Sinners & Sorcerers: Four Urban Fantasy Thrillers Read online

  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 too 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.”

  8

  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.

  And magical incense.

  I sneezed again.

  “No, I didn’t get that far.” My voice was embarrassingly stuffy. Couldn’t breathe through my nose anymore. “I’m not hungry.”

  Suzy muttered some choice insults about all my favorite body parts and slammed around in the kitchen. She also said something about “stupid men.”

  I snorted and kept reading.

  Isobel Stonecrow didn’t have an address. She’d never had an address, in fact. No place of employment. No medical history. No Social Security number. No coven affiliations. If it hadn’t been for three furious families short a wad of cash, we wouldn’t have even known she existed. So her name was probably a pseudonym. If I could find her real name, I could find where she lived—if she lived anywhere at all.

  With wandering feet like that, maybe she was mobile. Sleeping in the backseat of a car or something.

  The information in the files was limited, but there might’ve been more in the OPA database. Witness testimony, for instance.

  “Hey Suzy,” I called, marking a few notes in the margins, “you got any—”

  I looked up and forgot all my words.

  For a tough little pixie of a woman, Suzy’s legs looked awfully long when they were bare. It took me a few long seconds to get from her bare, dainty feet to the swell of her thighs and to realize that she was wearing a nightgown that didn’t cover much of anything. If she walked too fast, she would flash panties.

  Her charcoal hair was loose around her shoulders and she was holding two bowls of food. Like every man’s wet dream.

  “Uh, broken,” I said. That didn’t make any sense. Shit. “Your window’s broken. So’s your mirror.” That wasn’t what I’d meant to talk about. It wasn’t even what I had been thinking about.

  She set the bowls down. “Some dick broke in while I was at work two days ago and stole a few things. This neighborhood’s going downhill fast. But you get why I didn’t want you opening a window now, right?” She stepped into the kitchen again.

  Yeah, I got it. The thought of Suzy living alone in a neighborhood like this was enough to get my guts twisting. “Because you’re afraid of being attacked again.”

  “No, because I’ve cursed my windows.” She smiled devilishly at me as she set a pair of plates on the coffee table. “Next bastard that touches them is going to have more boils than a sailor’s prick. Rice?” I didn’t say yes, but she spooned some onto my plate anyway, topping it with chicken that smelled citrusy. “Eat it, Hawke. You look like you’re about to pass out.”

  She was eating with chopsticks like she was born with them attached to her hands, but she’d brought me a fork. Bless her.

  My appetite returned the instant the chicken touched my tongue. I gave a low groan. “That’s good stuff.”

  Suzy grinned. “Yeah, it is.” She was sitting on the coffee table, not the other couch. Her bare knees brushed against mine.

  Jesus, that was distracting. She was never this distracting in our cubicle.

  “What’s that?” Suzy pointed at the Stonecrow folder.

  “Oh. Uh.” I rubbed the back of my neck and tried not to look at her legs. Don’t look at her legs, Hawke. “It was the last case assigned to me before… It was assigned yesterday. It’s for this witch, some flavor of necromancer, who might be talking to the dead. I thought that I could get her t
o talk to Erin and find out what happened.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. You need to get out of town, and fast.”

  “What, and give up my job, my family, my life?” My collection of special edition Star Wars DVDs?

  “The OPA’s not going to give you any help with this case, Cèsar. It looks bad. Really bad. Worse, it doesn’t look like anything infernal or magical. They’re prepared to let you go through the mundane court system.”

  “I can’t believe Fritz is letting that fly,” I said. Fritz loved me. At least, I thought he did.

  “Even Friederling has bosses.” She sighed. “Look, I’ll do what I can about the case while you’re gone. But for now you need to get away from Los Angeles, and you need to do it before the OPA decides that they should have a witch tag you with a tracking spell.”

  I would’ve liked to see them try. I might not have been doubling the size of my apartment with magic, but I could detect and blast away passive spells like that in my sleep. “There had to be someone else in the apartment with Erin and me. That means there’s evidence. A trail I can follow. If I leave, that trail goes cold.”

  “And if you don’t leave, you get to go to prison.”

  I wanted to point out how they could only send me to prison if I was proven guilty, and they needed evidence for that, too. But what if Erin’s cause of death really had been magical or infernal? The fact the OPA wasn’t investigating meant that there weren’t any witches or demon hunters to sweep for evidence. The LAPD’s detectives were good at what they did—when it came to humans. But they didn’t have the tools they needed for this.

  Suzy wouldn’t hear reason, though. I knew what it sounded like when she had made up her mind.

  I’d been pushing the same piece of chicken around my plate for a few minutes without eating. I made myself take a last bite. “I’m exhausted.”

  A sympathetic look. “Yeah, I bet you are. Catch a few hours of sleep. I’ll hook you up with a bus ticket before I go to work tomorrow.”

  Suzy finished eating and cleaned up, which involved bending over a few times. I tried not to notice.