Hotter Than Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Mystery (Preternatural Affairs Book 3) (2 page)

The badge had my name, Cèsar Hawke, and it said I was a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Not sure what made their agents so special, but there you go. I grimaced at the bad picture and jammed it in my pocket. “I’ll let you talk to the homeowner,” I said. “Go ahead, ring the doorbell. Wake up the poor old people.”

Suzy hopped up the stairs. “My pleasure.” I hung behind her as she pushed the button, keeping an eye on the street surrounding us.

It felt like someone was watching us even though the street was empty. It was a nice morning, already about sixty degrees, with bright blue skies. If there were old people in the neighborhood, it was already well past time for front yard puttering.

But the street was silent, the curtains were all drawn, and it still felt like someone was watching.

“Been studying for your test?” Suzy asked as we waited. She must have noticed me reading the manual.

“Unfortunately,” I said.

“But you’ve already memorized it all, right? Your test is on Tuesday.”

I’d been trying to memorize it, but I hadn’t even gotten through the whole thing. A million-page epic fantasy series was easier to read for the seventh time than the hundred pages of
The Guidelines for Union-Affiliated Aspides.

“The test will be a breeze.” I didn’t look at her as I said it.

Suzy hit the doorbell again. “You’re so full of shit.”

“How hard can the test be? I’ve already been a witch my whole life. I should already know everything I need to be an aspis.”

Suzy snorted. “Keep telling yourself that. Where are these assholes?” She pounded on the door. Considering her fist was about a quarter the size of mine, she sure could make a ruckus. It should have been loud enough to wake up everyone within a three-block radius.

Even so, nobody poked their heads out of their houses to see what was going on. The street was still totally quiet.

My sense of unease was growing, and it had nothing to do with pre-test nerves.

“Have I mentioned that crank calls are my least favorite part of the job?” I asked, trying to peer through the curtains by the front door. They were printed with a pattern of ugly kittens and impossible to see through. “Bet this tip sent us to an abandoned house.”

Suzy just grunted in agreement.

Abandoned house or not,
someone
should have been trying to figure out what an SUV with government plates was doing on the street by now.

“See if you can find an open window,” Suzy said. “I’ll verify the address with dispatch.”

I stepped around the rose bushes and spotted one of those little bathroom windows high on the wall. Those never had curtains. Perfect for looking into the house.

Bracing my foot against the garden fence, I lifted myself up to peer down at the bathroom.

It looked a heck of a lot like my Abuelita’s old bathroom. Floral print everything. Safety bars by the toilet and shower. Extra TP rolls kept on a wooden dowel decorated with hand-painted cats.

The bathroom door was open so that I could see into the hallway beyond. The carpet was black.

My stomach twisted. I dropped into the bushes again to catch my breath. It was suddenly a lot harder to breathe.

Old people didn’t have black carpet.

Then I lifted myself up again for a second look, wedging my fingers in the window’s crack so that I could force it open. The change in air pressure wafted the scents of the house out at me—tobacco, mothball, and pennies.

Lots of pennies.

The carpet definitely wasn’t black. It was wet.

I tromped through the bushes, opened the side gate, and let myself into the back yard.

There was an open window behind the homeowner’s green trashcan, giving me a perfect view of the hallway beyond the bathroom. I didn’t have to guess at what could have left the carpet soaking wet now. I could see everything perfectly.

The bloody footprints. The smeared handprints on the wall. The mutilated body in the kitchen.

Okay. So I take it back.

Responding to crank calls is my
second
least favorite part of the job.

YOU AND I LIVE in totally different worlds and you don’t even know it.

There’s the world that everyone sees—the world that everyone considers to be real. That’s the world that you live in. It’s boring and mundane. Magic doesn’t exist. The greatest dangers are having a heart attack after eating too many Big Macs or forgetting your wallet on the bus.

The world I live in? It’s a lot more dangerous.

Unfortunately, it’s also real. And just because you don’t see what’s happening in my world doesn’t mean that it can’t kill you.

