by SM Reine
And magical incense.
I sneezed again.
“No, I didn’t get that far.” My voice was embarrassingly stuffy. Couldn’t breathe through my nose anymore. “I’m not hungry.”
Suzy muttered some choice insults about all my favorite body parts and slammed around in the kitchen. She also said something about “stupid men.”
I snorted and kept reading.
Isobel Stonecrow didn’t have an address. She’d never had an address, in fact. No place of employment. No medical history. No Social Security number. No coven affiliations. If it hadn’t been for three furious families short a wad of cash, we wouldn’t have even known she existed. So her name was probably a pseudonym. If I could find her real name, I could find where she lived—if she lived anywhere at all.
With wandering feet like that, maybe she was mobile. Sleeping in the backseat of a car or something.
The information in the files was limited, but there might’ve been more in the OPA database. Witness testimony, for instance.
“Hey Suzy,” I called, marking a few notes in the margins, “you got any—”
I looked up and forgot all my words.
For a tough little pixie of a woman, Suzy’s legs looked awfully long when they were bare. It took me a few long seconds to get from her bare, dainty feet to the swell of her thighs and to realize that she was wearing a nightgown that didn’t cover much of anything. If she walked too fast, she would flash panties.
Her charcoal hair was loose around her shoulders and she was holding two bowls of food. Like every man’s wet dream.
“Uh, broken,” I said. That didn’t make any sense. Shit. “Your window’s broken. So’s your mirror.” That wasn’t what I’d meant to talk about. It wasn’t even what I had been thinking about.
She set the bowls down. “Some dick broke in while I was at work two days ago and stole a few things. This neighborhood’s going downhill fast. But you get why I didn’t want you opening a window now, right?” She stepped into the kitchen again.
Yeah, I got it. The thought of Suzy living alone in a neighborhood like this was enough to get my guts twisting. “Because you’re afraid of being attacked again.”
“No, because I’ve cursed my windows.” She smiled devilishly at me as she set a pair of plates on the coffee table. “Next bastard that touches them is going to have more boils than a sailor’s prick. Rice?” I didn’t say yes, but she spooned some onto my plate anyway, topping it with chicken that smelled citrusy. “Eat it, Hawke. You look like you’re about to pass out.”
She was eating with chopsticks like she was born with them attached to her hands, but she’d brought me a fork. Bless her.
My appetite returned the instant the chicken touched my tongue. I gave a low groan. “That’s good stuff.”
Suzy grinned. “Yeah, it is.” She was sitting on the coffee table, not the other couch. Her bare knees brushed against mine.
Jesus, that was distracting. She was never this distracting in our cubicle.
“What’s that?” Suzy pointed at the Stonecrow folder.
“Oh. Uh.” I rubbed the back of my neck and tried not to look at her legs. Don’t look at her legs, Hawke. “It was the last case assigned to me before… It was assigned yesterday. It’s for this witch, some flavor of necromancer, who might be talking to the dead. I thought that I could get her to talk to Erin and find out what happened.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. You need to get out of town, and fast.”
“What, and give up my job, my family, my life?” My collection of special edition Star Wars DVDs?
“The OPA’s not going to give you any help with this case, Cèsar. It looks bad. Really bad. Worse, it doesn’t look like anything infernal or magical. They’re prepared to let you go through the mundane court system.”
“I can’t believe Fritz is letting that fly,” I said. Fritz loved me. At least, I thought he did.
“Even Friederling has bosses.” She sighed. “Look, I’ll do what I can about the case while you’re gone. But for now you need to get away from Los Angeles, and you need to do it before the OPA decides that they should have a witch tag you with a tracking spell.”
I would’ve liked to see them try. I might not have been doubling the size of my apartment with magic, but I could detect and blast away passive spells like that in my sleep. “There had to be someone else in the apartment with Erin and me. That means there’s evidence. A trail I can follow. If I leave, that trail goes cold.”
