Under Suspicion tudac-3

by Hannah Jayne

  That was supposed to be me.

  “We have to find out who’s doing this, Will,” I said. “We have to find out before anyone else gets hurt.” I pulled away from Will. “Mrs. Henderson, Bettina—and now Kale!”

  “Do you think they mistook her for the dragon and the—what’s the bird again?”

  I frowned. “A banshee. And I don’t see how they would. Bettina was leaving her apartment. It’s across town, by the ballpark. And she looks nothing like me.”

  Will nodded thoughtfully as though this all made perfect sense. “Right. No one would mistake you for a banshee.”

  I knew he was playing with me, but he pulled me back toward his chest, enfolding me in his arms. I felt remarkably, unexpectedly safe. His heart thumping against my chest was a comfort, as were the little puffs of his moist breath against the part in my hair. Standing there wrapped in Will’s arms, I almost felt safe. Almost allowed myself to feel comfortable. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought of Kale, and Bettina—and Alex.

  I stepped away, completely out of Will’s reach this time. “You should probably go.”

  Will’s hand was on the doorknob when the car alarm went off. Its wailing siren was insistent and annoying, and the side of Will’s lip curled in disgust.

  “Did you know in Australia that’s the sound the tropical birds make?” He shook his head. “I don’t see why people don’t do away with those bloody things. No one listens to them, anyway.”

  I clenched my teeth together in a forced smile and grabbed my purse from the peg by the door. “That one’s mine.”

  Will cocked an eyebrow.

  “I parked on the street. There was parking right out front and I was a little too creeped out for the underground.”

  Will opened the door and ushered me out. “Let’s go turn it off.”

  I stepped out into the hallway, a sudden prick of fear sending gooseflesh all over. “Do you think it’s something bad?”

  Will snorted. “It’s a car alarm, love. A heavy breeze probably came by and set the thing off.”

  I pushed through the vestibule door, with keys in hand, trying to soak in Will’s nonchalance. “You’re probably right.”

  “Maybe someone thought your car was a werewolf,” Will said, grinning.

  I rolled my eyes at his stab at humor.

  Though my rent includes an underground parking space, the cavernous darkness of the parking garage gives me the heebie-jeebies. So on the rare occasion that I can find aboveground parking in my zip code, it’s too good to pass up. Today the parking gods and Gavin Newsom must have been smiling down on me because I caught a cherry spot almost directly across the street. Sure, I had to shoehorn my little Accord into the space and make a forty-seven-point turn in the process, but kicking open the car door and having sunlight—or the graying drizzle that passed for sunlight in San Francisco—was wonderful.

  I really wish I had given the underground spot a second thought.

  “Oh no.”

  I didn’t realize I was standing in the middle of the street until a Muni bus came barreling past me. The driver was laying on the horn that wailed like a dying duck. I jumped out of the way and tried to press myself flat against my car door, but my car door wasn’t flat.

  Also, it wasn’t attached to my car.

  I felt my lower lip start to wobble; I felt the moist heat of tears behind my eyes. The hood of my car was bashed so solidly that the metal roof undulated like hard green ocean waves. Every window was smashed out and the car seemed to sink under its own destitution. I sniffed, trying to blink away tears, but I was still able to see that every single tire had been slashed repeatedly until the rubber flopped out in jaunty ribbons. I took a second step closer and felt the crunch of a car window underneath my sneaker. I tried to take a step closer, to run my hands over the puckered metal, but something was pinning me back. When I turned to look, I realized that a hunk of headlight—the size of my fist—had snagged my shoelace. I shook it off and rounded the car, somehow hoping the damage might not be so severe on the sidewalk side.

  That so wasn’t the case.

  “Wow, lady, looks like you really pissed someone off,” a kid said as he wandered by. His baggy pants pooled at the ankles and he walked with the kind of exaggerated limp that was meant to call up images of Snoop Dogg and original gangsters. Instead, he just looked like he was trying to keep his pants up.

  A low whistle from the other side of the car caught my attention. I peered through the broken-out passenger-side window and met Will’s gaze as he smiled at me through the driver’s-side window.

