Bitter Thirst

by SM Reine

  “No idea. We’re not finding any kind of history on the shooter. He’s a normal guy. Normal life. Normal job.”

  “A witch who’s not sure if he’s pissed at the OPA or not, but pissed enough to kill a few Union guys,” I said.

  “You’re lucky you weren’t one of them. In all seriousness, Agent Hawke—are you okay?” The way that Agent Bryce asked that made me think she didn’t mean physically. She’d picked out my bag to go upstairs and now she was making sure I was okay to work.

  “I don’t deserve you, baby,” I said.

  “Seriously,” she said. “I have friends in HR.”

  “Nobody has friends in HR. Nobody in HR has a heart capable of loving other people.”

  Agent Bryce didn’t look like she even considered smiling. She might have been a good partner, but she didn’t think I was funny.

  I straightened my expression. “Sorry about that, Agent Bryce. I’m good to work. Thank you for checking.”

  “That’s more like it,” she said.

  She waddled off to do important Agent Bryce things.

  I headed upstairs.

  Fritz’s team had unpacked everything, so the penthouse looked like the nicest office space ever. It was being occupied by a handful of people who looked way too young to work for the OPA. Interns? Whoever they were, they hadn’t been prepared for their first close encounter of the zombie kind. Male and female alike were staring at the undead woman helping them get settled in to work.

  Even when she was pretending to be first lady to Fritz’s president, Isobel Stonecrow managed to look like she was wearing a sexy Halloween costume. Her skirt was too short, too tight. Her blouse dipped too low in the front. There was a whole lot of latte skin exposed, and with this many glamours at this distance, the latte skin looked alive.

  She smiled when she saw me over the heads of the interns.

  That was when time stopped.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the interns. When she strolled toward me, she had every single pair of eyes on her.

  That was probably why she stopped a few feet back, just outside of arm’s reach. And I’ve got impressive reach on these arms of mine.

  She didn’t touch me, I didn’t touch her. We didn’t do that where people could see.

  It was hard, though.

  I’d been with Isobel off and on ever since we met in a graveyard years back. I had tried to arrest her, and she’d escaped me. Turned out Isobel was a hard woman to catch. Until she wanted to be caught. And right around the time she’d married Fritz, she decided she liked being caught by me.

  Every time I spent a few minutes away from Isobel, I started talking myself out of our weird relationship. The one where Isobel whispered that she loved me while I was inside her, and then got up the next morning to hang out with her husband again.

  Put in those terms it was easy to say Isobel and I should split. I was stupid for ever being in that kind of relationship. Beyond stupid. Apocalyptic moron. I’d proven I could land a woman like Krista, even if only for six months, and I didn’t need to push my luck with Isobel.

  But then I saw her again, and…

  Well, it wasn’t the body that convinced me. It was her smile, and the way she tilted her head a few degrees to the left when she looked at me.

  I wanted to take her into my arms, kiss her, whisper things back to her. And the not-so-temporary insanity seized me every goddamn time I saw the warmth in her brown eyes. I was helpless against the necrocognitive and I hadn’t even been dead yet.

  “Hey Izzy,” I said.

  Her mouth twitched. “Hey Cèsar.”

  Fuck me left, right, and sideways.

  “Where’s Fritz?” I asked.

  “Still with Justice Gwara. They relocated from the penthouse to his room when the staff showed up.” There wasn’t a hint of jealousy in Isobel’s voice, even though she had to know what they were doing.

  Awkward.

  “I didn’t know you were going to be here,” I said. She hadn’t ridden in on the jet with us.

  “I’ve been here for a couple of days. You would have known if you’d accepted my invitation to dinner before I left.”

  “I haven’t been hungry,” I said stupidly.

  Mirth sparkled in Isobel’s eyes. “So what are you doing up here?”

  “Trying to figure out which hotel room is mine,” I said. “I need to get into my luggage. Maybe take a shower.”

  “A shower sounds amazing,” she said. “I just got the key to my room with Fritz. I’ll grab yours.” Her booty jiggled from side to side as she strutted over to a table by the wall, where there was a whole box of room keys with sticky notes on them. She bent down to locate the one with my name on it.

