The Road to Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Thriller (Preternatural Affairs Book 9) Read online

  “I can’t believe you,” Isobel said. “The fact you won’t even consider—”

  “I’ve long considered it,” Fritz said quietly. “I already ruled it out.”

  She looked furious. And she looked even more furious when she realized she no longer had her husband’s attention. “What are you looking at?” she demanded, turning to glance over her shoulder.

  Isobel relaxed at the sight of Cèsar.

  Fritz and Isobel fought frequently, but they seldom fought in front of Cèsar. His appearance was like a white flag waving between them.

  “This conversation isn’t done,” Isobel warned Fritz.

  He had kissed her then, trying to express in physical language what could not be said in words. Isobel could have set the mansion on fire, taking his life and his legacy down to ash, and he still would have loved her more than any mortal man should have been able to love a woman.

  Isobel’s responding kiss communicated similar messages. She was angry with him that night. She might have even hated him. Yet she clung to his shirt, fingers curling in his collar, hips pressed against hips. She breathed desperation into his mouth.

  They broke away when Cèsar gamboled to their sides.

  “Fritz!” Cèsar’s grin was infectious. “And Izzy! Hey! You guys didn’t tell me you’d be back from DC today!”

  “I got back early. But it’s still late, and I’m tired,” Isobel said. She patted Cèsar’s cheek. “Good to see you.” And she drifted away to sleep.

  Cèsar all but broke his neck to watch her exit. Fritz could hardly blame him. Fritz had memorized every single one of Isobel’s curves, from her throat to her ankles, yet he was still transfixed by her beauty.

  Only when Isobel vanished into the manor could the men greet each other.

  “Friederling,” Cèsar said with a serious tone to contrast his excited expression. His posture was similar to that of a Golden Retriever puppy who had realized that Fritz was putting on shoes and grabbing a leash.

  “Hawke,” Fritz said. “You’ll forgive me if I’m—”

  “Shut up and come here.” Cèsar embraced him, engulfing Fritz in the stench of camphor, sage, and lemon. It was a one-armed hug, as brief as hugs between men tended to be, but the effect on Fritz was akin to a muscle relaxer.

  “Six weeks,” Fritz said. He patted Cèsar’s back, resisting the urge to crawl into his jacket with him. “That seems to be too long a separation.”

  It was the time in the hug where he should have let go and stepped back, but Cèsar’s hand lingered on Fritz’s shoulder blade. It was a point of warmth in a very cold, very dark world.

  “Izzy looked pissed. What’d you do in Washington to get her that angry? Were you getting Oreos banned on the federal level?” Cèsar asked.

  “I haven’t been in Washington, and this week has been among the worst of my life,” Fritz said with a degree of honesty that was probably illegal in anyone with Friederling blood.

  Cèsar’s face collapsed into a look of worry. “Fuck, you okay?”

  “No. I’m not.” Fritz glanced at his watch. It was late enough that the hour was threatening to turn into morning rather than evening. Yet he still didn’t want to sleep. “Come with me?”

  “Fuck yeah,” Cèsar said with too much enthusiasm for one in the morning. Fritz had been suffering separation sickness for weeks. He could easily imagine what Cèsar was feeling, because it was equally awful for both of them.

  Fritz registered unusual fatigue after the first week away from Cèsar. He could ordinarily survive on three hours of sleep; away from his aspis, he began to suffer a cognitive decline if he didn’t sleep at least six.

  The aches set in on the second week. Even the best of his magically enhanced prostheses forced him to shift his weight, his gait. Without his aspis, he became incapable of walking without a cane after a month.

  Fritz had been gone for almost six weeks, and he’d stopped trying to inventory the symptoms of his separation. He assumed it would get much worse from there.

  Being away from Cèsar made Fritz feel like he was drowning in an endless ocean.

  When he got home, Fritz’s head broke through the surface for his first lungfuls of air. He breathed and feasted and slept for hours, all in the first instant that he embraced his aspis.

  Tonight, looking up at Cèsar’s grin, national politics and apocalypse felt distant, unimportant. Fritz wondered why he ever left.

