Shadow Burns: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Preternatural Affairs Book 4) (13 page)

“I think Ander had Nichols summoning demons. That’s what it looked like to me. He’s the one I found in the basement under Paradise Mile.” I gave Isobel a quick description of the altar and what exactly had happened, just in case she recognized it.

But she only looked confused. She shook her head.

“It doesn’t sound like anything Ander used to do, but all those vines, that little girl… I guess he’s branched out. Anyway, once I was free from my contract, I wanted to help people. So I became Isobel Stonecrow. When I talk to the dead, it heals families. It mends shattered hearts. It resolves problems that should be irreconcilable after death.”

“You don’t have to defend yourself with me, Izzy.” I didn’t just mean about her necrocognition.

I’ve got a good gut instinct. Not just when it comes to magic.

Everything inside me was saying that Isobel was being honest now, and that she hated what had happened, and she regretted it.

She didn’t have to defend herself for
any
of it.

Even the murder—well, she didn’t remember it. How much could I blame her for something she’d forgotten? I didn’t remember killing the succubus assassin who’d attacked me, either.

The corners of her eyes crinkled as she smiled. “You called me Izzy.”

“What? You’d prefer Hope?”

“No,” she said firmly. She tilted my jaw back with gentle hands. “I prefer Isobel. And when it’s coming from you, I like Izzy. But only from you.”

The energy in the room was shifting away from misery and regret into something that fizzed in my stomach. Something electric in the places where Isobel’s skin touched mine.

But there was a question I couldn’t drop. I hated to bring that darkness into her eyes, didn’t want to make her remember. But I needed to ask.

“What’s it like?” I asked. “You know…down there?”

In Hell
.

She sank against me, thighs settling on either side of mine. Those hadn’t changed at all with the glamor. I couldn’t help but run my hands up her knees toward her waist. I’d been wanting to touch her for so long, it felt like sin to get to finally curve my fingers around the swell of her hips.

“Where I was, the sun was always at high noon.” Her trembling hands brushed my jaw. “Walking around outside was like being rolled across the top of a barbecue. Always bright, always on fire. Except for Ander’s house. It was dark in there. Full of shadows.” Her thumbs framed either side of my face, and she gazed down at me with blank eyes. Seeing but not seeing. “And the shadows burn, Cèsar,” Isobel whispered. “In Hell,
everything
burns.”

I couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like.

She’d gone to Hell to work. For a year. Isobel had come back broken, a different woman, someone with few memories and many regrets.

The fact she’d come out at all was amazing.

“Ander’s going to come for you,” I said. “I need to know more if we’re going to stop him.”

Her forefinger flicked the top button of my shirt, opening the collar. Her fingernail tickled against my chest. “Then I need you to help me remember. I need you to investigate Hope Jimenez and find out what she did. If we can follow her trail, maybe we can find a way out of the contract before Ander brings me back.”

“The contract. Right.” My mouth was dry.

She undid another button. “Will you help me remember, Cèsar? You’re the only one I trust to look into this.”

Frankly, I didn’t want to investigate. I didn’t want to know anything about the person Isobel used to be, or whom she had killed, or how she had died. I liked who she was now, straddling my hips and slowly stripping my shirt off.

But I’ve never been one to refuse a lady.

“Yeah,” I said. “I can investigate, even though you’ve lied to me about everything.” I added that last part mostly as a reminder to myself.

“Not everything.” She stroked her fingers through my hair. The light scrape of her fingernails radiated all the way into my stomach. “My past is a secret. Who I am—I’ve never been anything but honest about that with you. I’ve never pretended to act like a different person. The woman you know is the woman I am.”

It sounded good. She was saying the right things. “But you outright lied in Paradise Mile. You put us in danger.”

“I was afraid,” Isobel said. “I’m sorry.”

It was awfully hard to think when she kept stroking her fingers through my hair like that. I couldn’t decide if the urge to trust her was because my gut instinct thought I should, or because a slightly more southerly organ had taken control.

“I’d never turn you into the OPA, Izzy,” I said. “Whatever you did for Ander, whatever led you to Ander—that was another life.”

