Deadly Wrong Read online

  Hope snorted. “Good for them.” Assholes.

  They deposited Vena in an empty cabin. Hope took her roommate’s overshirt and shoes off and hung them in the bathroom. Blond Guy watched from the doorway with obvious amusement.

  There was some vomit on Hope’s dress, too. She scrubbed it off using towels that were monogrammed “FF” on the corner.

  “You’re not getting lucky with her tonight,” Hope said, glaring at Blond Guy. Her suspiciousness hadn’t faded at how helpful he was. “She’s unconscious. Can’t consent. Don’t even think about it.”

  “I don’t want to. I like my women awake and responsive.”

  “The fact you feel like you have to specify that is creepy.” She rolled Vena onto her side so that she wouldn’t choke if she barfed in her sleep. “You still haven’t told me who you are, by the way.” Hope tried to brush past him to leave the room, but his arm barred her exit.

  “I’m your future husband. We’re going to get married someday.” He stroked his fingers over the back of her hand. “I think the ring will be your graduation present when you leave law school.”

  Everything about that statement was ridiculously insulting. Hope wasn’t sure if she should laugh at him or slap him.

  She decided to slap him.

  He didn’t move an inch, didn’t even flinch.

  But he lifted a hand to his cheek as if surprised that she’d reacted with anything but swooning agreement. “You really don’t know who I am, do you?”

  “You’re an asshole. Don’t talk to me.”

  Someone started screaming.

  The instant change in the attitude of Hope’s would-be suitor was astounding. He went rigid and alert.

  There was also suddenly a knife in his right hand.

  Horror swept over Hope. She leaped away from him. “Don’t hurt me!”

  He let her go—didn’t even try to attack. He raced down the hallway in the opposite direction.

  Blond Guy kicked down one of the other cabin doors and jumped inside.

  Hope’s immediate instinct was to run upstairs to call the police. But that was a stupid urge, she knew. They were in international waters at that point. The cops couldn’t do anything.

  She was trapped on a yacht with a stabby creep and people were screaming.

  “I should have stayed home to study,” she told nobody in particular.

  Hope edged past the open door that Blond Guy had kicked in. When she saw what was happening in the cabin, she stopped.

  Vena’s partner in terrible dancing, Tracy, was sprawled across the bed.

  And Tracy was being eaten.

  Not in the good way.

  The pale-skinned bartender was crouched over her with his fingers buried in her chest. There was no incision, no wound; he had simply thrust his fingers into the bone knuckle-deep.

  His head was thrown back in ecstasy as he devoured her in the way that only demons could. Because that was what he must have been: a demon. Probably an incubus, judging by the raging erection dribbling ichor onto Tracy’s chest.

  Hope’s dad had warned her about all the common demon breeds a death witch might be unlucky enough to stumble across, including incubi. She hadn’t encountered them before, but he wasn’t hard to identify.

  While Tracy was quickly spiraling toward death, Blond Guy was fighting with another pair of incubi. He moved so fast that she could barely track him.

  Glass shattered, knuckles pounded against bone, blood sprayed.

  Kopis. That was what he had to be—and it explained why he’d recognized Hope as a witch. Kopides were demon hunters. Men who were born with a natural propensity for slaughtering evil. They had been part of her early education, just like incubi and nightmares and mara.

  Somehow, Hope had ended up on a yacht with a goddamn demon hunter and incubi.

  The kopis in question looked much too busy to save Tracy. Hope’s eyes fell on the lamp beside the bed. It was bolted down, like everything else on the yacht. It couldn’t work as much of a weapon.

  There was a power cord on the back, though.

  Hope swallowed down her fear, edging into the room silently. The incubi that was attacking Tracy was still wrapped up in his little world of dreams, dragging her through hell and back again, just for fun. He didn’t notice that she was approaching him.

  She always carried a pocketknife on her. It was a useful tool to have—a little two-inch blade sharp enough to open packages, cut through zip ties, that kind of thing.

