Ashes and Arsenic

by SM Reine

  The keys jingled as I reached up to unlock the door. I didn’t try to silence them. If someone was waiting inside my apartment, I wanted them to think I was oblivious. To be specific, I wanted them shooting at head or chest level.

  It took a few sharp twists of my wrist and some jiggling to get the crappy lock unlocked. I left them hanging in the doorknob, held my breath, and pushed the door open.

  It was dark inside my apartment. Someone had pulled the blinds and closed my blackout curtains on top of them, leaving it dark as a mineshaft. That hadn’t been my work. I liked getting a little sunlight in my space. It was the only way to keep my fern from shriveling into a brown husk.

  There wasn’t anyone waiting for me where I could see.

  One of the doors down the hall started to open, so I entered my apartment and shut the door halfway, leaving only a sliver of light.

  My heart tried to hammer out of my chest as I slipped into the kitchen, using the wall as cover. I kept the gun aimed at the floor even though that wasn’t a safe bet for a misfire. One of the problems with any apartment above the first floor was that I was surrounded on almost all sides by civilians—people I didn’t want to accidentally kill in a firefight.

  I grabbed a knife out of the block in the kitchen. Holstered my gun.

  The lesbian couple in the apartment next to mine was arguing. Their voices were muffled by the walls, quiet enough that I couldn’t tell what they were saying. They usually saved the real screaming for two in the morning. But now, they were just loud enough to mute the little sounds an intruder might make. I couldn’t tell if I was alone or not.

  Easing around the wall, I glanced into my living room.

  Nobody there.

  My apartment wasn’t huge. There were only so many places an enemy could hide.

  Bedroom seemed the likelier culprit.

  I flattened my back to the wall, reached my hand around to turn the doorknob.

  The door creaked open.

  There wasn’t anyone in my bedroom. The sheets were rumpled from where I’d slept badly the night before, my eight-tracks were neatly arranged on the shelf, the boxes of DVDs piled up in front of the window hadn’t been knocked over. My closet doors had fallen off months ago, so I could see there wasn’t anyone in there, either.

  Which only left the bathroom.

  My heart rate accelerated as I slipped toward it. If anyone was in the apartment to kill me, they’d do it in there.

  They had to know I was coming for them. They’d be ready to kill.

  I shoved the bathroom door open.

  A woman shrieked as she leaped off of the toilet, jerking one of my Star Wars bath towels in front of her body.

  “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry!” I shielded my eyes, trying not to see the lady who’d been using my bathroom.

  She held the towel tight to her chest with one hand as the other hurried to jerk her pants around her hips again. “Get out, get out, get out!”

  “Sorry!”

  I backed out halfway before realizing that there shouldn’t have been any women using my toilet at all.

  She got her pants into place and tossed my towel into the tub so she could button the fly. I kept my eyes above her waist because I’m nice like that. Still, I saw that she was wearing leather pants, motorcycle boots with buckles, a scoop-necked shirt that flashed her cleavage. All black, of course. Can’t be a badass wearing pink and yellow polka dots.

  It was Aisha, the witch who’d held me at gunpoint in the warehouse.

  And I’d caught her taking a dump in my bathroom.

  The Office of Preternatural Affairs is a great place to work. Since it’s a government job, my benefits are good. Retirement is included in the contract. I’ve even got a whole month of vacation days each year, which is great to think about while I’m working long hours at my desk and not going anywhere fun.

  All that said, the OPA is a fucking terrible place to work.

  Our contracts are evil. I mean, literally evil. The magic that they used to wipe our memories if we got fired had been taken from a demon crime lord.

  I’d also been threatened with death by the vice president just because I’d accessed information that was beyond my clearance level.

  And the OPA also keeps all of its employees under surveillance.

  So the first thing I did when I realized Aisha wasn’t trying to kill me was perform a sweep for bugs.

  She watched in bemusement as I grabbed all the usual devices. There was always one stuck under the kitchen counter, a couple in the light fixtures, a camera stuffed behind the books on my shelf.

