Shadows & Surrender: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Detective Series (The Jezebel Files Book 3)

by Deborah Wilde

  The three of us exchanged smirks—as if that would be a problem.

  Miles pulled out latex gloves and paper hats befitting a food services worker for himself and Arkady. It was kind of overkill for Miles, given his blond hair was buzz cut, but his attention to detail served him well as Head of Security.

  Arkady shuddered as he slipped the paper hat over his black, chin-length hair.

  “It doesn’t have cooties,” I said.

  “It’s a fashion blight.” He brightened. “At least it won’t detract from my stellar good looks.” He wasn’t wrong. Dude had cheekbones for days, pouty lips, and overall supermodel hotness.

  I clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit. Think positively.”

  We entered the kitchen and I led them to the victim, motioning to the body with a flourish. “Meet Tatiana Petrov.”

  “How can you be certain that’s her?” Arkady circled the body. “We can’t see her face. If she even still has a face.”

  I pointed to a thick white streak in her dark hair. “She’s registered in the House Pacifica database and there’s a photo. Her brother has a purple birthmark under his eye. That streak of white is her birthmark.”

  “I’ve met her before,” Miles said softly. “She was there when Levi first took over House Pacifica and keyed the new wards to his blood. I didn’t suspect her at all.” He clenched his jaw.

  Arkady reached out to pat his back, then jammed his hand in his pocket instead.

  “Don’t beat yourself up over it,” I said. “We had no idea how far-reaching Chariot was.”

  We still didn’t. Sure, we had a general understanding of how they operated, but we didn’t know the players or the precise scope of their range. To all appearances, Tatiana had been a leader in her field with a trustworthy reputation. Literally anyone could be one of them. How did I protect myself and watch my friends’ backs when I didn’t even know where to look?

  “Tell me about the brother,” Miles said.

  “Yevgeny Petrov.” I filled them in on my first meeting with Birthmark Man, up to and including my visit with Sergeant Tremblay. When I finished, I frowned at the body.

  “What?” Miles said.

  “I can’t get past the fact that there weren’t any wards on this place,” I said. “Whoever shot her just waltzed in and judging from the angle of the body, caught her coming out of either one of the bedrooms or the office. She’s a Weaver. Her brother worked for Chariot and she likely did too. Did she really trust them so unconditionally?”

  “Not everyone has honed your levels of suspicion,” Arkady said.

  “It’s common sense when you work for the bad guys,” I said. “Villains aren’t known for their undying loyalty.”

  “You work for the bad guys, too,” Miles said. “From her perspective. Hell, you are the bad guy. Yet, you’ve taken on a team. How do you know one of them won’t stab you in the back?”

  “As if I need a knife,” Arkady sniffed.

  “Could you not make a joke, just once?” Miles said.

  Arkady rolled his eyes. “Ooh, right. The commandment according to Berenbaum. Thou shalt not make light of anything lest anyone mistake it for thee not taking thine job seriously enough.”

  Their bickering had been an interesting glimpse into their current dynamic for the first minute. Now I was over it. “Back to Chariot.”

  “Chariot believes in the rightness of their actions every bit as much as you do,” Miles said. “Forget that for a second and it’ll be your body we find.”

  “Please. Mansplain the dangers to me. My point that Tatiana should have kept her guard up stands. Her brother Yevgeny was murdered. She should have been on high alert.”

  “So let’s find out why she wasn’t,” Arkady said.

  After a half-hearted search of the small bathroom, Miles and Arkady opted for the guest bedroom where Yevgeny had been staying, while I searched Tatiana’s room.

  “It’s a bust in here,” I said.

  A deafening clang rang out.

  I sprinted into the guest room. Arkady stood half in the closet, bashing in a safe door with heavy swings of his now-stone fists. I stayed behind Miles who was a very handy shield until the door crumpled entirely, allowing Arkady access.

  “And you were worried about me contaminating the scene?” I shoved Miles.

  He started as the safe’s metal keypad fell onto the ground. “The homicide cops will either think robbery was the motive or that this was a red herring.”

  “Not the point, dude. I’m a trained professional and this is just… not. At least concede I was right to search.”

