by Hannah Jayne
Officer Romero slowed; and when I caught up to him, he leaned into me. “We hardly had the thing out of the water before people started coming down. Everyone’s got a weird idea about it. Frankly, I’m pretty sure it’s just a regular man in a pretty advanced state of decomposition. He’s probably been submerged for quite a while.”
He shook his head and I pulled my sweater tighter across my chest.
“Let me see him.”
I edged around the assembled officers and sucked in a deep breath of ocean-tinged air. Three police officers were standing in a semicircle around a body-shaped lump covered in a blue tarp and leaking seawater. Officer Romero leaned down and edged the tarp back. I saw the dark hair first, tangled with kelp and trash. The smooth arc of his neck was purpled and marred, a thin piece of plastic rope coiled around and around his throat. I saw where his lips were slightly puckered and pale, the scratches at his neck where he must have pulled at the rope. My saliva went sour and I felt that familiar sickening need to vomit. My eyes teared up, and my breathing became hoarse and ragged.
Officer Romero moved the tarp a bit more and I could see the broad, naked shoulders of the man, his lifeless limbs. My heart started a spastic palpitation as the arch of his spine gave way to coarse, sand-sprinkled fur. I knew why the police officers were shaking their heads, while the people gathered at the barricades were uttering the names of legendary creatures.
“It’s a centaur,” I mumbled.
There were very few centaurs registered with the UDA, and this one was curled in on itself. His human hands were bound in front of him; his flank and cloven feet were puckered with clean knife wounds and wound with thin strips of the same plastic-looking rope.
“Did you say something?” Officer Romero asked.
“Who else has seen this?”
Officer Romero opened his mouth to answer but stopped as we were both drawn to a scuffle behind the police barricades. A floodlight had gone up and a camera crew had arrived. In record time the smooth-voiced narrator was going into his spiel.
I knew that smooth voice.
Harley had one hand wrapped around a microphone, the other resting on the stooped shoulder of a woman with dark hair pulled back into a hasty ponytail, half covered by a hairnet. The camera rolled in front of them and Harley asked the woman to describe what she saw; his brows were knitted, eyes rapt.
“Es un demonio.” She clawed her hands and growled, her lips curling into a fearsome snarl. “Es un chupacabra. No lo creia, pero lo vi con mis propios ojos.”
“She says it’s a chupacabra,” Officer Romero informed me with a disbelieving head shake. “My grandmother used to tell us the chupacabra would snatch us from our beds if we didn’t go to sleep. I thought it was a legend.”
“It is,” I said, beelining toward Harley.
By the time I got to him, he was on to another woman, zeroing in on her as she used huge arm gestures. Her cheeks were flushed as she stared into the camera.
“It was Tiamat,” she said, with an exaggerated shudder. “They pulled her in, and when she opened her mouth, I saw the serpent inside.”
Harley had a slight, abusive smile on his face as he ping-ponged his microphone between the two women.
“No, no,” the other woman shook her head, stepping in front of Harley’s camera angle. “Es un chupacabra!” She did the growl again, and a team behind her nodded enthusiastically, backing her up with a chorus of “Sí! Sí!”
I yanked on Harley’s sleeve. “Can I talk to you, please?”
Harley hid his annoyance at my disruption like an absolute pro; his smile never faltered even as he ushered aside his interviewees still fighting over the identity of the body on the dock.
“Sophie, right?”
“What are you doing? You’re riling everybody up.”
“I’m simply interviewing these bystanders.”
I put my hands on my hips and cocked an eyebrow. “For your next book?”
Harley stared me down. “What does it matter? Do you have a theory on John Doe over there you’d like to kick in?” Harley’s brown eyes slid over me, head to toe, and I stiffened, feeling immediately violated. “I bet you’d look great on camera.”
“Aren’t you interested in my best friend?”
Harley blew out a sigh and waggled the microphone in front of me. “Do you have something to add or not? This is for a major network, you know. Not cable.”
“I don’t care. There is nothing to see here. If you know that”—I pointed to the body that was now being moved, still under cover of the tarp—“is a regular John Doe, why are you interviewing these people?”
“I sell books, Sophie, and people like these”—he spread his arms as if he were among his brethren— “keep the myths that I debunk alive. More myths, more books.”
“More sales.”
“Spoken like a true capitalist.” He pressed the microphone underneath my nose. “Are you sure you don’t have anything to add?”
I looked from the fallen centaur to the woman with the hairnet, wringing her hands; the woman beside her was still muttering “Tiamat” and describing the evil attributes of the sea legend.
Harley may not have had fangs, but he looked every inch the bloodsucker lurking beside them, his microphone at the ready.
“I have nothing to say to you.”
I was inching through traffic and listening to Nina’s cell phone ring in my ear after my run-in with Harley and the centaur. By the time a Muni bus cut me off, and a line of Art Institute students zigzagged in front of my car, Nina picked up and I screamed, “Finally!”
There was a short pause and then, “Sophie?”
“Sorry, Neens. I’m stuck in traffic and I just came from the docks.”
“Trolling for dates again? Do we need to have another talk about acceptable places to meet men?”
