Psychic for Hire Series Box Set

by Hermione Stark

  Which was unexpected, especially for vampires.

  The team entered as quietly as ghosts, Storm bringing up the rear. The house was silent and dark. The Agents with their thick-soled boots made no sound as they rapidly infiltrated the house, spreading one-by-one through all the dark living spaces, weapons pointed ready for an attack. The weapons were guns with special bullets capable of slowing down a vampire.

  Storm made his way to the rear of the house but came across no suspects. Nobody was there but him. Storm’s ear piece did not even crackle - clearly none of the team had found anyone in the other rooms either. Storm came to a hallway at the back of the house which was as black as death. The tall windows had been painted over with thick black paint and hung with heavy curtains. They blocked out very sign that it was already dawn outside. Unsurprising in a vampire nest.

  Storm found the stairs leading to the basement. The team’s mage followed closely behind him, looking eerie in her night-vision anti-mesmerism goggles. Together they penetrated the basement and then the sub-basement. There they found a sobbing woman on her knees. She pointed a shaking finger down a long dark hallway.

  “My Leonie,” she whispered. “He took my Leonie, my niece.”

  The passageway had a smell of old stone and heavy earth. The ceiling was of vaulted stonework. They were in the crypts. Every doorway was sealed off like a burial chamber. This must be where the Ronins slept, if you could call it sleep.

  It was Storm who reached the chamber at the very end first, where the weeping woman had been pointing. The door was a thick slab of solid stone, its mass immovable even when Storm applied his shoulder and shoved it. And Storm was strong. Very strong. Which meant this was an old fashioned vampire’s door, like those they had in Otherworld. Those doors - once locked from the inside by the vampire using a special mechanism on the inner part of the door - could not be opened from the outside. The damn door was sealed like a tomb. It took three special blast spells from the mage’s wand to break it open.

  Storm and the mage looked in warily. Inside was a lavish bedroom with rich furnishings. At its center was a bed with gray silk sheets. On the bed was a dark-haired man, his mouth smeared in blood. He was sobbing. He was sitting in a mess of blood coming from the beautiful young woman beside him. She was naked, the curves of her body taut with youth. She was clearly dead.

  As Storm secured the suspect with sigil-inscribed restraints, he heard raised voices approaching along with scurry of scuffling footsteps outside. Cranning charged into the room. He looked delighted with what he saw; one of his team arresting a famous Ronin vampire.

  “Steffane Ronin,” Cranning said smugly. “You’re under arrest for murdering a human.”

  Ronin finally spoke, his voice quiet, seemingly with shock. “I didn’t do it.” The vampire fixed Storm with his glittering dark eyes. “It wasn’t me,” he insisted.

  Perhaps it was the vampire’s mesmerism; Storm almost believed him.

  Chapter 1

  Present Day

  DIANA

  The Petrichor Club was one of those underground bars that you got in London where from the outside it looked like it was going to be some seedy underground pit, but once you got down there was surprisingly spacious and full of a heaving plethora of beautiful bodies drinking and dancing and having all kinds of fun.

  I was perched on a bar stool, sipping on a gin and tonic and biding my time. Between sips I tinkled the overly plentiful ice cubes in my glass with a long black cocktail tube that was too thin to be a straw and had me wondering what the heck its purpose in life was supposed to be. This gave me something to do between the coy peeks I was taking at a woman sitting on a stool at the far end of the bar.

  Like me, the woman was here alone. Like me she had turned away a string of men who had tried to buy her a drink. She had a sweet oval face, very pale, and short inky black hair that curled playfully around her lovely forehead and high rounded cheekbones. She was an absolute Madonna. The kind of rare beauty it was hard to keep your eyes off. And she was definitely returning my interest.

  When she caught my eye I quickly looked away, fluttering my eyelashes down towards my drink, playing the shy girl for all I was worth. I was dressed the part of a sweet little thing too. The frilly white cherry printed summer dress I was wearing came to just above my knees. I had left my pale hair loose, streaming like silk over my back, with only an alice band to hold it in place. I looked like I did not belong here, which was exactly what I had intended.

  The Madonna across the bar might be flirting, but I was not. Not unless you counted flirting with danger. I was excited. I sensed that she was about to take the hook that I’d been dangling at her for the past half hour. All the while I had had to make sure my interest in specifically her was not overly obvious. I sensed that would put her off immediately.

  I sensed it with my everyday normal intuition if you were wondering, not my psychic powers. Because this woman was a complete blank on my psychic radar and that was what had caught my attention about her in the first place. Ever since my friend and part-time employer, wizard Theo Grimshaw, had performed a powerful magical spell on me three weeks ago, my psychic gift had taken an unexpected turn towards the interesting.

  The spell had not worked the way it was supposed to, and a side-effect had been changes in my psychic ability that I was still getting used to. Before my psychic abilities had usually been somewhat vague feelings or smells or visions and dreams that I’d had to interpret. Now it was like a constant background hum was always everywhere around me. If I concentrated, I could tune into it and interpret what it seemed to be telling me. I had explained to Theo that it was like I could now hear the resonance of my psychic powers as if it was music. Most of the time it was such a quiet background hum that I didn’t even notice it, but sometimes it became like a crashing crescendo of music. Not actual music, you understand?