  “Depends on what we find.” Man, this guy wouldn’t give me an inch.

  Arkady’s magic fists returned to normal. He reached into the safe and pulled out a camera. “Yevgeny, you perv,” he said, scrolling through frames.

  Miles and I crowded around him and I gasped. They were photos of my Jezebel predecessor, Gavriella Behar, and her former workplace, the Star Lounge, including the placement of security cameras and the back door from various angles of the parking lot.

  “Gavriella was kidnapped at work,” I said. I’d suspected as much, but confirmations were always valuable. “Yevgeny stalked her and cased the joint to figure out how best to snatch her without being seen.”

  Arkady handed the camera to Miles and leaned into the safe. “There are a couple more things in here.”

  The Android phone he removed was password protected so I said I’d take it to Priya Khatri, my best friend, part-time employee, and hacker extraordinaire. The other item was a thin metal lockbox. The lid had been busted open and there was dust in the crevice of the hinges.

  I ran a fingertip over a hinge and rubbed the dust between my fingers. “Wood. An under-the-floor safe?”

  I pulled out a handful of photos, but it took me a moment to recognize the girl. “It’s Gavriella again.” Her childhood through to early adulthood was captured in dozens and dozens of photos. “Given the lid was broken open, the contents, and the fact that Gavriella liked her hiding spots, this lockbox could have been taken from her apartment.”

  “Did Gavriella have a ward on her apartment door?” Miles said.

  “Yes, and it was active when Levi and I went there,” I said. “Oh, fuck. Level five Weaver. If anyone could disable it and then rearm it, it would have been Tatiana. They must have searched Gavriella’s home after she’d been kidnapped. I wonder what they were hoping to find?”

  “You think the cell is hers?” Arkady said.

  “Possibly,” I said. “Levi and I couldn’t find it when we searched her place.” I quickly sifted through the rest of the photos, hitting something hard at the bottom of the lockbox. A book with a reddish brown spine, it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, his first novel featuring my beloved Sherlock Holmes.

  “Props to her fine taste in literature, but why lock this puppy up?” I flipped the front cover open and frowned. “What’s this?”

  Under the title on the first page was a message printed in block letters—perfect for someone who didn’t want their handwriting recognized.

  On the first line was a “3.”

  On the second was a “1.”

  And on the third line was another “1” paired with a question mark.

  Underneath, that said, “Thursday. Steam clock. 8PM.”

  “The steam clock could be the one here in Gastown.” I rifled through the pages but there was no way to determine how old the message was and there was nothing else of interest.

  Well, not until I got to the back page.

  The men peered over my shoulder at the shaky drawing of a giant sunflower.

  Miles made a disgusted noise. “Kids defacing books. Little brats.”

  “Dandelion,” I said.

  “Wrong. It’s a sunflower,” he said.

  I stroked a finger over the flower as if I could draw warmth from it. “The Crayola color on the petals. Dandelion yellow. My favorite.”

 
It was a happy color, like my home. Talia had joked about me going through my “monochromatic phase” which was much preferred to “the sassy sixes” of my peers. Dad had praised my prodigious artistic output, and my finished drawings crowded the front of our fridge.

  “I don’t understand,” Arkady said.

  “This was my dad’s copy.” Buzzing filled my ears. I felt like I was spinning in place, a hollow shell in a reality comprised of a thousand shards of glass, flaying me alive.

  “Are you sure?” Miles said. “Lots of kids draw flowers.”

  I tapped the happy face in the middle of the flower with a small “A” for a nose. “I’m sure.”

  I dragged in a breath. I wasn’t that child anymore, helplessly riding out the shockwaves of other people’s actions on my life.

  “Pickle,” Arkady said, concern in his eyes, “there’s blood crawling over your skin.”

  Fire laced my veins and snaked up my spine. I stoked that bonfire with a dark rage that blazed behind my eyes, threatening to ignite everything.

  Sherlock Holmes famously said, “…when you have excluded the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

  This was mine: My father had taken away my magic. He’d then reached out to a Jezebel with some kind of coded message, making him more deeply entwined with this mystery than I’d ever imagined. Had he somehow always known what I was? Was this book part of some long con?

