Hotter Than Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Mystery (Preternatural Affairs Book 3) Read online

  CONTENTS

  Hotter Than Helltown

  Copyright

  About

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Dear Reader

  HOTTER

  THAN

  HELLTOWN

  A Preternatural Affairs Novel

  SM REINE

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  This book is sold DRM-free so that it can be enjoyed in any way the reader sees fit. Please keep all links and attributions intact when sharing. All rights reserved.

  Copyright © SM Reine 2014

  Published by Red Iris Books

  1180 Selmi Drive, Suite 102

  Reno, NV 89512

  SERIES BY SM REINE

  The Descent Series

  The Ascension Series

  Seasons of the Moon

  The Cain Chronicles

  Preternatural Affairs

  Tarot Witches

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  About Hotter Than Helltown

  A killer is mutilating bodies in Los Angeles. Agent Cèsar Hawke is on the case, but the murderer is ahead of him—way ahead of him.

  Wiping the memories of the dead so that the team’s necrocognitive can’t talk to them? Done. Preventing magical reconstruction of the crime scenes? Oh yeah. And the murders keep getting more brutal while Cèsar struggles to catch up.

  The best way to heat up a cold case is to go to Helltown, where Los Angeles’s most powerful evil hides out, but even those demons are afraid of the murderer. Their fear adds one more question to the growing pile of unknowns:

  What kind of bad guy is too hot for Helltown?

  CHAPTER ONE

  YOU WANT TO TALK annoyances? Let’s talk annoyances.

  When creatine powder leaves clumps at the bottom of my daily protein shake, that’s a minor annoyance.

  My neighbors having sex on the other side of paper-thin walls at all hours of the night, every night, keeping me awake and reminding me of my own nonexistent sex life? Significant annoyance.

  Having to spend three months living at a Motel 6 in New Mexico, waiting for a witch to slip up so I can arrest him? Huge annoyance.

  And yet I would take any one of those annoyances over dealing with crank calls at work. Fake reports of preternatural interference spawn paperwork. Lots of paperwork. They require money from our pathetic budget to organize an investigation. For that matter, they require investigators like me—trained witches who know how to hunt down other witches.

  All for nothing.

  Responding to crank calls is easily my least favorite part of the job with the Office of Preternatural Affairs.

  The worst part is that the callers always seem to know what kind of report is going to end up wasting the most time and money. The OPA’s budget is always written in blazing red numbers, so we ignore most tips until we have a slow week, which could be a year later, could be never.

  But if someone reports a dead body, we have to go look for it every goddamn time.

  Even when it’s an obscene hour of the morning and I’m not supposed to be at work, getting tipped off about a dead body means putting on my monkey suit, driving into the office to grab the file, and then heading to the alleged scene to search for a victim that doesn’t exist. And then there’s all the paperwork in triplicate that comes after that.

  Guess what I was doing on my Saturday morning.

  Hint: It didn’t involve sitting around on my couch with a hand down my pants while I reread the Wheel of Time series yet again.

  “On the bright side, we can get comped for the donuts,” said Suzy Takeuchi as she opened the driver’s side door of our SUV. She flicked a Dunkin Donuts receipt at me. I had to drop my folder to catch it. “Hang on to that. I expect to get paid back.”

  I skimmed her purchases. “Two dozen donuts?” She was a tiny woman, like about as big as my bicep. I couldn’t imagine her fitting one of those pastries in her face, much less twenty-four of them.

  “They’re not all for me.” She pushed a maple bar into her mouth until her cheeks bulged like a hamster wearing a suit and tie.

  Not that eating two dozen donuts would have hurt Suzy. She was a gorgeous woman with a waspish waist that our standard-issue suits couldn’t conceal. Great legs, too. If she’d put on a few more pounds, she probably would have just improved her already mind-blowing curves. I loved a woman with curves.

  Of course, Suzy’s curves are none of my business, and she’d knee me in the balls if she knew I was thinking about her. At our office, she’s “one of the guys” and happy to prove it—either with her sharp wit or her sharp, bony joints slammed into delicate places.

  With Suzy, it was always safer to keep my thoughts to myself.

  She offered the donut boxes to me. I set aside the manual I’d been reading—our organization’s requirements for witches about to become aspides—and lifted the lid on the top one.

  The donuts smelled better than orgasms and looked like a month’s work at the gym begging to get blown in thirty seconds.

  There was a raspberry-filled one in the corner. My favorite.

  Suzy slapped my hand when I reached for it.

  “Not for you,” she said around a mouthful of maple bar, spraying me with sugar. “Put them in the back seat if you don’t have any self-control.”

  She shifted the SUV into gear and followed the mechanical GPS voice’s instructions to get back onto the road. We weren’t far from the scene of the supposed crime now. We just had to drive a few miles into endless suburbia, find 7245 Cherry Tree Lane, and talk to the resident to make sure there was nobody dead inside. Easy.