“And if you don’t leave, you get to go to prison.”
I wanted to point out how they could only send me to prison if I was proven guilty, and they needed evidence for that, too. But what if Erin’s cause of death really had been magical or infernal? The fact the OPA wasn’t investigating meant that there weren’t any witches or demon hunters to sweep for evidence. The LAPD’s detectives were good at what they did—when it came to humans. But they didn’t have the tools they needed for this.
Suzy wouldn’t hear reason, though. I knew what it sounded like when she had made up her mind.
I’d been pushing the same piece of chicken around my plate for a few minutes without eating. I made myself take a last bite. “I’m exhausted.”
A sympathetic look. “Yeah, I bet you are. Catch a few hours of sleep. I’ll hook you up with a bus ticket before I go to work tomorrow.”
Suzy finished eating and cleaned up, which involved bending over a few times. I tried not to notice.
Damn.
She gave me some blankets and dimmed the lights. “I’ll wake you up at four. You need anything?”
I told her I didn’t. My resolve vanished in a puff of incense smoke when she headed upstairs, and I craned my neck to watch the globes of her ass flexing under her panties as she climbed. Double damn. Triple damn. Damnation above and below and everywhere in between.
I waited until I heard her door close before finding her laptop.
We all had them. The OPA issued laptops to its employees so we could take our work everywhere we went. No rest for salaried government employees, right? I usually left mine docked in its workstation, but Suzy was a workaholic. I knew it had to be around somewhere.
As I suspected, I found Cat sitting on her machine in the entryway. He gave me an offended look when I tugged it out from underneath his furry butt.
Our passwords needed to be changed every quarter, but Suzy’s password was always easy to figure out. She mixed up the ingredients that she kept in jars on her desk—always the same ingredients in a different order. Lotus, dragon’s blood, thyme, jasmine, moonstone. Not that I’d been watching her type or anything.
Anyway, it took three tries to get the order right, and I was logged in.
A quick search of the database brought up witness testimonies for Isobel Stonecrow, just as I’d been hoping. I printed them out. Stuffed them in my jacket. Put Suzy’s laptop back where I found it.
I spent a full minute at the base of her stairs and thought about leaving while she was asleep. But someone had broken into Suzy’s house. If I hit the streets tonight, I would spend the whole time stressing about her all vulnerable in bed, tangled up in sheets that smelled like her peach body wash, wondering if she would look like Erin in the morning.
I needed sleep. There was no avoiding that. Might as well do it where I could keep Suzy safe.
The blankets she’d given me smelled like Cat. I wrapped up in them and closed my eyes.
I was unconscious before my head hit the arm of the sofa.
CHAPTER NINE
I dreamed of Erin.
We were tangled in each other, her hips rocking, my hands mounding the twin swells of her ass. She was grinding, groaning. Her head rolled back on her shoulders. Her chest was freckled. I licked the sweat from between her breasts and bit her nipple. She liked that—judging by the sounds, she really liked that.
We moved in tandem, the two of us. Bodies slamming against the cabinets. Hands clutching at the counter. S
he was close to her peak. Her arm flailed and knocked the toaster onto the floor.
There was something wrong here—something missing between us. Something I had forgotten.
Couldn’t stop. Couldn’t think.
There was nothing but our bodies and the hunger.
She came hard, screaming. Her fingernails dug into my pecs. Even that knifelike pain was pleasure, carrying me toward the edge with her. I was balls deep, about to shoot a load inside this gorgeous woman, and I didn’t care that my heart had stopped beating.
But I knew I was about to die.
I shocked awake with a weight pressing on my chest. For a half second, I thought that I’d been buried alive. It was dark. I couldn’t breathe.
Then I saw two pale circles staring at me and realized that I wasn’t in a grave—I just had Cat smothering me. He was purring like a jackhammer and kneading Suzy’s blankets under his polydactyl paws. His whiskers tickled against my chin.