Everybody is caught in a hidden war between the forces of good and evil. Even you. And for now, evil is winning. It lurks in the dark corners of hospitals, preying on the weak. It owns businesses in your hometown and skips out on state taxes. Evil watches you through your window as you prepare to sleep in perceived safety.

My job is making sure you never need to know that this kind of evil exists.

I’m Agent Cèsar Hawke. I used to be a private investigator, but these days, I roll with the Office of Preternatural Affairs—also known as the OPA. We handle everything magical or not-human that makes life dangerous for ordinary folks.

That means bad witches most of the time. Sometimes that means demons. Yeah, like the things that come from Hell.

It used to be that I only handled witches with the Magical Violations Department. That’s my specialty. But Suzy and I got enlisted in a special team led by Director Fritz Friederling, my future kopis, and now we investigate internal affairs. We investigate everything else, too.

If trouble doesn’t fit into one of the usual boxes, we’re on top of it.

We’re the men in black, armed with magical potions, pentacles, and handguns. Conspiracy theorists hate us. Nobody else knows we exist.

That’s the way we like it, and we plan to keep it that way.

Pretty amazing how quickly the somnolent little neighborhood came to life once all of the OPA homicide investigators showed up.

We’d cordoned off the yard with yellow tape so that the gawkers couldn’t interfere. And there sure were a lot of gawkers from the neighboring houses, all of them as old as I suspected. Made me uncomfortable to think that they were all looking at me, seeing my face. I preferred being a spook.

Fortunately, they wouldn’t remember anything once they signed our enchanted witness statements. Not my face, not the murder, and none of our staff or equipment.

That touch of magic was almost as impressive as how quickly Suzy’s donuts had vanished.

I lifted the lid to find that they were all gone, including the glazed one with the raspberry filling that I’d been eyeballing. There was nothing left but crumbs and a few stray sprinkles.

“Really?” I muttered, shooting suspicious glances at the rest of the staff on site.

The forensics team had shown up in black vans with government plates to match our black SUVs. We’d also gotten a Union unit on site in case there was anything dangerous in the house. They’re like the military wing of the OPA, and they get involved anytime someone needs to be shot at.

We’d quickly discovered that nothing was lurking in 7245 Cherry Tree Lane, though. Now the whole Union unit was milling around in the front yard, smoking cigarettes, violating regulations left and right.

I was willing to bet one of those assholes ate my donut.

To be fair, after seeing all that blood, I wasn’t sure I’d have been able to stomach the red-colored jelly anyway.

“Anything left?”

I turned to see Harding, the unit’s witch, hovering hopefully behind me. He was a skinny black guy with a goatee and white tattoos encircling his wrists.

“Only the tragic scent of a donut graveyard and deep regrets,” I said, stepping aside so that he could peer into the back of the SUV, where Suzy had set out the Dunkin boxes.

“Darn,” Harding said. “I never get to the good snacks in time.”

Maybe the gluttons had been the forensics team after all.

“Sorry, man.” I gave him a sideways look. “You’re with the Union. You deal with demon murders all the time, right?”

“Sure.” He wetted a finger with his tongue, stuck it in the corner of the box, and then sucked the sugar off of his skin.

“Any guesses what breed of nasty killed this guy?”

“Could be anything. This is Los Angeles, after all. Helltown’s only fifteen miles that way.” Harding flapped a hand vaguely toward the south. “I’d bet our killer is already gone and we’ll never figure out what did it or why. Big damn waste of time.”

With another longing gaze at the empty donut box, he ambled back to his team.

Harding approached one of the men smoking on the lawn. The two of them were indistinguishable from the others in the unit. Black polo shirts, black utility pants, black combat boots. But something about the way they moved was different. Like they were two hands from the same body.

I was willing to bet anything that those guys were bound as kopis and aspis. The Union made sure to attach a witch to every demon hunter right after training; kopides were way too vulnerable to demon powers without a magical bodyguard.

The OPA was different. We mostly employed witches, and few of us were assigned to kopides.

But I was going to have to become the same kind of bodyguard as Harding in just a few days. It would be a permanent relationship, seeing as how the bond was unbreakable.

