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

  I angled the rearview mirror. Yep, still hamburger-faced. “Wonder why that is.”

  “I can fix it,” Stonecrow said. “I just need some herbs.”

  Her tone wasn’t exactly friendly, but she didn’t sound pissed at me now. It was a start. And if she could heal my face? Better and better.

  The phone crunched when I pulled away.

  We rode in silence, Stonecrow only moving to turn on the air conditioning. The quiet lasted on the road back to town for about five minutes or so when she said, “So…Cèsar, right? You didn’t kill the agents back there. Because you work with them?”

  “I don’t know if they deserve killing. And that’s not something I do, anyway. But yeah, I kinda work with them—or at least I used to. I’m currently taking what you might call an unscheduled vacation from the Office of Preternatural Affairs.”

  “Why?”

  No nice way to say it. “Because I’ve been accused of murder.”

  Stonecrow leaned toward her window a few inches.

  “Oh.”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said. “That’s why I need your help. I need you to talk to the victim and find out who did kill her. It’s the only way I can clear my name.”

  She let out a shaky breath. “Okay. Tell me what happened. Tell me about her.” I gave her the short version of Erin’s story. It wasn’t much shorter than the long version. When I finished, Stonecrow was frowning more than ever. “So you…you didn’t kill this waitress?”

  Could she have tried to sound a little less skeptical?

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “And you want me to talk to her.”

  It was like we were talking in circles. “If you can do what you say you can.”

  “I can,” Stonecrow said, tapping her finger thoughtfully against her chin. “I just need to get close to her remains, preferably within touching distance. You think you can pull that off with people gunning for your head? Do you think you even want to? It’d be much safer to run.”

  “I’ve gotten this far. I can’t stop now.”

  She sighed. “Okay. Let’s go talk with Erin.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  We made a stop at an herb shop then grabbed dinner at a fast food joint as the sun sank to the horizon. Dinner and magical supplies were paid for by Joey, who turned out to have a fat wallet. I left the credit cards and his fake FBI identification in the glove box. The cash was ours.

  I didn’t risk going inside the McDonald’s to order. We used the drive-through and ate behind the security of tinted windows in the parking lot. Stonecrow looked extremely disinterested in my burgers, but she seemed okay with her chicken wrap, and she guzzled her soda in about five seconds flat.

  “So what’s your story?” I asked when I was halfway through my meal, gesturing at her. “What does the OPA want you for?”

  “They don’t tell you that in your files?”

  “Your file says that you’ve had three families complain that you’re a scam artist. But every story’s got two sides, right?”

  “Three complaints.” She snorted. “The dead don’t lie, Cèsar. That’s why people complain. They don’t like what the dead have to say to them. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Stonecrow wiped her fingers with one of the paper napkins. She looked around for a place to throw it out and caught sight of her dirty face in the mirror. We were both all dusty from the brawl in the desert. She used other napkins to wipe off her face.

  “Necrocognition is a rare talent.”

  “Is it?” Stonecrow asked. I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not.

  “Where’d you learn to do it? Are you part of some kind of…I dunno, a tribe or something?” I asked. Her getup at Shady Groves had looked like the fifties Hollywood idea of a Native American wisewoman, but I had a hard time believing that that anyone who wore feathered headdresses and animal skins to a cemetery could be legit.

  Yet she sat up straighter, tossed her hair. Her whole demeanor shifted. It was like she pulled on a disguise as I watched. “Yes, my tribe taught me. I am a native princess. I was trained by the best shamans in all of the nations,” she said, voice resonant with that accent she’d had before. “I was going to stay on our reservation, but the spirits called me to the world beyond. It is my destiny to speak the truths of the dead even when people aren’t prepared to hear it.”

  “That so?”

  “You saw how those Union men behaved when they arrested me—what they were prepared to do to silence the voices of the dead.” She sounded both imperious and annoyed. I guess my incredulity was showing.