  I checked everywhere else by habit, too. Sometimes the agent assigned to replace the bugs got creative.

  Good thing I looked, because there was one on my goddamn TV this time.

  “Don’t you know that the magnets can fuck with my screen? If it’s broken, I hope you’re going to pay to replace that!” I yelled directly at the bug before crushing it between my forefinger and thumb.

  “Who are you talking to?” Aisha asked.

  I tossed the broken remnants of the bug into the box with all the others. I’d been doing routine searches of my apartment since moving in the year before and I’d filled a Banker’s Box with the corpses of OPA surveillance devices. I was trying to think of something funny to do with them. Maybe some kind of April Fool’s prank on the security department. I’d come up with something.

  “I’m talking to my employers,” I said, running my hands underneath the couch one more time, just to be sure.

  Aisha had been pacing by the kitchen, but she stopped to stare at me. “They’re monitoring your apartment?”

  “Everyone needs a hobby.” There wasn’t anything under the couch. I was reasonably confident I’d gotten all of the bugs out of the living room.

  Aisha looked uncomfortable. “Is there anything in the bathroom?”

  “Probably, but I don’t conduct secret business in the shower. Let them watch me take a piss. I don’t care.” I jammed the box’s lid into place, sat down on my chair, and used the box as a footrest.

  “So your guests are recorded too.”

  Now I understood the problem. “Maybe you shouldn’t have broken in and helped yourself to my bathroom.”

  “You were late getting back from work. I needed the toilet.” Aisha’s body language was practically shouting, I’m really embarrassed!

  At least she wasn’t communicating I’m going to shoot your fucking brains out with her body language.

  There was nothing threatening about her now, even though she was still wearing her guns. I hadn’t tried to take them away. I know better than to separate a woman from her firearms. As long as she didn’t try to pull them on me, she was welcome to keep them.

  “You’re not with the Half Moon Bay Coven,” I said.

  “I am. I’ve worked with them for about a year now.”

  “With them, but not for them.”

  Aisha shot a look at the box under my feet. “Are you sure all of those are disabled?”

  “Hundred percent,” I said. “Smashed them myself.”

  “As for magical surveillance?”

  “You disabled my wards before breaking in. You tell me.”

  She took a locket out of her pocket. It dangled at the end of a silver chain, studded with sapphires that seemed to burn in my lamplight. “It’s not flashing. You don’t have any active magic here. That doesn’t mean that Lenox’s coven couldn’t have placed spells—hers are undetectable.”

  I spread my hands wide in a helpless gesture. “I’m not sneezing. We’re probably fine.”

  “Sneezing?”

  “I’m allergic to magic,” I said.

  Her nose crinkled. “You’re a terrible witch.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that before. Thanks.” I sank into my easy chair, folding my hands behind my head as I studied her. “The magic you cast at my brother’s house was badass, I have to admit. I’ve never seen anyone use a word of power before. Something you learned f
rom the Half Moon Bay Coven?”

  “They do illusion magic. Words of power are a different specialty. I studied them back home, long before I ever came here. Not many witches can speak them.” Aisha said it with no small amount of self-satisfaction.

  “Where’s back home? I mean, who’d you work for before infiltrating Lenox’s coven?”

  “My kopis,” she said. “I’m bound as aspis to Raymond Driver.” She gave me a look when she said that, as though she expected me to recognize the name. I didn’t. Rogue demon hunters weren’t my department. “He’s well-known in Canada.”

  “Are the demons in Canada as polite as the humans? Do they apologize while eviscerating you?”

  “Driver is holding down the city while I work here,” Aisha said, ignoring my question. This wasn’t a woman with an overabundant sense of humor. “As you can imagine, the sickness is getting worse. I need to wrap this up and get back to Driver.”

  “What sickness?” I asked.

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re an aspis. I can feel your bond. How can you not know about the sickness?”

