by SM Reine
“She said she was a refugee in need of somewhere to stay. I believed her. She’d been on the streets for weeks and you could tell by the smell.” Dayna’s wry smile was brief. “She didn’t have that ugly turquoise thing yet.”
Apparently Isobel’s hideously retro RV had a reputation, even in Helltown.
“A refugee,” I said.
“She wasn’t specific about who she was running from. That makes her a dangerous refugee. But, as I said, she’s an incredible necrocognitive. It was worth sheltering her to keep that skill close at hand. Vedae som matis wanted her around.” That was the name for the demon known as the Hand of Death in the infernal tongue.
“Can you tell me about what Isobel said when she arrived?”
“Certainly. She told me that she was a practicing lawyer who had a relationship with a client go awry. It seems that he was more dangerous than she realized, and she was forced to take action to save herself. One thing led to another, she ended up in a contract with Ander…”
Isobel, a lawyer? Damn.
I must have looked shocked because Dayna gave me a sideways look. “Are you familiar with Ander?”
“Yeah, unfortunately.”
“He does have quite the reputation. Crime lords are practically gods in Helltown.” She sniffed disdainfully. “He used to run some kind of technology research company back east, but it was only a shell for thuggery.”
Shell corporations for engaging in thuggery? No surprise there.
Much more surprising were the other things that Isobel hadn’t mentioned—being a lawyer, her dangerous client, entering a contract to save herself from him.
Was she still withholding information from me, or had she lost those memories since arriving in California?
Forgetting that she used to be a lawyer would have to be a huge gap in memory. How could anyone forget years of law school? Internships? All those cases? It was slightly more time consuming than your average job.
And if she’d forgotten that, then what else might she have forgotten?
I let myself entertain the thought of Isobel as a lawyer as I took notes on what Dayna had said. Hope Jimenez, attorney at law. Showing up in court rooms in animal skins and painted in blood.
Pretty sure I was developing a new fetish.
“Does Ander deal in Helltown at all?” I asked.
“He’s done some trade,” Dayna said. “If you’re asking if he has an entrance to his parlor here, I don’t know and I don’t want to know. His contracts are too tempting and never worth the price.”
But if he did have a Helltown parlor, then I could get at him before he got at Isobel.
One more thing to investigate.
“Was that all Isobel ever told you, Dayna?”
“More or less. She was hurting and not very talkative in regards to her past.”
“Can’t imagine that,” I muttered.
“If you’re trying to help her, then why don’t you ask Belle about this?” Dayna didn’t sound all that suspicious. She didn’t actually care if I was on Isobel’s side or not.
The priestesses at the Temple of the Hand of Death had never given me trouble before, but I had a feeling that I didn’t want to get on their bad sides. They seemed almost universally without scruples.
“I’ve talked to Isobel. She doesn’t know all that much.” I tapped my temple with the pen. “Bad memory.”
“Yes, her memory was fading when she came. There were already large holes in her memory when she arrived, and they only grew larger as the days passed. I managed to recover some information from her mind before she lost everything. No details, but a few things about Ander. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that she’s lost everything else in the time since then, considering the level of trauma she sustained.”
“You can recover memories? Useful party trick.” The kind of party trick that would get her recruited by the Office of Preternatural Affairs if she wasn’t careful. We liked to acquire resources like her, whether or not the resources are interested.
Dayna arched an eyebrow at me. “It’s not all that useful. After all, I can only recover memories from the dead.”
Okay. So I’d definitely had sex with a dead woman.
After leaving Helltown, I sat in my car for a few minutes to process that information. I must have spent about twenty minutes going nowhere in the parking lot of a convenience store, hands on the wheel, staring blankly at the windshield.
To be fair, the slow return to my apartment was only partially from shock. I’d managed to recover my sedan from the hills outside Mojave, but it didn’t have a lot of life left in it. It took about ten tries to get it to start now. The wiring for the ignition was probably failing. A side effect of getting molested by vines in Paradise Mile.
But I mostly sat around because of the shock.
I’d seen zombies before. They were pretty distinctively dead. Rotten, still carrying their mortal wounds, kind of oily. They didn’t talk without help. They didn’t interact much at all.
I’d been all over every inch of Isobel the night before. She definitely wasn’t wounded or rotting, and she had been very…interactive.
She wasn’t a zombie.
But she was still dead enough that a death witch had been able to pull memories out of her. Somehow.
Well, if I could get over Isobel’s past as a blood-sucking lawyer, I could probably deal with her being one of the undead, too.
That was the thought that got me moving again. Despite the traffic, I got home before dark. My windows weren’t lit up yet, but my TV was going, so I could just barely make out a dark shape moving inside the living room.
My first thought was that it was Lynne standing in the window of the attic, her dark figure casting a shadow over all the other bodies. But Isobel had stabbed her. She couldn’t have gotten into my apartment, even if the wards had broken. There was no reason to be paranoid.
I still opened the door with trepidation crawling down the back of my neck. “Isobel?”
Her voice came from the kitchen.
“In here.”
