Deadly Wrong

by SM Reine

  Isobel felt heavy as she approached the black car.

  The window rolled down. Despite the tinted windows, Fritz was wearing sunglasses. She could see herself in the reflection.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  Isobel clenched her hands into fists. Her remaining fingernails buried into her palms. “Ready for what?”

  Fritz lifted an eyebrow.

  Yeah, he didn’t need to elaborate. He was asking if she was ready to give in to the magnetic pull of what his money could do for her.

  She tried to ignore the squirming sense of defeat in her gut.

  “Okay,” she said.

  The driver opened the door for her. Isobel slipped into the seat opposite Fritz, sinking into leather so plush that it consumed her body. The limousine was actually one of his cars that was more function than form; the minibar, television, and recessed lighting were meant to make guests comfortable, rather than anything Fritz enjoyed having in his vehicles.

  He was a man who appreciated the grip of rubber on pavement. He liked nice damn cars for the sake of performance and the way they reacted to his touch.

  The niceties of a limousine weren’t interesting to him.

  The fact that Isobel was starting to remember so much about Fritz’s preferences bothered her.

  “What will it be?” Isobel asked. “Have you hired the best covens to meet us at your private island to cure me?”

  “I’d do it if I thought it would help. The only remaining possible solution is much more boring, though.”

  The limousine glided onto the pavement. Isobel couldn’t even hear the engine.

  She studied Fritz’s features. His careful concealment of his thoughts behind the sunglasses had never worked on her. He was feeling just as frustrated and exhausted as Isobel.

  She wasn’t the only one grieving her impending death.

  Isobel sagged, covering her eyes with her hands, trying to slow the growing ache in her skull. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. I’m not angry with you. I’m angry at circumstance. I’m angry that I haven’t been able to fix this myself. I’m a death witch—this shouldn’t be so difficult.”

  Fritz slipped the glasses down the bridge of his nose. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot. “I know.”

  “I wanted to be able to save myself.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  His calm acceptance only made her feel more frustrated. “And the fact that you know so much about my reactions is terrifying. I don’t like that you know me better than I know you.”

  “That will change when we fix the contract,” Fritz said.

  “I think Ann can help. The necromancer that we hooked up with a free ride to college in Reno. That’s where I was heading.”

  But it wasn’t where the car was heading. They weren’t going back to Los Angeles, either.

  The driver had taken a side road off of the highway, leading them deeper into the miserable nothingness of the desert. She could just make out the glimmer of buildings on the horizon. A small town, maybe.

  “Ann won’t help you,” Fritz said. “She’s a necromancer. By the time your contract expires, it’ll be too late for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When someone dies, their soul evaporates within hours. It returns to some kind of central pool of energy to be remixed, recycled, reborn. Not exactly direct reincarnation, but—”

  “I know,” Isobel said. “I am a death witch.”

  “You’re already halfway there, Belle,” Fritz said. “Halfway between here and gone. Maybe more than half.”

  She looked at her increasingly mangled hands again. Missing fingernail, blackening skin, burned fingertips. “So this is it,” Isobel said. “Once the contract expires, I’m dead and gone.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  The buildings on the horizon grew. It wasn’t a town after all.

  It was an airport.

  “There are some things money can’t buy,” Isobel said.

  “See, now that’s just not true,” Fritz said. “That’s something that poor people tell themselves when they’re feeling insecure about their money. You can buy anything. You just have to know where and how.”

  The attitude rankled, even though Isobel was starting to think that was an attitude she had once shared with him. “Some things can’t be fixed. At all. Cèsar killed Ander, and Ander was the only guy who could rewrite my contract.”

  “But there are demons far more powerful than he was,” Fritz said.

  The limousine paused outside the airstrip so that the driver could punch an access code into the gate. It was a relatively tiny airport. There were more helicopters than planes. Some of the hangars stood open. She recognized private jets inside a couple of them.

  “We’re going home, aren’t we?” she asked, swallowing hard around the lump in her throat.

  “Yes,” Fritz said, sliding the sunglasses back over his eyes again. “We’re going home.”

  Back to New York.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IN THE BATHROOM OF Fritz’s private jet, Isobel realized that she had scuffed her knees while fretting over the RV. It was a minor injury, so minor that she wouldn’t have ordinarily given it any thought, but now her throat thickened with tears at the sight of it.

  The scuffs made the skin over her kneecaps a little paler, a little rougher. Just some dry skin embedded with dust.

  It was never going to heal.

  She felt like an automaton returning to her seat for takeoff, stiffly buckling herself into the chair and accepting a water bottle from the stewardess.

  Fritz was in the opposite chair. He spoke to her, but she didn’t respond.

  The jet took off.

  Isobel wondered if she had been on it before. She didn’t think so—it looked more recent than the jets she would have taken with Fritz. Maybe a new purchase with the Friederling fortune. She couldn’t remember…yet.

  The more broken Isobel’s body became, the more quickly complete memories returned.

  It was because of the magic, she thought. Ander’s contract was releasing its hold on her. The thick ropes of energy that had allowed her body to function as though she were still alive had also been holding the memories at bay, like a cloak over her mind.

