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

by SM Reine

  “I know.” I’d been procrastinating on it pretty hard and the OPA was more likely to take offense at my absence if I didn’t get it done.

  “Uh-huh. I see how it is.”

  “Please, Suze?”

  “It’s not like I can have your balls more than I already do. You’re going to actually owe me something tangible at some point. Something monetary. Oh, or something involving chocolate.”

  “Anything you want,” I said, knowing how dangerous that was to promise. Suzy was a creative lady. “Anything” could be pretty bad. Of course, we’d had similar conversations a hundred times before. She still hadn’t made me pay for all the things she’d said that she planned to make me pay for.

  It was hard to tell if it was because she wasn’t seriously keeping a tally, or if she was keeping a tally and just happened to be saving up all the testicle-barbecuing for a rainy day.

  “I’ll think of something,” Suzy said. “If I’m finishing your paperwork while you wimp around, then I’ve really got to go. Don’t die of swine flu or something.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “And don’t murder any succubi and then run from the law so that I end up getting arrested for it, either.”

  I grimaced. “Also not planning on that.”

  “You weren’t the first time, either.”

  “Yeah, right, always nice talking to you, Suzy. Thanks for the support.”

  She grunted and slammed the phone into the cradle.

  The dial tone buzzed through my skull like an annoyed bee.

  Suzy was always pretty abrupt, but I kind of wished she would have given me a few more minutes this time. I liked it when she gave me hell. It was reassuring—a constant in my life that hadn’t changed even as the job got weirder and weirder.

  Now that she was gone, I had nothing to distract myself from the task to come. The world was a little duller and grayer and a hell of a lot less amusing.

  Whether or not I wanted to deal with it, I was going to have to find out how Isobel had died. And I was going to have to do it while she haunted my apartment and grieved for herself.

  I was going to have to find Ander, too. Couldn’t kill him if I didn’t know where he was.

  I might not have been angling for the premeditated murder of a succubus assassin, but this wasn’t much better.

  Hey, at least Suzy wasn’t likely to get arrested this time.

  Even if the subject matter was miserable, it felt good to bury myself in research at home. Just me and a crappy old laptop that didn’t have the OPA logo anywhere on it.

  It felt a lot like my time as a private detective. I hadn’t been investigating demons at the time, mind you; I hadn’t known that demons existed until I had to save my sister, Ofelia, from the incubus mafia. My investigations had been more like insurance fraud and cheating wives.

  Worlds apart from trying to find a demon so that I could murder him.

  I wasn’t sure when I’d gone from thinking that I needed to relieve Isobel of her contract to thinking that Ander needed to die. Maybe when I’d seen the photo of Hope Jimenez, star lawyer, and realized what she’d given up.

  Morally defunct or not, she’d been educated. Accomplished. A superstar. Now she lived in a teal RV with beaded curtains. She was living a broken life because of Ander. She’d literally died and lost everything…and he wanted her back.

  Killing Ander wasn’t first priority, but if that was what I had to do to keep her from fulfilling her contract, then yeah—I’d kill him.

  It felt wrong to even wrap my mind around those words: “Kill him.” That wasn’t how I operated. Sure, I grew up in kind of a rough neighborhood, and I’d gotten locked up with my brother a couple of times, but almost never for fighting.

  I wasn’t the guy who made trouble. That was Domingo’s job.

  Now I had an enchanted knife and the Desert Eagle loaded and I actually planned to use them.

  I just had to know where I’d be aiming.

  There are places on the internet that you can’t access with Firefox. There’s this whole other internet, called the darknet, that you can only access with clients like Tor. And there’s no Google on the darknet. You have to know where you’re going.

  In other words, you had to be looking for trouble.

  I was definitely looking for trouble.

  I’d found some helpful forums in my time as private investigator, and I browsed those now, looking for rabbit holes. It was easy to find drug dealers on the darknet. In five minutes, I’d found a hundred dealers offering weed and lethe and mushroom spores in exchange for bitcoin—boring.

  Digging deeper led me to uglier places. Vague offers for services that were increasingly illegal. Stalking, harassment, trafficking, debt collection. Lots of those people would happily take money to assassinate victims, but they were too smart to say it.

  Gotta watch for the code words. “Negotiable services.” That kind of thing.

  Then I found a thread about getting out of trouble. Someone selling freedom from any kind of problem.

  Someone offering a special kind of contract.

  I was getting close.

  The shower was still running. Isobel had been in there for over twenty minutes. I glanced at the door to make sure it was still closed before clicking that link.

  The forum post didn’t say anything specific about Ander. It just offered a way out of trouble in the most vague way possible, and linked to another site.

  All that waited on that page were a series of street addresses.

  One of them was in Helltown.

  I’d found the local entrance to Ander’s domain.

  It was early enough for me to get into Helltown while the sun was high in the sky. Unfortunately, it was an overcast day in Los Angeles. The weather report I had open in another browser said that we were looking at a seventy percent chance of rain.

  At the moment, it was windy enough that I was getting only a few minutes of sunshine through the clouds at any given time. Probably still bright enough to act as a deterrent for any wayward nightmares that might want to eat me, but I wasn’t confident. Nightmares weren’t the only demons worth fearing in Helltown.

