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

  CHAPTER TWO

  YOU AND I LIVE in totally different worlds and you don’t even know it.

  There’s the world that everyone sees—the world that everyone considers to be real. That’s the world that you live in. It’s boring and mundane. Magic doesn’t exist. The greatest dangers are having a heart attack after eating too many Big Macs or forgetting your wallet on the bus.

  The world I live in? It’s a lot more dangerous.

  Unfortunately, it’s also real. And just because you don’t see what’s happening in my world doesn’t mean that it can’t kill you.

  Everybody is caught in a hidden war between the forces of good and evil. Even you. And for now, evil is winning. It lurks in the dark corners of hospitals, preying on the weak. It owns businesses in your hometown and skips out on state taxes. Evil watches you through your window as you prepare to sleep in perceived safety.

  My job is making sure you never need to know that this kind of evil exists.

  I’m Agent Cèsar Hawke. I used to be a private investigator, but these days, I roll with the Office of Preternatural Affairs—also known as the OPA. We handle everything magical or not-human that makes life dangerous for ordinary folks.

  That means bad witches most of the time. Sometimes that means demons. Yeah, like the things that come from Hell.

  It used to be that I only handled witches with the Magical Violations Department. That’s my specialty. But Suzy and I got enlisted in a special team led by Director Fritz Friederling, my future kopis, and now we investigate internal affairs. We investigate everything else, too.

  If trouble doesn’t fit into one of the usual boxes, we’re on top of it.

  We’re the men in black, armed with magical potions, pentacles, and handguns. Conspiracy theorists hate us. Nobody else knows we exist.

  That’s the way we like it, and we plan to keep it that way.

  Pretty amazing how quickly the somnolent little neighborhood came to life once all of the OPA homicide investigators showed up.

  We’d cordoned off the yard with yellow tape so that the gawkers couldn’t interfere. And there sure were a lot of gawkers from the neighboring houses, all of them as old as I suspected. Made me uncomfortable to think that they were all looking at me, seeing my face. I preferred being a spook.

  Fortunately, they wouldn’t remember anything once they signed our enchanted witness statements. Not my face, not the murder, and none of our staff or equipment.

  That touch of magic was almost as impressive as how quickly Suzy’s donuts had vanished.

  I lifted the lid to find that they were all gone, including the glazed one with the raspberry filling that I’d been eyeballing. There was nothing left but crumbs and a few stray sprinkles.

  “Really?” I muttered, shooting suspicious glances at the rest of the staff on site.

  The forensics team had shown up in black vans with government plates to match our black SUVs. We’d also gotten a Union unit on site in case there was anything dangerous in the house. They’re like the military wing of the OPA, and they get involved anytime someone needs to be shot at.

  We’d quickly discovered that nothing was lurking in 7245 Cherry Tree Lane, though. Now the whole Union unit was milling around in the front yard, smoking cigarettes, violating regulations left and right.

  I was willing to bet one of those assholes ate my donut.

  To be fair, after seeing all that blood, I wasn’t sure I’d have been able to stomach the red-colored jelly anyway.

  “Anything left?”

  I turned to see Harding, the unit’s witch, hovering hopefully behind me. He was a skinny black guy with a goatee and white tattoos encircling his wrists.

  “Only the tragic scent of a donut graveyard and deep regrets,” I said, stepping aside so that he could peer into the back of the SUV, where Suzy had set out the Dunkin boxes.

  “Darn,” Harding said. “I never get to the good snacks in time.”

  Maybe the gluttons had been the forensics team after all.

  “Sorry, man.” I gave him a sideways look. “You’re with the Union. You deal with demon murders all the time, right?”

  “Sure.” He wetted a finger with his tongue, stuck it in the corner of the box, and then sucked the sugar off of his skin.

  “Any guesses what breed of nasty killed this guy?”

  “Could be anything. This is Los Angeles, after all. Helltown’s only fifteen miles that way.” Harding flapped a hand vaguely toward the south. “I’d bet our killer is already gone and we’ll never figure out what did it or why. Big damn waste of time.”

