Spells & Ashes

by Kim Richardson

  “Where are the bodies now?” Kyllian leaned forward more, letting the moonlight fall on his face from the kitchen window.

  “The young man’s body is in a morgue somewhere in Queens,” I answered. “They found the women in Brooklyn and here in New York.”

  “I’ll take Queens,” said the angel, and I beamed at him. It was nice to see him alert and not with a bottle in his hand.

  I turned my attention on the demon. “Faris? You in? I could use your help with this. Like I said, if I get killed—”

  “Yes, yes, yes.” Faris rolled his eyes. “With you dead, I’ll have no more free passes,” said the demon, waving me off. “I’ll see about the female in Brooklyn. I actually have a special lady friend there, so the outing might not be a total waste.” A frown creased his face. “But that’s it. No more favors. Yes?”

  I gave him a tight smile and his frown deepened. I wasn’t going to answer that.

  “Okay,” said Kyllian, checking his baldric. “We can meet up at the pub—”

  “No.” I practically growled the word. “I think it’s best that we all meet back here.”

  Kyllian’s lips parted like he was about to object, his gaze firmly fixed on mine. “Fine.” The angel walked away without another word, though his face had been dark with emotion. The front door opened and closed, letting me know he’d left the house.

  “I’ll see you later, Sammy darling,” purred Faris as he headed down the hall, his kimono billowing behind him. “And when you do, I’ll be expecting something in return for my information.”

  I don’t think so. I thought about mentioning to him that he was about to leave in a kimono with nothing underneath. But he was demon. He knew what he was doing. I smiled at the thought of Vera getting a full frontal.

  “I never thought I’d see the day when an angel and a demon worked together,” said my grandfather, as he moved to stand next to me. “And both working for my granddaughter. I’m not sure what to say.”

  Yes. Both agreed to work with me. My life was so weird.

  “Don’t get too excited,” I said, feeling the beginning of a giant migraine. “I’m going to need all the help I can get to solve this case.” And that was an understatement.

  There were so many questions still unanswered. Too many unknowns. What did Julia have in common with the other murder victims? What was the connection between them? Was there even one?

  But what I really wanted to know was the name of the Greater demon bastard who’d sent those demons to kill me.

  12

  There were a total of four morgues in Manhattan, all with similar buildings and night staff, which made it really easy to use the same glamour sigil for all of them. Still, the first three morgues turned up nothing, and when I’d finally reached the last one, it was one in the morning.

  I was tired, hungry, and angry. Angry that there was a Greater demon in my city hunting innocent humans, and it had sent its demon thugs to try and kill me. Yeah, that was a big fat no-no. No one tried to kill me in my own home. It had been the only place I’d ever felt safe.

  And now the demons had taken that away.

  Bastards.

  Worse, Poe was a no-show, and I was beginning to get worried. What if Vera had caught him? What if he was boiling in her cauldron at this very moment to later serve him as Poe-stew?

  I let out an exasperated breath. That bird was going to give me an ulcer.

  I pressed the buzzer on the wall, the glass door buzzed, and I pulled it open.

  One tends to think that morgues in New York City are all filled with homicides. But most are your usual heart attacks, construction accidents, motorcycle crashes, and a few poor souls in need of further testing. They all lay there, with the calm of sleeping children, stacked on racks inside the coolers, waiting for a turn beneath the knife.

  I’d Scotch-taped my glamour sigil card—yeah, I didn’t have time to get fancy—to my jacket front. Glamour sigils worked on a conscious level, projecting what the persons were familiar with seeing in their environment. Like another guard or coworker.

  I passed a few night guards. And my glamour sigil, well, it worked like a charm—literally. They barely even looked my way. To them, I was one of their colleagues, not some trespassing witch.

  The morgue was almost an identical version of the other three I’d seen—boring white walls with matching boring white tiles, cold, unnaturally clean, all lit with fluorescent lights.