I’d be like that with Director Friederling once we were bound: two halves of a whole.

The idea was seriously creepy.

“You done moping around yet?” Suzy called to me from the doorway. She was holding half of an apple fritter in one bare hand. The other hand was gloved in blue and stained with blood. Not only had she gotten one of the last donuts, but the crime scene hadn’t made her lose her appetite. I wasn’t sure if I admired or hated her.

“I’m not moping,” I said, stepping around the crime scene photographer as he emerged from the house.

“Fine. Done being a big sissy about blood yet?”

Giving me shit was Suzy’s hobby. Usually, it was kind of funny. Today, I was not amused. Someone had died in that house just a few hours earlier. They’d been murdered messily. Painfully. And the killer was still out there.

Yeah, I definitely was not in the mood for bullshit.

“What’s your problem?” I snapped.

“Put on gloves and I’ll show you.” She stuck the rest of the fritter in her mouth and headed back inside.

They’d set a box of rubber gloves and plastic shoe covers on the table just inside the front door. I plucked two latex-free gloves out of the box so that I could handle the resident’s mutilated cadaver.

I didn’t put on the shoe covers.

It’s never a good sign when they want you to don plastic booties for a crime scene. That means there’s a good chance you’ll ruin your shoes if you don’t. And that means sloshing around in blood and whatever else the victim might have spilled.

Suzy was right about one thing. I don’t like blood. Don’t have to be a sissy to dislike blood, okay? But the sight of the booties alone was making my stomach twist.

I went in without them.

First thing I noticed was that the clock in the entryway had stopped at three thirty-seven that morning. It was one of those big round clocks with a different picture at each hour, and in this particular case, it pictured various kitten breeds. It didn’t have a power cord, so its batteries must have died.

I stepped into the living room. The clock on the side table had stopped at three thirty-seven, too.

“Did you notice the clocks?” I asked Suzy.

She snapped a second glove onto her bare hand. “Yeah. Apparently the power got knocked out for all the houses in about a half-mile radius.”

“These clocks are running on batteries.”

“Demons.” Suzy shrugged, like that was explanation enough.

The living room was trashed and the forensics team worked at tagging everything: the shattered TV, the couch vomiting its upholstered guts from a slash in the back, a dent in the drywall, a curtain that had been ripped down, the spilled ash tray.

I stood back to study it, trying to form a timeline of the struggle in my mind.

Entry to the house hadn’t been forced, so the fight hadn’t started near the front door.

It had started near the TV.

The resident had been surprised from behind. He’d been knocked into the entertainment system—that dent in the LCD panel was probably from his head—and then he’d pulled the TV down on top of him when he fell. But he’d recovered fast. He’d gotten out from under the mess to fight back.

The attacking demon had had a knife, though, and the victim had been unarmed.

So he’d tried to run. He’d jumped over the couch—hence the slash in the leather—smeared blood on the walls in the hallway, and made it all the way to the kitchen before succumbing.

That’s where Suzy was waiting for me now, along with a puddle of blood warping the linoleum.

“Meet our victim,” she said.

She was crouching beside the body I’d glimpsed through the window. He’d bled out through a gash severing the arteries in his throat, giving him that stereotypical second grin.

His face was bloody from the nose down—mostly because his nose and lips had been cut off—but his closed eyes were clear. It took me a second to get past the hamburger on the bottom half of his face to realize that this wasn’t an old man. No crow’s feet, no bags under the eyes, no wrinkled forehead.

“This doesn’t look like the guy who should live here,” I said.

“That’s because he didn’t.” Suzy flipped his wallet open. “Jay Brandon. Thirty-three years old, lives all the way out of town in Lone Pine. Seems he was visiting his mom.”

“Where’s his mom?”

“Luckily for her, not here. We haven’t found her yet.”

I took a second look at Jay Brandon, trying to see past the blood. Trying not to think of him as a human being who had just been alive hours earlier. Someone who had hobbies, friends, and a job. I wondered if he’d ever read the Wheel of Time series and then tried not to think about that, either.