Hexed Hit: An Urban Fantasy Mystery (The Lyon Fox Mysteries Book 4)

by Ann Denton

  I’m getting tired of dead bodies showing up every time I turn around.One—ew. And two—I’m so not qualified for this.

  I mean, this was supposed to be a magical drug bust. Easy peasy.

  But with my plucking luck, I walk right in and stumble over a dead body.

  This body belongs to a dealer who was worse than most. She took advantage of mixed breed shifters who were more powerful than they realized; she stole magic and got on the bad side of my favorite dragon.

  Bennett’s raging and I need to solve this case before he goes off the deep end.

  A rookie against dealers and addicts is not good odds.

  But it gets worse.

  Because the killer knows how to hex.

  Hexing uses magical equations to do the dirty work … and I hate math … well, math and murder.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Signup for My Newsletter

  Other Books by Ann Denton

  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

  A Personal Note from Lyon Fox

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  More Books

  Connect and Get Sneak Peeks

  About Me

  Copyright © 2019 Ann Denton

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

  Le Rue Publishing

  320 South Boston Avenue, Suite 1030

  Tulsa, OK 74103

  www.LeRuePublishing.com

  ISBN: 978-1-7335960-5-3

  To Chunky Monkey.

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  Other Books by Ann Denton

  The Lyon Fox Mysteries

  Magical Murder

  Enchanted Execution

  Supernatural Sleep

  My first reverse harem series is the Tangled Crown series. It’s a medieval fantasy with a bully romance feel in the first book.

  Tangled Crowns Series

  Knightfall - Book 1 - Available Here

  MidKnight - Book 2 - Available Here

  Knight’s End - Coming Soon!

  My second reverse harem series is the Lotto Love series. Its a rom-com reverse harem with a private island, lottery money, and tons of handsome men.

  Lotto Love Series

  Lotto Men - Book 1 - Available Here

  Lotto Trouble - Book 2 - Available Here

  If you’re in the mood for more intrigue, check out my Postapocalyptic Thriller series.

  Timebend

  Melt

  Burn

  Chapter 1

  "Baby-napping! Our first case is a baby-napping!" Seena's jaw drops as he stares down at our ‘team assignment’ folder. We’re two months into our training at the Tres Lunas Police Academy, and we now have our first, official off-campus case of our own. (Obviously, we’ll have a supervisor with us.) But hell-to-the-yeah! We get to test our skills and see how we do.

  From the cubicle on our left, I can hear another recruit groan. “Trolls,” a vamp named Petey whines. “That stinks.”

  All around us, the chatter starts up as different recruits get their first team assignments. There’s a feeling of anticipation and dread in the air. It’s kind of like the moment on your birthday, right before you open that present from your grandmother—not the one who gives you super soakers and fun stuff, the grandma who hasn’t heard that children don’t appreciate books on manners and embroidered handkerchiefs.

  Seena shakes his black head of hair as he scans the first page of our assignment. "Hell no! They want us to find people who stole babies? I thought we were supposed to get low-level shit!"

  I turn in shock to stare at Seena Mostafavipour, my miniature-Arabian-horse shifter partner who (ironically) is Persian. His hair is a mess, and he straightens his glasses as he re-reads the file, as if that will change the words on the page.

  "Hold up." I raise my hand. "Wait. You think this case is about what?" I push back my rolling chair so I can get a better look at him. We’re crammed into a tiny cubicle stuffed with two desks and two chairs in a space that’s really meant for one, so I can’t back up much. (Tres goes all out for its trainees. Our cubes are the lap of luxury.)

  Seena cocks his head and looks at me like I’m ridiculous. He yanks at his scratchy police uniform collar as he repeats, nice and slow for me, "Baby-napping."

  "Yeah, but you said—"

  "The kidnapping of infant children. A crime that's just about the worst thing—"

  "Whoa, whoa, who-o-oa!" I can't help dragging out the word as if I were directing a horse. You know, because he’s a horse shifter. (What? He messes with me all the time. He totally played that stupid 'What Does the Fox Say' song during workouts last week.) "Seena, are you telling me that in LA, people actually kidnap babies?"

  Seena transferred to Tres Lunas from LAPD. And he's still working on the mental transition from an all human police force to an all supernatural one. Tres Lunas is the only completely supernatural town in Southern California. And I’m so glad Seena moved here. He’s my bestest bud at the Academy.

  "Um. Yes. People kidnap babies all the time,” Seena says.

  I close my blue eyes and try to picture it. My dad was human. I was raised human when I was a kid, but after dad died, I was taken in by magicals and I've lived in Tres for so long, that sometimes I forget about the outside world. The human world. "So, there are people out there that steal babies. But ... all they do is scream and poop!"