  The weather looked better tomorrow. Maybe I’d reinforce the wards, stay in with Isobel another day, see if we could find a way to forget about Jimenez and Associates together.

  I wrote the Helltown address down on a piece of paper and pocketed it.

  With that done, I didn’t have a choice but to go back to searching news articles while I waited for Isobel to get out of the shower. I had to find out how she’d died. Dig up the past, do a little bit of necrocognition myself.

  Find some small detail that might get Isobel out of her contract if Ander came back with it in hand.

  So I went back through the articles, skimming all those ones that made me uneasy. Looking at the mafia bosses that Isobel had gotten off with time served. She’d even worked with other kinds of celebrities—politicians, singers, actors. Lawyer to the famous.

  Even the blogs that hated what she’d been doing—and there were a lot—had admired how good she was at her job.

  That was something, at least.

  Then I found a blog about the last case she’d worked on. The defendant hadn't been famous. Wasn’t a serial killer. Wasn’t the head of any mob family.

  Calhoun Deppe, certified public accountant.

  There weren’t any pictures of him, and the author didn’t come to any conclusions as to how he could have afforded Hope Jimenez, much less why he needed to.

  He’d been accused of embezzling funds from a small New York corporation. That was it. Pretty boring job for Jimenez and Associates.

  “Calhoun Deppe,” I muttered, writing that name in my Steno pad.

  Searching for his name didn’t bring up anything else about him. I didn’t find him on any social networks. Didn’t find him on any corporate websites. I even risked a quick search on my OPA laptop, combing through police records—no mention of Calhoun Deppe
.

  Aside from his indictment, he didn’t exist at all. Not anymore.

  The shower was still running.

  Not sure why I suddenly noticed it after all that time, but I did. The sound of water running through the pipes in my walls was thunderous.

  My search for Deppe had taken up a big chunk of time. Isobel had been in the shower for almost an hour now.

  After that long, there probably wasn’t any water left in Los Angeles, much less hot water.

  I set aside the now-empty breakfast plate, my laptops, and went to the bathroom door. Aside from the running water, I couldn’t hear any hint of Isobel’s activity inside.

  I rapped my knuckles on the door.

  “Izzy?”

  She didn’t respond.

  The doorknob was locked. It was an old, cheap lock—the kind that virtually any key could open. But I’d never locked the door before so I’d never had to unlock it, either. I patted my pockets looking for something that would fit in the keyhole and didn’t find anything. Needed a screwdriver, maybe.

  But first, I bent down to squint through the hole.

  I couldn’t see my bathroom on the other side. All I could see was a flat plane of red.

  Just like in the servant’s quarters of Paradise Mile.

  My heart leaped into the back of my throat, pounding through my whole body.

  “Isobel!” I shouted.

  Forget finding a screwdriver.

  I took two steps back and leaped into the door, hitting it with my full weight, shoulder-first.

  The door exploded off its weak hinges. First time I was ever grateful for living in such a cheap little shit hole.

  It wasn’t dark in the bathroom—just foggy from the water running for too long. The mirror was covered in condensation. It was so hot that I couldn’t breathe.

  I flung the shower curtain open.

  Isobel wasn’t inside.

  But the window over the shower was open.

  Goddammit, it was open, and I hadn’t even felt my wards break. Someone must have cut through them from the inside using an athame. It was the only way to have gotten out without my feeling it.

  Isobel could have been gone for almost an hour and I never would have known.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  IT WAS OVERCAST WHEN I drove back to Helltown. I ditched my car outside the gates when the engine started to splutter, jumped out onto cool pavement, and launched inside.

  Rain peppered the asphalt as I rushed down the street.

  The address for the Helltown entrance to Ander’s house was like directions, rather than an actual street name with a number. “Apothecary behind Little Death.” That was all it said. The information was more than enough.

  Little Death was a club—a dangerous club owned by the incubus mafia, the Silver Needles. A reference to the cutesy French idea that an orgasm was la petite morte, translated to “the little death.”

  Where incubi and succubi were concerned, it wasn’t such a cutesy idea. They were sex demons. They fed on the sexual energies of humans to the point of draining the life force.

  It’s not hard to guess what happens to humans stupid enough to go inside Little Death.

  I’d faced off with the Silver Needles more than once before. Those were the assholes who had tortured my baby sister. More recently, they’d put a dollar figure on my head and sent assassins after me. I discovered exactly how good incubi were at feeding on sexual urges, not to mention evoking them.

  No matter which way you swung, no matter which gender of demon was attacking, they could make you want them. Bad.

  Killing someone you desperately want to fuck is a lot harder than you’d expect.

  The OPA had knocked off the incubus that was out to get me, but the Needles probably hadn’t forgotten me. Going anywhere near a business they owned ranked as an eleven on the Richter scale of bad ideas, especially for a guy like me.

  But Isobel was worth it.

  Overcast or not, it was also daytime, and Little Death wasn’t as busy as usual. There was no line outside the front door, even though the velvet rope was set up for nightfall.

