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

  “Our wards haven’t been the same since Agent Takeuchi left us,” Fritz said dryly, since it was a reaction far superior to panic.

  He and Cèsar opened fire simultaneously.

  Bullets peppered the demon’s face. Ichor gushed out of the resulting holes, splattering to the floor. The demon barely reacted.

  Fritz had to raise his voice to hear himself speak over his ringing ears. “It will take more time than we have to repair Helltown’s wards. I’m going to take a team to the Fissure to see what I can do in the short term.”

  Cèsar paled. “You’re going into Helltown? Now?”

  Fritz loosed another spray of bullets. This time, the demon fell.

  There was another behind it—a creature that looked like a stringy-haired male with arms too long to be human. Fritz popped one in its forehead. “There’s a Focus maintaining the wards in Helltown. I’m going to secure the area where it’s planted so our witches can perform a repair.”

  The door behind him banged open.

  Fritz swiveled, prepared to shoot. But the press of black-clad bodies on the other side belonged to a Union unit rather than more demons. They were responding to the breach.

  “Keep on it,” Fritz called, striding back to his office.

  Cèsar rushed to keep up with his kopis. “I don’t know if I can—”

  “We need to split up.” He couldn’t listen to Cèsar talking right now. Every time he glanced at his aspis, he remembered Cèsar signing that contract. “I want you to stay on campus and help the team protect the artifacts in storage. If demons steal them, the apocalypse will become a thousand times worse.”

  “You’re the secretary of the OPA. You’re too important to go into Helltown. Plus you’re a gimp, so you’re gonna get murdered by demons that aren’t gimpy.” Cèsar took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “I’ll take the team into Helltown.”

  “No you won’t,” Fritz said.

  “I said that I’m not willing to let you into Helltown. Did you hear me?”

  “I heard you.” And Fritz was trying not to let Cèsar’s concern, kind as it was, sway his resolve. He let a hard edge creep into his tone. “I shouldn’t need to remind you that I’m your boss. You’re assigned to remain here and guard storage.” He wanted Cèsar to stop pushing. Wanted him to just be an honest, obedient, simple employee.

  Cèsar looked wounded. Probably because he’d stopped thinking of Fritz as his superior around the time that they moved into a house together, or possibly when they’d exchanged blood and sworn to spend the rest of their lives together.

  As Fritz got sterner, Cèsar turned increasingly into a moping cinnamon roll.

  “Look, man, you’ve trained me well,” Cèsar said. “And I want to go to Helltown. I really do.”

  That was an obvious lie. He didn’t want to go anywhere. This was Cèsar Hawke, after all. A man who had only agreed to work for the OPA under the condition that he didn’t have to deal with homicides.

  If he didn’t want to go to Helltown, then his insistence could only mean that he needed to go to Helltown for his other allegiances.

  Fritz shook his head. “No. Watch artifact storage.” He turned, acid roiling in his belly.

  Cèsar grabbed Fritz by the shoulder before he could head out the door to the waiting BearCats. The contact of Cèsar’s skin on Fritz’s was almost enough to turn his brain inside out.

  “Let me go to Helltown,” Cèsar said urgently.

  Fritz put a hand atop his aspis’s. It intensified the bond so that Fritz could feel the tenor of Cèsar’s thoughts, if not the exact words. Cèsar really didn’t want Fritz to go into Helltown. And Fritz didn’t want Cèsar to go, either. Not for any reason.

  “I’ll be in contact when I get back from the Fissure,” Fritz said.

  He pushed Cèsar’s hand off and left.

  The operation should have been reasonably straightforward. Agent Bryce and the scrying team had combed Helltown remotely to locate the Focus. They had studied the crystal closely and determined it was repairable, assuming that they could get a few hours with it.

  Reaching the Focus was Fritz’s problem.

  Fritz picked a half-dozen good agents and got into a car.

  “The Focus is a soul link,” Agent Bryce explained to Fritz on the drive deeper into Los Angeles. They bounced with the rhythm of the SUV’s turns, bumps over curbs, and dips into potholes. “The soul links controlling the wards are anchored in Silver Needles territory. If we can get in there to restore the Focus, Helltown will be closed up again.”

