Psychic for Hire Series Box Set

by Hermione Stark

  I push my chair backwards, moving away from them both. He looks like he might punch me.

  “Your niece was just telling me about who murdered her sister,” I tell him calmly.

  “It was that boy Mustafa. That disgusting creep!” he yells. “You people already arrested him!”

  “That would be convenient for you, wouldn’t it?” I say snidely before I can stop myself. Except it wasn’t me. It was the little voice, slipping into the front of my mind for a second and taking command of my tongue. Furious, I firmly push her aside. She goes reluctantly.

  “What?” James Fenway says, looking astonished at my words.

  “Mustafa Salehi has been taken in for questioning,” I say more calmly, hopefully more professionally. “He hasn’t been placed under arrest yet. We don’t arrest people without proof.”

  No matter how much you want us to, says the little voice in my head. I don’t repeat her words out loud.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Fenway roars. “Just who do you think you are?”

  His shouts have drawn an Agent into the room. A young man I do not recognize. He looks alarmed. Seeing him seems to embolden James Fenway.

  “Who is this girl?” he roars at the young Agent. “She’s accosted my niece. Put her in an awful state. I’ll have her badge! I’ll have yours too!”

  The young Agent’s mouth drops open. He looks at me helplessly. He seems to sense things might kick off but he doesn't know who to blame. His hand goes to the weapons belt at his hips and hovers uncertainly between his restraints and his stunbommer.

  It strikes me that he must be new to the job too. I had expected him to immediately make me apologize and hustle me away. I probably have only a minute or two until someone senior arrives who does have the authority to make me leave.

  I can’t leave now. Not when I am so close.

  I fix my eyes firmly on James Fenway and try not to cower in my shoes. “You’re very good at making up stories Mr Fenway. Like the one you made up for the press about Mustafa Salehi. You must have thought he was the perfect patsy. It was you who got Jenny’s friend to release those pictures of him to the press, wasn’t it? If we speak to her, is that what she’ll say?”

  “What? You! I… No such thing!” Fenway blusters. Then he seems to swell with self-righteous indignation and finds his voice. “How dare you make these unfounded accusations? You’re finished. You’ll never work in this city again!”

  I had no idea whether my hunch about the friend with the photos would pay off, but his response tells me I am on to something. But unless he or Eliza confesses, I have no shred of evidence. And a powerful man like James Fenway will get away with his lies.

  And I am sick to death of murderers getting away with it. I’m going to make him pay. I’m going to prove to Constantine Storm that he was right to hire me, and close this case right now.

  A sense of certainty fills me like a balloon. I can already feel the thrill of success.

  “It was you,” I tell Fenway firmly and loudly. “You couldn't resist seducing your succubus niece. When we find the proof I bet you’ll change your story fast. You’ll say it was her, the succubus, who seduced you. Except she was only a child. Only sixteen. How long has it been going on? One year? Two?”

  Eliza is staring at her uncle with wide eyes. She gives a whimper. He glances at her and quickly looks away. Eliza makes a sound that is half sob, half wail. She staggers away from her chair, thrusting her uncle’s hand off her shoulder. She moves in a daze towards the Agent, as if he will help her. She cowers next to him.

  James Fenway’s fists are clenched. He wants to hit me. I take another step away from him but I keep him pinned in my gaze, determined to extract a confession. “Why did you kill her?” I demand. “Was she finished with you? Did she want to end it? Did she threaten to tell Eliza?”

  “You have no proof,” he snarls at me. “No proof!”

  Eliza screams. She is hurling herself towards her uncle, her arm raised like she is going to slap him. But she doesn’t slap him. She has something in her hand that looks like a small flashlight. She rams it into his mouth. She presses the button on its base. Its proximity alarm gives a brief warning whine but she doesn’t let go.

  It is the stunbommer. Realizing what is about to happen I stagger back in horrified shock. The weapon’s magic ignites. The force of the magical stunbomm blows James Fenway’s skull open. It throws me aside. Seconds later I am still cowering on the ground near the table, my ears ringing from the force of the magic wave. I stare in disbelief at the blood and brain matter spattered over the beautifully patterned floor tiles.

  Racing footsteps come our way, and then Storm is standing in the doorway. He looks at the headless dead man. He looks at an unconscious Eliza Fenway, her face and torso spattered in gore, stunbommer still in her hand. He looks at me.

  “Holy hellfyre,” he says. “What have you done?”

  Chapter 2

  DIANA

  Two years later I am half-jogging, half-walking to my job at a catering company. Jogging because my cat AngelBeastie had somehow managed to unplug my alarm clock in the middle of the night, making me wake up late. But still half walking because I cannot afford to turn up at work all hot and bothered.

  Today’s catering event is for a blue-chip financial company, a premium shift that I’ve been lucky to get, and I cannot be disheveled in front of the clients. My boss already has enough reasons to not like me.

