by SM Reine
“What happened to her?” Isobel asked.
It was a question I’d gotten a few times before, from a few different people. I’d never answered it before. It wasn’t anyone’s business.
But fate, destiny, whatever, had entrusted Isobel with the testimony of the dead. She had followed me into a morgue to try to clear my name. She hadn’t run when she’d learned the truth.
If I could trust anyone, it was Isobel.
So I told her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Sounds cliché to say it, but it was a dark and stormy night. The kind of night where the wind blows the trees sideways and tosses the ocean against the beach like it’s got a vendetta against the sand. It was Hurricane Raquel, a should-have-been-impossible tempest ravaging California.
All the sane people were hiding indoors. But my sister had still been out there somewhere. Nobody had seen her for days. Her last text message had been to Domingo, asking him to pick her up at the CVS a few blocks from her house, but she hadn’t been there when he’d arrived.
It wasn’t all that weird. Ofelia was a hurricane all her own. She had a habit of flaking out and disappearing with friends for days only to return later in a whole new outfit with her head shaved, a new tattoo, and dark rings under her eyes. That was normal for Ofelia.
But this wasn’t normal. She’d been running with new friends. Instead of coming back from outings with tattoos, she was coming back with caked-on makeup that almost entirely concealed bruises. And now the hurricane had moved in and she hadn’t talked to anyone, not even Pops.
So I’d tracked her. Hacked into her Find My Phone account and zeroed in on the GPS. I wasn’t working for the OPA then—I was a private dick, paying my rent by catching vanishing parolees and taking photos of cheating spouses. I didn’t have access to any of the databases that I would later on. Searching for her phone was as fancy as I could get.
It was good enough. In a few minutes, I had an answer.
Ofelia’s phone had been dropped outside the gates to Helltown.
At the time, I didn’t know what it was. The neighborhood just looked like a piece of shit to me. One big gray blight on the face of Los Angeles. It didn’t occur to me that the cars and houses were just illusions.
I looked around for her phone and couldn’t find it on the street.
When I turned around, I saw people appear out of that empty road. They shimmered when they crossed the invisible barrier. It was a group of three slender men with long black hair, all wearing leather, all pale-skinned and perfect. And they’d come out of fucking nowhere.
I ducked into an alley, heart jackhammering, and watched.
The men melted halfway into the shadows while they talked. They didn’t look human because they weren’t. Abuelita had taught me to cast magic, but this? This was new. It was the first I’d seen of this world, a place filled with demons and haunts and things that bumped in the night.
One of them was holding something.
Ofelia’s phone.
I thought about attacking them right there. Oh man, did I want to attack. They had seen my sister. They knew where to find her. But I understood instinctively that they weren’t human and that throwing a few punches wouldn’t do shit to stop them.
Before I figured out what to do, they climbed into an Audi parked on the corner and drove off.
I wouldn’t figure out what I had seen for days, not until I was working for the OPA and Fritz Friederling debriefed me. But I can tell you now that they were incubi. They’d been coming out of Helltown.
At the time, all I knew was this: They had Ofelia’s phone.
So I got in my car and followed them.
They went to a beach house in this insane hurricane. It was built up on stilts. All the sand had been washed out from under it, but the house stood strong in the storm.
One of the incubi got out of the car. Went into the house. Then the car left.
I had to climb up and break a window to follow him inside. Looked like a normal vacation home. Any kind of place you would have found on a B&B website, pretty much. Generic furniture, generic wallpaper. Non-smoking signs.
But there was a glass bowl in the kitchen. That bowl was filled with needles as long as my fingers and sharper than knives.
I hadn’t known it at the time, but that was the calling card of the Silver Needles—the incubus mafia.
The man I’d followed was in the bathroom washing up. He was shirtless, covered in tattoos from his waist to his neck. There was an eagle inked on his spine. Its wings wrapped around his throat, touched his chin. Ofelia’s phone was on the sink next to him.
I slipped past him. Headed up into the attic. Not sure how I knew I’d find her there, but I did.
Ofelia was hogtied in the corner. There was a ball gag in her mouth. There was so much blood on her face and neck that I barely even recognized her.
She tried to speak around the gag and couldn’t. I peeled it out of her mouth. “Ofelia?”
My baby sister said, “Cèsar,” and then she began to sob.
When I untied her, I realized she was fully dressed. No torn clothes. Same outfit she’d disappeared in. All the wounds were on her face and neck and hands. They hadn’t touched her anywhere else. But her cheeks, her lips, her eyelids—they were riddled with tiny punctures.
The demons had used that bowl of needles on her.
She told me what had happened as I untied her. Turned out that the Silver Needles, despite being sex demons, didn’t rape their victims. They were the sickest kind of sadists—the kind that got off on psychological pain as much as the physical kind. They enjoyed the process of forcing people to give themselves up, so they didn’t use thrall to coerce their captives. They liked the victims to beg for sex.
The Needles gave their captives two choices: get tortured, or consent to being fucked to death. “Willing” demon food.
Ofelia had picked torture.
