Psychic for Hire Series Box Set

by Hermione Stark

  I opened the door a little and poked my head in. On the far end of the room was a large pentacle carved into the stone floor. Mozz was sitting cross-legged on the ground outside it. She was staring at it and humming to herself a melancholy tune. Its eerie haunting notes made me shiver.

  For a moment I remembered how it had felt to be sitting inside that pentacle while Theo worked his magic. The room had been dark and lit only by candles. Inside that pentacle I had burst apart into a million pieces. At least that’s what it had felt like. I had blown apart and come together again. The pain and the power had been immense. The me that went into the pentacle was not the same me that emerged from it.

  As if sensing my presence, Mozz turned around and looked right at me. For a moment she looked scared, and then she realized it was me. A smile blossomed on her little round face, and she came running up to me with her arms stretched in front of her. But it was not cuddles that she was after. “Slime!” she demanded, holding out both hands.

  Mozz had long since grown bored of all the various knickknacks of interest in Theo’s shop. For her the more ordinary things I brought in from the human world were fascinating. Like glitter slime.

  Within minutes she was happily lolling around on the shop floor, pouring various colors of glitter into pots of multi-colored slime and squashing it happily into a shimmering dough between her chubby little hands. She made me sit and play with her and admire her handiwork. When Beastie arrived, having made her own way across London to the shop and let herself in through the cat flap that Theo had installed, Mozz found a new joy — the making of slime bubbles. Using her particular magic she blew them up into the size of balloons and made them float away. Beastie indulged her by chasing them and popping them with her claws. Mozz shrieked with laughter.

  Now that I knew that Mozz was safely preoccupied and not at risk of getting into any trouble under my watch, I returned to my files. Zezi’s case felt in hand. If Marielle Zamas did not call with anything interesting, I planned to go back to the Petrichor club from last night and scour it from top to bottom until I got a new lead.

  But the file on Steffane Ronin was still troubling me. It had been calling to me with its low persistent thrum since the moment that I had walked into the magic shop. I didn’t know why. Ronin was a vampire that was found in a locked vault of a room with the blood of his dead victim all over him. He had clearly been drinking from her. No other vampires had been in the room. The massive stone door had been locked from the inside. It was an open and shut case, no pun intended. But not according to the persistent psychic thrum emerging from the file, tugging at me while the other cases — except Zezi’s — remained silent.

  I leafed through the file again and re-read all of the notes. It did not help. Feeling annoyed that such a supposedly clear-cut case of murder by bloodthirsty vampire was eating at me but offering me no fresh insight, I slammed the case file shut and opened up one of the other ones. I had not given the rest enough attention, and I might as well read them thoroughly before giving up on them. Soon enough I found my mind wandering. I wished I could talk to this Steffane Ronin and put my mind at rest. Although why I would want to speak to a vampire was beyond me.

  Half an hour later the sound of a bell ringing drew me out of my reverie. I hurried out of the hidden section of magical goods at the back of the store and into the store’s front section where we kept the everyday human pawnshop items.

  A man in a cowboy hat was standing by the counter waiting for me. “Howdy,” he said.

  “Howdy back atcha.”

  “You Diana Bellona?” he asked.

  I hated it when somebody I did not know asked for me by name. It no longer made me feel afraid, but it still felt intrusive. This guy was in his late twenties and was wearing the whole cowboy shebang; stetson, plaid shirt, fringed jacket, faded jeans, boots with spurs, and a belt with a big old shiny buckle. It should have looked like a ridiculous get-up since we were in London, but it sat well on him. It helped that he had one of those faces that was weather-beaten and affable and easy to like.

  “What’s it to ya, pardner?” I asked with a smirk.

  He grinned appreciatively and tipped his hat to me. “Boss man wants to see you, ma’am.”

  “I assume this is your boss man, rather than my boss man.”

  “Sure thing ma’am.”

  “And who are you?”

  “Just the driver, ma’am.”

  “The question is do I want to see your boss man?”

  “He certainly thinks so ma’am. I’m to take you to the prison right away. Car’s outside.”

  “The prison. That explains everything. I’ll be with you right away.” I pointed my finger at him and then at the door, making it clear I wanted him to leave.

  He stayed standing where he was. He shoved a hand into his jeans pocket, pulled out a slip of paper, and slid it across the counter towards me. “Boss man told me to give you this. Said you’d know what it was about.”

  I was about to slide it right back across to him when I saw what was written on it. A name that made me pause. The cowboy was wrong. I had no idea what this was about, but I wanted to know and badly. Because this itch had been scratching me all day and it was high time I put it to rest.

  I stabbed the name with my forefinger. “Is this your boss man?” I asked.

  “Sure thing, ma’am. He says he’s been waiting for you.”

