Hotter Than Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Mystery (Preternatural Affairs Book 3) (20 page)

Something smacked into the side of the RV, rocking it on its wheels.

“What was that?” I asked.

Yelena was struggling. Sweat drenched her forehead. “That would be a visitor knocking.” She didn’t sound so bright and perky anymore.

I didn’t need to ask what kind of creature wanted to visit us.

“Extend the wards,” Isobel called over her shoulder. The RV kept trundling toward the church, but we were moving in slow motion, and it looked so far away now. Impossibly distant. According to the speedometer, we were below five miles per hour.

“I’m trying,” Yelena said. She shut her eyes, squeezed her hands on the crystals in the circle. Her face was purple with exertion.

The magic wasn’t expanding.

Another hard
thump
, and the RV rocked again.

Which was about the time that the engine started spluttering.

The cabin lights flickered. For a few seconds, the only light inside of the RV was the faint glow of Yelena’s magic. I could see what was outside the windows in that instant.

There were faces pressed to the glass, peering through the beaded windows with glowing crimson eyes and bared teeth.

And then the lights came on again. Isobel jammed her foot against the gas pedal.

“Come on, come
on
,” she growled.

The RV groaned as it accelerated a fraction, and the church grew in the windshield. The speedometer inched toward ten miles per hour.

The stairs were right in front of us. Isobel didn’t hit the brakes.

I grabbed the dashboard. “Isobel?”

“Hold on!” she shouted.

We smashed into the stairs, bumping as we climbed toward the front door. Yelena shrieked. I slammed into the dashboard.

The door was just a few feet away. Getting closer.

Isobel drove us right into it.

The church doors exploded open just as the RV’s engine gave up the ghost and died with an exhausted wheeze. The battery followed seconds later. Darkness filled the passenger compartment.

We rolled a few more inches into the church. I felt another
thump
as our bumper tapped the statue guarding the foyer, tipping over a handful of the candles illuminating its base.

And then our momentum was gone, and we stopped.

“Wow,” Isobel whispered, hands locked on the steering wheel like she couldn’t let go.

I swung around to check on Yelena. “You okay?”

The intern had curled up on the floor between seats, arms over her head. Somehow, she had managed not to break her own circle of power. She had, however, snapped one of her necklaces, scattering parrot feathers and pink beads everywhere.

“I’m good,” she said in a tiny, muffled voice.

“Why’d you do that, Isobel?” I asked, stepping over the seats to look out the back window. The rear half of the RV jutted through the doors, but the darkness on the other side of the glass wasn’t impenetrable anymore.

All those swirling shadows were held a few feet back, like they couldn’t pass the stairs of the Ministry.

“The church is warded, but only a few feet outside of the walls,” Isobel said. “I knew we would be safe if we could just get inside before Yelena’s magic dropped out.”

“Mission accomplished,” I said. Now the RV was inside the goddamn church, and there was no way that the fallen angel would have been able to miss hearing our arrival.

Yelena pushed onto her knees again. “I’ll stay here and protect the RV.” She mounded her hair and tied it in a messy knot at the nape of her neck. The beginnings of a bruise marked the left side of her forehead. “I’ll try to get the engine going, too.”

“Great.” I drew my Desert Eagle, checking the safety, the magazine. Everything looked good. “Isobel can help you.”

“Isobel is not sitting here while you endanger your life,” Isobel snapped.

I wasn’t about to argue with the death witch who had just driven us face-first into a fucking church.

Together, we left to search for Fritz.

It was a lot harder to leave the RV behind than I would have expected, considering that leaving the RV also meant leaving Yelena. But she had quickly gotten the lights functioning again. They filled the foyer with a warm glow.

Once we were through the doors to the nave, there was no light at all.

Metal glinted in the corner of my eye. I looked down to see Isobel holding a long knife. Don’t ask me where she’d hidden it—she’d swapped out her animal skins for blissfully snug Daisy Dukes, which didn’t cover much more than the loincloth.

“Be careful,” I warned her. “When we find this thing, I don’t want you getting in the way.”

Isobel’s eyes flashed. “In the way?”

“We’re dealing with a fallen angel here. It’s more powerful than anything you’ve ever faced before.”