  I stuck the boxes on the floor behind me. “Why’d you buy two dozen donuts if you’re not eating them or sharing?”

  “I didn’t say I’m not sharing them. I’m just not sharing them with you.”

  “Love you too,” I muttered, opening the case file to review it one more time.

  We had received the anonymous tip that morning. The woman had claimed to hear a disturbance at 7245 Cherry Tree Lane around three in the morning, and said she “just knew” that it was a murder.

  When she’d been asked how she “knew,” she’d changed her story, claiming that she’d seen a body through the window. She also said that it had definitely been a murder by a demon, although she mysteriously didn’t know what kind.

  And then she’d hung up.

  We’d gotten three other tips like that in the past month. Always on the weekend, always vague, always resulting in a very grumpy Agent Suzy Takeuchi on the scene. She’d been on call the entire month, so every single one had landed on her desk.

  This one was obviously fake, too, but Suzy
had asked me to suffer with her this time. I didn’t have to go. I wasn’t on call. But I’m useless against a woman asking for my help, even at four in the morning on a Saturday, and Suzy knows it.

  Luckily, crank calls aren’t very common. When you work for a secret government agency that doesn’t officially exist, your phone number doesn’t get publicized, either.

  When it does happen, it’s usually bored, sex-drunk incubi who want to giggle over all our black SUVs rolling out to the middle of nowhere. Thanks, guys. Real funny.

  Man, those donuts smelled good.

  “They’re an investment,” Suzy said, finally swallowing the rest of her sugar-bombed breakfast. “You don’t like waking up early on Saturdays, do you?”

  “I love waking up early on Saturdays. I love having a whole long weekend to myself so I can brew potions and lift weights and not wear these stupid black suits.” And read The Great Hunt again. I hated being interrupted at the good part.

  “But you don’t love going into work on Saturdays. Nobody loves going in to work on Saturdays. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone else had to do that?”

  “Someone usually does,” I muttered. I’d been on call the month before Suzy and I hadn’t had to deal with any pranksters.

  “The donuts are for dispatch,” Suzy said. “Next weekend, when some asshole calls in a dud, dispatch is going to look at who’s on call. They’re going to see my name on top with Aniruddha as my secondary if they can’t reach me. And then they’re going to say, ‘What, wake up Suzy? That nice agent who brought us frosted donuts? No, I’m going to call the other guy.’”

  “Or they’re going to say, ‘Wow, we should wake up Suzy, she brings us donuts on the early mornings,’” I said. “And then, when you return without donuts, they’ll realize you were making empty gestures in a cold attempt to toy with their emotions.”

  She shot me a sideways look. “That’s not how it works.”

  “You’ll find out next weekend, won’t you?”

  The neighborhood slowly turned from gas stations and convenience stores into houses. A few had barred windows, but this was still a pretty nice part of town. No graffiti on the signs, cars that were less than ten years old. Not somewhere I’d expect a murder to happen.

  According to the GPS, Cherry Tree Lane was still a few miles away. I reopened the OPA witch’s manual to take another shot at reading an incredibly boring chapter on herbal quality regulations.

  I didn’t care about herbal quality regulations. I didn’t care about the spells that aspides needed to know, either. An aspis was a witch bound to a kopis—a demon hunter—to act as his magical shield, protecting him from the mental powers of demons and strengthening him in battle. I’d never planned on becoming such a thing. That wasn’t my life. I was a former detective, not a fighter.

  But then I had gotten into trouble with the OPA. The only way to get out of it had been to agree to become Director Fritz Friederling’s aspis.

  Now I was taking the aspis approval test in a couple of days, and I needed to know everything in this stupid, boring manual if I wanted to keep my job. Possibly my life. With the OPA, it was hard to tell how serious they were about any given situation.

  Secret government organizations are exempt from a lot of labor laws. You know, like the ones that say, “Don’t kill your employees for insubordination.”

  I’d been struggling to study for weeks, but skimming the manual made me feel like I was going to pass out. Great sleep aid. I wished I’d thought to bring energy potions with me when I’d met Suzy that morning.

  “You know, I’m pretty sure Malati in dispatch has a crush on me,” I said, putting my finger on the page so I wouldn’t lose my spot.

  “Her and every administrative assistant in the department,” Suzy said, rolling her eyes.

  “I could talk to her about your position on the on-call list…if only I weren’t so hungry.”

  “Don’t be such a baby.”

  “Don’t be stingy with the Dunkin,” I said.

  “Fine. Eat one. It’ll go straight to your ass.”

  “You’ll be the first to notice, I bet.” I grinned at Suzy as I reached back for a jelly-filled donut. I couldn’t quite reach with my seatbelt on—it had locked into place. I untethered myself and reached again.

  She slammed on the brakes.

  My shoulder smacked into the dashboard, sending the case file and manual flying. “Hey!”