  Walking is a bad idea. I knew that before I started out. Head office is halfway across town and the weather forecast had predicted rain today. A thunderstorm. A heavy shower had ceased before I left my apartment, so I’d decided to take my chances. Otherwise I would have had to take the bus, wasting money I can ill afford.

  Of the two jobs I currently have, this is by far the better paying one. I need to look good because the tips are worth more than the wages.

  My second job is evening work at a local restaurant. It has the benefit of being near my apartment, but the pay is minimal, the tips non-existent, and the greasy food they serve leaves my hair and skin and clothes smelling of fat. But at least Luca, the boss, is kind. I’ve learned a kind boss makes up for many other evils.

  The earlier rainstorm has left deep puddles in the sidewalks and on the pavements. I tread carefully, keen to avoid getting my one pair of shiny black shoes full of water. It is the morning rush hour on a Friday, and I am not the only one in a hurry to get to work. The London crowd is bustling and unpredictable. I weave and dodge through it, an expert at navigating it by now.

  The appearance of a sudden hefty torso, man attached, emerging from an alleyway catches me off guard. It sends me swerving sharply towards the road. A big red bus rushes past, sending a giant swoosh of water up from a puddle.

  I screech in quiet dismay as the grimy water drenches my pristine and crisply ironed white blouse. I stare down at my chest in disbelief. What the hell am I going to do now?

  I stomp grimly onwards, my mood completely ruined. And it hadn’t been that great to begin with. If I were anyone else, any normal person, I could have afforded to go into a store and buy a new shirt. I could have afforded to replace my bicycle when it got stolen.

  But I am not a normal person. I’m the Angel of Death apparently, though no one would know it to look at me. Heck, I wouldn’t know it if the little voice in my head didn’t keep insisting it. My adoptive family didn't know it either, but they’d still kept me locked away. I’d had no work experience to speak of, and I suspect that it only my blond fragile looks landed me my jobs.

  The bundle of money that Magda, my biological mother, had given me two years ago is tied up paying the deposit on my crappy rental apartment. An apartment that I could only afford back when I was supposed to get a decent salary from the Agency of Otherkind Investigations. A job I no longer have. Since then I’ve been subsisting on whatever cash I’ve earned from week to week.

  London is not cheap. My shifts this week are barely enough to
cover my rent. I had to beg for a couple of them, including today’s one. Forget about food. These past couple of months I’ve been eating leftovers at work and making the rest up with the tinned fish and lentils I’ve scavenged from local stores.

  It doesn’t help that I am hungry all the goddamn time. It’s like my adolescent years of starvation at the Coltons’ have finally started to catch up with me at age twenty-three. Worse, I’ve burnt myself on the grill twice at work this month. Both times at my catering job. Both times because Rosalie, my fellow catering waitress, was carrying a large tray into the kitchen and claimed to have not seen me.

  I had to hide the burns and pretend they weren’t there. How else would I explain it when they magically healed overnight? A healing process that left me famished.

  My hand goes to my navel, my fingers feeling for the hardness of my navelstone. The moment I feel it my fingers drop away. I don’t know why I do that. Touch it, I mean.

  I’ve spent what feels like a lifetime trying not to touch it, trying not to even see it. The stone, which is fused into my flesh, is shiny black and sharp edged like a grotesque gem. I had always hated it. It marked me out as an oddity. It had made Mrs Colton think of me as an obscene devil child.

  I had been healing in my sleep for years. I had never realized until recently that it was my hated navelstone that was responsible. Godstone, Magda had called it, but the letter she left me before being murdered had given me no useful information at all. It had warned me only that evil people would try to steal the power of the stone, and that I must remain anonymous to protect myself. It had warned me that DCK, the Devil Claw Killer himself, was after me.

  It almost makes me laugh as I trudge through the crowded streets, chilled through with grimy rainwater. Magda had been so sure I was special. What would she say if she could see me now? Perhaps she’d think I’d been clever. Nothing makes a girl more anonymous than the ignominy of poverty.

  The healing process always drains me, and combined with the nightmares I’ve been having, it’s left me grouchy and irritable. Not a good way to feel when your job requires you to paste a smile on your face and be pretty and cheerful and welcoming.

  Nevertheless, by the time I arrive at Head Office I make sure to put on a smile. I’ll need it for my boss Mr Smithers, because I’m going to have to beg him to let me use one of the spare shirts. Both my spares were burned in Rosalie’s little accidents.

  It is Smithers’ job to make sure the staff are pristine, as accidents do happen in catering. I know he has shirts available. But he keeps them, like everything else, under lock and key. I am really not looking forward to the lewd comments Smithers is bound to make about my wet shirt.

  A soft whistle of sympathetic surprise stops me in my tracks. It is my colleague Ben. He looks rather impressed with the ghastly state of my shirt. Seeing the harassed and worried look on my face, his brown eyes soften. He wastes no time in saying, “I have a spare you can borrow if you like? It’ll probably be big on you.” He looks a little apologetic at this.