“You have no idea what I’ve faced.”

“Nothing is stronger than an angel.” Actually, I had no idea. It sounded right to me. Mostly, I just wanted to scare Isobel enough that she’d go back to the RV—but she didn’t look scared.

“Let’s just find Fritz and get out of here,” she said.

Now that I could agree with.

But we’d already been discovered. Someone was moving by the altar, silhouetted against the mural of sunny fields.

I grabbed Isobel’s arm, but she wouldn’t let me shelter her with my body.

“Wait,” she said, stepping ahead of me.

“Izzy!” I hissed under my breath. “What part of ‘more powerful than anything you’ve ever faced before’ didn’t you hear?”

The person by the altar stepped forward into a beam of moonlight tinted ruby by the stained glass windows. It wasn’t the terrifying monster I’d expected. It was a shriveled little old lady in baggy robes.

Isobel remembered how to speak before I could. “Mary?”

“My goodness, is that
Isobel
? Sweet little Belle?” The volunteer from the soup kitchen smiled. It made the edges of her eyes crinkle pleasantly. “It seems like it’s been months since I’ve seen you and your cookies around here. Oh, come here, let me look at you!”

Mary limped over, arms open. Isobel made the knife vanish again and plastered a smile onto her face.

“Yeah, it’s been a few weeks,” Isobel said, but without the friendliness that she’d had for Sister Catherine. She sounded wary. And for good reason. Yet she accepted Mary’s hug, and I could only gape as the women embraced.

Over Mary’s shoulder, Isobel looked terrified.

There was nothing intimidating about a fragile old woman shuffling around in the dark, even if we were in Helltown. But that was the thing—humans didn’t stick around Helltown at night.

Which meant she wasn’t what she appeared.

My eyes raked down her voluminous black robes. The cloth dragged on the ground, so I couldn’t see her feet.

“I was just making some tea for my husband,” Mary said. “Would you like to join us for a cup?”

Isobel quickly stepped back and clung to my arm. “I didn’t know that you’re married. I’ve never seen you with anyone before.” I think she said it for my benefit.

A light clicked on in my head.

The fallen angel had been killing people compulsively based on some ideal victim. That victim was probably someone that the angel loved, someone she knew intimately.

Someone like a husband.

“He just came back to me. He’s been…” Mary paused, frowning, as though trying to figure out what she was saying. “He’s been traveling,” she finally said with finality.

She has him. She has Fritz.

“I’d love to meet your husband,” I said.

“He’s sleeping right now. I’m sure he’ll come down once he wakes up, though,” Mary said cheerfully. She took my other arm in both of her hands, and I went tense all over. “I want you to look at my electric teakettle for me while you’re here, Agent Hawke. The enchantments protecting it from Helltown’s energies seem to have failed and you did such an excellent job with the oven at the soup kitchen.”

I swallowed hard. “I’m happy to help however I can.”

Mary guided us down the pews. Her footsteps sounded sharp on the stone, like she was wearing cowboy boots under those voluminous robes.

Or like she didn’t have shoes at all.

She stopped at a kitchen at the back of the church. There were overstuffed chairs scattered around the room, a French press on the counter, even a bookshelf with a few well-worn bestsellers from the last couple of decades. Someone had gone mural-crazy in the back, too, and the brightness of the paint was shocking in the otherwise colorless gloom of Helltown.

“Nice,” I said.

“Sometimes they feed the human slaves back here.” Isobel sounded like she was trying to feign cheerfulness, but failing. “When their masters let them stay after mass, they’ll come back here and socialize.”

Mary released me. The place that her hands had been touching felt cold. “We try to make them as comfortable as possible. It’s a challenge.” She sighed. “I wish there was more that we could do for the mortals of Helltown, but they come and go so frequently…”

“You mean, they get killed all the time,” I said.

“Their masters are not gentle.” Mary looked sad. Genuinely sad.

Pretty weird, considering that I was ninety percent certain this old bat had been murdering innocents for months.

I scanned her face for any hint of guilt and didn’t see anything. No guilt, no guile, nothing. As Domingo would have said, “The bitch is crazy.”

Mary didn’t even know what she was doing.

