Doomed Cases Series Box Set

by Joanna Mazurkiewicz

  I brought my hands together, making time pause in its natural moment. Now I had more than enough time to destroy the flying bullet and deal with the human, but bending destiny like that was going to cost me big in the long run.

  Everything stopped—the small dots of rainwater had been suspended, the air shifted and all the humans around me became frozen statues. It took me a second to realise that the bullet was heading straight in my direction. I was going to die here, in this wet cemetery. I had never truly experienced using my abilities to this extent. The demon nearby was watching, sensing the fact that I was breaking all of Lucifer’s rules, just to save myself and possibly Prince George.

  I knocked Zachary off his feet, moving at least a meter away from the speeding bullet. Those couple of seconds gave me enough time to reboot time again. I screamed at the top of my lungs landing on top of Zach, reaching for the energy of the storm. The light pulsated, became more of a living entity as waves crossed over, feeding me with bits of nature’s power. Lightning slashed its angry light through the sky and then I summoned it. My fingertips were red as they throbbed, and tiny wisps of smoke began drifting away from my arms. The lightning hit the human man that fired the gun, but the impact knocked the others off their feet.

  My eyes started to glow, as I shot back on my feet, feeling the enormous power of my energy begin tearing my flesh apart and joining itself with my demonic soul. Two humans that landed on the soaked ground were screaming their heads off.

  I didn’t even realise that Zachary was fully conscious now, staring at me with his eyes wide open. The pain eased off as the power slowly faded away. Mist began covering the entire space, drifting through the graves. I had brought it in, so whoever was watching couldn’t see what I was planning to do next. A second later, the bullet hit the grave behind me, missing my hair by about an inch.

  “Your eyes, Maxine, your eyes are glowing,” Zach shouted. He shot back on his feet and lifted his gun. We didn’t have time to play this game right now. The prince was already out of sight, somewhere behind the cemetery walls, and Zach was ready to shoot me on the spot.

  My head was banging loudly, and for the first time since I came back, a human had witnessed the real me. This whole thing was supposed to turn out differently. Zach was meant to be knocked out when I landed on him, so I could deal with the rest of the guys.

  “Zach, put the gun down. We have to go after the prince!” I shouted back, wondering if he was really ready to kill me. His mind was confused, convinced that I was the cause of his partner’s death.

  “You were one of them this entire time. I knew there was something wrong with you,” he shouted. The other two guys stopped moving and that wasn’t good. Zach was ready to blow my head off. He believed that I was evil, that he was finally seeing the real me.

  “I’m Maxine. You know me. Just put the gun down, so we can talk about it,” I said firmly. A haunted look crept into his eyes right before he averted his gaze down to my hands that were most likely still sparkling. His dark eyes turned into the furious shade of liquid tar, as his mind filled with dark images of his partner that spread over the bed, her wrists were sliced, sheets soaked with blood…. The prince didn’t matter anymore.

  “Witch, you’re a witch, like the rest of them. The government is twisting our minds, but I finally know the truth,” he kept mumbling, shaking the gun right in front of my face. More humans were on their way and I couldn’t let him ruin us both.

  I concentrated and froze the bullet in his gun with the magic that was still alive in my sore fingertips. He pressed the trigger convinced that he was doing the right thing, and I covered my face with my palms, ready for the worst. The gun didn’t fire, so I took this opportunity to jump and deliver a roundhouse kick that would knock the stuffing out of him and leave him disorientated.

  He was lying on the ground, touching his face. I reached out and grabbed his hand. A second later my wet palms connected with his cheeks, and the words started floating out of me before my mind could process what was happening.

  “You made a mistake; I didn’t do anything extraordinary. The thunderstorm hit the tree nearby, distracting the guy that held the gun and he fired it accidentally. The bullet nearly hit me, but now everything is fine.”

