by SM Reine
The contract dissolved from my hands.
“I should have asked for terms that would have kept me from rotting during my decade of service to Ander,” Lynne said. Her eyes sparkled with grim humor.
I struggled to wrap my brain around what she was saying. “You gave up your soul to someone named Ander for ten years of good life. And now…this.” Haunting a retirement home with a rotting body, and Lord only knew what else. “Is it worth it?”
“I spent my additional decade of freedom with my family,” Lynne said. “I watched my youngest son graduate high school. My husband and I celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary in Bora Bora. We completed a triathlon the week I died.” She leaned in close, giving me a great view of the cracked skin flaking over her forehead. “It wasn’t worth it. I should have died rather than signing that contract.”
Every word she spat at me gusted the fresh stink of spoiled eggs right in my face.
I was grateful when she stepped back.
“It’s always the same,” Lynne said. “These people weren’t ready to die, and they thought service to Ander would be a fine way to delay that fate. They didn't realize that there's no escape from Ander once a deal is made. Nobody ever escapes.” She shot a look of pure hatred at Isobel. “Except Hope.”
Hope. Nichols had used that word a few times. I thought he’d been saying he didn’t have hope anymore, but now I thought that I’d misunderstood.
I turned to Isobel. “Is that your real name? Hope?”
She didn’t respond, but I could see the truth in her eyes.
Hope. Huh.
“Isobel?” I asked again when she was silent.
“Speechless, you little brat?” Lynne asked. “Good.”
Isobel licked her lips. She lifted the needle-tipped feather, then lowered it.
She edged toward the trap door, and Lynne followed her.
“You broke the contract somehow, and you left us, and you didn’t take anyone with you.” Lynne lifted her trembling fists. “You could have spared me the last three years of this! I will never forgive you, Hope Jimenez, not if it’s the last—”
I interrupted her. “Jimenez?” Isobel flinched when I said it, as though I was hurling the name at her face. “You’re not even a fucking Native American, are you, ‘Isobel Stonecrow’?”
“I’m one-eighth Cherokee, okay?” Isobel scowled. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Don’t you think there’s some racist implications to pretending to be Native American when you’re actually Hispanic?”
“The last name ‘Jimenez’ is just as deceptive as ‘Stonecrow.’ I’m the same amount of Mexican as I am Cherokee.”
“Except that your name is actually Jimenez. Where the hell are you from?”
“My mother’s family is Iranian, by way of Manhattan. For the last fifty years.”
I snorted. “Ah, yes. Manhattan. Land of feathered headdresses, animal-skin loincloths, and drumming rituals to raise the dead.” I knew it was going to piss her off, but I couldn’t help rubbing it in. I’d known she was full of bullshit. The confirmation was too satisfying.
“It’s a branding thing. You’ve always known that,” Isobel said. But she still looked guilty.
“Excuse me,” Lynne said, a little louder than she needed to. “I was threatening Hope, in case you forgot.”
Oh, right.
I waved my hand, inviting her to go on. “Okay, finish what you were saying.”
Lynne opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She frowned. “Where did I leave off?”
I had to think about it for a second. I was feeling so smug about the supposed native princess that I’d completely lost track of the conversation. “Never forgiving her, last thing you do. And something about suffering. Go ahead, take it from there.”
She huffed. “No. The mood’s gone now.” Lynne flung her hands into the air. “You can’t even allow me to wreak my bitter revenge on you properly!”
“Maybe you should just skip the revenge entirely,” Isobel said, edging to stand beside me, presumably for protection from Lynne. She clutched at my arm. Lynne’s eyes brightened at the sight of it.
“Is this a new conquest, then?” Lynne asked. “You’ve already moved on to a new romantic interest. How sweet. I imagine you wouldn’t like it if he knew the terms of your contract.”
“Don’t,” Isobel said.
