Spellsmoke: An Urban Fantasy Novel (A Fistful of Daggers Book 2) Read online

  Without horns, there was no fight to the guy. It flattened and gasped facedown on the peeling linoleum. Black oozed from its injured gills.

  “You’re a disappointment,” Inanna said.

  “The feeling’s more than mutual.” Lincoln crouched next to the kelpie and held the paper bounty beside its face so he could compare. They had the same tiny runes carved into their eyebrows. It was a match. This was the piece of shit that had killed his way across four states before landing in Lincoln’s territory.

  “Ba-set Mal, you’re officially under arrest for murder.” He wrapped a chain around the kelpie’s throat and clipped it tight. Magic sizzled.

  “Arrest,” Inanna said scornfully. “This is what’s become of my soul?”

  “I can’t believe this is my life either,” he spat back.

  The coyote emerged from the other hall. Spencer had followed the scent in a loop around Meadowood Mall, tracing the path of the kelpie as it had slaughtered through the mall.

  When Spencer loped over, he passed through Inanna. The vision shimmered and then vanished. Spencer never showed any sign that he’d seen her.

  Because Lincoln was walking around with a piece of a god in his head, and it was a hell of a lot less fun than he’d have ever expected.

  Chapter 2

  The Reno Police Department received bounties at their jail on Parr, north of the University of Nevada. Spencer and Lincoln were far from the only vigilantes hoping to take home cash; the secured waiting room was stuffed by tired-looking vampires held in wooden collars and the mundanes who had caught them. Ba-Set Mal was the only bounty with a pulse. Vampires were like rats: a lot more common, and easy to exterminate.

  Lincoln had scraped up a few thousand dollars from low-value bounties on vampires. He was about to earn twice as much from a single kelpie misidentified as a demon. He caught more than a few envious glances from the other hunters.

  “Keep an eye on the room,” Lincoln muttered to Spencer. “And a nose.”

  “So long as you keep a hand on Ba-Set Mal,” Spencer said.

  Lincoln wasn’t letting go of the kelpie long enough to take a piss. This bounty was his. Nobody would get between him and his money—not other vigilantes, and especially not the quarry himself.

  Ba-Set Mal didn’t look likely to run, though. Getting his horns kicked off had left him spilling black fluid down his face and his skin shivering like it might crawl off his bones.

  He was still in better shape than most of the vampires. The backlog meant that some of them had probably been waiting for processing all night. Starving vampires looked like skeletons on their chairs.

  A police officer emerged. He gave an envelope to a vigilante on the bench, then took that vampire into the back with him. The door shut again.

  Spencer had perked up at the sight of the cop. He sagged again when he disappeared. “Damn.”

  “Give it a few more minutes,” Lincoln said. “They know we’re here.”

  “I don’t know if we’ll be delivering the bounty alive if it takes a few more minutes. He’s gonna bleed to death before anyone sees us at this rate.”

  “He’ll survive. This guy is bleeding a lot because he’s juicy, and that’s because he fed on a lot of victims.” Lincoln jerked Ba-Set Mal’s collar, making him whine. “We’re lucky we caught him, as strong as he must be.”

  Lincoln was generous saying that this was a “we” thing. Spencer’s ability to shapeshift gave him strength, and therefore a huge leg up against men with mundane strength like Lincoln. But he’d been a tradesman before Genesis, an electrician who worked at a warehouse outside of town. So his only physical conditioning was how much time he’d spent on his feet, and he had no combat training at all.

  Brute force could only take you so far when your enemies were as powerful as you.

  No, this catch was entirely Lincoln’s.

  He was going to have to split the bounty with the entire collective anyway. Spencer, Javi, Li, all of them. That was the deal Lincoln had agreed to when moving into the house. He got a few bucks from their catches, and he had to share his too.

  The kelpie slithered low in his chair, head rolling on his shoulders. He looked like he was trying to rub invisible ants off his skin. “Get up,” Lincoln snapped, yanking him back into the seat.

  “You should’ve killed me,” the kelpie moaned.

  “You don’t get out of this that easy. You will face justice.”