She shoved an electric teakettle into my hands. “Fix this. In the meantime, I’ll stoke the fire and boil some water.” She shuffled to the fireplace, struck a match, lit the charcoal inside. There was a pot of water suspended over it.

Isobel slipped to my side. “It can’t be her,” she whispered.

“Just like how you thought Sister Catherine couldn’t be involved?” I hissed back.

“Well she isn’t the murderer, is she? I wasn’t wrong.”

“But she’s been—” I cut off when Mary glanced back at us.

“How does the kettle look?” the old woman asked.

I hadn’t even glanced at it yet. I rolled the teakettle over in my hands.

The wires had been ripped out of the bottom and connected to batteries. Crystals had been duct-taped to the base. Judging by the way they flashed in the edge of my vision like Isobel’s RV, it was probably safe to guess that those should have protected the batteries from Helltown’s powerful infernal energy.

“It’s probably fixable,” I said. “It’s not my area of practice, though.” A thought struck me. “How do you even know I can cast magic?”

“I can always tell. It’s a gift.” Mary prodded the fireplace with a poker. The flames flared and momentarily rendered her black robes semi-translucent, letting me see the outline of her body. Her knees looked thick and malformed.

Whatever she had hidden under those robes, it was not human.

“When did you say your husband was going to come down?” I asked.

“Oh, who knows? He has a habit of sleeping in. After being gone for so long, I don’t want to bother him.” She limped away from the fire, now burning strong, and opened a cabinet. “Anyone for Milano cookies? They’re not as good as Isobel’s cookies, of course, but we make do in a drought.” She winked at Isobel.

The woman at my side looked like she was going to throw up. But she said, “Sure. I love Milanos.”

I set the electric teakettle on the counter and patted my suit down, searching for a pocketknife. Instead, I found a hard lump on the back of my belt.

I’d forgotten that I was still carrying the ritual knife from the aspis test. It was hidden by the tail of my jacket and still warm with magic.

My eyes sliced across the room to Mary. Would stabbing a fallen angel in the heart be enough?

She was offering a cookie to Isobel with a warm grin. I couldn’t even imagine burying the blade between her shoulder blades. Just contemplating it made me queasy.

I found my Swiss Army Knife and used it to cut the crystals off of the teakettle. The magic was still in place; the spell was just dead.

“I can probably energize them,” I said. “Might make it work again.”

Mary popped a cookie into her mouth. “I knew you’d be able to help.”

“But before I can start, I need to clear my head. And, uh, some other things. Is there a bathroom?”

She pointed at a door beyond the fireplace. “Back that way. I have to warn you, we don’t have proper plumbing here. We tried to install actual toilets once and they constantly broke. All that infernal energy, you know.
Everything
breaks around here.”

Damn, but she pulled off the charming, cuddly grandma thing. She was even better than Sister Catherine.

I stood. “Isobel? Want to show me where they are?”

“I’ll just stay here and catch up with Mary,” she said. “I don’t need to use the facilities.”

“But it’s dark back there,” I said through my teeth. I wasn’t going to leave Isobel alone with an insane fallen angel.

“You’re a big boy. You’ll be fine.” Isobel gave me a hard look. “Go find the bathroom.”

I couldn’t argue with her without giving us away. And every second I waited was another second that we didn’t know what condition Fritz was in—or if he was even still alive.

“I’ll be fine,” Isobel said softly.

She had been a priestess at the Temple of the Hand of Death. She was probably safer alone in Helltown than I was, even here.

So I gave Mary another smile, and I left Isobel alone with the fallen angel.

I HAD TO SEARCH three staircases before I found one that led somewhere other than the dusty attic and choir loft. The inside of the bell tower was a long, lightless, spiraling staircase with darkness waiting at the top.

Climbing those stairs took an eternity. I lost track of the number of floors after the first five. Shadow consumed the stairwell below and above, forcing me to guide myself with a hand on the wall.

The only way that I knew I was getting to the top was that I could hear wind whistling through open windows.

Finally, I found myself in a square room big enough to house multiple bells, though there weren’t any bells in sight.

Empty chains dangled over the hollow core of the tower.

And there was Fritz.