I was torn. Hell yeah, I wanted to know the terms of Isobel’s contract. But she looked so afraid. It pierced right through my curiosity and smashed into the heart of my urge to protect her.
“I don’t care,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Lynne’s obvious delight increased. “It doesn’t matter that Hope Jimenez is a murderer?”
A murderer? Isobel?
That wasn’t the woman I knew. The one who bent over backwards to help us solve cases and save lives.
Of course, just because that wasn’t the Isobel Stonecrow I knew didn’t mean that wasn’t Hope Jimenez.
“Is it true?” I asked Isobel. She didn’t respond, so I asked Lynne instead. “Really? She killed someone?” The apparition didn’t respond either. “Come on, ladies. I deserve some answers here.”
Lynne leaned in close, eyes glimmering with glee. “Check the garden.”
Isobel ripped the anointed knife from my hand.
With a cry, she buried the blade straight into Lynne’s heart.
Magic gushed from the knife, clutching my throat in an invisible fist that made it impossible to breathe. I gasped for air that tasted like blood. Wasn’t sure if it was my blood, or Lynne’s, or something about the house.
“He's in the garden!” Lynne gasped, both hands clenched on Isobel’s wrist, trying to pry the knife out of her breastbone even as she sank to her knees. Smoke poured from her mouth and nose.
I tried to pry Isobel off of Lynne, but the necrocognitive was strong when she was mad—and boy, was she mad. Isobel was screaming as she jerked the knife free and stabbed it in again and again, each time with another explosion of magic.
Each one sucked the breath from my lungs.
Had to get away from it.
The garden. Answers are in the garden.
I was too weak to fight against Isobel like this, suffocated by magic.
Get away…
My feet carried me back to the ladder, abandoning the enchanted knife to Isobel.
I was already three rungs down when she realized I was leaving.
Isobel whirled on me. “Cèsar, don’t! Listen to me!”
I was done listening to her. Done listening to her excuses, her lies, her denial.
Everything seemed to compress around me as I dropped out of the attic and landed on the second floor. The hallways had seemed endless as we’d ascended in the house, but now the distances were short, easily bridged in moments. I reached the dining room in two strides.
Breath returned to me slowly, painfully, as I staggered through the hallway and put distance between the knife and myself.
Isobel kept calling me, but she already sounded like she was miles away. As though we were on opposite ends of the Earth instead of different parts of a haunted house.
The foyer blurred past me. The front door was open and waiting. I jumped outside to the grass.
I thought I heard Gertie’s distant giggle but didn’t pay any attention to it.
“Cèsar!” Isobel was catching up.
My feet slipped as I ran across the dewy grass, but I still managed to keep ahead of her as I rounded the house. I had to find the garden. Isobel didn’t want me there, so that was exactly where I needed to be.
The wrought-iron fence appeared from the misty darkness. I tore the gate open and launched myself inside.
Just as I’d suspected, the garden wasn’t a garden at all. It was a cemetery. The place where they had been planning on burying the bodies of Paradise Mile’s residents. Sagging willows overlooked low tombstones, all of which were tightly encased in creepers.
Yank
ing the vines off of the nearest grave marker, I found a name I knew: Russell Nichols. The orderly.
The next grave had one of the victims’ names. Charlton Savard. I remembered it from all the paperwork I’d been doing. Same with the next two graves: Platt Forsyth. Allison Kendrick.
One grave was different from the rest. It was a life-size figure of a woman standing on a dais. She had angel wings and a sad face. More vines concealed the name on the bottom of the statue, but they did nothing to hide that incredibly sad expression—or the fact that the statue looked to have been modeled off of someone I knew well.
The sad angel looked just like Isobel.
I ripped the vines off of the placard and tossed them aside. Piece by piece, the words carved into the slate appeared. Hope Jimenez. Born in July of 1975, died in March of 2004. Not quite twenty-eight years old.
