Sinners & Sorcerers: Four Urban Fantasy Thrillers (10 page)

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.”

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 went through 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’s. 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.”