Sinners & Sorcerers: Four Urban Fantasy Thrillers Read online

  The cops were polite about putting me in the holding cell and locking the door behind me. No manhandling or anything, just took off the cuffs and sat me down.

  “I need a phone call,” I said.

  One of my escorts said, “We’ll see what we can do.”

  I wish I’d told them in the car that I worked for the FBI—the currently accepted cover story for OPA agents—because I was hesitant to say it after having met my two new roommates. I mean, I was an intimidating guy. I benched twice my body weight, my body fat was less than ten percent, and I looked like a freaking tank in gray sweat pants. But two gang members with stylized crosses on their throats and “SUR 13” on their foreheads weren’t going to be hot on chilling in a holding cell with a Fed. The next couple hours of my life would be easier if I kept my cover story to myself.

  Once the cops were gone, there was nothing to do but read these guys’ life stories inked into their skin. I didn’t know human gang signs well. Give me a witch wearing chains of crystals and medallions, I could tell you his coven affiliation, status in the witching community, and even his favorite spells to cast. But a sad-looking Jesus, some elaborate crosses, eighteens and thirteens—I had no clue.

  They didn’t think much of my staring. They stared back. Hard.

  I wished I’d brought my last strength poultice with me when I’d gotten arrested.

  I didn’t belong in jail. I wasn’t this guy. I wasn’t the one with the tats bleeding from an alleyway knife fight. Even when I’d gotten caught up in trouble with Domingo, it’d been property crime. Not this violent crap.

  Bloody Face started cajoling me in Spanish. Whatever he was saying, it was probably offensive. I wouldn’t know. When Abuela Teresa had come from San Salvador two generations back, she made sure all her kids spoke English. My parents, aunts, and uncles had never spoken Spanish, so I definitely didn’t. But I still had the looks, and these guys weren’t the first to think they could talk with me in “our” native language.

  It was easy to tune out words I didn’t understand. It faded into the background of distant voices. I stretched out on the bench, folded my hands over my chest, focused on the window.

  Sky was turning gray. Looked like rain.

  My memory of finding Erin in the bathroom swelled to the surface.

  Erin. Jesus, Erin.

  I had ridden along on a couple of murder scenes when I was in training for the OPA. Everyone did their time with the Union whether they liked it or not, and it was always unforgettable. I remembered the stuff that they looked for in deaths related to demons. There were often runes and seals, finger painting with blood, that kind of stuff. Smarter demons, the ones more like humans, often liked to carve into their prey. The dumber ones just ate them.

  Erin hadn’t been eaten. She hadn’t been carved. There were no runes in my bathroom. Just a hole in her heart and hand-shaped bruises stamped onto her throat.

  It looked like any mundane murder I’d seen on those CSI TV shows. Nothing to do with demonic possession or magic or a hungry fiend whose master had lost control. It looked like someone had fucked her, choked her, shot her. All stuff that a human could easily do—anyone with a grudge.

  I refused to think of that “anyone” as me. I was a victim here. It was the only possible truth, and the only one I would consider.

  Something touched my feet and I looked up to see Bloody Shirt making kissy faces at me. He was pressed up against the bars. Leaning toward me, harassing me with gestures instead of words.

  I propped up my knees so they couldn’t reach me. Shut my eyes. I still had a hangover and none of this was making me feel any better about it.

  Guess with what happened to Erin, I should have been grateful that I was alive to feel so fucking miserable.

  I told myself, Count your blessings, Cèsar, because the day is going to get worse before it gets better.

  Sometimes it sucked to be right.

  + + +

  Yesterday had been so much better.

  I’d just wrapped up a four-month-long manhunt for a witch named Black Jack who had a quick hand for tarot and a quicker hand for curses. Most of those curses were dumb pranks—might mess with someone’s head, but nothing deadly. The numbers in the OPA’s budget were redder than blood, so he’d been on the observation list for years without anyone managing to justify the cost of hunting him down.

