by SM Reine
CONTENTS
Deadly Wrong
Copyright
About
Dedication
Title page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Dear Reader
DEADLY
WRONG
A Preternatural Affairs Novella
SM REINE
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
This book is sold DRM-free so that it can be enjoyed in any way the reader sees fit. Please keep all links and attributions intact when sharing. All rights reserved.
Copyright © SM Reine 2014
Published by Red Iris Books
1180 Selmi Drive, Suite 102
Reno, NV 89512
SERIES BY SM REINE
The Descent Series
The Ascension Series
Seasons of the Moon
The Cain Chronicles
Preternatural Affairs
Tarot Witches
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ABOUT DEADLY WRONG
Isobel Stonecrow’s life has an expiration date. She has one month, two weeks, four days, and six hours remaining.
Not that she’s counting.
When she signed a contract giving her soul and memories to a demon named Ander, she didn’t expect that she would ever have to face termination. But now Ander is dead and she’ll be following suit if she can’t find a way to dissolve the deal.
Too bad she can’t remember anything from the time before she signed the contract.
Fritz Friederling, a billionaire businessman who owns several ventures in Hell, isn’t ready to give up on Isobel. But she isn’t sure that working with Fritz is better than dying. She doesn’t know much about her past life, but she knows that she signed that contract for a reason—and that getting away from Fritz was a significant part of it.
Escaping her contract means remembering the life that she chose to forget. And it means trusting Fritz Friederling, who Isobel fears might be the biggest danger of all…
For Teddy, whose surprising arrival interrupted this book.
I can already tell you’re going to be the best kind of trouble.
CHAPTER ONE
ISOBEL STONECROW NOTICED THE rot developing at the beginning of February.
The condition of her fingernails had become shameful in the last few weeks. It didn’t seem to matter how much she washed her hands; the pig’s blood she used in her rituals wouldn’t come out from the edges and underneath the tips.
None of the grave dirt would wash off, either. Every little stain was a permanent mark on her skin.
It got worse quickly.
She was speaking with the spirit of a man named Vance Hartley when she accidentally ripped a fingernail off. She was beating on her newest bass drum with mallets, and she caught the jagged tip of her nail on the drum’s beaded trim, and then it just came clean off. The entire thing.
Isobel finished the job anyway. She desperately needed the money—five hundred dollars—and she’d already spent the deposit, so she couldn’t return it to the client.
The spirit of the dead spoke through her while she was internally freaking out about the fact that losing her pinky nail didn’t even hurt the way it should have.
With Isobel’s help, Vance Hartley told his mother that he really had killed himself. That his death hadn’t been foul play. That he had been horribly depressed for months, addicted to gambling, penniless, and without a scrap of pride remaining. It had seemed so much easier to hang himself rather than admit that he needed help to his family.
So he had killed himself. He’d just lost the suicide note down a crack in the floorboards, and he hadn’t noticed until he was kicking at the end of the rope and couldn’t go down to fish it out.
It wasn’t the news Mrs. Hartley wanted to hear. She wrote a check for the remaining money and left the cemetery sobbing.
Normally, Isobel would have tried to offer a little extra help to Mrs. Hartley before she left. Crushed family members were outside of Isobel’s job description as necrocognitive; once she had spoken to the deceased in question, her role in the family’s affairs were over.
But most people did leave crying, so Isobel had printed off papers with phone numbers for resources. Suicide hotlines, grief-management therapists, that kind of thing.
That night, she let Mrs. Hartley go without speaking to her.
Isobel sat down on Vance’s grave, legs straddling either side of the cross on the top, arms hugging the figure of Jesus, and inspected her pinky finger.
It was definitely gone. The skin underneath was black.
Still, she didn’t feel any pain.
“Oh no,” Isobel whispered, turning her hand to get a better look.
She hadn’t been struggling to clean the pig’s blood and grave dirt off of her skin after all. Her skin was actually turning those colors.
The flesh was rotting.
Isobel lifted her buckskin loincloth and checked the scratch on her hip. She had gotten that particular injury while arguing with one of the other death priestesses in Helltown. Isobel hadn’t been paying attention to it; she’d always been a quick healer and assumed that wouldn’t change.
The scratch hadn’t changed in a week. It wasn’t red or swollen. It wasn’t scabbed, either. It was the same as the moment that she had scraped herself along one of the big wicker baskets they stored cadavers in.
She wasn’t healing anymore.
Worse, she was rotting.
“I’m out of time,” she told the indistinct figure of Jesus on Vance Hartley’s grave.
He didn’t offer any sympathetic words for her. Probably for the best—if a statue had started talking, Isobel would have started suspecting that her brain was rotting, too.
She shouldn’t have been out of time, though. The only thing keeping her alive at the moment was her agreement with Ander, a demon crime lord who used magical contracts to bind people who were on the brink of death to his service. Like all his employees, she’d been “almost” dead when he’d picked her up, and the length of her service had a timer on it.
