by SM Reine
“I’m thinking he’s a spy, Ezra,” Vaughan said. “You know what we do with spies?”
Ezra’s free hand crept down my chest. I wasn’t getting patted down anymore. I was getting fondled. “I’ve got ideas.”
“I can shoot you before your friend manages to do anything,” I told the one in front of me.
That made both of them freeze. They exchanged looks.
And then I realized that they hadn’t expected me to talk back at all. A normal person wouldn’t have been capable. Last time I’d gotten that close to an incubus, I’d gone brain dead with lust. But the last time I’d been that close to an incubus, I hadn’t been an aspis, either.
Binding with Fritz really had helped.
These assholes couldn’t pull thrall on me anymore, and now they knew it.
Fuck.
I’m not a good aim, but you don’t need to be a good aim with a hand cannon like a Desert Eagle from less than a foot away. I jerked it away from Vaughan, tucked it under my arm, and shot Ezra at my back.
He dropped the knife with a shout. The brush of its sharpened edge on my neck was barely more than a sting. I’d moved too fast for him to cause a serious injury.
Another twist, and I shot Vaughan. I’d been going for his chest but hit him in the shoulder instead.
Blood spurted from the wound. It fountained a good two inches into the air.
He released me. “You’re going to pay for that!” Vaughan said, trying to cover the wound with his fingers.
“Yeah, yeah.” I shot him again, and this time, I did hit him in the chest.
His black heart saw daylight.
Vaughan fell, face blank.
“Oh shit,” Ezra said, scrambling to his feet again, arms wrapped around his wounded gut. Blood poured down his shirt.
He slammed out into the alleyway, and I let him go.
If I’d been trying to make the Needles leave me alone, plugging a couple of their guys wasn’t the way to go about it. But that would be a problem for later. I’d already wasted enough time getting to Ander.
Now that they were gone, I had enough time to look at the apothecary’s shop. It was pretty tidy. The shelves were all labeled neatly, filled with weird herbs and ingredients that I’d never even heard of before. Pete, behind the counter, stuffed the money in the register drawer and gave me an unimpressed look when I turned the Desert Eagle on him.
“You got my shop bloody,” said the living head. His voice sounded distant, muffled. My ears were ringing from the gunshots. Another reason that I hated using my sidearm.
“I need the entrance to Ander’s place.” I could barely even hear myself talk. I was shaking with adrenaline. “I know it’s in here.”
“Basement door.” Pete jerked a stubby thumb at the wall. “Knock three times and turn the handle left. It’ll open to his foyer. And may the Father have mercy on your soul, you fucktard.”
I kept my gun trained on Pete as I moved toward the door. There was more shouting echoing from the alleyway—more Needles closing in to fuck me up before I could get to Isobel.
Can’t believe I shot two demons.
That wasn’t me. I didn’t resolve my problems with a gun. Maybe Fritz had been right when he said that Suzy was a bad influence on me.
Had to get to Isobel.
The door to the basement wasn’t hidden—just tucked behind a few shelves with severed fingers, eyeballs, and ears that belonged to various demon breeds. First time I opened that door, all I found on the other side was another brightly lit and well-organized room.
Given more time, I would have liked to explore those rooms. Bet I could have found some awesome potion supplies.
That wasn’t Ander’s house, though.
Knock three times and turn the handle left.
I shut it again and did as Pete had instructed. Three knocks. Handle left.
This time, when I opened the door, there was a dark room on the other side. Small. Filled with antiques. Appropriately shadowy. That looked more like I expected.
Footsteps pounded from the alley and entered the shop.
“Where’d he go?”
The Needles had arrived.
I jumped through the door to Ander’s foyer and shut it behind me.
If I’d entered Hell, there was no way to tell. The room was windowless. The air felt the same, tasted the same. For all I knew, it was just an unusually dark entrance to a doctor’s office.
There was a fringed rug in the middle of the room. A table, a couple chairs. A mechanical music box playing a soft, jingling tune that sounded like a funeral dirge. A desk that looked like it belonged in a hotel lobby.
