Banshee Blues (Bones and Bounties Book 1)
Page 1
Banshee Blues
Bones and Bounties
Bilinda Sheehan
Contents
Also by Bilinda Sheehan
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Banshee Bones
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
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Also by Bilinda Sheehan
Copyright © 2016 by Bilinda Sheehan
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Also by Bilinda Sheehan
Bones and Bounties Series
Banshee Blues
Huntress Moon - Coming soon
The Shadow Sorceress Series
A Grave Magic
Blood Craft
Grim Rites
Wild Hunt
Touch of Shadow - Coming Soon
Bond of Blood and Shadow Series
Violet Line - Book One
Violet Code - Coming 2016
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For Gran.
Beannachtaí libh go bhfeictear arís sibh
Banshee Bones
Bilinda Sheehan
Chapter One
Clomping through the office into the tiny cubicle I called a bathroom I stared woefully into the mirror at the streaks of dirt covering my cheeks. The stuff was in my hair, on my hands, and I was pretty sure I could even feel some of it dripping down inside my T-shirt.
After turning the faucet on full belt, I waited the obligatory three minutes for the water to go from freezing to mildly manageable. Hey, it wasn’t as though beggars could be choosers, and all I truly cared about was scouring off the worst of the Faerie swamp mud before it hardened into cement.
Ducking my head below the spray of water, I did my best to scrub the worst of it from my hair. There were Fae out there actually stupid enough to pay to have this goop scrubbed into their skin, but I definitely wasn’t one of them.
Instead, I got to be the lucky Fae who traipsed around the swamp looking for the Mamuna who had disobeyed a direct order from the Unseelie court. She’d been desperate enough to run when she saw me coming, and I’d been stupid enough to follow her straight into the goddamn swamp. That crazy cow owed me a new pair of boots…
Well, she would owe me a new pair of boots if the Unseelie ever decided to let her go. Ignoring a direct order and hunting in the human realm was way up there on the Unseelie’s list of no-nos. Great—not only had she ruined my favourite boots, but if I wasn’t mistaken I was actually beginning to pity her. There were fates worse than death, and the Unseelie were better than most at inflicting such punishments.
I knew from experience that she would wish for death long before they would ever consider granting it. And if she were like me, that death would become a life of perpetual servitude spent hunting disobedient Fae through the Faerie swamps.
The water turned murky as I fought to pick the twigs and hard clumps of swamp from my hair. If there was one thing I hated—aside from my indentured servitude—it was being dirty.
The little bell over my office door tinkled and I jerked up, the side of my head catching on the faucet. A small yowl escaped my lips and lights danced in my vision. A bump like that would definitely leave a bruise.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice called out. I jerked a towel off the rail next to the sink and scrubbed my face, then poked my head around the door and spotted the woman examining my extensive library of occult books and general mythology. They were human books—I kept all the really good stuff in the back room behind a spelled lock.
“I’ll be out in a second if you want to grab a seat,” I said, a flicker of satisfaction winding its way through me as she jumped and glanced over at me. My tainted nature made itself known to me, and I fought to suppress the voice in my head telling me I could do so much worse than make her jump.
Her eyes widened a little as she took in my appearance. Clearly, she wasn’t expecting to see a half-drowned banshee covered in Faerie swamp. But she couldn’t know I was a banshee just by looking at me, unless she was also one of the Fae. That just wasn’t the vibe I was picking up from her, though.
Upper-class suburban socialite, maybe. I could already see her hosting soirees by candlelight but standing in the middle of my office, didn’t seem as likely and yet there she was.
“Are you Darcey Thorne?” she asked. The steadiness of her voice instantly elevated her in my opinion.
“The one and only.” I ducked back into the bathroom before she could continue questioning me. She looked like a woman who would have at least a thousand questions, and there was no way I was answering them without first fishing the last of the swamp mud from my bra.
Grabbing the spare shirt I kept on the back of the door, I ripped off my muddied Panic! At the Disco T-shirt and dragged on the clean one. I stared at my reflection and sighed—the French Bulldog in a bow tie had seemed like a great idea when I’d bought it, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to wear whilst meeting clients. Without a doubt, I needed to get better at leaving appropriate clothing in the office for times like this…
After dumping the last twig into the sink, I strode into the office and plopped down into my swivel chair behind the large desk I’d managed to salvage from a yard sale when I’d first decided to open my doors as a private investigator. Indentured servitude was notoriously bad at paying the bills, and my exile to the human realm left me with no choice but to get a very real human job. Oddly enough, there weren’t that many job opportunities for a bad-tempered, half-depleted banshee.