  She bent like that on purpose. I knew she was trying to fucking tease me.

  “Here we go,” she said, handing me the key.

  “What’s with the ducklings?” I asked, sticking the key and my hands in my pockets, where they would be compelled to behave themselves.

  “They’re new hires with untrained magical potential,” Isobel said. “Indications suggest that they may have some hint of necro magic. I volunteered to show them what I do, and see if any of them react.”

  “New hires? To what?”

  “The OPA. They’re recruiting, and there are a lot of applicants since OPA employees are exempt from certain parts of PRAY.” There was tension at the corners of her eyes. She would never get old enough to have wrinkles, but creases appeared when she was worrying.

  There was a lot to worry about.

  “What dead guy are you talking to? If you tell me it’s George Washington, I call dibs on interviewing him. I wanna know if he really cut down that tree.”

  “Maybe we can find him later.” Isobel tugged on my sleeve to pull me out of the doorway. I was distracted enough by her touch that it took me a second to realize we were clearing a path for a body bag.

  The crinkle of tarp-like material on the body bag was distinctive. A couple of men wearing black suits a hell of a lot like mine wrestled a fresh body into the room.

  How could I tell it was fresh? Dripping blood is always an indicator. And let me tell you, body bags are meant to contain drippy things.

  “What in the world do you think you’re doing?” An angry woman stormed out of the back. “My God, you’re making an enormous mess!” It was Janet from forensics, which meant that Fritz had imported her as part of his team too. “Who is going to clean that up? I’m not!”

  “Wait,” I said to Isobel. My heart was sinking. “In that bag…that’s not…?”

  “Your shooter,” she said. No wonder there was so much tension in her features. Her fingers slipped against mine. “Someone has to question him. Today, I’m someone.”

  The new hires had been given something to focus on other than Isobel’s cleavage, and only about half of them were coping. The other half were about to throw up, or—no, wait, one of them was already throwing up. That hadn’t taken long.

  “What are you going to do if you discover a necromancer in that batch of babies fresh from the nursery?” I asked. The last time that Isobel and I had tried to nurture a young necromancer, she’d ended up destroying half of the western United States.

  “Report them to Fritz,” Isobel said, “of course.” I noticed how she said Fritz, and not the OPA. Fritz wasn’t collecting assets for our new secretary. He was collecting assets for himself. “You’re welcome to stick around for the interview if you want, but I doubt you will.”

  “Not that it doesn’t sound fun, getting to see what a guy looks like when my sister blows his skull apart, but…”

  Isobel’s eyes brightened. “So that was your sister. Where is she?”

  “Agent Bryce magicked her out of custody and she’s run off with Pops,” I said.

  “Ooh, Pops is here too? When do I get to meet them?”

  Well that was a loaded fucking question.

  When was I going to introduce my not-girlfriend who was married to my boss to my
estranged family?

  “I wish they weren’t even here, Izzy,” I said.

  The body bag had been unzipped. We didn’t have time to keep talking about this. Isobel did have time to look hurt by my reluctance. “We’ll talk later,” she said. She brushed her lips along my jawline. It was enough to fill my mind with the scent of grave dirt and nightshade. My hands itched with the urge to grab her.

  Isobel was not using a lust charm against me. Yes, I’d checked. This was one hundred percent stupid Cèsar Hawke.

  I lingered by the door to the hallway, watching Isobel take charge of the ducklings. She wasn’t feigning the shy smile and withdrawn posture. Isobel wasn’t comfortable in positions of leadership, especially not with OPA employees. She used to be a lawyer, back in the days pre-mortem, but post-mortem Isobel was reclusive. Becoming a zombie had changed her on multiple levels.

  Thinking of which, I had another recluse that needed my attention.

  My bedroom was right across the hallway, in one of the other suites. Not as big and nice as the penthouse, but a step down from that, which was still a thousand times better than my studio apartment at home. It was almost a Fritz-quality room, which meant he’d probably paid for me to have it. Fritz wasn’t going to bully me into moving in, but he was going to make sure my lodgings met his standards.