  The kelpie’s eyes were welling up with something that looked more like ink than tears. “I couldn’t help it, man. I couldn’t help it. I was so hungry. If I had known—”

  “Stop talking,” Spencer said. He looked nauseated.

  The waiting room door opened again, and all of the bounty hunters looked up.

  This time, an OPA agent emerged, holding a clipboard.

  Agent Swallow had paid out several of Lincoln’s bounties before, so she needed no introduction. She handed her paperwork to Lincoln. “Ba-Set Mal’s identity has been verified. All you have to do is sign.”

  Lincoln signed with his name and the number for his pending vigilante license. He gave her the clipboard.

  Agent Sparrow gave him an envelope of money.

  Lincoln lifted the flap to count the stack. Currency had inflated since Genesis rebooted the world, since supplies were scarce and the economy could only be described as limping at its most generous. A dozen fresh eggs cost hundreds of dollars. Even by those standards, the kelpie’s bounty was handsome.

  The final total made Lincoln’s heart skip a beat.

  “Don’t react,” Spencer whispered.

  Lincoln kept his features smooth as he tucked the envelope inside his jacket.

  “Thanks for a good, clean catch. Have you thought about working for the Office of Preternatural Affairs?” Agent Sparrow asked as she took hold of Ba-Set Mal’s collar.

  “No,” Lincoln replied. End of subject. It wasn’t the first time Agent Sparrow had brought up the idea, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  “The offer stands,” she said.

  “I know.”

  She dragged Ba-Set Mal into the back. The tension didn’t leave the room this time—all the bounty hunters were watching Lincoln now, like the envelope had burned a target into his jacket.

  Lincoln grabbed Spencer’s shoulder and headed for the door.

  “Even a small percentage of that cash is pretty good,” Spencer said in a low, hurried voice. Excitement gleamed in the beads of his eyes. “Do you think it’s going to be enough for you? You must be excited to see your girlfriend again.”

  Lincoln’s gut knotted up. “I told you not to talk about that.” He’d gotten drunk one night and told the collective why he was saving up so much money. They hadn’t let him forget it.

  “But you are gonna get to see her, aren’t you?”

  Lincoln handed Spencer the envelope. “Have Li split that and leave my share on my pillow. Don’t fuck with me. I’ll know if either of you fucked with me.”

  “Chill out, man. Nobody’s gonna steal from you. We’re not like that.”

  “Go,” Lincoln said.

  The shifter left.

  Lincoln had hooked up with Spencer out of practicality, not because they liked each other. Their first meeting had ended in the coyote shifter kicking out Lincoln’s teeth. He wasn’t going to say he hadn’t deserved it, but it also wasn’t grounds for friendship.

  What kept them together was a mutual willingness to kill for pay. If not for the beer, they wouldn’t know anything about each other beyond that.

  It was better that way.

  Spencer had already vanished into Reno’s seamy nighttime when Lincoln reached the street corner. Shifters didn’t need cars to get around; their super speed meant they could cross the entire Truckee Meadows on foot in an hour.

  Lincoln, on the other hand, was confined to the broken public transportation system. It meant he was always lagging behind. Always waiting to catch a bus, hire a car, or walking at a slow, hum
an speed of four miles per hour.

  Tonight, Lincoln decided to hoof it. Reno wasn’t especially dangerous in the dark. The nightmare demon infestation had vanished in Genesis, vampires were commonly indoor hunters, and most shifters were normal people who didn’t want trouble from anyone. They certainly didn’t want trouble from the guy wearing a trench coat on a seventy-degree evening. Lincoln’s shotgun hid nicely under the back, and his foot-long dagger made of falhófnir horn could be concealed by a flip of the lapel.

  Even with the trench coat, Lincoln caught himself shivering. A cold wind picked up when he passed the train trench. It didn’t die down once he hurried to stand behind the bowling stadium, either.

  His foot slipped on the sidewalk. He looked down to see fractal patterns of ice spreading underneath him in shades of neon blue, as if reflecting the lights from a casino on Virginia Street. But he was too far away to catch a reflection that vividly, and the night shouldn’t have been cold enough to frost.

