Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, & Magic

by SM Reine

  “Why not?” Domingo agreed. “I’ll make dinner happen while you nap. No shimmying down trees while I’m distracted, though—you need to get some real rest. And I’ll know you’ve ducked out on me.”

  “Hey, if it worked on Pops…”

  “Don’t even. What do you want for dinner? Pizza? Burgers?”

  “You could give me your moldy leftovers and I’d be the happiest man alive.”

  Domingo snorted as he pulled out his cell phone. “Not with the way I cook.”

  It felt like it’d been days since I smiled. I patted him on the back. He smiled back.

  It was good to be home.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I didn’t shimmy down the tree outside the guest room, but I also didn’t stay for dinner. I crawled into the shower to rinse off the dirt, tossed back a few shots of energy potions, and crept out the back door as soon as the shock of consciousness hit me.

  Every minute I spent at Domingo’s house was another minute begging for him to be dragged out to the desert next.

  My new car was a Dodge Charger, newest model year. Bumblebee yellow with two sexy black stripes up the hood. I gave a low, appreciative whistle. Domingo’s “friends” were richer than I expected. That worried me—the idea that Sofia was gone and Domingo was suddenly tight with his old contacts again. But I’d deal with that later.

  I grabbed the keys out of the wheel well and booked it.

  My leads were dry. Erin had been murdered two days ago and I still didn’t know anything about what had happened—only that Stonecrow was a dead end and that Suzy was sick of me.

  If a case was going cold, then all I needed to do was heat it up. And we have a saying at my office: “There’s nowhere hotter than Helltown.”

  The agents weren’t talking about the weather when they said that. Helltown is just another neighborhood in Los Angeles, much like Chinatown, and it enjoys the same temperate winters and steamy summers that the rest of the city does.

  But if you’re looking for a murderer, or missing evidence, or a stolen item on the black market—chances are real good that you would find it in Helltown.

  You just had to know where to look.

  I drove around until sunrise, then parked the Charger at a Walmart and walked three blocks east. I stood outside Helltown with my arms folded, eyeballing the empty street in front of me.

  It didn’t look like anything special—definitely not a demon hideaway. From the outside, all I could see were rows of uniform housing with barred windows and sunbaked lawns. The fact that I was seeing those houses at all meant I was allowed to enter. Meant that someone inside of Helltown was expecting me.

  Most humans weren’t going to stumble into Helltown by accident. It was drenched in enough wards and diversion spells to render the average mortal stupid. There were lots of accidents on the intersections outside because people drove too close and got zapped with old magic. But I walked right up to the edge of the block and didn’t get turned away. My invitation was open.

  Not the most cheerful thought.

  I stepped over the line in the sidewalk—and got smacked in the eye with a femur.

  “Jesus,” I growled, slapping it away, spinning to look at what I’d walked into.

  From this side, I could see that the entrance to Helltown was marked with an iron arch that had bones dangling down the middle, kind of like Isobel’s beaded curtains. I rubbed my face hard where the bone had touched it.

  Lord, I hope the sun’s bleached all the bacteria off of that.

  Then I turned around to get my first look of the morning at Helltown.

  As soon as I had passed under that archway, the seemingly empty street had become populated. Demons and witches and idiot humans with death wishes bustled through the road, pushing along wheelbarrows and dragging sacks behind them. The road hadn’t been maintained since it vanished into Helltown in 1968, and the pavement was all but dust under my feet, making me stumble when I stepped off the sidewalk. My foot squished in something red-brown and rotting. Graceful, Cèsar, very graceful.

  The yellowing lawns I’d seen from outside were nothing but dirt pits in here. The bars and glass were missing from most windows, letting me see to the seething darkness within the houses. All of the street signs had been torn down and replaced with sheets of engraved steel—all decorated with spikes, of course. Demons love putting spikes on everything.

  It was a neighborhood out of a nightmare, twisted and perverse.

  It was my only hope of finding a lead now.

  “Welcome to Helltown,” I muttered under my breath.