  They were on the roof of the garage a few minutes later. Fritz had a lot of cars, so the garage was rather large, and multi-tiered. The flat portion between air-conditioning units was perfect for a private putting green, giving him adequate space to drive balls across the gardens.

  Before following Fritz upstairs, Cèsar made himself a coke with lime—a virgin drink—and poured a staggeringly large snifter of staggeringly expensive bourbon for Fritz. “Nice night,” Cèsar said, relaxing on the park bench set beside the fake-grass green. His head tipped back to stare up at a sky that was beginning to cloud over, obscuring the stars.

  “It’s a foul night,” Fritz said. “That’s smoke.”

  “Well I think it’s nice.” Cèsar probably meant it. He thought a great many things were nice, including spending his weekends reading nerdy books and destroying expensive stockpots to make potions. “If you haven’t been in DC, whereabouts you been?”

  “Las Vegas,” Fritz said. He smacked another golf ball off the roof of the garage. It vanished into the velvet black of nighttime.

  Sometimes strong emotions could push through the bond, even when it wasn’t activated. Cèsar’s emotions weren’t pushing through the bond yet. But Fritz definitely felt something nudging.

  After a conspicuous silence, Cèsar said, “Oh.” And then he followed it up with a too-casual, “Heard it’s bad there.”

  “Bad” seemed like a puerile word to use for the situation.

  Demons had been attacking the city in hordes. It was an incredible volume of violence and even the OPA was unequipped to handle it.

  A group of demons known as the Fates had been sighted in the area. They had been killing freely. Many an agent had been lost, and there was nothing Fritz could have done to save them. Somehow, that was more frustrating than killing them through incompetency.

  Yet as Fritz stood on the roof of the garage, whapping golf balls off of his fake-grass green, it wasn’t the lost agents that he was worried about.

  “You’re feeling like shit,” Cèsar observed, his eyes gone foggy. Fritz had drunk half a forty of bourbon. He was drunk. That meant his aspis was getting quite drunk too. And as Cèsar became drunker, he became increasingly attenuated to Fritz’s mood. “But…it’s not Vegas you’re upset about?”

  “No, I’m upset about Vegas.” Fritz would have sounded like a terrible person if he admitted that Las Vegas’s plight was low on his list of concerns.

  “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s eating you, Fritzy?”

  Fritz had been about to hit another golf ball. He let his driver drop. “What did you just say?”

  “What, your mistresses can call you Fritzy and I can’t?”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s exactly how that works.”

  “Okay, Friederling. Tell me what’s actually wrong or else I’ll just chase Isobel back to the master bedroom and make her tell me.”

  Fritz took a hand off the golf club long enough to pull a small paperback out of the inside of his jacket. He tossed it to Cèsar.

  “I read Lolita in college,” Cèsar said. “It’s creepy, but it’s fiction, dude.”

  “Page sixty.”

  Cèsar opened it to page sixty. As soon as he broke the spine, a Purple Heart slid into his lap. “Where’d this come from?” he asked, lifting it to dangle between forefinger and thumb. “You were in the military?”

  “My father was, briefly,” Fritz said. “He just died.”

  He sent another golf ball into oblivion.

  Cèsar’s face went slack. “God, I’m so sorry.”

  “We
weren’t close.” He took Lolita and the Purple Heart back.

  “But he’s your dad,” Cèsar said.

  That was true. Werner Friederling had implanted his seed within the womb of Fritz’s mother, so they were biologically bound.

  By all means, Fritz should have been upset that his father had shuffled off this mortal coil. He should have been grieving the things he’d never done with his dad. Like throwing a baseball around on lazy weekends, learning how to fix cars, or looking one another in the eye.

  “He told me that when he died, he’d send me the Purple Heart as a reminder of what he taught me,” Fritz said.

  “Why Lolita?” Cèsar asked.

  “It’s a book with an unreliable narrator. The perspective character is a pedophile who paints himself as sympathetic, seduced by a child, and the reader can’t believe anything that he says.” Fritz slid the book into his jacket again. “The last time I spoke to my father, we discussed that book.”