  I’d never been so relieved to see my luggage intact. Plus, the closet was a walk-in. More than big enough for Suzy’s anchor.

  First things first.

  I cast a spell that would alert me to intruders. It was a fancy casting, and yeah, I had to lean on spells borrowed from the OPA supply closets to make it work. It’d alarm whenever someone other than me showed up in the room.

  Next I swept the room for electronic bugs—thoroughly. The Washington D.C. OPA contingent wasn’t used to someone like me looking for their shit, so the clever hiding places inside hard-to-reach light fixtures did jack shit against my pinching fingers. I crushed three surveillance devices and flushed them down my private toilet.

  Later, the easterners would get sneakier about their bugging, and I’d have to work a lot harder to find everything. But it was so much easier than sweeping my apartment that it was actually kinda cute.

  Then I tossed up some wards—including a spell that verified nobody could hear us—and unzipped my luggage. Suzy’s floating cube thing was still swaddled lovingly in my briefs. I peeled off my underoos.

  Every time my fingers brushed against the cube, I sneezed, so transferring it to my closet made me feel like someone with a dog allergy being killed by a puppy pile. Once it was in place, all the sneezing cut off, just like that. Suzy’s pro-Cèsar wards kicked in and her anti-everyone else wards revved into high gear.

  Blue light swirled around the cube, and Suzy stepped between dimensions.

  “Took you long enough.” She was wearing sweat pants and carrying a mug of coffee that didn’t smell like coffee’s supposed to. Probably spiked with whiskey.

  “Sorry, I was busy almost getting shot by a domestic terrorist,” I said.

  Suzy cackled loudly. Apparently this was funny. I caught myself starting to grin.

  “But seriously, don’t make me wait in the Batcave that long again,” she said. “Have you swept the room for bugs yet?”

  “Yes, Suzy, and I brushed my teeth too.” That last part was a lie. I hadn’t brushed my teeth since waking up. I was feeling pretty gross actually.

  “You were really fucking stupid when I left you behind,” she said. “Considering a domestic terrorist ‘almost’ got the jump on you, it sounds like you’ve only gotten stupider. So I had to check. It’s for my safety.”

  Ah, yes. This was the verbal ass kicking I’d missed. I braced myself for the rest of the tirade, especially the parts where she made colorful threats against my manhood.

  But Suzy just handed me the coffee. “Drink. You’re pale.”

  Yep, it smelled like coffee and whiskey, which were two substances I had no interest in. “Thanks but no thanks.” I handed it back. “Come on, tell me what you’re going to do to me for making you sit in there so long. Does it involve swizzle sticks and hungry rats?”

  “Christ, you’re sick,” she said.

  “Uh, you’re the one who threatened to turn my testicles into kebabs.”

  “Yeah, but you shouldn’t volunteer for it.” Suzy lifted a corner on the curtains so she could look outside. “This is D.C.?”

  “It’s hard to tell when you can only see riots, huh?”

  She let the curtains fall shut. “I’ll need your help coordinating an escape. There should be members of the movement that I can meet here.”

  “Yeah, it’ll have to be later. Right now Izzy’s teaching a bunch of interns how to talk to the dead using the shooter as an example.”

  “I want to see it,” Suzy said.

  “You can’t. The penthouse is full. But if I tell Fritz you’re here, I bet he’ll clean them out, and then—”

  “Fuck, Cèsar,” she said. “How many times do I have to tell you? A secret’s a secret.” She took a velvet bag out of her sweat pants pocket and extracted a pinch of crystalline powder. She tossed it at my wall.

  I sneezed, and my wall vanished.

  Now we could see across the hallway and through the other wall to the penthouse kitchen. The body of the terrorist had been put on the island. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen someone being seriously unsanitary in the kitchen. At this point I was starting to kind of think of kitchens in general as morgues.

  Isobel had already raised Lawrence’s ghost. He was hairless from the top of his head to his eyebrows and…everywhere else. The necrocognitive’s eyes had gone glassy as her mouth moved. She was speaking for him.

