by SM Reine
Unsurprisingly, we were trapped.
“Oh man,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow.
I’d dealt fine with Paradise Mile the first time around. I’m a chill guy. I can deal with just about anything once if I have to. No escape? Fine. Creepy dead people? Fine. Rooms that only sometimes look like scenes from a horror movie? Fine.
But I’d gotten through that, and I’d gotten out.
I was fucking done with Paradise Mile.
The endless hallway didn’t freak me out. The idea that I might not be able to leave again…well, that was starting to screw with my head in a pretty big way.
“I don’t recognize this place,” Fritz said.
“Did you expect to?”
“I wouldn’t have been surprised. I get around.”
Even so, he kept his gun lifted, aimed at the low horizon, as we moved down the hallway together. Didn’t seem to matter which direction we took—it looked the same both ways.
“So you buy crime syndicates that trade in souls, operate from Hell, and exploit people for labor,” I said, “and now you expect to recognize a haunted house. What the fuck did you do before working for the OPA?”
“Oh,” Fritz said. “I dabbled in a few different things, I guess. Nothing too interesting.”
That didn’t sound like a lie. I believed he wasn’t keeping information from me—he just didn’t think it was interesting enough to talk about. At least not when we had more pressing matters at hand.
But I suddenly thought his past was interesting. Really interesting.
“Do you still use Ander’s business to kill people?” I asked.
Fritz frowned. “What kind of man do you think I am?”
“I have no goddamn clue, to tell you the truth.”
“I shut down his syndicate immediately, Cèsar. I’m only maintaining the office until the last of the contracts expire. I don’t have any interest in exploiting people like that.”
I hadn’t really thought he would, but it still made me feel better to hear it.
“All right,” I said. “I trust you. But I don’t trust Ander. I still think he’s behind all of this.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Fritz said.
Before we could continue walking, I noticed that the hallway had changed around us. One specific part of the hallway, to be exact: the floor.
The trap door had appeared between us.
Thankfully, it wasn’t glowing.
Gertie hadn’t wanted Isobel and me to go into the basement before. She’d sent us into the attic, probably to kill Ander instead. But that trap door was where Nichols’s altar had been, it was where I had seen that burning light from my nightmares, and it was where we were going to go now.
“There,” I said.
Fritz aimed his gun at the trap door, then gave a sharp nod.
I yanked it open.
After the glow I’d seen in my nightmares, I expected to find the trap door opening straight to Hell. Or at least a short stairway leading down into the basement again.
Instead, I found an earthen slope tunneled into the ground, steep enough that it’d be a challenge to climb back up once you got down.
Nothing that belonged under an old house.
“That’s not right,” I said.
A frown carved Fritz’s face into angry lines. “I know. I saw the basement.”
If I hadn’t been certain it was a trap before, I was sure now.
A feminine cry echoed down the tunnel. Made my hair stand on end and my stomach lurch with protective heat.
Isobel.
“I’ll investigate.” Fritz jumped down the steep slope, vanishing into the darkness.
Fuck. There was no way I could let him go alone.
Muttering something that could have been a prayer or a curse, I jumped down after him.
If Isobel hadn’t been the subject of the scene we found underneath the trap door, I think she would have appreciated the imagery.
She was strapped to a table in the center of a small cave. Bones were scattered on the floor in little mounds, like anthills made of cracked ribs, shattered kneecaps, and skull fragments. The walls were hung with skins. Some of them didn’t look like human skins. The rest—well, they could have belonged to demons.
I wasn’t too optimistic. The candelabras around the room were made of freaking spines. Definitely human spines. The vertebrae were held together by wax that allowed them to crumble as they melted away.
All in all, it was an impressively horrifying presentation. None of it was required for whatever was about to happen to Isobel—I didn’t sense any magic around the decorations—but it sure as hell looked scary.
Scariest of all, Ander stood over Isobel with a knife.
I knew it.