So they’d tortured her. Lord, had they tortured her. But Ofelia had held out.
She’d been at the mercy of the Needles for a week. An entire fucking week. They’d ripped her so full of holes that she was faint from blood loss, and she hadn’t given in.
I thought about the incubus washing up in the bathroom, the bowl of needles in the kitchen.
I thought about killing him.
But Ofelia was too weak to walk. I tossed her over my shoulder and climbed out of the attic like that.
I took her straight to the hospital. I stuck by her side the whole time that the nurses were bandaging her wounded body, and when the cops showed up to question her. She refused to file a police report. She told me that it’d just get the cops killed if they went after her attacker—he wasn’t human; they couldn’t hurt him.
So once she fell asleep, I went back to get the fucker that had taken her myself.
He was still at the beach house. I found him talking on Ofelia’s cell phone under the pier. He looked agitated. Fearful. He was telling someone on the other end that he’d lost her and that the Needles were going to kill him for it. His eagle tattoo jutted over his collar, so I could tell that it was the same guy, and the sight of him made my vision go red.
I interrupted his call by smashing his head into the rocks.
Saying what I did to him wouldn’t make me sound good. I’m not a violent guy, you know. When I arrested witches on the OPA’s most wanted list, I’d rather sneak up on them than risk a direct confrontation. But this guy, I just about knocked his fucking head off.
He never saw me coming.
That was how I discovered that incubi have a weakness—a big one. When they bleed, they bleed hard. His skull cracked when I dropped him. He poured blood all over the sand. And I realized that I might have gotten what I’d been fantasizing about, but didn’t really want—I might have actually killed the guy.
I used Ofelia’s phone to call for an ambulance. Fucking stupid, right? An ambulance for the demon from Hell.
I didn’t get EMTs. I got black SUV
s.
The guy who came out on the beach to greet me had blond hair and a nice suit and a look of surprise. He asked me if I’d tracked and taken down the incubus on my own. I told him yes. And I apologized. I felt like shit for what I’d done to the incubus. I wanted him to face justice, not die.
Apparently, that was the right thing to say. The blond man smiled at me. He told me that his name was Fritz Friederling, and he didn’t arrest me.
He asked me if I wanted a job.
“So did he die?”
I looked at Isobel for the first time. I’d been staring at her beaded curtains the whole time I talked. Didn’t want to have to see what she thought of me. But now I saw, and she was watching me with sympathy in her eyes.
“Fritz said that he was locked up in a Union detention facility,” I said. “So, yes, he survived.”
“And Ofelia?”
“She healed. Just about disowned me for going after the incubus on my own, but she’s fine. Back to her usual shit. Getting into trouble.” I couldn’t help but smile to think of her. She was getting in trouble in Mexico now, somewhere with warm beaches and no incubus mafia.
“Sounds like you did all the right things,” Isobel said.
It was the first time I’d told anyone the whole story since starting to work for the Office of Preternatural Affairs. And she didn’t think I was stupid or a violent animal. My heart unclenched a little.
“Fritz probably saved my life from retaliation by the Needles,” I said. “The job’s good. I love my job. And I’ve ruined all of it.” I gave her a sideways look. “Why did you think the incubi were out to kill you?”
She looked surprised by the question. “Oh. It’s just…Helltown drama, I guess. North side versus south side. Death’s Hand doesn’t like incubi and vice versa. They’re always after the priestesses.”
“I don’t think you should go back there.”
Isobel stroked her fingernails through my hair. “I can take care of myself.”
I was too exhausted to argue. I dropped my head into my hands again. “I wasn’t lying to you when I told you I didn’t kill Erin. I didn’t know—I never thought I could have—”
She kissed me.
My first reaction was all animal—the little brain, not the big brain. She climbed into my lap and all I could think about was how incredible she felt, the way she tasted, the smell of her hair. She pushed me so that my back bumped the wall and she kissed hard.
I liked it. A lot.
But big brain won out. I grabbed her by the arms instead of the parts I really wanted to grab. I pushed her back.
She looked surprised and confused. “What?”
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Isobel skimmed her fingernail down my cheek, like she was tracing the path of a tear. I tried not to look down her shirt. It was hard. I had a great view from that angle. “I’ve been thinking about kissing you ever since you saved me in the desert. Actually, that’s a lie. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I washed your face off and realized you weren’t a hideous gargoyle.”
I was too confused to be offended. “But I killed Erin.”
“Oh, Cèsar,” she sighed, like I was totally clueless. She melted against my chest. Her head felt good tucked against my neck. “You need to turn yourself in. Tell Fritz everything that’s happened—everything about the Needles in Helltown, and Erin Karwell, and the Union guys. I know he’ll be able to help you.”
“Turn myself in?”
“Yes. I’ll take you to him in the morning.”
So Isobel wasn’t afraid of me, but she still thought I should be arrested. She was probably right. That was the only way that Erin Karwell was going to get the justice she deserved now.
But I couldn’t let Isobel drive me to Fritz’s house. The OPA had been looking for her. They wouldn’t just arrest me.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’ll turn myself in. And I should probably—”
Isobel put her hand over my mouth. “Shut up and hold me.”
