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

  Don’t ask me how she ever managed to get any business with vaguely worded messages like that, but I know that she did pretty well for herself. We’d only crossed paths because Fritz had hired her to talk to his late wife in the first place. Or maybe she’d been talking to his grandfather. They kept changing the story on me, and I didn’t know which one was true.

  I peered over the walls of the cubicle farm to make sure Aniruddha was nowhere in sight. Then I called the number on the ad.

  A woman picked up on the third ring.

  “Hello?” Her voice was musical and pleasant. Not the way I’d expected husky, melodramatic Isobel to sound on the phone.

  “Izzy?” I ventured.

  “Who’s Izzy? Oh. Isobel. No. I mean, yes!” The girl’s voice dropped to a mysterious undertone. “You’ve reached the shaman named Isobel Stonecrow. How may we lay your troubles to rest?”

  I glanced at the computer monitor to make sure that I’d called the right number. “Uh…who are you?”

  “I’m blessed to be in training with the shaman.”

  Jesus, Isobel. She’d picked up a fucking intern. “Look, can I just talk to Isobel? Tell her it’s Cèsar.”

  “We don’t interrupt the mystical vibrations surrounding Shaman Stonecrow until the appropriate phase of the moon. Phone calls are incredibly disruptive to her gods-granted powers. But I’d be happy to take a message for you.”

  What bullshit. Isobel was about as attuned to the phase of the moon as my desktop computer.

  My magic was pretty traditional, hooked into the Earth and sky and seasons. It was summer—bad time to brew strength potions. The moon was waning, too, which meant I hadn’t been able to replenish my supplies in over a week. I knew moon cycles. It was a big part of my witchcraft.

  Isobel had no clue what the moon did to magic. Her talent was more like a psychic power. It was definitely not gods-granted and did not require meditation.

  She didn’t need anything to raise the dead but a dead body.

  I couldn’t tell if Ms. Perky knew any of that or was just feeding me a line, so I said, “Just tell Isobel that it’s Cèsar.”

  A long pause. “I don’t know where she is.”

  “She’s missing?” I couldn’t keep the hard edge out of my voice.

  “No, on the road to meet a client. I couldn’t leave town for this one. I’d miss too many classes.” Ms. Perky had turned to Ms. Sulky just like that. “I don’t know where she arranged to meet this guy.”

  “But she’s on the road. So she’s really in San Francisco?”

  “I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be talking to you,” she said.

  Fuck me. “No, wait—”

  “Don’t call me back. I’ll have the shaman call you.”

  The phone was already shuffling, making those telltale “I’m going to hang up on you” noises. I raised my voice, as if that would help. “It’s urgent that she—”

  And the line went dead.

  San Francisco was a good seven hours north of the OPA offices in Los Angeles, and there was no way my beater of a Camry was going to make the trip. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d changed the oil. My windshield was more cracks than glass. The tires were so bald that Mr. Clean would have been envious to see them.

  Working for the government isn’t a rich or glamorous lifestyle, but hey, at least I had great health benefits. Who needs a sexy car when you’ve got sexy teeth?

  I abandoned my car in the parking lot and requested use of one of the company SUVs from the motor pool instead. Apparently, they also had people on staff this weekend. My request was approved immediately.

  Grabbing the case file, I headed down to the garage.

  Seven hours of driving on three hours of sleep. It was going to suck, but at least Isobel would be waiting somewhere at the end. One of the last times I’d seen her, she’d left me with a pretty memorable kiss and the promise of a lot more than that to come.

  Considering I hadn’t heard from her for months, I was dealing with some pretty mixed signals here. Searing kisses followed by chilly silence.

  I never would have wished for an excuse to talk to Isobel—especially since the only good excuse was someone dying—but since I had one, I was going to take advantage of it.

  The thought carried me down three flights of stairs, across the bridge to the parking garage, and down a few more floors.

  Where a cherry-red Bugatti was waiting for me.

  The driver’s side window rolled down and Director Fritz Friederling peered at me over the frames of his sunglasses. “I intercepted your request for a car. Need a ride?”