He’d been lying to us about everything with Gertie, Nichols, and Herbert. He was behind everything after all.
The fat demon turned at the sound of our entrance. It’s not easy to walk on a carpet of bone gracefully, and impossible to do it silently.
“Betrayal,” Fritz said. Rage quivered through that single word.
Ander looked surprised to see us there. His knife wavered. It was a practical thing with an ebony handle and a simple four-inch blade—a tool, not a decoration.
A tool that was just inches away from Isobel’s heart.
The anointed butcher’s knife found its way into my hand. It crackled with magic in the corner of my vision. The vibrations were more intense now that I was back in Paradise Mile and facing Ander.
“Betrayal,” Ander echoed, eyes narrowing at the sight of my knife. “I see how it is, Friederling.”
Those were the last words I planned on ever letting him say.
“Grab Isobel,” I told Fritz, and then I attacked.
Ander sidestepped my first swing, but he wasn’t fast enough to miss it completely. My fist landed on his shoulder. Knocked him back. Made him drop his knife.
The demon’s return blows were clumsy. Easy for me to dodge.
He might have been big scary shit as far as demon bureaucrats went, but he wasn’t a fighter.
I slashed the butcher’s knife over Ander’s chest and opened a gash in his shirt. Blood dribbled down his stomach.
He gasped. “Wait!”
I’d been about to slash at him again, but his plea stopped me.
There was no point in killing the guy. He was pathetic. We could arrest him. Run him up on charges. Send him off to a Union detention center to enjoy the remainder of his retirement in some dark pit where he’d never be able to hurt Isobel again.
So I stepped back.
Yet my hand leaped up and it buried the knife in Ander’s chest.
The fact that I actually connected was as much of a shock for me as it was for him. The knife had pulled my hand forward of its own volition, and it had perfect aim. The point struck at the center of his heart.
Magic erupted around us, blurring my vision and closing my throat.
Ander tried to suck in a breath. He couldn’t, but not for the same reason I couldn’t. I was suffocated by magic. His lungs were collapsing. Blood stained his lips and fog poured out of his mouth.
He gripped my shirt, pulled me close, rasped a few words into my ear. It was so hoarse that I couldn’t understand him—not at first.
He dropped to his knees. My fingers had seized up around the knife and his weight dragged me down. He was conscious for a few moments after the blood stopped flowing. There was light in his slitted demon eyes. Consciousness.
Anger.
Then that was gone, too.
Ander was dead. Holy shit, he was dead, and I hadn’t even done it deliberately.
That’s what I got for trusting Gertie’s knife.
I managed to peel my fingers off of the hilt and left it buried in his chest. Blood oozed around the blade where it vanished into his breastbone. The fluid wasn’t quite as red as my blood. It smelled like sulfur and burned against my fingers.
“Oh my God,” I said, backing
away from him. I wasn’t looking where I was going and stumbled on the bones. Almost fell over again.
“What did he say to you?” Fritz asked, helping Isobel sit up. She was still groggy. Looked kind of drugged. Her head rolled against his shoulder, too weak to support itself.
I moved to rub my hand down my face, then realized it was covered in nasty demon blood and stopped myself just in time. “He said…” I swallowed hard. My mind whirled, trying to process Ander’s final, rasping words. “He said that he was trying to save Isobel from Calhoun.”
Shock flashed over Fritz’s face. “Calhoun? Calhoun Deppe?”
That had been the name of Hope Jimenez’s final client. The embezzling accountant.
I recognized the name, and I was surprised to see that Isobel recognized it, too. She sat upright and fumbled weakly for Fritz’s shirt. “It’s him,” she said. “He’s changed. He’s not—”
The spine candelabras exploded in towering columns of flame. Searing heat rippled over me. Fire licked the ceiling, painting charred lines on the stone.
Through the flash of light, I could just barely make out dark shapes moving at the edges of the room. We weren’t alone anymore. There were people pouring into the cavern, like they’d been waiting for Ander to die and leaped out the second his blood spilled.
