“Hey, old buddy, talk to me. You okay?”
My partner’s eyes fluttered open, and he regarded me for a disoriented beat. Reality was slowly slipping back into focus for my old friend.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Good question,” Skulick said, still groggy and blinking away the cobwebs. “One moment Celeste’s telling me about growing up without a father, the next I’m out for the count. There was no physical violence…”
Skulick’s voice trailed off, the implication clear.
“Magic,” I said.
“Celeste used a low-level sleeping spell to knock me out, as far as I can gather,” Skulick said.
“Are you saying our client is a spell slinger?” I asked, my surprise growing.
“It appears that way,” Skulick said.
I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the idea of Celeste using magic.
“Why would she taze me…”
As soon as I asked the question, the answer hit me. “Celeste must’ve known about my protective ring. This was all one big setup.”
Skulick’s features filled with grim understanding. “She stole something from the vault, didn’t she?”
I nodded.
“Besides the Medal of the Saints, she helped herself to a dagger. And she marked me with some of her blood, too.”
Skulick’s mind churned behind those intense eyes, processing this new information. I was still playing catch up here, but the pieces seemed to be coming together for him.
“What the hell is going on here?” I asked.
Somehow I knew I wouldn’t be happy with the answer.
Neither Skulick nor I got much sleep that night. While my partner combed through obscure texts and occult databases, I was left with the fun job of securing the warehouse. First order of business was to wash Celeste’s blood from my face. Next up was making sure all our wards and surveillance systems remained in perfect working order.
We’d done an excellent job securing the facility, but the wards were designed to stop agents of darkness, not human thieves. Especially not when I invited them inside. Our own carelessness and softhearted approach to the case had enabled this fiasco. I was furious at myself.
Inspecting the garage soured my mood further. The Ducati was missing. Once I assured myself that Celeste hadn’t done any more damage, I returned to the loft’s main floor.
Only now that the morning sunlight slashed through the warehouse’s oversized windows did sleep threaten to overwhelm me. I let out a yawn and fought the temptation to close my eyes.
I held no illusions about getting any rest today. As long as Celeste was at large with the stolen dagger, I couldn’t afford to sleep. Resigning myself to a long day, I brewed a pot of strong coffee and poured two cups, one for myself and one for Skulick, whose attention remained glued to his bank of monitors and books.
I approached my partner’s desk, steaming mugs in hand, and offered him a cup. Skulick didn’t avert his gaze from the thick tome he was leafing through as he accepted the fiery hot brew. When Skulick tackled a problem, he did so with the ferocious, single-minded tenacity of a terrier. I blew on my coffee and hazarded a sip. “Any luck?”
“Perhaps. Take a look at our surveillance footage.”
Onscreen, I watched myself pulling into the underground garage, getting out of the Equus Bass with Celeste, and then heading for the elevators. At first, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the footage. That all changed when the camera zoomed in on Celeste’s face. The closer view revealed features that appeared blurred and distorted.
“What does it mean?” I asked, leaning closer to the screen.
“It means our thief was telling us the truth, at least to a degree. The electronic distortion of her image suggests that a dark force was targeting her.”
In other words, her soul was indeed hellbound. That much hadn’t been a lie.
“Okay, so why turn on us? And what about the dagger?”
“It’s called the Soul Dagger. Used by the Berlin Ripper, a serial killer, occultist and amateur mage. Your father and I managed to bring his reign of terror to an end in the early ‘90s.”
Good old dad, I thought. How many monsters had he and Skulick dispatched while I was growing up? Too many to count. The man had been a real hero, and Skulick and I were the only two people in the whole goddamn world who knew his story. I wished I’d known the man better.
“What’s the magical significance of this dagger?” I asked.
“The name says it all. It absorbs and traps the souls of its victims.”
I thought this over for a moment, recalling the way Celeste let some of her own blood dribble on my face. Almost as if Skulick had read my mind, he said, “You must be wondering why she used the dagger on herself. Those drops of blood held a trace amount of her soul.”