  I open my eyes to find Seena staring at me. "Yeah, so?"

  "So, who in their right mind would wanna steal a baby?"

  "Why is this a foreign concept for you?" he wrinkles his brow.

  I pull a hair tie off my wrist and toss my blonde hair up into a ponytail. "Maybe because someone would be nuts to try to steal a shifter baby. They'd be sniffed out in half a second. Fae already hand their kids out to others like candy, so that wouldn't be a thing. I mean, and really, who could stand a troll baby? Think of the smell!"

  Seena waves the file in his hands. "Then what the hell is this case about?"

  I laugh and grab the file from him. "Who put rocks in your oatmeal this evening? Geez. Look, right there. Baby-napping is an addiction. To a drug." I grab the file, flip a sheet of paper and point. Of course, I’m more familiar with the file layouts than Seena i
s, so I know exactly where to look. I used to be a paralegal before I started training to be a cop.

  "What?"

  I sigh and try to think of the human equivalent. "It's kinda like ... I think humans call it hero? That drug that makes people all chill?"

  "Heroine?"

  "Oh, yeah. The girl one."

  "Baby-napping is a drug?"

  "Well, that's not the name of the drug. The drug is actually Nappies. But that's the addiction, right? Baby-napping. Who doesn't wanna sleep like a baby?"

  Seena rubs his forehead and sighs. "Okay. Drug addicts. I guess that's better than stolen babies. So, this drug just makes people fall asleep?"

  I laugh. "Heck no! You need to read the whole file next time, Black Beauty. It turns them into babies."

  "What!!?" Seena rubs a hand over his jaw. "Now I'm picturing babies in plaid shirts sitting in cardboard boxes in back alleyways that are full of broken glass and overflowing dumpsters—"

  I laugh. "Dude! Lay off the crime shows. Geez. They aren’t outside. They have nap shacks."

  He scrunches his forehead in confusion.

  "Like ... you know, geez ... I need to Goblin this. I dunno enough about the human drug world." I drag out my phone and use the supernatural search engine for a few seconds. I also shoot off a text asking my boyfriend, Luke, if he knows about any drug shack places back when he was alive. (Luke is the world's hottest, Viking-god-wannabe vampire. And he's mine. All mine. Since last week, anyway.)

  Before Goblin can spit out an answer that's not full of random click bait, Luke gets back to me.

  "Opium dens," I read the text out loud. "Not sure what that is. But Luke says that's what nap shacks are like. Did they have cribs and cages for opium people to sleep in?" I look up at Seena, who's flipping through our case file and muttering to himself.

  "What? Huh? Not sure—" Seena's answer gets cut off as our oh-so-awesome boss approaches.

  Diego Flores leans on the edge of our cubicle, giving us a death glare.

  I glance side to side, trying to figure out why the tiger shifter is angry at us. "We didn't do anything—"

  Flores, aka Flowers on the force—nicknamed for his kind, beautiful personality (hear the sarcasm there?)—rolls his eyes. "I'm supervising your dumb asses on this one. So, let's get a move on."

  My shoulders immediately slump. Flowers and I don't see eye to eye on much. And that's not just because I'm a five-foot-four, wingless part-fae and he's a six-foot-plus Hispanic athlete whose toe muscles probably give him an extra inch in height. Nope. Flowers is what you'd call a disciplinarian.

  Discipline and I ... we're not like BFFs. JR is my BFF and she's totally not a disciplinarian. She's part nymph—wilds and woodlands and all that.

  The disciplinarian is staring at me all grouchy-like. As if he can understand my wandering thoughts. Thank frickin' goodness he can't. Because when he's around, they're pretty grumptacular.

  Seena pops out of his seat and grabs his coat. I sigh as I grab my jacket and follow the two down to the parking garage that houses our police vehicles.

  I was hoping a mummy named Darrell would be our supervising officer for this assignment. He seemed pretty cool on the last case I worked. But I guess he hasn't recovered from that cat attack a few days ago. I heard he had a couple loose threads when he walked through the station. Bad timing, because someone had brought in some cat shifters high on catnip. I play out the whole incident in my mind, imagining them batting at him and getting tangled up in his bandages. I smother a laugh as I climb into the backseat of the car, letting Seena ride shotgun.

  He and Flowers talk about drug crime stats in Tres Lunas. They're going over boring things like the illegal use of Ironmen, a testosterone and iron mixture that shifters love to use in the FFA, Fae Fighting Arts. The drug makes athletes kick serious fae ass due to the iron, but the iron also kicks the taker's ass. As in, they end up shitting iron. Which is not worth it, IMHO. But what do I know? I think voluntary exercise is dumber than most trolls. And that doesn’t even cover voluntary fighting.