  “Good thing your car alarm went off,” he told me.

  “Oh God, Will. What am I going to do?”

  “You’ve got insurance, don’t you?”

  I sighed and leaned against the battered car door as Will came around to join me. “Yeah, but this car was new. Or sort of new. And now I have to report once again that my car got mysteriously bashed in.”

  “Did they take anything?”

  I yanked on the door handle and the door swung open easily, leaving a confetti-like spray of broken glass in its wake. I was about to slide into the car when Will grabbed me by the shoulder, slipped out of his sweatshirt, and laid it on the car seat.

  “There’s glass everywhere. You don’t want your arse to look like—”

  “My tires?” We shared a small smile and I crawled onto Will’s sweatshirt, taking inventory of my front seat.

  “Bad news,” I said, pushing my head out. “They got my American Idol CD.”

  I could see the smile in Will’s eyes. “That’s rather good news, actually.”

  I turned in my seat—the selection of broken window glass crunching loudly underneath me—and felt my eyes go wide. “Wow.”

  Scrawled on the inside of the battered windshield was the word freak.

  I swallowed slowly, my own saliva choking me, crawling up the back of my neck. “I have to get out of here.” I pushed past Will and edged out of the car. I stumbled on the sidewalk and doubled over, taking little short breaths of cold night air.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Will’s head disappear into the cab of the car; he pulled out again, looking slightly confused. I expected at some point I should fill him in on me and why a five-letter word would spur me to nausea.

  Though I comfortably live with a vampire, have spent a good chunk of time talking to my dead grandmother through a hunk of fruit, and share an office wall with a hobgoblin who has to use a slobber tray, the freak thing is something that, to this day, still cuts to the spine.

  Like every other teenager in the world, I had only wanted two things: to be popular or to be invisible. The invisibility thing was pretty much a lock all through junior high. I never made many friends and the school bus (thankfully) dropped me off a full seven blocks from the little stuccoed house that I shared with my grandmother and the four-foot-high neon hand that flashed PALM READING ... PALM READING ... PALM READING through the front window.

  Without knowing about my grandmother’s occupation, and every day, clad in a rotating collection of Guess? jeans and oversized B.U.M. sweatshirts, I looked just like any other anonymous mid-1990s high schooler.

  Until they came to my house.

  They were the popular girls who had scrunchies that matched everything they owned, and they drove enviable cars, like the Geo Storm. On one Saturday in May they thought it would be hilarious to have their futures foretold. Of all the days of the year for the Psychic Friends Network to go on hiatus.

  The knock came at three o’clock in the afternoon, and my world went crashing down two days later. On Monday morning, at nine o’clock sharp, “Special Sophie, the Freak of Nineteenth Street” was born, illustrated, and pasted to my locker.

  From then on, it was stupid mentions of my crystal ball and a constant inner begging to suddenly get powers—preferably, powers that could blow up perky blond cheerleaders who had smooth ponytails and grandmothers who baked banana bread rather than her
bal elixirs.

  I was leaning against what would have to pass as my new car door when Will came around the side.

  “They know who I am,” I whispered, starting to cry.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Will said, his accent warm and familiar, “because they will never get to you. Not as long as I’m around.”

  I wanted to believe him. Wanted to put my hand in his and snuggle up on the couch, putting all of this behind me.

  “It’s only going to get worse, Will. It’s only going to get worse, and no one is listening to me.”

  Will held me closer and I sank into his arms. I felt my body curve into his. He pushed a thick lock of hair behind my ear and kissed the lobe gently.

  “I’m listening to you,” he whispered, “and I promise to keep you safe, Sophie Lawson.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I woke up jittery and exhausted, having tossed and turned all night. Images of Kale, of the concrete, of her lolling head, haunted my dreams. I forewent my usual morning jaunt to Philz Coffee and headed into the agency early. We were packed, and the entire waiting room buzzed with a kind of nervous energy. But everything seemed to drop into an awkward silence when I stepped onto the floor. I paused, and clients turned to gape at me—the flat, cold-as-stone eyes of zombies; the sharp, narrowed eyes of vampires. They all seemed to zero in and though I desperately tried to tell myself I was imagining it, I couldn’t quite get over the strange chill of the room.