The woman who was sitting at it got to her feet when I came in, offering me a smile despite my bloodied shirt and drawn gun. “Welcome.” Her voice was pleasantly musical. She looked human aside from her weirdly pinched features and shadow-black eyes. “How can I help you?”
“Ander,” I said.
Puzzlement crossed her features. “You’re looking for the owner?”
“Yeah, Ander. Where is he?”
She hesitated, then thumbed through a notebook on her desk. “Well, it does look like you have an appointment. Agent Hawke, right?”
Hearing my name out of her lips gave me pause.
How had she known?
“Yeah,” I said after a moment. “I’m Agent Hawke.”
“You’re actually a few minutes early. But he said you could go in whenever you arrived, so head right through the door, please. You’ve been given permission to take your weapons, but maybe you should consider putting them away to be polite.” It felt like being chastised by my Abuelita.
I didn’t put the gun away.
There was a second waiting room behind the lobby, decorated similarly to the first. The right-hand wall was lined with portraits, and a single window was shuttered on the opposite wall. Light seeped in through the cracks of the shutter. Bright light, just like what I’d seen through the trap door in my dream.
Maybe I was in Hell after all. I didn’t feel like opening the shutters to find out.
Instead, I took a quick look over the portraits. They all looked like assholes. They wore professional suits from various eras, tightly buttoned and clean. There was arrogance in every single pair of slitted, catlike eyes staring out of those paintings.
I didn’t recognize most of the portraits, except for the one at the end, closest to the door. Ander himself. Guess it was a family business.
The door at the far end of the room was unguarded. The sign was in two languages: the infernal tongue, and English. “CEO’s Office.”
Ander would be in there. If he was lucky, Isobel would be in there too—unharmed. My trigger finger felt itchy.
I kicked the door open without checking if it was unlocked. The other side was as dark as the foyer. The executive chair behind the desk was turned away from me. “Freeze,” I said, aiming the Desert Eagle at the back of the chair. “Don’t move.”
The chair swiveled around anyway, and I tensed to shoot.
Until I came face-to-face with Fritz Friederling, looking perfectly comfortable in Ander’s house.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I COULDN’T HAVE SHOT the Desert Eagle even if I’d wanted to. Spotting Fritz was like coming face to face with the Gorgon, and I’d turned to solid rock.
“Your phone’s been turned off,” Fritz said, hands steepled in front of his face. “Want to explain why?”
That was the most urgent issue here? My phone being turned off, rather than the fact that my kopis was hanging out in a demon’s Hell-based office as though he belonged there?
“You’re in Ander’s house,” I managed to say. It felt like I should have creaked when I spoke because my joints had rusted stiff.
“I’m in this house because I’ve owned it for the last three years. And I would have happily told you that if you’d spoken to me before running around guns blazing.”
“How’d you know?” I asked.
“Y
ou walked into Helltown while it was raining, shot two members of the Silver Needles, and threatened Pete the apothecary. You’re not subtle.”
Jesus. Fritz really did know everything.
“The woman at the desk said I had an appointment,” I said.
“I assumed you’d called in sick to find Ander. Again—you’re not subtle. I had you tracked.” Fritz sighed and rubbed a hand down his face. He looked exhausted. “I told you not to get involved in this investigation. You don’t listen well.”
Yeah. Literally everything.
He’d had me followed, for fuck’s sake. Did that mean that he’d seen Isobel at my apartment, too?
Fritz pushed his chair back and stood. He was carrying a silver-headed cane and actually leaning on it, so his leg must have still been bothering him. “You’re wasting your time following leads in this direction, though. Ander has been retired for years.”
“He’s behind Paradise Mile,” I said. “He’s still sticking people under contract. That’s what happened to all those victims at the retirement village.”
“Sure,” said another man. Ander himself emerged from behind the velvet curtains in the corner, ruffling them as he passed. “I took them under contract, and then I lost them. I’ve lost everything at Paradise Mile. Rub it in, Agent. I’m sure it makes you feel good to pick on an old man.”