I pushed the cat off, let the sheets fall, pressed a fist to my chest. Heart was slamming against my breastbone. It wasn’t hot, but I was drenched in sweat.
Needed to breathe. Could have used another poultice for strength, too.
I raked my hands through my sweaty hair, leaned on my knees. I was all right. I was still here, even if Erin wasn’t. There was still time to get justice for her. All I needed was the manila folder on Suzy’s coffee table and some time. I checked the clock on the wall. Bad news was, Cat had only allowed me to sleep for two hours, and my eyeballs felt drier than granite and everything still hurt from yesterday. Good news was that Suzy was still asleep.
I got dressed, donned my jacket, and was almost ready to go when I saw the phone light up on the table near the sofa.
It was Suzy’s work phone.
Ignoring my whispering conscience, I flipped it open. It was from the OPA, not a boyfriend. She had gotten a standard tracker text—an alert telling her that a suspect in her current case had been sighted. It contained a series of digits that would translate to coordinates once decoded. I scribbled the number in my notebook before deleting the message from her phone.
The first four digits attached to the code were the same as the serial number on my manila folder. It proved what I already suspected: someone else had been given the Stonecrow case.
And that someone was Suzy.
What the hell? I’d told her that I wanted to talk to this Stonecrow witch, and she’d just told me to blow town. Suzy should have told me that she had the inside track on locating Stonecrow. On the bright side, now I wasn’t going to have to search very hard to find Stonecrow. The morning was already looking up.
I gave Cat a rub, got out the door.
The witch wasn’t going to catch herself.
Working for the OPA, you don’t get out on your own until you’ve already been walked around a few times on a short leash. Aside from the mandatory ride-along every agent has to do with the Union, there’s also a six-month probationary period where you get all the baby cases: kids slaughtering the pet cat to try to raise the dead, snake oil salesmen, housewives trying to emulate spells on Charmed and accidentally summoning demons. All the stuff that has no malicious intent and no victim but still has to get cleaned up.
Shady Groves Cemetery was the number one site of these bullshit cases. It was right next to a high school on the outskirts of the city, so that was where most complaints of lurking “Satanists” (emo teenagers without enough extracurriculars) got reported.
I’d been on so many somnolent stakeouts at Shady Groves that I had the layout memorized. It was up on a hill. Parking lot on the south side, school on the west side, bodies all up under the trees. The mausoleums and Victorian-era statues are the real tourist draw. The place has more creepy buildings than a small town in Louisiana.
If Stonecrow was the real deal, then she wasn’t a big player. Because that was where the tracker text was sending me: Shady Groves Cemetery. The little leagues. Training wheels for people who want to be necromancers.
So I didn’t bother preparing before heading over. I didn’t borrow Suzy’s kitchen to brew a magic neutralization potion. I didn’t get ropes or other restraints. I did take the gun—figured that’d keep my ass covered well enough if Stonecrow turned out to be hostile. I might even be able to shoot someone with it if they stood still long enough for me to get my bearings.
In retrospect, it wasn’t one of my best plans. Mostly because I had no plan at all.
I hit Shady Groves Cemetery about an hour before dawn. Even at four in the morning, Los Angeles traffic blows monkey balls. It was stop and go the entire way—mostly stop.
Eventually, Shady Groves came out of the predawn gloom. I didn’t park the stolen Toyota in the parking lot, since it would be visible from the graves. I took it up a frontage road around back. The tires thumped along for a couple hundred yards, bouncing me around like dice in a cup.
I could have picked a better car to steal. As in, maybe one with any suspension whatsoever.
Then I heard a thump and a hiss, the Toyota sagged on one side, and suspension was suddenly the least of my problems.
“Of course,” I muttered, killing the engine and getting out to look, even though I already knew what I was going to see. I’d blown a tire on a sharp rock that had been invisible in the darkness. Guess that was just my luck that week.
I kicked the tire. My short, illicit affair with the Tercel was over.
