Ashes and Arsenic

by SM Reine

  Domingo grinned, slapped me on the shoulder. “I knew you’d come around.”

  I shoved his hand off. “I’m still not saying I believe you. I’m saying I’ll give you a chance to prove it. I want the real robber caught, and if you can get me there…great. Just fucking great.”

  The door opened.

  “Domingo!” Gina rushed in with Murray behind her. She was carrying a gun like she had no idea how to use it. She swept the muzzle over my body.

  “Whoa!” I threw myself behind the leather chair.

  Domingo grabbed her arms, forced her to aim the gun at the floor. “You guys want to tell me why you abducted my brother?”

  Murray gaped. “Your brother?”

  “Yeah. My brother.” Domingo plucked the gun out of Gina’s hands. “Guys, this is Agent Hawke with the FBI. Agent Hawke, these well-meaning idiots are from my coven.”

  “I thought he was at your house to kill you,” Gina said. “I thought he was one of Lenox’s hit men.”

  “Cèsar’s much more dangerous than that. But not dangerous to us.” Domingo grinned broadly as he gave me a half-hug. There was something dark and dangerous in his eyes. “He’s the guy who’s enough of a badass to take down Lenox.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  SUZY WAS SITTING AT our shared desk when I arrived at the Office of Preternatural Affairs. Her nose was buried in a manila folder so I could only see her wide eyes over the top. “Holy shit on a cracker.” She hadn’t looked at me, but obviously had heard me coming. “I know Los Angeles is supposed to be one of the biggest cities in the world, but it’s a small fucking city.”

  I dropped my briefcase on my desk, ripped off my tattered jacket. “What are you talking about?”

  “The dead witches that washed up in Redondo Beach this morning. Guess who they work for.”

  “Your mother,” I said dully.

  Suzy shot an annoyed look at me. And then she dropped the folder. “Whoa. What happened to you?” She waved her hand in front of her nose like trying to blow away a nasty smell. “That magic is sickening.”

  “Had a wild lunch break.” I stripped my shirt off and tossed it in the trash bin. The wife-beater-and-slacks look wasn’t professional, but who was going to nail me for it while Fritz was out of town?

  “Let me guess,” Suzy said. “You saw something on the security footage that tipped you off on the robber. You went to find the robber—without me—and got your ass kicked.” She didn’t give me a chance to reply. “You deserved it.”

  “It’s complicated, Suze.”

  “Whatever. Watch me care. Did you make an arrest?”

  I plucked a few weeds off of my slacks and tossed them in the trash, too. “I’m still working on it.”

  “And I bet you’ll have fun being the hero when you catch him all on your own. Again.” She yanked a charm out of her desk drawer—a plain iron disc that sparkled with magic in the corner of my vision. Suzy lobbed it into the trash like it was a grenade.

  The charm’s magic clashed with the attack spell’s residue and exploded.

  I sneezed hard. “What the hell?” My throat had closed up, so I sounded a lot like Urkel.

  “You’re dragging crap everywhere,” Suzy said. “I had to neutralize it before you got residue all over my desk and ruined my spells.”

  I sneezed again. The air smelled faintly of ozone, but now the jacket and tie in my trashcan weren’t glowing with even the faintest hint of magical residue. “How many spells do you have in your desk drawers?”

  “A few. By the way, I tried to look at the security footage after you left the bank. It seems to have disappeared. No idea how that happened.” Her expression said that she knew exactly how it had happened. “What did you see on there?”

  If Suzy had been asking as a friend, I’d have told her about my family. What Domingo had done to us. How much trouble he’d caused. She’d have probably found a rare scrap of sympathy within her merciless heart.

  But she wasn’t asking as a friend. She was asking as an OPA agent assigned to the case, in an OPA-owned building, surrounded by surveillance equipment that our intelligence team had planted everywhere on campus. A private conversation was impossible.

  “Nothing. The spell didn’t recover any footage,” I said.

  Suzy shoved the manila folder at me. “Good thing I’ve got another lead, then. Look at this.”