Understanding hit me. “She marked me with her life force.”
Skulick nodded grimly. “The Medal of the Saints has made Celeste invisible to the hellhounds’ senses. The only scent they’ll be able to pick up-“
“Is the one she left on me,” I finished.
“In time, the demons’ minions will recognize their error. The Medal of the Saints will shield Celeste only for a short while.”
“Yeah, but by the time they realize they have the wrong soul…”
There won’t be enough of me left to scrape off the floor, I finished mentally.
“You sure have a way with women, kid.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “No good deed goes unpunished.”
“Clearly she doubted our ability to protect her and took matters into her own hands. Miss Solos was apparently much better informed about the occult than we realized. She knew about the Medal of Saints and the Soul Dagger, knew about our operation and, from the looks of it, has dabbled extensively in magic.”
I processed this. The price for dabbling in the dark arts was madness and corruption. I’d seen it too many times to doubt that Celeste would end up just like the Blackmore Witch if she wasn’t stopped. It was likely that the magical abilities had already begun to poison her mind.
“What’s the endgame here?” I asked. “At best, marking me with her blood buys Celeste a little time. But there has to be more to it than that.”
Skulick hesitated before he answered. “A Faustian pact can’t be broken. Only renegotiated.”
I perked up. “How so?”
“You have to offer Hell something of greater value in exchange. And what could more valuable to a demon than Celeste’s soul?”
I thought it over for a moment, and the answer hit me like a sledgehammer to the head. “Multiple souls.”
As if to lend weight to my words, Skulick tapped a key and the image of the stolen Soul Dagger appeared onscreen.
“The Berlin Ripper planned to murder thirteen innocents, the most saintly people he could track down. Nuns, priests, relief workers, hero cops. People whose souls were beyond the reach of the forces of darkness.”
“The dagger let him offer their souls to his dark master,” I said. Celeste’s plan was coming into focus. She was going to use the knife to collect souls she could trade for her own. How many? It didn’t really matter. Even one life would be too many. I felt bad for her. It wasn’t her fault that her father was a power-hungry son of a bitch. But if she went down this path, she would deserve Hell.
“Skulick, I’m so sorry I brought her here,” I said. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Skulick’s grim visage softened. “You wanted to save a young woman from a fate worse than death. Your heart was in the right place, kid. If I were twenty years younger, I would’ve done the same. Hard to resist a damsel in distress.”
Tell me about it. But Celeste had turned out to be no damsel. Far from it.
“What’s our next move? How much time do we have before Hell comes knocking on our…?”
The words died on my lips as my cell chirped. A quick scan of my phone identified the incoming caller as Hom
icide Detective Rob Benson, our contact person in the department now that Kove had moved on. After a year that had seen a sharp rise in occult crimes, the police had grudgingly accepted that Skulick and I could be assets. Benson’s call meant he was working some occult crime scene and needed my help.
As Benson explained the reason for the call, I could feel my mood darken. Five minutes later, I cut him off with a promise to immediately head over to the crime scene.
“What’s troubling the good detective?” Skulick asked.
“There’s been a murder. Gabriel Horne, son of Desmond, was discovered stabbed to death in his penthouse apartment. This image was found next to the body.”
I held up my cell phone for Skulick. Benson had sent me a photo of the luxury apartment turned crime scene. Of greater interest than the expensive decor was the occult symbol painted on the wall. I assumed that it had been etched in the murder victim’s blood. That was the way these things usually went. The symbol was identical to the mark on Celeste’s arm–the brand of the demon her soul was promised to.
If the identity of the dead man hadn’t been enough, the signature left behind at the crime scene told me everything I needed to know.
The Soul Dagger had found its first victim.
