by SM Reine
She was on her feet in seconds. Isobel was fast, probably even faster than I was with Fritz’s strength.
But there was no way she could be fast enough to reach Calhoun before he escaped.
He was only a few short yards from freedom. The dark image of Los Angeles beyond the mouth of the canyon waited, oblivious to the horrors that were about to cross over.
“Stop!” Isobel screamed, raising the knife.
She only made it a dozen feet before the vision of Los Angeles wavered.
The road blurred, momentarily obscured by fog so dense that I couldn’t see the other side.
The vines shriveled, peeling away from the passage as though seared by heat.
When it came back into focus, I was met by a much more familiar sight than downtown LA: a grassy lawn dotted with trees and square white buildings. A woman stood at the center of the road, hands extended in front of her, bandages wrapped all the way around her throat.
Suzy had taken control of the entrance to the dimension from Gertie and moved it so that it came out at the campus for the Office of Preternatural Affairs.
Don’t ask me how, but she had.
She didn’t move as black SUVs tore past her. They were close enough that they ruffled her hair.
The windows were rolled down, letting men in black uniforms hang halfway out of the vehicles with their fully automatics trained on Calhoun. At the sight of them, the rampaging demon-witch skidded to a stop so quickly that his clawed feet dug deep furrows into the earth.
“Get down!” I shouted at Isobel.
No idea if she heard me, because at that moment, the air erupted with explosions.
Gunfire chattered. Muzzle flashes illuminated the foggy night.
The Desert Eagle hadn’t done anything against Calhoun, but even a big handgun was nothing compared to the might of several squads’ worth of automatic weapons.
Bloody spots peppered his flesh. Fluid gushed from him, and not all of it was red.
Gertie was shrieking. Isobel dropped to her knees, hands clapped over her head, and I could only hope that it wasn’t because she’d been hit. I was too far to be able to tell. I ducked, dodged a Union SUV tearing past me, raced toward Isobel’s side.
Bullets buzzed through the air like furious hornets. My skull rang.
Something hard struck me from behind—Fritz. He shoved me to the ground. We slammed into the dirt together.
His mouth moved. I think he was cursing at me. Calling me stupid. I couldn’t hear him, but I could imagine. The bond made his intent pretty clear even with my hearing wrecked.
An SUV zoomed just a few feet in front of us, close enough that it probably would have hit me if I’d taken another step.
Calhoun roared on the other side. I glimpsed his feet between the tires. Blood was streaming down his legs.
The vehicle pulled up right alongside him.
A Union kopis plugged him right in the chest, and, finally, Calhoun dropped.
The only way that I could tell they stopped shooting at that point was because the air stopped humming. My ears were completely blown out. It was going to take a few visits to the OPA healing witches to restore the frequencies I’d lost that day.
“Isobel,” I said, shoving Fritz away from me.
She was already on her feet, and I was relieved to see that she hadn’t been hit by any stray gunfire. She had the butcher’s knife in hand. Between her blood-soaked body, her wild eyes, and the weapon, she looked almost as much like a demon as the thing sticking out of Calhoun’s chest.
One by one, the muzzles of the guns shifted to aim at her.
“Don’t move!” shouted one of the Union men. It sounded like he was yelling from the other side of the canyon.
Fritz stood. “No, you don’t move. None of you move! Hold your fire! Remain by your vehicles!”
There seemed to be some debate among the Union as to whether they should obey him or not. The Union was a separate entity from the OPA; not everyone recognized Director Friederling at a glance.
The moment of hesitation was enough for Isobel to reach Calhoun, clutching the enchanted knife, hatred twisting her features into something ugly.
He rolled over onto his back.
“No, Hope,” Calhoun said as Gertie shrieked within his stomach cavity. There was nothing human in her sounds.
“Hope is dead,” Isobel spat.
She brought the knife down swiftly. It buried deep into Calhoun’s stomach, severing the vines that clutched Gertie.