My hands stilled before I could shred the rest of the creepers. There was more to the inscription, but I was stuck on that name and those dates. It was 2008—four years after Hope Jimenez was supposed to have died. Either Isobel and Hope weren’t really the same person, or she was far past her expiration date.
“What the…?”
The garden gate creaked. I turned to look at Isobel, or Hope, or whatever the hell her name was.
Light blazed in my face. I flung up a hand, shielding my eyes from the brilliance and the sudden heat. The change was so drastic that I was momentarily convinced that a nuclear bomb had detonated inches away from me.
My eyes adjusted slowly.
The graveyard was gone, along with the grass, the fog, and the fence. The tombstones I had exposed had vanished.
The whole canyon was gone, actually.
I lowered my hand and squinted through the sunlight to see sagebrush spread over a slope in front of me. There was a smooth white pillar to my left—a giant wind turbine. The shadow of its slow-spinning blades flashed darkness and light over the desert in turn.
I was standing on the side of a hill in the desert overlooking Mojave. I thought I could even see the gas station where I’d refilled my crappy old car’s gas tank before heading to the memorial.
Isobel was there, too. Still wearing her little black mourning dress. Definitely alive. She almost looked as sad as the statue of the angel, though.
She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking past me.
“Ander,” Isobel said.
I whipped around to find him standing right behind us where the graveyard used to be.
All things considered, Ander didn’t look all that threatening. He looked like a man forty years and forty pounds past his prime. He was short, broad-shouldered, wrinkled. The only indication that he wasn’t actually the one retiree who’d survived Shady Acres was that his eyes looked like a cat’s. They were yellow with slitted irises.
When he spoke, he flashed sharp teeth. “Hope Jimenez. I was starting to think you’d slipped permanently from my employ.”
Her throat worked as she swallowed. “I did. I should have.”
“If you wanted to avoid being found again, you should have avoided the exact people likely to cross my path, too. I smelled you on him the instant he crossed my threshold.” The demon was referring to me.
Guilt clawed up my spine. He’d found Isobel…because of me.
I was a little impressed, though. I hadn’t even seen her in weeks. He must have had a great sense of smell.
“You were my favorite, Hope,” Ander said. “You were everything that I ever hoped to get from a contract. I would have extended the term to keep you working for me until the day I die.” His eyes sparked. “And then you defied me. Didn’t I treat you well? Didn’t I give you the easy assignments, the most comfortable lodging, the most lenient curfews?”
“It didn’t change what I had to do for you.” Her voice was tiny, barely more than a rasp.
“Must I remind you that you came to me, and that you’re the one who requested employment?”
She clamped her mouth shut, shook her head.
This conversation felt too private for me to be privy to it. Sort of like listening to a father chastising his wayward daughter. It was actually a lot like any of a thousand lectures I’d heard Pops give my sister, Ofelia.
“And then I find you here. The worst of all places to be.” He shook his head and sighed. “Hope, Hope, Hope. What am I going to do with you?” She didn’t respond. “I think it’s past time that you fulfill your obligations.”
I stepped in front of Isobel to provide what little protection I could, acutely aware of the butcher’s knife in her hand and how easy it would be to bury it in my back. Isobel had never tried to kill me before, but it seemed there were a lot of things I didn’t know about her. Like the fact she’d murdered someone else.
“If you’re going to kill me, Ander, then just do it,” Isobel said.
He sighed. “Relax, both of you. I don’t want you dead. What would ever give you that impression?”
“The house of horrors?” I suggested.
“The house isn’t my horror. It only seems that my Gertie got a little carried away in the hubbub with Nichols.” Ander flapped a dismissive hand, as if to say, What can you do about kids? “I’ll have a talk with her later.”
“Then what were you doing there?” Isobel asked.
“Hiding. It’s not easy to retire peacefully when you’re like me.”
“You took on twelve new contracts,” she said. “Some retirement.”