  His pupils were dilated, and his eyes darkened as he ran his thumb along my face. I was in his head again easing the anger slowly until I saw that one covered-up memory from the past that someone replaced with the image of his dead partner.

  “Hey, Cora, I brought your favourite chocolate cake, the one that makes you extremely horny,” I shouted through the threshold, knowing how much that kind of thing wound her up. This whole thing between us was very new, but somehow exciting. We started sleeping together over the past few weeks, after I made a move on her in the car.

  First I thought she would slap me, but she kissed me back instead. This wasn’t something that I planned; it was a spur of the moment thing.

  My mother kept nagging me, saying that I would end up alone, never marry and never settle. There was some truth in that, because I’d been enjoying myself a bit too much, partying most of the time and sleeping around. Women liked the fact that I had a badge, that I wasn’t looking for anything stable.

  I walked into the living room, smelling the odd burning scent, suspecting that she most likely ruined our dinner for tonight. Being in the kitchen wasn’t one of her strong suits. There were masses of paper lying on the floor, the sofa was turned upside down.

  Something was wrong. I took out my gun moving forward. There was an intruder in the house. This area wasn’t one of the safest.

  I started climbing upstairs, quietly, listening in. A few days on the run Cora had been acting strange. She seemed convinced that someone was after her, telling me that she had been followed home a few times. I kept telling her that she was working herself to death. Sometimes we spent over sixteen hours on a case, driving around the city and checking all the leads. She was drained and needed some time out.

  “Please, no. I didn’t do anything wrong. You can’t take me, you can’t,” I heard her talking to someone. I stopped halfway up the stairs, wondering what the hell was going on inside her main bedroom. There was someone there with her. I swallowed hard forcing myself to move.

  Another voice spoke. “You broke the rules of your faction. Leviathan needs you in the underworld. There is a new army being formed. You cannot say no; this is your duty.” The man, whoever he was, wasn’t from around here, and he had an unrecognisable accent. The lights from candles flickered, and an odd terrifying sensation rippled through my spine. My grandmother had told me that there were things in this world that couldn’t be explained. Somehow she fucking sold me her sixth sense.

  “But I paid off my duty. Leviathan cursed me out a long time ago. You can’t just expect me to go back. I have a life here on the outside.”

  “That’s true, but you have broken the rules, bedded with a human. Lucifer sends others to pits; he punishes them severely. He doesn’t want to see any more mongrels being brought into this world,” the strong voice stated.

  I shook my head and barged into her bedroom, holding the gun in my hand. My own voice died when I saw Cora naked on the bed with the older, bare-chested guy. There was something wrong with his eyes—they were white, without any pupils. He jerked back with a hiss.

  “So he is the one that services you with earthly pleasures?” the man questioned her, standing up. He was taller than me, wide through the shoulders, and his chest shined with sweat.

  “Zach, leave, please. You don’t want to get involved. There is always a price and I have discarded the rules. I thought that no one would care,” Cora said in a sad tone of voice. She was radiant, her hair sleek, eyes gleaming in the dim light of the room. There was something wrong with the way she was staring at me, with that overwhelming sadness. That crazy-eyed guy most likely had done something to her. This was beyond normal.

  “Get up, you son of a bitch. I don’t know what the hell
is going on here, but you have two seconds to get the fuck out of here!”

  Then I felt the pain in my head, gut-wrenching pain that spread to every part of my body. My gun slipped from my fingers and I fell to my knees, screaming in agony. Suddenly the man was standing beside me, and bright yellow light filled the room, but I couldn’t see anything. I was holding my head, wanting to bang it against the floor just so the pain would ease.

  “I’m taking her with me, human. She’s going back to the underworld where she belongs. You will grieve her here, but you will never know what happened,” the voice in my head said.

  The pain faded as quickly as it came. I woke up on the floor in Cora’s bedroom. Then I saw her. She was spread on the bed; the sheets were covered with blood; her wrists were slit.

