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

by SM Reine

  He limped toward the door. “We need to return to Paradise Mile. Right now.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  TO SAY THAT SUZY was annoyed to hear from Fritz and me was an understatement.

  Her tiny fist slammed into my bicep, instantly numbing my arm from the shoulder down. “It’s always something with you, isn’t it, Hawke?”

  “Hey!” I leaned away from her and rubbed my arm. “What was that for?”

  “Because you’re getting into trouble again! You, and…” She trailed off when she turned to Fritz. Suzy wasn’t familiar enough with our boss to go off on him, although I could see that she wanted to. “Can’t I investigate one normal case without you guys messing it up?”

  “You investigate plenty of cases without my interference,” I said.

  “None of the interesting ones, though,” Suzy said. “Get into the right lane, Director Friederling. I’m off the next exit.”

  We were all piled into one of Fritz’s cars. Not one of the especially nice ones; just a boring old Porsche, which definitely hadn’t been designed with three passengers in mind.

  Even though Suzy was tiny, she was compressed in the space between Fritz and me, and looking wholly frustrated by the experience.

  The Porsche hugged the road as we took the cloverleaf down into the suburbs.

  Suzy lived in a neighborhood of two-story townhouses, which all looked exactly the same from the outside. The only thing that distinguished hers from the rest was a bright blue door. Not sure how she got that past the homeowner’s association, but it had been like that for as long as I’d known her.

  The blue door thing is common among witches. Meant to ward off bad spells. Not sure if that’s true or not, but most of the people in the Magical Violations Department do something similar to their homes.

  When you’re a big guy like me, you get invited over to coworkers’ houses to move furniture all the damn time. I knew way too much about the lifestyles of the witchy and overworked.

  Suzy opened the garage using the keypad on the outside, and Fritz moved the Porsche inside.

  “Don’t mind the clutter,” Suzy said. “I haven’t been home much lately.” Her cat, Cat, greeted us at the door by yowling and running off into the depths of her townhouse.

  If you cast a lot of magic in one place, it leaves a residue over time. Most people can’t sense it. It doesn’t even bother some witches. But for those who can detect it—like me—it bothers us a lot.

  My ability to breathe vanished when I followed Cat’s bushy ass inside. And then I tripped over a laundry basket in the hallway.

  When my eyes stopped watering, I saw how uncomfortable Fritz looked in Suzy’s space. And then my vision cleared enough to see that her space would make just about anyone uncomfortable. She had boxes stacked to the ceiling around all the walls. Unlit candles and incense on every surface. Blankets thrown over her furniture.

  “What the hell, Suze?” I asked.

  “Don’t mind the clutter,” she said again through gritted teeth. “If it’s a problem, then maybe you assholes shouldn’t have insisted on visiting my private residence for what should be government work!”

  Okay. We weren’t discussing the squalor that she was living in. I could deal with that.

  “Where’s your ritual space?” Fritz asked.

  But she was already heading upstairs, stomping on every step, muttering epithets under her breath.

  Suzy was our best bet for finding the herniated dimension known as Paradise Mile. And she’d agreed to help us find it off the books, even though she was also investigating it on the books.

  That didn’t mean she wouldn’t make us regret asking her for the favor.

  I had to trip over a few more boxes and struggle through another sneezing fit to get upstairs. The magical residue had risen to the second floor like a wave of heat. It coated everything in Suzy’s house with glimmering flashes of kaleidoscopic color, red and orange and blue and yellow.

  The second bedroom was the only uncluttered spot in her townhouse. The shelves more closely matched the orderly behavior I expected to see coming out of Suzy. The window was covered in plywood, though, which still gave the whole place kind of an eau de trashy.

  “You stand in the corner,” Suzy told Fritz, dropping formalities now that there was work to do. “Cèsar, you’re in the circle with me. Take the center. Don’t move.”

  “You’re the boss,” I said.

  “Actually, I’m the boss,” Fritz said.