  Distant strains of music reached his ears.

  “Fuck,” Lincoln muttered.

  The music came from inside of himself. It sounded like his ribcage housed an entire orchestra that he could only hear through the vibrating of his teeth. Cellos, violins, maybe even an acoustic guitar. The melody made him think of misty forests. It reminded him of full moons and foggy lakes and crystal caves.

  It reminded him of people that he had been hoping to never speak with again.

  Lincoln glanced around Center. It was a few hours before dawn, and utterly silent. The bars were already closed and barred. The last two people on the sidewalk were rushing toward a pay-by-the-week motel, probably heading to hotel rooms subsidized by the government.

  Once the door swung shut behind them, Lincoln should have been alone.

  Music grew in volume. The sidewalk turned to a sheet of ice under his feet. Icicles formed under a stop sign as fog billowed out of a nearby alleyway.

  Lincoln stepped around the corner, hand on the hilt of his falhófnir dagger. The entire alleyway had come alive with ice and mist, and vibrant turquoise light seeped from between the bricks.

  “What do you want?” Lincoln asked, voice bouncing off of cement and rattling metal trash cans.

  A feminine silhouette appeared in the mist, backlit by cold starlight. Her skirt was split like raven wings, exposing the smooth length of her bare legs wrapped in heeled gladiator sandals. A bustier emphasized her massive breasts, like twin moons below the lovely face of a woman who had thought it was a good idea to tattoo a cobweb beside her left eye. Jewelry dangled from her ears, her hair, her fingernails.

  Ofelia Hawke, the queen of the Winter Court, made the whole world warp around her when she stepped onto Earth. Manipulating a ley line to reach Reno was a staggering show of power—and totally unsurprising from a faerie queen.

  “I want you, Mr. Marshall,” Ofelia said. Her husky voice was seductive. “It’s been a long time since we talked.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve got no business left with you,” Lincoln said.

  “Not with me,” Ofelia agreed. She stepped aside, blowing away the rest of the mist with a sweep of her hand.

  Another woman emerged from behind her, staggering under the weight of an enormous backpack, two tote bags, and a hip pouch.

  “Hello again, Mr. Marshall,” she said cheerfully.

  Sophie Keyes had come to Earth.

  Chapter 3

  For every hundred humans who came back from Genesis as a preternatural, a hundred more hadn’t returned at all. The world had lost hundreds of millions of lives in a blink, and as a result, many businesses that collapsed would never return. Not even a necromancer could resurrect institutions where every last employee had died.

  On the other hand, there were places like the Little Nugget Diner.

  It had always been open for twenty-four hours a day and would always be open for twenty-four hours a day.

  And if you could afford a forty-dollar burger, they still had the greatest greasy diner food in the entire state.

  Lincoln directed the Historian and the Queen of the Winter Court to a wobbling table crammed between two slot machines. An ash tray smoldered in its center, and ketchup dotted the table. It was next to a mirror so Lincoln could keep an eye on Sophie while he ordered dinner for all of them.

  Sophie Keyes in Reno, Nevada.

  He never would have expected it.

  “Four Awful Awfuls,” Lincoln told the cashier. A hundred and sixty dollars even. They weren’t collecting sales tax, and there wasn’t a damn thing to do about it. There was no tax agency to receive reports of fraud anyway.

  The world’s post-Genesis disarray was a mixed bag. Mostly bad—no taxes meant no state services, like cops and hospitals—but there was some good in the chaos too. The same flickering lights that indicated another brownout meant that security cameras couldn’t draw enough power, either. There wouldn’t be any video footage of Sophie in the Little Nugget.

  Sophie Keyes was the one and only Historian. She alone knew a secret history that predated Adam and Eve—or so she claimed. That secret history meant she had spent her life in isolation, protected by a few guardians who had been missing for years. Lincoln’s path had crossed with hers during a job in the Summer Court. Right around the time that Inanna had shown up, in fact. Lincoln’s strange relationship with Inanna was another of Sophie’s secrets now. She was one of the only people who knew that Lincoln carried a Remnant of Inanna’s soul inside of him.

