobel swung the antenna as if to illustrate. It whistled through the air and stirred the fog in gray curlicues.

  Her upper body strength had seemed good enough when she’d been wrestling with Nichols.

  “Climbing’s mostly in the legs. You’ll be fine.”

  But when I grabbed a bare patch of stone, creepers slithered over my hands. They felt like worms, soggy and muscular, twining around my fingers and clutching my wrists.

  I jerked back with a shout. The vines ripped free of the canyon wall and stuck to my sleeves.

  I’m not too much of a man to admit that I slapped them off like some fifties housewife freaking out over a mouse. I’d been coping with the creepy canyon pretty well, but I drew the line at worm-vines.

  They writhed on the ground where they landed. The ragged stumps oozed black.

  It looked like the creepers were bleeding.

  “We climb out of the canyon,” Isobel said faintly. “Okay.”

  I rubbed at my arms until my fingers burned. It still felt like those goddamn things were trying to sneak up my sleeves. “If you’ve got any better ideas, I’d love to hear them.”

  I turned to face Isobel and found that we weren’t at the rear of the house anymore.

  The Paradise Mile sign was right next to my knee again, just begging for me to trip over it. And the distance between the sign and the house had compressed, shrinking the lawn so that we were only a few feet from the front stoop.

  The front door was hanging open, waiting for us. Inviting us into the house where so many murders had just occurred.

  “No,” Isobel said, horror dawning in her eyes. “No, we can�
��t go in there. We can’t do this.”

  It didn’t seem like we had a lot of alternatives. “Whatever’s causing this wants us to confront it. We’re not dead for a reason.”

  “No, Cèsar, please. Don’t make me enter that house.”

  “If you know something about this that you’re not telling me…” I wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence. It wasn’t like I was going to threaten Isobel. “There’s something going on with you and this house. I need to know what.”

  She just shook her head. It didn’t seem like a refusal to speak so much as denial, trying to reject the reality of the situation. And who could blame her? Reality had become awfully fucking unreal.

  But we couldn’t leave through the road. We couldn’t climb out of the canyon, either.

  The only place we could go was into the house.

  She was crying again. My guts went all liquid at the sight. “I’m not going to let anything hurt you,” I said.

  “You can’t promise that.”

  “I can, and I am.” I meant it. I’d do anything to protect Isobel. I’d brought her to that canyon, and I was going to bring her home, too—even if she was lying to me.

  She shuddered, but she nodded.

  We entered the house together.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE FIRST THING I heard when we stepped into the foyer was a little girl giggling.

  Because, you know, the whole canyon wasn’t creepy enough yet.

  “Screw it. I’m out.” Isobel tried to leave, but I caught her arm.

  “And where do you think you’d go?”

  She sagged in my grip. “Cèsar,” she whispered, like a plea. But she didn’t keep fighting me. Good thing too, because I didn’t need to deal with the house and her secretive bullshit at the same time.

  I kept a hold of her as I scanned the quiet foyer, trying to come up with a game plan.

  First things first: I needed a weapon that would allow me to defend myself against attack, with or without Isobel’s MacGyver jewelry. I didn’t see anything serviceable in the foyer, but I could hit up the kitchen.

  And then second things second: I needed to find whatever fucker was controlling the crazy shit around Paradise Mile, take him out, and escape.

  After that, the OPA could raze the whole damn canyon.

  Easy.

  Except that creepers were slithering over the foyer’s towering windows. They weaved over the open doors the way that they had blocked the road outside. The only open path led back to the hallway.

  We were being guided by whoever was controlling the house.

  “What do we do, Cèsar?” Isobel asked.

  “The kitchen.” I had to clear my throat before I could continue speaking. “There are knives in there. Nice knives. I need some.”

  And then maybe a visit to the basement to pick up some even larger bladed implements. The kind of thing a gardener might use to hack away all of those creepers, or that someone creative might use in a zombie apocalypse. Pinking shears, giant saw, something like that.

  But as soon as I thought about visiting the basement, my nightmare about the servant’s hallway came rushing back to me.

  Someone wanted me to go into that basement. If it was the same creature that was controlling the retirement village—ghost orderly included—then I didn’t think they wanted me in the basement for tea and crumpets.

  So maybe I’d stick with the kitchen knives.

  Isobel followed close behind me as I crossed the foyer. She didn’t have a choice. I wasn’t about to release her so that we could play a game of tag again.

  The creepers were so thick now that they had blocked most of the windows, blotting out the fog beyond. The room grew darker. Shadows crept in from the corners, devouring the birdcages and fountain.

  Another giggle echoed through the foyer. It sounded like it was coming from the end of the hallway—the only way out of the room.

  The sound stopped me in my tracks.

  Herbert had mentioned an apparition that looked like a child. A child ghost. I could handle a child ghost. How bad could she be?

  “No such thing as ghosts,” I muttered.

  “It’s true,” Isobel said. “The dead move on to the next life immediately.”

  Normally, I would have been happy for the insight. But now it just rankled. She was happy to share the secrets of life and death with me, but not explain how she knew the orderly and why she had a weapon specially designed to kill him?