  As if I could have forgotten.

  “This is my house,” Suzy said. “You’re the boss in the office. Sir. But my home, my rules. Stay in the fucking corner.”

  It was the first time I’d heard her dare to use that tone with Fritz, even though she talked to me like that all the damn time. Maybe they were getting to be friends after all.

  And then she went about the business of ignoring him completely, grabbing a huge jar of salt off of a shelf that was mounted almost too high for her.

  “So how are we finding Paradise Mile?” I asked, rubbing my hands together. “How do I help?”

  “For the moment? By standing still. Finding stray dimensions isn’t easy. Easier than expanding the space you’re in, but harder than, say, your average healing spell.”

  I let off a low whistle. Healing magic was difficult. I wouldn’t have been able to make a bruise disappear even if I dedicated a month to studying the technique—that kind of difficult.

  She tossed a few bottles of oil at me. I barely caught them in time.

  “The rules surrounding dimensional magic are simple, though. They’re not dependent on lunar phase or season or time of day. It’s more to do with brute forcing your will on all of existence. That means you need a diverse array of herbs and crystals, many of which are rare.” Suzy drew fresh marks for a circle on her floor. Grabbed a chest and started plucking out crystals.

  “How rare?” I asked.

  “Rare enough that we’d be screwed if I didn’t already do this kind of magic,” Suzy said. “Unless you wanted to take an impromptu shopping trip to North Africa.”

  I didn’t want to think of what would happen to Isobel if we took that long to rescue her.

  “Maybe next time we get some PTO,” I said.

  Suzy flashed a smile, then hurled a second box of crystals at my head. “Pull out whatever you think we need.”

  This was how we often cast spells together. She’d just give me ingredients and tell me to choose. It worked well for my weird ritual sense, but it was imprecise. “We don’t have time for an educational experience right now, Suze.”

  “Then pull out whatever you think we need quickly.”

  “We’re short on time, Agent Takeuchi,” Fritz said.

  “I’m working as fast as I can,” she snapped.

  While Suzy lit candles around the circle, I collected a handful of crystals. I barely even looked at them. But when I offered them to her, she gave them all a quick, approving once-over. “Put them on the altar.”

  My organization methods were about as calculated as my crystal selection method. I set them down in no particular pattern.

  Suzy looked content with that, too.

  “You need to represent every element, every flavor of energy, every aspect of magic when pulling dimensional strings,” she went on. “So that’s a good selection of crystals. You’ll notice the candles are anointed with a similarly broad array of oils.”

  I didn’t actually notice—Suzy’s magic looked like jumbled nonsense to me—but I wasn’t going to argue and slow her down.

  Suzy muttered incantations under her breath as she finished creating the circle, using sticks of chalk as thick as her wrist, colored salt, and a few more candles.

  When she clapped her hands, the magic secured itself around us like a clamp. My throat closed. My eyes watered.

  Suzy shoved a scarf in my face. “Don’t sneeze on the salt. It’s sensitive.”

  But her scarf had obviously been used for rituals,
and having it jammed against my nose just made the reaction worse. My eyes swelled as I sneezed repeatedly. Couldn’t catch my breath.

  Cat yowled at me from outside the circle, as if offended that I’d dare make such noise in his house.

  Just when it seemed like I might be able to breathe again, Suzy started moving her hands over the crystals, whispering verses under her breath. The exact words didn’t matter. Not for my kind of magic, and not for Suzy’s. It was more about the rhythm, the focus, the direction of willpower.

  Her crystals illuminated. The light didn’t affect anything in the room, so they weren’t really getting brighter—as a kopis, Fritz probably couldn’t tell anything was happening at all.

  To me, it looked like Suzy was summoning a hurricane.

  Tides of magic coursed through the circle, barely contained by the dome created by Suzy’s salt lines. It crashed against her invisible walls. Swept over us. Made me sneeze a few more times until the scarf was stained with my blood.