My left eye started to twitch. “I was on the dock because the police pulled a centaur out of the Bay.”
“That’s weird. Centaurs are not known for their swimming prowess.”
“He’d been murdered.”
“Oh.”
“I called Dixon. Investigations is coming out to take care of it.” I shook my head, tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. “This is scaring me, Nina. First Mrs. Henderson, and now a body in the Bay?”
Nina harrumphed. “Do you know how many bodies there are in the Bay? I’m guessing thousands. That centaur could have been in there for ages and just washed up now. It’s not pleasant, I’ll give you that, but I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.”
“I guess.” I rested my foot on the brake, staring at the flashing lights in front of me. “You know who else I ran into? Harley.”
Nina let out a pained little yip. “Harley? My Harley?”
“He’s already your Harley?”
Nina ignored me, prattling on. “Oh my gosh, is he okay?”
“He’s fine, but I can’t say as much for the people he was talking to. He was here preying on their beliefs. He had an entire camera crew and was interviewing people who saw the—the body.”
“Chupacabra? Anything that looks somewhat odd around here and it’s a chupacabra.”
I nodded, inching my car forward as the light in front of me changed. “Yes, but ... he was practically making fun of them. He was using them to prove his stupid debunking theories—making them look like idiots, like they all believed in these silly, made-up stories.”
Nina blew out a sigh, and I imagined her on the other end of the phone, examining her manicure. “That’s what he does, Sophie. He’s an author. He has to interview people, has to introduce the myths so that he can debunk them. It’s no big deal. It’s what sells his books. Besides, half the legends that people believe in are made-up.”
I wanted to zing Nina with something about her being a vampire, about her being one of the most made-up myths of all, but my mind was still churning, folding over the crumpled centaur and Harley’s shiny white veneers as he listened to the women argue.
Dollar signs were practically glistening in his eyes.
“He’s mean, Nina. And he’s wrong. There was a dead demon forty paces from him and he was interviewing some old ladies, getting them riled up about a chupacabra and Tiamat.”
“So what do you want me to do? Drag him to the Underworld to prove that he’s wrong? I’m not sure if you’ve recently read the UDA bylaws, but keeping the whole demon thing under wraps is really something we rely on around here.”
“Doesn’t it bother you at all that you’re all hot and bothered by a man whose entire career centers around the idea that we don’t exist?”
I could hear the rustle of cellophane as Nina unwrapped a blood bag on her end of the line. “According to him, you do exist. I don’t.”
I paused and Nina relented. “What are you really upset about, Sophie?”
My bottom lip pushed out and I slumped lower in the driver’s seat.
“I’m not sure.”
Chapter Five
I was steeling my resolve to walk into Dixon’s office and demand a full-scale investigation of Mrs. Henderson’s crime scene, and the body we just found, when my cell phone buzzed as I waited in the vestibule for the UDA elevator to come up.
“This is Sophie.”
“Sophie? Kale.”
“Hey, K—”
“Where are you? Are you on your way to the office?”
“I’m waiting for the elevator right now. Kale, what’s wrong? What is that? Kale?”
When the elevator dinged thirty-five floors below the San Francisco police station, the line went dead. I banged the phone against the heel of my hand a couple of times, shrugged, and threw it in my purse, knowing I’d see Kale in a millisecond.
But I didn’t.
The big metal doors slid open on the Underworld Detection Agency and it was—forgive the expression—like a ghost town. There was an ominous quiet; and though all the lights were on and business should have been in full swing, the lobby was desolate.
And then I heard the scream.
It was a high-pitched, bloodcurdling sound. It was a mixture of angst and misery, terrified and terror inducing. I clenched my hands into fists, feeling my fingernails digging little half-moons into my sweaty palms.
“Kale?” I called, my voice sounding odd and tinny in the silent room.
I took a step toward the reception desk and felt a hand grip my wrist, then yank me downward.
“Kale?”
She was huddled underneath the reception desk, a sweatshirt wrapped around her head. Pierre, our centaur filing clerk, was down there with her, sitting back on his haunches, hands pressed over his ears.
“What’s going on?”
Before Kale could answer me, there was another earsplitting scream, and then I knew.
“Banshee?” I said, grimacing.
Kale nodded and I rubbed my temples, the rhythmic drumbeat of a migraine beginning to pulse behind my eyes. “They wouldn’t be so bad if they could get the screaming thing under control.”
“She’s waiting for you in your office,” Kale said, pointing.
I nodded, then stepped out from under the desk. My ankles and knees cracked as I did so. “It’s okay, everyone, you can come out.”
Little by little, the UDA lobby came back to life as clients rolled out from under chairs and from behind the potted palms. Every man, woman, and beast held their hands over their ears or were sporting homemade earplugs, which may or may not have been torn from last month’s Martha Stewart Living.
I prepared myself to meet Bettina Jacova.
She was sitting primly at the edge of my office chair. Her posture was impeccable, and her long, dark hair hung in a sheet down her back. Her hands were neatly folded in her lap and her outfit—pearls, a baby pink twinset, and a dark pink chintz skirt—stood out cheerily against her decaying gray skin.
“Hello, Bettina.”