  Until he cursed some car keys and his ex-girlfriend drove into oncoming traffic.

  That had bumped his priority up real fast.

  The New Mexico office sent the file to us and Black Jack landed on my desk. Long story short, I bagged him just like I’d bagged a half a dozen other witches this year. Picked him up in a gas station. Slipped a mix of a sleeping and paralysis potion in his energy drink, knocked him out cold.

  That was the result of four months of hunting on my part and years of monitoring by other agents. Taking Black Jack off the streets meant that we’d be saving a lot of money on cleaning up his bullshit. It meant we might actually get merit increases on our paychecks next summer.

  Yeah, the big boss had been happy with me, and so was everyone else.

  That was why I had been at The Olive Pit last night even though I don’t drink. We were riding high on the knowledge that Black Jack was going to Italy for trial, never to be our problem again. Everyone had been there: Fritz Friederling, the director who had given me the job with the OPA; some hunters with the Union; all the other investigators in the Magical Violations Department; even the administrative assistants.

  Suzy had been there, too. The amount of alcohol that woman could put away was incredible considering she was five feet tall in heels. She had been exchanging crass jokes with Joey and Eduardo, the kind of stuff that I would never say in front of a lady, and playing drinking games that started with setting shots on fire and ended up with us all getting completely trashed.

  I hadn’t paid for a single drink. All the guys had been buying for me—the man who nailed Black Jack.

  They had given me shit over the way tequila made me cough and choke. Suzy had been pounding her tiny, delicately boned fist on my back and it had felt kind of like a jackhammer.

  Bad alcohol, great company. So I had been feeling good. Real good.

  Then Erin had arrived for her shift. She’d had a nasty black eye covered up with makeup. Big bruise. It covered half of her face. I remembered when my sister, Angela, was trying to cover up the evidence of her abuse, so I’d known immediately what was going on.

  I had cornered Erin by the kitchen. I’d said something like, “Tell me who’s messing with you, and I’ll take care of it.” Big words coming from a drunk guy, but I’d meant it.

  “Nobody’s messing with me,” she had said. She’d batted her eyelashes at me. Shot me a sweet smile. “I’m okay.”

  “Let me help you,” I’d insisted. And then I’d told her who I was, whom I worked for, how I could nail the guy that was hurting her. I shouldn’t have told her the truth, but I did.

  Then there was a haunted, hungry look in her eyes. Just for a second. Nothing more than a flash of it.

  “I’ll think about it,” she’d said.

  Suzy had found me, dragged me back to drinking. We’d played a few more games. I noticed at some point that Fritz had left and thought that was probably my cue to leave, too. Whenever the director thinks it’s time to get home and sleep, it’s time to sleep. But Suzy had talked me into staying.

  Erin brought me a drink toward the end of the night. When she’d dropped it off, she kissed me on the cheek, slipped me a note. “I’ll tell you after my shift. Maybe you can help. But not here. Your place.”

  When she’d left, I checked what she had given me.

  Her phone number.

  Then I’d tossed back the fireball she’d given me. I’d felt hot and excited at the thought of having Erin in my apartment. Suzy had been talking to me but I’d barely even seen her lips moving, much less understood what she was saying. My head was filled with liquored ha
ze and the buzz of knowing I’d be taking a beautiful woman home.

  After that…well, I guess Erin had come home with me, and I think we might have had sex.

  I knew I hadn’t helped her.

  I couldn’t remember that part.

  You always thought if you got in trouble working for the OPA, it was going to be when you crossed someone like Black Jack. You thought it was going to be having a curse slipped under your desk or a demon assassin crawling out of the darkest alleys of Helltown.

  I’d never thought it would be like this.

  4

  They got the other guys out of the holding cell before they came for me. I was alone with my view of the drizzly spring day for about an hour. Just me and my thoughts and a determined sparrow shrieking. It was kind of nice. Meditative.

  Then life was moving again. There were people at my door and the halls were sliding past me. More desks, lots of guards, locked doors.