  That night, it would be a murder weapon.

  She sliced the cord open near the base of the lamp, fraying the wiring. It sparked at the touch of metal. Hope made sure to keep her fingers on the wooden part of the knife.

  Then she jammed the cord into the bared knee of the incubus eating Tracy.

  Electricity leaped between the cable and his flesh. The lights in the cabin dimmed.

  His eyes flew open, lips parting with silent shock. Sparks danced between his teeth. The shadow of his skeleton flashed through his pale skin as he jerked his hands out of Tracy’s chest and fell backwards.

  The lamp cord was too short to chase him with it. Hope tossed it aside so it wouldn’t accidentally electrocute anyone else.

  “What the fuck?” the bartender growled. He was recovering fast. Too bad—the voltage hadn’t been high enough to cause real damage.

  Electricity was one of the only things that could really hurt demons like him, or so Hope’s family had told her. But she brandished her tiny blade anyway. Her heart was pounding with the terror of facing a demon—an actual demon.

  “Conscious consent, asshole,” Hope said. Her voice only quavered a little. “Is it that hard?”

  “It is for demons,” said Blond Guy, who was holding another incubus’s head in one hand, fingers tangled in his hair. He had decapitated the thing.

  The bartender took one look at his dead friends and bolted out the door.

  Blond Guy followed. So did Hope.

  “What’s going on here?” she asked Blond Guy, skidding into the hallway a few inches behind him.

  “This group of incubi has been contracting themselves out as wait staff for parties and killing people once they fall asleep,” the kopis said. He was breathless but calm. Decapitating incubi was no big deal for him, apparently. “I lured them here so I could kill them first.”

  They chased the bartender outside. Hope reached the deck in time to see the incubus hurl himself over the railing and into the ocean. Either he was a great swimmer, or drowning was a slightly better alternative to dealing with the kopis on the yacht.

  “You lured them here? What did you say your name is?” Hope asked when she finally remembered how to speak.

  He gave her the faintest smirk as he approached the railing, stripping off his jacket and shirt, exposing an admittedly impressive set of abdominal muscles. “Fritz.”

  “Fritz what?”

  “Friederling,” he said, and he jumped over the railing into the ocean.

  Isobel woke up in a graveyard. Not on a yacht. She was curled up on her side in the grass with dew clinging to her skin and a tombstone topped by a crucified Jesus a few feet away.

  “You can’t sleep here.”

  A female officer stood over Isobel—a pleasantly round-faced woman who looked more sympathetic than annoyed. Probably because Isobel had remembered to change into normal street clothes before falling asleep. The police didn’t react quite as kindly to a half-naked woman in animal skins.

  Isobel sat up, rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. She immediately checked her pinky finger. It was still rotting. That hadn’t been a nightmare.

  “Are you okay? Do you need a ride to a shelter?” the officer asked gently.

  “No, that’s all right. Thank you.” Isobel stood and dusted herself off.

  “It’s not safe to spend your nights somewhere like this.”

  “I fell asleep grieving.” Not a lie. Isobel was grieving herself, the body she was losing, the contract she never shoul
d have signed. “I won’t do it again.”

  The officer followed her to the gates. She watched until Isobel got into her RV and drove away.

  Isobel only went to the next city park before stopping again. She still needed to cash Mrs. Hartley’s check at the bank and probably shouldn’t walk into civilization covered in the soil of Vance Hartley’s grave.

  She showered as carefully as she could, trying to wash off the dirt without also washing off any other parts of her body. As Isobel bathed, she drifted back on her newfound memory of meeting Fritz on the Friederling X yacht.

  That had been the first time that Isobel had rejected Fritz’s marriage proposal. It was a fun memory. Definitely one of the better things she was recalling from Hope Jimenez’s life now that the magic of Ander’s contract was starting to fade.

  The second rejection had been four years after she died—after she lost all her memories of Hope Jimenez and became Isobel Stonecrow.

