The Road to Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Thriller (Preternatural Affairs Book 9)

by SM Reine

  But I’m not a smart guy. I’ve never taken “this is impossible and you’re gonna die” as an answer.

  Like I said, my name’s Cèsar Hawke. I’m one of the few survivors of the Breaking. I keep busy trying to save refugees.

  And now I’ve been taken captive on a yacht by three total strangers.

  “This is Isobel Stonecrow,” Fritz said, indicating the taller woman on the yacht. I offered my hand to shake Isobel’s. She took it in both of hers, smiling sadly as she squeezed my fingers.

  “Nice to meet you, Isobel.” My tongue felt clumsy when I talked to her because Isobel Stonecrow was gorgeous. No way around noticing that.

  She wore a bikini halter top that barely covered the swells of her very nice, probably artificial, breasts. She’d paired that with cutoff shorts that showed off the bottom swells of her ass and many miles of creamy tan leg.

  While everyone else was withering away with starvation, Isobel Stonecrow had meat on her bones. Mostly on her hips and thighs, exactly where I liked it.

  “Yes, it’s nice to meet you too, Cèsar.” Isobel hadn’t let go of my hand. Her fingernails stroked the back of my wrist.

  I carefully disengaged before my dick realized I was being petted by a pretty lady and gave me the most awkward boner ever. No time for boners in the apocalypse.

  “And this is Suzume Takeuchi,” Fritz said, gesturing to the other woman. “You can call her Suzy.”

  “You better call me Suzy,” the short woman said. Her handshake felt like she was trying to jerk my arm out of its socket. “If I get called Suzume one more time I’m gonna have to stab someone in the eyeball.”

  Suzy wasn’t as in-your-face pretty as Isobel. She looked as fatigued and deflated as I felt. She wore a baggy Yale tee with basketball shorts. But there was pleasant symmetry to her features, and an even more pleasant stubborn set to her chin. It took stubborn souls to survive days like these.

  “Nice to meet you all,” I said, casually saluting each of them in turn. “Guess thanks are in order for saving my ass back there. My ass, and Halle’s ass.”

  “Who’s Halle?” asked Isobel. Decorative feathers framed a face with full lips, big eyes, and a hurt scowl. “Was this Halle woman your girlfriend? Whose children were those?”

  “The Becketts were my clients,” I said. “If you know who I am, you’ve gotta know what I do, too. I’m the best coyote in San Fran.”

  Suzy choked on the water she’d been sipping from a near-empty bottle. “Coyote?”

  “Maybe not the best word to use for me, but…” I shrugged. Coyotes used to be guys who helped Mexican immigrants cross the border into the United States. Nobody wanted to cross into the good ol’ US of A anymore. I’d stolen the word for my use. Some people pillage electronics stores in the apocalypse; I pillage other cultures. And also electronics stores. Look, it’s not like anyone needed those Blu-ray players more than me.

  “Then it’s true.” Fritz sat back on a beach chair, one foot tucked under him and the other dangling. His dangling foot appeared to be made of metal. He lived on a yacht like a billionaire but had a peg leg like a pirate. “You’ve been helping people in the Bay Area. When you vanished, I feared the worst, even though I knew you couldn’t be dead.”

  My eyes narrowed with suspicion.

  I had two beautiful women gazing at me like I was Bruno Mars, but I was a lot more fixated on this guy, who thought I had “vanished.” A stranger had no business worrying where I wandered.

  Yet I felt weirdly excited to see him.

  Really excited.

  Fritz Friederling had grabbed me so that he could throw me onto the yacht. If I were being honest with myself, that brief touch had made me feel…different. Like I’d just chugged a half-dozen strength poultices and could now run a marathon.

  He was like the sun breaking through the clouds after months of ash. I wanted to go sit next to him. I needed to bask in the warmth.

  I didn’t.

  “You heard I’d be around here,” I said carefully. “Who told you?”

  The three people exchanged looks. “We just investigated, is all,” Suzy said. “We were looking for your help. Word of mouth. That kind of thing.”

  It sounded legit. My clients always found me by reputation.

  “All I’m doing is hooking survivors up with boats to help them escape. You already have a boat and you don’t need me,” I said. “You should be sailing for New Zealand right now.”