  With another longing gaze at the empty donut box, he ambled back to his team.

  Harding approached one of the men smoking on the lawn. The two of them were indistinguishable from the others in the unit. Black polo shirts, black utility pants, black combat boots. But something about the way they moved was different. Like they were two hands from the same body.

  I was willing to bet anything that those guys were bound as kopis and aspis. The Union made sure to attach a witch to every demon hunter right after training; kopides were way too vulnerable to demon powers without a magical bodyguard.

  The OPA was different. We mostly employed witches, and few of us were assigned to kopides.

  But I was going to have to become the same kind of bodyguard as Harding in just a few days. It would be a permanent relationship, seeing as how the bond was unbreakable.

  I’d be like that with Director Friederling once we were bound: two halves of a whole.

  The idea was seriously creepy.

  “You done moping around yet?” Suzy called to me from the doorway. She was holding half of an apple fritter in one bare hand. The other hand was gloved in blue and stained with blood. Not only had she gotten one of the last donuts, but the crime scene hadn’t made her lose her appetite. I wasn’t sure if I admired or hated her.

  “I’m not moping,” I said, stepping around the crime scene photographer as he emerged from the house.

  “Fine. Done being a big sissy about blood yet?”

  Giving me shit was Suzy’s hobby. Usually, it was kind of funny. Today, I was not amused. Someone had died in that house just a few hours earlier. They’d been murdered messily. Painfully. And the killer was still out there.

  Yeah, I definitely was not in the mood for bullshit.

  “What’s your problem?” I snapped.

  “Put on gloves and I’ll show you.” She stuck the rest of the fritter in her mouth and headed back inside.

  They’d set a box of rubber gloves and plastic shoe covers on the table just inside the front door. I plucked two latex-free gloves out of the box so that I could handle the resident’s mutilated cadaver.

  I didn’t put on the shoe covers.

  It’s never a good sign when they want you to don plastic booties for a crime scene. That means there’s a good chance you’ll ruin your shoes if you don’t. And that means sloshing around in blood and whatever else the victim might have spilled.

  Suzy was right about one thing. I don’t like blood. Don’t have to be a sissy to dislike blood, okay? But the sight of the booties alone was making my stomach twist.

  I went in without them.

  First thing I noticed was that the clock in the entryway had stopped at three thirty-seven that morning. It was one of those big round clocks with a different picture at each hour, and in this particular case, it pictured various kitten breeds. It didn’t have a power cord, so its batteries must have died.

  I stepped into the living room. The clock on the side table had stopped at three thirty-seven, too.

  “Did you notice the clocks?” I asked Suzy.

  She snapped a second glove onto her bare hand. “Yeah. Apparently the power got knocked out for all the houses in about a half-mile radius.”

  “These clocks are running on batteries.”

  “Demons.” Suzy shrugged, like that was explanation enough.

  The living room was trashed and the forensi
cs team worked at tagging everything: the shattered TV, the couch vomiting its upholstered guts from a slash in the back, a dent in the drywall, a curtain that had been ripped down, the spilled ash tray.

  I stood back to study it, trying to form a timeline of the struggle in my mind.

  Entry to the house hadn’t been forced, so the fight hadn’t started near the front door.

  It had started near the TV.

  The resident had been surprised from behind. He’d been knocked into the entertainment system—that dent in the LCD panel was probably from his head—and then he’d pulled the TV down on top of him when he fell. But he’d recovered fast. He’d gotten out from under the mess to fight back.

  The attacking demon had had a knife, though, and the victim had been unarmed.

  So he’d tried to run. He’d jumped over the couch—hence the slash in the leather—smeared blood on the walls in the hallway, and made it all the way to the kitchen before succumbing.

  That’s where Suzy was waiting for me now, along with a puddle of blood warping the linoleum.

  “Meet our victim,” she said.