  As one thing slipped, so did everything else.

  She felt it slipping faster now as fatigue set in. It might have helped that getting onto Fritz’s private jet was far more Hope Jimenez territory than Isobel Stonecrow territory, too. The leather seats and eager stewardess triggered something deep inside her brain.

  The sound of the jet engines lulled Isobel to sleep. Her head drooped against the side of her chair.

  And she dreamed.

  She dreamed of white sand beaches, turquoise water, and a cool, salty breeze. She dreamed of walking barefoot among the driftwood in a long white dress, holding a bouquet of tropical flowers that a florist had given her when she told him that she was getting married that day.

  “Do you, Fritz Jeremy Friederling, take Hope Jimenez as your wife?” asked the officiant. He was a dark-skinned man with dreadlocks and a hint of a patois. He smelled pleasantly of sunscreen and sandalwood.

  Fritz stood on the officiant’s other side. He took Hope’s hand. His fingers were wrapped around something hard and cold.

  A knife.

  There was mischief in his eyes as he passed it to her.

  “I do,” he said.

  Hope felt the corner of her mouth lifting in a smile of her own.

  Shrieks echoed over the beach as a crowd rushed toward them. The clamor had initially sounded like part of the slap of ocean against beach, but now it was distinctly an approaching horde.

  They were running out of time.

  The officiant spoke faster. “Do you, Hope Emmeline Jimenez, take Fritz Friederling as your husband?”

  There was little room for doubt at that point. They were eloping thousands of miles from their nearest friends, family, and business associates. They’d spe
nt weeks on the Friederling X together, sailing the warm waters of the Caribbean as Fritz hunted demons that threatened his international holdings.

  And Hope, fresh out of law school, was enjoying every single moment of it. Even the bloody parts. Fritz always took care of her.

  She never wanted it to end.

  “I do,” she said.

  Fritz kissed her before the officiant said that he should. It was brief, a brush of lips against lips.

  Then he whirled and plunged the knife into a demon before it could tackle him.

  The fight lasted for over an hour, most of which Hope spent trying to stay out of the horde’s reach. The officiant was a friend of Fritz’s—a local kopis who had been trying to deal with the demon infestation for weeks—and he fought as fiercely as though he were a demon himself.

  Between the two men, they were more than capable of holding back even a hundred fiends. They carpeted the beach in blood and bodies.

  Hope’s dress didn’t even get stained.

  It was everything that Hope had been trying to avoid by attending a nice, normal law school so that she could get a nice, normal job, but Fritz was pretty good at making that all seem okay. He was very convincing.

  The officiant survived, somehow. So did they.

  No demon walked off the beach that day.

  Hope and Fritz spent the night in a penthouse overlooking the beach where they had gotten married. He had been injured and refused to let her treat the wounds. They got all kinds of bodily fluids all over that very expensive penthouse—blood and other things—and they left a generous tip before getting back on the Friederling X.

  Happy times, both warm and bloody.

  In the private jet, the intercom chimed. The pilot spoke. They were almost at their destination, and the sound of his voice woke Isobel up with a start. She felt raw, as though she had been crying. Her cheeks were dry, though. She didn’t have tears anymore.

  Fritz was still sitting across from her, working on his BlackBerry. “Sleep well?” He didn’t even look up from his phone. There was none of that youthful liveliness in him, that mischievous spark that had made his wild proposals so impossible to refuse.

  Isobel imagined that was just what happened to a man after he lost his wife.

  “Fine,” she said. “I slept fine.”

  Isobel was exhausted, but she didn’t let herself sleep again, even when they got caught in traffic between the airport and their destination.

  She didn’t want to remember anything else.

  Unfortunately, as they traveled through the dense streets of Manhattan, she started seeing a lot of things that stirred memories. Not just of her time as Hope Jimenez before she died, but of her time after signing the contract with Ander, too.

  Isobel had sworn she would never return to New York. She’d planned to abandon more than one life there. “What’s the plan?” she asked, forcing herself to look away from the buildings passing outside the limousine’s windows.

  “It took you long enough to ask,” he said.

  “I’m not feeling very talkative.” She kept her tone measured, even though she considered using Fritz’s necktie to slap him in the face a few times.

  “I have a portal to Hell in my condo. We’re going to go to the City of Dis and make an appeal with the Judge at the Palace to nullify the terms of your contract. We should be able to restore you to the condition that you were in before you signed.”

  He was so matter-of-fact about it.

  Fritz had a portal to Hell and they were going to use it.

  “Why the heck do you have a portal to Hell?” Isobel asked. She knew that Fritz had some business dealings with demons; he’d never exactly been secretive about it. But she’d always assumed that they came to him.

  “I have multiple pathways, actually,” Fritz said. “Just the one leading to Dis, though. What do you know about the city?”

  “I know that Ander worked there a lot.” She left that dangling as an unspoken accusation.

  “Most demons of any repute do work in Dis. It’s the political and industrial center of Hell.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Ander’s former property isn’t in that dimension, though. It was in one of the smaller worlds.”