  When I got to her, I knew she was dead, and my thoughts went racing. I didn’t even remember how I got upstairs, why I was in her house. Everything was blurry, until a quiet sob escaped me.

  I pulled away from Zach, breathing hard, trying to gain some oxygen into my lungs. Suddenly everything was clear. His partner, the woman that he’d worked and slept with, was a demon cast out of hell. That night when Zach arrived at her house, a Watcher was there, ready to claim her back. All this time I suspected that Zach was under someone else’s influence, but I was wrong. He’d simply witnessed something that he wasn’t supposed to see.

  Cora used him as an escape and he fell in love with her. She lied to him. She knew about the rules from the very beginning. The Watcher couldn’t leave himself exposed, so he killed her and made it looked like a suicide. He made a choice to end her life there.

  Now I was sitting on the cold grave filling Zach’s head with images that were far from the truth. When we were surrounded, I exposed my true self, not caring for the consequences. The violence could have been avoided, but that human had fired a gun. I had to react, and not thinking things through I merely acted on instinct.

  “Max, are you all right?” Zach asked, looking around, disoriented and confused. His gun was lying on the grass, a few meters away. The prince was gone. I couldn’t sense him anywhere. The fried humans were alive, barely, but they were going to make it.

  “I’m fine. The prince was here, with Jessica. Her friend was right, she had him,” I said, falling to the ground exhausted and shivering with cold. I had lost my focus, my strength, and all because I was high on magical tequila. Nothing else mattered because I failed to recognise the danger, failed to see beyond my own stupid ego.

  Zach got up, wiping the excess water from his face. Then the stranger’s voice echoed in my head.

  “Maxine Brodeur, surrender yourself to the temporary hearing outside the dark gates. You have broken the rules and exposed our world to humans. You have until midnight to show; otherwise you will be brought down to the underworld by a Fallen.”

  I tangled my hair, knowing that this was it. I had finally crossed the line, exposed my own abilities. The head of my faction was summoning me down to the gates. My death was upon me.

  Chapter Twenty

  “The poets leave hell and again behold the stars.” ― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

  Zach and I heard the police sirens nearby. I suspected that some human alerted the authorities. There was a lot of lightning in the sky and that unexplained mist that now drifted away. The guy that tried to shoot me was hit with lightning; he was unconscious, and the other two were moaning on the ground. They were going to be just fine, but I had to clear their minds too, just in case. My hands were trembling, my knees felt like paper. If I hadn’t gotten completely wasted a night before, maybe this would never have happened. Now I had to answer to the Lucifer faction and a tiny voice in my head kept whispering that this was possibly my last night on earth.

  I couldn’t cry over spilt milk. What was done was done. I had exposed my abilities and the world below to humans. The rules were put in place to protect all the demons that lived on the outside, and my sloppy energy nearly killed an innocent man. Whoever witnessed my theatrics knew that I was powerful. That kind of magic was limited to a demon. My human mother had told me many times that I was different, that one day someone would come for me and explain everything. Now I was getting what she meant, now it all finally made sense. The demon that knocked her up must have revealed our world to her, must have mentioned that I was going to be much stronger than other mongrels.

  “Stay with him. I will look around,” I told Zach, who was back on his feet checking the guy I accidentally fried earlier on. His mind was in despair, but at least he wasn’t questioning his own sanity. I felt really guilty, knowing that I could never tell him the truth about his partner, that I could never truly explain that the world around him was doomed.

  “We have to question these two and search for the prince. He can’t be far,” Zach said, standing up. “That guy there is alive, barely, but he will make it.”

  “I’m not a cop, Zach, it’s your job. I’m just helping out. I have somewhere that I need to be,” I stated, rubbing my neck and wondering if I was going to be sent down to the underworld tonight. The faction couldn’t be that cruel, but it was a possibility.