  Checking my watch, I found that it was still, in fact, Saturday the fourteenth, just after lunchtime. I could tell the date because of the fancy-ass timepiece that Fritz had given me for my birthday two weeks earlier. It had the moon phase and everything.

  There definitely hadn’t been a time warp back to Friday or ahead to Monday.

  “Does everyone here work on Saturdays?” I asked.

  “Just the lucky ones. Get in.” The doors clicked as they unlocked.

  “I’m headed on a research trip,” I said. “You probably don’t want to come along.” Normally, I would have been happy to see him. Fritz and I had been swapping movie recommendations. I’d introduced him to anime; he’d gotten me started on silent movies, and now I was hooked on Buster Keaton.

  But anytime I was hoping to see Isobel was a time that I was also hoping not to run into Fritz.

  He didn’t look impressed by my attempt to divert him. “Now, Agent Hawke.”

  I slipped into the passenger seat and was hugged by cool leather. The dashboard looked like it belonged on an alien spacecraft, although the effect was kind of blown by the cacophony of nineties music coming from the speakers.

  He might have been my boss, but I still couldn’t help but give him a Look. The kind of Look that said, “You’re a billionaire with a passion for silent movies and aggressive stock investments, yet you listen to jock jams in the car?”

  He gave me a responding Look that was like, “Don’t forget that I gave you this job and saved your life. I can listen to whatever I want.”

  And my Look was conciliatory, because he was right.

  Kind of a dick move to go all judgmental on someone who’d done as much for me as Fritz had.

  We have really meaningful Looks.

  Fritz pushed his sunglasses back up and put the car into gear. The silent conversation was over. “You were going to look for the necrocog, weren’t you?”

  “So you’ve been talking to Suzy.”

  “She wanted permission to restrict forensics access to the victim until Belle got a look at him.”

  “Belle” was what Fritz called Isobel. Obviously. Because endearing nicknames between an OPA director and his secret contractor were normal. Maybe they were when that director and contractor used to date, and the contractor had refused the director’s marriage proposal yet continued to work for him anyway.

  Like I said, totally normal.

  Also a pretty compelling reason not to take Fritz to San Francisco with me. Talk about a cockblock.

  But it seemed like I wasn’t the one taking Fritz anywhere. He was taking me. He slipped through Los Angeles traffic with all the caution of a guy whose team of lawyers can make speeding tickets vanish as easily as fanning away a fart.

  Did I mention that Fritz is rich? He is “holy fuck” levels of rich. He hadn’t bought his spaceship of a sports sedan on a government paycheck. More like a legacy of mining money and smart investments. He earns more breathing in his sleep than I will in my lifetime.

  He also wasn’t driving northward.

  “This isn’t the right way,” I said.

  “I’m taking you to the morgue to meet Suzy.”

  “We’ve got a morgue on the OPA campus.”

  “I didn’t want to catch Isobel on the security cameras,” Fritz said. “We’ve borrowed a funeral home and sent the body on a detour. After I drop you of
f, I’ll pick up Belle and bring her back with me.”

  “But she’s missing—possibly somewhere in the Bay Area. I was going to get to San Francisco and then cast a tracking spell.”

  “I know where she is. I’ve already warned her I’m coming,” Fritz said.

  Right. He was a former client. Of course he could contact her.

  Annoyance pricked at me. Why did he get her direct line while I had to deal with Craigslist and breathy interns?

  At least I wasn’t going to have to listen to jock jams all the way to San Francisco.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JAY BRANDON’S BODY LOOKED so much worse in the sterile lighting of the morgue.

  We had borrowed the Golden Fields Funeral Home for this conversation because it was conveniently close to the OPA campus—just about two blocks west. They had great lighting in their embalming room. I could see every little detail of Jay Brandon’s severed nose and lips, not to mention all the other damage.

  The cutting hadn’t been limited to his face and nose; the murderer had also cut his heart out of his chest by going under the ribs, too.

  Demons are creative bastards.