  “We came to you because we’re looking for someone.” Isobel settled alongside Fritz. He let his arm fall around her shoulders. “A friend of ours has been gone since the Breaking, and we want him back.”

  Locating people was one of my better PI skills. I’d done it for a few families separated in the chaos, though this was the weirdest way anyone had approached me for the work. “You think he’s in this neck of the woods?”

  “Yes.” Isobel’s throat worked as she swallowed hard. “We do.”

  I raked a hand through my hair, glanced back at the city. It was too foggy to see much of it. Not weird for San Francisco. The towering plumes of fire-lit smoke were the weird part.

  It was getting darker. The storm of demons had arrived, and I didn’t have time for this chat. I began to say, “I don’t—”

  “We’ll feed you if you talk to us,” Isobel interrupted. “Fresh food. I can’t imagine you’ve had anything fresh in a long time.”

  “Well…” It did sound good, but it wasn’t enough.

  Fritz’s eyes sparked with intelligence. “I can get you a small amount of fuel,” he said.

  “No we can’t,” Suzy said. “We’re running low.”

  “Everyone is running low,” Fritz said.

  I performed the mental math—how much gasoline I still needed to fill my tanks, how much time I had before that black cloud of demons descended on the shore.

  “All right,” I said slowly. “I’ll talk to you, but I need the fuel first.”

  “You can have it after we talk,” Fritz said.

  Damn, he knew I’d been thinking of swimming back alone. “Okay. I’ll take it after we talk, but before I go searching for anyone,” I said.

  He nodded. “Agreed.”

  “Fine.” I grabbed the side of the boat when a wave tossed us, Coke bottle thumping against my thigh. “You want me to find someone in San Francisco, I’ll need details. Lots of details. The city’s empty, but it’s still huge.”

  “We can give you all the details you want,” Fritz said. “Sit down. There’s a story about how our friend went missing that you’ll need to hear in order to find him.” He patted the beach chair next to him.

  Good God, I wanted to sit next to him.

  I folded my arms and leaned against the cabin wall instead. “Start talking. And I’ll need a water bottle for my time, too.”

  “Such modest demands.” Suzy fished a bottle out of a cooler and hurled it at my head. “Happy?”

  I caught it. “Sure.” I drank, savoring the clean taste of pure, unrecycled water. Damn that was good. “Don’t let the boat drift far while you talk. I’m not ready to leave the city.”

  A line appeared between Fritz’s eyebrows. “Very well,” he said. “This story starts right before the Breaking. Back when the world was still normal. Suzy, would you please?”

  Chapter 2

  August 2013 — A pocket dimension anchored in Los Angeles, California

  It was Suzy Takeuchi’s first time trying to torture a man, but she was doing a great job for a newbie. “What’s that you say? No more thumbtacks?” She shook her pencil case, peering inside as though searching for something softer than pins. “Hmm…I don’t know. Do you think it’d hurt less if I jammed this pen in your ear?”

  “No,” David Hodgins said, “please, for the love of Adam, don’t hurt me anymore.”

  “Wuss.” Suzy tossed the pencil case on the table. Thumbtacks scattered.

  “Very wussy,” agreed Gary Zettel.

  The fact that he agreed wit
h her, and approved of what she was doing, was enough to make Suzy want to stop with the whole torture thing.

  Zettel wasn’t good people. An ally, yes, but still definitely not good people. Suzy couldn’t shake the itchy feeling that agreeing with him meant that she was bad people too.

  She’d been dealing with that itchy feeling a lot lately.

  Suzy was inhabiting a cavern shared by the Apple. Some people regarded the Apple as a cult, but she preferred not to use such a narrow-minded classification. It wasn’t like they were wearing white robes and poisoning themselves on behalf of Adam, whom they worshipped as God. They were normal people.

  Normal people who occasionally tortured unhelpful members for information.

  Hodgins had been embedded in the Office of Preternatural Affairs until two days earlier. He’d been transferred from the Fernley base and sent to Las Vegas to respond to an increase in demon activity.

  A lot of people were dying in Las Vegas. David Hodgins should have spied on events and reported back to Zettel.

