Shadow Burns: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Preternatural Affairs Book 4)

by SM Reine

  “Cèsar,” Isobel whispered urgently.

  Gertie’s tongue darted out, slurping blood into her mouth. She took another sloppy bite without looking away from me.

  That was definitely raw meat she was biting. Some kind of organ, from the looks of it. Hard to tell.

  The pieces of carcass on the cutting board in front of her were easier to identify. I recognized fingers, a skinny wrist, two bones jutting from the ragged end of the meat.

  She shoved the last of the fibrous meat into her mouth with her palm, smearing the blood over her face, then sucked fluid off of her fingers one at a time.

  Man, I really would have liked to have one of those knives.

  Gertie hopped off of the stool, landing on the floor with a splash of blood. She played in it, bounced from foot to foot, watched the puddles spread. Dancing a little kid dance. She didn’t smile, but I heard a giggle coming from behind me.

  She stopped splashing in the blood, grabbed a bowl from a drawer, and walked toward me.

  “Cèsar.” Isobel’s hiss was so desperate that I thought she might be about to explode.

  Silently, Gertie offered the bowl to me. It was filled with some kind of dry, flaky powder, all brown and mottled green.

  Herbs?

  At first, I could only manage to stare at Gertie. She was drenched in blood. I’d just seen her eating what I could only assume was human meat. But she was offering me that bowl, and she wasn’t acting at all threatening.

  My fear waned. “What do you want me to do with this?”

  She kept the bowl uplifted, watching me expectantly.

  Kids. I didn’t get kids. Even dead kids.

  “Don’t take it,” Isobel urged.

  “But I think she’s trying to tell me something.” And it didn’t seem like that something was “I’m going to savor sucking the marrow from your bones,” because I had the feeling I’d already have been dead if that was her plan.

  Isobel whined as I accepted the bowl and sifted the herbs through my fingers. There were several different substances mixed together in there. The faint, earthen smells of dried leaves wafted from it, tangling with my sense of the flowing energies.

  Saffron, pennyroyal, snapdragon.

  Heck, I was even pretty sure there was some fresh grave dirt in there.

  “You want me to cast a spell,” I guessed.

  Gertie offered me a corked glass bottle next. Her fingers left bloody smudges on the outside. The inside was filled with oil, which the label identified as olive, though the color was all wrong.

  A quick sniff told me that it was made from wormwood.

  What could I do with those herbs and this oil?

  And then Gertie answered the question just as silently as she had posed it.

  She offered me a butcher’s knife.

  It looked exactly like the one that Herbert had used to slit his wrists. The blade was a hand-cut fang of iron, with a hilt of stained wood that had been textured for easy gripping. It belonged in a centuries-old kitchen, when families would have passed it down for generations, butchering hundreds of pigs and gutting fish with a single knife.

  Gertie wanted me to anoint it. Oils and herbs. The saffron and pennyroyal might give me some kind of strength specific to killing demons—I’d read about them in Suzy’s Book of Shadows. The snapdragon, I didn’t know, but the wormwood oil would seal it all.

  I had a feeling that it would all come together to allow me to slaughter whatever big and ugly was running the house.

  The only question left was…why? Why did one of the apparitions want to arm me with a weapon?

  “What are you thinking?” Isobel whispered, as though afraid speaking any louder would set Gertie off.

  It was a more difficult question than she realized. I was thinking an awful lot of things. They raced through my head, tumbling over each other, a cacophony of confusion and semi-certainty.

  We’re going to die if I don’t have a weapon.

  This kid isn’t attacking. She can’t be that bad, even if she might be a cannibal ghost.

  Maybe she’s not a cannibal ghost. None of this is real. The kitchen, the vines, whatever—none of this can possibly be real.

  We’re still going to die without a weapon.

  We can’t trust Gertie. This is a bad idea.

  Bad idea or not, I need this weapon.

  “I’m thinking I’m going to anoint this knife,” I said slowly.