Relief sighed from her. “I haven’t let anyone in for a long time,” Isobel murmured, angling her hips so that she was rubbing against me, slow and rhythmic. “Living a lie is lonely.”

Yeah, thinking rationally just kept getting harder.

It was a bad idea to get cozy with Isobel, and not just because of the secrets and lies.

There was another reason I’d been resisting her. A reason who drove a Bugatti, wore designer everything, and once proposed marriage to Isobel. You know, the guy who I’d sworn my life to protect as his aspis.

That
reason.

But goddamn, the last woman I’d been with had been a succubus assassin, and I didn’t even remember it. I’d had a dry spell of some embarrassing, not-worth-counting number of months leading up to that.

Isobel wasn’t the only one who lived a lie. Working for a secret government organization, my life was nothing but lies. And yeah, it was lonely.

There’s only so much self-control a guy can exert before he runs dry.

Isobel kissed me, and I let her. Her lips were the softest I’d ever tasted. Everything about her was soft. Her skin, her thighs, her breasts molding against my chest.

She pushed, and I dropped back on the bed. I didn’t stop her when she unbuttoned my shirt. But there was more between us than just clothing. There was my kopis, my boss, Isobel’s ex-boyfriend.

“I shouldn’t,” I started to say, but Isobel didn’t let me talk.

“No, Cèsar,” she said against my lips. “Don’t. Not anymore.”

Like I said, a guy only has so much self-control before he runs dry.

And I was definitely dry.

THERE ARE WORSE THINGS than waking up smashed against the wall of my apartment by a warm, curvy female body.

Even if the female body in question is a massive bed hog.

Not just a bed hog, but a pillow and blanket hog, too. My head was flat on the mattress, and I was completely naked, almost cold, while Isobel was swaddled in all of my sheets.

The blankets were pulled low enough to flash one bare breast. Her arm was flung over her eyes. She was oblivious to my gaze as it traveled down her exposed flesh to the curve of hip wrapped up in my sheets.

Her right leg was thrown over mine. She didn’t react when I cupped her thigh again.

Still just as perfect as the evening before.

I didn’t need a pillow anyway.

My hand kept stroking her leg absently as I mulled over the previous night. Not what had happened with Isobel and me, but what had happened after I had fallen asleep.

I hadn’t had any nightmares about the hallway. No dreams at all, as far as I could recall.

It would have been too much to hope that our confrontation at Paradise Mile had ended the nightmares. Ander was still out there. He still planned on making Isobel fulfill her contract. And he obviously knew where I lived—he’d sent me that invitation, after all.

The fact that he hadn’t come for us must have meant that my wards had worked.

Bless Suzy and her amazing witchcraft lessons.

Isobel rolled over with a sigh, scooting back so that her butt pressed against me. I might have believed she was still asleep if it weren’t for the little wiggle that made sure I was wedged right between the cheeks of her ass. It was a great place to be. Probably the best place in the universe. It definitely had been the night before.

“That an invitation?” I murmured into her neck.

She made a contented noise, a little bit like a purr. “It would be, but…”

“But?”

“Look at your clock, Cèsar.”

I did. And I immediately regretted it.

It was after nine in the morning.

I was running late.
Really
late. As in, an hour after I was supposed to be sitting at my desk late, with an hour of miserable traffic separating me from my destination. And that didn’t even take into account that Fritz would have expected to see me at his gym that morning.

The realization was even more effective at murdering my libido than a cold shower.

But Isobel was stretching the rest of herself up against me now, reminding me of the perfect curve between her ribs and hips, the weight of her body on top of mine.

The idea of leaving her alone was unbearable. Going where I couldn’t keep an eye on her—where I couldn’t keep two hands on her—seemed like the worst idea I’d ever had.

My cell phone caught my eye. The alert light was blinking.

As I watched, it buzzed with another text message.

I considered ignoring it. But Isobel said, “You better check that and get going.”

“You’re killing me.”

She gave me a pitying smile. “I’ll see you later?”

Like she could keep me away.

“You’re not leaving this apartment while I’m gone,” I said. “Got it? Not even to check the mail or, hell, to stick your hand outside a window and feel if there’s rain. I’ll be back for you as soon as possible. Until then, you’re stuck.”