  The colored tab displayed a short string of characters. We assigned a unique tag to each case we worked, and they were essentially random, so I didn’t recognize most of them. But this one, I knew. I knew what it was because I’d just assigned Aniruddha to the case that morning.

  I flipped open the folder to find pictures of the dead witches who had washed up on the beach. They looked like they’d been under water for a while, all swollen and blue and half-eaten by sea life. Not pretty.

  “Whom did you work for?” I muttered, flipping through the papers.

  The victims were named Susana Barb and Ahmed MacFarlane—Domingo’s missing coven mates. He’d been right. They were dead, and in an ugly way. I skimmed their stats, the coroner’s notes on the bodies, and their nonexistent criminal records before settling on the bottom of their pages.

  Both had worked for the First Bank of the Sierras.

  “Interesting, right?” Suzy asked.

  “Jesus.” I’d picked the bank robbery because I’d expected it to be easy. More importantly, I’d expected it not to involve any dead bodies. Or attempted assassinations. Or my brother, for that matter.

  Turned out that I was shit at picking cases.

  Suzy took the papers back. “Guess that means we’ll need to work with Aniruddha on this after all.”

  Another reason to regret picking the case.

  I like most of my coworkers. We drink together after work, swap tips for spellcasting, watch football on Sundays. Aniruddha was an exception. Before joining us in the Magical Violations Department a year or two ago, he’d been one of the Union’s accountants. Aniruddha brought this whole accounting vibe into the department. It wrecked our camaraderie.

  Not to mention that he had a habit of harassing Suzy. Stalking her around the office, trying to get assigned to her cases, sending her text messages at all hours of the night.

  “I’ll move you to another case,” I said.

  She planted her hands on her hips. “Excuse me?”

  “Anything you want. Pick an active case and I’ll attach you to it.”

  “Because of Aniruddha?”

  I shrugged. “Just trying to be nice.”

  “Don’t you ever try to be fucking nice to me, Hawke,” Suzy said. “You have no goddamn clue what I want. If I wanted to be reassigned, I’d ask for it.”

  “Like hell you would. You’ll tough anything out to prove you’re the biggest badass in the office.”

  She jabbed a finger in my chest. “Take me off this case and I’ll have your balls for breakfast. Got that?”

  “Okay. I won’t try to keep you out of a toxic work environment. You’re welcome. Any time.”

  “Don’t let power go to your head, Hawke,” Suzy said.

  Women. Don’t try to be nice, they hate you. Try to be nice, they really fucking hate you.

  She strode toward the elevators and I matched her pace. It was easy to keep up with Suzy. She was a foot shorter than me and needed two steps for every one I took, even when she was hurrying.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Meeting Aniruddha at the morgue. I want another look at those bodies, see if I can find anything interesting the coroner might have missed.” She sighed. “You can come. I guess.”

  I didn’t need her permission. After all, it was my case.

  But I said, “Thanks.”

  I knew better than to keep poking the dragon.

  Have I mentioned I don’t like dead bodies?

  I don’t like dead bodies.

  To be fair, most people probably don’t. But it’s hard to work a job where you’re constant
ly faced with death without growing numb to it. Suzy was numb. She’d wiggled her fingers around in a cadaver’s chest wound looking for evidence and had no problems sleeping afterward. I’d even caught her using a human skull as a hand puppet once.

  I wasn’t numb.

  See, every dead body used to be alive. A person who had family and friends. Someone who’d lived, laughed, and loved, just like me—except that I was still walking around, and dead people weren’t going to get a chance to do something as simple as that ever again.

  Unless they got turned into zombies. But that wasn’t much of an improvement.

  Anyway, if I don’t need to deal with bodies, I won’t. That’s the long story short. So when Suzy and I went to the morgue, I stayed by the door.

  The bodies were on tables beside each other, covered from ankles to shoulders in white cloth. Ahmed and Susana. Their lives were spelled out in the files Suzy was currently reading. Both had been unmarried, both had been witches ranked decently well in the OPA database, both with good jobs at the First Bank of the Sierras.

