Once Darkness Falls (Preternatural Affairs #7) Read online

  “We’re concerned about a potential violation of the Treaty of Dis,” Fritz said. “The risks of failure here are far greater than death.”

  “Treaty of Dis?” Suzy asked.

  “That’s the treaty that established the kopis class way back in the dark ages,” I said.

  “Earlier than that,” Fritz said. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Tell me, Cèsar, did you take history at UCLA?”

  “They didn’t exactly cover the Treaty of Dis at UCLA. Anyway, the treaty made kopides as a way of protecting humanity from angels and demons.” I’d had to read too much about it while studying to become Fritz’s aspis. “It also created laws that prevent demons from entering Heaven and angels from entering Hell.”

  “And kopides enforce that?” Suzy asked.

  “It’s self-enforcing. The laws are impossible to break,” Fritz said.

  Suzy’s eyebrows climbed her forehead. “But you think someone’s managed to break these inviolable laws.”

  “Indeed. What do you think happens when ancient magical law gets violated? If your guess involves the entire universe shattering, then you’re correct. We’re seeing symptoms of reality unwinding in Reno.”

  My heart sank. “That sounds like the kind of mess that’s going to require a little more than a staff reorganization from Lucrezia de Angelis.”

  “I think I should be on this with Cèsar,” Suzy said.

  “Sit with the pilot, Agent Takeuchi,” Fritz said.

  If I’d tried to give her an order like that, Suzy would have laughed while ripping my balls off. Even she had some respect for Fritz’s position as director, though. She barely rolled her eyes as she tossed the tablet onto her seat, then clambered into the front of the helicopter.

  Gotta say, it didn’t inspire a lot of confidence that Fritz wanted to talk to me alone.

  He didn’t speak again until she was out of sight. He switched channels on his headset, and I followed suit, making sure we could talk without being heard.

  “This matter’s sensitive,” he said. “Our relations with the Union have become more strained since the failed semi-centennial summit earlier this year.”

  The semi-centennial summit was a big meeting that happened—you guessed it—every fifty years. It was attended by the most powerful angels, demons, and kopides in order to hash out grudges in a semi-organized fashion.

  This year had been the first time that the OPA and Union had attended. I wasn’t important enough to have earned an invitation, but my understanding was that it had gone about as well as the Wicked Witch of the West taking a dip in a hot tub.

  “Do they blame us for the mess at the semi-centennial summit?” I asked.

  “Yes. The Union wants someone to blame other than themselves, which is hilarious, since they also insisted on taking charge of operations in Silver Wells. They’re threatening to crack down on the OPA.”

  “The Union’s an OPA department. How much damage can they cause?” I asked.

  Fritz gazed out the window. The helicopter banked over the mountains, skimming just over the Sierras. I might have been able to see Lake Tahoe if it hadn’t been so fucking black out there. It was fine that I couldn’t. My last visit to Tahoe had been horrible enough to quash any urges I might have had to visit again.

  “How much honesty do you think you can handle?” Fritz asked after too long a pause.

  Not a lot. Probably none. “Give it to me.”

  “The Union predates the OPA, which was set up solely to get a foothold in American politics. They’re owned by a much larger international organization. The Union is in charge of us, essentially, and they could kill us all if we make them angry.” He said it with his usual dry calm.

  I was feeling calm about it, too.

  That news would have shocked me a couple years ago, when I first found out the preternatural existed because incubi abducted and tortured my sister. Even in the months after that, when I still believed I’d been recruited by a secret government organization intended to save people from that kind of torture, I’d have been surprised. I wouldn’t have signed up to work for the OPA if I’d thought they were evil.

  Since then, I’d learned that I had signed a cursed employment contract that would blast my memory to smithereens if I got fired.

  I’d also been about two seconds away from getting murdered by Lucrezia de Angelis just because I looked at Fritz’s work phone. Then I’d been shoved into a lifelong kopis-and-aspis bond with Fritz as my only alternative to getting killed.

  I’d have only been shocked to learn the OPA wasn’t evil at this point.

