I’d take the tablet to Osiris and try to talk him out of the deal. There was no other way.
Shoving the drink aside, I woke my sleeping computer and opened a few emails. One from Mafdet with the monthly breakdown of Shu’s buying habits. No news on my mother’s box, which I’d given to her to crack open.
At the bottom of my inbox, an old email from Bastet, Queen of Cats and my ex-wife, waited. It had been sitting in my inbox for three months and included details on her missing women. She’d asked me to take on the job. I’d refused. We’d argued, like we always did, and she’d left. I hadn’t heard from her since. Being a god, she’d let years pass before walking back into my life like I’d last seen her yesterday. But something bothered me about her quiet acceptance. I’d expected more of a fight. And she hadn’t replied to my email asking to meet and discuss the job. She must have gotten to the bottom of the case on her own.
I clicked the email and dragged it to the trash folder, but I didn’t let go. Maybe one more follow-up email wouldn’t hurt. After that, I’d forget it. I meant what I’d said to her; we never worked well together.
I dragged the email back to the inbox and hit reply.
My cell rang, playing the chorus of “Stand By Me” by Ben E. King. I dug it out. “Hey, Cujo. Last night, it wasn’t—”
“Get your ass to my place, Ace. There’s a guy here, really wants to speak with you.” Cujo’s gruff words held a jagged, angry edge. Someone had gotten his panties in a twist.
“Can’t this guy come in? I’m pretty busy.” My planner was empty, as usual, but I didn’t like doing business at Cujo’s home. The gods and their ways were my world. Cujo didn’t need that in his living room.
Shuffling ensued, and then a new voice filled my ear. “I need your help. No more brush-offs. Get here now, or I’ll put a bullet in your friend’s head.”
The line went dead before I could demand his name or counter-threaten him.
Scooping up Alysdair and my duster coat from the corner, I left the office and shouted down the hall at Shu that I’d be back in a few hours. With the sword snug against my back and a purpose occupying my mind, a smile rode my lips the whole way to Cujo’s apartment, right up until I noticed his door was ajar.
Chapter 3
I shoved Cujo’s unlocked door open and stepped inside. The apartment never changed. Clean, functional. Cujo kept it that way, or his daughter, Chantal, did. It was a weekday, which meant Chantal was with her mother and I was free to wield Alysdair without the risk of spooking normal people. But there was no use getting sword-happy until I knew what I was dealing with. I kept the sword sheathed snugly against my back and quietly stalked down the hallway.
“… won’t help us.” The male sounded younger than he had on the phone, and his voice quivered, probably from a touch of fear.
“Shooting me won’t help either,” came Cujo’s gruff response. The anger was still there, more like indignation than fear. Few things frightened Cujo, and a kid with a gun wasn’t one of them.
“I don’t want to. I just… I don’t have anyone else to turn to. Nobody is listening to me. I don’t have a choice.”
“Nobody turns to the Nameless One unless they’re desperate.” I smiled at the gravitas in Cujo’s words. He was deliberately stoking the urban legend bullshit. The mystique surrounding the Nameless One meant the cops were more likely to dismiss reports of me and my sword.
“But he doesn’t like witches,” Cujo added.
“Why?” the kid asked, sounding younger by the second.
“A bunch tried to capture him once and syphon off his—”
I stepped into the living room, bringing an abrupt end to their chat. Cujo was sitting in his wheelchair facing me, his back to the window. He had a gun taped to the wall behind the drapes, but he hadn’t reached for it. Sitting across the table from him was the reason why. Even with his back turned to me I could tell the witch was in his early twenties—young for a witch. It usually took a few decades for their obsession to turn them into cantankerous zealots. This one was bouncing his knee and tapping his fingers on the table. Adrenaline and fear rattled his bones.
He saw Cujo’s attention drift and twisted in his seat to see me standing in the doorway. The coat, the sword—they had a reputation. The kid witch swung his little gun around and aimed it somewhere around my torso. His hand shook so much he’d probably miss, even at five feet away. The fact he preferred to threaten me with a gun and not magic told me a lot about this kid’s magical ability.
I lifted my hands and reached behind my neck, bringing my fingers closer to Alysdair’s grip. “That’s twice in twelve hours I’ve had a gun pointed at me. You’d think witches would be more creative.”
The kid’s darting eyes were still bouncing around me, taking it all in. The Nameless One. Soul Eater. And Godkiller, if he believed the rumors. Considering his damp hairline and wide eyes, he did.
“Put the gun down,” Cujo drawled. “Shooting the Nameless One will just piss him off.” One of Cujo’s eyebrows arched in a Can you believe it? expression.
“W-what …”
I noticed a plastic bag beside his chair and wondered if the smell of blood had lingered on me from Osiris’s gift basket or if it was coming from whatever was in that bag. “Lunch?”
“Huh?”
“What’s your name?”
He swallowed and hesitated, as if telling me his name might give me power. “Er… Kenny. My name’s Kenny.”
I lowered my hands. Kenny wouldn’t shoot Cujo or me. With a sigh, I stepped forward, plucked the gun from his hand, and showed him the safety. “You might wanna flick that over next time you threaten someone.”