  I didn’t wait for him to stop me. Besides, the cemetery started filling up with other cops. I backed away, seeing flashlights moving quickly towards us. Uncomfortable questions would follow and I didn’t have time to fill out any statements or talk to the human shrink. I had messed with enough minds tonight. Maybe Ricky could pull some strings and get me out of this mess. The only problem was that Ricky had pissed off a few people down below too, and his hands were tied.

  On my way back home I felt much worse, shaking all over and being sick everywhere on the street. When I got inside I threw myself on my bed and lay there for a good half hour, telling my stupid self that this was the last time I drank more than I could handle. Paul must have put more magic than he intended in one of my bottles. It wasn’t his fault that I was an addict. I forced some food through my mouth later on, knowing that I had to fuel my body with new energy. After my stomach was full, I felt slightly better.

  The Watchers were most likely around. I saved Emma a couple of weeks ago and I managed to get away with that kind of outburst of power, but thunder and lightning down at the cemetery pushed its limits. My days were numbered. Most of the time demons downstairs didn’t care to listen to explanations. They needed to punish mongrels like me.

  I must have fallen asleep for an hour or two, because a car horn outside woke me up. The clock on the wall was showing half past ten. I was an hour and a half away from my judgment hearing. Part of me wanted to call Ricky to warn him that he might never see me again, but I didn’t want to worry him. I had a small advantage: the missing royal and my case. If I could just get in touch with Rodriguez somehow, maybe he could stop the hearing and let others know that I was only trying to do my job.

  The voice of reason reminded me that it was too late for that now.

  I swallowed the tears down when I stepped outside in the cold. Arthur had showered me with attention and I suspected that maybe my involvement with him triggered new attention back, but this time from hell. Only certain members of the royal family knew what happened between us, but word may have spread. Demons in hell only knew black or white. They didn’t believe in love and desire. These emotions were foreign to them.

  I headed to Payne’s Wharf. It was a wasteland, a deserted part of London near the River Thames. Most of the time humans avoided it. Lately there had been reports that a couple of females had been raped in that area. The police advised everyone to stay away.

  I believed that it was just hell’s propaganda, to keep humans away from the only official entrance to the underworld. The Gates of Hell were guarded by the Watchers so that no one could enter without their say-so. I never had the courage to actually check this theory out, but I knew that many mongrels had, ending up lost down below.

  The night was windy; a new storm was approaching from the west. I walked through the streets, passing humans that had
no idea that a world below actually existed and that some of them would end up there at some point in their lives. I took the tube down, and my anxiety rose, filling my stomach with heavy bricks.

  I reached my destination just before midnight, pushing the fear away, telling myself this was the price that I needed to pay. I could only blame myself for what happened.

  In the distance the tall facade of Payne’s Wharf spread in front of my eyes, and my stomach blossomed with a fresh dose of rippling trepidation. Fear drifted behind me in tiny tendrils, stinging me with its sharp claws. This was it, my time had come. I didn’t have any regrets. I made my choices, and I couldn’t do anything about the fact that the rules of hell weren’t fair.

  A demon crossed my path several moments later. I stopped, inhaling the raw musty smell of stagnant water close by. Maybe after the incident at the cemetery I was immune to other supernatural beings. My normally sharp senses didn’t register any danger, not just yet.

  “Are you the one that everyone is waiting for?” a female demon with nice long blonde hair asked.

  “Presumably,” I responded. She smiled, like she was genuinely excited.

  “Come, she is waiting for you.”

  We walked through the wasteland for the next few minutes in silence. Behind the pillar of another ruined construction I spotted at least five demons, all from the same faction. Lucifer’s presence around here seemed profound, and it surprised me that everyone was so calm. The woman who stood on the large piece of concrete looked familiar. I stopped in my tracks, feeling fooled and betrayed. She’d called herself Alexis at the palace, but this couldn’t be her real name down here. She warned me to stay away from Arthur, selling some crap about being connected to the Princess Layla. This was some kind of a joke. She couldn’t be the judge.