A few swift cuts, and the child-demon ripped free. She flopped wetly out of Calhoun’s gut.
I blinked, and Calhoun was a man again. The leathery skin and bulging muscles vanished. His stomach was mostly healed, aside from a few slices where Isobel had done the cutting. Gertie writhed beside him like a nasty little larva.
Fritz approached, holding one of the guns that the Union kopides had brought. He leveled it at Gertie.
She flopped onto her belly and tried to crawl away.
He opened fire and didn’t stop firing until the magazine was empty and the demon was nothing but a bloody smear on the grass. Then Fritz tossed the weapon aside.
A pair of Union men came over with handcuffs and rope.
“Calhoun Deppe,” Fritz said, “consider yourself under arrest.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE PARADISE MILE DIMENSION started folding in on itself shortly after Gertie died.
It was a pretty spectacular mess.
The house of horrors that had been haunting me for days crumbled from the foundations up. Windows shattered, the roof rotted before my eyes, and those fluttering curtains turned to ash.
Then the ground yawned open wide and swallowed it all. The wreckage, the cemetery, the canyon—everything.
Luckily, I got to watch it happen from the outside, safe on the grassy lawn of the OPA campus. “Holy shit,” I said as the opening between universes popped into nothing. It shriveled up on itself like a puckered asshole and left nothing behind.
Suzy stepped back, wiping her hands off. The aura of magic rapidly faded around her. “It’s gone. We don’t have to worry about any of that anymore.”
“Excellent work, Agent Takeuchi,” Fritz said.
“I’d love to take credit for the cleanup, sir, but it was obviously rigged to collapse when the creator died. It probably started losing integrity when Gertie and Calhoun were separated.”
The big bad witch himself was being shoved into a black vehicle as we spoke. Calhoun’s face was hidden underneath one of the Union’s hoods, and I was glad not to have to see him again.
Fritz patted Suzy on the shoulder. “I look forward to reading your analysis of the incident.”
“My analysis? My analysis?” She swatted his hand away. “I’m not doing a single piece of paperwork for this bullshit case. You get to explain what the fuck happened here.”
His lips thinned. “Agent Takeuchi—”
“Just because you boys are willing to work off the books doesn’t mean that I am,” Suzy rasped. “First time one of you did that, I ended up in a Union detention center. And now getting mauled by a creepy little demon? No. I’m not writing up the justification for this. If you don’t like it, then you can suck my giant monster dick.”
“Monster dick?” Fritz echoed dryly. “Well, isn’t today full of revelations?”
“Don’t patronize me, sir.” She jabbed her finger into his chest. “I mean it. If we’d done everything through the official channels, I would have summoned Gertie in a secure OPA location. There would have been backup. I wouldn’t have this.” Suzy tipped her head back to flash the bandage, as if we could have forgotten.
He looked at me over Suzy’s head. “She realizes that this is insubordination, right?” More patronization.
If he wanted to win brownie points with her, that wasn’t the way to do it.
I wasn’t sure whose wrath I should have been more worried about—Suzy’s or Fritz’s. Either way, our work environment was
about to get a hell of a lot pricklier. And I was going to be in the middle of it.
So rather than responding to Fritz, I settled for cowardly retreat.
“I’m going to check on Isobel.”
I left the two of them bickering and hunted down the OPA’s ambulance, which was solid black. If it hadn’t been for the rear doors standing open, letting me see all of the ordinary medical equipment inside, I never would have been able to tell the difference between the ambulance and any one of our other work vehicles.
A pair of EMTs—also clad in black—were tidying up the rear compartment. There was no patient in sight.
I leaned through the doors to address the EMTs. “What happened to the woman you were bandaging?”
The men exchanged looks. “Well…” said the guy on the right. His name was Mark. We’d been hired at the same time and done orientation together.
“Come on, man,” I said. “Where’d she go?”