He blinked too many times to count. I turned my back on him and peeled back the drapes, uncovering Cujo’s backup plan. “And don’t pick a cop to threaten.”
Cujo had called me out for amateur hour.
Kenny’s already pale face whitened to the color of milk. “He’s a cop? I just thought… when you wouldn’t take my calls and the coven said to avoid you, I… I checked out the last known site where you were spotted—” I scowled and he swallowed with a loud click. “There’s a website. You can log the Nameless One’s… your… er…your last known sighting.”
Cujo snorted like he’d never heard of it. He’d probably created the damn thing.
My scowl hardened.
“I found some fibers, did a little”—Kenny wiggled his fingers in the air—“and cast a spell to find your strongest connection. I didn’t know this guy is a cop.”
Kenny’s spell must have been weak to focus on a human connection. Otherwise, it would’ve picked up that my strongest connection was Shu. I would’ve liked to see Kenny break into Shu’s office and put a gun to her head. She probably would’ve used his skin for a new rug. His poor spell-casting abilities had saved him that fate.
Cujo smiled. “Strongest connection, huh? Love you too, Ace.”
“You do that often?” I asked the kid. “Go following spells into people’s homes and threatening them?”
“No. I mean…this witch thing is a hobby. It’s my girl who got me into it. She’s awesome. She has all these achievement awards from the coven. She does way more—”
I tossed Kenny’s gun to Cujo, cutting off Harry Potter, and moved to the window to check the street outside. I wasn’t expecting trouble, not with the kid’s poor planning, but it didn’t hurt to keep an eye out. As Cujo had so kindly spilled, I’d crossed paths with witches before.
A cat dashed across the street and disappeared behind a row of parked cars. A suited and booted guy marched up the sidewalk, staring at his cellphone while furiously tapping out a message with his thumb. Nothing unusual jumped out at me, but a slippery uncertainty gnawed away at my insides. The sensation pulled at my thoughts, like a kid tugging on a pant leg, as though I’d forgotten something vital and at any second, it would come rushing back and knock me on my ass.
“So, Kenny the Witch,” I said. “You have me here.
Now what?”
Kenny ran his trembling fingers through his short blond hair and rubbed at his forehead. “My girlfriend. She’s missing.”
I crossed my arms and glared across the room at him. “Not my problem.”
“There are others—”
“I’ve heard.”
“We asked for help—”
“I refused.”
“But we—”
“I have a long memory. If you don’t know what happened, ask someone who does. You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t have threatened a friend of mine. You’re lucky I’m not carving tiny pieces off you to take back to my pet sorceress.”
Kenny looked ready to lose his breakfast. He opened his mouth—to beg, to make excuses, I didn’t know and didn’t care. Cujo could have dealt with him without dragging me all the way out here.
“Ace…” Cujo grumbled. “Ask what’s in the bag.”
Kenny didn’t wait. He snatched the bag off the floor and clutched it to his chest. “I know I shouldn’t be here.” His wide eyes flicked between Cujo and me. “I know that, but… well, like I said, I don’t have a choice.”
He flipped the bag over and looked away.
A human arm flopped onto the tabletop. Long, decorated nails and small, thin fingers. Female. The cut was clean, below the elbow. A chopping blow, no sawing. Someone or something would have to be abnormally strong to cleave an arm off in one go. Or maybe the witch had caught her arm in industrial machinery. What did the rest of her look like?
“That’s something you don’t see every day,” Cujo quipped and then winced as he remembered Kenny.
I approached the table, leaned in, and drew the stiff fingers back. There, on the palm, a single hieroglyph was carved into the flesh depicting the body of a jackal with the head of a snake. I’d seen it before, only once, on the box I found in my mother’s chamber right after she’d died. “What is that?”
Kenny shifted from foot to foot. “We don’t know. None of us know. I even looked it up online, and I—”
I had him by the throat and against the wall before either of us realized I’d moved.
“Ace,” Cujo snapped.
I glared at Kenny the Witch, dug deep into his eyes, and found that naive soul of his: bright, light, and clean—ripe for the picking.
Wait.
I didn’t want his soul… oh, but I did. How long had it been? Not long enough, but still, power clawed at me, eager to be free and grab hold of young, stupid Kenny and devour him whole. I could sink Alysdair into his gut and let the sword have him, but where was the fun in that? I wanted to take and own this foolish witch for being the parasite he was, for stealing magic that didn’t belong to him, for all the damn witches and their insolence.
I tore my gaze away and tossed the witch against the table. He stumbled, almost upending the table, and fell to a knee. Tiny threads of his soul lingered within reach. If I wanted to, I could pull and I’d have him. I growled a warning at him, at myself, at everything.
Damn witches.
Kenny spluttered and wheezed, and when I could look at him without wanting to tear his soul out, I watched Cujo wheel over to help him up.
Pinpricks of restlessness touched my nerves. What by Sekhmet was going on with me?
I should leave the witches to their own damn problems, but that mark, that symbol… it was connected to me by way of Ammit’s little box, the one warded against me, and there it was again, on a witch’s severed arm. What did it mean?