  I shrugged. “My kopis is out of town and I feel fine.”

  “The sickness develops over weeks of separation. The bond begins to sour if you don’t spend enough time with your kopis. It weakens your magic, twists your thoughts, makes you ache for their presence.”

  I had a hard time imagining I’d ever “ache” for Fritz.

  But okay.

  It didn’t surprise me that there were things about the bond that I didn’t know. The partnership had been dumped on me by upper management at the OPA. I hadn’t volunteered, and I definitely hadn’t entered the arrangement well informed.

  Luckily, Fritz wasn’t the worst guy to be bound to. He had a kick-ass home theater that I could use whenever I wanted and a lot of really nice cars.

  But just like anything the OPA did, there were always consequences. Some kind of binding sickness seemed par for the course. I’d deal with the idea that I’d have to spend the rest of my life actively seeking Fritz’s companionship later.

  Aisha started pacing again, still twisting the watch on her wrist. “I came here because I thought that the Half Moon Bay Coven was responsible for my brother’s death. They’re not. But they have been up to something. They have bizarre artifacts unlike any I’ve seen before.” She pulled her wallet out of her back pocket, extracted a picture from inside. “Does this look familiar to you?”

  It was a photo of Lenox from the San Francisco Chronicle. They’d done a profile on her because she was an angel investor into several wildly successful startups.

  Aisha pointed at something in the background of the picture, which had been taken at Lenox’s house. She had a statuette no bigger than my hand on her shelf. The statue was weirdly geometric, sort of like a twisted triangle.

  “That looks like First Bank of the Sierras,” I said.

  “Lenox owns that bank. She built it to look identical to one of her strange artifacts. This one.” She shook the article emphatically.

  If Lenox owned the First Bank, and if she were framing Domingo for it, then she would have robbed five million dollars from herself.

  It made sense. The crime would have been difficult without inside help—maybe even impossible. On the other hand, it would have been easy for Lenox to modify her own security footage, plant the remnants of a ritual in the vault, and report it to the OPA.

  The insurance payout for a five million-dollar robbery that hadn’t happened would probably be sweet, too.

  “That would confirm my theory that the bank was built to be part of a ritual,” I said. “The giant pentagram over Los Angeles. Have you noticed it?”

  She gave me a withering look. “I’ve been here for a year, Agent Hawke. I’ve noticed everything. Initially, I assumed the pentagram belonged to Lenox, since it involves her bank.”

  “And because Lenox sent you to establish a point of the pentagram at Domingo’s house,” I said. “That’s why you blew it up.”

  “I went to that house to prevent your brother from performing a ritual sacrifice on the scene. I thought if I destroyed it, the dearth of emergency responders would leave the site occupied long enough to prevent the completion of Domingo’s ritual.”

  It was so ridiculous that I had to laugh. “Bullshit.”

  Aisha wasn’t laughing.

  “See, Lenox might have bizarre artifacts, but she’s not murdering. I’ve been on her enforcement team for a year. I’d know if they were killing people.” Her eyes smoldered with anger. “The only person Lenox has ordered me to kill is Domingo Hawke.”

  “That’s because Lenox is trying to pin her crimes on him,” I said.

  “So why did I find a sacrifice at your brother’s house when I returned this evening?” Aisha asked.

  “You what?”

  “After Agent Banerji removed you from the hotel, I returned to Domingo Hawke’s house to finish what I’d started this morning. But your brother got there before I could. He’d sacrificed another witch and formed the next point on the pentagram.” Aisha pulled another photograph out of her wallet.

  I only glanced at the picture when she offered it to me. I’d met my death quota for the day. I didn’t need to look for long to tell it was a dead woman in Domingo’s living room.

  “Lenox did that,” I said.

  Aisha huffed with frustration. “She sent us to the warehouse because she expected to find your brother performing a ritual sacrifice there, too.”

  “Then she was deliberately misleading you. All of you.”

