Shadow Burns: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Preternatural Affairs Book 4) (16 page)

“I didn’t want to know.” Isobel toyed with the bagel without taking a bite. “Criminal law?”

“Looks like you’re pretty good at what you do.”

“No, Cèsar. That’s not me. That’s another woman. She’s long gone.”

“Lawyering’s probably more lucrative than being a native princess shaman,” I said.

“I don’t care about the money.” She took a tiny bite of the bagel. Swallowed hard. I wanted to ask what she thought of it being fried in bacon grease, but it didn’t seem like the right time. “Did you find anything else?”

You might have been slightly cold-blooded, verging on evil
.

“Nah,” I said. “Not yet.”

She set the plate aside. “I’m not hungry. Sorry. I need a shower.”

Isobel peeled herself free of the sheets, abandoning her breakfast on my bedside table and the picture of Hope Jimenez.

I was tempted to follow her into the bathroom, but I doubted she wanted to be bothered. Not today.

Last night’s magic was gone. She didn’t even want to eat my greasy breakfast.

“More bacon for me,” I said to nobody in particular.

I took a big bite as I grabbed my house phone to call work. I still didn’t plan to talk to Fritz—the text message would be enough. I’d deal with his response later.

Instead, I called my own desk.

Suzy answered immediately. “You’re late again, Hawke. I’m gonna have your balls for this. How do you think we should prepare them this time? Filleted, dredged in pork rinds, and then fried for a delicious low-carb snack? Pickled and then—”

“I’m not coming in today,” I said, interrupting her. Normally, the detailed description of how she planned to mutilate my genitalia was amusing, but my normal sense of humor seemed to be MIA. “Actually, I might not be in for a couple days. Not sure yet. But definitely not today.”

“Oh.” I could practically hear Suzy’s disapproving scowl. “And why’s that?”

“I’m not feeling well.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. My guts felt like they’d been tied into knots.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with Fritz telling you not to investigate Paradise Mile, does it?”

I decided to go for casual and funny rather than defensive. Less suspicious that way. “The only thing I’m investigating right now is the bottom of my toilet bowl.”

Her tone softened a little, even if her words didn’t. “You’re calling to tell me this…why? You don’t call in sick to me. I’m not your boss.”

“What are you talking about? You own my balls; you’re worse than a boss.”

“Well, that’s true,” Suzy said. I’d been joking, but it didn’t sound like she was. “You officially have my permission to watch TV all day and keep your nasty miserable germs to yourself. Blessed be.”

“There’s just a favor I have to ask.”

“Uh-huh, of course there is. What do you want?”

“Turn the paperwork in for me? It’s on my desk.”

A moment of silence. I could imagine her expression darkening as she pushed the papers around on my desk. “The paperwork’s not done yet.”

“I know.” I’d been procrastinating on it pretty hard and the OPA was more likely to take offense at my absence if I didn’t get it done.

“Uh-huh. I see how it is.”

“Please, Suze?”

“It’s not like I can have your balls more than I already do. You’re going to actually owe me something tangible at some point. Something monetary. Oh, or something involving chocolate.”

“Anything you want,” I said, knowing how dangerous that was to promise. Suzy was a creative lady. “Anything” could be pretty bad. Of course, we’d had similar conversations a hundred times before. She still hadn’t made me pay for all the things she’d said that she planned to make me pay for.

It was hard to tell if it was because she wasn’t seriously keeping a tally, or if she
was
keeping a tally and just happened to be saving up all the testicle-barbecuing for a rainy day.

“I’ll think of something,” Suzy said. “If I’m finishing your paperwork while you wimp around, then I’ve really got to go. Don’t die of swine flu or something.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“And don’t murder any succubi and then run from the law so that I end up getting arrested for it, either.”

I grimaced. “Also not planning on that.”

“You weren’t the first time, either.”

“Yeah, right, always nice talking to you, Suzy. Thanks for the support.”

She grunted and slammed the phone into the cradle.

The dial tone buzzed through my skull like an annoyed bee.