  “So the Purple Heart in that book means something to you?”

  Fritz swallowed down the crimson surge of anger. “No.” It didn’t mean anything he was willing to explain. “However, my father’s death means that I’m the heir to the Friederling legacy.”

  “You were already richer than a Hearst,” Cèsar said. “So what are you now? Richer than a Gates? Richer than God?”

  “I’m fucked,” Fritz said.

  He sent another golf ball soaring into nothingness.

  Fritz emptied his snifter of bourbon. There must have been a couple ounces remaining at the bottom, and Cèsar looked appropriately impressed by how much Fritz managed to drink in one breath. Impressed, and intoxicated.

  “You’re so rich now,” Cèsar said, leaning against the edge of the roof. “The richest ever.”

  “Not quite. I’ve inherited all of the Friederling debts as well as the riches.”

  “Like mortgages?”

  “The Friederling family is inextricably intertwined with the House of Belial,” Fritz said. “As in, the House of Belial that is settled within Malebolge, one of the Hell dimensions.” Malebolge resided within the skeleton of a fallen titan. You had to cross miles of rotting viscera to reach the market from the suburbs. The House of Belial was somewhere in the pelvic girdle. Fritz privately thought of it as the asshole of Hell.

  “I know your family sucks, but you can do whatever you want with the House of Belial now, right?” Cèsar asked.

  He didn’t understand. “I’ve inherited everything from the House of Belial.”

  Werner Friederling had been in Las Vegas to negotiate a trade with local demons when he’d died. They had been trading in human life. Slaves.

  Fritz had suddenly found himself inheriting hundreds of human slaves. Their care, their maintenance, their commitments.

  “You’re six kinds of fucked up about this, huh?” Cèsar grabbed the rest of the bourbon bottle and poured. Fritz used his stellar kopis skills to hold his hand out steadily so that nothing slopped over the side of the snifter.

  “Isobel only married me the first time because she wanted me to free her relatives from slavery,” Fritz said. “She thinks that owning the House of Belial means I should release every single slave instantly. No paperwork, no waiting. Just a thousand freed mortal slaves suddenly loosed upon the infernal dimension.”

  Understanding crossed Cèsar’s features. “Shit,” he said.

  “Yes, it’s shit. I can’t release that many slaves out of nowhere. Preternatural contracts are more complicated than that. Of course I won’t renew any of them, and people will be freed as terms dictate, but…”

  “That’s not good enough for Izzy.”

  “I can’t let them go,” Fritz said. “Most of these people grew up in slavery in Hell. They’ve never known a life outside of the House of Belial. They wouldn’t know how to pay bills, drive cars…”

  “Sure, but they could sit around on Earth being really confused and not enslaved,” Cèsar said. Fritz drained the snifter again. “Restore their dignity. Just go downstairs and be like, ‘hey guys, stop polishing the Hell-china. You’re not slaves anymore.’”

  “Oh, Cèsar.”

  Magical contracts were never that simple.

  Nothing was as simple as Fritz would have liked.

  He was not capable of delivering his father’s slaves unto absolution at a whim, and Cèsar was not merely a charming accessory. He was a brilliant witch with sterling morals.

  And Cèsar was not nearly as loyal to Fritz as he looked.

  “Speaking of contracts,” Fritz said, stooping to put another golf ball on the edge of the roof, “the OPA needs to make adjustments in reaction to Las Vegas.”

  “The demons?”

  “And everything they bring with them. The public already knows that the preternatural is real, but now they’re going to have it in their living rooms, and the OPA will be under intensified scrutiny. Your contract will need to be revised.”

  “Gimme that,” Cèsar said, reaching out a hand for the putter. He wasn’t worried yet. He should have been. Had he not been drunk, he’d have surely picked up on the dread that radiated from Fritz’s end of the bond.

  Cèsar set another ball on the tee. He handled the expensive putter like it was a dime-store baseball bat, performing test swings at shoulder level.

  “So what’s new in the contract?” he asked. “Did the OPA come up with something eviler than wiping out my memory if I get fired?”