  She was crouching beside the body I’d glimpsed through the window. He’d bled out through a gash severing the arteries in his throat, giving him that stereotypical second grin.

  His face was bloody from the nose down—mostly because his nose and lips had been cut off—but his closed eyes were clear. It took me a second to get past the hamburger on the bottom half of his face to realize that this wasn’t an old man. No crow’s feet, no bags under the eyes, no wrinkled forehead.

  “This doesn’t look like the guy who should live here,” I said.

  “That’s because he didn’t.” Suzy flipped his wallet open. “Jay Brandon. Thirty-three years old, lives all the way out of town in Lone Pine. Seems he was visiting his mom.”

  “Where’s his mom?”

  “Luckily for her, not here. We haven’t found her yet.”

  I took a second look at Jay Brandon, trying to see past the blood. Trying not to think of him as a human being who had just been alive hours earlier. Someone who had hobbies, friends, and a job. I wondered if he’d ever read the Wheel of Time series and then tried not to think about that, either.

  He was a victim. He was my job.

  Just another case.

  The nose had been cut off cleanly. Sharp knife. Same knife that had gutted the sofa and cut his throat open. Same knife that had removed his lips.

  His lips. Jesus.

  “Why are his teeth…?” I couldn’t finish the sentence. It looked like someone had tried to punch them into dust.

  “I don’t think it was because he was struggling,” Suzy said, digging her fingers into his mouth and pulling the jaw down. “It seems to have been part of the mutilation. See this?”

  I didn’t see it. The kitchen was hot, the walls were close, and everything seemed to be spinning.

  She kept talking. “The missing teeth are in his mouth, so this was done while he was lying here. But this isn’t where he was killed. That was done in the hallway.”

  “The hallway?”

  “Hung him from a rafter by his feet while cutting his throat. That’s how most of the blood ended up all over there…” Suzy waved at the blood-soaked carpet. “And then in here, once the perpetrator dragged him into the kitchen. Probably after he was dead.”

  He’d been bled out like a pig. A kosher pig.

  “You okay?” asked one of the forensic guys who had been taking a sample of blood from the counter. “You don’t look good, Agent Hawke.”

  “I think he’s going to yark.” That was from Janet, the vulture of a woman who led the forensics team. She had a smear of chocolate on her bottom lip. Definitely one of the ones who had eaten the donuts. But now that chocolate glaze looked like blood to me.

  This was probably Suzy’s cue to jump in and help tease me, so I didn’t look at her. I tried to look at the body, focus on the job, think of him as just part of the case.

  Suzy still had her fingers in his mouth. I glimpsed the white shine of shattered teeth in the back of his throat.

  And that was when I finally lost it.

  I didn’t throw up. Okay? I’m bad, but I’m not that bad.

  I did, however, spend about two minutes hovering over a toilet with a padded pink seat while the donuts I didn’t eat strongly contemplated visiting the porcelain gods. Probably a good thing I’d only managed to get one poultice in my gut before leaving the apartment that morning.

  Jesus, the bathroom smelled like old people. Foot creams and shit. That didn’t help.

  What did help was the idea of the forensics team in the kitchen just down the hall, waiting to hear if I barfed on a crime scene. They’d never let me hear the end of it if I did.

  So I swallowed down the bile, splashed some water on my face, and loosened my tie.

  No vomiting.

  I’d been in such a hurry to get to the bathroom without splashing in blood-drenched carpet that I hadn’t remembered to close the door. Behind my reflection, I could see Suzy leaning against the doorway, arms folded and eyebrows lifted.

  “Go ahead,” I said, sipping water out of the palm of my ungloved hand. “Say it. I know you want to.” I splashed the rest of the water on my hair. It wasn’t that it was an unusually hot day for Los Angeles, especially not this early in the morning, but panic messes with a guy.

  Suzy rolled her eyes. “Come here, Hawke.” She straightened my tie and tightened it once more. “You good?”

  “I told Fritz that I don’t do bodies when he offered me the job,” I said.

  “Yeah. I remember that.”