Two steps in, the odor hit me. My apartment smelled like baking cookies. It was probably the most pleasant smell that had ever graced my bachelor pad—not that brewing potions and post-workout stink were much competition.
And then the most pleasant sight to ever grace my bachelor pad appeared.
Isobel had borrowed a pair of my boxers. They weren’t cut to fit the female figure; the breadth of her thighs made the leg holes ride up, exposing creamy flesh from knee almost all the way to her hip. She’d also taken a baggy black t-shirt that said “Serenity” across the chest and knotted it in the back so that it pulled tight over her breasts and exposed midriff.
Normally, that would have been enough to turn off every rational thought in my brain for the next week.
The fact that she was also holding a tray of freshly baked sugar cookies was just the cherry on top.
Being a necrophiliac wasn’t as bad as I would have expected.
“I have flour?” I asked.
Yeah, that was the only coherent thing I could manage to get out.
“But no chocolate chips, which is why I went for sugar cookies.” Isobel lifted the tray toward me. The pink, shiny burn scars on her arms were hidden again. She’d returned all the beads and feathers to her hair, so she was back to her native princess supermodel look. “Look good?”
Look good? Jesus. I could barely take my eyes off of her hips.
My stare didn’t go unnoticed.
“Sorry,” Isobel said. “I didn’t have anything clean of my own.”
I laughed. The idea that she would consider raiding my dresser apology-worthy was ridiculous. Seeing a woman in my clothing woke up a caveman inside of me, something that made me feel like I’d done the human equivalent of marking my territory by pissing on it.
The idea that she had come to Los Angeles homeless and scared was burning in my gut now. It had been years earlier, but I was retroactively pissed off
. Downright vengeful.
“You’re fine,” I said, and it came out kind of sounding like a growl. My testosterone levels were through the fucking roof.
“Did you learn anything?” she asked.
I’d meant to tell her everything Dayna had said as soon as I got back, just to see how she reacted. See if she’d been keeping the lawyer thing from me deliberately. Now all I could manage to get out was, “Yeah, I caught some leads.”
“Like what?”
The last thing I wanted to discuss was the case. I didn’t want to see that look in her eyes again.
Using a towel off the stove, I grabbed the tray from her hands and set it on the counter.
Then I pushed her against the kitchen table. I rolled the beads dangling from a thick lock of hair between my fingers, but didn’t pull it off. She’d chosen how she wanted to look. I wasn’t going to argue with that.
“Cèsar,” she said, but not like she meant for me to stop. More like she was having trouble catching her breath.
“I want my clothes back,” I said.
She quirked an eyebrow. “Then you’ll have to take them from me, won’t you?”
The wards were secure. Ander would wait.
Everything could wait.
CHAPTER TWELVE
HABIT WOKE ME UP at four o’clock the next morning, bright and early, ready to train with Fritz.
I texted him to say that I was going to stay home sick for the day and turned off my phone.
I’d ended up wasting more time the previous evening than I should have. Get two lonely witches together, and it turns out that there’s a lot of magic waiting to be made. Not the kind of magic that comes from ritual circles, but the rhythm of two bodies. The intermingled sweat. And the abuse of some of my smellier essential oils.
It had been a welcome distraction at the time, but I woke up feeling tense. The week was slipping past me. Some invisible deadline was looming, and I needed to find answers.
Felt like Cinderella was going to turn into a pumpkin at midnight, or something like that.
So I went to bed in a blissfully orgiastic coma and woke up fiercely determined to work. And I knew exactly which rabbit holes I was going to drop down that day.
Hope Jimenez had been a lawyer. That meant she would likely have had a website, or the law practice she’d worked for would have had a website.
Even if she’d died in 2004, there might still be something cached out on the web.
I slipped out of bed, grabbed my laptop, and sat on the floor beside my mattress. Isobel’s naked leg draped off the side of the bed, warm against my shoulder.
She didn’t stir as I started running Google searches.
I immediately found a website for Jimenez and Associates and news articles.
A lot of news articles.
“Wow,” I muttered under my breath.
Isobel smacked her lips and rolled over.
I started with the Jimenez and Associates website. She hadn’t even been thirty years old, but she’d had her own law practice, and the website had been recently modernized. The business had survived after she disappeared—or died—and the partners had taken over without changing the name in her honor.
Jimenez and Associates was now run by lots of fusty old white guys. Those would have been the associates. Weird that they didn’t want their names on the sign over the door.
They still had a page about Hope Jimenez on the site, professional photograph and all. It was wild to see Isobel Stonecrow with a business-like haircut chopped into a neat line at her jaw. Her makeup was practical. She looked like any Ivy League graduate I’d crossed paths with before.
This was the woman without the glamor. Lighter hair, bigger nose. No feathers or beads anywhere. Just a lawyer whose family had been in Manhattan for fifty years.
I could only see her from the waist up in the picture, but she had her arms folded, shoulders thrown back, chin lifted. Her defiant stare threatened to blow her professional look.
That was a woman who got shit done.
Her bio was short. Didn’t say what had happened to her—just said that she’d founded the firm, quick overview of her educational history, and how she was missed.
Right.