I turned the gun on him, but didn’t fire. “What the fuck is going on here?”
“I sold my business years ago,” Ander said.
Fritz leaned harder on his cane, knuckles white on the silver head. “By ‘sold,’ he means that he surrendered ownership in return for his life.”
“Either way, I’m out of the game. Paradise Mile wasn’t meant to cause trouble. The deaths of all the people who lived there with me—I didn’t do that.”
I realized that I was still holding the gun, but nobody seemed interested in fighting. I engaged the safety and eased it back into my holster. “They weren’t killed by carbon fucking monoxide, either.”
“Definitely not. But it was also not my fault because I’m not in the murder business anymore.”
“Then who is?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“I am,” Fritz said. “I bought Ander’s business, and almost all of his remaining contracts, four years ago.”
The news sank in slowly.
Fritz owned some kind of crime syndicate that traded in souls.
The same syndicate that had somehow obtained Hope Jimenez’s soul when she died.
“She said that a kopis saved her from Ander,” I said. “It was you, wasn’t it?” I wanted him to deny it, because if that was the truth, then Isobel really had been continuing to lie to me.
My heart sank when he said, “Yes, I’m the one who saved her from Ander.”
She’d kept that information from me for a reason. I wasn’t in a place where I could try to wrap my head around the reasoning. Surprise had piled on surprise like the layers of the worst parfait ever, and, frankly, I just didn’t have the mental capacity to process it all at once.
“So you saved Isobel and then bought the business afterward. Jesus Christ, Fritz, you own a business in Hell. I thought you were a trust fund baby. You never told me what kind of businesses you’ve run.”
“You’ve never asked. There’s a lot of money in Hell. That said, in this particular instance, the investment was intended to protect Isobel.”
“I’d have tracked her down and killed her if he’d left me to my devices,” Ander said pleasantly, like that was just the natural thing to do. “I was pretty angry about the whole thing. Her escape, Fritz’s involvement, the Calhoun Deppe affair…”
I wasn’t really listening to the demon. “You own Isobel’s soul.” I couldn’t stop staring at Fritz. He looked different to me all of a sudden. Like he was this stranger wearing the face of some guy that I considered to be a friend.
Fritz didn’t look any happier about it than I felt. He took a few limping steps around the desk, and then stopped by its side, like he wasn’t sure he should actually approach me. “Acquiring a business means acquiring all its assets. In the case of this particular business…”
“Souls.”
“Contracts dictating the terms of several individuals’ lives. Yes.”
Ander inspected his fingernails. Picked at a peeling cuticle. “If it helps, he’s got her contract, but it’s locked down like most of my contracts were. He can’t make any changes to it. That means he can’t manipulate Hope with it unless he sells it back to me.”
No, it didn’t help. It didn’t fucking help at all.
“I’m not selling,” Fritz said.
“That’s because you’re a stubborn dick.” Ander still sounded entirely too chill about this. “You’ll change your mind, though. If not now, then by the time spring comes around, you’ll change your mind.”
“You didn’t meet Isobel because you wanted her to talk to your dead ex-wife or grandfather or childhood dog or whatever line you’ve been feeding me,” I said. “Did you?”
“She has spoken to my late wife and grandfather before,” Fritz said. “Both of those are truths, of a sort. They were favors, however. Not jobs. Belle initially entered my life in a very different way.”
Because he’d saved her from a contract with a demon.
He gathered the papers on the desk, sliding them back into their individual folders. “I’d prefer if we kept this conversation between us. Specifically, the parts about my ongoing involvement with the syndicate.”
“Doesn’t she know that you bought it?”
“Isobel’s aware that I have business partnerships in Hell. As far as she knows, however, I’m only the kopis who spared her from an expensive mistake. An ordinary rescue. Part of my job.” Fritz sat on the edge of his desk, stretching his leg out next to him. “A man will do very stupid things for the right woman.”