  Was I?

  “Hey, breathe.” Miles kept his breathing slow and measured until I had matched it. “What do you want to do?”

  I bundled up all my complicated emotions around my dad and shut them down along with my sputtering blood armor. I’d spent the past fifteen years in a state of uncertainty around him and I’d had enough of the past hanging over me. It was time for answers—and for closure. “Find out Adam Cohen’s game once and for all.”

  And hope it didn’t cost me everything.

  Chapter 2

  I tossed the cell into the lockbox and carried everything to the kitchen to bring home with me when we left. “Let’s finish up already.”

  After a round of rock, paper, scissors to see who’d pick the lock, which I was too distracted to play and Miles flat-out refused, Arkady broke in.

  It wasn’t an office, but a darkened stairwell leading into a basement. Arkady flicked the light switch but when nothing happened, he pushed Miles in front. “Get going.”

  “Scared?” Miles smirked.

  “Hardly, but exploring creepy basements is a stupid white-person move. People of color are infinitely smarter than that.” He waved us goodbye. “Call me if you survive.”

  Miles pulled a coin out of his pocket and tossed it into the darkness. “No motion-activated traps.”

  “Ooh, brains and a pretty face.” Arkady prodded Miles. “Move along, Mr. Badass.”

  Miles called up a ball of flame and he and I peered into the gloom. The way seemed clear. My patience was frayed and I wanted to go home and brood, so I manifested my full-body blood armor and shoved past Miles. The top step creaked ominously but nothing happened.

  “Stick close,” I said.

  We crept down the stairs.

  I stepped into the large unfinished room. “There’s nothing—”

  A length of orange yarn about the thickness of my thigh shot down from the ceiling and knotted around my ankle, yanking me upside down and into the air. Red-hot stabbing pain flared through the old injury on my right thigh. I did an ab curl to grab for the knot, but more yarn—purple this time—wrapped around my wrist, flinging me sideways toward the wall. My curses turned to shrieks.

  Was my armor impact-proof or was I about to hit like a crash test dummy, my skull splatting like a cantaloupe? I tried to protect my head with my free hand, only to have another knot wrap around it and jerk my arm straight. I flailed my left leg and, in response, a blue strand snagged and bound it, flipping me.

  Could this get more undignified? I was splayed spread eagle on my back in mid-air, my limbs tightly imprisoned, but at least I’d come to a dead stop without colliding into the wall. And people accused me of being a pessimist.

  Miles hadn’t fared any better except he lay on his side. “A fucking spiderweb. Are you kidding me?”

  I wrenched on the yarn but it defied my low-level enhanced strength. “It’s kind of poetic if you think about it. A Weaver, knotting her prey.”

  “That armor of yours fireproof?” Miles said. “I could burn us out.”

  “Go for it.”

  Fire burst forth from his forearms and the yarn knotted against his flesh glowed red. Yeah, show that string who was boss.

  The fire crackled higher; the room grew hotter.

  Sweat ran down the side of my face inside my armor, both dank and ticklish. I was boiling in my own protective suit. “Fought bravely. Died sous-vide.” was not going to be my epitaph.

  “Hurry up,” I growled.

  His magic flared so bright and high that it almost licked the ceiling. The yarn crackled.

  “Gotcha,” he said.

  Uh-huh.

  The yarn sizzled, the room filling with a noxious black smoke that sent us into paroxysms of coughing. His magic abruptly shut down, with no real harm done to the yarn.

  Never send a man to do a woman’s job.

  “My turn.” A sharp blood dagger, my weapon of choice, did zip against the heavy fibers. Huh.

  “Much better,” Miles bitched.

  “That was just step one.” Dropping my magic armor only bought me the slightest wiggle room, but it allowed me to send a silky red ribbon into the green yarn manacling my left arm. My powers hooked into it and I flinched. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

  My magic snapped back into me.

  “What?” Miles said.