  Isobel had moved to California when initially fleeing Ander. She’d picked the location solely because it was as far as she could get from him without sneaking into another country. The fact that Fritz had been working in Los Angeles was only a minor complication. She’d been afraid of him at first, worried that the kopis who had shattered Ander’s business would expect repayment, but he hadn’t bothered her for a long time. She’d had plenty of time to establish her own business and build a life in Los Angeles.

  When he finally asked for repayment, it had been with the completely reasonable request to speak with his dead grandfather.

  Easy job. Easy money.

  Somehow, easy quickly turned into complicated, and then two months of dating. If anyone could call “holing up in Fritz’s mansion to have lots of sex” dating.

  It was brief and intense. The definition of a whirlwind romance. Fritz said all the right things, knew exactly what kind of clothes she liked and what size to buy them in, took her to restaurants that unexpectedly became her favorite, plied her with expensive presents.

  Everything he did was right. He was charming as hell.

  But it had all gone so damn fast.

  The marriage proposal had surprised her at the time, and not in a good way. Dating an intense billionaire demon hunter was too overwhelming.

  So Isobel had ditched him. Agreed to keep working with him if he needed it, but no more sex, no more presents, definitely no diamond rings.

  He hadn’t even seemed heartbroken at the time.

  But Fritz didn’t go away, either.

  Now she understood why, many months later. Once she dipped into her memories with the help of Dayna, a priestess of the Hand of Death, Isobel had seen a wedding from her previous life. She’d been wearing a gauzy white dress and lifted her veil to see Fritz on the other side.

  Isobel had thought that Fritz was just the kopis who saved her from Ander. Instead, it turned out that Fritz was Hope Jimenez’s husband—and he was still waiting for his wife to come back to him.

  Lost in thought as she showered, Isobel scrubbed her hip a little too hard. It was habit—her skin got scaly if she wasn’t thorough with the loofah.

  But now it peeled the cut on her hip wide. There was no blood. The skin ripped open an inch and exposed a little bit of decay underneath, where it had been developing unseen. The skin was greenish-purple.

  She got out of the shower. Pulled on a bathrobe. Sat on her couch and tried not to cry.

  One month, two weeks, less than four days.

  Fritz wasn’t going to have to wait for his wife in vain much longer.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ISOBEL ALWAYS FOUND FUEL for her RV one way or another. She hated resorting to theft, but she only had five hundred dollars from Mrs. Hartley; she had to be realistic about how much it was going to cost to survive for the next month and a half.

  With a tank as big as hers, she had to siphon from multiple vehicles at the shopping mall. She went after the big ones. The SUVs, the Jeeps, the minivans. Isobel took a few gallons here and there, filling red gas canisters and carting them back to her RV before anyone caught her.

  Her hip and pinky finger were itching.

  When the needle on her gauge was over three quarters, she bought herself a bun from Cinnabon and headed north on the freeway.

  Okay, she actually bought a dozen buns from Cinnabon. But she was dying. Life was definitely too short not to stuff her face.

  Who was going to notice a few extra pounds on the zombie anyway?

  Her RV hated going at freeway speeds, so she kept it slow and ignored the people who honked angrily as they zoomed past her. She got better mileage when she went slowly anyway, and she needed to make it several hundred miles to Reno, Nevada.

  That was where Isobel had left behind a young necromancer named Ann. She’d already been in contact with Ann twice. In fact, Ann had been the first call that Isobel had made when she learned that her contract with Ander had a looming deadline, since Ann could raise zombies as easily as Isobel rolled out of bed in the morning.

  If anyone could resurrect Isobel, it would be Ann.

  The problem was that Ann had already said she couldn’t do it and wasn’t interested in wasting any time to help Isobel. The young necromancer had valid reasons, which she’d shared bluntly with Isobel over a terse phone call.

  First of all, trying to resurrect someone—not reanimate them, but resurrect them—was a huge energy drain that would require a human sacrifice. Sacrifice would draw unwanted attention to Ann. Second of all, considering the terms of Isobel’s contract, she really needed a magical lawyer more than a necromancer.