  “I have a hard time believing the Union would try to kill you if you can do what you claim. You’re too valuable. Hell, I bet the OPA would love to hire you.”

  “You can deny it all you want, but it’s obvious that those men didn’t intend for you and I to come back from the desert.”

  That much, I couldn’t deny. I just didn’t know why.

  She tossed her trash in the backseat and grabbed the plastic bag from between her feet. I’d let her do all the buying in the herb shop and kept my aching face inside the SUV, so I had no idea what she’d gotten.

  “So how does your necrocognition work? Is it an evocation thing?”

  She glanced at me before opening a baggie and pouring something green and grainy into her empty soda cup. “What? What’s evocation?”

  For the first time since we’d started chatting, I believed the disbelief in her voice. It was more genuine than her bullshit “princess of the tribes” speech. “So you’re not summoning demons in order to talk to the dead. Doing blood rituals and shit. Human sacrifice.”

  “I do use blood,” she said. I grimaced, and she hastily added, “I get it from the butcher. Pig, cow, chicken.”

  The thought of slaughtering animals for a spell didn’t bother me—I’d knocked off a few mice and rats in my time training with the OPA—but witches that were willing to kill for power often didn’t stop at animals. I watched Stonecrow warily as she mixed ingredients. After she’d tossed a few things into her cup, she replaced the plastic lid and shook it.

  “I was impressed with your spell in the SUV,” she said, softer than before. “That was great.”

  Great? Well, if that was the word she wanted to use for it, I wasn’t going to stop her. “What can I say? Panic is inspirational. I don’t even do ritual circles most of the time. I’m more of a potions and poultices kind of guy. My coworker, Suzy, she’s all about the circles of power and energy manipulation. Bet she could have cooked up something even better.” I laughed. “Bet she could have cursed both of them without even getting out of the car.”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “Well, you did well enough for both of us to survive.”

  Yeah, we’d survived. Couldn’t ask for much more than that.

  She took the lid off her cup again and scooped out a pulpy mess that smelled like a hamster cage. Stonecrow reached across the center console toward me.

  I jerked back. “What’s that?”

  She grabbed the wrist of my blistered hand.

  “Relief,” Stonecrow said, smearing the mix on my skin.

  The hot ache of the wound immediately subsided and was replaced by a damp coolness. Shivers rolled down my skin as the blisters dried, shriveled, and sloughed away to reveal fresh skin underneath.

  It felt so good that I didn’t stop her when she dabbed it on the rest of the blisters, too. The stench was overpowering, but not magical. I didn’t even sneeze.

  She handed me a fistful of napkins. “There you go.”

  I wiped my face clean and checked the mirror. I looked like Cèsar again. A Cèsar that desperately needed to shave, but Cèsar nonetheless.

  Stonecrow was smiling a little, giving me a weird look.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, tilting my jaw to see if I was turning purple or something.

  “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just—I didn’t get a good look at you in the cemetery before defending myself, so now I
’m…looking at you.” The smile seemed fixed to her lips.

  Fuck if I knew why. Women.

  “Thanks for the…” I drew a circle in the air around my face with a finger, indicating all the freshly healed skin. “Even if you caused the damage to it in the first place.”

  Her eyes had gone a little glassy as she gazed at me. She blinked and refocused. “Oh. Self-defense. I thought you were going to kill me.” It wasn’t exactly an apology. Guess I didn’t need one. Stonecrow grabbed a clean napkin. “You missed a spot.” She wiped along my jaw. I didn’t think I’d missed anything, but I appreciated not smelling like hamster cage, so I let her clean down my neck and collar.

  Once she was done with the pawing, I finished my last burger. The beef didn’t taste quite as good now that she’d mentioned using animal blood in her rituals. “Let’s get one thing straight, Stonecrow. If you’re into human sacrifice for your magic, get out of the car right now. I don’t work with murderers.”

  “Isobel,” she said. “Not Stonecrow. Isobel’s fine.”

