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

by Ann Denton

My eyes are glued to the door handle. I think I see it turn. I stiffen. I blink. Nope. Just a stressed-induced hallucination.

  Flowers yells again. (Our rulebook says you have to yell twice since shifters mid-shift might need another second to get to the door.)

  When there’s no answer, Flowers lifts his leg and power kicks that door. He leaves a hole in the middle. He reaches through the hole with one hand and holds onto the handle with the other.

  He turns the front knob, opening the door. But … there is no click.

  My jaw drops as I stare at him. Did my instructor just make a boo-boo? “Was the door unlocked?” I stage-whisper.

  “No,” he scoffs.

  “But I didn’t hear the lock click.”

  He schools his features, which is a definite tell from Flowers. The door was totally unlocked. He shoulda’ checked it instead of being a showoff. But why does he think he needs to look like a badass in front of me?

  Flowers snaps in my face. “Focus, Fox,” he chides.

  I press my lips together, ready to follow him in. But I know I’m right. And I’m feeling a bit smug. I’ll have to figure out a way to rib him about this. Before I can think of anything, he swings the door open.

  We step into a front hall and the first thing we see is an older woman passed out on the floor. Her pale grey curls are matted. She has a flower print apron on. A baby bottle is on the ground near her hand, and it leaks milk onto the wood floor. It looks as if she was carrying it to feed one of the many infants I can hear bawling in a side room.

  Flowers gestures for me to approach her. He covers me, stepping around the woman to check the nearby doorways and clear the rooms.

  I crouch and put my fingers to the woman’s neck.

  There’s no pulse. Crap.

  “She’s dead.”

  Chapter 2

  Flowers clears the rest of the house while I let Seena in through the back door, which is also unlocked. Apparently, security isn’t a big deal at this nap shack. Or maybe the locks are just broken. Looks like just about everything else in this house is.

  It doesn’t make sense to me, though. I mean, if I was a drug dealer, I wouldn’t want people to be able to just walk right in and grab my stash. Or maybe it’s magically protected. Or maybe clients take the drugs in the backyard. The dead grass out there did look kinda flattened. In which case, if I was the dealer and had to inject clients and then I had to carry a baby inside each and every time, I’d definitely leave the place unlocked. I mean think about it. Baby bear shifters? What if they don’t turn into human babies? The data suggests about half of all shifters go animal when this shit’s injected.

  I shut the door and wipe my hand on my pants. Even the doorknob in this place is filthy. I crinkle my nose. If I was a dealer, I’d have higher cleanliness standards than this, too. Not that I’d ever be a dealer …

  I join Seena and we stand around in the outdated, sticky-looking kitchen, waiting on Flowers. There’s a little butcher block island that rolls. On it is a gallon of milk, an empty saucer, and a cutting board with a knife and a bunch of vegetable ends: carrots, celery, lettuce, etc.

  I put the back of my finger against the milk carton. It’s still cold. I resist the urge to put it back in the fridge.

  Seena scolds me, “Dude, this is a possible murder scene.”

  “I know,” I whisper yell. “I just wanted to know how fresh the milk was. I mean, did this woman just die or has it been out awhile?”

  Seena shakes his head at me but doesn’t scold further. “I can’t tell if we have the worst or best luck of any rookies on the force. I mean, what are the chances of us coming here and finding a dead body?”

  I shrug. “You’re the math guy.” Internally, I agree with him. I just wanted to arrest a few doped-up magicals and be done for the night. Not happening now. Even if it ends up this woman died of natural causes, I wouldn’t put it past Flowers to have Seena and I practice evidence collection just for kicks.

  The cries from the babies in the front room get as loud and shrill as those airhorn thingies sporty people use when they feel like being dickwads to the people sitting next to them. It’s awful. I use my hands as earmuffs while Seena and I wait for Flowers to come back and give us the ‘all clear.’

  Flowers trusts me enough to watch his back when he kicks down a door but not enough to go through a death/potential murder site without contaminating ‘every last shiny thing.’ His words. So, I stare at Seena, bobbing my head, covering my ears and pretending to listen to Jeopardy countdown music as I wait instead of the piercing melody of crying babies.