  “Great,” she said, snagging the material out of my hands and dipping the corner in the fire.

  The entire scarf burst into flames.

  Apparently her magic liked my snot and blood, because that flared too.

  I leaped back, but I could still feel my eyebrows getting singed. “Jesus, Suzy! You could have warned me!”

  “I thought we were in a hurry.” I could barely make out her mischievous smile through the jumping fire as the scarf vanished into ash.

  The room darkened. Suzy clapped her hands again.

  A bolt of electricity lanced through the center of the circle with a thunderous crack. The sharp tang of ozone filled my sinuses.

  And I sneezed.

  When I looked up again, there was no magical door to a separate dimension, or a map, or whatever else that Suzy had been trying to do with her magic.

  Instead, there was a small figure standing in the circle with us. She was about as tall as my waist with her arms limp at her sides. The room’s light didn’t touch her. The shadows bent around her and distorted.

  She hadn’t come alone, either. She was surrounded by greasy lumps of meat and crimson splatters, too, like she couldn’t go anywhere without lunch following.

  Gertie.

  “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Suzy said.

  No shit.

  My partner scrambled to rearrange her altar. I didn’t bother telling Suzy that she’d done nothing wrong, that the spell was probably flawless, that we had been outsmarted.

  We’d been looking for Paradise Mile and we’d found it.

  At least, we’d found its creator.

  Gertie lifted her head to look at me. A smirk played over her tiny lips, flashing fangs.

  I could almost hear her saying, I found you. I wasn’t sure if I was just imagining that or if she was actually speaking into my mind.

  Fritz took a step toward us, drawing his sidearm.

  “Don’t break the circle!” Suzy warned.

  Too late.

  He crossed the salt line.

  The magic snapped open around us, releasing all of the energy Suzy had held captive. It gushed into the rest of the house. Poured over the crystals on her shelves, shattering their tenuous energies.

  Cat yowled and darted out of the room.

  Gertie moved almost as fast.

  She was a blur crossing the circle. Her feet didn’t even seem to touch the ground. And then she was on me, little hands locked on to my throat.

  Her thumbs buried into the flesh on either side of my esophagus, cutting off the circulation. My blood pounded as it struggled to reach my skull.

  If she had been an adult male assailant, it wouldn’t have been a problem. There were a thousand maneuvers I could use to get her off of me. But most of those maneuvers involved direct violence. It meant attacking her back.

  Yeah, she had bloody fangs, and yeah, I’d seen her eating what was most likely human flesh.

  She was still just a kid, so my reaction time was slow.

  But Fritz didn’t hesitate.

  He whipped his pistol through the air. The butt cracked against the back of Gertie’s skull.

  She dropped to the ground, thudding to all fours. She bared her teeth at him in a hiss that sounded almost like Cat, except a thousand times wilder, more primal, more monstrous. The sound of a furious mountain lion coming out of a little girl.

  Fritz aimed down at her, but Gertie flashed away again, launching herself into the altar.

  She smashed into the table. Crystals scattered across the floor and knocked over candles.

  Gertie jumped off of the surface and struck Suzy.

  “Hey! Fuck—fuck! What the fuck?”

  That was the last thing resembling actual language I heard from my partner before the blood started spraying.

  Gertie slashed with her nails, dug her teeth into Suzy’s shoulder. When she jerked her head back, I heard something tearing, and I didn’t think it was just cloth.

  Fritz tracked the girl with his gun. I saw his finger tense.

  “Whoa! Watch it!” I slammed into his arms, shoving his gun away before he could try to shoot Gertie and hit Suzy in the process.

  The bullet pinged off the shelves above Suzy. Snapped one of the wooden supports. The whole shelf came down, dumping pickled chicken feet and a box of empty vials on Gertie and her victim.

  I grabbed the kid by the back of her dress. It was tacky in my hands from either blood or mud—I was betting blood.