Bettina pressed her hands to the sides of her face and her mouth dropped open, ready to let out another earsplitting howl.
“No!” I said, jumping forward and slapping my own hand against her mouth. “Sorry.” I rubbed my palm against my thigh. “You’ll just need not to do that here, please.”
Though my new station as head of the Fallen Angel Division meant that I didn’t work with the general demon population any longer, there were a few members—and demon breeds—I kept tabs on. Either because our staffers had issues (Nina, being non–fire retardant in the face of dragons) or the demons themselves had certain powers that made general fraternization difficult.
Bettina was one of those demons.
You see, Bettina Jacova is a banshee. And though people are generally aware of the banshee yell—as in, “Those kids have been screaming like banshees all day”—they fail to realize the seriousness of it. The banshee scream signifies death.
Generally, yours.
Some demons are immune, but others are not.
The UDA found it prudent not to take the chance after we lost half the finance department to our Romanian intern, who failed to mark the box “banshee—deadly” on her intake form. My magical immunity super power allowed me to work with fire-breathing dragons and Bettina with her murderous screams.
Just another perk of being the only nearly normal at the Underworld Detection Agency.
Lucky me.
I sat down across from Bettina, who eyed me nervously. I offered her my most reassuring smile, praying to Buddha, God, and Oprah that she wouldn’t let loose another scream. It was hard enough to cover our clients when two of our staffers went on vacation simultaneously; should the entire group drop dead from banshee screams, well, then the Underworld Detection Agency would be in deep trouble.
“So, Bettina, how may I help you?”
“Well,” Bettina started to say, kneading her fingers in her lap. “I need help. I mean, I think we all might need help.”
I’ll say.
“‘We all,’ as in all the banshees?” I mentally started to scan my inner Rolodex. From my recollection there were only six banshees total in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area. “I suppose we could get some sort of soundproofed bus for—”
“No, not just banshees.” Bettina’s eyes shifted uneasily. “Everyone.” She paused, sucked in a sharp little breath, and cleared her throat. “Ms. Lawson, I was attacked last night.”
I felt my eyebrows rise, and felt the prick of heat wash through my body. “Attacked? By whom—or what?”
Bettina’s eyes started to water; her lower lip trembled. I snatched a few Kleenex from the box and pushed them into Bettina’s hands. “It’s okay, Bettina, you’re safe here. Now, can you tell me exactly what happened?”
“Well, I was leaving my apartment. I live by the ballpark, you know. It’s very loud and”—a twinge of pink bloomed in Bettina’s cheeks—“there’s a lot of general screams, so ...”
So the death-signifying screams of a banshee could be drowned out before entire subsections of San Francisco mysteriously dropped dead. Smart.
“Go on.”
“Well, I was going to get some groceries, and I was walking toward the bus stop. I wasn’t alone, because there was a Giants game going on, so there were tons of breathers.” Bettina blushed and lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry, Sophie. I meant there were lots of other people around, at first. Most of them went into the stadium so the street emptied out pretty quickly. Even so, I felt like I was being followed.”
“Did you see anyone?”
“That’s the thing. Before I left, I looked out the window to check the weather. I thought I saw someone on the sidewalk looking up into my window, but then the bus came and I guess he got on. I went downstairs and walked to the bus stop myself, and I got that weird feeling again.”
“Like you were being watched?” I supplied, feeling the hairs on my arms prickle.
Bettina nodded. “I was walking and I looked over my shoulder, and no one was there. Then I turned back and someone hit me. Hard.” Bettina’s graying fingers shakily pushed aside
her bangs, showing off an impressive gash just over her left eyebrow.
I sucked in a stunned breath. “Oh my. Bettina, I’m—”
“I was down on the ground, and he kicked me, too, right here.” Bettina gingerly rubbed her lower belly. “I was going to scream—I would have, but he caught me by surprise—and he hit me again.”
“Do you know what he hit you with?”
Bettina wagged her head. “I’m not sure. It looked like some sort of pipe.”
“Like a tire iron, maybe?”
Bettina shrugged. “I’m not really sure what those look like.”
I wasn’t entirely certain, either, but whether Bettina’s assailant was wielding a tire iron or a magic wand made a world of difference. At least it did here, in the Underworld.
“He wasn’t done, either,” Bettina said. “He—he was going to hit me again, in the head, but the game must have let out, because people started to fill the streets. He told me that my kind needed—needed to be erased.”
“Your kind? Did he—did he know you were—”
My saliva went sour and suddenly my skin felt too tight.
Demons walk among us every day. A vampire might be your neighbor; the corner store might be run by a werewolf or a troll. There is a thin veil that masks the demon differences from the human sight. That veil, combined with our human ability to unsee anything that might unsettle us, has allowed the demon race to prosper and blend into the natural world.
That veil doesn’t work on me; and if Bettina’s assailant was human, the veil didn’t work on him, either.
“He looked over his shoulder and ran, once the people started to come.” A single fat tear rolled down her cheek and plopped onto her cheery pink skirt.
“I’m so sorry, Bettina.” I patted her shoulder awkwardly and she fell into me, head buried in my shoulder, her small body shaking violently as she cried.