  And yeah, I thought it was just as crazy as Isobel obviously did. I just didn’t know what else to do at that point.

  There was a patch of counter where the blood had mostly dried. I set the bowl and the oil on that.

  “Bad idea,” Isobel said. “This is such a bad idea.”

  Gertie hovered at the edge of my vision, watching as I drew a quick circle in the blood. I was already slimy from having touched the counter earlier; I didn’t even have to get any new blood to use as finger paint. Add a little salt from the mysteriously un-bloody shaker next to the stove, and the magic snapped into place.

  The energy from it was barely enough to tickle my sinuses, but that was all right—I just needed a way to contain the energy of all those herbs.

  I set the knife in the center of the circle, then opened myself to the energy in the kitchen.

  Let me tell you, there’s a lot of energy to access in a haunted house.

  Bad energy.

  I pushed all of that power into the knife as quickly as possible, muttering a nonsense incantation to keep it all focused. Gertie’s eyes burned darkly as she waited and watched.

  Dot the oil on the blade. Flip it over. Dot more oil.

  Add some herbs.

  Whisper a prayer, and hope that I wasn’t doing something stupid.

  When I clapped my hands to end the brief ritual, power wrapped around the knife like a cage. Just like I’d expected, it felt strong, offensive, aggressive. Not in a bad way, like the rest of the house. More like it’d be able to cut through anything.

  Maybe even an incorporeal demon.

  “What happened?” Isobel asked. When it came to rituals, she was even worse at witchcraft than I was. Couldn’t even put a simple potion together without fucking it up.

  It was always weird having someone asking me for help with magic.

  “This is for killing demons.” Breaking the circle, I picked up the butcher’s knife and tested the balance in my hand. It hummed with energy that made my elbow and shoulder ache. “Isn’t it, Gertie?”

  The little girl smiled. The spaces in between her teeth were dark with blood.

  Aside from that, she was kind of cute.

  A vine was trying to wiggle through the crack in the window, fighting its way into the kitchen. I sliced through it with the cruel tip of the knife.

  At a touch, it blackened as though burned.

  Yep. Demon-killing knife.

  “And I know just where to use it,” I said.

  The hallway leading to the drawing room wasn’t smoky anymore. The illusion of fire was gone. Now it looked like the hallway had been burned months earlier, leaving blackened walls behind.

  The door to the drawing room stood open.

  Like the kitchen had when we first entered, the drawing room looked pristine. Some of the furniture was still covered in drop cloths. I didn’t plan on sticking around long enough to see if that idyll was an illusion, too—especially since some of those drop cloths were twitching. It looked like there was more than furniture underneath.

  Suffice it to say, I wasn’t curious enough to look.

  I was going to go down into that basement that had burned in my dreams, find the demon responsible, and sink the knife into its heart. Get out of the house as fast as possible. Figure out what the fuck was happening later.

  Gertie stepped ahead of us when I entered the servant’s hallway. When I tried to move to the trap door, the little demon girl stood on top of it.

  Slowly, the little girl shook her head. Not this way.

  “But i
t’s down there, isn’t it?” I asked. “I’ve been dreaming about it.”

  Another shake of her head.

  I tried to step around her to the servant’s quarters, but she didn’t allow me to do that, either. I guess I could have easily moved her aside, considering the top of her head didn’t even reach my hip, but anointing a knife at her silent urging hadn’t exactly made us friends. I didn’t want to touch her.

  “Then where, kid? Where am I going?”

  Gertie lifted her finger and pointed. That way.

  Following the line of her gesture, I looked up at the ceiling and tried to think of what was beyond that. The second floor? The bedrooms?

  No, she was pointing even higher than that.

  Certainty settled into my gut.

  The attic.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I HAD TO BREAK down the barricade of furniture to enter the dining room and head upstairs. Once we reached the top, we found the ladder in position, like someone had anticipated our visit.

