Shadow Burns: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Preternatural Affairs Book 4) (3 page)

“Aside from the basement right underneath us, yeah.”

Suzy and I exchanged a look.

“How do I get into the basement?” I asked.

I hadn’t noticed the trap door in the servant’s hallway. When I opened it, what waited underneath was wholly uninviting in that dark, cobwebby kind of way. The narrow stairs led directly underneath the drawing room. They looked so old that I wasn’t even sure they could hold my weight.

“You want to check that out?” I asked Suzy. “You’re smaller.”

She looked kind of green. “You go ahead.”

I couldn’t remember the last time Suzy had been anything but gung-ho on a case. Probably because she was
never
anything but gung-ho.

“You’re not claustrophobic, are you?” If she were, I’d have to tease her mercilessly about it.

I immediately began planning an office prank involving obscene amounts of cardboard around her cubicle.

“It’s the cobwebs,” Suzy said out of the corner of her mouth, arms stiff at her sides.

“What? The spiders?”

“Yeah. The spiders.” Her cheeks were pink.

Suzy and I had been forced to go into semi-abandoned mines on a case earlier that year. I say “semi-abandoned” because the mines hadn’t been occupied by people anymore, but they had been home to demon-spiders the size of small horses. They would have killed us if we hadn’t gotten backup in time.

She’d come out of it a lot more fucked up than I had, both physically and mentally.

“Okay, no problem.” I shed my jacket and handed it to Suzy.

I was surprised that she didn’t try to prove herself manlier than me by jumping down anyway, but she was still standing stiffly beside the trap door when I headed down into the darkness.

The basement stairs creaked underneath my weight. I hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight to a job taking place during full daylight, so I felt along the wall for a switch and felt nothing but cobwebs whispering across my fingers.

Something cold bumped me in the forehead, gave a soft jangle.

Chain for a light bulb?
I tugged on it.

Dim orange light radiated through the basement, painting long shadows on everything stored in the basement.

There was so little visibility that it was easy to imagine those shadows as things much scarier than the mundane reality. A stack of bulk toilet paper formed the lumpy shape of a giant worm. The faded Christmas decorations cast shadows of demons I’d once fought in downtown Reno. The fake potted plants looked like jagged teeth. Lawn maintenance equipment looked like…well, lawn maintenance equipment.

Giant rusty tree clippers don’t need to look like anything else to be creepy.

None of that was suspicious or out of the ordinary. I even spotted the spare linens that the one old guy had been asking for.

But there was one incredibly suspicious thing sprawled right in the middle of the basement, and it was no trick of the light.

Someone had left a giant fucking altar and circle of power in the basement of a retirement home.

Maybe Herbert wasn’t all that nutty after all.

I’d been doing intense study on circles of power lately, trying to beef up my ritual knowledge. So I could tell it was the kind of circle I’d never cast, not in a million years.

The symbols carved into the floor were jagged and hungry looking, augmented by white paint. Melted wax marked the thirteen points where candles would stand during a ritual. The altar was covered in bones. Big bones. Either someone had been butchering a deer at Paradise Mile, or someone had sacrificed humans for their spell.

Those marks, those remains, the placement of those candles—I recognized everything.

Someone was evoking demons from Hell.

Coincidentally, that someone—the witch himself—was standing on the other side of the altar, and he was aiming a gun at me.

His scrubs were stretched awkwardly over the frame of a high school football player who had gone to seed. His greasy hair was cut short. The name badge on his chest said “Nichols.” He stared at me with wild eyes, sweating so profusely that it dripped on the floor.

Neither of us moved.

We were frozen, staring at each other in shock. I hadn’t expected to find anything in the basement. And the orderly definitely hadn’t expected to find me, either.

“I found the source of the apparitions,” I called up the stairs, hoping Suzy would hear me, hoping she’d detect the worry in my voice and wouldn’t come down to investigate.

I couldn’t hear her response. Couldn’t hear anything but the pulse roaring in my ears.

The whole basement seemed to have reduced to the gun pointing at me.

The orderly’s tongue darted out to wet his lips. He was trembling. “I have to do this,” he rasped.

I lifted my hands slowly. Real slowly. Like I was saying,
Hey, look, I don’t have a gun.
“Let’s talk.”

The whites of his eyes made a bloodshot rim around his irises. “We can’t talk. There’s no time if we want to be able to stop him before he performs the merging. Don’t you understand?”

I didn’t understand what he was saying, but I did understand that I was one finger spasm away from joining those bones on the altar.

There wasn’t any time to negotiate, no time to talk him down.

The floorboards above creaked. The orderly jerked with surprise.

I leaped off the bottom of the stairs and dived into a shelf of bathroom supplies. Toilet paper and disposable razors and Band-Aids exploded everywhere. The debris cloaked me and made it harder for the orderly to aim at anything fatal—I hoped.

Bang! Bang!

Two gunshots, nearly at the exact same instant.

Wood exploded right next to my head, shattering one of the shelf posts.

Simultaneously, a perfect red circle appeared in the center of Nichols’s forehead.