Isobel should have still had one month, two weeks, four days, and a few hours until her contract expired and she met the final death.
An entire month and a half to find a solution.
Yet her fingers were rotting, the cut on her hip wasn’t healing, and Isobel was definitely running out of time.
It no longer seemed important that she was out of money to refuel her RV and feed herself.
Mrs. Hartley was the last client that she serviced.
It used to be that Isobel didn’t have to worry about money at all. That had been a long time ago—literally another lifetime—but she remembered it in bits and pieces.
Before she had died and entered Ander’s service, Isobel Stonecrow had been a lawyer. Her name had been Hope Emmeline Jimenez. She had come from modest beginnings in Manhattan, earned a lot of scholarships, and attended an Ivy League school. She had opened her own law firm and, by all accounts, done very well for herself.
She had also married a millionaire. Money really hadn’t been an issue after that. Not for survival purposes, anyway.
But that had been another life.
Money was a problem now. It was the “now” that
mattered.
After Mrs. Hartley left, Isobel climbed onto the roof of her RV to watch the sunrise. Even though her panic was growing after losing her fingernail, Isobel didn’t have many alternatives.
Her gas tank was running low. She’d have to cash that check in order to refill, which meant waiting for business hours. In the meantime, she couldn’t reach any of her usual camping spots outside of Los Angeles.
So she rested on the RV’s roof in the parking lot of a cemetery, waited for the sunrise, and lost herself in thought. The stars were dim, reduced to hazy blurs by the Los Angeles light pollution. Hard to tell how long she had until sunrise. She settled in for the long haul.
Isobel tried for the hundredth time to remember her wedding. She recalled some kind of gauzy white cloth. White heels. Ridiculously restrictive white underwear, corset and garters and all. She wasn’t really sure that she had summoned those images from her memory or if they were just what she expected from someone like Hope Jimenez.
But she did remember meeting the groom at the altar. One brief moment where her veil was lifted, allowing her to see the man who she had agreed to marry. A handsome man, as angular and blond as Isobel was curvaceous and dark-haired.
Fritz Friederling. Demon hunter. Inheritor of his family’s billions.
Her husband.
Isobel lifted a hand to look at her fingernails again. It was dark enough that her hand was a silhouette without detail. But she could tell that she had nails on three fingers and a thumb, and then a twisted pinky with no nail at all.
Fritz would probably want to know that she was rotting.
It had been months since she’d spoken to Fritz or his aspis, Cèsar Hawke. If she didn’t want to involve Fritz, then Cèsar might have been helpful for her not-so-little problem. He’d been a private investigator once; he had a penchant for brute-forcing his way through problems with a mixture of dumb luck and sheer enthusiasm.
Unfortunately, Isobel had hooked up with Cèsar before remembering that she used to be married to Fritz, and she had no idea what she was going to say to Cèsar about that. She didn’t feel very sorry, but she also didn’t want to continue her relationship with him, and he wouldn’t take it particularly well.
He was a sensitive man, that Cèsar Hawke. And Isobel was allergic to awkward encounters.
It was stupid to avoid someone who might help because she didn’t want to have to give him the “it’s not you, it’s me and my impending death” speech. Isobel knew that. But there were slightly less stupid reasons to avoid Cèsar, too.
He would have to use resources from the Office of Preternatural Affairs to help her. If the OPA caught on to the death witch who was dying from a bizarre, one-of-a-kind contract with a demon, she very well might have been added to the OPA’s shelf of oddities.
Nobody wanted that, least of all Isobel. There really were fates worse than death.
Plus, Cèsar was incredibly loyal to Fritz. He’d definitely tell Fritz what was happening. And that spiraled right on back to the incredibly awkward conversations Isobel didn’t want to have.
Isobel didn’t need either of them anyway. She didn’t need a man to save her, dammit. She didn’t remember any of it, but she was an Ivy League graduate who had dominated dozens of difficult court cases, and she could save herself, thank you very much.
It was impossible to deny that she was getting desperate, though. Isobel had been searching for a way out of the contract for as many months as she’d been avoiding Cèsar and Fritz.
Honestly, she hadn’t thought it could be that hard to circumvent death. She was a death witch and she knew practically every other death witch in America. They were a small community. One of them had to know a workaround, she’d thought. If not an actual way to end the contract, then a way to resurrect her as soon as it ended, or delay it.
But she was rotting, there was still no solution, and her husband would want to know.
She wasn’t going to tell him.
Isobel just needed a little more time.
Unfortunately, all she had was one month, two weeks, and four days.
CHAPTER TWO
THE FIRST TIME THAT Hope Jimenez rejected a marriage proposal from Fritz Friederling, they had been on a yacht.
It had been the summer of 1998, and Hope seriously regretted the life choices that had led her to being on that stupid yacht. She wouldn’t have even come to the party if someone hadn’t needed to keep an eye on her roommate.