I found my way through the bushes to a section of chain-link that had been cut away long before I ever started working with the OPA. It was probably one of my trainee predecessors that did it; all of us have been through Shady Groves during our probationary periods, and I can think of at least one or two fat-assed agents that would have gotten sick of having to climb.
Pushing through the bushes, I beat away the snarls of metal and stumbled into the cemetery.
The second I freed my jacket, I realized that I should have taken at least a few seconds to prepare before going after Stonecrow.
Mostly because I was suddenly suffocating.
I’m not much into big showy rituals, but I know what it feels like when someone else is doing one. The air goes thick with magic and it’s like trying to breathe underwater. That was what happened to me when I crossed over the invisible line of wards underneath the trees rimming Shady Groves. My chest clenched up, throat closed, eyes watering.
I sneezed into the elbow of my sleeve. And then sneezed again, and again.
Shit. If I’d been on another OPA training run, I would have gotten so many points off on covert ops. Needed to clear my head. And my nose.
Necromancer or not, Stonecrow had real power. But I left my gun in my holster as I crouch-walked through the bushes, trying to make as little noise as possible for a six-foot-tall ape like myself. I plastered my back to the edge of a mausoleum and blew a few more muffled sneezes into my sleeve.
When I finally got control of my breathing, I heard the drums.
The rhythm immediately made me think of tribal things. The jungles of Central America. Wildcats and parrots. Those big bass drums that you pound with mallets before battle and make your enemies shit themselves because it sounds so badass.
The drumming was punctuated by a dry jangling noise. Not metal, but maybe wood.
A thickly accented voice echoed over the graveyard.
“By the light of the coyote moon, I summon the spirits,” she said. “By the dirt of these hallowed graves, I summon the spirits.” More rattling, another beat on the drums.
That accent didn’t sound like anything I’d heard before. I could barely understand a damn thing she was saying. But between what I did understand and the overwhelming sting of her magic, I knew that I’d found the suspect.
I peered around the edge of the mausoleum. Further down the hill, I glimpsed faint, flickering candlelight reflecting off of smooth brown skin. Bare skin, to be exact.
A woman was standing in front of a grave with her arms raised. Bone bracelets encircl
ed her wrists. That was the only thing she seemed to be wearing above the waist, aside from a feathered headdress that had probably required the death of an entire endangered species to produce. There was some serious meat on those half-naked hips. The swell of her ass was covered in a strip of coyote pelt.
Beyond her shoulder, I could make out a pair of terrified-looking faces. They were far beyond the light from her fire. The candles lit their eyes with bright pinpricks. It was enough to tell that they were both wearing suits, like they’d be off to office jobs once they were done with the graveyard girl.
So this would be Isobel Stonecrow and her latest clients.
She was still talking in that thick, obscure accent. “Gods of the sky and stars! Deliver to me Brad Stewart!”
“Brian,” said the woman in the suit skirt. “His name was Brian.”
A pause, and Stonecrow called, “Brian!”
I sneezed repeatedly into my sleeve, trying to smother my face with my suit so that nobody would hear. The magic was too much for me. I slid to the ground with my arms over my nose and mouth, sitting on muddy grass that was still wet from yesterday’s rain.
Fortunately, Stonecrow was drumming again, even louder than before. She beat that damn drum until it sounded like the skin might break.
Then, suddenly, she stopped.
“Cindy?” Her voice sounded different, higher-pitched and with an American accent. “What are you doing here, Cindy?” The magic was still thick, but it had stopped building in intensity. It felt like the whole world had stopped to listen to Stonecrow’s voice.
The other woman gave a cry. “Brian!”
Magic surged, hard and sudden.
I sneezed.
There was no drumming to cover my ass this time. There was a clattering of bones as Stonecrow whirled to stare at me, only halfway concealed by the corner of the mausoleum. The candlelight from the tapers lit up the side of her face, giving me a glimpse of a very beautiful woman. She had big lips. I’d always liked big lips.