I couldn’t see who they were, couldn’t make out any detail. The contrast was too much. But at a quick count, I saw that there were twelve of them. Same number as the victims at Paradise Mile.
Worse than that, we were surrounded.
Fritz ripped away the bindings holding Isobel’s ankles, pulled her off the table. “Calhoun!” he roared, veins bulging from his neck, his forehead.
My hand closed on the hilt of the butcher’s knife again. There were twelve people outside the circle, but my handgun only had ten bullets left in the magazine.
I couldn’t afford to abandon any weapons.
The knife came free from Ander’s chest easily now that he was dead, like the blade was satisfied with the job that it had done. I jammed it into my belt and drew the Desert Eagle instead. Better to use a killing device that didn’t have a mind of its own.
The fire burned brighter, hotter. I inched away from Ander and my back bumped against Fritz’s. We watched both sides of the flaming circle as all the dark figures stepped up, letting us see their illuminated faces.
The only one I really recognized was the reporter with the fedora again. He was still wearing that stupid trench coat, like it was a permanent feature to his spirit. But if he was there, then that meant that all those people were the young, ghostly forms of the Paradise Mile victims.
I lifted the Desert Eagle, but I wasn’t sure which of them to aim at. They stopped trying to approach once they stepped between the candelabras.
“Magic,” Isobel said hoarsely. She was looking down at the carpet of bone.
Even when she’d pointed it out, it took me a second to notice the crackle of magic. The bones weren’t an aesthetic choice; they’d been hiding a circle of power on the floor underneath.
Now Fritz, Isobel, and I were trapped inside that circle.
“These are the people who died at Paradise Mile,” I said over my shoulder to Fritz. “I don’t get it.”
“I do,” he said grimly. “It’s Calhoun.”
“Hope Jimenez’s last client?”
“My greatest mistake.” Fritz pushed Isobel to me, freeing his hands so that he could also draw a gun.
“He was in your apartment,” she said, limp against my chest. I had to support her completely. Her words were slurred. Definitely drugged. “I don’t know how long he was in there, but he was waiting for me when I got in the shower.”
“The embezzling accountant was hiding in my apartment?”
“He was so much more than that,” Isobel whispered.
The bodies surrounding the circle were just watching us as we spoke.
Waiting.
I wanted to know what the fuck was up with Calhoun as much as I’d ever wanted to know anything in my life, but it was distracting to have all those blank eyes focused on us. Especially when I didn’t think that they were waiting for us to do anything. They were waiting for someone to arrive—this Calhoun guy.
“He worked for me,” Fritz said curtly. “I’d hired him to perform espionage within Ander’s shell corporation. I didn’t know he would get caught and be put on trial for alleged embezzlement.”
“You were spying on Ander? Before he bought Isobel’s soul?”
“Ander was a thief. He had information I wanted. Ancient secrets of magic. Ways to evoke demons and harness their powers. I needed to know how much of a threat he presented so I could decide how to take action.”
“Calhoun didn’t embezzle from Ander,” Isobel said. “He talked while he was dragging me here—he said that he stole those secrets and kept them for himself instead of passing them to you. He’s an opportunist.”
“I see that now,” Fritz said. “I never should have told you to represent him in court, dammit.”
“You told me to take Calhoun’s case?” Isobel asked, trying to twist around so that she could look at Fritz. The sudden motion almost made me drop her. “You knew me before you saved me from Ander?”
That was news to me, too.
“We’ll talk about this later,” I said. “Tell me what to shoot. Are these people alive? Are they going to try to kill us? What do I do?”
“I don’t know,” Fritz said.
That was even scarier than all the staring eyes.
The circle of magic rippled around us. A doorway opened within the circle’s perimeter, and a thirteenth figure stepped forward to join us inside.
Where Ander had looked like a harmless old man, this guy radiated danger. But he wasn’t a demon. Everything about his red hair, square face, and freckles was human. Those muscles had been built the same way as any guy at the gym’s—with long hours of hard work.