  The room itself was decorated with white and red tile on the walls and stainless steel everything. The vibrant, high-contrast colors kind of made me think of the way a fifties diner might be decorated, which made me think of burgers and fries, which made me feel pretty sick.

  Greasy food was not a pleasant thought while staring at a mutilated body.

  I forced myself to look away from him. The alternatives weren’t much better. Jars of embalming fluid were lined up along the tiled walls right next to the pump that filled the veins of cadavers with plastic junk to make them look slightly less dead.

  The fluids were just as bright as the walls themselves. Some were purple, others were pink-tinted, one was clear, and the most disturbing of them was a sort of bodily fluid-reminiscent orange. All the colors together made me think of a soda fountain.

  I really needed to stop thinking about food around the victim.

  “Poor bastard,” Suzy muttered, pulling on a pair of fresh gloves. “What a way to go.”

  “How did he…uh…go?” I asked. I was pretty certain that I didn’t want to know the answer to that question, but it seemed like the thing to ask. “Was it the heart or the…” I pointed at my own throat to indicate the slit under his chin.

  “Cause of death was definitely the throat injury. But they verified that all of the mutilation was inflicted before he died—including the removal of the heart. It must have gone fast.” She grimaced. “I swept the scene for spell residue and found nothing. Whatever happened on Cherry Tree Lane was violent, but not magicked.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “I know. Poor guy.”

  Being killed without magic was far worse than the alternative. Ritual sacrifice was often so intoxicating to the victim that they didn’t feel anything. At other times, the witches responsible would drug the lucky sacrificee so that they wouldn’t be able to fight back.

  At least, that was what the handbook for aspides said about ritual sacrifice.

  Yes, the test I was studying for apparently had questions about magical murder. Fun.

  “No magic narrows down our list of possible perpetrators, though,” I said.

  Suzy snorted. “Sure. Instead of being one of the thousands of witches within Los Angeles city limits, it’s one of the thousands of demons. Now we just have to find which one.”

  A knocking at the door. It swung open and Director Fritz Friederling stepped in. “She’s here.”

  Isobel Stonecrow entered behind him.

  If the morgue was a fifties diner, Isobel was the pinup model on the chef’s calendar in the kitchen. The most morbid pinup girl I’d ever seen.

  Her glossy brown hair was twisted up into a half-up, half-down style held in place by clips of animal bone. Judging by the fact that she was wearing Fritz’s suit jacket over a loincloth of coyote fur, she was probably topless underneath—her idea of what a death shaman should wear.

  Fritz had pulled her off the job to help us out.

  When she stepped into the room, the jacket gapped a few inches, letting me glimpse her beaded necklaces and the curve of breasts underneath.

  Yep, topless.

  There’s something about hips like hers that render me stupid. Doesn’t matter that I’ve seen her a few dozen times by now. The amount of meat on this woman is always shocking in the most pleasant way possible, and it redirects all my blood flow from the brain in my skull to the less useful brain below the belt. Add in a glimpse of her breasts…

  It was a good thing I had Suzy to do all the thinking about the case, because I was going to be pretty useless around her.

  “Hello,” Isobel said to Suzy, all cool courtesy. Her tone heated when she addressed me. “And to you, too, Cèsar.”

  Somehow I managed to say, “Hey.” Articulate as ever.

  Cèsar Hawke: ladies’ man, melter of loins, consummate poet.

  I caught Suzy rolling her eyes when she thought my back was turned.

  “Who is this guy?” Isobel’s eyes roved over the body, lingering on his facial wounds, the gaping hole under his ribs. Then she fixed her gaze on the floor, eyebrows knitted.

  Unlike Suzy, she wasn’t comfortable with the mutilation. She usually worked with cadavers that were six feet deep. She didn’t have to see the blood and bone.

  Must have sucked to be a death witch who wasn’t comfortable around the dead.

  “His name is Jay Brandon,” I said. “We found him in—”

  “Why don’t you tell us?” Suzy interrupted. “You’re the necrocognitive.”

  Isobel frowned. “I need his name to summon him, at least.”