  Suzy gave me a look of wide-eyed innocence. “Oops. I almost missed the house. We’re here!”

  Muttering to myself, I scooped up the papers, opened my door, and tossed the folder onto my empty seat. I was pretty sure my shoulder was going to bruise.

  Cherry Tree Lane was even nicer than the rest of the neighborhood. We’re talking the kind of lawns that look like they’re maintained by gardeners, not neighborhood kids. There wasn’t a barred window in sight.

  The residents looked to be fairly old: no sign of toys scattered across the driveways, lots of tacky lawn angels among the begonias, ramps for the disabled built up to the patios.

  “Quiet here,” Suzy remarked, checking her gun as she rounded the car to my side. She used to carry a Glock, but she’d switched to a Beretta after her last sidearm ended up getting her falsely accused of murder. Guess she’d held a grudge against the gun.

  “Bet the squealing tires woke up all the nice old people when you hit the brakes,” I said.

  “Poor fuckers, getting disturbed when they try to sleep in on a Saturday.” She tossed a slender leather wallet at me. “You left this on your desk.”

  It was a fake FBI badge that looked as good as the real thing. Probably made by the same vendor. The OPA and the FBI are both government organizations, after all.

  I bet FBI agents don’t have to worry about their bosses killing them if they fail to pass a certification test, though.

  The badge had my name, Cèsar Hawke, and it said I was a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Not sure what made their agents so special, but there you go. I grimaced at the bad picture and jammed it in my pocket. “I’ll let you talk to the homeowner,” I said. “Go ahead, ring the doorbell. Wake up the poor old people.”

  Suzy hopped up the stairs. “My pleasure.” I hung behind her as she pushed the button, keeping an eye on the street surrounding us.

  It felt like someone was watching us even though the street was empty. It was a nice morning, already about sixty degrees, with bright blue skies. If there were old people in the neighborhood, it was already well past time for front yard puttering.

  But the street was silent, the curtains were all drawn, and it still felt like someone was watching.

  “Been studying for your test?” Suzy asked as we waited. She must have noticed me reading the manual.

  “Unfortunately,” I said.

  “But you’ve already memorized it all, right? Your test is on Tuesday.”

  I’d been trying to memorize it, but I hadn’t even gotten through the whole thing. A million-page epic fantasy series was easier to read for the seventh time than the hundred pages of The Guidelines for Union-Affiliated Aspides.

  “The test will be a breeze.” I didn’t look at her as I said it.

  Suzy hit the doorbell again. “You’re so full of shit.”

  “How hard can the test be? I’ve already been a witch my whole life. I should already know everything I need to be an aspis.”

  Suzy snorted. “Keep telling yourself that. Where are these assholes?” She pounded on the door. Considering her fist was about a quarter the size of mine, she sure could make a ruckus. It should have been loud enough to wake up everyone within a three-block radius.

  Even so, nobody poked their heads out of their houses to see what was going on. The street was still totally quiet.

  My sense of unease was growing, and it had nothing to do with pre-test nerves.

  “Have I mentioned that crank calls are my least favorite part of the job?” I asked, trying to peer through the curtai
ns by the front door. They were printed with a pattern of ugly kittens and impossible to see through. “Bet this tip sent us to an abandoned house.”

  Suzy just grunted in agreement.

  Abandoned house or not, someone should have been trying to figure out what an SUV with government plates was doing on the street by now.

  “See if you can find an open window,” Suzy said. “I’ll verify the address with dispatch.”

  I stepped around the rose bushes and spotted one of those little bathroom windows high on the wall. Those never had curtains. Perfect for looking into the house.

  Bracing my foot against the garden fence, I lifted myself up to peer down at the bathroom.

  It looked a heck of a lot like my Abuelita’s old bathroom. Floral print everything. Safety bars by the toilet and shower. Extra TP rolls kept on a wooden dowel decorated with hand-painted cats.

  The bathroom door was open so that I could see into the hallway beyond. The carpet was black.

  My stomach twisted. I dropped into the bushes again to catch my breath. It was suddenly a lot harder to breathe.

  Old people didn’t have black carpet.

  Then I lifted myself up again for a second look, wedging my fingers in the window’s crack so that I could force it open. The change in air pressure wafted the scents of the house out at me—tobacco, mothball, and pennies.

  Lots of pennies.

  The carpet definitely wasn’t black. It was wet.

  I tromped through the bushes, opened the side gate, and let myself into the back yard.

  There was an open window behind the homeowner’s green trashcan, giving me a perfect view of the hallway beyond the bathroom. I didn’t have to guess at what could have left the carpet soaking wet now. I could see everything perfectly.

  The bloody footprints. The smeared handprints on the wall. The mutilated body in the kitchen.

  Okay. So I take it back.

  Responding to crank calls is my second least favorite part of the job.