  I shrugged out of my jacket and smiled, anyway, beckoning the first person over.

  “I can help who’s next in line.”

  Several pairs of eyes (and the occasional single) raked over me, but no one moved. I stepped forward, inclining my head toward the person at the front of the line.

  “I can help you right now.”

  She was a behemoth of a woman, with a blunt-cut black pageboy and eyes that took up the better half of her face. Her pale lips were quirked in the kind of smile that is meant to be friendly, but it oozed avoidance.

  “That’s okay,” she said to me. Her head snapped back to bore through the back of the person in front of her. “They’re almost through here.”

  I craned my neck and eyed Nina, who was doing her best to cut off the woman in front of her, who continually kept thrusting photos of her newest grand-demon at her while Nina processed her paperwork.

  “I think it’s going to be a while,” I said in what I thought was a friendly tone.

  “No, thank you.” Blunt-cut black pageboy kept her eyes fixed; her knuckles turned white as she gripped her paperwork.

  “Okay.” I shuffled back to the person behind her, and wished I had kept my jacket on when I realized it was Windigo, a recent Canadian immigrant, with a stack of papers the thickness of my right thigh. Each time he shifted, a waft of frigid air floated from him.

  “Hi, Windy. I’m Sophie Lawson. I can process your paperwork if you’ll follow me, please.” I reached out for the stack and Windy blinked at me, a pointed tongue darting out of his ice-tinged mouth as he licked his bottom lip. He didn’t move to hand me his paperwork, and I dropped my hand to my side, frowning.

  “I thought you only handled fallen angels now,” he said, his voice an icy rasp.

  “Oh, well, that’s true. I do do fallen angels, but I still work with the generals. Especially when there’s a line this long. So, are you ready?”

  Windy shifted, taking a small, unsure step toward me. He seemed to think better of it, and then stepped back in line. “I think I’ll wait.”

  I stepped closer to Windy, who immediately stiffened and rose to his full height, which was at least two heads taller than I am. His decrepit skin seemed to crack as he did so.

  “Is there some reason you don’t want me to help you?”

  I saw him considering—the smoky haze in his eyes studying me, as if assessing the challenge. The man was a pointy-toothed man-eater whose breath froze human hearts solid, and he was assessing all five feet two inches of me: fiery red hair, T-shirt with barely faded ketchup stain, oblivious expression (I’m assuming) on my red-cheeked face.

  “Look, Sophie,” Windy said, leaning close, “it’s not that I don’t appreciate your willingness to help. It’s just that”—his eyes cut left and right, his voice dropped to an even lower, even chillier octave—“everyone knows that lately any one of us you come into contact with ... well ... dies.” He looked immediately apologetic. “Or at least gets really hurt.”

  I felt my mouth drop open and stumbled backward, taking stock of the line of demons—man-eaters, night stalkers, shape-shifters—all avoiding my stare, all frightened of me.

  “Is that true? Do you all feel this way?”

  No one answered me, but Windy finally nodded, looking half apologetic, half matter-of-fact. “No one wants to take the risk.” His eyes went from my toes to my face. “Not for someone like you, anyway.”

  Someone like me.

  “Human?”

  I watched the deceased remains of Windy’s Adam’s apple bob in his throat as he swallowed heavily.

  “Okay.”

  I turned around and headed toward my office, not bothering to turn my eyes from the private pixies in the hallway, not needing to avoid Lorraine and her ever-present stack of questionable invoices, because they all avoided me.

  I swung into my office with a plan to take a heavy breather and talk myself out of a panic attack. Instead, I opened the door, stepped inside, and felt my mouth drop wide open.

  “What the hell happened here?”