Suzy was always pretty abrupt, but I kind of wished she would have given me a few more minutes this time. I liked it when she gave me hell. It was reassuring—a constant in my life that hadn’t changed even as the job got weirder and weirder.

Now that she was gone, I had nothing to distract myself from the task to come. The world was a little duller and grayer and a hell of a lot less amusing.

Whether or not I wanted to deal with it, I was going to have to find out how Isobel had died. And I was going to have to do it while she haunted my apartment and grieved for herself.

I was going to have to find Ander, too. Couldn’t kill him if I didn’t know where he was.

I might not have been angling for the premeditated murder of a succubus assassin, but this wasn’t much better.

Hey, at least Suzy wasn’t likely to get arrested this time.

Even if the subject matter was miserable, it felt good to bury myself in research at home. Just me and a crappy old laptop that didn’t have the OPA logo anywhere on it.

It felt a lot like my time as a private detective. I hadn’t been investigating demons at the time, mind you; I hadn’t known that demons existed until I had to save my sister, Ofelia, from the incubus mafia. My investigations had been more like insurance fraud and cheating wives.

Worlds
apart from trying to find a demon so that I could murder him.

I wasn’t sure when I’d gone from thinking that I needed to relieve Isobel of her contract to thinking that Ander needed to die. Maybe when I’d seen the photo of Hope Jimenez, star lawyer, and realized what she’d given up.

Morally defunct or not, she’d been educated. Accomplished. A superstar. Now she lived in a teal RV with beaded curtains. She was living a broken life because of Ander. She’d literally died and lost everything…and he wanted her back.

Killing Ander wasn’t first priority, but if that was what I had to do to keep her from fulfilling her contract, then yeah—I’d kill him.

It felt wrong to even wrap my mind around those words: “Kill him.” That wasn’t how I operated. Sure, I grew up in kind of a rough neighborhood, and I’d gotten locked up with my brother a couple of times, but almost never for fighting.

I wasn’t the guy who made trouble. That was Domingo’s job.

Now I had an enchanted knife and the Desert Eagle loaded and I actually planned to use them.

I just had to know where I’d be aiming.

There are places on the internet that you can’t access with Firefox. There’s this whole other internet, called the darknet, that you can only access with clients like Tor. And there’s no Google on the darknet. You have to know where you’re going.

In other words, you had to be looking for trouble.

I was definitely looking for trouble.

I’d found some helpful forums in my time as private investigator, and I browsed those now, looking for rabbit holes. It was easy to find drug dealers on the darknet. In five minutes, I’d found a hundred dealers offering weed and lethe and mushroom spores in exchange for bitcoin—boring.

Digging deeper led me to uglier places. Vague offers for services that were increasingly illegal. Stalking, harassment, trafficking, debt collection. Lots of those people would happily take money to assassinate victims, but they were too smart to say it.

Gotta watch for the code words. “Negotiable services.” That kind of thing.

Then I found a thread about getting out of trouble. Someone selling freedom from any kind of problem.

Someone offering a special kind of contract.

I was getting close.

The shower was still running. Isobel had been in there for over twenty minutes. I glanced at the door to make sure it was still closed before clicking that link.

The forum post didn’t say anything specific about Ander. It just offered a way out of trouble in the most vague way possible, and linked to another site.

All that waited on that page were a series of street addresses.

One of them was in Helltown.

I’d found the local entrance to Ander’s domain.

It was early enough for me to get into Helltown while the sun was high in the sky. Unfortunately, it was an overcast day in Los Angeles. The weather report I had open in another browser said that we were looking at a seventy percent chance of rain.

At the moment, it was windy enough that I was getting only a few minutes of sunshine through the clouds at any given time. Probably still bright enough to act as a deterrent for any wayward nightmares that might want to eat me, but I wasn’t confident. Nightmares weren’t the only demons worth fearing in Helltown.

The weather looked better tomorrow. Maybe I’d reinforce the wards, stay in with Isobel another day, see if we could find a way to forget about Jimenez and Associates together.

I wrote the Helltown address down on a piece of paper and pocketed it.