He wore a sleeveless shirt to show off those muscles, plus about a hundred tattoos. The dude was solid ink from wrist to shoulders.
The tattoos depicted thorny, creeping vines, just like the ones that filled Paradise Mile.
Gertie entered behind him. She clutched at one of his hands like his young daughter, though there was nothing but beast in her eyes.
Her presence answered a lot of questions. Ander had been wondering how he had lost control of Gertie and who had told Nichols to free her. Now we knew. It was some tattooed douchebag with a penchant for interior decoration using human bone.
He and Gertie were a match made in a horror movie.
“Thanks for killing Ander for me,” the man said. “Everyone else in this cavern had a contract with him, and he always inserts a goddamn clause to prevent his peons from harming him. But not you, Agent Hawke. You weren’t under contract. You and my knife did exactly what you were supposed to do.”
“And who the fuck are you?” I asked.
“My name’s Calhoun. Calhoun Deppe.” He grinned. It was only then that I noticed his eyes were completely red—no pupils, no irises, no whites. Just brilliant crimson. “But you’d know me as the man who killed Hope Jimenez.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I THINK I’M A pretty easy guy to get along with. I like just about everyone when I meet them, and it takes a lot to lose my trust. I can’t say I’ve ever had a real enemy in my life—though some of the witches I’ve arrested while working for the OPA might disagree.
The fact that I hated Calhoun Deppe on sight meant a lot.
I actually hated him. Wanted him dead.
It takes a lot to make me feel that much anger.
“I was right about Ander, wasn’t I?” Fritz asked. It was weird to hear him talking to Calhoun with the same tone he used on any of his underlings at the Magical Violations Department. “His corporation really was developing a method to produce hybrids of demons and witches.”
“Right in one. I’m impressed,” Calhoun said.
“I’ve h
ad a few years to study the files Ander didn’t burn when I took over.” Fritz waved his handgun at Gertie. “She’s the one you’ll be merging with.”
“That’s the plan.” Calhoun squeezed the little girl’s hand. She buried her face against his hip. “If it makes you feel any better, it would have been one of Ander’s employees if it hadn’t been me. I’m not such a bad guy, am I? Better that I have the power instead of Ander. He’d have made an army. I just want to merge myself.”
“Merging?” I asked. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
I might as well have not spoken at all. Fritz and Calhoun didn’t even look at me.
Gertie did, though. She smiled at me with those sharp, nasty little teeth.
“While I’m doing such a good job with my guesswork, I’ll posit that the ritual requires twelve ordinary human deaths, as well as a thirteenth for power,” Fritz said. “You killed everyone at Paradise Mile to start it off. Now you needed Ander to fuel the act of merging itself.”
“His blood is much more powerful than Hope’s,” Calhoun agreed.
She stiffened against me. Tried to step toward him, clenching her fists. She could barely stand up on her own, so letting her attack Calhoun seemed like it would have been a terrible idea. I held her back.
“Los Angeles will be almost as good as New York,” Calhoun said. “I think I’ll like running Helltown. Gertie?” At hearing her name, she turned to look at Calhoun. “Go ahead. Now. While the blood’s fresh.”
Gertie reached up, dug her fingers into Calhoun’s stomach, and ripped him apart.
Guts spilled over the waistband of his jeans. Blood poured over her hands. Calhoun’s crimson eyes burned, throwing his head back, teeth gritted.
But he kept standing. He kept standing, and he kept breathing, and he didn’t die as the little girl completely gutted him.
I’d have been lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit impressed.
Then Calhoun picked Gertie up with a hand under each arm. Pulled her against his body.
She crawled into the cavity that she had made underneath his chest.
Don’t ask me how she fit. She was small, but not that small, and she didn’t seem to change size. He didn’t change size, either. They just fit. She was outside, and then she was inside as Calhoun folded his arms around her, and it didn’t make any rational sense but that was definitely what I was seeing.