  Instead, Hodgins had run.

  They’d caught him trying to hide out in San Jose. What little intelligence Hodgins provided had been unclear. He was scared senseless. He babbled nonsense. He’d even kicked Zettel in the face rather than talk about what he’d witnessed in Nevada.

  Whatever was happening in Vegas—if something was happening in Vegas—it was six kinds of bad.

  Zettel pulled a chair in front of David, dropping onto the seat. He folded his arms over the back. “Do you remember how one of my guys picked you up?”

  The right side of David’s face spasmed. “You…you just…I was in Las Vegas and—”

  “A member of the Apple saw you running from a fight,” Zettel growled, “and he learned that your aspis had been devoured by the ichor.”

  “Ichor?” Suzy asked. “What’s this about ichor?”

  Zettel had a nasty habit of keeping secrets, even within the Apple. He used to be the Secretary of the Office of Preternatural Affairs. It had given him a bloated sense of self-importance. Information was need-to-know, and the only one who needed it was Zettel.

  “It’s the same ichor we saw in Reno a few years back,” Zettel said.

  She gnawed on a knuckle to keep herself from swearing as much as she’d have liked.

  Suzy hadn’t seen the ichor since 2009, but there was no forgetting how a single drop could turn anyone into stone. It was the scariest thing she’d ever seen. And Suzy had seen some shit. “This isn’t from the Mother of All Demons again, is it? I thought she was dead.”

  “She’s dead. Not all of her offspring are.” Zettel turned back to Hodgins. “Who’s leading the demons in Las Vegas? What’s the plan?”

  “I don’t know,” he moaned.

  “You don’t know. You don’t know. That’s because you ran before you could learn anything.” Zettel flicked his wrist, and a switchblade appeared. “You’re useless to us and worse than useless to your aspis. When you ran, you let her die.”

  Suzy winced. “Oh man.” No wonder Hodgins had gone senseless. A kopis who lost his aspis was lucky to escape with his life, much less his sanity.

  A kopis was a human born to be a warrior against the preternatural—a sword in the fight against evil. Some kopides were magically bound to witches named aspides. An aspis served as the shield to match the sword. It was a deadly powerful bond. When one went, the other usually went too.

  Hodgins’s cowardice had allowed his aspis to die.

  It was a slightly huge deal.

  “Maybe you should let me finish questioning him.” Suzy held a hand out for the switchblade.

  Zettel had gotten the fire of craziness in his eyes, and he wasn’t letting the knife go. He’d lost his first aspis, Allyson, while working for the OPA, and never got over it. He couldn’t be trusted with a kopis who’d let his aspis die on purpose. “I’ll take care of him.”

  “Sure you will,” Suzy said. “But I can get information out of him without killing him. Although I won’t rule it out, either.” She threw that last bit at Hodgins, hoping to Bad-Cop her way to information.

  Hodgins was beyond being affected by such psychological manipulation. Bleeding from his fingernails, slumped against the chair, sweaty hair plastered to his forehead, Hodgins was beyond pretty much anything.

  Zettel pressed the flat of the knife against Hodgins’s thigh. “I can take care of this aspis-killer on my own.”

  Suzy was saved from having to intervene by the door creaking open.

  Cèsar Hawke had entered the room.

  He always looked like he wasn’t sure what to do with himself around members of the Apple, and he looked totally disarmed at the sight of Zettel with a knife. He must have been hoping to find Suzy alone.

  “Hey,” he said, edging closer toward her.

  His eyes fell on Hodgins.

  Cèsar took one look at the guy strapped to the chair and suddenly knew exactly what he was doing with himself. Confidence closed around him like a hard shell. “I’m surprised you guys didn’t call me in for this interrogation,” Cèsar said, snapping the pencil case shut on a handful of bloodstained tacks. “I have experience with this.”

  “You’re not willing to do what needs to be done,” Zettel said dismissively. He’d withdrawn the knife. Suzy exhaled.

  “You’re too willing to do it. Remember who the good guys are, remember that good guys don’t torture people, and pull it back a few degrees,” Cèsar said.

  Anyone else would have flinched when Zettel scowled at them. The former secretary was King Kong miniaturized by shrink-ray, and he was intimidating despite his height.