  “I swear something just reached out and tried to touch my mind.” Defense-system yarn was one thing, sentience was quite a different and unwelcome ballgame. A creepy crawly sensation scuttled over my skin. Only an idiot would go in for round two, but being trussed up like a turkey didn’t leave a lot of options. “Okay, I know what to expect. Trying again.” I shot my magic into the yarn once more and pulled as hard as I could.

  The magic tasted like silk. I closed my eyes with a smile, a sharp buzz zipping through me. The most expensive whiskey was a cheap burn of moonshine in comparison to this honeyed smoothness. I drank deep, then pulled it out in a smudgy shadow, trapping it in my red forked branches.

  The ropes quivered. One edge rose up in a funnel, the thick strands forming a multi-colored face with an open gaping maw.

  I yelped. The section where I was shackled tore free of my magic branches, spinning to wrap me in coils. Blinded and barely able to breathe, I fought to catch hold of the yarn’s magic again, but it kept slipping away. I couldn’t tell which way was up, plunged into a relentless chaos that I couldn’t harness, despite how hard I fought.

  A loud grinding noise vibrated along the yarn. No, a muted gnashing. Exactly how a mouth full of teeth made of giant knots would sound.

  I thrashed pointlessly against my prison. There were a lot of things that might kill me, including the truth about my father, so some dead woman with a string fetish and Weaver magic did not get that honor.

  Even if I wanted my armor back to protect me from those teeth, I was too tightly wrapped. Adding it would crush me faster. In one jerky motion after another, I was drawn closer to the mouth. Or so I assumed, since I was completely encased in yarn that abraded the skin on my face and my eyes were screwed tight.

  The more I tried to hook into the yarn’s magic, the more it neatly evaded me. I had to catch it off guard.

  “Miles!” I hoped he could hear my muffled words. “Burn it again!”

  Knotted teeth clamped down on my right ankle and pain blazed up my leg. A change from the pain that generally shot downward from the poor femur held together by rods, courtesy of a car accident in my wild youth. The teeth ground down harder, trying to tear through the protection of my m
otorcycle boots’ leather.

  Limp with exhaustion, I braced myself for my ankle bone to snap, but the grinding stopped.

  I sniffed. Smoke. I slammed my magic into the yarn’s. Miles had provided enough of a distraction for me to once more hook into it. I could have kissed him. I ripped the magic free, snagged it into my red forked branches, and let those gorgeous white clusters bloom.

  The rope disappeared, dumping Miles and me onto the ground. I swore as my ankle jostled against the concrete.

  A thunderous crash boomed from the top of the stairs and I flinched, but it was just Arkady, who’d smashed the door open.

  I blinked against the brightness of the lights switching on, and then Arkady jumped the stairs two at a time, his face wild. “I was kidding,” he babbled. “I wouldn’t have sent you down alone—I couldn’t break the door down.”

  Miles lay on his back, winded, with a sooty streak on one cheek, but at Arkady’s agitated manner, he sat up. “Nothing we couldn’t handle. Right?”

  “Right.” I flexed my ankle, getting a sharp twinge, and hissed. “Badly bruised, but not broken.”

  Arkady nodded tightly, but he placed both hands on Miles’ shoulder as if to assure himself of his well-being. Miles leaned into his touch, which apparently triggered their recollection that they were pissed off at each other, because they jerked apart.

  Miles laughed, a deep belly guffaw.

  “Don’t snap on us now, Berenbaum,” I said.

  “You still worried about a lack of a ward?” he said.

  I laughed, then winced because somehow even that hurt my ankle. “Yes, because Knotface only was rigged for down here.”

  “That sounds interesting.” Arkady slid an arm underneath mine to help me up.

  “It was something, all right.” I leaned on him, shaking my head when he tried to steer us upstairs. “There’s one more door down here and after a welcome like that, I want to know what’s behind it.”

  Miles pushed to his feet and carefully opened the door, only to be hit with a chorus of howls and the stench of urine.

  “What the—” His hand flew up to cover his nose and mouth.

  A quick glance to the walls revealed the room was covered in soundproofing. The sole object in it was a crate intended to house a large dog, but instead of one animal, five puppies of various breeds were crammed inside, crying piteously.