That led me to the articles. Old newspaper archives were often locked for subscribers, but I had ways around them—any private investigator worth his salt did. It was easy to jump around the pay walls and pull up hours’ worth of reading material on Hope Jimenez.
Most of the articles were about her former cases. She’d handled high-profile clients. Names that I recognized without even needing to pull up the Wikipedia articles. People accused of mass murder, crime lords—even a terrorist one time. That had been a career-maker for her.
I was pretty sure I remembered hearing about that case on the news. Small world.
It looked like Hope Jimenez operated well in a moral void. Not just a good lawyer, but a great lawyer.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
Those were all the older articles. Didn’t say anything about what had happened to her afterward, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know anymore.
One of the articles had a photograph of Hope Jimenez walking out of a courthouse with her newly freed client. A CEO who had been accused of killing his wife for cheating on him. She’d gotten him off on a technicality.
She was smiling in the picture. Victorious.
I couldn’t reconcile the merciless lawyer with the woman who hadn’t let me have a square inch of sheets the night before.
It was getting to be bright outside anyway. I’d been reading for a couple hours and my stomach was reminding me that it was time for a protein shake. I plugged my laptop in, left Isobel hogging my pillow, and went to make breakfast.
Chemistry and spellcasting weren’t my strong suits, but cooking? Cooking is easy. I heated up my electric griddle and grabbed food out of the refrigerator. Bacon first. Frozen hash browns and eggs in the grease. Toss a bagel in and cook that on the grease too. Don’t want any of that bacon to go to waste.
Being the considerate soul that I am, I made my protein shake with an immersion blender so that it wouldn’t wake Isobel up.
Shake, bacon, eggs. About a million grams of protein.
Breakfast of champions.
Despite my attempts to be quiet, Isobel was sitting up in bed when I returned with food. Once I got past the initial shock of a gorgeous naked woman hanging out where I usually slept alone, I realized she had my laptop with her.
She looked up at me with pain in her eyes. The Jimenez and Associates website was up on the screen.
Hope Jimenez looked like the kind of woman who had probably eaten low-fat cottage cheese, sliced melon, and judges’ testicles for breakfast. I suddenly felt a little weird bringing bacon and eggs to her.
“Breakfast,” I said. “If you want it.”
She set the laptop aside and nodded mutely. “It smells good. Thank you.” She took the plate and I sat next to her with my shake.
“You look surprised. Didn’t you ever run a search for your former name?”
“I didn’t want to know.” Isobel toyed with the bagel without taking a bite. “Criminal law?”
“Looks like you’re pretty good at what you do.”
“No, Cèsar. That’s not me. That’s another woman. She’s long gone.”
“Lawyering’s probably more lucrative than being a native princess shaman,” I said.
“I don’t care about the money.” She took a tiny bite of the bagel. Swallowed hard. I wanted to ask what she thought of it being fried in bacon grease, but it didn’t seem like the right time. “Did you find anything else?”
You might have been slightly cold-blooded, verging on evil.
“Nah,” I said. “Not yet.”
She set the plate aside. “I’m not hungry. Sorry. I need a shower.”
Isobel peeled herself free of the sheets, abandoning her breakfast on my bedside table and the picture of Hope Jimenez.
&
nbsp; I was tempted to follow her into the bathroom, but I doubted she wanted to be bothered. Not today.
Last night’s magic was gone. She didn’t even want to eat my greasy breakfast.
“More bacon for me,” I said to nobody in particular.
I took a big bite as I grabbed my house phone to call work. I still didn’t plan to talk to Fritz—the text message would be enough. I’d deal with his response later.
Instead, I called my own desk.
Suzy answered immediately. “You’re late again, Hawke. I’m gonna have your balls for this. How do you think we should prepare them this time? Filleted, dredged in pork rinds, and then fried for a delicious low-carb snack? Pickled and then—”
“I’m not coming in today,” I said, interrupting her. Normally, the detailed description of how she planned to mutilate my genitalia was amusing, but my normal sense of humor seemed to be MIA. “Actually, I might not be in for a couple days. Not sure yet. But definitely not today.”
“Oh.” I could practically hear Suzy’s disapproving scowl. “And why’s that?”
“I’m not feeling well.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. My guts felt like they’d been tied into knots.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with Fritz telling you not to investigate Paradise Mile, does it?”
I decided to go for casual and funny rather than defensive. Less suspicious that way. “The only thing I’m investigating right now is the bottom of my toilet bowl.”
Her tone softened a little, even if her words didn’t. “You’re calling to tell me this…why? You don’t call in sick to me. I’m not your boss.”
“What are you talking about? You own my balls; you’re worse than a boss.”
“Well, that’s true,” Suzy said. I’d been joking, but it didn’t sound like she was. “You officially have my permission to watch TV all day and keep your nasty miserable germs to yourself. Blessed be.”
“There’s just a favor I have to ask.”
“Uh-huh, of course there is. What do you want?”
“Turn the paperwork in for me? It’s on my desk.”
A moment of silence. I could imagine her expression darkening as she pushed the papers around on my desk. “The paperwork’s not done yet.”