  “It won’t bring back the demons who already left,” Fritz said. They had estimated the escape of hundreds of nightmares, and just in the first few hours since the Breaking.

  Fritz’s phone chimed with constant messages from dispatch: bestial demons appearing in Hollywood, the Port of Los Angeles falling to nightmares, succubi in Griffith Park. No matter how fast Fritz and his team moved, they couldn’t bring those fuckers back.

  “At least it’ll bring Helltown’s egress and ingress down to its usual two points,” Agent Bryce said. “It’ll make it easier to control the flow demons into Los Angeles going forward.”

  Fritz banged his gloved fist on the window separating the passengers from the driver. “Redirect the convoy to the Santa Monica Pier.” It was nowhere near Helltown.

  Agent Bryce looked puzzled by the order. Yet when she opened her mouth next, the question that came out was, “Why is the organization’s undersecretary leading this mission?” Like most people inside and outside the OPA, she didn’t know that Gary Zettel had been replaced by Fritz.

  “Undersecretary or not, I’m still a kopis.” As a kopis, Fritz was more qualified to handle Helltown than the likes of Agent Bryce, a low-level witch.

  “With all due respect, both you and Agent Hawke are too valuable to risk in the field under these conditions.”

  They passed a building burning so bright that it stung Fritz’s eyes through the tinted windows. He slid a pair of sunglasses on. “Good thing Agent Hawke isn’t here.”

  “Neither of you is useful if either die,” Agent Bryce said bluntly. “Thrall is heavy in that area. The Silver Needles are debilitating anyone who approaches Helltown and then shoots them.”

  “The Needles don’t shoot,” Fritz said. “They torture slowly.”

  “I think they’ve gotten a little excited about the Fissure breaking open.”

  Incubi were the exact kind of sadists who would “celebrate” something like that by declaring a field day on the surrounding mortals. “We will not encounter Needles, thrall, or traps on the way to the Santa Monica Pier.”

  “That’s because it’s not a route to Helltown,” Agent Bryce said.

  “As far as you know,” he said.

  The Santa Monica Pier had a boardwalk dotted with carnival attractions and was flanked by strips of golden beach. The lights on the Ferris wheel barely glimmered in the gathering smoke. There was no sign of ships beyond that.

  It was strange to drive up the empty pier. None of the regular crowd had shown up. There were no joggers with Skullcandy headphones, teens on hover boards, panhandlers, or bikini-clad women glistening with suntan lotion.

  Fritz leaped out of the SUV before it completely stopped. “Follow me!” he shouted to the team. They were a hodgepodge group consisting of a half-dozen witches. He’d have given them all up to have Cèsar at his back.

  He took them behind the midway. There were a lot of unremarkable doors dotted with peeling paint back there, but only one opened at the brush of Fritz’s thumb.

  A dark hallway waited on the other side. It looked to be a half-mile long and smelled like rotten eggs.

  “Interesting,” Agent Wallace said, peering around Agent Bryce’s shoulder. “That hallway looks like it should be too long to fit in the midway.”

  It was too long to fit in the midway. That hallway wasn’t anywhere near the Santa Monica Pier, even if the door to access it currently was.

  “Get i
nside,” Fritz said, stepping back.

  His agents piled in.

  He took one last chance to look over Los Angeles. He could only see streetlights beyond the shimmer of the Ferris wheel’s bulbs. Everything else was consumed by orange-tinted smoke.

  The Ferris wheel flickered, dimmed, and went out. The lights didn’t come back.

  Fritz followed his agents into the hallway. The door shut behind him.

  There was only one direction to walk from there. He loped down the wood-paneled hallway, which was lined on either side with old paintings of demons. They depicted men with tusks where most people had teeth. Some were wearing human suits over bodies with too many limbs, or too few.

  Everything was buried underneath half an inch of orange dust. That dust had a way of covering everything in the infernal planes. Ander’s office didn’t have a single door or window that opened to the wasteland outside, yet it still wormed its way in through the cracks.