  My gaze tracked from the bottom rung of the ladder all the way up to the ceiling where a door should have been.

  A square of yawning darkness waited at the top.

  I didn’t think the other OPA agents had managed to open that door. It had opened for us.

  “She’s gone,” Isobel said.

  Chilly frisson settled over me as I turned to look for Gertie. Her bloody footprints were on the runner down the center of the hallway, marking the path she had taken to follow us upstairs. The last footprint was right behind me. The kid was nowhere in sight. Isobel was my only company now.

  “That’s not at all suspicious,” I said.

  Isobel clutched the needle-tipped feather in one trembling fist. “I don’t like any of this.”

  What was there to like? The hallway upstairs looked a lot like the foyer downstairs. It was crawling with vines, all its doors locked, fog pressing against the windows. It was oppressively silent.

  Guess the lack of blood and meaty human flesh being eaten by a child were likable.

  That was pretty much the only thing.

  I shifted my grip on the anointed knife. The textured hilt fit well against my palm. I’d been half-expecting the thing to possess me on the way upstairs, forcing me to slit my own wrists and spray arterial blood all over the house, but nothing had happened so far.

  “Maybe you should stay down here, at the bottom of the ladder,” I said. “I don’t know what kind of demon’s going to be waiting up there for us.”

  “Who knows what’ll come looking for me if I’m alone?” Isobel asked. “That girl just disappeared.”

  “I don’t think she’s going to eat you.”

  “And I don’t find that very comforting.”

  It was probably better not to split up anyway. I’d seen my fair share of horror movies—I knew what happened when people made the mistake of going their separate ways.

  Jamming the knife into my belt, I climbed into the attic and gave Isobel a hand up to join me.

  The attic smelled stale, like mothballs and laundry that had sat for too long in the washing machine. The sloped roof was low enough that I couldn’t stand up straight. The floor joists had been unevenly laid so that everything leaned toward the windows in the front.

  The glass was dirty, so there was barely any light in the room. Enough for me to see that there weren’t any demons.

  There also wasn’t much clutter as there had been in the basement. More drop cloths protected furniture along the edges of the room, where most people would be too tall to walk without bumping their heads.

  Aside from whatever the blankets were covering, the attic looked a lot like the bedrooms on the second floor. There was an armoire, a twin bed, some personal photos.

  Someone had been living up in the attic. The idea was deeply unsettling.

  Who would volunteer to live in such cramped confines unless they were hiding from something?

  “The bodies,” Isobel whispered.

  “What?”

  She pointed to the furniture covered in drop cloths. “Those are all bodies, Cèsar.”

  Once she said it, I realized that she was right. Those weren’t low couches. They were tables draped in sheets. I could see a few wooden legs poking out from under the blankets.

  I walked up to the nearest and jerked the sheet off.

  Yep, definitely a dead body. He was naked and unmoving.

  For now.

  But he wasn’t old, which meant that he couldn’t have been one of the residents of the retirement village. He was a middle-aged man. Actually, I recognized him. It was the reporter I’d seen at the memorial wearing the old-style fedora and carrying a giant microphone.

  No obvious cause of death marked his body. No stab wound, no bruises, no blood.

  I counted the number of sheet-draped bodies around the room.

  Twelve.

  Isobel pulled the sheet off of another body, and I recognized her too. It was one of the memorial guests who had been standing ahead of us in line for the rec hall. She had a big hairy mole on her face.

  “I think I’m missing something important here,” I said.

  Isobel didn’t seem to be missing anything. She had moved to my side, and now she recoiled in horror at the sight of the dead reporter. “Oh my God.”

  “What?”

  She pointed. The reporter’s hands were mottled with burns, like he’d reached into smoldering coals without protective gear. Sure, it looked painful, but he was dead. “What about it?”

  “I just…” She licked her lips. “Never mind. I don’t know.”

  “I think you do know. I think you know a hell of a lot more than you’re telling me.”