  “I am the OPA,” Fritz said quietly. The public believed that Gary Zettel still led their agency to help maintain the illusion of stability, but Fritz was privately holding the reins on all contracts. Including Cèsar’s.

  It was true that if Cèsar violated his current contract with the OPA, he’d lose years of his memory. He’d forget that he ever worked for the Magical Violations Department underneath Fritz, as well as everything else that had happened over the span of those years.

  Meeting Isobel.

  Falling in love with Isobel.

  Binding as Fritz’s aspis.

  The people he’d saved, the cases he’d solved.

  All it took was one major error on Cèsar’s part and everything would be gone. He’d spend the rest of his life feeling terrible due to separation from Fritz and never know why.

  Cèsar’s putter met the ball with a whip-crack. When he swung, his shoulder muscles flexed and bunched. They sloped down to frame either side of his spine and cord his compact waist. He was a pleasure to watch move, even when his form was dreadful.

  He leaned over the roof to look for the ball. Fritz looked around for more bourbon and didn’t find any.

  “The new contract requires loyalty,” Fritz said, tilting back his glass to get the last dregs. “It will guarantee that you’re not a member of any faction other than the OPA, and permit you to have a higher security clearance so you can work with the public.”

  Cèsar had been about to hit another ball, but the putter froze over his shoulder. “Other factions?”

  “Like the Apple,” Fritz said, watching for his aspis’s reaction.

  Cèsar did not react. He lined himself up to hit the ball again, starting over from the beginning position. But even when he was ready he just stared at the tee.

  Eventually, he said, “Huh.”

  “It must seem absurd to swear you’re not a member of the Apple,” Fritz went on, “but we must guarantee loyalty to the organization.” The words tasted rotten on his tongue.

  “No, yeah, I get it,” Cèsar said.

  “It’s a shame for any employee who is secretly part of the Apple, though. If anyone in the organization finds out, they’ll be fired instantly, with all of the consequences that incurs. Including memory loss.”

  Cèsar dropped the putter.

  Fritz had sat down on the edge of the roof at some point. Now Cèsar sat beside him, warm and huge. His eyes were the troubled black of nighttime seas.

  “We’ll sign the revised contracts first thing in the morning,” Fritz s
aid lightly. “Since we’ll need to be in the office early, we should get to sleep, I think.”

  Cèsar looked at him.

  Fritz looked back.

  Was Cèsar finally going to tell the truth? Confess that he’d been living under the Friederling roof while keeping secrets from his friend, his boss, his kopis?

  He should have known that Fritz was his friend, even though Fritz was also a slaver, a terrible person, the culmination of generations of Friederling perversity. If Cèsar told the truth, Fritz would forgive him anything.

  Cèsar said, “I’m sorry about your dad.”

  Fritz’s chest ached. “Thank you,” he said. “I am too.”

  Six hours later, the two of them were at the Los Angeles office of the OPA.

  Cèsar was facing a new contract that said he would get fired if he was discovered to be a member of the Apple.

  And he signed it without ever telling Fritz the truth.

  Chapter 5

  Suzy was almost back to the pocket dimension’s anchor when Cèsar caught up with her. She had only left long enough to go shopping for groceries, but she still felt like she’d been caught sneaking out of her parents’ house in the middle of the night.

  She considered trying to hide the case of beer behind her back so he wouldn’t know she was gonna spend her night trashed, but it was too big and she was too petite. Oh well. It wasn’t like it was news that she was an alcoholic anyway.

  “Hey Hawke,” she said, reaching up on her toes to kiss him.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She frowned. “Why do you look like someone took a dump on your chest while you were sleeping?”

  Cèsar laughed loudly.

  The library’s patrons stared.

  Because the anchor to the Batcave was in a library.

  Cèsar used to keep the anchor in his closet, but then he’d moved into the guesthouse at the Friederling mansion. It would have been weird if Suzy was disappearing into Cèsar’s closet for days on end, especially since her parents would have been disappearing with her, and Gary Zettel, and Stephanie Whyte, and…

  So. The library.

  Cèsar knew one of the librarians, and she had agreed to conceal the floating wooden cube in the shrubbery behind the patio there.