  Fritz hadn’t been in Ander’s office to clean for well over a year. He had only ever visited to make sure contractees phased out of Ander’s “program” as smoothly as possible. All the contracts had lapsed, so there was nobody left to maintain.

  As such, it was quiet in Ander’s office. He’d even let the receptionist go with a great severance package a year earlier, so nobody greeted him at the front desk.

  He halted the agents in the lobby. “Wait here for two minutes. Then follow me into the office.”

  Two minutes was how long it would take for him to move the dimension. Two minutes to swap out doors so that it would open into Helltown, hopefully near the Fissure.

  Agent Bryce saluted Fritz before he ducked into the room where Ander’s files were kept.

  There was a dark figure standing over the desk, messing with the crystal that determined where in the world Ander’s office was located.

  Adrenaline calmed Fritz in a weird way, bringing the world to sharp clarity as he lifted his machine gun. “Freeze.”

  The figure froze.

  “Turn around slowly,” Fritz said.

  And he did.

  Cèsar looked guilty, holding the crystal in one hand while the fingers of the other traveled over its jagged surface.

  Chapter 10

  Fritz dropped the machine gun with a groan. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Um…” Cèsar’s eyes darted the way they did when he was trying to think of a lie. “I was worried about you, so I came to make sure you’re okay.”

  It was a terrible lie.

  Cèsar couldn’t have been checking up on Fritz because he hadn’t known that Fritz would be at Ander’s office. For that matter, Fritz hadn’t known that he’d be at Ander’s office until he gave the order to the driver.

  Cèsar was in the office for the same reason Fritz was.

  Because it was the only way to get into Helltown without getting murdered by trigger-happy Silver Needles.

  “Drop the crystal,” Fritz said. “Step away from my desk.”

  Cèsar crept backward. Fritz checked the orientation of the crystal. As he’d suspected, Cèsar had moved the dimension’s entry point to the heart of Helltown. Not quite at the intersection of Shadow and Scapula, where the Focus was, but only a couple of blocks away.

  Fritz tweaked the coordinates. “While we’re in Helltown, I don’t want you to move from my side, not even for a moment.”

  Hope lit Cèsar’s eyes. “You’re not going to tell me to stay here while the team works?”

  “You wouldn’t obey if I did.” And even though there were no contractees left, Ander’s dimension was still dangerous. Cèsar didn’t need to live a life burned by shadow the way that Isobel was.

  Ander’s office walls shuddered as the dimension shifted.

  The door opened and Agent Bryce entered with the other operatives.

  Fritz shouldered his gun. “Agent Bryce, we can now exit through the same door we used as an entrance. I delegate control of the Focus reparation team to you.”

  “Yes sir,” Agent Bryce said.

  She and the other agents hustled back the way they came. Fritz followed, knowing Cèsar would be close behind. He still couldn’t resist the urge to say, “Stick close to me, Hawke.”

  “That’s my line.” Cèsar drew his gun as he took position beside Fritz in the hallway. There wasn’t enough room for two men to walk abreast, so their shoulders pressed together. “I’m the shield, remember?”

  “You haven’t done much shielding lately,” Fritz said.

  He immediately regretted it. Cèsar looked like he’d been slapped.

  “Are we good to go?” Agent Bryce asked, poised by the door at the end of the hallway. As soon as she twisted the handle, all Hell was going to break loose. Literally.

  “Yes, we’re good,” Fritz said, which was a lie as terrible as any of Cèsar’s.

  She opened the door.

  Golden beach and aging boardwalk were no more.

  Instead, there was a road torn into pieces after decades without maintenance. The passage of claws, cloven hooves, and chains had carved permanent lines into its crumbled remains.

  The buildings were destroyed too. The fifties-style ranch housing, convenience stores, and gas stations looked a hundred years older. There was no electricity to light the windows, even on the darkest days. Nothing functioned in Helltown, mechanical or electric.

  That was what made this operation so dangerous—and why they didn’t have three hours to repair the Focus. As soon as Fritz’s team passed through that door to reenter Earth, there was no guarantee their guns would even work.