  They dropped in an interview room.

  It was hot in there. It couldn’t have been more than sixty degrees outside, but it was ninety between those four unremarkable walls, and I was immediately sweating. Hard to say if the discomfort was meant to be a technique to loosen me up or if the LAPD just didn’t have a budget for fixing the A/C. Either way, I didn’t like it. I still wanted my phone call.

  Instead, they were gonna interrogate me.

  You couldn’t call them “interrogations” anymore, though, because we didn’t “interrogate” people. That was too aggressive. That assumed too much guilt. We interviewed suspects these days.

  Whatever we called it—whatever the LAPD called it—I knew exactly where I was and what was about to happen to me. And I knew it wasn’t going to be fun or pretty.

  Back at OPA headquarters, we had several interview rooms. One of them had a silver-reinforced door and silver chains and a silver chair, just in case we crossed paths with a werewolf and needed to “interview” them. One of them was warded against magic, nullifying any witch that might sneak a charm in with her. Another had crosses and the pendant of St. Benedict engraved into the concrete floor—that one was for the demon-possessed perps.

  But this place was almost hilariously normal. One-way mirror. Table in the middle with two chairs on one side and a single chair on the other—that was for me. The door wasn’t magicked or silver or anything. I got a good look at the completely normal lock as they guided me inside. They didn’t even have wards to nullify the magic in the poultice I had consumed that morning.

  Two detectives came in to talk with me. I wondered how many were on the other side of the window. I wondered if they were scared of how big I was, how messy Erin’s body had been, how little they could find about me with a background check.

  “You like to drink, Mr. Hawke?” asked the first detective. Her name was Kearney.

  “I’d like a water, yeah,” I said.

  That wasn’t what they meant, but they got me a glass of water anyway. Tasted like it had been sitting in a plastic jug for months.

  “You drank a lot last night,” Kearney went on. She was an intense woman with a square jaw and no waistline. Fists clenched on top of the table. “When we tested you this afternoon, your blood alcohol level was still above legal limits for driving.”

  I didn’t want to talk about my drinking habits. I didn’t have drinking habits.

  “I need my phone call,” I said again. Felt like I’d been saying nothing else since they’d brought me here.

  “Where do you work?” asked the other detective, Ramirez. He was a skinny man with gray hair.

  I didn’t even have to think about the fake answer. It was habit now. “I work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  They didn’t look surprised by that answer, so someone had already found my fake FBI badge.

  “What do you do for the FBI, exactly?”

  “It’s classified.” So much more classified than they could ever know. They lived in a small world, an ordinary world. They didn’t know anything.

  Identifying myself as an FBI agent was usually enough to get me out of any degree of trouble. It didn’t work that day. Not after Erin, and not with Kearney shooting daggers out of her eyeballs at me. “I’m sure that must be stressful,” she said. “Working for the FBI, doing secret work. You have to unwind somehow. Who can blame you?”

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “How often do you think you go to the bar called The Olive Pit? Three times a week, four times? Every day? Just on Fridays? How much does it take to help you unwind, Mr. Hawke?”

  I knew this routine. I’d done it a few times myself. They were trying to establish a narrative. They would try to set me up as a woman-beating alcoholic, tell me I got piss-drunk and killed Erin, try to sneak into it sideways so that I wouldn’t even realize I was agreeing until I’d signed the confession. You’d be surprised how easily people would admit guilt when they thought someone understood them.

  But I wasn’t going to give them anything. They knew that I could ask for a lawyer at any minute and the interview would come to an end.

  Thing is, I didn’t want my lawyer. I had nothing to defend.

  I wanted the men in black suits to roll in here and erase me.

  “Who does the Glock belong to?” I asked Kearney, addressing her directly. “Did you check the serial numbers?”

  “Don’t you think it’s kind of strange to have a gun on your coffee table and no idea whom it belongs to?”

  “Yeah, I sure do,” I said.