  “Maybe we should call a sitter,” Seena grabs my arm and pulls me over to peer into the living room, where there are at least five cribs and two stacks of cages filled with … I squint.

  “Is that a squirrel with a rhino face?” I pull my flashlight off my belt and shine it into one of the cages. It totally is. Curled up on a towel, with his tail brushing his nose horns, the little brown squirrel has two grey ears that fold up like rolled paper, just like a rhino. His head is over-sized. Most baby heads are. But I mean, like, really really over-sized. It’s a mini rhino head on a squirrel body. I don’t think a squirrel neck could hold that head up. But then, the baby blinks and proves me wrong, lifting his head and snuffling at me, making his horns jerk up and down.

  “Weird,” Seena whispers.

  I pull my flashlight away from the cage as the rhino-squirrel’s adorable black eyes blink at me. He yawns and goes back to sleep once the light isn’t in his face.

  I shine the light at the next cage down, which is quite a bit bigger. Inside, a group of fluffy little yellow chicks huddle together. Their feathers are at that fuzzy stage of adorableness. One turns its tiny face toward me, and I realize it has the face of a puppy dog. The feathers turn to fur somewhere around its forehead and it has a wet little black nose. Pup chicks. Chick pups. Chickie pups. Holy helium balloons! I didn’t know such adorableness was possible. Is there anything in the world that’s cuter than a baby chicken combined with a baby puppy face? If there is, I haven’t frickin’ seen it. Cute aggression hits me hard, and the urge to snuggle and squish those little suckers comes on quick. Flowers was probably right not to take me through the house.

  I turn off my light, before I wake up any more babies. I take a deep breath to smash down the cute aggression, grip Seena’s hand, and yank him back into the kitchen.

  “Ow!”

  Whoops. Guess I took out some of the need to squish out on Seena. “Sorry, but did you see those chickie pups? I’m dying.” I put away my flashlight and bury my hands in my pockets, so I don’t accidentally start kneading Seena’s arm. “Cuteness overload.” I shake my head.

  Seena shakes his head too, but because he’s disagreeing with me. “It’s a damn shame, that’s what it is. Those poor shifters.”

  I furrow my brow. “Did you not see the same thing I just saw? Hecka cute!”

  Seena waves a hand at that room. “Yeah, I saw. Did you see the grasshorse?”

  “What?”

  “Grasshopper horse? Geez. Talk about a nightmare. No wonder these guys are drug addicts.”

  I squint at Seena.

  I go back to the doorway and shine my flashlight around the living room. There are several human babies fussing in cribs. (They are nowhere near as adorable as the chickie pups.) There’s a tall empty cage next to the cribs that has a couple feathers stuck in the newspaper lining. Not there. I swing the light around some more. Sure enough, in a tiny cage perched on an end table, a little green shifter has the shape of a horse and tiny black hooves. But the critter’s body looks like a tiny, thumb-sized horse was covered in green armor. No horsing around—he looks like a miniature badass. Like if the ants ever have an apocalypse, he’ll be the horse that brought it. Grasshorse. Freaking bohemoth of the backyard insects. A movie narrator’s voice clicks on in my head as I stare at the miniature guy. “Watch out, black widow. The grasshorse is out for vengeance.” I picture the camera zooming on
the grasshorse rearing up on its hind legs.

  I trudge back into the kitchen and click my light off. “What’s wrong with that?” I point back at the cage in the living room. “He might be the most kick-booty, ninja-awesome grasshopper around.”

  Seena shakes his head. “Not if he was born into a horse family.”

  “Oh.” I finally get it. Yeah. Badass among the ants. Not so much around real horses. Runt of the litter is an understatement.

  “My aunt had a seal-horse.”

  “A sea horse?” I ask, thinking he said it wrong.

  “No. A seal-horse. Her son, Duke, has the body of a seal, head of a horse when he shifts. Pretty much ended her marriage since my uncle’s pure horse.”

  “Huh,” I’m not really sure what to say. My life pretty much revolved around fae issues growing up. Lotta flying envy. Elemental magic envy. Beauty envy. How about just a lotta envy in general?