  The night security guard at the front desk barely gave me a glance as I walked past him toward the elevators. After one floor down and the ding from the elevator, I stepped into a cold basement and pushed open the door with a square of frosted glass, the word MORGUE painted on it in large, black letters.

  It was like stepping into a man-sized refrigerator. The cold hit, and my skin erupted in goose bumps. A few degrees colder, and I would be a witch popsicle.

  The air had the harsh scent of cleaning products overlaying the sweetish odor of decay. White light flooded down from the fluorescent lights overhead.

  Heart thumping, I searched the room. Metal refrigerator doors lined the opposite wall, like safe-deposit boxes in a bank but much larger. A stainless-steel autopsy table sat in the middle of the room, a white sheet covering the body, next to a metal stand with a scale on it for weighing organs. A rolling medical cart stood next to the autopsy table topped with an assortment of medical devices that looked like they belonged in a horror movie.

  Moving fast, I made my way to the autopsy table and pulled the sheet off.

  Julia’s blank expression stared back at me.

  Shit. I stood there like an idiot with my mouth hanging open, and the guilt hit. Buckets of it, until I felt like a rope was tightening my insides and then slicing my intestines.

  “Julia, I’m so sorry,” I breathed, staring at her now pale, grayish face and sunken eyes, with a tinge of dark gray on her lips. I hated that her eyes were open. They were lifeless, but for some odd reason they were staring at me. It was almost as though they were accusing me.

  Creepy.

  I’d seen my share of corpses in my line of work, but I’d seen more than enough to last me a whole month tonight. All these bodies left a sour taste in my mouth. I’d had enough dead bodies for tonight.

  The Y-incision of the autopsy had been closed, but they’d done a poor job of it. Its lines carried the precision of a monkey, the stitches uneven and grotesquely large, like a five-year-old had done it. Her head was a little off to the side with a jagged edge to her neck that shouldn’t have been there. A very visible cause of death, a broken neck.

  I let go of the table’s sides when I realized I was gripping them.

  “I’m going to find your killer, Julia. I swear it on the cauldron.”

  The memory of her ghostly soul, frightened and confused, hit me hard. Was there a way to save her soul? I had no idea. Another question to add to my bucket list of questions.

  After I’d covered Julia with the sheet, I moved to the back of the room, took hold of one of the metal refrigerator door handles, and pulled. It slid out on rollers.

  It was a male. I pushed it back and pulled open the next one. Another male, this one was a black man, and judging by the folds in his face and gray hair, he was past seventy.

  I looked at the wall of doors. There were at least nine more.

  “Just great.” Frustrated, I moved over, reached up, and yanked open the next one. My card with the glamour sigil got caught on the corner of the door, the force ripping it off my jacket and sending it flying and floating to the white tile floor.

  But I barely took notice because the body I’d pulled was female.

  Adrenaline surged. I moved to the side to get a good look at her face. Yup. She was in her fifties, but from the looseness of her cheeks and the amount of age spots and sun damage, I’d guess she was closer to sixty. Caucasian with light auburn hair. Her eyes were closed, thank the cauldron. I couldn’t see a cause of death on her. Her neck looked fine. But I wasn’t
here for that.

  I reached out, grabbed her wrist, and twisted it.

  There, just like Julia, was a carved sun with a triangle in the middle. I let go of her wrist, moved over to the other side and checked her left. Another carved sun stared back at me.

  So she had them too. But why? Why her and Julia? And what did it all mean?

  I grabbed the cardboard toe tag attached to her big toe. Susan Young. Could there be a relation to Julia Martinez? It didn’t seem likely. This whole thing didn’t make any sense. Yes, I’d wanted to see if the victims had the same sun carving on their wrists. But now what? Why them? If they weren’t related, what was their connection to each other? Why had the Greater demon killed them?

  “You again,” came a voice behind me.

  I started. Then I spun around, my heart in my throat as I tapped into my will and channeled the energy from my rings, my lips moving in a dark curse—

  And then I frowned.