  I was talking to myself. Three days since going rogue and I was already going nuts.

  Keeping my head down, I walked fast toward the intersection of Grim and Blacksburg. Demons and witches had self-segregated within Helltown, so there are neighborhoods within the neighborhood. All the higher demons, like incubi, live on the northern streets with the mortals that feed them; I was heading south, where the less powerful demons hid out.

  I never went to the north side of Helltown. Never.

  Moving quickly, I watched my feet instead of watching my surroundings, trying to look like I belonged. I didn’t want to see what I was passing anyway. The ramshackle buildings had human skulls over most doorways. Several of the houses had converted the yards to pens for exercising human servants. Vendors had carts set every few feet, selling crafts made of demon and human byproducts, selling kebabs of flesh, clothes woven from human hair. Those were the worst. Just the smell of them made me want to barf.

  It wasn’t a nice place, Helltown. Kopides had been trying to shut it down ever since a coven of witches and duke from the City of Dis collaborated to make those streets disappear from Los Angeles. But you can fit a lot of evil in a couple square miles, and we couldn’t trust automatic weapons to operate around all that infernal power. It didn’t leave a lot of options for slaughtering the residents of Helltown.

  For now, the OPA only jumps in when we need something. When Helltown is spilling outside its boundaries.

  As long as Helltown stays self-contained, anything goes.

  Down on the south side of Helltown, there are fewer shops and more apartments. The buildings were crammed all full of demons like carcasses being eaten by maggots from the inside out. But there’s one shop on the ground floor of a tenement that I’ve visited three or four times before. Aside from being a source of irritation for the OPA, the shopkeeper was a nosy pain-in-the-ass that always knows what’s going down in her town.

  Monique was one of the more innocuous demons in Helltown—a glass blower. She mostly crafted supplies for witches—vials for potion making, bowls for mixing ingredients, enchanted flasks, that kind of thing—but she also made pipes for drug use. That was the thing that got her in the most trouble. It’s one thing to supply witches that live in Helltown, and another to supply potheads on the outside with pipes shaped like dicks.

  Everything that demons craft gets demon energy crafted right into it. By smoking through a novelty pipe that Monique had made, druggies were opening themselves to demonic possession. It wasn’t a big deal for the occasional smokers. Now imagine April twentieth at UCLA with a hundred college students that suddenly need exorcism, and you’ll get why Monique is a problem.

  We’d originally thought the dick-pipe affair was a witch thing, which was how it got assigned to me. Now Monique had the pleasure of being my one and only demon contact. She’d cut a deal to avoid incarceration, and she fed me information whenever I was brave enough to head into Helltown.

  She still had a bunch of dick-pipes on the shelf by her front door at eye level. I had to give it to her. Monique was a real artist. Big dicks, little dicks, circumcised, uncut, all of them perfectly shaped for smoking weed.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” said a gravelly voice.

  I dragged my attention from a nine-inch pipe with detailed veins. The artist herself was behind the counter, sitting on a stool that lifted her squat, froggy body to a normal hei
ght. She was surrounded by spindly glass sculptures. They were genuinely beautiful.

  “Hey, Monique,” I said. “How’s business?”

  She gave me a flat look. Literally a flat look. No nose, no eyebrows, barely any lips. All of her looks were flat. But this one was especially unimpressed, like I’d just asked to borrow money from her. “I’ve stopped selling pipes to mortal kids, so I know you’re not here to fuck with me. Yet I told you to get the fuck out of here and you’re not listening. You want something, you ugly cunt, so what the fuck is it this time, Hawke?”

  Great. I’d caught her on a bad day. “I’m looking for information pertaining to a murder.”

  “You know I didn’t fucking kill anyone.”

  I grabbed an Erlenmeyer flask off of her shelf. I could use some new equipment. “I know. You’re too short to do anything worse than bite ankles.”

  She flashed dagger-like teeth at me. “I said I didn’t kill anyone. That doesn’t mean I won’t.”