  It was a relief to have their identities confirmed. That meant that Domingo hadn’t been lying about the members of his coven being murdered. If he wasn’t lying about one thing, then maybe he was telling the truth about everything else, too. I’d rather deal with a war between covens than my brother being guilty.

  “So what did the coroner find?” I asked.

  Suzy blew a breath from between her lips. “A lot. You won’t believe the cause of death.”

  “Don’t tell me. They drowned.”

  “I wasn’t being sarcastic, Hawke. You really won’t believe the cause of death.” She handed me the file.

  I flipped through the pages, seeking the coroner’s conclusion. “Arsenic poisoning.” I had to read it a couple more times to be sure I’d read it properly. “They died of arsenic poisoning?”

  “Congratulations, you’re finally literate.” Suzy took the file back. “Wonder who the killer could be. I bet our cadavers would know.” She gave me a significant look as she said it.

  She was suggesting that I contact our most frequently used contractor, Isobel Stonecrow. She was a necrocognitive. That meant she could talk with the dead. If Ahmed and Susana had seen who killed them, Isobel would be able to tell us about it.

  “I don’t think she’s in town,” I said.

  Suzy rolled her eyes. “What, has she wandered off to scam other people? Call her up. Tell her to come back.”

  If only it were so easy.

  I didn’t have Isobel’s phone number anymore. She’d gotten a new phone and hadn’t shared the digits with me. I was trying not to take it personally, which was hard, considering that we’d hooked up a couple of times before she vanished.

  She’d been having a rough week when she disappeared. Okay, more like a rough decade. So I hadn’t employed my powers of investigation to track her down. I just figured she would get a hold of me when she was ready to talk again.

  It had been ten months since we’d last spoken.

  I was coming to terms with the fact that Isobel wasn’t going to be ready to talk to me again. Ever. I knew she was safe—she still talked to my boss, and Fritz assured me that Isobel was okay—but our lives had been thoroughly disconnected from each other’s.

  Isobel Stonecrow wouldn’t be helping me talk to the dead any time soon.

  “I can’t contact her.” I shrugged like it didn’t matter. “We’ll have to investigate these witches the old-fashioned way. Whoever our killer is, they must not be experienced, right? Someone who’d done this before would have dumped the bodies so we wouldn’t find them.”

  “That’s the thing—I think the killer wanted them to wash up. It’s part of a bigger ritual.” Suzy pulled out her phone, opening a map of the greater Los Angeles area. “This is the bank that got robbed. This is where we found the bodies.”

  “I don’t see the connection,” I said.

  “Neither did I, until we calculated where the bodies must have been dumped in order to wash up on that beach. You know, calculating tides and length of time in the water, things like that.” Suzy added a third point to the map by tapping on it.

  The triangle formed by those three points was equilateral.

  “We’re going to find two more sites, aren’t we?” I asked. “Right around there…and there.” I pointed at the two places that would need to be added in order to form a perfect, five-pointed pentagram.

  She pocketed her phone. “I’ve already got the scrying team sweeping both areas. They’ll call us if they find anything.”

  “You’re going to send me a copy of that map, right?”

  “Already have.”

  “Beautiful, Suze,” I said. “So this arsenic poisoning—that’s gotta be part of the ritual too. All we have to do is track down the spell based on a single ingredient. Because that will be easy.” There were probably a thousand spells that used arsenic.

  “It’s not a single ingredient. They also got this off of the bodies.” Suzy tossed a glass vial at me. I lifted it to the light. The bottom was filled with blackish-gray granules. “I’m waiting for lab to send results, but I think it might be grave dirt.”

  “Ash,” I said. “Not dirt. Ash.”

  “How can you tell?”

  I shrugged. “I can always tell.”

  “Okay, smart ass. What kind of ash?”

  With a flick of my thumb, I uncorked the bottle. “Where’d you say you found this? One of the dead witches was carrying it?” I lifted it to my nose for a quick smell.