  I liked the sound of that, but I didn’t feel like being on first name terms with a murderess. “You haven’t killed anyone for a magic spell,” I pressed.

  “Never,” Isobel said.

  Good enough. We could always talk about the animal cruelty later.

  “Then let’s have a talk with Erin,” I said, turning the SUV on.

  The night grew dark and sultry. It was nice enough out that I would have liked to roll down the windows and let the damp evening breeze into the car, but I was hesitant to give up what little privacy the tinted windows gave us. Not to mention the bulletproof glass. I could still feel the barrel of a gun jammed into the back of my skull. Now that the giddiness from my shitty luck/strength spell was wearing down, I could feel it real well.

  I’d been one finger squeeze away from my brains splattered on the desert. That was enough to make a guy turn paranoid.

  We parked outside Suzy’s townhouse.

  Isobel glanced out the window. “What’s here?”

  “My coworker. Suzy. She’s gonna be able to help us.”

  “Suzy,” she mused. “Bet she has blond pigtails.”

  More like pure animal rage and filthy jokes trapped inside a woman’s body. Whatever. “Stay here,” I said, and got out. When I rounded the car, Isobel was slamming her door, hiking her shorts up her ample hips. “Uh, didn’t I say ‘stay here?’”

  “You said it,” Isobel said, giving me a disarmingly dazzling smile.

  Right.

  She didn’t follow me when I headed toward Suzy’s blue door. She remained leaning against the SUV. I kept an eye on her as I headed up the walk.

  I was on Suzy’s front step, about to knock, when the door flew open. There must have been magical alarms that I hadn’t sensed.

  The instant of total relief on Suzy’s face was immediately overwhelmed by anger. “Cèsar, you are one stupid motherfucker,” she said, but she was grabbing me by the jacket, running her hands over my chest and arms, like she couldn’t believe I was still alive. “What are you doing here? Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”

  Considering that I hadn’t gotten a bullet in the head? Yeah, I was feeling pretty thoroughly okay. “Did you get to Eduardo and Joey first? Did you question them?”

  “Of course I didn’t,” she whispered. “The Union must have been ten seconds behind you. They recovered them first.”

  “So you don’t know if executing people is Union procedure or if they’d been hired to kill us?”

  “Executing people?” Suzy’s eyes went wide and round. Her fists clutched my lapels. “For fuck’s sake, Cèsar, what the fuck? Who would have hired Eduardo and Joey as assassins anyway? They’re dumbasses!” She shook her head. “No. They’re good. They wouldn’t—it couldn’t have been bribes or something. They wouldn’t do that.”

  Either Suzy didn’t know her friends as well as I now did or it really was Union procedure to shoot people in the head the second they became nuisances. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

  She pressed her face to my chest, wrapped her arms around me for a tight squeeze, and then pulled back to punch me in the stomach. Damn, Suzy was a violent hugger. “Fuck, Cèsar. My texts are monitored. You stole a fucking Union SUV. You—” She cut off. She had finally noticed that I wasn’t alone. “Who’s that?”

  Isobel was coming up the sidewalk. I opened my mouth to respond.

  “You brought the necrocognitive to my house?” Suzy interrupted. “What the flying fuck is wrong with you, Cèsar?”

  Leaning my shoulder against her doorway to block her view, I shrugged. “Bet if you asked Pops, he’d tell you he dropped me a few times as a kid. Look, Suzy, like I was saying, we need your help.”

  “We?”

  Did she need to shout everything at me? “We need to find Erin Karwell’s remains so we can talk to her and clear my name.”

  “We?”

  Okay, she’d already said that.

  Isobel touched my back. “Hey,” she said. “Is everything okay? You guys are…loud.”

  Suzy’s expression shuttered. She looked between me and Isobel and the SUV with a weird look, brow furrowed, lips frowning. “I told you to get on a bus, Cèsar. I told you to run. I’m not going to help you serve your balls to the Union on a platter. We’re done with this bullshit.”