Her expression darkened. “You don’t have to convince me to stay inside your wards.”

“Good.” I slapped that extremely juicy ass and got out of bed.

According to my cell phone, I’d missed multiple calls and texts. Only a couple of them were from Fritz. The rest were Suzy. All of them meant that I’d be in pretty big trouble, one way or another.

When you work for a government agency that routinely handles preternatural threats, getting trapped in a haunted house isn’t a valid reason to miss work. I mean, that’s the job. You have to make an appearance unless you’re literally tied up or dead.

Fritz would understand. He would have to, once I told him that Isobel was in danger.

Another twinge of guilt.

Facing Fritz was going to suck pretty bad.

I’d worn the last of my clean suits to the “memorial” and dropped the others off at the dry cleaner, so I didn’t have any choice but to put on jeans and a t-shirt. Black, of course, so that I wouldn’t clash with everyone else at the office.

Isobel hugged my pillow to her chest and watched me get dressed. “What are you going to tell Fritz about Ander?”

“I’ll have to tell him the truth. The Paradise Mile case needs to be reopened. I’ll report on what I saw at the house, what I think might have happened, and the risk it presents to the public. Normal business. Nothing to worry about.”

“Don’t tell him I was there,” she said. “Please don’t tell him anything about me at all.” I could tell that it was meant to be an order, not a request. Women were pretty good at making nonnegotiable demands like that.

“Why?” I asked.

She gave me a Look. The kind of Look that said, “The fact that you’re asking is making me seriously question your common sense.”

Either Isobel didn’t want Fritz to know about her past, or she didn’t want him to know that it had caught up with her.

Fine. As far as the OPA knew, Isobel didn’t exist anyway. She didn’t need to go on the record about anything related to Paradise Mile.

I jerked my jacket on, zipped it halfway up. “Help yourself to anything in the fridge. If it’s in a Tupperware, it’s probably a potion, so steer clear of that. Food’s in wrappers. Clean towels in the linen closet if you want to shower.”

She nodded, pulled the sheets tighter around her, hugged the pillow hard.

Isobel was scared. And who could blame her? As soon as the afterglow wore off, reality set in, and reality was one ugly motherfucker.

“Ander isn’t going to get your contract back, Isobel,” I said. “You’re going to be fine.”

Another nod.

I didn’t like having to leave her, but my phone was buzzing again.

One more kiss and I was out the door.

An hour later found me standing in Fritz’s office, feeling like a kid who’d been sent to the principal’s office.

“Let me get this straight.” He pushed back from his desk, extended his leg, and rubbed his thigh as though it were cramping. It probably was. The prosthesis made him stiff if he sat for very long, and I’d interrupted a string of phone conferences with my tardiness. “You returned to Paradise Mile to investigate a case we’d already closed.”

“Technically, I returned to attend a memorial.”

“Without notifying anyone.”

“The invitation was sent to me personally, and as you said, the investigation was closed. I didn’t have to notify anyone.”

He drummed his pen on the desk blotter. “Okay. So there was trouble at Paradise Mile.”

“The house came alive. The residents were animated dead, or…something. The canyon was closed off by some strange fog, but I managed to escape.”

Fritz would be able to tell I was leaving a lot out, but it was hard to get any deeper than that without mentioning Isobel.

I wasn’t telling him about the anointed butcher’s knife, either. The OPA would want to seize it as evidence. Once something disappeared into our storage rooms, it never came out again. And I wasn’t going to surrender my only weapon to fight Ander.

“I’m not really surprised things went south at Paradise Mile, to be honest,” Fritz said. “The orderly’s body disappeared from our morgue yesterday morning. I’d sent a team to investigate the retirement village and they couldn’t even locate the canyon.”

“The road is gone?”

“The entire canyon is gone. You know, if you’d reported your invitation to the memorial, I could have sent a team to investigate with you. As it is, there’s nothing left to investigate now. No body, no house, no canyon.”

“Damn.”

“We’ll reopen the case for further investigation. See if we can dig anything up. I’m not going to assign you to it for safety reasons. Obviously, they wanted to contact you specifically; you may be some kind of target. You’ll stay on deskwork for the near future.”