  "New topic!" I announce. "I don't need to picture hot guys with metallic shi—" I can't finish the word. My mother, the sweet kind fae that she is, put a cursing curse on me during my teen years, to stop my potty mouth. I still haven't figured out how to lift it. So, I literally cannot say a goddamn curse word aloud. "Excrement," I improvise lamely, using the word to finish my sentence and to curse my mom at the same time.

  "What happened to your Persian cursing?" Seena asks me.

  "Takes too much thought," I grumble. “The other day I couldn't remember one of the phrases you taught me. Cursing at someone is ineffective when you have a five second pause before you insult them. Obviously … I mean, look at my statement about metal turds."

  Flowers rolls his eyes, “Too much thought is always a problem for you.”

  “Hey!”

  “You should be listening to our conversation to glean as much as you can about different drug effects, seeing as we’re on a drug-related case right now.” Flowers lectures me as he steers through a lower-class neighborhood.

  I consider arguing, but it’s too early in the night to get into with him. Instead, I sniff and stare out the window. The houses are double-stacked, meaning the garage apartment behind the main house has been converted into a second house with a full family in it. California real estate is killer expensive. Especially for those of us not on the ‘Richest of…’ lists. The driveways are full of rusty cars, and the streets are lined with them, too. There are a lot of ghetto gates on the front doors and bars on the windows. I stare sadly at the little kids playing ‘tag the shifted kids’ in the front yards of those houses. I always feel bad for kiddos when their house kinda looks like a jail. Or a zoo exhibit, which is what the house with the tag-playing flamingo kids looks like.

  Flowers parks on the side of the road, near what looks like an abandoned, boarded-up, two-story brick house. The yard is overgrown and full of trash. One of the upstairs windows has a hole in it.

  "Are you sure this is the place?" I ask, "I thought Nappies was an expensive drug."

  "They are," Flowers responds as he pockets his keys and opens his door.

  "Dude. Uh-uh," I make a face and shake my head as Seena helps me out of the car and we both stare up at the creepy house. The brisk November wind hits us just right, making my nose start to leak just as the scent of freshly ruined diapers wafts down from the house. I grab a tissue out of my pocket and wipe and shield my nose. “I think I shoulda’ brought a gas mask. Maybe tactical gear.”

  "Addiction makes people make bad choices,” Flowers lectures as he comes around the front of the car. “A lotta shifters get addicted to Nappies. They like the chill at first. But then, they like the mindset; they like forgetting their problems and having someone take care of them. And they get hooked. It becomes an everynight thing. They stop thinking about things like cleanliness—”

  Workout addict wants to critique daily addictions? Well then … “Agreed. Addicts also stop using normal chairs or eating normal meals. Instead, they eat nasty things like protein bars and sit on exercise balls—” I retort.

  Flowers glares at me. “Or eat jellybeans and sneak naughty books under their desk?”

  Damn. He burned me back. I better not read at work for a week. Okay, who am I kidding? I’ll go a day at most. Fuck. I am addicted. I glare at Flowers and debate my next words, wondering how far I can take this before I get punished.

  Seena glances between the two of us and holds up his hands. “I’m out.”

  Flowers shakes his head at me one last time before slipping into instructor mode. “I’m going up first. Seena, you go around to cover the back door. Do not go in on your own. We’ll come to you. Fox, you got my back?”

  I nod. Much as he might annoy the crap outta me, he’s a decent cop. And if it comes to him or some junkie, I’ll pick the tiger-shifter every time.

  “Wait,” I grab Flowers’ shoulder. “Should I go first?”


  “What? No—why?”

  “Well, didn’t the tiger want to eat Mowgli? Isn’t that a thing? Eating babies?”

  Flowers’ jaw tics. “This isn’t a Disney movie.”

  “Are you sure—”

  “Get the hell behind me, Fox,” Flowers growls and stomps toward the house.

  “Okay, geez. But I don’t think our insurance covers attacks on infants.”

  “It does cover friendly fire.”

  “Well, shoot. I mean—don’t,” I mutter.

  Flowers doesn’t laugh as he approaches the door. His tension makes my heart speed up.

  This can’t be that dangerous, right? We’re walking into a room full of babies.

  I hear a high-pitched yowl inside. Someone must have shifted to a baby kitten.

  Kittens are so not dangerous. So why is Flowers scared?

  He takes a deep breath and braces himself. That makes me feel like I should widen my stance. I mean, I guess a baby elephant shifter could come barreling out. Who takes care of these babies anyway? Oh … now I get why Flowers is tense.

  “Tres Lunas Police!” he yells. “We have a warrant.”

  He looks down at his watch as we wait for a response.