  “Nothing’s changed. I still don’t do bodies. Missing persons, sure. Witches abusing power, heck yeah. Demons supplying infernal bongs to college students—I’d do that again. It was hilarious. But murders? I draw the line at murders.”

  “I know,” Suzy said.

  She wasn’t giving me a hard time. I wondered if she was sick.

  “Are you good?” I asked.

  “This guy wasn’t just killed. He was mutilated.” She said it matter-of-factly. Suzy wasn’t bothered by dead guys at all. “Director Friederling called to tell me we’ve been assigned to this case, but there might be someone outside the organization who could find answers a hell of a lot faster. Save us some work, you know. And help us catch the killer before he kills again.”

  I looked at her blankly. “Like…the LAPD?”

  “Like…some kind of consultant.” Suzy gave me an expectant look.

  “Oh,” I said. “You mean her.” I didn’t say her name, not when we had a house filled with personnel who weren’t supposed to know that she existed.

  “That won’t be a problem, will it?”

  “Kind of. I haven’t really spoken to her since we got back from Reno. I’ve been busy.”

  “Oh yeah?” That information seemed to perk Suzy up for some reason.

  “I don’t even know where to find her.”

  “Guess it’s time to look her up again. You’ll do it, right? You don’t like bodies, I don’t like necrocognitive witches.”

  Could I find Isobel Stonecrow? Hell yes I could. I’d found her before, I could do it again. “I’m on it,” I said.

  “Great. Get out of here. Track her down. I’ll have the body taken to the morgue, and we can just ask Jay Brandon who killed him.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  YOU’D THINK THAT FINDING one of our consultants should be pretty trivial. I’d worked two cases with Isobel Stonecrow now, taken her on a road trip with my team to Reno, and I’d even taught her a thing or two about magic.

  We were kinda coworkers. I hoped that we were also friends. It should have been as easy as picking up a phone and making a call.

  But Isobel didn’t do well with phone numbers. Or being tracked, for that matter.

  Which meant that finding her always required a little investigation of its own.

  “Working overtime?” Aniruddha asked, stopping besid
e my desk. His coffee mug said “Don’t Look at Me, I Just Cast the Magic” and was roughly the size of a bathtub. And that was his weekend cup. His mug was more like an Olympic pool during the week.

  Talk about a guy who can’t get enough of work.

  I minimized the window I’d been looking at and swiveled in my chair to face him. “Some cases just don’t have the courtesy to stick to office hours.”

  “Were you looking at Craigslist?”

  “No,” I said, by which I meant, Yes, now go away.

  His lips curled into a smile. “I heard you tossed your cookies all over a dead body today.”

  It had only been three hours since I left the Brandon house and rumors were already getting around. Again, on a Saturday. It seemed like the need to get a life was growing pretty desperate around the OPA offices.

  “No idea where you heard that,” I said. “Hey, are you working on the crank calls?”

  “Agent Gonzales was doing some research on that,” Aniruddha said.

  “Then what are you doing here on a Saturday?”

  He shot me a mind-your-business look over the rim of his coffee tub. His expression was less than intimidating with the broomstick-riding cartoon witch painted under the snarky text. “Well, look at the time. Seems I have to get to a phone meeting.” He hadn’t even checked his watch.

  But hey, Aniruddha was gone, and I opened Craigslist again feeling just a few degrees more dispirited.

  I’d been using the website to keep tabs on Isobel over the past few weeks, even though we weren’t talking. She never posted her ads in the same section twice. I’d found her posting in the farm and livestock section once, which was just about the last place I’d ever think to look for a necrocognitive.

  She wasn’t in the farm section today, or community services, or anywhere else on the Los Angeles site. I actually found her posting on the San Francisco boards this time. In the women-for-men personals section.

  “Home of diseased escorts and death witches,” I muttered.

  Her advertisement just said, “Lost a beloved family member or friend? Have unfinished business? Call me to find peace.” And then a phone number I didn’t recognize. No other contact information.