Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, & Magic Page 4

  It was Suzy. Ah, Suzy. She was obviously working because she was wearing professional attire. Tailored black suit, white shirt, black necktie. It was meant to make us all look uniform, but there was no hiding the waspish waist and incredible legs underneath the comfortable cotton. Even with her hair up, you could tell she was beautiful.

  She looked shocked to see me. Her hand was already in her jacket, reaching for her shoulder rig.

  “Oh, Cèsar,” she said. “You idiot.”

  She wasn’t wrong.

  There were people moving behind her. I couldn’t tell who, but she wasn’t alone. That made the decision for me.

  I was out the window, over the side of the fire escape. Flying. Falling.

  As soon as I hit, I was running again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Olive Pit was a mix of old and new, hip and nostalgic. The first floor had wood paneling and leather furniture. The second-floor balcony, on the other hand, was all acrylic—you could look through it to see the classier decorations below.

  When it was running hot on a Friday or Saturday, they would get the spotlights going, and the transparent floor and chandeliers looked insane. But when I reached The Pit after fleeing from my apartment, it was quiet. You didn’t even notice the second floor with the lights off. It just looked like a cigar bar or something. Glistening wood floors, shelves of old books, outdated maps on the walls. The kind of place you could kick back with a martini and a cigar for hours of bullshit with the guys.

  On a Wednesday night—or Thursday morning, take your pick—there was nobody there but the staff. One of the girls was leaning on the handle of her mop like she wouldn’t be able to stand without it. Mascara striped her cheeks.

  I didn’t know her name. I’d only ever paid any attention to Erin. I wished I knew her name, wished I knew her well enough to tell her how sorry I was. Hated seeing girls cry.

  Shaking the rain off my lapels, I headed in.

  The waitress noticed that I was approaching and fixed a polite smile to her face. “We’re closing.” Didn’t even sound like she’d been crying. Good at covering up.

  “I know. I’m here to talk with you.”

  Her cheeks went pale. She ran a hand over the curls trimmed short to her scalp. “Is this about Erin?” She knew what was up. I probably wasn’t the first one here to talk about her. Luckily, she didn’t recognize me.

  “Did you know her well?” I asked, extracting one of the Steno pads from my jacket. The most recent one was only half filled. I found the line that said “Black Jack got nailed,” skipped to the next blank page, and wrote “The Olive Pit” at the top.

  “Guess so,” she said. She rested her cheek on her hands, wrapped around the mop, and gave me a scrutinizing look. Like she was trying to decide if she recognized me.

  “Erin was in trouble. She came in last night with a black eye.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yeah, right eye.” I pointed at mine to illustrate. “Had you seen her with signs of abuse before?”

  “No, she wasn’t abused. Not Erin. She’s not that kind of woman.” Her throat worked as she swallowed. “She wasn’t that kind of woman.”

  “What kind of woman was she?”

  “Smart. She always knew what she wanted and stood up for it. She worked hard. She took all the extra shifts without complaining.”

  Yeah, Erin had looked like a smart girl to me. I believed it. And I wrote that down, too. It felt important to make note of what was good about her, the things that had marked her as special when she had still been breathing. “Was she hard up for money?”

  “I guess so, but who isn’t these days?” The waitress pointed at the bar with her mop handle. The half-light from the lamps highlighted red on her high cheekbones, the bare curves of her shoulders. “Nobody worked the bar like she did. She was very dedicated to her job, and she got tipped like nobody else because she was such a delight to spend time with. If she was here just for the money, then she faked it well.”

  “So you don’t think that she was abused,” I said.

  “Not a chance. She wouldn’t have put up with it.”

  “Did you ever spend time together outside of work?”

  “I work three jobs, brother,” the waitress said. “The only thing I see outside of work is my pillow.”

  I laughed at that. It felt good to laugh. Made my face ache a little, but the weight in my chest lightened a few ounces.