  Shifter issues sound different. I think about the shifters I know. But most shifters spend their working hours as humans, unless they’re like my ex-boss Arnold who likes to shift his lower half to wolf in a disgusting display of animal prowess that’s completely office inappropriate.

  I’ve really never contemplated what happens when shifters mix. Most of them in Tres are pretty rigid about not mixing with other shifters. “A seal-horse. How does that happen—”

  Seena gives me a look.

  I backtrack. “I mean, I know how babies are made, doofus. But, like, how does that convo not come up before people do the deed?”

  Seena sighs. “In Tres, things are so open. Magical creatures are safe here. But in human cities, a lotta shifters never talk about what they are. Hide it even. They try to avoid shifting if at all possible. Repress it.” Seena waves his hands at the front room, “My guess is that a lotta those people in there are the result of one-night stands. Or shifters who thought they were mating with humans, diluting their magical genes … when surprise! They weren’t. They mated with another repressed shifter. It’s a real problem.”

  I tilt my head in thought. “But, like, sometimes you get hardcore cool combos like hippogriffs, right?”

  Seena sighs and shakes his head at me. “More often, you get a poor animal who can’t fit into either side of their family. Duke, my cousin … can’t go run through the meadow with the fam. Can’t go underwater and use his flippers because his horse head can’t handle staying under. He’s stuck.”

  I bite my lip, “What’s he do about it?”

  Seena shrugs. “He ran off when he turned eighteen.”

  Sadness smacks me across the face and my cheeks heat up. That’s the worst. I didn’t fit in, but at least I had my dad. Then Jacob. “Sorry.” I’m not sure what else to say. Other than someone always has it worse than you. I kick the memory of my nineteen year-old-self. ‘See? You had no reason for a pity party!’ I tell her. She flips me off and goes back to putting on black eyeliner.

  Seena shrugs and stares at the vegetables on the cutting table. “Hey, is that blood?” He points at the knife.

  I circle the island to stand next to him. Sure enough, the knife has a couple drops of blood on it. “Maybe she cut her finger chopping up baby bunny food? The old lady?” I suggest, shrugging.

  “Yeah, maybe she got distracted.”

  “Easy to do here,” I say as the crying babies are interrupted by a strange thumping in one of the rooms upstairs. A little bit of dust trickles down from the light fixture overhead. “Crud. I hope there’s not a gorilla shifter or something up there pounding on Flowers.”

  “Should we check?” Seena’s hand reaches for his belt, where we trainees are equipped with flashlights and handcuffs. Excellent tools for facing down drug-addled shifters.

  “Maybe we should call for backup,” I murmur.

  Just then, Flowers bursts into the room. “Hippo shifter cage is broken upstairs,” he pants. “I called for backup. And the ME. We better move out back.”

  “You’re a tiger!” I tell him.

  “HIPPO!” he yells as if that explains everything. I’m about to argue when a loud snort and ungodly wailing sound comes from the floor above.

  “Crap,” Seena mutters, pulling at his sleeves nervously.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “Hippos are crazy aggressive,” Seena mutters.

  “This is a baby,” I argue.

  Flowers clears his throat. “His dose of Nappies musta’ worn off. Because he was getting bigger by the second.” He heads toward the back door.

  I grab Flowers’ sleeve and yank him back. “We can’t leave all these babies here!”

  I pull him toward the living room and he begrudgingly follows as I grab two cages—strike that, a baby calf is heavy as hell, I set him down and keep the chickie pups—one cage and move toward the back door.

  “Hold up!” Seena stops me. “Why don’t you just make that hippo get lost?”

  I turn to stare at him as a giant body thunders down the stairs, literally causing the walls of the house around us to shake. Baby hippo has reached adult, stair-crushing proportions.

  My heart jumps in my throat. “Where?” I ask, eyes flickering between Seena and Flowers.

  A thump makes the floorboards shake beneath us like an earthquake. Oh shit.

  Flowers grits out, “Anywhere! He’s compromising a crime scene!”

  “He’ll trample random people!” I argue.