  Setting the flask on her counter, I fished around for some of the cash I’d stolen from Joey Dawes. “Erin Karwell. She was a waitress at a bar called The Olive Pit. Do you recognize the name?”

  “Mortal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure?” Monique asked. I set a twenty on the table. Before I could let go of it, her hand shot out and seized my wrist. Her fingers were those of an artist, long and slender and delicate. Her touch sent chills rushing up my forearm. “I don’t want any of your fucking money. I know why you’re here. You’re in deep shit, Hawke, and you’re desperate for answers.”

  “You can’t know why I’m here if you don’t know Erin.” I flashed the news article with her photo.

  “Is that the cunt you killed?” Monique asked, barely even glancing at it.

  Shit. She did know why I was there. It wasn’t fun being part of Helltown’s rumor mill. No fun at all. “Don’t tell me you’re siding with the cops on this one.”

  “I’m on nobody’s side but mine, and my side is awfully fucking interested in not getting dead.”

  I pulled my hand back from her counter, twenty clutched in my fist. “Has the OPA been through here asking for me?”

  “It’s not the OPA you need to worry about,” Monique said. “Yeah, I recognize Erin. She used to come around here.”

  That was news to me.

  “What do you mean, ‘around here?’ Helltown? Your shop?”

  She pushed the flask toward me. “Take it. Consider it a parting gift.”

  I didn’t touch it. “Erin was just some waitress. What would she have been doing in Helltown?”

  “Get your dumb ass down to the Temple of the Hand of Death,” Monique said. “It’s on Sekhmet, northwest side. That’s where you’ll get your answers.”

  My sense of alarm heightened. “Why? Is someone there expecting me?”

  Her smile was even more unpleasant than her glare. “Have a nice day.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Common sense said that I shouldn’t go to the Temple of the Hand of Death. It was on the north side. The north side of Helltown was where the incubi were, so I didn’t go to the north side. Especially not if there were things expecting to see me there.

  Should have been a no-brainer, right?

  But common sense and desperation didn’t play nicely, and I didn’t have a lot of other options.

  I drew my Desert Eagle before approaching the so-called temple.

  It was one of the shittier buildings in Helltown. The temple looked like it occupied a former gas station, judging by the row of vintage gas pumps in front of it. You could still almost make out the graceful lines of the fifties-style decorations on the outside of the building, but they had rotted with age. The roof sagged in the middle. The sun had bleached the colors out of everything. The windows had been punched out.

  Smoke spiraled out of the windows, fogging the area in front of the door. Smelled like a brushfire. I sneezed.

  A steel sign had been hung over the door. It read: “Vedae som Matis Duvak.” I didn’t understand vo-ani, the demon language, but I was going to assume that meant “ugly-ass gas station.”

  I pushed the door open.

  The floor inside was poured concrete. An altar stood at the far end of the room—a folding table with an array of melted candles sitting in piles of sludgy wax. There was a big clock on the wall behind it. A couple of hand-woven baskets stood along each wall. They were covered, fortunately. I didn’t want to know what demons considered to be fitting offerings for demon-gods being honored in a temple gas station.

  I didn’t see any demons there, but I still eased the safety off the gun as I slipped inside. The door whined shut behind me.

  “Is anyone here?” I asked, raising my voice. “My name is Agent Cèsar Hawke and I’m with the Office of Preternatural Affairs. I have questions.”

  “I have answers,” someone said from behind me.

  No way in hell someone had gotten behind me.

  I spun to see a woman. A human woman. She had bushy brown hair, a hunched back, innocent-looking eyes. Couldn’t have been any older than a gawky fifteen or sixteen. She wore black velvet—heavy skirt, sleeves that draped to her fingertips—and a boned corset. Delicate iron jewelry dangled at her neck and over her forehead. Black symbols had been painted on her cheeks, one under each eye.

  She gave me a nervous smile. She was holding some kind of stone scepter that looked much too fancy for an awkward teenager.

  “Are you a good man, Agent Cèsar Hawke?”