  I only realized that the front door had opened again because I could hear the patter of rain on the sidewalk outside. Then the waitress’s eyes focused behind me. She stepped back, propped her mop against the bar, disappeared into the kitchen. She was fast. I’d barely reached for her and opened my mouth to ask her to stop before she was gone.

  And then something hard pressed into the small of my back.

  “Freeze, a-hole,” said a woman behind me. “Your nuts are mine.”

  The moment of paralyzing fear instantly melted away. There was only one woman that obsessed with anything below my belt, and unfortunately all she wanted to do was chew it up and spit it out.

  “Suzy,” I sighed. She let me turn around. She didn’t have a gun—she had jammed the hilt of a folding knife into my back. I lifted my hands to my shoulders in a gesture of surrender and arched my eyebrows in a gesture of, Are you kidding me?

  Even if she was serious, there was nothing intimidating about a five-foot-tall woman. My reach was at least twice hers. I could have knocked her out before she got close enough to stab me. Not that I would have ever knocked Suzy out, mind you—but I could have.

  I liked to think that we were friends. She knew I could overpower her. She also knew I wouldn’t.

  Suzy rolled her eyes and flicked her knife shut. “You’re a dumbass.”

  “About so many things, yeah, but why now?”

  “Because I found you here. Here, Cèsar? Really? You might as well walk through the front doors of the Union offices with a sign that says ‘I’m guilty’ taped to your shirt.”

  “You followed me,” I guessed.

  “No, you’re pretty slick on the streets. We lost you two blocks north of your apartment. But I know you. I know what you’re doing. It wasn’t hard to guess you’d come here looking for answers.”

  “And yet you came alone.”

  “Guess I’m a dumbass too.” She shrugged. “You’re trying to prove your innocence, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I am. But I don’t need to prove anything to you, right? You know that I didn’t kill Erin Karwell.” It seemed ridiculous that I even had to say it. Suzy should have known it. Everyone should’ve known.

  There was sympathy in her big brown eyes. “Then who’s the culprit?”

  “That’s the problem—I don’t know. I don’t even remember leaving the bar last night. I guess I drank too much, and then I woke up to find everything like…well, you saw it.”

  Suzy’s lips pinched into a thin line. Was she thinking that meant I was guilty?

  “Look, Suze, there’s no way I did it, and you know it,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “let’s finish what you’re here to do.”

  She yanked the badge off of her belt and marched for the door to the kitchen. I was only a few steps behind her.

  There were two women in back. They were standing beside the door to one of those big walk-in freezers. The schedule was on the wall behind them—including Erin’s name signed with a smiley heart—and shelves of alcohol to the left.

  The waitress that I’d spoken to earlier looked alarmed to see me. Her body language was totally different, like a hamster about to bolt for cover. She was hiding behind her coworker even though the second waitress was six inches shorter.

  Suzy brandished her badge. “Agent Takeuchi, Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “I know who you are,” said the waitress in front. “You come here all the time with all of those guys.” She didn’t sound fond of our coworkers. Bet it was because government employees were t
oo poor to tip well.

  “What’s your name, ma’am?” Suzy asked.

  “Thandy Cannon. Second shift manager.” She waved over her shoulder at the other woman. “This is Ladasha.”

  “Okay, Thandy and Ladasha. I’m investigating the murder of one of your coworkers—Erin Karwell. I need anything you can give me. Whom she might have talked to last night, whom she was dating, friends and family. People with a grudge.”

  “Oh yeah?” Thandy asked with a sneer. “You need to know who she was dating, do you?”

  “This isn’t girl talk or gossip,” Suzy said. “This is an official investigation.”

  “Is that why you’re dragging her boyfriend around?”

  It took me a second to realize that Thandy was talking about me.

  Suzy shot me a questioning look and I shook my head. No way. I was not dating Erin. Of course, that had been despite my best efforts, but Suzy didn’t need to know how roundly Erin had turned me down. My pride was already having a terrible day.

  “You recognize this man?” Suzy asked, jerking a thumb at me.