  Ann had said that part half-jokingly. “Magical lawyer.”

  In all seriousness, that sounded like a great idea to Isobel.

  But no such thing existed. Ann was as good as it got.

  Isobel had to convince her to try.

  It was a nine-hour drive to Reno from Los Angeles without any major delays. Less than a day. Her RV had a pretty big tank of gas; if she were careful, she would only need to refill once to reach her destination. She could even probably top it off with a little bit of cash.

  She barely made it two hours outside of the city.

  The highway leading northwest cut directly through the desert. It was the fastest route, but unfortunately, less-trafficked than the other routes that she could have taken.

  That meant there weren’t any rest stops nearby when her RV began to splutter.

  “No,” she whispered, hands tightening on the wheel. “No, no, no…”

  The vehicle bucked hard enough that the frame shivered, making her beaded curtains clatter. Glass bottles jangled in her cabinets. The engine moaned—actually moaned.

  Isobel didn’t know much about the mechanical side of things where her RV was concerned, but she didn’t think that moaning was a good sign.

  The gas pedal stopped working.

  There was nothing in sight but empty desert.

  Pulling the wheel to the side, her tires jittered as the RV moved onto the shoulder. She shivered to a stop a car’s length off of the highway. About two seconds later, all of the lights in her vehicle died.

  “Ugh,” Isobel groaned, dropping her head so that her eyebrows bumped against the steering wheel.

  This is not a promising start to one of the last days of the rest of my life.

  The blazing sun beat down hot on her shoulders as she dropped to the dusty ground outside. There was no wind. Nothing but a hundred degrees of stale, miserable heat. It felt like she was going to catch fire within seconds of exposure. Hopefully that wouldn’t be the case—Isobel was feeling awfully dry, and she had no idea how her zombiefied body would handle heat.

  She popped the hood and propped it up with the metal bar inside. Something inside was smoking, but she couldn’t tell what. She waved the air clear.

  “Come on, baby, give me some kind of hint,” Isobel muttered.

  All the mechanical pieces lurking inside her RV looked fine. She twisted a few knobs, poked at the cables. T
here weren’t any obvious leaks. Not that she would have known what to do with them even if there had been any.

  How the hell was she going to get to Reno with this thing now?

  Isobel’s hands were throbbing. She flipped her palms over to discover that she had burned her fingertips while prodding at the RV. The skin on her left hand had melted away, leaving three of her fingers smooth and shiny.

  It hadn’t hurt. She hadn’t felt that at all.

  She sank to a crouch, back leaning against the RV, and dropped her face into her hands.

  Isobel felt like crying, but even though her shoulders started to shake and her eyes burned, nothing came out.

  The magic of Ander’s contract was fading faster.

  Isobel wasn’t sure how long she sat there, watching the sun move, trying to cry without leaking a single tear. She got up a couple of times to try to turn the RV on again, praying that it would have magically healed itself the way that she wasn’t.

  The shadows grew longer, a few cars passed, nobody stopped to help.

  When she finally rounded the RV to start walking, maybe stick a thumb out to hitch a ride, the sun was nearly touching the horizon.

  And someone was waiting for her.

  There was a black car parked down the hill. It could have been there all day, for all she knew—she hadn’t walked far enough in that direction to see it, and she hadn’t heard it stopping behind her. The windows were tinted dark enough that she couldn’t see who was inside, but she didn’t need to see.

  It was no surprise that Fritz Friederling would show up once she became desperate.

  Knowing him, he’d had her followed for months anyway. He had probably been watching her every move. Waiting for her to get desperate.

  His timing was perfect.

  She tried to wipe her cheeks dry, even though there were no tears on them. It hurt to walk away from the RV, knowing that she might never get back to it. The thing might have been an antiquated piece of shit, but it was her antiquated piece of shit, and it had been home for years.