  “You have a gun safe in your apartment.”

  And I had a gun in it, too. A Desert Eagle. They wouldn’t know that, though, because I’d warded the safe with the help of some of the OPA’s best witches, and nobody could open it but me. Seeing the stuff in there would have made Kearney grow chest hair.

  “I use it for my china collection.” I didn’t smile when I said it.

  Disbelief was etched all over their faces, but they didn’t challenge me on it. Why bother pushing? They thought they had all day. Really, they only had until Suzy came in with her backup.

  I hoped Suzy was close.

  “A heavy-drinking FBI agent with a china collection,” Kearney said.

  “I like breaking stereotypes.”

  “Tell me about how you got the scratches on your arms.” The order came rapid-fire, almost talking over me. Trying to startle me into answering.

  I turned my arms over so I could look at them. They had swabbed the scratches when I’d first arrived. Took a DNA sample out of my mouth and a vial of blood, too. The scratches had hurt the most. They were still tender.

  I didn’t have an answer for them, and I wouldn’t have given it if I did.

  “How long have you been thinking about killing Erin Karwell?” asked Kearney.

  I slammed my fists on the table. I knew better, but I couldn’t help it. “I didn’t kill Erin.”

  “Relax, Agent Hawke,” Ramirez said. “It seems like you’ve got a lot of pent-up aggression.”

  Yeah, I was feeding right into the damn narrative.

  The way he said “agent,” it sounded like he was referring to a piece of shit stuck to the sole of his shoe. He didn’t think much of federal agents, did he?

  The pissing contest between local and federal government was an eternal battle. I’d seen it play out in a dozen different states—any time that I had to cooperate with the cops and deal with all the bullshit that followed.

  They didn’t like having the feds fuck with their business, and they were taking it out on me.

  It had to be that because there was no way anyone would really believe I’d kill a woman.

  Problem was, I wasn’t who they thought I was. And I shouldn’t have even been there.

  Where the hell was Suzy?

  Kearney opened her mouth to ask another question, but I was tired of questions.

  “I want my lawyer,” I said.

  Interview over.

  5

  I didn’t call my lawyer. I didn’t
even have a lawyer. Who needed one when the OPA had the best legal department that taxpayer dollars could buy?

  Instead, I called Suzy. I was ticked off when she was at her desk to answer it. I’d been imagining her leading the cavalry to come and save me, riding in on her metaphoric white horse, and instead she was in our damn cubicle.

  “Cèsar. It’s you.” Her tone didn’t inspire confidence.

  I took a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure Kearney wasn’t on my ass. She was at the nearby desk filling out paperwork. Ramirez was watching me, eyes wary, patiently watchful, but too distant to hear a whisper.

  I twisted my wrists, trying to get comfortable with the phone. My wrists were cuffed again and I was getting real sick of it. “What’s going on, Suzy? Why am I still here?”

  It took her a long time to answer.

  “I’m sorry, Cèsar.”

  My heart sank all the way down to my sneakers. Her tone was enough to tell me that the OPA wasn’t coming. No men in black to make me disappear. Nobody to say that I was innocent, this had all been a misunderstanding, their files were forfeit.

  “Do you have guys at my apartment? Are they investigating?”

  “Yeah. We’ve gotten involved, but the Union is handling the investigation.”

  Bad sign. Union procedure was a secret, even to me, but they only got called in when the shit had hit the fan more than usual. “And?”

  A sigh. “It looks bad. Real bad.”

  “You know I didn’t do this, Suzy.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I know. It matters what everyone else thinks. Look, I can hook you up with my lawyer. He’s a good guy. He’s done criminal law before, and if anyone can get you out of there on bail—”

  “I don’t need a fucking lawyer!”

  That part I’d said too loud. Kearney was staring at me. Ramirez was moving in.

  “I’m sorry, Cèsar,” Suzy said again. I was real sick of hearing those words. I didn’t think I could hear them again without losing it.