  “Hell yeah I do,” said Thandy. “That’s the asshole that yelled at Erin for twenty minutes before dragging her out of here last night. That’s the guy who killed her.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Suzy was good at her job in a different way than I was. She was a witch, too, a jack of all trades. But that wasn’t what made her effective. It was the fact she would do anything to clean up a mess.

  Today, that “anything” was bribery.

  She was smooth. She made a few benjamins appear from her wallet and Thandy and Ladasha promised not to talk about what they’d seen, quick as you please.

  That money made the waitresses sign the standard nondisclosure agreement. The paper flashed with magic when Suzy tucked it back in her jacket. Thandy and Ladasha wouldn’t be able to say a thing about seeing me leave with Erin, even if they wanted to—the curse would choke them when they tried to speak. A pretty piece of magic from the OPA’s very best witches.

  I was still numb with anger when Suzy took me home. I didn’t even realize she’d taken me back to her place until we were already there.

  “You shouldn’t,” I said as she parked in front of her townhouse. “You’ll get in trouble if you’re seen with me.”

  She punched the remote and her garage door lifted. “What else are you going to do if I don’t give you somewhere to sleep, huh? Go to your apartment and curl up in bed, wait for someone to find you? Use your ID to check in at a strip motel?”

  “I’m not that stupid.”

  “You could have had me fooled.” She pulled into the garage. “Get your ass inside, Hawke.”

  Her townhouse was a cozy two-story wedged between a pair of identical units. The HOA kept a tight grip on exterior decorations, so from the outside, there was no telling them apart. She had the same blinds that the others did. Her lawn was maintained by the same service. Only difference was, her front door was painted bright blue. And once you walked through that door, the whole world changed.

  Suzy’s townhouse was bigger on the inside—more like a Victorian mansion than a barebones townhouse. I’d measured it inside and outside once. One living room wall to the other was sixty feet across. But if you stepped out and measured the space between her neighboring townhouses, it was barely thirty feet wide. Don’t ask where that extra square footage came from. I was pretty sure even Suzy didn’t know how it worked.

  She packed that extra space with enough ingredients and crystals to supply three covens, making her townhouse the magical equivalent of a hurricane. The amount of mystical energy swirling in her house was even crazier than Suzy herself.

  Technically, dimensional distortions were against the law. Not to mention that she probably would have given the HOA board an embolism if they realized what she was doing to the neighborhood’s metaphysics. Luckily for Suzy, the HOA board didn’t include any witches—but the OPA did. We caught her as soon as she finished casting the spell. Her wards weren’t good enough to hide what she’d done from us.

  But this was Suzy. An agent had shown up to arrest her and she’d ended up with a job offer instead.

  She’d been hired a month after me. We had shared a cubicle ever since. And she still had her crazy-ass townhouse two years later.

  The room flexed around me as I stepped through her doorway. I had to duck under dried herbs and step over a cat to get inside. “Bad kitty,” Suzy said, scooping up her cat in one arm before he could escape between my legs. He had a big gold bell hanging from his neck that glinted red out the corner of my eye. Some kind of protection spell.

  “New familiar?” I didn’t recognize this particular cat. Not that I’d been to Suzy’s place since she’d bought new furniture last year. I’d helped her carry some couches upstairs as a favor. When you were as big as I was, you were always the first one to get called when someone needed heavy crap moved.

  “Witches of my ilk don’t have familiars. We have sacrifices. Cat is not one of them.”

  “Cat? That’s his name?”

  “I’m not a poetic soul,” she said, tossing her jacket on the hook, fluffing out her hair, and heading into the living room.

  Her living room was filled with smoke from smoldering incense cones. Every shelf was covered in crystals and she had herbs drying in every window. There was a permanent altar where most people would have a TV. Her assortment of deity figures could put a museum to shame—Horned God and Mother Goddess, a weeping Buddha, a crucifix with a tiny Jesus in the middle. Ready for any ritual at any time.

  The smell of rose and jasmine made me sneeze twice, hard. It wasn’t just the incense. I was sensitive to magical energy—the stronger the active spell, the stronger my allergy attack. It was pretty much the most embarrassing quirk for a witch to have.