  But then, suddenly, the hippo’s in the doorway. I see a giant set of jaws dropping open. Who knew hippo teeth were as big as my forearm? Holy wrinkled shirtballs. I’m about to get trampled. Or eaten. “That hippo’s lost in a field with no one around it for miles!” I say as I shake my hands in a wild freak out motion. And fuck! My leg is on fire, I drop the cage of baby chickie pups I was carrying, my uniform pants rip, and my right leg goes chicken. It sprouts feathers and a claw unfurls inside my shoe. I fall to the floor as the hippo disappears and my stupid power works.

  “Corn sticks!” I curse as the chickie pups burst out of their broken cage and swarm over my feathered leg. I try not to move because I’m worried that I’ll crush the adorable little suckers. They start to nuzzle. I almost feel maternal for a second. Until one of them nips and then I’m backing away and shaking them off like vermin. “Son of a booger butt, puppy teeth are sharp!”

  I latch onto Seena and force him to pull me upright, away from the nipping teeth. I sling an arm around his neck so he can help me stumble around the room, but we’ve hardly made it two feet away from the chickie pups before a human baby’s scream rises above all the other chaos. It sounds tortured. Truly tortured. The sound has Seena dragging me toward the cribs. He props me up on the edge of a crib and picks up a little brown-haired baby whose face is red as a tomato. Seena awkwardly pats the baby’s back and starts doing this bouncing squat thing, bending his knees. He coos at the kid.

  The screaming, thankfully, stops. I’ve never really been around a lotta kids. But apparently bouncing is good for them.

  A group of adult voices trail in from the front yard and I give a sigh of relief. Backup is finally here. Seena turns too, putting his back to me, with that scrunched up little baby face looking at me all weird and judgy over Seena’s shoulder.

  “Look at this place—” I recognize Bennett’s voice. My ex has a hot gravelly voice that I could pick out of a crowd. Unfortunately, I often hear it in a crowd because he’s my boss’s boss. He’s the head of the entire felony investigation department. Bennett French, the big-muscled, black-haired poster-boy for steamy dragon shifters everywhere, steps into the hallway.

  And that’s the moment the little monster in Seena’s arms projectile pukes … right onto my face.

  Chapter 3

  I start spitting. Because that shizzle got in my mouth. And while it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever tasted—don’t ask—the very fact that I have baby puke in my mouth makes me want to puke.

  I gag. I lean over and put my hand on the wall.

  “Fox, stop contami
nating the possible crime scene!” Flowers yells at me.

  I swipe at my mouth with my sleeve. My sleeve comes away covered in white alien slime. Seriously. That’s what it looks like.

  “I wanna file assault charges,” I gasp, shaking my sleeve even as Flowers comes over and grabs my arm to stop me.

  “Contamination,” he growls again. And then, as if my latest words have just registered, he recoils, “You wanna file charges against a baby?”

  I point at the white ooze dripping from my hair. “Do you see this?” His lip curls and I continue, “That’s not really a baby. We don’t even know if the mental state fully regresses on Nappies. You shoulda’ seen how that little guy looked at me. He knew what he was doing. He puked on purpose.”

  “I can’t tell if you’re serious.”

  “Totally serious.” Totally fucking with Flowers. But I am totally pissed about being covered in baby puke. I hold his eyes as long as I can. But I’m weak. I cave and a tiny smirk crosses my face.

  His eyebrows come down. “Not funny. Take it outside if you’re gonna yak.” He turns away, but not before I see a hint of a grin on his face.

  Damn straight. I’m hilarious.

  I grumble under my breath but don’t actually argue with him. Flowers likes to give out awful punishments for insubordination. “Am I allowed to go clean up?”

  He nods.

  “Are there spare clothes in the car?”

  “You really think I’m gonna let you repeat the bog pants incident?”

  Crap. He’s never gonna let that go. You lose one borrowed pair of pants into a bog pit on purpose to punish someone … “I bought you new pants.”

  He just shakes his head.

  I turn to Seena. He’s putting the growing baby, now the size of a two-year-old, back into its crib. “Seena, please tell me you have spare clothes.”

  Seena just raises an eyebrow at me when he turns back. “Did you want something with rainbow sparkles or a leather collar?”

  I glare at him. “That was an official police undercover op. You should be proud of that moment!”