  They’d split again as soon as the Summer Court job was done. Lincoln had wanted to see where their partnership might go, on a personal level, and Sophie hadn’t.

  End of story.

  But there she was, sitting uncomfortably atop the stack of her luggage, out in public for possibly the first time ever. Little Miss Recluse’s eyes were so big that they served as mirrors for the slot machines glimmering around her. She picked a smoldering cigarette butt out of the ash tray and looked at it wonderingly until Ofelia took it away.

  “Fries are almost ready,” said the short order cook leaning against the counter. He wore a grease stained apron that might have once been white, and no hairnet or gloves. No taxes also meant no health department. “Who’re those pretty ladies with you?”

  Lincoln followed the cook’s gaze to the table. The queen was smoking hot—no question of that. But Sophie was almost as pretty as she was smart, naïveté in regard to cigarettes aside. Lincoln had almost convinced himself she wasn’t as pretty as he remembered. Round face, uplifted chin. She was dainty, from her little ears to her delicate wrists and her crossed legs. But she was weird. She wore a swallow-tail jacket with the flaps hanging over her luggage, almost like a pianist sitting on his bench. Her boots were sidhe-made, glimmering faintly in the darkness.

  “Back off,” Lincoln said through his teeth.

  The cook’s face darkened. “Don’t wanna share, amigo?”

  “They’re not mine to share.” Not Ofelia Hawke, and especially not Sophie Keyes. She’d practically run away when Lincoln made the mistake of trying to kiss her. It was the single most humiliating moment of his life since Genesis. And he’d gotten his ass kicked by Javi the first time they met.

  When he returned to the table with Ofelia and Sophie, Lincoln carried two huge baskets on each forearm—four burgers with about four pounds of french fries. It was a lot to spend on one meal, but when a queen visited from another plane of existence, it was worth the splurge.

  “Dig in,” Lincoln said, sitting at the corner of the table.

  Ofelia did. She picked up the burger—she needed both hands—and tilted her head to take a big bite of all the dripping layers. Her mouth was too full to speak, but she gave an approving nod and thumbs up as ketchup slid down her chin. She had concealed her otherworldly clothing using magic, and now she wore tattered denim shorts, cowboy boots, and a crop top that revealed an enormous belt buckle. A little bit of ketchup didn’t do anything to detract from her outrageous curves. Somehow, it ma
de her look even sexier.

  Meanwhile, Sophie had made a fork and knife appear out of her bag and was cutting her burger into quarters.

  “The hell are you doing?” Lincoln asked, already halfway through his first Awful Awful.

  “This is an astonishing amount of food, and modern medical science correlates excessive red meat consumption with developing heart disease,” Sophie said. “Furthermore, women are more susceptible to heart disease than men, so it’s in my best interests to eat a smaller portion than one such as yourself would regard as appropriate.”

  That was another way Sophie was so weird. She was only pretty up until she opened her mouth.

  “I mean to ask, what are you doing here?” Lincoln asked. “I thought you were staying in the Summer Court until one of your guardians found you.”

  “I did plan to stay in my cabin, but I experienced an attack most strange,” Sophie said.

  “Strange is normal in the Middle Worlds.”

  “Though I don’t disagree, I posit that this experience was not gaean in origin,” Sophie said. Gaean was a word indicating preternaturals native to the Earth planes, including the Middle Worlds. “This assault originated from powers unknown. It may sound absurd to you, but I felt as though the world were unfolded and presented to me in its array of jagged pieces so that I could see the entirety of time. The world was a shattered teacup, and I would also shatter if I did not escape. Thus, I escaped. I fled my cabin and the Summer Court.”

  Lincoln’s eyebrows lifted. He’d seen too much strangeness to debate her, but even that sounded weird to him. “All right.”

  Sophie had finished cutting the burger but still didn’t eat. She toyed with her french fries. “I know how it sounds. You must believe me to be insane, and I can hardly blame you for it.”

  “I don’t think you’re insane, but…” Ofelia wiped her chin clean with a napkin. “You might have eaten a funny mushroom. I’ve never seen anything like that in the Middle Worlds. Manipulating time and reality—nobody has powers like that.”