  “And now you’ve got it.”

  “Cool it, Agent Takeuchi.” Fritz’s BlackBerry buzzed in his pocket. He checked the screen and then went for the door. “We don’t have the funeral home for long. Make this fast, Belle.” He slipped into the hallway to answer his phone call.

  “Need anything?” I asked Isobel. “Latex gloves? Drink of water? Actual clothing?”

  She didn’t seem to hear me. She was staring at his empty chest, the hard lines of muscle smeared with blood, the concave plane of his stomach.

  Suzy stepped back next to me, leaning on the counter at my side.

  “Here we go,” she said with a smirk.

  I felt the magic rising a heartbeat later. It filled the room like an invisible tide, climbing up my thighs, clutching my chest in its grip until it became hard to breathe. The back of my throat itched.

  Isobel stretched her hands over the body, palms down and fingers spread. Most witches needed a ritual in order to build power for their craft. Not Isobel. She didn’t need circles, chanting, or herbs. All she needed was a name.

  “Jay Brandon,” Isobel intoned, “rise up and speak to me.”

  Magic surged. I sneezed into my sleeve.

  Suzy was already holding a tissue up for me.

  “Thanks.” Blowing my nose didn’t stop the itching. I’d always been kind of allergic to magic, but it wasn’t because of anything in my sinuses. It was an uncontrollable reflex.

  Great quirk for a witch to have.

  The tension reached its apex, and I gripped the counter behind me hard to keep standing. My head was spinning. I couldn’t seem to inhale anymore—my lungs felt like they were filled with fluid.

  But just as my vision began to darken, the energy eased. Instead of passing out, I sneezed again.

  Twice.

  “Come on, Jay,” Isobel said. “Come here.”

  Silver mist lifted from the cadaver’s dull skin. What looked like a ghost sat up from Jay Brandon’s body, marked by none of the wounds that had killed him. He also had no clothes, no hair, no real focus in his eyes. He looked like a creepy adult-fetus-ghost-thing.

  But it wasn’t really a ghost. It was only an imprint of who Jay had been, a memory brought to life by the energy that remai
ned postmortem. But it could talk and think like Jay, and that was what mattered.

  “Hello, Jay,” Suzy said pleasantly. “How are you doing?”

  I wiped my watering eyes clear in time to see his semi-transparent head swivel toward her. His face was intact. His nose was hooked, his lips kind of thick for a dude. I pulled my Steno pad from the inside pocket of my jacket, flipped it open to the first blank page, and started sketching.

  When the victim responded, it was through Isobel’s lips. His mouth moved but she did all the talking.

  “I’m good,” Isobel said softly. Jay’s ghostly image threw his legs over the side of the table and dropped to the floor. “Thanks for asking.”

  Standing, the victim was about an inch shorter than me, and a pretty skinny guy. Well-built, though. What we called “otter mode” at the gym. The kind of guy who got all his exercise from swimming, jogging, and other hard cardio.

  “Tell us what happened to you,” I said.

  “Are you talking about what happened at the Saint Benjamin Soup Kitchen?” Jay asked through Isobel’s mouth. “Because I already told the cops I didn’t want to press charges. The whole point of volunteering is working with indigents, and sometimes they get a little rough. That’s how it goes.”

  I stopped sketching long enough to write the name down: “Saint Benjamin Soup Kitchen.” I’d never heard of it. Then again, I barely had enough free time to keep up on all the shows I recorded on my DVR, much less feed the homeless.

  “What do you remember from this morning at your mother’s house?” Suzy asked.

  “I was watering her plants,” he said.

  We waited for him to continue speaking, but that was it. He’d been watering her plants. “And then?” Suzy prompted.

  “I took a nap on her couch.”

  Suzy stepped up to the misty version of Jay Brandon, who didn’t seem to notice his own body a few inches behind him. “Okay. When did you get to LA, Jay?”

  “Thursday night.”

  “Did you drive? Fly? What?”

  “I drove,” he said. “I live up in Lone Pine. Small town. Crummy airport. I always drive.”