  Aside from all of that, Suzy had spent a day or two in a Union detention center after being arrested under suspicion of murder. A murder that I committed. She’d come out that detention center different—harder, meaner, angrier. And she’d also come out with the conviction that there was something very wrong with the Union.

  Having Fritz validate what Suzy had told me months earlier was a kick in the balls. I’d have loved to be wrong about my asshole employers. Even so, it wasn’t a shock.

  “Okay,” I said slowly, trying to wrap my head around what Fritz was telling me to do. “I need to determine who in the Union is responsible for the MOAD incident in Reno, which almost made the universe unravel. I need to tell Lucrezia about it as soon as she arrives. And all of this needs to happen without anyone in the upper echelons catching on so we don’t get Swiss cheesed with bullets. That sounds…fun.”

  “The fun part is when you surrender a culprit to Lucrezia.”

  “I’m supposed to find a culprit? I thought I was just doing a presentation.”

  Fritz inspected his cufflinks. “It might be somewhat less of a presentation and more like bringing a suspect to trial. The Union and the OPA would both love to charge someone for what happened to Reno. It would help ease tensions between our organizations to imprison someone over the MOAD incident.”

  He said “imprison,” but I understood that he meant “kill.” And by taking him to my so-called presentation, I’d be responsible for killing the guy.

  “Okay,” I said again in as neutral a tone as I could manage. I was numb in all my squishy inside parts.

  Like I said—nothing shocked me about the OPA anymore.

  Didn’t mean that I felt all butterflies and bunnies about the bullshit I dealt with under their fist.

  Fritz handed me a Bluetooth earpiece. “You’ll use this to communicate with the Union while in Reno. Remember that they’ll be able to hear everything you say while wearing it.”

  So I couldn’t say anything sensitive. “Got it.”

  “Play your investigation close to the chest. Don’t trust anyone, Cèsar,” he said.

  “Including you?”

  His smirk said, Especially me. We were a few months and one kopis-and-aspis binding too late for that, though.

  We hit turbulence. The helicopter jittered and my heart crawled its way down into my gut.

  We were getting near Reno. Easy way to tell: everything smelled like death.

  What’s death smell like? It was that cloying smoky stench that made me think of cold places six feet deep in the earth and sexy necromancers who thought shirts were optional.

  Guess it was one of those “know it when you sniff it” kinda things.

  “We need to talk about something else while we have a moment of privacy,” Fritz said in a tone that said it was going to be A Woman Thing. Women who were also sexy necromancers, probably.

  It’d been a while since everything had gone down with the witch named Isobel Stonecrow. Months or years—I hadn’t been watching the calendar all that close enough to know.

  We had met because I’d tried to arrest her in order to save my ass from prison. One thing had led to another from there, as it tends to do. Over time, Isobel talked to a lot of dead people for me. I saved her from almost getting sacrificed. Sparks flew. We hooked up, it turned out she was actually a zombie, and—oh yeah, that she had been married to my boss,
Fritz Friederling, before she had died and lost all of her memories, therefore forgetting that she was unintentionally cheating on him with his hard-up-for-it aspis.

  Typical boy-meets-girl story.

  Fritz and I hadn’t talked about her since. Generally speaking, it made for a much more pleasant work environment to avoid the subject of Isobel, but it seemed that we couldn’t avoid talking about it forever.

  “All right,” I said, tensing my core the way I did before trying to break a personal record for deadlifting. “Shoot.”

  “Belle and I are getting married,” Fritz said.

  Shit.

  When I’d said “shoot,” I hadn’t meant literally. But that punching feeling in my chest felt an awful lot like getting hit by a bullet at point-blank range. It was worse than having the Union’s evil nature validated by my department’s director.

  “Okay.” I was still using that neutral tone I’d learned for special occasions, like learning I was on an OPA suicide mission, or that a woman who had given me orgasms was about to marry my best friend.

  Better than saying the words that were actually in my head.