  So anyway, without this new sense I might never have known that the Madonna at the bar was the only person in this place who might be able to help me to find my missing girl Zezi. Where everyone else in this place was letting off that same vague background hum that I had mentioned, which had not caused any prickles of alarm for me, the Madonna herself was a complete absence of sound or music to my psychic radar. It was like she was a void from which sound did not emerge. Which had got me aching to find out why, and whether she was doing it on purpose.

  I flashed a quick glance up at her again from beneath my eyelashes, and this time she smiled and crooked her index finger at me. It was like a command. She was fixing me with those big dark eyes of hers and clearly she expected me to obey. Interesting. I responded like a puppet pulled on a string and made my way over to her.

  “Hello, sweet pea,” she crooned, patting the empty stool beside her, which had just been vacated by some guy that she had batted her eyelashes at. The guy hovered for a few moments, but when neither of us paid him any attention he disappointedly took the hint and drifted off.

  “And what brings you here, darling?” the Madonna said to me, and reached over to tuck a loosened strand of my hair behind my ear. The graze of her fingers on my cheek was cool and made me stiffen ever so slightly, as I realized something that I had not guessed from looking at her alone. The woman was a fucking vampire.

  I pretended I hadn’t noticed this. “Erm, well, you know, sometimes you have to live a little,” I said, my words hesitant with pretend shyness.

  She let out a tinkle of laughter and ordered me a stronger drink. “Here’s to living a little,” she said, clinking my glass against hers.

  I gulped my drink quickly and made sure to keep my eyes averted from hers except for brief glances. No wonder she had tried to fixate me with those big eyes of hers. Silly me for forgetting about vampire mesmerism. Not that she seemed to be using it on me yet. But if she did, no way was I going to be able to keep up my little ruse with her. This fact annoyed me. But only ever so mildly.

  The way I was feeling was another side effect of Theo
’s spell. I should have been feeling worried by now, having just allowed myself to drift into the interest of a vampire. Gorgeous or not, everyone knows that vampires are not to be messed with. But instead of feeling anxious, I felt irrepressibly buoyant, happy as a sunbeam, and growing tired of my little pretense if I was honest with myself.

  “So, what’s a bad vampire like you doing in a nice place like this?” I asked her lightly.

  She looked astonished for the briefest moment, and I was not sure whether this was because I had guessed what she was or because I had so abruptly stopped my game-playing. She let out a shout of delighted laughter. It was a gorgeous and delicious sound, as if she had cultivated it over the decades. It turned out that her name was Marielle Zamas, and that she was a happily-married law-abiding vampire who, as much as she loved her husband, was sick of staying in her nest under the thumb of her mother-in-law all the time.

  “She’s such a drag,” she moaned. “And like you said, a girl has got to live a little.”

  Her turning out not to be a big bad vampire was both annoying and a relief. A relief because now I wouldn’t have to consider killing her for being illegally out on the hunt, and annoying because it looked like she was not going to be able to point me in Zezi’s direction either.

  “Have you been coming here long?” I asked.

  “Oh years,” she said airily. “Half of the clientele are otherkind. They really don’t mind a vampire or two. They even serve my margaritas the way I like them.” She gestured at her glass of deep red stuff and I realized for the first time exactly what was in there. I grimaced and she giggled.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to discriminate against your food or anything.” I might not be too impressed with the blood drinking apart, but it was better that she was drinking her blood out of a glass than from anywhere else.

  “So if you’ve been coming here for a couple of years, I wonder if you’ve seen this girl?” I took the photo of Zezi Shahidi out of my pocket and slid it across the smooth wooden bar top towards Marielle.

  It was a small passport photo, creased up from being handled over the years. Zezi’s mother had not kept anything else. When Zezi had first gone missing two years ago, her rather strict mom had been furious, convinced that Zezi had run off to live with her new and tawdry friends. Feeling abandoned and rejected, Mrs Shahidi had confessed that she’d dumped all of Zezi’s things in a pile in the garden and set it on fire. To teach Zezi a lesson, she had said.

  A couple of weeks later when it had become clear that her daughter was not staying with any of her friends, and certainly had not gone anywhere of her own free will, her mom had been horrified and distraught. Not only had she let two weeks pass without calling the police, she had burned up all the evidence than might have pointed to whatever had happened to her daughter. Zezi had never been found and her mother had never forgiven herself. When I had visited her recently, her pain had been raw and difficult for me to be around. It had been like a crashing tumult of fierce waves thundering and tearing at me and leaving me feeling flayed. It had even managed to temporarily flip my sunshiny mood upside down.

  Back then the police had forwarded Zezi’s case to the Agency of Otherkind investigations - where I was currently consulting on a part-time basis - because Zezi’s mother had insisted Zezi had involved herself with otherkind. Goblins apparently. There had been no evidence of this so the Agency had rejected the case as being outside of their jurisdiction.