I’d contemplated getting into retail, but quickly changed my mind when I’d imagined what I might do to the customers if they annoyed me… Death was pretty bad for business.
“Well, since you already know my name, I feel at a disadvantage, Mrs…” I deliberately trailed off.
The French Bulldog T-shirt had definitely been a bad idea, since the poor woman couldn’t take her eyes off it. She probably thought I was some sort of lunatic… or a joke. It wouldn’t be the first time—and it definitely wouldn’t be the last time—a client thought I was nothing more than an elaborate joke.
“Mrs Archer. You’ve probably heard of my husband.” Her fake, posh accent grated on my ears, but I fixed my face into a smile and nodded.
For the first time, I noticed the large sparkling rock on her ring finger.
Everyone had heard of her husband, and anyone who said they hadn’t was either lying or had been living under a rock for the last ten years.
“Okay, then, Mrs Archer, what is it you want me to do?” I asked.
“I want you to find my husband, of course.”
Her request wasn’t unsurprising since I was renowned for my ability to find missing people, but I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. This sounded like just another run-of-the-mill case.
“And why can’t you find him?” I said, cringing as I caught sight of the dirt beneath my fingernails. “Did you consider that maybe he doesn’t want to be found?”
“He went out two nights ago to see his mistress and he hasn’t come home. Henry doesn’t do that…”
Pushing up in my chair, I cut her off with a raised hand and a shake of my head. “Whoa, he went to see his mistress? And you know this how?”
“We have an open relationship. He has his dalliances and I have mine, but in the end we always return to each other. It’s part of what makes us work so well.”
“And he couldn’t just be lying low with this mistress of his?”
She shook her head, her perfectly coiffed blonde bob barely moving—she had used enough hairspray to trap a small child on her head if one wandered too close. “No, there was an important shareholder meeting this morning that Henry wouldn’t miss. Not without a reason.”
She seemed sincere enough, and Goddess knew I needed the money. Run-of-the-mill or not, the case would be relatively easy and guaranteed money. No one on this earth could hide from me for very long; I might have been half-depleted, but at least that gift hadn’t faltered.
“Fine, I’ll go and find him.” I pulled open my desk drawer and fished out a standard contract. “What exactly do you want me to do with him when I find him?”
“Can’t you just bring him home?”
My eyes widened a little as I stared at her. I could bring him back, whether he wanted to return or not but I’d learned that humans tended to object to being manhandled against their will.
“I don’t go hands-on unless it’s for my own safety,” I said. “But when I find him, I can tell him you want him to go home…”
“Just tell me where he is, and that will be enough,” she said with a sigh.
I pushed the contract and a black pen across the desk, and she stared down at the ballpoint as though I planned to use it to murder her. Popping open the top of her small but expensive clutch, she lifted out a gold gilt pen and scrawled her name across the bottom of the contract before pushing to her feet.
“As soon as I have something, I’ll contact you,” I said as she dropped her card onto the desk and turned for the door.
She nodded almost absentmindedly, then crossed the floor with the grace of a woman groomed for the public eye. When she pulled open the door, the small bell tinkled once more.
“Sooner rather than later, Ms Thorne,” she said, leaving me alone to swivel around on my chair and ponder her strange adieu. This wasn’t the goodbye of a woman who was concerned about the welfare of her husband; she sounded much more like a woman who cared what the press would think if his absence carried on unanswered.
Chapter Two
I picked up the iron blade, hefting its weight in my hand before flicking back my wrist and then jerking it quickly forward again. The weapon flew from my fingers and landed with a satisfying thump in the chest of the mannequin I had propped against the wall.
One day, I planned to get myself a proper training dummy. The old shop mannequin I’d found in a skip outside one of the downtown department stores worked fine, but its chest cavity was beginning to collapse under the damage caused by my iron blades.
Iron and Fae didn’t mix; it was one of the only things capable of putting a permanent stop to their immortality. And from the look of poor Boris the dummy, cold iron and plastic mannequins didn’t mix either. My exposed skin tingled where the metal had touched it, but at least contact with iron didn’t hurt as much as it used to. The rough callouses across the tips of my fingers and my palms made it easier for me to handle the blades, but handling iron still wasn’t without its downsides. Too much contact and the callouses would very quickly break down and become welts once more.
The sound of my computer dinging snapped me out of my thoughts. Time to go to work…
I crossed the room and dropped into my chair, my eyes scanning the pictures and names on the screen as fast as I could absorb them.