9
Gabriel Horne’s twenty-story luxury apartment was located in one of the ritzier areas of the city. To my surprise, I got lucky and found a parking spot without much trouble. Fatigue loomed heavy and my eyes burned with the need for sleep. I felt ragged and worn out. The lack of rest, the physical stress of confronting the Blackmore Witch—not to mention being hit by fifty thousand volts—it was all catching up to me big time. Even though I wanted to crash, sleep would have to wait. Perhaps I wasn’t in the right shape to brave the world, but ready or not, here I came.
There would be no rest for the wicked today.
I guzzled the last dregs of coffee from my thermos and stepped out of the car. One drawback to mainlining caffeine on a daily basis was that you build up a tolerance. Stubborn bastard that I am, I kept hoping the next cup might somehow miraculously get the job done.
A fine drizzle shrouded me as I made my way down the sidewalk, one laborious step at a time. Ever since the Crimson Circle’s ritual punched a hole into reality, the weather in this city has gone to shit. We have more rain and fog than nineteenth century London. Under normal circumstances I would’ve found the light rain unpleasant, but I welcomed it in my current groggy state. It proved a hell of a lot more effective in clearing my head than the coffee surging through my system.
Flashing squad cars greeted me at the main entrance of Gabriel Horne’s apartment building. Uniformed cops swarmed the crowded lobby and struggled to keep a throng of reporters at bay. The Horne family was a constant fixture of both the tabloids and mainstream press, so this murder story was going to make some waves. An officer I’d seen a few times, but whose name I could never remember, waved me over.
Fortunately the reporters barely paid me any attention as I navigated the gauntlet of snapping cameras. Certain articles had mentioned my name over the past year, but I’d made a concerted effort to avoid follow-up questions. Weirdly enough, the Seal of Solomon helped me maintain my anonymity. The few journalists who’d tracked me down would be hard pressed to describe me. Don’t ask me how, but the magical ring dulls people’s memories of my appearance, and cameras have a habit of taking blurry pics around me. The ring finds ways of keeping me safe from demonic as well as more mundane dangers. Good thing too. It’s difficult enough doing this job without having to worry about the media hounding you. Skulick and I liked to operate behind the scenes as much as possible. “Shadow detectives” as he likes to call us, which is as good a name as any.
Even if any of the reporters recognized me, they had bigger fish to fry at the moment. Some occult expert with questionable credentials who looked like he just rolled out of bed couldn’t compete with the story of the year.
Officer Forgot-His-Name greeted me with a curt nod. “Benson is waiting for you upstairs,” he said as he escorted me to the elevator.
Catching a glance at myself in the elevator door made me flinch. I was suddenly doubly grateful that nobody wanted to take my picture. I looked like shit. Run-down, sleep-deprived shit.
The elevator doors split open and erased the scary fella staring back at me.
I followed the officer into the lift, took a deep breath, and prepared myself for what awaited me on the top floor. I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be pretty.
Less than a minute later, I was inside Gabriel Horne’s penthouse residence. The photograph Detective Benson had sent me didn’t do the place justice. Organic textures like stone, weathered wood, and glass dominated and defined the space. A stunning three-sixty view created the impression of being inside an observatory. The polished China clay floor, the artfully twisted and curled industrial lighting fixtures, and the tasteful black and white furniture all discreetly whispered that the people who lived here were obscenely wealthy.
Just inhaling the rarified air in this place could get you laid.
I vaguely recalled that Gabriel Horne had held a cushy position in one of his daddy’s media companies. Nothing wrong with nepotism, but I doubted that a father willing to sell his daughter’s soul to a demon did anything out of the goodness of his heart. Gabriel Horne’s gig had no doubt come with strings attached. Maybe Daddy Dearest had just wanted to keep tabs on his first-born.