  The same, insufferably rude angel-born Operative was standing in the doorway, a surprised look on his face.

  Damn. My eyes flicked to my glamour card on the floor between us. Nice going, Samantha. Now the pretty angel-born knows you’re here.

  I kept my face blank. “What the hell are you doing here? You following me or something?”

  The angel-born screwed up his face in a sour expression, like the idea of him following the likes of me would give him an STD. He crossed the room and stood right next to me. Well, next to poor Susan.

  Still very, very close. So close, I could smell the musk from his aftershave and his soap. I could even see how much fuller his bottom lip was than his rather thick top lip. Those looked especially fun to nibble on.

  “I should be asking you the same thing.” His irritation was palpable. God, he was fun. His eyes moved over the body as a silent tension surged between us. “We already know about Mrs. Young,” he said. “I told you there were more bodies.”

  We? Okay, wiseass. “I needed to check for myself. I don’t know you. You could have been lying.” I needed to see for myself if I’d been right about the marks on the other victims’ wrists. I put my hands on my hips. “Why are you here, then?”

  The angel-born gave me a severe look. If I’d been a lesser, scaredy-cat kind of female, I might have run away. But thank the cauldron I was a tough witch. I matched his glare and didn’t look away. He looked away first. I won.

  He turned, walked over to Julia’s table, and pulled the white sheet off of her, exposing her naked body.

  “Hey! What the hell are you doing?” I was next to him in a flash, thinking up new ways to spell his ass. A couple of warts on his pretty face would do wonders for his complexion.

  I didn’t know why, but I felt protective of Julia, even her corpse. She’d suffered enough in life, and now her body had suffered its share of cuts and pokes. It was enough. I didn’t want his angel-born fingers on her.

  He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Don’t worry. She’s dead.”

  “No shit, wiseass.” I shoved him out of the way with my shoulder and pulled the sheet over her, all the way up to her armpits. I looked at him and said, “Uncover her like that again, and you’ll be choking on your own blood.” I was surprised he didn’t stick me with his soul blade right there and then. I had just physically touched him.

  A flicker of irritation crossed his face. He looked at me for a moment, frowning. “Why are you still working her case?”

  “Why are you still drawing breath?”

  His jaw tightened, his brown eyes squinting as I saw him visibly force the tension out of himself. God, I enjoyed pushing his buttons. Why was that?

  He let out a sigh, his eyes on Julia. “I’m here because I needed to follow up on the latest death. For one, making sure she doesn’t come back as a revenant. I’m here to make sure she stays dead. So I can close her file.” He flicked his gaze back to me and rested on my gloves. I resisted the urge to put my hands behind my back. “I’ve shared some information,” he said. “Now it’s your turn. Why are you here?” he asked again.

  Is he for real? “I’m not telling you anything. I don’t work for the angel-born. And you haven’t exactly told me anything I hadn’t already figured out—without your help. Thank you very much.”

  “I told you there were more bodies.”

  I frowned at the tone in his voice, like he expected me to tell him everything I discovered because he’d mentioned the bodies. I took a step back and looked up at him. “Right. Like that helped.”

  “You’re here. Aren’t you?”

  I cocked my hip. “Because of my extraordinary investigative skills. Not because of you.” Thank you, Alex. “As I recall, you don’t like sharing information.”

  “Maybe.”

  My temper flared. “Look, whatever Greater demon you’re after, well, he tried to have me killed tonight. So, yeah. I want him dead too. So, maybe now you could do the right thing and share.”

  He looked mildly surprised. “The Greater demon tried to have you killed? Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” I took a breath. “Lesser demons just don’t show up out of the blue in your own home and attack you. They don’t have specific targets. They just attack whatever’s there. This Greater demon sent them to my house. He wants me very dead.”

  He watched me for a beat longer. “Do you know what these markings are?” he asked, gesturing to Julia’s wrist and making the muscles on his arm flex. Not that I was looking.

  I pressed my lips together, feeling like a child, but I wasn’t going to tell him anything.