  “It just reminds me of someone that I used to—but it’s not him. It can’t be him. The growing vines, the fog, how dark it is outside… It can’t be him. That’s not how he works.”

  “Who?” I pressed.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It isn’t who I think it is.”

  “Well, why don’t you ask? You’re the necrocognitive. You came here to talk to the bodies.” I swept my hands over the reporter. “Get talking.”

  Isobel dried her hands on the hips of her dress. She swallowed hard and licked her lips again. She’d been doing that so much that there was almost no lipstick left, making her look even paler.

  She hesitated so long that I thought she was going to refuse. But then she hovered a hand over the body of the reporter.

  Isobel closed her eyes. I braced myself for the surge of energy.

  It wasn’t a surge so much as a dribble. Didn’t even make me sneeze.

  She immediately dropped her hand again.

  “I can’t talk to them,” Isobel said. “There’s nothing there for me to talk to. Sorry, Cèsar.”

  Isobel lied professionally. She should have been good at it. Yet she obviously wasn’t a woman who liked to tell lies, because her whole body betrayed the truth: the uneasy undertone to her voice, the way she shrank in on herself a little, the curve of her shoulders.

  She was lying about this now. It wasn’t that she couldn’t talk to the bodies. She just didn’t want to.

  “What would these people tell me that I’m not supposed to know, Izzy?” I meant to make it sound angry, see if I could intimidate her a little. My heart just wasn’t in it. It came out gentle.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen them before in my life.”

  I believed that part. “But they know something.”

  “They’re dead, Cèsar.”

  And she couldn’t speak to them without revealing the truth.

  The dead didn’t lie, after all.

  “Let me help you,” said a female voice.

  A new woman stood silhouetted in front of the dusty attic window. Her frail body was draped in tattered cloth. The light from the foggy sky beyond glowed through the thin dress, highlighting the ridges of bones at her hips, her ribcage, her knees. She was little more than a skeleton
.

  It was the red-haired woman with the rotten teeth.

  If she was one of the apparitions, then Herbert had given her a name, too. “Lynne,” I guessed, easing the knife out of my belt. The magic made my hand tingle so badly that it felt like my fingers were going numb.

  “I’m honored that my reputation preceded me,” she said. “Particularly considering that I doubt our mutual friend told you about me.”

  Mutual friend?

  My first thought was Nichols, the orderly, but one glance at Isobel told me otherwise. She had gone almost as pale as one of the apparitions.

  “Do I alarm you?” Lynne asked, strolling toward me. “My appearance, my odor? Don’t be afraid. I’m not here to hurt you. I’m only a woman with a contract, just like everyone else in this house—aside from you, that is, Agent Hawke.”

  My gaze cut to Isobel. Still no reaction except to grow stiffer.

  Lynne pulled the blanket off of another dead body. It was another person who was too young to have lived in the retirement home. She rested her hand on his face.

  “Think of me as a necrocognitive, telling you what the dead say.” Lynne shut her eyes, tipped her head back. There was no magic in the air. “I grew old and I regretted so many things. I regretted my infirmity. The opportunities I didn’t take. I regretted my waning health, the grip of hospice care, and chose to pay the highest price in return for a second life.”

  “You’re not actually a necrocognitive,” I said.

  She dropped her hand. “I don’t need to be. The story is the same for all of us. Everyone who signed one of those contracts was trying to escape death, after all.”

  “What contracts?” I asked.

  “Their contracts with Ander.” With a flick of her wrist, a paper materialized between the pinched forefinger and thumb of Lynne’s brittle hand. “This is mine. Peruse as you will.”

  She let me take the paper from her. I kept one eye on her and one eye on the paper as I read.

  It was a pretty simple contract, written in plain English rather than the usual dense legalese. According to the opening paragraph, Lynne McGlen had cancer. She’d wanted another decade of life with good health. The terms of the contract granted that to her, followed by another decade in servitude to this guy named Ander, and then a painless death.