  Chapter 5

  DIANA

  I told the cowboy that I was working and that he should come back later. He said he’d wait. And he did, because when I shut up the shop in the evening, there he was parked up outside in a powder-pink, open-top Cadillac cabriolet.

  I whistled in appreciation. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  He grinned when he saw it was me. He had been lounging in the back seat, his feet up, reading a paperback. He threw the book into the front passenger seat and bounded out of the car in one swift movement to open the back door for me.

  “It’s the boss’s car, ma’am. I drive what he tells me to drive.”

  It was just as well that it was mid-August in London and we were enjoying a brief spell of hot weather. I wondered what he drove the rest of the year. The sense I got from him was that he was exactly what he seemed to be. A guy who had had his struggles in life and was now interested in an easy life even if it meant working for the bad guys. This guy was at total ease with himself. The almost-music emanating from him was just the usual background hum of someone who was maybe not entirely innocent of all wrong-doing, but was not particularly dangerous either. He wasn’t about to pull a knife on me. I could pretty much trust him. So I ignored the rear door he was holding open and got into the front passenger seat. He shrugged and joined me.

  As he started up the car, I asked, “So what’s a nice cowboy like you doing working for a villainous vampire like Steffane Ronin?”

  He shrugged. “He pays well.”

  “What’s your name? Or do you go by cowboy all the time?”

  “Cowboy suits me just fine.”

  I looked pointedly at his manicured hands. “Some cowboy.”

  He grinned a big toothy grin. “Perk of the job, ma’am. A man can’t live the hard life forever.”

  As he drove, I took the time to sit back and think. Was this cowboy really taking me to see Steffane Ronin? And how the hell did Ronin know that I wanted to see him? And why the hell did I even want to see him? He was a killer. Just because his case had been tickling at my subconscious didn’t mean I needed to go digging around in it. I could just imagine what Storm would say if he knew what I was up to. He would be seriously unimpressed at the very least.

  This made me giggle. Perhaps he deserved to be unimpressed.

  The thing was that saying could no to seeing Ronin was going to get me nowhere, and saying yes might actually get me somewhere. Listening to the weird tickling of my psychic subconscious was the one thing that I really knew how to do. It always had landed me where I was supposed to be. Not
listening to it would be like not drinking water when I was thirsty. Pointless, and eventually painful. The Ronin case might only be a nagging itch now, but give it time and left untended it would become full-on nightmares and insomnia. Past experience had taught me this.

  And heck, perhaps this Ronin case was how I was finally going to douse my deadly little desire. Maybe this Ronin guy deserved a killing by a supposed Angel of Death.

  Cheered at the thought, I sat back to enjoy the ride. But this open top car malarkey was not all it was made out to be. My long hair in its messy bun came loose the moment we hit an empty patch of road and the cowboy put his foot on the gas. The wind whipped through it tangling it all up, no matter how often I tucked it back into the neck of my jacket. By the time we had arrived at the prison, which was on the outskirts of London, my hair was thoroughly snarled. I looped it back up in a messy bun again as I followed the cowboy into the prison.

  This was a special prison for otherkind only, and Steffane Ronin was being kept in a wing specifically designed for vampires. I had to go through a metal detector and be eyed up by a grumpy mage and then be patted down by a female security officer before they let me through. The cowboy was not allowed in, so I had to go alone. I followed a pair of beefy guards down several dim corridors before coming to a door. One guard handed me a pair of weird looking goggles and told me to put them on.

  “Do not make eye-contact with the prisoner at any time,” he warned me sternly. “And do not take these off.”

  “Sure thing. What are they? Some sort of magical anti-mesmerism glasses?”

  “Supposedly,” said the guard.

  “No such thing,” said the other in disgust. An undercurrent of fear was coming off this one, as if he was fully aware that he was working in a place surrounded by monsters and the idea of what one of them would do to him if it got free was constantly nagging at him. This guy was a stress-pot.

  “Stay outside the circle at all times. Do not approach the prisoner. Do not touch the prisoner. Keep the alarm button in reach and press it the second you need help.”

  “Much good it’ll do ya,” muttered the stress-pot.

  “I’d prefer if you armed me with a cross bow,” I told the first guard with a grin. “The type that shoots stakes.”

  He grinned back. “Tell me about it. Why are you here to see this one anyway?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

  The guard shrugged. “Your funeral.”

  He opened the door to let me in. The room inside was completely dark, but I didn’t need the help of the glasses to see. The room was ten feet square. At its center was the circle that the guard mentioned. It was made of sigils carved permanently and deeply into the stone floor. They were highlighted by the faint glow that they were emitting.

  In the middle of the circle was a metal monstrosity of a chair that was welded into the ground. And sitting on it, shackled with chains, was a dark-haired man with glittering eyes. A thick metal belt around his naked torso held him attached to the back of the chair. His wrists and forearms were shackled to the chair’s arms. He had been staring at the ground and sitting as still as a corpse. But then he looked up directly at me and I saw that cruel edge to his features that I had seen in my dream.