  “I’m gonna open a window,” I said, scrubbing my nose furiously.

  “Do it and die.” She breezed past me and climbed the stairs. “The couch is yours for the night, but we’ll need to figure out what you’re doing tomorrow.”

  “Proving my innocence,” I called up after her. It was hard to work up conviction when another sneezing fit caught me.

  I eyeballed her windows, trying to decide which I could crack without her noticing, and realized that one of them was covered in plywood. Broken?

  I didn’t even see the clothing hurtling at me from the top of the stairs until I’d been smacked in the face. I caught them on my chest, picked them apart. They were a t-shirt and sweats that looked awfully familiar. Suzy yelled down at me, “I got those out of your locker at work. Don’t sit on my couch with your muddy clothes.”

  I changed in the downstairs bathroom with Cat’s cold, appraising gaze behind me in the mirror. The bathroom mirror was shattered on the right side. It fragmented my face into five frowning sections. I wasn’t looking good—I could have passed for something dredged out of Helltown.

  I tossed my clothes over an empty towel rack to dry then splashed water on my face and the back of my neck.

  Even Suzy’s bathroom was filled with crystals and knickknacks. A row of porcelain cats with right paws uplifted filled the shelf across from her toilet. If Cat weren’t so damn furry, he’d be indistinguishable from his china counterparts.

  Once I was as clean I was going to get, I dropped onto Suzy’s living room couch. I felt like I could have passed out the instant I settled onto the beaten furniture. The alcohol hangover had faded hours ago, but I had a shock hangover, too. The throbbing ache of a life turned upside down. Wasn’t that long ago that I’d squirmed out a police station window.

  Suzy’s voice drifted downstairs. “There’s leftover chicken in the refrigerator if you’re hungry.”

  Sounded good to me, but the fridge was around the corner about ten feet away, and it sounded like too much work. I kicked my feet up and sank against the arm of the sofa.

  The pipes in the walls groaned as the shower started.

  My eyes traveled to the folder I
had dropped on Suzy’s coffee table. The red tab labeled “Isobel Stonecrow” and a ten-digit code specific to her case. I pulled it into my lap, flipped open the cover, and skimmed the details again.

  This Stonecrow was some kind of witch who could talk to spirits. It was a rare talent, but not impossible. We used to have a witch on retainer at the OPA that did something like that. He would touch skulls and tell you what the victim was thinking before she died. Useful guy to have around. Made it real easy to close cases that the mundane police thought had gone cold.

  He’d killed himself last year. We hadn’t found another witch that could talk to the dead since then.

  But this Isobel Stonecrow, she might be able to do the same thing.

  She might be able to ask Erin who killed her.

  Stonecrow’s case file was a hell of a lot more interesting with that thought on the tip of my brain. I started reading it again with new eyes.

  Three different families had filed complaints about her this year. One in Long Beach, one up near Sacramento, another down in San Jose. She sure got around. Wonder why she was traveling all over the state like that. Trying to keep us off her tail?

  Those complaints hadn’t inspired this investigation. The last of those had come in three months ago, and we usually acted on real problems faster than that. If it wasn’t a problem now, it wasn’t a problem at all.

  But the overview letter said that they wanted Stonecrow nailed within the week, and the budget set out for grabbing her was a lot more than we usually give one obnoxious witch.

  That told me two things: first, that Stonecrow must have pissed someone off at the OPA, and second, that I wouldn’t be the only one looking for her. This wasn’t a case that was going to wait until I get back. They would have already given it to one of the other guys. Who knows? Maybe they were already on her trail tonight.

  Not good.

  I heard Suzy come down the stairs as I studied the files. Her shadow slid over me, doubled and tripled in size by all the candlelight. Her silhouette was almost as big as her personality. “Did you warm up the chicken?” she asked as she stepped into the kitchen. I smelled her body wash as she passed. She had used peach soap. Smelled feminine, like soft skin and curves.