He hopped out of the ambulance. Dropped his voice to a whisper. “She slipped away when we weren’t looking. I have no idea how she did it. My back was only turned for a few seconds.” That sounded like Isobel to me. “Are you going to report us?”
“Nah, I don’t blame you. She’s escaped me a few times.” It was probably better for her to get away from the OPA as quickly as possible. God only knew what they’d find in her blood if they did a draw.
Mark looked relieved. “She did leave this.” He fished something out of his pocket and handed it to me.
It was a scrap of paper with a phone number on it. A feather with a needle point had been driven through the center. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure nobody was watching before tucking it in my slacks. “I think this is for me. Thanks.”
I hung back to watch everyone clearing out, returning to their respective posts. The EMTs went to the medical center. The Union took Calhoun off campus entirely. I hoped he was going somewhere incredibly miserable.
Fritz stood at my side as I watched the vehicles depart. His attention was on Suzy, who was now conversing with Aniruddha under a nearby tree.
“That woman is going to have my job someday,” Fritz said.
“Agent Takeuchi? Pretty sure she’s going to run the entire Office of Preternatural Affairs someday. And when she does, we’ll be screwed.” He gave a low chuckle at that. I didn’t laugh. I wasn’t joking. “Fritz, about Isobel—about Hope Jimenez—”
“We’re not going to discuss that.”
“But you knew her. You know things about her that even she doesn’t know because you were there before she signed the contract.”
“That’s right. And we’re not going to discuss it.” He checked his watch. “You’d better get some rest. Agent Takeuchi may have saved our lives, but she involved the entire organization in the process. That means you and I are going to be dealing with a lot of bureaucracy tomorrow. I expect you to pick me up at five o’clock.”
Frustration clawed at my chest. “I don’t care about the goddamn bureaucracy. I’m just worried about Isobel.”
His eyes flashed. “Consider the door closed with Isobel, Agent Hawke. Focus on what we can control. Focus on the job.”
I knew an order when I heard one. I set my jaw.
“Yes, sir.”
Calhoun Deppe’s trial went swiftly.
To be honest, I was surprised he got a trial at all.
After more than three years working for the Office of Preternatural Affairs, I’d never seen anyone get a trial. The way we dealt with significant threats was a lot creepier than that. The Union just made people we didn’t like vanish into black bags.
The Constitution isn’t a big deal when you’re a secret government organization handling creatures that don’t officially exist.
But apparently we did, in fact, perform trials sometimes. I just hadn’t ever been invited to one before.
The trial took place inside one of our secure interview rooms. It was the space we had prepared to contain demon-possessed perpetrators, although it had been modified to include niceties from our interview room for witches, too. There were so many dampening spells that my eyes watered just walking within ten feet of it.
Calhoun spent the entire trial blindfolded, gagged, and strapped to a chair. We weren’t taking any chances with that asshole.
The proceedings themselves weren’t very exciting, though. There were no lawyers or judges. Agent Bryce had been put in charge of Calhoun; she listed off the facts as we knew them while the director for the Los Angeles branch of the Union listened attentively.
It only took an afternoon. A long, miserable afternoon of recounting every awful thing that had happened at Paradise Mile Retirement Village.
Fritz and I watched from the other side of a one-way mirror. Agent Bryce finished her review around four o’clock. Director Grimsey sat quietly as she reviewed the paperwork for Calhoun’s case, looking for any missing forms or conflicting evidence.
She wouldn’t find any. Fritz and I had worked on that shit all week, and our case was perfect.
My kopis was watching the silent room with great interest even though it had been quiet for several minutes. I took the chance to study him. This guy whose life was tethered to mine, who I thought I knew pretty well, yet actually knew nothing about at all.
There were bags under his eyes and new lines bracketing his mouth. He hadn’t been sleeping—I knew that much. I’d actually won a skirmish against him when we trained that morning, and it wasn’t because I’d improved.
Something was keeping him up at night. I could guess what it was.
It made me feel a little better to know the case had bothered him. That even he couldn’t handle all the lies, the deception, and the ugly consequences of our decisions without approaching a breaking point.