  “Aren’t you listening to me? Lenox doesn’t need to frame your brother for anything. She doesn’t have to convince me that he’s evil. The Half Moon Bay Coven didn’t kill my brother—Domingo Hawke did.”

  I snorted. “I’d love to see all your nonexistent evidence.”

  Aisha leaned over me, grabbing either arm of the chair I was sitting in. It was probably meant to be an intimidating gesture. I was surprised that it actually kinda worked. With or without a gun in her hand, danger haloed Aisha. I believed she would shoot me in a heartbeat.

  “Your brother killed mine,” Aisha said, enunciating each word. “I’m only away from Driver, and suffering this separation sickness, to avenge DeShawn. I won’t go back until I get justice.”

  “So that’s why you tried to kill me in the warehouse,” I said. “To avenge DeShawn’s death. Not because you’re a mercenary working for a murderous high priestess.”

  “My cohorts shot at you. I didn’t. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.” Her eyes narrowed as she studied my face. “You know why I’ve come to you in peace today? It’s because I’ve read your files. You’ve distanced yourself from Domingo’s choices, and I believe when you realize everything he’s done, you’ll bring him to justice.”

  If what she said was true—if Domingo was a murderer responsible for the huge pentagram forming over Los Angeles—then she was right. I’d arrest him. I’d watch him vanish into one of our black bags and hate myself for the rest of my life.

  Good thing Domingo wasn’t a murderer.

  “You don’t have any proof,” I said. “You don’t have one goddamn bit of evidence.”

  Aisha stepped back. “Come with me. I’ll show you.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AISHA DROVE A LIFTED pickup—a beast on four wheels with glistening chrome accents. She’d replaced the Ford logo with skulls. The inside of it smelled like old blood.

  “How many murder victims have you transported in here?” I asked, pulling on my seatbelt.

  “None,” she said. “I go deer hunting a few times a year.”

  “You? A hunter?”

  “Bow hunting. What? Something weird about that?”

  “I just thought most aspides would leave hunting to, you know, the demon hunters.” I’d never been much for hunting myself. Camping, yes. I got lots of reading done when I was camping. But hunting? Too much sitting around watching for grouse.

  �
�You can’t always wait for your kopis to save you,” Aisha said. “Everyone should know how to kill.”

  She drove east for a long time. Long enough that I was starting to think she might kill me and dump me in the desert.

  But she didn’t go that far. We ended up stopping at a cemetery.

  I’m familiar with most graveyards in our local jurisdiction. Every OPA trainee goes through a phase where they end up on “dead duty,” trying to catch witches pretending to be necromancers. If there’s something more boring than staking out a cemetery all night, I haven’t experienced it yet.

  I’d never been to this cemetery before. Its fences were tall iron bars with spikes at the top. An elaborate crucifix hung over the gate. The lawn beyond looked like a nice park aside from all the tombstones: grassy hills, mature trees, well-trimmed bushes.

  Rich people cemetery. Don’t get as many lurkers in those kinds of places, where they’re more likely to have security protecting the interests of their deceased clients.

  Aisha parked her car a couple blocks away and we walked to the gates. The heat was a fist on my lungs by the time we got there. It was almost sundown, but it was beyond hot, maybe the hottest day of the year so far. The shadows of the fence stretched like spears threatening to impale us if we got too close. The grass on the other side was yellowing and brittle. Even rich people don’t get green grass when a drought gets bad enough.

  A familiar car was parked outside the gates—an ugly gold sedan literally held together by duct tape.

  “Domingo’s here,” I said. “That’s my car. He took it earlier.”

  “You actually drive that thing?” Aisha asked, nose wrinkling.

  “I’m frugal,” I said.

  “Some things are worth spending money for.” She patted her dashboard like a knight might pat the flank of his beloved steed.

  We reached the front gates. There was a security guard posted by the entrance, sitting in a little building like a tollbooth.

  I couldn’t imagine that security guards saw many mourners in leather pants, but he didn’t stop us on the way in.