  You want to talk about things that make me useless? Women were number one. Children were number two. Combine both of them by sticking a vulnerable young girl in front of me, and I turn into a giant sucker. This kid was way too young to be dressing up like an infernal priestess and hanging out in Helltown, no matter what she’d done or who she thought she was.

  Every single one of my protective instincts went nuts in an instant. Like a big raging beast was trying to break out of my chest.

  “Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, lowering the gun. “Who are you?”

  She cocked her head to the side. “Who am I? Who are you?”

  “I’m Cèsar,” I said again, slower this time, even though she’d already said my name. “What are you doing here? How did you end up in Helltown?”

  Her smile turned weird. Her eyes unfocused. “I think you are probably a good man, Cèsar, but that doesn’t change anything.”

  Wait, her eyes weren’t unfocused.

  They had just focused behind me.

  I turned.

  And there she was: Isobel Stonecrow, holding a folding chair in both hands like she thought she was a WWE wrestler.

  She swung. The chair struck.

  I was out before I hit the ground.

  I didn’t feel it when I went unconscious. It was like I blinked, and suddenly I was in a chair with ropes tethering my ankles and left wrist. Isobel Stonecrow was kneeling on my right side, quickly knotting the cord on that arm.

  I couldn’t react as quickly as I normally would have. The world was swimming around me, spinning and flipping and blurring like I’d just had another rough night with a bottle of tequila. I swiped at Isobel too slowly. By the time my fist grabbed at the place her throat had been, she had already dodged, grabbed my arm, and pinned it back to the chair.

  She wasn’t alone. Another priestess of the Hand of Death was behind her, watching with an amused grin that she couldn’t hide behind her fingers.

  Yeah, laugh it up.

  “He’s ridiculously handsome,” the priestess said, giving Isobel a thumbs up. “Nicely done.”

  The corner of Isobel’s mouth twitched. “Can I have a minute, Elora?”

  “You can have fifteen. Or maybe twenty. However much you need.” Was she waggling her eyebrows? Jesus. Women.

  The priestess slipped past Isobel. I twisted, trying to see where she was going. I couldn’t turn far. For all I knew, there were a dozen priestesses back ther
e giggling at me really quietly.

  “What the fuck, Izzy?” I asked once I was reasonably certain that we were alone.

  One thick eyebrow arched, lips twisting. “Nobody calls me Izzy.”

  I didn’t even know why it had slipped out like that. I sure as heck wasn’t feeling in a “pet names” mood with her. Probably the concussion talking.

  Tried to jerk my wrist free. She had already knotted the rope. Damn, she was fast.

  “You hang out in Helltown?” I asked as she backed away from me.

  “Sometimes,” Isobel said. “It’s a place to settle when I’m not on the road. I have friends here.”

  Friends? More like coworkers. She was wearing the robes of the priestesses of the Hand of Death, all black velvet and glittering iron jewelry. I would have been lying if I said that the way the corset lifted her breasts wasn’t totally awesome. But even if I’m a sucker for beautiful women—and I am—I’ve got my limits.

  “Let me go,” I said.

  “All I want to do is help. Don’t be afraid.”

  A scoff. “I’m not afraid.” Not that afraid, anyway. But you try being held hostage by someone in Helltown without losing your cool. I’d heard stories of agents going into Helltown and never coming out again—some of them rumors, some of them definitely not. I didn’t want to be another cold case. I might have been sweating a little.

  Like I said, there’s nowhere hotter than Helltown.

  Finally prying my eyes free of Isobel in all her robes and demon jewelry, I took a long look at the room where I was now momentarily trapped. I was fairly certain that it was underneath the gas station temple. It looked like a basement. There were floorboard joists over my head. The walls were bare concrete stained with moisture. No windows. Just torches. Fucking torches, like we were in the Temple of Doom.

  Isobel had three big baskets behind her. She grabbed one of them and hauled it closer to me.

  “Let me out of here,” I said.

  “Not until you believe me. I’ll untie you once you’ve seen the truth, and you can decide what to do after that.”