  It was easier to watch out the helicopter, too. Easier than looking at Fritz, whose expression I couldn’t read out of the corner of my eye.

  Not a whole lot more pleasant, though.

  We were approaching the crater that used to be Reno. That place where all those people were apparently trapped, unable to be rescued.

  From up high, it was easy to tell that it hadn’t been a natural disaster, like January Lazar had claimed. Looked more like a huge-ass earthworm had gone burrowing under the strip malls. Those earthworms had collapsed tunnels, sucked buildings into the mines, and left nothing but ash where they’d been. Ash, and a lot of this black rock that resembled obsidian. The obsidian thing was a side effect of exposure to certain infernal creatures.

  But mostly there were giant tunnels.

  Fritz had said that this Mother of All Demons had eaten Reno, after all.

  He caught the way I was gaping out the helicopter. “If you think this is impressive, wait until you see the rest. This is only the south end of town.”

  “There’s more damage?”

  “Oh yes.”

  The wind gusted harder, momentarily blowing the haze away from the sky. It let me peer across the rooftops of the shattered town to downtown Reno.

  Both versions of downtown Reno.

  Because there were two of them: the one on the ground, which was wrecked all to hell the way South Reno was, and then the mirror image of it sitting in the sky. The fake city floating above the real city was flipped so that the tallest buildings almost kissed at their tops.

  It was huge. At least a mile wide.

  Smoke blew over the mirror city again, hiding it away.

  For a second, I thought I had to have imagined the inverted city, because it was too insane to be real. Then I saw Fritz’s face. He was watching for my reaction.

  Suzy had mentioned the Mother of All Demons, but that wasn’t demon work.

  Demons couldn’t mirror several city blocks like that.

  All I could manage to ask was, “How?”

  “Do you remember Paradise Mile Retirement Village?” Fritz asked.

  How could I have forgotten? That was the case where I had learned that Isobel was a zombie. It had involved going into a so-called “pocket dimension”—an alternate universe that had herniated into Earth—in order to fight demons. I’d have had to be lobotomized or dead to forget about that.

  “Are you saying that’s a pocket dimension?” I gestured toward the upside-down city hidden behind black smoke.

  “It used to be,” Fritz said. “Fighting the Mother of All Demons violated the Treaty of Dis and brought it out of the pocket dimension. I’m sure you must have been wondering.”

  I kinda wished that I was still wondering. Some things were better not to know.

  Instead of saying any of that, I said, “So…marriage, huh? Sounds like things have been going well with you and Isobel.” Must have been really well. I hadn’t seen her in months, but that was still a short time frame for Fritz to go from “Isobel’s ex-boyfriend” to “Isobel’s fiancé.”

  The corners of Fritz’s mouth curled into something that could have been a smile or grimace. It was hard to tell. “The wedding is set for…” He waved a dismissive hand. “After we handle the MOAD incident. We’ll take a yacht to the Caribbean and do it there, assuming the Caribbean still exists at that point.”

  “Okay,” I said again.

  Did he want my blessing? My permission? He didn’t need either. Whatever relationship I’d thought I had with Isobel, it had vanished at the time her memories had come back. And Fritz, as I’d said, was a billionaire who didn’t hesitate to pick me up from my shitty apartment in a helicopter. I couldn’t compete with that. I was the guy living in the shitty apartment, not the one with the helicopter and multiple Bugattis and a house in Beverly Hills.

  The two of them could do whatever they wanted. It wouldn’t even be the first time they’d been married.

  The bond between a kopis and aspis was usually passive, but when there were strong enough emotions on either end, you could kinda feel what was going on with your partner. Right now, Fritz was feeling something a lot like amusement. Ha ha. Nice to know he was laughing.

  “I want you to be my best man,” he said.

  “No fucking way.” I couldn’t quell the knee-jerk response. “Not a goddamn chance.”

  Emotion flashed over Fritz’s face. If I wasn’t hallucinating things, I thought his feelings might have been hurt. But that vanished so quickly that I couldn’t tell. “Why not?”