  Aside from the club, Helltown was busier than I’d ever seen it. The cloud coverage made demons bold. Made them comfortable going outside to take long strolls in the rain, away from the sun.

  Trying to push through the crowd was harder than it should have been. Even sticking to the middle of the busted asphalt road, I was getting jostled by demons.

  Every bump was a fresh shock of adrenaline.

  One second I’d be sporting an instant boner from brushing up against a half-naked succubus, and the next I’d be fighting back the urge to vomit from touching a demon that filled my head with memories of Gertie eating human flesh. Every touch dragged some kind of awful emotion out of me.

  It used to be even worse. Binding to Fritz had made me partially immune to their powers. It felt awful, but wasn’t overwhelming.

  The fact I wasn’t susceptible anymore just made me a more obvious outsider. I was getting a lot of curious looks. The demons were wondering what fresh human meat was doing willingly walking into Helltown on a gloomy day, obviously trying to reach the alley that ran alongside Little Death, and obviously impervious to their powers.

  The knife was jammed in the back of my belt and the Desert Eagle was heavy under my arm. Comforting weights. Not comforting enough.

  Demons wouldn’t need to use their powers on me if they just ripped me limb from limb.

  The crowd started shifting as I approached Little Death. Not pressing against me anymore, but making room, opening a path.

  I glanced over my shoulder. There were two men approaching me from the rear. Both were skinny without an ounce of muscle, draped in studded leather.

  Show me a human guy who probably weighs about a hundred pounds, and he won’t even register on my radar as a threat. I could toss hundred-pound weights around at the gym one-handed. Even if a skinny guy has a gun, I’m betting money on my strength and reaction time over a stick like that.

  But show me a demon guy who weighs about a hundred pounds, and my adrenaline goes nuts. These guys were so creepily thin that they almost wouldn’t pass for human outside of Helltown.

  Demons who don’t look a lot like humans don’t need to. Their power rests elsewhere.

  With incubi, that meant thrall.

  “Hey!” shouted the one on the left, picking up his pace. “Stop right there!”

  Couldn’t let the Needles catch up with me. Wouldn’t want to normally—had no interest in our unfinished business—and was especially uninterested now that Isobel’s life was at stake.

  I broke into a run.

  Fleeing in Helltown is like unleashing a rabbit in front of greyhounds. The demons surged around me, closing the gap, reaching for the back of my jacket with pallid hands.

  Fingers wrapped around my collar. I shucked the coat and plunged into the alleyway behind Little Death.

  It was cramped and moldy, narrow enough that the Los Angeles sun might never touch it. Water drizzled from a pipe on the wall of the club and I noticed the fluid was brown. Draining something nasty from the roof.

  I splashed through puddles that smelled like waste, feeling the press of demons behind me.

  Another clawed hand grasped my sleeve. I turned long enough to slam my elbow into the face of a demon that looked a lot like a fanged Betty White. She hissed at me, baring a serpent’s tongue.

  There were others behind her. Hungry demons drawn to my fear and adrenaline. They could only reach me one at a time in that alley, but any one of them might be enough to do me in.

  “Back off! He’s ours!” roared one of the incubi from the mouth of the alley.

  Good news was that the demons listened. The Silver Needles own big swaths of Helltown—including the one I was in.

  Bad news was that the demons listened, peeling away and leaving nothing between the incubi and me.

  Very bad news.

  I jerked the Desert Eagle o
ut of its holster as I picked up my pace again, skidding around the corner. The apothecary was at the back of the alley. The entrance was a narrow door with a hand-painted sign that probably said “apothecary” in the infernal language—not that I could tell. Just a guess.

  The sounds of the chasing incubi grew near. Fast bastards.

  Throwing myself at the apothecary’s entrance, I jumped inside and tried to slam the door behind me.

  A leather-clad arm thrust itself through the gap before I could.

  The door exploded open again, letting both Needles inside.

  “No fucking around in my shop,” grumbled the demon behind the counter. It had two heads, though one of them had slack features and drool dangling from its chin. The hands counting cash were stubby and clawed.

  “Shut your mouth, Pete,” said one of the incubi.

  Pete? Really?

  The other incubus grabbed my shirt, dragging my face down to his. I pushed the Desert Eagle into his gut. Unfortunately, his companion shoved a knife against my throat at the same time.

  The cold bite of metal made me go still.

  “What are you doing in our neck of the woods, mortal?” asked the one holding my shirt.

  “Shopping trip,” I said, barely moving my chin as I spoke. No need to encourage that blade to slip. “Needed some new shoes.”

  “Look at this, Vaughan.” That was from the knife guy. He’d patted down my pockets and found my FBI badge. He showed it to his friend.

  “FBI?” Vaughan snorted. “More like OPA.”

  Damn. We were starting to get a reputation. And we’d been doing so well keeping ourselves secret from everyone—even demons.

  On the other hand, if they were mostly concerned about my employer, that meant they didn’t recognize me. Had no idea that I’d ever interfered with their operations. Didn’t know that I’d had a bounty on my head just a few months earlier.

  They were after me because I was a human running around their territory, not because I was Cèsar Hawke, Ofelia’s vengeful big brother.

  At least if they killed me, it wouldn’t be personal.