  The human police had not been interested in pursuing a girl who her own mother had initially thought had run away. Especially as the girl had been eighteen already. And so poor Zezi had been consigned to the pile of missing people that nobody had any time to look for, not even her mom who was run ragged raising her other three rambunctious children. Zezi had been the eldest. She used to help look after her troublesome teen brothers and her baby sister while their widowed mom was working two jobs. Zezi’s disappearance had practically destroyed their already struggling family.

  For me Zezi’s case file had hummed against my psychic radar so loudly that it had drowned out nearly everything else in the stack of cold cases that my boss Agent Storm had assigned to me to review. The humming had been like a haunting music singing to my subconscious. Not actual music, but that didn't stop me from almost hearing it. Find Zezi, it said. Find her. Find her. Find her. Don’t you dare let her go. Despite the fact that I was also interested in one of the other cases in the pile, this one grabbed hold of me like a limpet.

  It was typical that even my new and improved psychic senses still gave me nothing more useful than an insistent feeling that I must find Zezi. But one thing was for sure — if my senses wanted me to find Zezi, even without bothering to tell me if she was dead or alive, then it must mean that what had happened to her was important. I had chosen to believe for now that she was alive.

  Marielle had picked up the little photograph of Zezi and was staring at it curiously. The lighting in the photo was crap and did not show Zezi with her gleaming glossy espresso complexion to her best advantage. Even so, it was hard to miss Zezi’s bright curious eyes and her mischievous smile and those mirrored dimples in each cheek.

  “Pretty girl,” said Marielle. Then she grimaced. “Which isn’t a good thing in this case, I suppose. It’s a dangerous world out there. You said it’s been two years. Are you sure it’s worth your while to be looking for her?”

  “I hope so. Does she ring any bells?”

  Marielle shook her head. “I can’t say I remember seeing her. But I can ask around if you like?”

  “That would be great. Her name was… is Zezi Shahidi.”

  Marielle nodded. She took my number so that she could call me. I left the bar shortly afterwards, knowing that I wouldn’t be making any more progress tonight. I was feeling pretty good though. I felt bad for Zezi, but wasn’t she lucky she had me? Because unlike the others, I intended to find her. Sunshiny optimism be damned. It might be false, but I was real and I was darn good at my job.

  It was a fine clear night, and I decided to walk a couple of blocks and enjoy it. I clicked along in my silly heels and hummed along to the psychic background almost-music in my head, which was currently melodious and befitting of London in summer. Both the music and the night were marvelous and warm and delightful. This was how I had thought being here would feel back when I had first come to England, having escaped my trapped and awful existence in America. I had thought that I would finally feel free, and that life would be full of possibility. But I had still felt trapped and so often angry and full of doubt. That was until Theo’s magic had set me free.

  And set the killer in me free too. Oh yeah.

  Humming to my music, I danced a couple of steps as I walked, not caring who was watching until one passerby whistled lewdly. I stopped to glower at him and bared my teeth to show him that I was a beastling, not some sweetie pie for him to pick on. There must have been something scary in the look in my eyes because he got the message and hurried off quickly. Or maybe he just thought I was too crazy to be worth his time. I could never be sure of what people saw when they looked at me.

  I resumed my strutting and humming until suddenly the music of the world turned into a crashing walloping crescendo. It rose up out from nowhere, bringing me to an astonished standstill. What the heck was that? It seemed to be coming from some way up the main street in the direction I had already been heading towards. Feeling excited, I quickened my pace, following it. Maybe this was the clue I had been hoping for. I trotted down a narrow side street and the music led me to the entrance of a much less classy bar than the one I had been in earlier.

  I went inside and down a darkened stairwell, arriving in a fume-infested pit of a room where people clearly didn’t care that smoking indoors was against the law. There my eyes took in a scene that was the last thing I expected to see.

  One guy, clearly out of his mind, was squaring up to fight a bunch of eleven beefy dangerous-looking folk. That one guy was Special Agent C
onstantine Storm. My very dishy boss.

  Chapter 2

  DIANA

  Although this smoky bar was the last place I would have expected to see him, I recognized Storm immediately. That sable-black head of hair was wonderfully tousled right now, and I was intimately familiar with the way his tall and muscular body moved, having spied often enough on him prowling around the office with the leonine grace of a predator. He still had it now even though he was currently stumbling around in a way I had never seen before.

  I scowled, wondering if someone had hit him with a stunning spell, but no one in the crowd was looking smugly mage-like. I realized the simplest explanation was the right one. He was drunk. And about to get walloped by eleven angry guys. Half angelus or not, in his current inebriated state that was going to do some damage.

  “Darling!” I screeched loudly, so that everyone within earshot winced. “Darling! Honey-boo!” I raced across the bar and flung myself bodily at Storm.

  I came crashing into his wonderfully firm chest and he caught me by instinct. He looked down at me in bafflement. Clearly his brain hadn’t caught up with the fact of my sudden appearance. Or perhaps it was my cherry-print attire which had confused him.