  I laughed mirthlessly. How was I supposed to put to words my horror at the idea of being best man at Isobel’s wedding?

  Luckily, I didn’t have to find words to say it.

  Because at that instant, a billowing black fist of smoky darkness swarmed out of downtown Reno and punched our helicopter out of the air.

  And you know what? It was a hell of a lot better than having to talk about Isobel and Fritz getting married.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FUNNY THING ABOUT WITCHCRAFT: it’s not like you can do it whenever you want.

  At least, I can’t.

  Maybe you’re the type of witch who can cast whatever kind of magic she wants, whenever on the calendar she wants, who doesn’t need to refer to a million almanacs about moon phase, tides, positions of the stars, and even the goddamn season. A real powerful witch.

  I’m not that kind of a witch. And I’m enough of a man to admit it, thank you very much.

  Like most of us who deal in the craft, I have to do all kinds of charting and shit before I can even put down a circle of salt. Some kinds of spells are good to perform during the waning moon, some for the waxing. Sometimes you have to orient your circle of power toward the south in order to appeal to the guardians of the watchtowers of fire. Sometimes you have to dance naked under the moon.

  But no matter how powerful you are, you can never cast magic when tumbling out of the sky in a helicopter smashed by demons.

  Kind of a major flaw if you ask me.

  I had a few seconds to regret that flaw while the Apache went into a tailspin. Not very coherent seconds, mind you, but…seconds. Definitely seconds.

  And then we were on the ground.

  Alive.

  Believe it or not, that wasn’t a good outcome in this particular scenario.

  The Apache was surrounded by slick blackness, about the same color as ink congealing under the broken printer at work. That shadow crawled into the helicopter within seconds, and it had inertia. Matter. Form.

  That was why we hadn’t experienced a fatal crash despite those dizzying moments of flipping head over ass: we’d fallen on top of shadow. It had pillowed our landing. The body of the Apache was crumpled, but the occupants inside were safer than eggs in a carton.

  That black shit had saved our lives.

  I’d se
en such “black shit” before, but only once: in nighttime Helltown, a demon-occupied neighborhood of Los Angeles. Once darkness fell in Helltown, it was overtaken by demons that weren’t strong enough to take on human-like corporeal form, so they just looked like wispy shadow.

  If that’s what had happened to us now, in Reno, we were in big fucking trouble.

  “Fuck,” Fritz said. He actually sounded worried, which told me that the shadow was exactly what I thought it was.

  Demons.

  “Fuck,” I agreed, trying to stand in the helicopter.

  During our fall, I seem to have ended up plastered on the back wall. The helicopter hadn’t landed on its skids. We were propped against something. Bet it was a building. There was no way to tell because I couldn’t see a goddamn thing past my nose.

  Bodies thumped around inside the helicopter.

  “What happened?” Fritz shouted. His voice was distorted by the darkness, filtered so that it sounded like he was a million miles away. Hopefully he wasn’t. That would’ve been a fantastic way to make a bad day worse.

  The pilot responded, and he sounded even more distant. “Nightmares, I think.”

  He didn’t mean “nightmares” in the sense of those crappy slasher flicks played out by your subconscious at night. He meant “nightmares” like the breed of demon. Critters that could fuck your shit up without ever touching you. Drive you to the brink of madness. Make your nights sleepless for months after you brush up against one.

  I’d met a powerful corporeal nightmare before. In Reno, as a matter of fact.

  My heart jumped up into my throat. I tasted bile and smoke. “We need lights!” It was the only way to deal with demons that dwelled in shadow. You had to take away the shadows.

  “We have no power,” Fritz said grimly.

  Better and better.

  A hand grabbed me. I tried to karate chop it.

  “Hey!” Suzy protested.

  “Sorry,” I said. No matter her shitty taste in men, she wasn’t a demon, nor was she a bodily threat to me at the moment.

  I grabbed her delicately boned wrist to try to orient myself, and she dug her nails into me so hard I must have been bleeding. I immediately rescinded my earlier thought about Suzy not being a threat.