  And then she slammed the door in my face.

  “That was helpful,” Isobel said brightly.

  No fucking kidding.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  We got stuck in traffic after leaving Suzy’s. I didn’t know where we were going, so it didn’t really matter. I just drove without stopping, creeping down The Five slowly enough that I might as well have walked it.

  The Union was probably tracking us now. We’d have to ditch the car soon—find another one. Where and how, I didn’t know. I was exhausted and annoyed and my ability to plan had been left behind in the desert. I’d expected Suzy to have the answers—and access to Erin’s body. Without either of those, I had no idea what to do next.

  “Do you know where the OPA takes victims for autopsy?” Isobel asked.

  Guess my aimlessness was obvious. “No,” I admitted. “I never deal with murder. I specialize in picking up witches who’ve been getting into trouble, but generally not the homicidal type.”

  “More like the ‘talking to the dead’ type?” she asked with a teasing smile.

  “If you’re asking if you’re one of my cases, yes. You are.” I huffed out a breath. “Were.” But she had the gears in my skull turning. Where did we take the dead? I’d never seen body bags hauled into my office building, but I had seen ambulances around. They probably went somewhere on the OPA campus.

  The idea of breaking into one of our buildings was laughably bad. We had hundreds of magical and physical alarms—I’d have gotten arrested before I made it past the Starbucks between the Magical Violations and Infernal Relations buildings.

  But maybe if someone could bring Erin’s body out…

  “How much body do you need?” I asked. “The whole thing, or would an arm or a finger work?”

  Isobel pulled a face. “I don’t know. I suppose I could do it with any part of the body.”

  Any part?

  I cast my mind back to the blood in my bathroom. It might not have been cleaned up yet. And Erin had to have left some tissue behind, too.

  We were almost past the exit closest to my apartment. I changed lanes without signaling, slicing through the narrow space between cars. Horns blared at me.

  Isobel grabbed the leather arm of her chair. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting you a piece of the victim.”

  We parked a few blocks away from my apartment building and walked the rest of the way there. I noticed that Isobel was carrying the bag from the herb shop with her, but didn’t ask what else she had bought. She’d already admitted to using animal blood. I probably didn’t want to know what she had in there.

  It was a nice nig
ht for walking, even if I was out with a necrocognitive. The moon was hazy yellow, and the air was quiet and still. No signs of cops or Union anywhere. Didn’t get any better than that.

  Isobel eyeballed my building as we headed around back. “What is this place?”

  “What, got a problem with it?”

  Guess my defensiveness had given me away. She gave me a skeptical look. “You live here?”

  I took another look at my apartment. It was indistinguishable from any of a million other apartment buildings in Los Angeles. The architecture was…well, it wasn’t going to win any awards, but it wasn’t like I spent much time looking at the big taupe box from the outside. It had a secure lobby and a couple trees. Whatever. I spent most of my time at the office anyway.

  “You live in a teal RV with beaded curtains,” I pointed out.

  “Teal is a magical conductor. The curtains…” The corner of her mouth quirked. “Well, there’s no excuse for that.”

  At least she was willing to admit it.

  Grabbing the fire escape’s ladder, I pulled it down and stepped aside.

  “Ladies first,” I said.

  Isobel stared up at it. “I don’t like heights.”

  “It’s the only way up.” I extended my hands toward her. “I won’t let you fall.”

  She hesitated then climbed onto the first rung. I dutifully stood behind her, prepared to catch her in the unlikely event of the fire escape suddenly melting and throwing her to the ground. As soon as she reached the second floor, I followed her. And we did that all the way up to my floor.

  When we got up to my apartment’s window, Isobel glanced over the railing at the ground and turned pale. She grabbed my sleeve.

  “I’ve got you,” I said, steadying her.

  She sighed and leaned against my chest, all warm and soft. Probably trying not to fall over. “You do have me, don’t you?”