Ander’s smile was just as patronizing as his tone. “Everyone needs hobbies. But they’ve been taken from me now, too. Gertie got really carried away. I have plenty of time to focus on your return to the fold, Hope.”
“The fold” being a traveling freakshow of semi-dead people and demons.
Yeah, I wasn’t sure that was better than dying.
I reached back and took the knife from Isobel. I was surprised at how easily she yielded it to my searching fingers. “If you want her, you’ll have to go through me,” I said.
I’d never been in a real knife fight in my life. I wasn’t Fritz Friederling, billionaire ninja. But I’d been training with the billionaire ninja, I’d learned a few moves, and Ander looked pretty frail for a demon.
My odds didn’t seem too bad.
Ander’s smile broadened. I wondered if he’d filed his teeth to make them pointy or if he’d been blessed at birth.
“Hope always had a way with the gentlemen. You’re very charming, young man. I also have no interest in you.” He wafted the air toward his nose, like he was trying to smell warm cookies baking in the oven. “You don’t have the desperation I seek in my contracts. There’s nothing I can offer you. We have no reason to fight.”
“If you’re out to get Isobel, then we’ve got plenty of reasons.”
He ignored me and focused on Isobel. “I don’t hold your contract anymore, my dear, so there’s nothing I can do for you at the moment. I will offer you safety from Gertie, though. She’s been unruly this week. I would hate for you to be caught in her tantrum. Hence the…change in scenery.” He waved his hand at the turbines.
“You’re so kind,” Isobel said faintly.
“I’ll see what I can do about Gertie, and then I’ll see about getting your contract back. We’ll make arrangements. See if we can’t finish out the service you owe me.”
She made a tiny whimpering sound behind me.
Ander took a step back. I realized too late that the demon was escaping. His form shivered around the edges, making him go blurry all over. My instincts said to let him go—that he was dangerous, that he’d kill me if I tried to stop him.
But the reality was that he was only leaving to search for a way to entrap Isobel.
If I didn’t get him now, Isobel might never be safe.
I leaped at him with the butcher’s knife. Dust kicked up around me as I skidded down the hill.
Ander wiggled his fingers in a gesture of goodbye.
He vanished before I ever reached him.
CHAPTER NI
NE
THE FIRST THING I did when we reached my apartment was cast warding spells. Lots of them.
Until recently, I’d been pretty bad at rituals requiring big circles, incantations, and complex ingredients. But while I’d been feeding Suzy a constant stream of sleeping potions, she’d been giving me lessons in being less of a shitty witch.
Spellcasting was as delicate as chemistry. It required incredibly precise conditions to produce a successful spell. But whatever it was that made me bad at spells in the first place meant that I couldn’t seem to cast by the book, the way that every other witch in the world did.
I had to operate on gut instinct, or else everything blew up in my face.
Suzy didn’t even let me look at Books of Shadows anymore. She would give me the general rules of the type of spell I was trying to cast and then hover nearby while I mucked around, screwed things up, and generally did my best to make my apartment explode.
She’d had to whip out a fire extinguisher to save my living room more times than I could count.
Did I mention that I’d always been really bad at chemistry?
But I was slowly figuring it out. I’d been doing wards most often, so I didn’t even make anything start smoking when I put five of them right on top of each other.
The first layer blocked out noise. The second and third formed physical barriers—not easy to do. Those left me sweating. The fourth bound those first three together.
And the fifth was the one that wouldn’t allow any demons to pass.
I wasn’t so sure I did that one right, but as long as the other four were solid, we’d be fine. Probably.
When it was all done, I faced Isobel down. She hadn’t attempted to help me with the circles at any point. She was sitting on the edge of my bed, dusty from our time out in the desert.
At least she’d given the enchanted knife back to me.
“Hope Jimenez,” I said.
Isobel wouldn’t look at me. “Don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s your real name.”
“That’s the name that I had before. Isobel Stonecrow is the name I gave myself after I was liberated from Ander and everything that came before.”