That I could do.
I wrapped my arms around her. Lord, what I would have given to have been with a woman like Isobel a week ago. Before I hurt Erin. Before I fucked up and made an innocent life pay for it.
Isobel didn’t try to kiss me again. She rested against me, warm and comfortable and silent, giving me the trust I didn’t deserve.
Eventually, her breathing slowed. She relaxed.
I’d had energy potions, but Isobel hadn’t. She probably hadn’t slept in days. Made it easy to gently move her off of me, stretching her out on the cot. Took superhuman strength not to lie down next to her, but I didn’t. I grabbed another energy potion out of my jacket, took a quick swig.
Then I went walking.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I had to walk for three hours before I finally spotted a cab. The closest things I had to water were the energy and strength potions I’d snagged from Domingo, so I drank them as I walked up the highway toward Los Angeles. I was jittering hard by the time I got into the checkered cab.
“Where to?” the cabbie asked me.
My hands were shaking like I’d tossed back a twelve pack of Red Bull. I raked my fingers through my hair. I was soaked with sweat.
It wasn’t just the walk or the potions. It was knowing what I had to do next.
For a second, I thought about telling him to take me back to Isobel. I thought about locking myself in the RV with her and seeing what else she’d been thinking about doing to me. I thought about asking her how she felt about spending the summer in Mexico with Ofelia, maybe heading into San Salvador to visit Abuelita’s family.
But Isobel wouldn’t take me back, so I gave him a different address.
The driver turned on the meter and got on the road.
Fritz Friederling lived in Beverly Hills. He’d told me over drinks at The Pit once that his great-grandfather had been big in mining—something about minerals—and Fritz had inherited everything when he was sixteen. He worked for the OPA because he was passionate about keeping the country safe, not because he wanted the benefits. Definitely not because he wanted an extra eighty grand a year. It was pocket change for him.
His house was wedged in between two celebrity mansions. The kind of place that buses visit on tours. The cabbie gave a skeptical look at the elaborate gate guarded by stone lions with uplifted paws and said, “This right?”
“This is right,” I said, and I gave him a sweaty wad of cash.
He was gone before I’d gotten all the way to the intercom.
I buzzed. The speaker crackled on, and I said, “It’s me, it’s Cèsar Hawke.”
The gate swung open immediately. Fritz’s front lawn was bigger than most public parks. It was early in the morning and gardeners were working on maintaining his flowerbeds. The staff didn’t even glance at me as I headed for the front door.
A man emerged from the house, half-dressed for work in charcoal gray slacks. He was a suave motherfucker with his blond hair slicked back, a tie hanging around his neck, and a watch that probably cost more than Domingo’s house. I’d always thought he looked kind of like James Bond.
“Cèsar! Thank God!” Was I imagining things, or did Fritz look relieved to see me?
I lifted my hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’m not here to fight. I’m turning myself in.”
“Turning yourself in?” Fritz frowned deeply. “Aren’t you going to try to defend yourself?”
“No. I’m just…turning myself in.”
“Well,” he said. “You surprise me.”
I’d surprised myself, too. “I’ve had a bad week, man.”
He obviously already knew that. He swept a hand toward the front door. “Let’s go inside. You look like you could use a drink.”
Fritz had servants. One of them brought me a snifter of brandy. Not my usual breakfast, but considering I was about to go somewhere that I’d never have a drink like this again, it seemed like a final act of generosity from my boss. Even so,
I didn’t want to drink it. I never wanted to drink alcohol again. I cupped the snifter between my hands and warmed it with my body heat as Fritz hiked up the legs of his trousers and settled on the chaise across from me.
He looked like he was going to speak. I didn’t let him.
“I’ve been doing some investigating in my…time off. Trying to figure shit out. Get my head on straight. You’ve probably heard some of it from Eduardo and Joey.”
Fritz’s eyes sparked with interest. “Agents Costa and Dawes? What about them?”
“They didn’t tell you that they found me?” I asked.
“They haven’t been back to work in days.”
Well, that was interesting. “They caught me at an RV park, dragged me out to the desert, and tried to execute me.” Fritz’s jaw dropped open. I quickly added, “I left them alive. All I did was tie them up.” I didn’t mention Isobel. If the OPA didn’t know how to find her, I wasn’t going to help them.
“I believe you,” Fritz said. “I know you wouldn’t lie about that.” He raked a hand through this hair. “That’s not good, Cèsar. Costa and Dawes are with the Union, and as you know, there’s somewhat of a…veil of secrecy between our department and theirs. I’ll have to go through official channels to get authority to investigate them.”
“But you will investigate them?”
“I’ll investigate,” he said.
Relief warmed me. At least something good had come out of this. The only good thing, maybe, but at least it was something.
Fritz leaned his elbows on his knees, staring at me intently. “Now do you want to talk about what’s happened with Erin Karwell?”
I stared into the brandy. The pattern of the marble floor was distorted through the curved side. “Not really.”
“I wish you had come to me when you left the police station.”