  Agent Bryce signaled for the other agents to spread out. Cèsar moved to join them. Fritz grabbed him by the arm, suddenly so fearful that it overrode even the anger. “You will tell me if anything you’re doing here will endanger my men?”

  Cèsar’s guilty look intensified. “Fritz,” he began.

  The team leaped through the door.

  Fritz followed them into the smoke-clogged air of Helltown.

  The neighborhood was never nice. Nothing about it was nice. But in the daytime, when the sun was out, it was as close to safe as any infernally operated neighborhood could be. Fritz had visited the shops many a time for information, or for social purposes; he’d even used the barbershop across the way. The demon barber trimmed hair using his claws. It made for very accurate haircuts.

  Now the distance between Ander’s office and the barbershop was an impassable canyon of flame. The Focus wasn’t just close to the Fissure. They were practically on top of each other.

  This was Fritz’s first face-to-face with the Fissure. He’d gotten videos from Director Hekekia in Las Vegas, but he hadn’t yet gotten to stare into the heart of Hell as it breathed sulfur into his face. Even now, Fritz only had a moment to inventory the chaos outside Ander’s office.

  The gash down the center of the pavement.

  The black smoke that smelled like Dis—desert and rot and sulfur.

  The demons dragging themselves up the sides of that craggy crevice, using their claws sunk into the asphalt for purchase.

  Cèsar rimmed by red light from the flaming Fissure, looking pale and sickly. Plumes of smoke twisting around his collar, making his jacket flap.

  He was staring across the street, eyes shadowed under his swaying bangs. Fritz followed Cèsar’s gaze to see a ring of bronze statues. Five of them.

  The figures in those statues could have been humans who’d been stretched out on a taffy puller. Everything about them was scrawny except their sexual features: puffy labia, enormous testicles, breasts swollen to boulders with nipples upturned. These were the incubi and succubi who had founded Helltown.

  There should have been a sixth figure. There also should have been a prickly bronze cornucopia suspended between their hands, pouring spiked steel wire from its mouth. Neither were anywhere in sight.

  The Fissure’s cut through Helltown had toppled one statue and taken the Focus with it.

  If the Focus had
fallen into the Fissure, they were screwed.

  “Secure the perimeter!” Agent Bryce had to scream to be heard over the wind, and her voice cracked.

  The agents scattered to the corners of the street. They prepared the spell with militaristic precision: dropping crystals into place, securing them with wax, arranging candles, lighting them. One witch raced around the edges to spill salt between the crystals to form an enormous circle.

  Even though they were moving fast, this spell was still going to take hours to cast. The minutiae of spellwork was neither Fritz’s concern nor his wheelhouse. He took position behind a piece of upthrust asphalt, bracing his M5 on the edge.

  There was nothing to shoot at yet.

  Like cockroaches, many of Helltown’s less-bold denizens vanished at the sight of humans, but he could feel them even if he couldn’t see them. They were everywhere. Likely slipping unseen through the wreckage, evaluating the OPA unit for how well they’d be able to defend themselves, searching for weaknesses.

  The biggest weakness to the team had disappeared. Fritz couldn’t see Cèsar from his position.

  Fritz reached out along the bond, feeling for his aspis. Cèsar stood near the Fissure, frowning at his cell phone. It probably wasn’t working. They were registering power outages anywhere within miles of the Fissure.

  “Hawke!” Fritz said.

  Cèsar looked up like he’d been caught doing something bad again. He dropped his phone in his pocket.

  Magic washed over the square and Cèsar started sneezing. Each was an explosive blast echoing against the jagged faces of Helltown’s shops. The sound bounced down alleys, off of roofs, and rang out throughout the entire neighborhood.

  The witch dropped beside Fritz, smothering his sneezes into his sleeve. “Sorry,” he gasped.

  “Close the perimeter!” Fritz ordered Agent Bryce. “Get the wards up!”

  She looked pale but resolved. “Faster!”

  Her team moved faster. The circle was almost closed.

  Unfortunately, there was already black smoke crawling in around the edges of the square. Faster wasn’t fast enough.