  Isobel knew. She remembered. There had been no name for the wasteland that he’d lived in, and no occupants aside from Ander himself—she had discovered that firsthand, in the most unpleasant way possible.

  Ander’s front door had opened wherever he wanted it to open. While Isobel had been working for him, that had usually been somewhere in New York, or occasionally overseas. Every other exit opened into his Hell dimension.

  During her one and only attempt to escape through a window, Isobel had ended up wandering the empty desert outside Ander’s house. She’d only survived because it was nighttime. The shadows had permanently burned her flesh. If she’d escaped during the day…well, she wouldn’t have a problem with her contract expiring, that was for certain.

  “So you think this Judge can reverse the contract,” Isobel said, shaking off the memories she wished she could have forgotten.

  Fritz nodded. “Judge Abraxas has supreme authority over any deals other demons make, so long as they’re members of the Palace court—which Ander was up until his death.”

  “How do you know I won’t just die when this Abraxas guy releases me?” Isobel asked.

  “You weren’t dead when Ander took you. You don’t have any mortal wounds right now, so you should be restored to good health.” The way that he said “should” didn’t inspire much confidence.

  She studied the hands spread across her lap. The pinky finger with no nail in particular.

  It sounded like a long shot, what Fritz was talking about. But it was also the only shot she had now.

  “Okay,” she said. “So we’re going to Hell.” No big deal, just a burning pit filled with demons. Couldn’t be much worse than Helltown in Los Angeles. Or New Jersey, for that matter.

  The limousine pulled into a parking garage underneath a high rise. Fritz took Isobel to the elevator and swiped a card. The number for the highest floor of the building illuminated.

  It felt like it took hours to reach the penthouse, though it couldn’t have been longer than a minute or two. They were greeted by a small lobby at the top of the building. It had marble floors and big windows with a view of the city that had probably cost eight figures.

  Fritz had to swipe the key again to open the platinum-handled doors at the end of the hallway.

  Two layers of security to reach the penthouse. Very fancy.

  “You live here?” Isobel asked.

  Fritz stood back to let her enter first. “We both did.”

  She didn’t want to enter the double doors now. Didn’t want to see what was waiting for her on the other side.

  “The portal’s in the office,” Fritz added.

  She knew without having to ask that the office was on the second floor loft in the rear. There was no way to reach it except to go inside.

  Gathering her strength, Isobel stepped forward.

  The entryway of the condo was simultaneously strange but familiar. Without having to look, she knew that she would find leather couches to the right and could imagine the view she would see through the floor-to-ceiling windows to her left.

  None of it suited her tastes. Everything was glass and steel. Pretty Scandinavian-looking.

  Knowing Fritz, he had probably hired designers from Denmark to custom build all his furniture. Why not? With access to the Friederling fortune, the sky was the limit.

  That thought came to her with a twist of disgust. She’d never been disgusted by Fritz’s money before. Something else she was remembering from her life as Hope?

  “You didn’t always live here.” Fritz shut the door silently behind them. “We had our own apartments in addition to this one. Yours was sold after your death, so I can’t take you there, but it was less than a block from your law offices. Very convenient.”

  “Convenien
t,” she echoed. As if it was normal to have a shared living space as well as independent living spaces.

  She wondered if her private apartment had been as uncomfortable as the condo that she shared with her husband.

  Even if her finances hadn’t been limited, Isobel wouldn’t have chosen to live anywhere but her RV. That was her style. Not necessarily the eclectic interior decorations—most of which were hand-me-downs from witchy friends—but the freedom of it all, the ability to pick up and leave whenever she wanted to, untethered to location.

  Isobel couldn’t imagine a life where she would have enjoyed this kind of condo.

  Fritz was showing her around the kitchen now. He was rattling off the types of flooring and cabinets and how they had picked everything out to be the very best, but Isobel only had an eye for the two big ovens.

  “Now this looks like something I’d enjoy,” she said, opening one to peer inside. They were each industrial-sized, like something that she might have found in a restaurant kitchen.

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “Think of all the cookies I could make.” Isobel was still feeling a little queasy from all the Cinnabon she had snarfed after her RV broke down in the desert, but baking still sounded very appealing.

  “Where in the world did you pick up a baking habit?” Fritz asked with a weak laugh.

  The fact that it surprised him left a weird aftertaste on Isobel’s tongue.

  Who had she been if she wasn’t the kind of woman who baked cookies for fun and lived in a billionaire’s Danish dream house? Did she know Hope Jimenez at all?

  “Some friends taught me to bake,” Isobel said. “There’s not a lot for humans to do in Helltown at night when you’re on lockdown against nightmares. A couple of the other priestesses liked to make desserts. I only got good at cookies. Everything else was too difficult.”

  “Interesting,” Fritz said in a way that made it clear he didn’t find it interesting at all.

  He didn’t like to be reminded that she had changed any more than she did.

  Isobel headed up the glass staircase to the loft, no longer waiting for Fritz to give her the grand tour. Their bookshelves didn’t have a lot of books on them. Mostly, they were decorated with expensive crystal baubles, knives held aloft on stands for display, and a few globes that didn’t depict Earth.