  Wrenching her off of Suzy should have been easy. I’m a big guy and the kid was somewhere around forty pounds and, well, a scraggly dead thing. But I couldn’t lift her. Gertie’s grip was too good.

  She dropped to Suzy’s throat for another bite.

  My partner’s scream came out wet and bubbling.

  This time, when Fritz fired, I didn’t try to stop him. I just got out of the way.

  The bullet splattered into the top of Gertie’s skull, spraying black blood over the wall behind her and exposing juicy brain on the inside. That got her attention. She ripped away from Suzy and skittered into the hallway without ever getting off all fours.

  She wasn’t a child. She was a fucking wolverine.

  I dropped to Suzy’s side. Her throat and shoulder were a mess. Entire chunks of flesh the size of a child’s mouth had been ripped off of her body.

  Suzy slapped my hands away when I tried to apply pressure. “Get her,” she gasped, clutching at her own throat, blood bubbling between her fingers.

  “But—”

  “Don’t fucking argue with me, Hawke!”

  She couldn’t have been dying if she was pissed at me for being slow.

  I was two steps ahead of Fritz, pounding down Suzy’s hallway, vaulting over the stairwell.

  An instant of free fall, and I landed on Suzy’s coffee table.

  It buckled under my weight. Sent wood fragments and leftovers from the shawarma place all over her carpet.

  Gertie already had a hand on the front door. She waited until I was on my feet before she opened it a crack, slipped through, and slammed it shut behind her.

  Shit. There was a wolverine ghost child on the loose in Suzy’s townhouse complex.

  No way could that go badly.

  Fritz elbowed past me and threw the front door open.

  He stopped short before running outside. “What the…?”

  I looked over his shoulder. Where Suzy’s lawn and street should have been, there was instead a narrow hallway with a low roof, peeling wallpaper, and ancient creaky floorboards.

  It was dark, but not so dark that I couldn’t tell that the hall was empty. Gertie had already moved on.

  “Well,” I said. “Looks like we found Paradise Mile.”

  Fritz rubbed his knee, glaring at the hallway. “This is a trap.”

  “Yeah, and Isobel is the bait. Any chance we’re not going to take it?”

  “None whatsoever,” Fritz said grimly. He shot off a few text messages on his Blackberry. “If S
uzy’s home is still accessible from Earth, there will be an ambulance here soon.”

  I hadn’t even considered that the entire townhouse might have been moved into the canyon or Hell or whatever.

  “You know, when I signed up to work for the OPA, I thought I was mostly going to be arresting asshole witches,” I said.

  Fritz pocketed his cell phone. “Your point?”

  “Don’t have a point. Just saying.”

  “Noted,” he said.

  And when he stepped through the doorway into the hall, I followed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  WHEN I WAS IN college, I used to have this recurring nightmare about tunnels.

  Actually, I’m not sure I could call it a nightmare. Nothing bad ever happened in that dream. But it was definitely kind of eerie, and probably a product of smoking too much weed with my roommates.

  It would go like this: I’d find myself standing at the mouth of a tunnel, like in a subway without any tracks, and I’d start walking. The amount of time that passed varied from night to night, but it didn’t matter how long I headed down that tunnel; nothing would change as I walked. The white tiles would move past me, each of them indistinguishable from the last.

  Then I’d turn around to try to go back, and there’d be nothing but tunnel behind me, either. Lots of walking, white tiles, no change. Just endless tunnel.

  That was the whole dream.

  A lot better than the “naked in front of class” dream, but I still woke up sweating every night, regretting that last blunt we’d lit up before finally passing out at four in the morning. I nearly failed macroeconomics because of how badly I’d been sleeping.

  The hallway in the retirement home didn’t look anything like a subway tunnel. It was more like the Winchester Mystery House than the Metro, that was for sure.

  But when Fritz and I entered the hall in Paradise Mile, it still tossed me right back to that dream I used to have. The endless tunnel.

  When I turned around, the door was gone. Nothing but hallway waited behind us.