  It was Steffane Ronin I had been dreaming of!

  Suddenly I remembered who he reminded me of; one of my favorite actors — Joaquin Phoenix — when he was young and playing some evil Roman emperor. I’d been spending my evenings binge watching movies and TV shows, trying to distract myself from my itch to go out and kill something.

  The movement of Steffane Ronin’s head had caused the sigils on his shackles to gleam. He didn’t react. No wincing and gritting his teeth like he had done in my dream, but I did notice that he stiffened almost imperceptibly until their light died down. He was shirtless and pantsless, wearing only a black pair of boxers just like I had seen. I had thought that the chair was a prison, but now I thought it was more a torture device.

  An unpleasant thought occurred to me. This was not just a visitor’s room. This was his cell. This was how he was being kept permanently.

  “Diana Bellona, I presume,” the vampire said.

  His voice was unexpected. For a guy locked into a chair it was far too smug. And deep and rich and melodious; the kind of voice that immediately magnified a man’s attractiveness tenfold. But he wasn’t for me. Sadly I seemed to be stuck on Storm.

  “At your service,” I told him, taking a seat on a second chair outside of the circle. It had an alarm button attached to its arm. Compared to his, this chair was spindly.

  “Glad to hear it,” he said.

  “A figure of speech,” I retorted. “Don’t get your hopes up, vampire boy. You want to tell me why I’m here?”

  He threw back his head and laughed a booming laugh, and this time he didn’t seem to care at all about the gleam of the sigils. “Vampire boy,” he said, shaking his head. “Nobody has ever dared call me that.”

  “Ooh. You must be a big bad vampire boy. So, what do you want?”

  Meeting him had thrown me off. I had expected that I would come in here and I would sense something from him immediately, the way that I had sensed that insistent nagging tugging from his case file. But he was like the vampire Marielle; a void in the middle of the psychic music. I could not sense anything coming from him at all and I did not like it.

  “What do you think I want?” he said.

  “Very funny. Am I supposed to pick your brains for you? I’m not in the mood. You asked for me, so spit it out.”

  He tilted his head and looked at me curiously. “Why you came when I asked is of interest, no?”

  “Call me curious.”

  He didn’t tell me that curiosity killed the cat. He glanced around his cell meaningfully. “Clearly I want your… help.” He said the word ‘help’ like it was an unpleasant thing. Like he had never asked for help in his life.

  “And how and why am I going to do that? You’re a killer in a supermax. It seems to me that you’re exactly where you belong.”

  “I am not where I belong,” he snapped. “I did not murder Leonie.”

  It surprised me that he called her by her name rather than just ‘that girl’. Leonie Ashbeck was the name of his victim. She had been eighteen years old. Why did I always seem to be chasing after girls who had been targeted by monsters? Why couldn’t these goddamn monsters target their own beastly peers for once?

  There had been not much else about Leonie in the file. No photos. I wondered what she had looked like. Whatever that had been, I couldn’t imagine any teenage human girl would have consorted with this cruel-faced vampire if she had really known the monster he was.

  “You seriously expect me to believe that you really cared about Leonie Ashbeck?”

  “I care nothing for what you think.”

  “Clearly you do.”

  “I didn’t murder her,” he repeated, looking me right in the eyes.

  “I’ll just take your word for it, shall I?”

  “You don’t need to,” he said with a smug smile. “Given that you’re a psychic.”

  I frowned. How the heck did he know that? It’s not like I’d been advertising the fact. “A psychic, huh? Why would you think that?”

  “My friends told me.”

  I took a meaningful look around his cell. “I bet you have a lot of friends.”

  “Enough to count. It’s where they are that matters.”

  I wondered if this was meant to be a threat. “And where’s that?” I asked.

  “Interesting places.”

  “Gosh, you just love to give people the old dance-around. I bet you were fun in your day. Why did you want me to come and see you, Mr Ronin?”

  “Because you can help me.”

  “Why me specifically? Where did you get my name?”

  “You looked me up,” he said. “On a computer.”

  “So?”

  “I like to keep an eye on those who are keepin
g an eye on me. My friends alerted me to it. You took an interest in my case. Why? Is it because you sensed I was innocent?”

  “So how does that work? Do you have some sort of alert set up to ping on google every time someone types in your name?”

  “Wouldn’t the world be an interesting place if it was that simple? You would know the name of every man who had a crush on you, and I bet a lot of men have crushes on you.”

  “Are you flirting with me?”

  “I always flirt with beautiful women.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

  “Can you blame a man for trying?”

  “Sorry old pal. I didn’t see a thing that pointed to your innocence.”