  Cèsar didn’t flinch. Didn’t back down. In his mind, it was wrong to stick thumbtacks into anyone, even a traitor, and he wouldn’t back down for anything.

  “David Hodgins is a Union officer,” Zettel said through clenched teeth. “He was present for an incident in Las Vegas that may impact the entire world. We need to know what happened, and unless you’ve got intel…” He gave Cèsar an expectant look. “Do you have intel?”

  Cèsar was a special agent for the Office of Preternatural Affairs, which had been a secret government organization when Suzy worked for them. The agency was no longer a secret from the public. But they weren’t much more transparent than that.

  “If something’s going on in Las Vegas, I don’t have clearance to know about it,” Cèsar said.

  “David did. He can tell us what’s going on. So what’s your problem with this, exactly?” Zettel asked, waving the switchblade.

  “I don’t know,” Cèsar said, tapping his chin thoughtfully. It was a cute expression on a guy as big as he was, delivered unselfconsciously. He wasn’t aware of how cute he could be. In fact, Cèsar believed himself to be as intimidating as Zettel. “You’re sticking pins in a guy tied to a chair. Does that sound like the shit that good guys do to you?”

  “Good guys,” Zettel spat. “Those kinds of words are meaningless.”

  “The words aren’t meaningless to me,” Cèsar said.

  “Takeuchi?” Zettel asked.

  Suzy did not want to be in the middle of this. She tossed her hands in the air. “Hodgins is a traitorous piece of shit. We need information. You’re not getting intel from Secretary Friederling, so we’ve got to find it somewhere else.”

  Fritz Friederling was the secretary who had replaced Zettel as the head of the OPA. He also happened to be kopis to Cèsar’s aspis. That made Cèsar a theoretically powerful member of the Apple—but only in theory.

  Cèsar had never probed for information he wasn’t supposed to have. Never took advantage of Fritz’s trust to get better intel. He just observed, reported, and frowned when the Apple did things he found unethical.

  In other words, he was kind of a terrible cultist.

  Cèsar shot Suzy big puppy-dog eyes. “You think David Hodgins really has information we need?”

  “I do,” she said.

  When Zettel returned his attention to David, Cèsar did
n’t try to intervene, thankfully.

  Passivity was as good as endorsement in this case.

  Zettel jammed the knife in Hodgins’s thigh. Their captive screamed.

  “Can we talk, Suze?” Cèsar whispered, looking faintly green.

  “Sure. Hey, Zettel! I’ve got some other shit to do!” Suzy called.

  Zettel’s eyes flicked to Cèsar, then back to the bloody man strapped to the chair. “I can handle the rest of this.”

  Suzy took Cèsar away—out of the room, away from the dirty work. Even though the door quickly fell shut behind them, she heard when David began to scream.

  Chapter 3

  The room the Apple used for torture was positioned at the rear of the cavern. The cavern itself occupied the entirety of a pocket dimension designed by Suzy. When they stepped out of their interrogation room, she found herself on a chthonic island encircled by a moat fed by waterfall. Suzy had added a lot of dramatic features like that to the plane. Between the Japanese-inspired supports, the wall of computers, and the glowing stalactites, her cave was practically perfect in every way. Much like Suzy herself.

  The main chamber bustled with more than a dozen members of the Apple. Most of them had come from the Half Moon Bay Coven, with a couple White Ash Coven transplants. Suzy didn’t trust any of them more than she trusted Zettel.

  Neither, apparently, did Cèsar. He walked briskly through the cave without opening his mouth.

  “What’s up, Hawke?” Suzy asked, hurrying to keep up with him. She needed two steps for every one he took with those muscular giraffe legs.

  Cèsar glanced around, probably to make sure that nobody was getting too close to them. “I don’t feel good,” he said under his breath. “Need a little help getting in my skin.”

  “Already?” He’d complained of feeling sick two days ago too. It used to take a week between treatments. “Okay. Get in the room.” Suzy swiped a hand over a warded door set into the wall of the cave. Their bedroom unlocked.

  Their bedroom. Because Suzy and Cèsar had been sharing for as long as Cèsar had been in the Apple.