  The angel-born was eyeing me questionably. “You cared about her?” he asked.

  “I still care about her,” I snapped. I cared about her soul. I swore I was going to hex him. I didn’t care how pretty he was. I could fix that.

  We stood in silence for a while longer. Then he asked, “You spoke to her parents?”

  I was surprised at the sudden change and gentle tone in his voice. I let out a deep breath. “I did. And I don’t want to talk about it.” My throat closed up. Damn. I could still hear Mrs. Martinez’s heart-wrenching wail through the phone when I’d called her that night, right after I’d placed an anonymous 9-1-1 call. My ears ringing with Mrs. Martinez’s undulating cry, I’d broken down after I’d hung up. I couldn’t help it. She’d just lost her only child, her baby girl. I never wanted to do that again. And I never wanted another mother losing another child, nor any other innocent life, to a murderous Greater demon.

  My eyes flicked to Julia’s face. Eyes burning, my heart lurched in my chest.

  What was I still doing here? I needed to get home before Kyllian and Faris showed up. “It’s been great talking to you and all. Really,” I added, blinking fast. “Very informative. I’ve got to go.” I turned to leave and snatched up my glamour sigil from the floor. Wouldn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands, like a stupid human who thought they could tamper with magic.

  “He’s not going to stop,” came the angel-born’s voice behind me.

  I whirled around. “He?” My heart thumped like it was wrestling with my lungs. “You know who he is. Don’t you? What’s his name? Tell me.”

  The angel-born flicked his gaze back to Julia’s body, lost in thought for a moment. “I thought I could catch him. I thought I had enough to go on. But I don’t. I was an idiot. I know that now. I know I need more to vanquish him.”

  “What’s his name?” I asked again, my pulse fast as I stood next to him. “If you don’t tell me...”

  Anger flashed on his face. “You’ll what? Spell me? You do know that’s against your laws to hex an innocent person.”

  Unrepentant, I shook with my own anger. “I never cared for our laws.” And if you don’t tell me, I’m going to make you tell me. That’s a promise, pretty boy.

  He took a deep breath, brow furrowed, and straightened. “Maybe we can help each other.”

  I forced out a laugh. “So, now you want to play nice?” I asked with a grimace. �
��I don’t think so. No.”

  “No?” he said, his eyes wide and his expression pinched in disbelief. “You’re just going to let this demon kill more innocents? Haven’t you figured it out yet? He’s not going to stop. And he’s going to find another Julia and kill her. Is that what you want?”

  “Don’t you dare blame this on me,” I seethed. My voice was rising with my temper, but I didn’t care. Bastard.

  He sighed and shook his head. “I just want to find the demon. Just like you, apparently. Why else would you be here? You want to kill him. Just like me. I can’t defeat him on my own, but together”—his eyes flashed—“we might stand a chance.”

  The guy had a point. This wasn’t a normal demon-possession case. This was a badass Greater demon, and I needed all the help I could get.

  Still, I worked alone. I never teamed up with anyone, well, not unless you counted Poe. And asking Faris and a couple of other demons I’d summoned to help me didn’t count either. They were more like informants than partners.

  He was staring at my gloves again. “Does your council know what you’re offering?” I asked, seeing as I’d never heard of angel-borns working with witches before—a dark witch at that.

  If the angel-borns requested the help of other half-breeds, they usually went to the Gray Council, consisting of one member from each half-breed court—vampires, faeries, werewolves, and witches—and including the leaders of the angel-born. It was created after centuries of conflict between the half-breeds and the angel-born. All half-breeds were allowed to live in the mortal world and govern themselves if they followed one strict rule—never harm a human.

  The angel-born flashed me a smile, and I had to do a double take at how handsomely it transformed his face. Oh boy.

  “They don’t have to know,” he said and edged closer. “I’ve been given carte blanche to kill this demon. If it means I might ask for help from an unlikely source, then I will.”

  I pursed my lips. He was sort of a badass. I liked that.