  “Just be quiet, Isobel,” I said. “We’ll talk later.”

  She looked hurt. I tried not to let it bother me.

  As soon as I set foot in the hallway beyond the foyer, I heard yet another giggle. It didn’t echo like the others had.

  We were getting closer.

  The wallpaper peeled around us as we walked, curling away from the walls, flaking into fragments of ash. The boards on the other side smoldered slightly. Curlicues of smoke licked the ceiling. The air was growing stuffy.

  Impossible to tell if that was a real fire or the illusion of a fire.

  Either one was its own kind of bad.

  The entrance to the dining room had been barricaded with furniture, just like the windows in the rec hall. The drawing room was shut, giving me no access to the basement entrance that it concealed.

  So much for hunting down some pinking shears.

  But the door to the kitchen was cracked. No sign of creepers or smoke from over there.

  “The kitchen might be pretty bad,” I warned Isobel in a low voice, trying not to breathe too much of the smoke. “That’s where the first body was found after the mass murder. I don’t know what this decay will do with a murder scene, but…well, it could be bad.”

  She gave me an “are you crazy?” look. “The whole house is bad.”

  The kitchen couldn’t be worse than a smoldering hallway. I elbowed the door open and stepped inside.

  Actually, it wasn’t bad at all. The room had been cleaned since my last visit to the crime scene, so it was just as shiny and pristine as it had been on Herbert’s tour.

  The dishes had even been put away. Pops would have approved.

  I headed to the range. The magnetic strip on the wall was still covered in knives, and I almost collapsed from relief when I saw them. “Weapons. Awesome.” I reached out to grab the biggest.

  My fingers went through the handle and brushed the wall beyond.

  I tried to grab it again, and my fingers still passed through it as easily as smoke. Same with the other blades alongside it. I even tried to grab one of the tiny paring knives and a pizza cutter with a dull circular blade—anything would have been helpful.

  I couldn’t. They were as illusory as the smoke in the hallway.

  Isobel was investigating the rest of the kitchen, so she hadn’t noticed my ungainly struggle to pull a nonexistent knife off of the wall. There was some nice woodwork there, particularly considering that the rest of the house was so old, worn down, and seemingly haunted.

  Keeping my tone level, I said, “Let’s look through the drawers, huh? If you don’t find any cooking knives that look mean enough, then maybe a cast-iron skillet. I can work with a bludgeon.”

  “A bludgeon,” Isobel said. “Okay.” She tried to open one of the drawers, but it wouldn’t budge under her grip. Neither would the drawer beside it, or the drawer beside that one. “That’s weird. Are there child locks on these?”

  “Maybe,” I said, mostly because I hoped it was something that mundane. I tried to pick up the teapot on the stove. My fingers passed through that, too. “Weird,” I muttered, echoing Isobel’s earlier comment. “Real weird.”

  “Plan B?” she asked.

  “Hmm. Well, we could always curl up into a ball and shiver until someone kills us.” I leaned a hand on the counter. My palm slipped against granite. Jerking my hand away, I expected to find a puddle of water or oil spilled underneath—and instead found my palm stained with blood.

  So much blood.

  It s
meared all the way across the counter and dripped into the sink in a slow, steady trickle. I was pretty sure that it hadn’t been there a few seconds before. Now it was so profuse that it looked like I was standing in the worst butcher shop ever.

  Pools spread from underneath the baseboards, too. It looked like a pipe had burst, allowing the blood and sludge to flood the floor. It was even dripping from the place where ceiling met wall.

  There were no longer any knives on the metal strip on the wall, nor was there a metal strip. Just a few empty screw holes. There also was no teapot on the counter. The dishes were scattered across the floor, banged and broken, crushed in the same murderous struggle that had left the kitchen drenched in blood.

  Yep, the whole room was an illusion. I hadn’t been able to grab them because I hadn’t been seeing the truth.

  Now the illusion was gone and I kind of regretted it.

  “Oh my God,” Isobel whispered.

  I followed her gaze to see a little girl sitting at the counter underneath the window.

  She was perched on a wobbly old stool, swinging her feet over the side. Her hair was a tangled black mass around her head. Her hands were bloody.

  The child was eating something. She looked like any thousands of children across America who ate PB&J sandwiches at the counter after a long day at school. Except that this snack squished every time she sank her teeth into it. Black fluid drizzled from the bites, pattering in dotted lines across the cutting board underneath her.

  Whatever she was chewing, it sounded wet and crunchy. Her fingers dug into juicy black meat, shredding off more pieces so she could slurp them down.

  It was the kid that I’d seen playing outside the funeral in the grass.

  If she was one of the apparitions—and considering that she wasn’t freaking out about being alone in a murder kitchen, I was betting she was an apparition—then Herbert had mentioned her name. This was Gertie. The little girl who Herbert had said had no manners.

  He hadn’t been joking about that.

  “Never heard of napkins before?” I asked.

  Her head snapped around so that she could focus on me. Her eyes didn’t have a pupil or iris. They were glazed white with the cataracts of death.