  “How are you at reading lips?” I asked.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Suzy said. “I know it’s hard, after you’ve spent your whole life working so hard to be so stupid, but just try not to be.”

  She tossed another pinch of powder at the wall and muttered a few words.

  Isobel’s voice amplified. “I was paid,” she said while Lawrence’s mouth moved. “If I could disrupt the protests, then they would pay me even more. They wanted me to make sure the press got video. And I was supposed to be recorded making statements in favor of PRAY.”

  I jolted. “Is she saying what I think she’s saying?”

  “Your attacker was paid to make the preternatural protesters look bad. God, I’m so fucking shocked. Corrupt politics as usual.”

  One of the new hires asked a question, and I heard him as clearly as I could hear Isobel’s voice. “I don’t know. The hiring was anonymous.”

  I paced in my hotel room, thinking hard. “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Who’d want to make a bigger mess of the country?”

  “The same people trying to pass PRAY. Namely, Lucrezia de Angelis.” She paced the room, tapping a finger on her chin. “I’m going to need street clothes. And then I’m going to need you to carry my portal outside and let me out somewhere discreet.”

  “More clothes? You couldn’t send someone from the movement to your old townhouse?”

  “The landlord sold my stuff before anyone got there.” Suzy folded her arms and looked grumpy. “Anyway, my old clothes wouldn’t fit me anymore. The Batcave is boring. The only thing I have to do in there is eat, so I’ve gained about a million pounds.”

  Had she gained weight? I couldn’t tell.

  Her ass did look better than usual, and her ass always looked fucking fantastic.

  A tiny fist slammed into my bicep and the whole arm went numb. “Stop staring!”

  “I was just trying to figure out what size clothes I should buy you!”

  “I’ll Prime Locker something and you’ll go get it, dumbass,” she said. “You don’t have to figure out my bra size.”

  “I’ll guess 32C,” I said.

  This time, I totally deserved getting punched in the arm.

  “Once I’m out, I’m going to hook up with local members of the mo
vement and tell them what I know,” she said. “We’ve got to figure out a way to discredit the people discrediting protesters. Build that case against Lucrezia.”

  “I’ve got a handle on Lucrezia de Angelis.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t trust the judgment of a guy who thinks these mosquito bites fill out a C-cup,” Suzy said, pointing at her boobs. How was I supposed to not look at that? “All the weight went to my ass. Trust me.”

  “Oh, I do.” I handed her my phone. “Order whatever you want. I’ll get it tonight.” Anything for the lady who wanted to deep-fry my testicles.

  Chapter 10

  Given a choice, I’d have spent my day in the Batcave with Suzy, force-feeding her water and playing Borderlands. But I didn’t have a choice. As soon as Fritz was done reviewing the case in Justice Gwara’s panties, my phone pinged, signaling a text message. It was an automated update from the OPA’s calendaring system. Fritz and I had a meeting with Tate Peterson.

  I might have just seen Union kopides get killed, but that didn’t mean I got an afternoon off of work.

  “Have fun?” I asked Fritz, who was deftly retying his tie as he strode down the hall to the elevator. He’d managed to miss the entire almost-shooting while with the justice.

  The elevator chimed and let us inside.

  “Some fun,” he said. “A lot of work. We’ve got a plan for countering the president’s new executive order, but it’s going to be an uphill fight.”

  “You were working in there?” Justice Gwara had come out of that room smiling like she’d just had a month-long vacation. That wasn’t how I looked when I was getting off the job.

  “I didn’t say we were clothed while working,” Fritz said. “And now to Tate Peterson.”

  “Fun. Are you going to screw him too?”

  Fritz only chuckled.

  We stepped into the parking garage. Someone was trying to scrub the blood off of the pavement. Probably another of the new hires, like the witches upstairs with Isobel. Their eyes radiated misery above the face masks.

  “Wait, are you going to screw Tate too?” I asked, settling myself into the limo seat across from Fritz. “I’m not standing around for that one.”