Hope didn’t make it a habit to party in the weeks leading up to midterms. That was just asking for trouble.
But her roommate, Vena, had come from a conservative Mormon family and didn’t know how to party safely. She was generously described as a “fucking moron” whenever she got into the liquor. Someone had to look out for her, even if there were tests coming up soon. Important tests.
The material was easy, but the tests were deliberately obscure. Entire books had been published about defeating those damn tests.
She should have been reading those books that night. Instead, she was at the open bar, watching Vena get sloshed and dance with some other female law student. Hope wasn’t sure if the rough ocean was making them flop around so terribly or if they were really that uncoordinated. Either way, it was embarrassing to watch. Hope hadn’t stopped sympathy-cringing for hours.
Luckily for Vena, everyone was dancing terribly. She didn’t stand out as particularly worse than anyone else, although there was something distinctly Mormon in the clumsy jerk of her hips and flap of her elbows.
At least they looked like they were having fun.
The bartender gave Hope another gin and tonic. It was only her second for the night. She was confident that the warm, buzzing disorientation in her skull had more to do with seasickness than the gin itself.
“You don’t look like you’re enjoying yourself,” said the bartender. He was a narrow-shouldered man with black eyes and strangely pale skin. He looked like he belonged at a Black Death concert rather than working on a yacht.
“I’m enjoying myself,” Hope said. “I’d be enjoying myself more if the boat would stop moving so much.”
He smirked. “Maybe you need to lie down.” Judging by his tone, he didn’t mean for her to lie down and sleep.
She rolled her eyes and turned her back on him to enjoy her gin.
Vena and Tracy had draped themselves over some blond asshole now. Hope didn’t recognize him—he wasn’t in her class. She would have remembered his angular good looks, his slicked-back hair, the way he helped himself to handfuls of the girls hanging on to his shoulders. Gross.
This guy looked like exactly the kind of stupidity that Hope needed to protect Vena from.
She didn’t have to venture onto the dance floor to rescue her friend. The slimeball strolled toward the bar with his new arm accessories. “Drinks for the ladies,” he told the bartender. “Anything they want.”
Hope peeled Vena off of him. Her roommate was so sloshed that she didn’t even fight back. “I think they want glasses of water.”
The blond man looked surprised to see Hope, as though he hadn’t noticed her by the bar.
Once he spotted her, the familiar once-over followed. The slow look from her feet to her face, and then back down again to make sure that he’d seen that everything in between was really that good.
She hadn’t dressed up for the party, but Hope was always meticulous in her appearance, and she wasn’t shy about accentuating her natural assets. Specifically, the big ol’ assets attached to her ribcage.
Seeing which parts of her body men examined first was a pretty reliable asshole test. Blond Guy lingered on her tits and never made it back to her face.
He’d definitely failed the asshole test.
Blond Guy carefully dislodged Tracy, propped her against a bar stool, and gave Hope his full attention. “I don’t remember seeing you here earlier.”
“Try again,” Hope said.
“Excuse me?”
“That doesn’t
even pass for a pickup line. If you’re going to hit on me, please come up with something cheesier so Vena and I can laugh about it once she’s sober.”
Amusement sparked in his eyes. “Would a marriage proposal work for you?”
“That’s pretty bad, yeah. Who are you?”
“Who am I…?” Now the amusement had turned to a grin. “A better question is, who are you?”
“Hope Jimenez.” She thrust a hand toward him. “Guardian angel of ladies too drunk to consent to sexual activity. The emotional equivalent of a designated driver.”
“A hero.” He shook her hand. His fingers lingered on hers. “And a witch.”
She jerked her hand back. “Excuse me?”
How could he have possibly known about that?
Hope looked down at herself, expecting to see that she had grave dirt on her dress. She’d visited the cemetery before leaving for the party with Vena. But her outfit was clean. Her nails were clean. There was no sign that she had been hanging out with dead people, so there was no way this guy could know who—and what—Hope was, aside from a law student.
“You radiate,” Blond Guy said helpfully, noting her confusion.
“That’s getting closer to the shitty pickup line I was looking for.” But Hope had lost some of her confidence. She smoothed down her bobbed haircut and checked her reflection in the mirror behind the bartender.
Meanwhile, Vena blew chunks all over the bar.
Hope grabbed her friend, pulling her hair back. It was too late. Vena’s modest Mormon shirt was slick with vomit. “Damn! I need a bathroom.” Her roommate chose that moment to slump into unconsciousness. Hope almost dropped her. “Ugh, and I need a bed, too. Are there any beds on this stupid boat?”
“Six,” Blond Guy said. “There are cabins upstairs.”
“What kind of assholes can afford a yacht with six bedrooms?” Hope muttered as she hauled Vena away from the dance floor.
Blond Guy stooped to pull Vena’s arm over his shoulders, taking most of the weight from Hope. “This is the Friederling X, I think,” he said. “So there are at least nine other Friederling yachts. They must do well for themselves.”