“Got you,” I muttered beneath my breath as I double-clicked on one picture in particular. That was the problem with being in the public eye all the time—a man like Henry Archer was much easier to track down.
Dropping back into my chair and propping my feet up on the edge of the desk, I closed my eyes, holding the image of the pretty, dark-haired woman in my mind’s eye. How the press hadn’t picked up on Mr Archer’s affair with his secretary was beyond me, though it probably had something to do with bribes in brown envelopes and threats in dark alleys. There was nearly always something nefarious behind a situation like this one where humans were concerned.
I picked up on the dark-haired woman’s thread, the very essence of her being, and my heart sank. The thread was severed, which only meant one thing.
“Am I interrupting something?” A voice like sin itself caressed my skin, sending a shiver of desire lancing straight through my core.
“What do you want, Lunn?” I said, forcing as much boredom into my voice as possible. Not that I could ever be bored where Lunn was concerned… Even knowing he was in the same room as me set my heart racing. And Goddess damn him if he didn’t know it.
He laughed, and the sound drew a small moan up my throat that I swallowed before it could pass through my lips. The last thing I needed right now was for Lunn to know just how much of an effect he had on me.
Opening my eyes, I sucked a deep breath in through my teeth and dropped my booted feet back to the floor. He was closer than I’d thought, his muscled thigh brushing the edge of my desk as he towered over me and his bright gold and green eyes watching me the way a cat might observe a mouse before devouring it whole.
“You’re working on something?” he asked, and the nonchalance in his tone sent my suspicion into overdrive. Lunn was never nonchalant. And he wasn’t named for being mild-mannered and apathetic either, and that was for sure and certain.
“Nothing I can’t put aside if the Court needs something from me.” The words tripped from my tongue as I curled my fists. It wasn’t a lie, which bugged me far more than I cared to admit.
“I’ve never seen you so willing to obey before.” There was an edge to his voice that made my core ache; he’d clearly seen my reaction and was now toying with me. Would I ever get over my ridiculous crush? As I stared up into his face, I already knew the answer. Not even a saint would get over a man like that, and I was as far from a saint as one could get.
I hopped to my feet with a groan and pushed past him, but realised my mistake the second my body was forced to touch his. Tension sang through him, vibrating across the surface of his skin where we touched before it passed into my body. I froze, my breath caught in the back of my throat as I glanced up at him.
Mistake number two.
Lunn had been worshiped as a god in a past so distant the art of storytelling was something the frightened humans did to pass on their history when gathered around the fire as the darkness of their unforgiving world crowded in. And while he wasn’t really a god, and definitely no longer had the power of one, when I stared up into his eyes I felt my world shift. The urge to throw myself at his mercy washed through me.
Reluctantly, I broke free of his hold and flung myself as far from him as the cramped basement would allow. I ended up on the other side of the room with my back pressed against the broken mannequin, pinned in place by Lunn’s gold-green eyes.
“I didn’t know you could resist me?”<
br />
Under normal circumstances, I could have come up with a witty comeback to quickly put him back in his place. But this time, Lunn wasn’t messing around. It was a genuine question, and I could see the question in his eyes.
In a way, Lunn was my boss—a sort of go-between for the Fae Court and little old me. If I stepped out of line, he was there to make sure I hopped back in double-quick. Of course, the Fae Court were a nasty bunch of assholes who thought screwing with people’s heads until they were infatuated with someone so utterly out of reach as Lunn was a nice little added bonus to go alongside my sentence of eternal servitude.
“It’s not really resisting you, but I definitely think better with a little distance between us,” I said.
Lunn studied me thoughtfully, his eyes raking over me from head to toe, causing my mind to wander to far more interesting things we could be doing. Things that involved a distinct lack of clothing and a lot of heavy breathing.
“Are you even listening to me?” The irritation in his voice snapped me out of my perverted thoughts, and I tilted my head to the side with a sigh.
“No, but you can’t exactly blame me for that, now can you?” The distance between us was finally allowing my head to clear a little.
“The Court wants you to look into something pretty straightforward. Even you should be able to stay out of trouble with this.” His lips curled slightly as he spoke.
“Okay, what is it?”
He dropped an envelope onto the desk and gave me his best hundred-watt smile. It was a damn good smile. “No idea, I’m just the messenger.”
And then he was gone.
There was no magic puff like in the movies, but between one breath and the next he simply vanished. I’d always admired his ability to do that. I could move fast—faster than the human eye—but I couldn’t just disappear into thin air no matter how much I wished I could.