Detective Benson could be found, as always, at the center of an active crime scene. Tall, African-American, and somewhere north of his mid-thirties, he looked like he could have owned the penthouse, or at least been invited here for drinks once in a while. Some cops let the stress of their work eat them up; bad lifestyle choices are common. Comfort food and alcohol are much needed and often abused psychological Band-Aids for many. Throw in the long hours, the lack of exercise, and other questionable habits, and it wasn’t surprising that many cops looked like crap. Benson was different. He wore a sharp designer suit that fit his athletic physique like a glove. There was an admirable sense of discipline and self-control about the man. Standing next to him in my wrinkled trench coat and tieless shirt, I couldn’t help but feel like a bum.
“About time you showed your face, Raven,” Benson said. “I was starting to get worried.”
“Have I ever stood you up, Benson?”
Benson eyes narrowed. He doesn’t really like me too much but he knows he needs me. And I know that he knows it. Ours is a complicated relationship.
“Want to bring me to speed? Who found the body?”
“The maid. She cleans the place on a daily basis,” he said. “Only access to the penthouse is by private elevator or emergency stairs.”
“Did you talk to the building manager yet?”
Benson nodded. “Doorman didn’t see anyone coming or going. No signs of forced entry. Some of my men are in the process of reviewing the security tapes. They show a woman entering the building not long before the murder, but her face is blurred out in every shot. I bet you have some perfectly logical explanation for that one, don’t you?”
I did, actually. But I doubted Benson would be too keen to hear the truth. Celeste must’ve used a cloaking spell, allowing her to enter and leave the building undetected. We both were camera shy in our own way.
“Where’s the body?” I asked.
Instead of answering me directly, Benson said, “Detective Archer, show him the vic.”
I flinched and turned toward the female detective who’d snuck up on us. Detective Jane Archer is half Puerto Rican and a quarter each of Irish and Italian. Average height and fit enough to make an American Ninja contestant envious, she had a penchant for leather jackets and a habit of wearing her curly hair short. Archer is a skilled martial artist, great shot and excellent detective capable of thinking outside the box. Like any strong woman with a badge, most of her fellow officers assume she swings for the other team.
I know from personal experience that t
hey’re wrong. Big time. But I never kiss and tell. Especially not when the lady in question could break my bones in a variety of creative ways.
“Follow me, Raven.” Her voice was all business. I didn’t even get a smile.
“How have you been?” I asked.
“Fabulous. By the way, there’s a new invention I’ve heard about—you should try it sometime. It’s called a shower.”
“Charming as always, Detective.”
That almost got a smirk, so things were looking very slightly up. “How is the ghoul fighting business?”
“The pay’s shit, the nightmares keep me up at night, and there are zero fringe benefits.”
She shrugged. “Sounds a lot like being a cop.”
I wanted to say something else—maybe along the lines of “Sorry I snuck out of your apartment at the crack of dawn, I’m an idiot, please call me”—but the moment passed. In case you’re wondering, Archer and I did hook up. Once. Copious amounts of alcohol were involved. Our partnership never quite recovered.
Archer pointed at the back of the room. I spotted a doorway, which I assumed led into the victim’s bedroom. The details of the crime scene, as far as I could see, seemed tame compared to some of the other weird cases we’d worked on in the past.
“Any idea why Benson called me in on this one?
“I think the message convinced him.”
I arched an eyebrow. “What message?”
“You better take a look for yourself.”
That didn’t sound good. Taking a deep breath and steeling myself for the worst, I brushed by a cluster of cops. Their wary, mistrustful glances followed me. You would think they’d appreciate my help—and some did. But for many of them I represented an unknown variable, and they didn’t quite know what to make of me. The supernatural was terrifying to the average person, and even some of the most hardened officers on the force wished they could forget some of the shit they’d experienced in the months following the breach. I could easily imagine what went through their minds when they looked at me. What kind of guy voluntarily seeks out these nightmares? Was I some occult ambulance chaser, a deranged crackpot, or a big phony selling myself as an expert?
Shadow Detective Supernatural Dark Urban Fantasy Series: Books 1-3 (Shadow Detective Boxset) Page 6