“Who’s your girlfriend?” I asked, looking again at the curled hand and the mark. Flakes of blood had fallen onto Cujo’s clean, white table.
“Julie Carter. She works in a health food store on Thirty-Fifth and—”
“A witch?” I snarled, hearing the acid in my voice and not caring.
“Yeah, but we’re not grand witches or anything. I mean she’s better than me. We just practice on weekends. We were going to watch Netflix, but when I got to her place…it was trashed. And I found that. I freaked out. I mean, the mark, I knew it was magic related, but the coven, they were already busy with other missing cases. They said they’d look into it, but she could be out there somewhere, and nobody is doing any—”
“When was this?”
“Last night.” Kenny swayed on his feet and rubbed at his neck. “They said not to contact you, but witches have been going missing for weeks and nobody is doing anything!”
I shoved the arm back into its bag and scooped it off the table. “Kenny, congratulations. You’ve succeeded where the others have failed. I charge ninety bucks an hour, and the minimum charge is four hours. The full list of fees is on the website. I don’t want any other witches involved. I’m keeping the arm. I’ll be in touch.”
As I strode through the door, I heard Kenny ask Cujo, “Is he always like this?”
“Only on good days.”
Chapter 4
Shu wasn’t back at the office. I called her cell, but she didn’t answer. Not one to be so easily dissuaded, I checked the Find Friend app and rode my Ducati through a rain shower to where the app had pinned her location. People streamed back and forth from a diner on West Thirty-Fourth Street, a block from Madison Square Garden and right in the heart of tourist central. After a quick recce, it was clear Shu wasn’t inside, but I hadn’t really expected her to be. I wasn’t entirely sure what she did outside of work, but I had my suspicions. Hence keeping tabs on her spell-purchasing activities at Mafdet’s Curiosities store.
The app blinked her location as inside the building.
I parked the bike against the brownstone walls and eyed a set of rickety steel-frame stairs snaking up the back of the building. Shu moved apartments regularly. I had no idea if this was her home or someone else’s that she happened to be visiting in the middle of a workday. Maybe she was on a job? Or was it personal?
I tried calling her cell again and started up the stairs.
A gaze skittered down my back, pulling me to a stop. A glance over my shoulder revealed plenty of people power walking back and forth along the sidewalk, but none were looking up. Few New Yorkers bothered looking up. They focused on their destinations and marched to it. Still, something had hooked into my senses.
At the top of the steps Shu answered the door before I could knock, and shot me a scowl jagged enough to cut. Her jacket was gone, but otherwise, she looked the same as she had earlier that morning.
“What are you doing?” she asked, raking her gaze from my head to my boots and back again.
“Working. You?”
“Lunch.” She scanned my face, looking for what, I wasn’t sure.
“Were you expecting company?” I asked.
“No. Why?”
I shrugged off the gaze on my back and lifted the arm in its bag. “I brought you a gift.”
In the soft light, I could just make out the bloody fingers clinging to the plastic. Shu couldn’t miss the ripe smell of decay wafting from inside the plastic.
“I need you to take a look at it.”
“Of course you do.” She moved aside, letting me pass.
I stepped over the threshold, expecting to feel the magical tickle of a shielding spell or something to protect whatever she got up to here, but I felt nothing. No wards, no protection spells. If there were any, they were so deep I couldn’t detect them.
Her apartment was a mess and appeared either half finished or half gutted. Some walls were plastered, while others weren’t walls so much as frames you could step through. Split-levels and trailing cables made walking treacherous, and above, the ceiling was long gone, exposing the original steel beams that led up to the trusses. I was fairly certain her place wasn’t up to code.
Ahead of me, Shu stepped through the chaos with practiced precision, weaving through doorways with no doors into a room without walls, and stopped at a long steel table that appeared to be a stand-in for a kitchen countertop. She swept her a whole array of bowls, jugs, colored jars and plastic containers aside and turned to me, waiting.<
br />
I stepped around extension cables, empty paint cans, and used paint trays. “Renovations?”
“The owner bailed halfway through fixing it up. I bought it cheap.”
“You own this place?” She must have needed it for spellwork. Why else would an ex-demon sorceress need to buy an apartment? Maybe something about its geographical location made it a power hotspot? I’d look up the address back at the office. A sorceress would have a reason for purchasing a dilapidated old building.
“Did it come with the diner round the front?”
“Yeah, but that’s managed separately.”
“Osiris’s balls, how much did this place cost?”
Her glower sizzled. “You have your things. I have mine. Now give me the damn arm.” She held out her hand.
I dug into the bag and handed over the arm. “You actually own this place? Your name’s on the deed?” My gaze snagged on an easel leaning against a wall in another room across what might have once been a hallway. Seven or eight painted canvasses also rested against the wall. The one at the front, facing out, was a striking oil portrait marked with bold slashes of color against deeper, darker strokes. I didn’t recognize the subject and wasn’t sure whether it was human or god or something else entirely.
Did she paint those? No, Shu didn’t paint. That was absurd. Maybe she’d stolen them or someone had traded them as payment on something I probably didn’t want to know about but should.
Witches' Bane (The Soul Eater Book 2) Page 3