  “Some of that substance was found under their fingernails. That particular sample was scraped from their sinuses.”

  Maybe I didn’t need to smell the ash after all.

  I put the cork back in place. Set it down on the edge of the metal table. “It’s rowan,” I said. “I’ve got some at home. Same vibrations.”

  “Vibrating ash,” Suzy said, rolling her eyes again. “That’s the same type we found at the bank yesterday. I’ll let the scrying team know. Maybe we’re looking for a garden store, landscapers, something like that. Could narrow down the search.” She snapped the folder shut.

  “Scryers. Good. Yeah, that’s a great idea.”

  If the scryers were looking at those areas, then we wouldn’t have boots on the ground. It was a smart allocation of resources. Nicely low budget. Much cheaper than sending out a fleet of SUVs and several teams to sweep.

  It also meant I wouldn’t bump into other agents if I wanted to investigate off the record.

  “You’re thinking about getting up to something, aren’t you?” Suzy asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m trying not to blow chunks all over the evidence.”

  She laughed and pulled the sheet over Ahmed’s face. I couldn’t help but glance at him before he disappeared. He was swollen and blue from his time in the water. Bits of his face were missing. Looked like Ahmed had been delicious to the various creatures living in the ocean.

  Suzy rolled them back into their refrigerators, and they were out of sight, out of mind.

  Aniruddha arrived as she was locking up. He was carrying a coffee mug the size of an Olympic swimming pool. It said “Give me java or give me death” on the side. “Got a minute to talk about the case?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “He’s asking me, Hawke,” Suzy said. “Remember who’s doing double time on the robbery and the dead witches here? And yes, I have a minute.” She gave me a significant look, the kind of look that told me to fuck off, and I lifted my hands in surrender.

  “I’ll review the evidence in the waiting room,” I said. “Plan our next move.”

  They remained silent until I left.

  The morgue’s waiting room was one of the nicer places on campus since it was one of the few places we occasionally brought outsiders. It was where family members hung out until they could identify their dead loved ones. Our interior decorator had gone the extra mile to make that miserable experience slightly more pleasant.
The room was adorned with a few potted plants, walls painted in warm colors, even comfortable chairs.

  I dropped into one of those chairs and checked out the map that Suzy had forwarded to my email.

  Three points of a five-pointed star. The remaining two points created a broad search area. The scrying team was slow. They could be at it for days.

  But they didn’t know that I already had the fourth point.

  Domingo’s house fit perfectly on the developing pentagram.

  The remaining point looked like a dense industrial area. I wasn’t familiar with it. Didn’t have much reason to head over to that neck of the woods under normal circumstances. I checked the time. Despite my eventful morning, it was still only mid-afternoon—plenty of time to search the area.

  I’d need an excuse to blow Suzy off. She’d want to come with me if I told her I was investigating something related to the bank robbery and she’d flip her shit if I vanished again.

  She hadn’t come out of the morgue yet, though.

  I wasted time by trying to think of a plausible excuse for leaving. A doctor’s appointment or something. Yeah. That would work.

  Ten minutes later, she still hadn’t come out of the morgue.

  I texted Domingo’s burner phone to set up a rendezvous. Then I waited some more.

  Fifteen minutes, and she still wasn’t out.

  Forget it. I was done waiting.

  I headed into the morgue, dropping my phone into my pocket. “Hey, Suzy,” I began. “I’m going to…”

  Aniruddha had his hands braced against the wall. Suzy was trapped in front of him, back against the refrigerator doors.

  I reacted without even thinking. I didn’t need to think.

  “Hey!”

  In three strides, I crossed the morgue, grabbed Aniruddha by the shoulder, and tossed him into one of the empty tables. He caught himself against it, managed to stay upright. But only until I punched his goddamn face in.

  One solid hit and he was down.

  “What the fuck?” Suzy asked. I turned, and the instant she had my attention, she punched me in the stomach. Man, that woman could inflict some serious pain with her tiny little fists. “Goddammit, you fuck-brain, what the fuck is wrong with you?”