  Though my desk and obsessive-compulsive straight lines of Post-it notes and pencils remained untouched, I couldn’t say the same for the rest of the office. The walls and carpet showed great rectangular lines of fresh paint and cleanliness, where file cabinets had been removed, and my ever-present spider plant was set gently on the floor, along with a stack of general office tchotchkes. Joining this disarray was a photo of my grandmother and me that usually lived on top of a bookcase normally stuffed with tomes on UDA standard operating procedures, The Modern Classification of Demons, Monsters, and the Undead for Insurance and Appraisal Purposes, stacks of life/afterlife insurance forms, and a tattered copy of What Color Is Your Parachute? The last book remained, but nothing else.

  I didn’t know why, but I knew Dixon was behind this. Dixon, or at very least the newly formed fanged triumvirate that was Dixon, Vlad, and Eldridge, top-seated vampire representatives of UDA, VERM, and ... Queer Eye for the (Undead) Straight Guy. White-hot anger roiled through my veins, and I felt my hands automatically roll into fists so tight that my fingernails bored into my palms, cutting through the skin.

  I made a beeline to Dixon’s office and didn’t even slow when Eldridge tried to feed me some crap about Dixon being a busy man and me needing an appointment. I breezed past him and kicked open Dixon’s office door, not even stopping to shiver when a series of pale-faced vampires stared up at me, surprised and hunger evident on their faces.

  “Where are my files?”

  Dixon, chilled as a pre–global warming iceberg, knitted his hands and looked up at me. His brown eyes were wide and open; his mouth pushed up into a calm smile. “Well, Ms. Lawson, what an unexpected surprise. Gentlemen, this is Sophie Lawson, the acting head of our newly established Fallen Angel Division here at the Underworld Detection Agency.”

  I felt a snarl tug at my lip. “Acting head?”

  Dixon tipped his head from side to side, but made no move to explain. “As you can see here, Ms. Lawson, I’m kind of in the middle of something. Is this something that Eldridge can help you with?”

  I finally scanned the faces of the assembled—there were four men, all vampires—sitting around Dixon’s desk. Two I recognized as Dixon’s new promotions, one was Vlad, and the third, brand-new.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked, unease walking up my spine.

  “Board meeting,” Dixon answered breezily. “Now what did you need?”

  “My files,” I said, suddenly uncertain, my anger turni
ng to suspicion.

  “We’ve simply lightened your load,” Vlad piped up. “Some of our clientele were looking for a change, a provider a little more in line with their needs. We thought it would also be a great opportunity for you to begin expanding your division.” Vlad’s answer smacked with scripted practice, and his lips curved into that same stupid serene smile that Dixon wore like a mask. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  Unable to form a cohesive thought—or a witty response—I turned on my heel and sped back to my office, my mind ticking. I was there for a millisecond before Nina sauntered in, completely oblivious to the spring-cleaning that had cleared out my office, unaware of the gales of pissed-off heat that wafted off me.

  “What do you think of Athena Bushant?” she asked.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, willing the thundering headache that was starting behind my eyes to hold off. “What’s an Athena Bushant?”

  Nina rolled her eyes and flopped her head back, as if I’d just asked her to ride shotgun in a primer-colored Pinto. “Not what. Who. Athena Bushant.” She thrust out her chest and stepped forward, arms splayed, superstar style.

  I shrugged. “Is she new?”

  “I am Athena Bushant. Actually, Athena is me. Athena Bushant is my pen name. What do you think? Perfect, right? Just the right combination of mystery and wisdom. And it’ll look great on a dust jacket. I’ve already come up with my bio. Listen to this.”

  “Nina, I don’t have time for this right now. Look at my office.” I spun around, with excess room to do so—now that more than half my file cabinets were gone.

  “I think it looks great. Now listen. ‘Athena Bushant holds a master’s degree in the mystical arts from Oxford University. When not sailing—’”

  “Does Oxford even have a department of mystical arts? Does any school other than Hogwarts?”

  “It’s called artistic license.”

  “Nina, listen. Dixon, Vlad, and the rest of the Fang Gang board members have moved all my files out. They’re taking over more than half my cases because I’m apparently not”—I made air quotes—“in line with my clients. I basically have nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs all day.”