My growing anger fractured when he said that.
I couldn’t understand all the lying. I couldn’t understand wanting to run a business that had fucked with so many lives, either.
But I could understand doing stupid things for a woman.
Especially a woman like Isobel.
“So wait,” I said. “If we’ve got some kind of…I don’t know, gentleman’s agreement between a kopis and demon, swapping soul contracts and businesses…then how did everyone at Paradise Mile die?”
“Gertie,” Ander said. “I lost control of her. I’m still not sure what happened there. Nichols was definitely involved—he violated our contract to cast that spell in the basement, and that spell somehow released Gertie. She’s a very powerful demon, you know. The most useful asset of all. I picked her up after my forced retirement and she made Paradise Mile at my direction.”
“Where’s Gertie now?” I asked.
Ander gave a half-shrug, as though he couldn’t care less. “It doesn’t matter. I’m done with Paradise Mile.”
“I’d say it matters where the kid went,” I growled. “It matters a hell of a lot. What the fuck has happened to Isobel?”
Fritz’s lips drew into a deep frown. “She’s been hiding out with you ever since you risked her life by taking her to Paradise Mile.” He didn’t need to say it outright, but disapproval dripped from every word.
“She’s missing,” I said. “Vanished about an hour ago because of that guy.” I pointed at Ander.
I’d chased him into Helltown “guns blazing,” as Fritz had said, because I’d been so confident that it was Ander’s fault that Isobel was gone. But I wasn’t feeling all that confident about it anymore, especially now that both Ander and Fritz looked shocked.
“I had nothing to do with her disappearance,” Ander said. “I told you, Friederling—someone’s out to get me. Someone directed Nichols to free Gertie. The boy was an idiot; he wasn’t smart enough to figure out that ritual on his own.”
“Someone?” I asked.
“I don’t know who. Everyone hates me. Could be anyone.” He shrugged. “Consequence of b
eing a highly ambitious businessman.”
That was one way of describing his job. Not the way I’d do it, but fine.
“I’d be looking at your other contracts to find the culprit.” I drew the butcher’s knife from my belt and hefted it so that the others could see. “Gertie helped me make this while I was at Paradise Mile.”
I might as well have just whipped out a grenade with the pin missing, considering how fast Ander was out of his chair, half-hiding behind the back.
“Where did you get you that?” the demon asked sharply.
“That’s interesting,” Fritz said, massaging his temple with two fingers. “It’s enchanted. I can feel it.” Probably through our bond. “And it matches Herbert’s knife.”
“The one he used to kill himself?” I asked.
“I killed Herbert with it,” Ander said. “After he attacked me. I never wanted to hire Herbert; it was Nichols’s suggestion. I thought that Herbert had simply gone insane when he ran at me with that thing.” His catlike gaze sharpened on me. “You say that Gertie gave it to you. But why would Gertie want you to have such a powerful demon-slaying knife?”
So it really was intended for slaughtering the big bads. Good to know.
I was getting an ugly mental image of the events at Paradise Mile Retirement Village. Herbert had gone into the kitchen the night of Nichols death and found Gertie. She had given him a weapon, same way she had given me a weapon, and instructions on how to use it. Herbert had gone after Ander and died instead. I was still missing pieces of the puzzle, but the developing picture was frightening.
Gertie—or whoever was controlling Gertie—wanted me to go down the same road as Herbert. A road that had ended in bloody death.
Ander looked like he still expected me to have an answer for him. Why would Gertie have given a duplicate of Herbert’s knife to me to me? To kill Ander, obviously. But why did she want him dead? That was a whole different can of creepy possessed vines.
“Maybe she didn’t like being under contract with you,” I said. “I don’t fucking know. But everyone at Paradise Mile died for whatever drama’s going on between you guys, and now Isobel’s gone too.”
Fritz’s mouth twisted with hatred. I wasn’t on the receiving end of his scowl, but it still chilled me. I’d seen that guy cut the heart out of a fallen angel’s chest looking much less pissed off than that.