Even ruthless billionaire Fritz Friederling had his limits.
Agent Bryce moved forward to remove Calhoun’s gag. They were finally allowing him to speak. “I’ve reviewed your case and come to a verdict, Mr. Deppe,” Director Grimsey said. “Do you want to make a statement before I sign off on your detention?”
The witch’s head swiveled around so that he was facing the one-way mirror. He was still blindfolded, so I couldn’t see his red eyes. He shouldn’t have been able to see us, either.
But I felt him staring through the blindfold.
“No jail can hold me,” Calhoun said. “Not now that I’ve tasted the strength of demons. Gertie might be gone, but there’s more where she came from.”
I almost missed the director’s exasperated headshake. She was a white-haired lady with a square jaw and jowls, probably well past retirement age. She didn’t look like she had any patience for vague threats.
“Then we’ll have to skip detention, won’t we?” She wrote something at the bottom of a form, signed it, and announced, “Calhoun Deppe will be executed this afternoon.”
He jerked in his chair. “Wait, what? I wasn’t finished.”
“I’m finished,” Director Grimsey said. “Get him out of here.”
Calhoun thrashed as Agent Bryce returned the gag to his mouth. Up until the moment it was strapped tightly into place, he was still trying to protest that he had more to say.
Whether it might have been more threats or some kind of apology, the director wasn’t interested. She straightened her suit and walked out without looking back at him.
As I’ve said, I’m not a violent guy. But I’d still be lying if I said I didn’t have a little bit of a justice boner.
The door to the viewing room opened and the director entered. Fritz stood to meet her.
“Director Grimsey,” he said warmly, shaking her hand.
“I hope you’re satisfied by the verdict.”
“Satisfied and awed by your eminent wisdom, as usual.”
She shook her head at him, just like she’d shaken her head at Calhoun. The director was not a fan of Fritz. If she had a grudge, she’d just have to get in line; most of the OPA’s upper management seemed to detest his exi
stence. “And who’s this? The new aspis?”
“Agent Cèsar Hawke,” Fritz said. “Yes, he’s my aspis.”
I shook her hand too. Her skin was warm and soft and wrinkled, but her grip was steel.
“You must be something special, Agent Hawke,” Director Grimsey said. “Anyone who agrees to put up with Fritz here for the rest of his life must be quite the guy.”
I wasn’t really sure what to say to that. Even if Fritz didn’t bother making friends with many of the others at the OPA, it was still some kind of honor to be his aspis.
Right?
I settled for, “Thanks.”
On the other side of the glass, Union guards wheeled Calhoun away for his last ride down the hallway.
Fritz and Director Grimsey kept talking. They’d already moved from the matter of Calhoun Deppe to inter-departmental niceties. Something about making arrangements for a semi-centennial summit. I didn’t really hear them because I wasn’t listening.
I couldn’t tear my eyes from the man who had killed Hope Jimenez until the moment he vanished through the door. When it shut, the muffled sound through the wall was a little bit like a mausoleum slamming closed.
Justice for Isobel at last.
Or something like that.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
AFTER CALHOUN DEPPE’S EXECUTION, my coworkers held a party at the Magical Violations Department’s favorite bar.
Yeah, we’re morbid assholes. What can I say? Even though the case had been officially closed for days, the MVD hadn’t had much to do with it, and people had died, my coworkers still wanted to celebrate over drinks.
That was how the department worked. Bad guy killed? Get drunk. Big case closed? Get drunk. New employee? Get drunk. Someone’s going on vacation for two weeks? Heck, why not get drunk? We’d probably miss Clarence from HR while he was gone—better drink away our sorrows.
I didn’t go to this party. I deleted the email verifying that Calhoun was dead, checked out of work, and drove to the beach.
It was raining, so the teal RV overlooking the shore was alone on the sand. The beaded curtains were drawn. Faint magic glowed from the wards.