  It is all I can do to not throw my arms around him in relief. “Thank you, Ben. You’ve saved me!”

  Ben blushes a rather sweet pink. I pretend not to notice, looking away from his face to make him feel less awkward. By the time I have cleaned up and put on his shirt, which is too big but is at least crisp and clean, I’m ten minutes late. I sidle into the staff meeting, cringing as the door hinges squeal loudly on my entry.

  Smithers looks right at me. “Late again, Diana?” he says. He makes a little note on his clipboard.

  I try not to glower at him. I have only been late once, and that was only by three minutes and on my first day when I couldn’t find the meeting room. Two whole years ago. But to hear him, you would think I was late all the time. Rosalie is standing beside Smithers as if she is his right-hand woman. She giggled at his snide little quip, and is still smirking at me.

  She didn’t like me right from the start. She liked me less when I got the Ambassador’s Ball shift this week and she didn’t. The tips will be immense. I badly need the money for my rent but I suspect Instagram-junkie Rosalie planned to use the shift to make some new celebrity pals. She is pissed to miss out, and she isn’t one to pull her punches.

  She is the one who dug up a certain viral video of me off the internet and emailed it around to everyone at work my first week here.

  I ignore her smirk, and pay attention to the instructions for the day. Smithers drones on and on. When he is finally finished I am not the only one who is fidgeting, impatient to get on with the work. I rush to get started on checking the inventory we need to take to the venue. I am helping Ben load crates of china onto a van when Smithers comes to find me. He does not look pleased.

  “You’ve got a phone call,” he snaps.

  “Me?” I ask, surprised.

  “You,” he practically snarls.

  As I follow him back to his office, he complains at length that I am not supposed to have phone calls at work, and demands to know how this person, who refused to divulge their name but who insisted the call was very important, had got hold of his phone number.

  I know that he expects me to apologize, but I cannot recall giving his number to anybody. I have barely given my own pay-as-you-go phone number to anybody. I can’t afford to use my phone except for emergencies. My phone is currently in my locker. I wonder if this person tried calling me on that first. If they had to track down my work number, the call must be important.

  My heart skips a beat. The only person who would have an important reason to call me is Storm. But I have not heard from him in two whole years. In those first few weeks after losing my Agency job I had hoped it was him every time my phone rang. I had hoped he would offer me my job back, telling me the Agency had decided to give me another chance. He never called. Not once.

  I hurry anxiously into Smithers’s office, and get an unpleasant shock. Rosalie is in there and she is hanging up the phone.

  “No!” I say, but it is too late.

  “I thought you’d left it off the hook,” she trills at Smithers, batting her eyelashes.

  She proceeds to explain how she came here because she thought Smithers might like some help with the paperwork. She raises a finely arched eyebrow at him suggestively. I clench my fists, wanting to scream at her for hanging up my call. I know that she must have known it was my call. She would never have hung it up otherwise.

  Smithers is grinning at Rosalie in a way that makes me sick. “You can go,” he tells me curtly.

  Suddenly the phone rings again. Smithers snatches it up before I can. He listens to the person on the other end and then wordlessly hands it over to me. He takes a seat at his desk. He does not leave to give me the courtesy of privacy. Not that I expected him to. He glowers at me as I pick up the phone and say, “Hello,” in a voice that emerges embarrassingly squeaky with nerves.

  “Diana!” says a relieved voice on the other end. It is Remi Bronwyn. I am surprised and disappointed all at once. I had convinced myself it would be Storm.

  “Thank goodness,” Remi continues in a rush. “I tried your number but there wasn’t the option to leave a voicemail, and I was so worried that I would miss you. Then I finally got this number, and then that girl hung up on me!”

  Remi had stayed in touch, calling me intermittently. Then her calls turned to text messages. Lately her messages had dwindled to one every few months.

  Her current urgency makes a little knot of anxiety twist in my stomach. “What is it?” I ask her. “Has something happened to Storm?”

  Not that she would call me if it did, I realize with embarrassment.

  She sounds surprised. “No, nothing like that. It’s about erm… Magda.”

  She doesn’t call her my mother. Only Storm’s team at the Agency know that Magda was my mother. They hadn’t made this fact public in case it put me in danger.

  Hearing my biological mother’s name on her lips is like a dash of cold water in my face. Magda’s body is stil
l in the custody of the Agency of Otherkind Investigations. They hadn’t released her in two years. They’d said an in-depth magical autopsy involved all sorts of complicated things, and it could take months. They had been hoping to find even the smallest clue that would lead them towards her murderer, the Devil Claw Killer having been notoriously hard to catch. Then they’d said there were some unique peculiarities that made it important to keep her longer than usual, but that I need not worry because she was being magically preserved.

  “What about her?” I ask stiffly, fully aware that Smithers is listening to every word.

  Rosalie is perched on the edge of his desk, tapping her heels on the ground as if I am inconveniencing her, whilst not bothering to hide her interest in my private life.