With that done, I didn’t have a choice but to go back to searching news articles while I waited for Isobel to get out of the shower. I had to find out how she’d died. Dig up the past, do a little bit of necrocognition myself.

Find some small detail that might get Isobel out of her contract if Ander came back with it in hand.

So I went back through the articles, skimming all those ones that made me uneasy. Looking at the mafia bosses that Isobel had gotten off with time served. She’d even worked with other kinds of celebrities—politicians, singers, actors. Lawyer to the famous.

Even the blogs that hated what she’d been doing—and there were a lot—had admired how good she was at her job.

That was something, at least.

Then I found a blog about the last case she’d worked on. The defendant hadn't been famous. Wasn’t a serial killer. Wasn’t the head of any mob family.

Calhoun Deppe, certified public accountant.

There weren’t any pictures of him, and the author didn’t come to any conclusions as to how he could have afforded Hope Jimenez, much less why he needed to.

He’d been accused of embezzling funds from a small New York corporation. That was it. Pretty boring job for Jimenez and Associates.

“Calhoun Deppe,” I muttered, writing that name in my Steno pad.

Searching for his name didn’t bring up anything else about him. I didn’t find him on any social networks. Didn’t find him on any corporate websites. I even risked a quick search on my OPA laptop, combing through police records—no mention of Calhoun Deppe.

Aside from his indictment, he didn’t exist at all. Not anymore.

The shower was still running.

Not sure why I suddenly noticed it after all that time, but I did. The sound of water running through the pipes in my walls was thunderous.

My search for Deppe had taken up a big chunk of time. Isobel had been in the shower for almost an hour now.

After that long, there probably wasn’t any water left in Los Angeles, much less
hot
water.

I set aside the now-empty breakfast plate, my laptops, and went to the bathroom door. Aside from the running water, I couldn’t hear any hint of Isobel’s activity inside.

I rapped my knuckles on the door.

“Izzy?”

She didn’t respond.

The doorknob was locked. It was an old, cheap lock—the kind that virtually any key could open. But I’d never locked the door before so I’d never had to unlock it, either. I patted my pockets looking for something that would fit in the keyhole and didn’t find anything. Needed a screwdriver, maybe.

But first, I bent down to squint through the hole.

I couldn’t see my bathroom on the other side. All I could see was a flat plane of red.

Just like in the servant’s quarters of Paradise Mile.

My heart leaped into the back of my throat, pounding through my whole body.

“Isobel!” I shouted.

Forget finding a screwdriver.

I took two steps back and leaped into the door, hitting it with my full weight, shoulder-first.

The door exploded off its weak hinges. First time I was ever grateful for living in such a cheap little shit hole.

It wasn’t dark in the bathroom—just foggy from the water running for too long. The mirror was covered in condensation. It was so hot that I couldn’t breathe.

I flung the shower curtain open.

Isobel wasn’t inside.

But the window over the shower was open.

Goddammit, it was open, and I hadn’t even felt my wards break. Someone must have cut through them from the inside using an athame. It was the only way to have gotten out without my feeling it.

Isobel could have been gone for almost an hour and I never would have known.

IT WAS OVERCAST WHEN I drove back to Helltown. I ditched my car outside the gates when the engine started to splutter, jumped out onto cool pavement, and launched inside.

Rain peppered the asphalt as I rushed down the street.

The address for the Helltown entrance to Ander’s house was like directions, rather than an actual street name with a number. “Apothecary behind Little Death.” That was all it said. The information was more than enough.

Little Death was a club—a dangerous club owned by the incubus mafia, the Silver Needles. A reference to the cutesy French idea that an orgasm was
la petite morte
, translated to “the little death.”

Where incubi and succubi were concerned, it wasn’t such a cutesy idea. They were sex demons. They fed on the sexual energies of humans to the point of draining the life force.

It’s not hard to guess what happens to humans stupid enough to go inside Little Death.

I’d faced off with the Silver Needles more than once before. Those were the assholes who had tortured my baby sister. More recently, they’d put a dollar figure on my head and sent assassins after me. I discovered exactly how good incubi were at feeding on sexual urges, not to mention evoking them.