His eyes went blank. He collapsed behind the altar.

I shoved the toilet paper off of me and spun to see Suzy on the steps, both hands gripping her Beretta. She was stiff. Glaring. Nostrils flared, eyes wide, jaw clenched.

The orderly’s arm was limp on the floor beyond the altar, the gun inches from his unmoving fingers. A puddle of blood oozed into the grooves of the circle set into the floor.

Hell of a shot from Suzy Takeuchi.

She didn’t lower the gun until she had kicked the orderly’s weapon away and checked him for vitals. “You’re welcome,” she told me, which I took to mean that the witch tormenting poor Herbert and company was dead.

So it wasn’t exactly a He-Man case, but at least it was over fast.

I’d had worse days.

MY NAME IS CÈSAR Hawke. I work for a secret government organization that handles everything that doesn’t officially exist.

Pretty cool, right?

We’ve got a department that handles dissemination of misinformation. Guys whose livelihoods hinge on convincing government officials that their city’s children didn’t vanish because of a bloodthirsty cult, but because of sex trafficking. Or that the winged thing soaring over their city wasn’t a demon escaped from Phlegethon, but a hot air balloon with an unusual design.

There’s another department for regulation of rogue demon hunters. Pretty big job there—especially since collateral damage from vigilantes is a bigger cause of civilian death than actual demon attack.

Try finding a job like
that
on Craigslist.

Me? I work with witches, mostly bad ones.

I’m pretty good at it. We’re all pretty good at our jobs, though.

You can tell we’re good because normal people keep living normal lives, oblivious to the work we do. You’ve never heard of Magical Violations, Infernal Relations, or Kopis Regulations because we’re so damn good.

Sure, the pay is crap, but I don’t do it for the pay. I do it because I like helping people.

Even when helping people means that I have to watch my partner shoot an old guy in the face.

You’d think after my front-row ticket to a man getting shot in the head, I might have trouble sleeping. But I rested like a chloroformed baby after my day in Mojave. Eyes shut at ten, eyes open at four, no dreams, felt awesome in the morning.

I didn’t make a habit of dipping into my sleeping potions, but I’d been working a lot of rough cases the past year. A succubus assassin, a psychopathic werewolf, a nightmare demon, even a fallen angel. Decent sleep was becoming harder by the week.

If I needed potions to rest, then dammit, I’d drink the potions.

It was the only way I’d be able to make it to my daily gym appointment the following morning.

To be honest, I didn’t really
need
to go to the gym at all. Sleeping potions weren’t my only magical augmentation. Strength spells were my real specialty. Every morning, I magically juiced myself using potions and poultices, and the outcome was a thousand times better than anything I could accomplish in a gym.

After years drinking my brew, I was strong. Really strong. I could probably bench a car if it was one of those wussy European two-seaters, but I’d never tested it.

Try finding someone willing to spot a lift like that. Good luck.

But I arrived at the gym by five in the morning, same as I had every other morning for months. Strong for the average person is weak compared to most preternatural enemies. I’d been working hard at building up my reflexes and speed.

The results had been less than magical so far. Let’s put it that way.

Still, you’d expect that potion-enhanced strength alone would help me win against a guy who’d had his foot recently amputated. Beefy ol’ Agent Cèsar Hawke versus some skinny dude missing an appendage? Easier than a drunk kid at his first frat party.

That’s what you’d
think
, anyway.

“Get off of me, you stupid gimp,” I groaned into the padded blue mats.

Director Fritz Friederling twisted my arm behind me until the elbow threatened to pop. “What did you say?”

“Uncle. I said uncle!”

He laughed as he let me up. It wasn’t a pretty sound. Despite the fact that Fritz was some suave martial arts master who drove sports cars and owned enough gadgets to make James Bond jealous, his laugh sounded more like Bill Gates sucking down helium.

Most of the time, he kept up the serious super-spy persona. Not a lot of people knew he had one dorky goddamn laugh.

But I did. He laughed at me a
lot
now that we were training together.

Fritz helped me get to my feet, of which I had two. Normal feet with normal toes and possibly a case of athlete’s foot.

My boss and friend, on the other hand, only had one normal foot, which looked suspiciously pedicured. The other leg was prosthetic from mid-calf down.

Fritz had several different prostheses depending on the occasion. I’d seen him with a business casual foot, a formal foot, even a “boating day” foot.

Today was the “foot I can shove right up Cèsar’s ass” model: a cage of elaborate titanium, both sturdy and impressive to look at, with gears that made him almost as mobile as he used to be.

“You’re cheating,” I said.

Fritz bounced away from me, shadowboxing with vicious jabs that I knew for a fact hurt when delivered to one’s throat region. “Cheating? How am I cheating?”

“You’re wearing an enchanted foot.” I could see the magic in the corner of my vision. There weren’t any spells that I recognized, but then again, I wasn’t much for exotic specialty magics like that.

“They only prevent my leg from being disengaged in a conflict.”

“You sure they don’t also bless you with some crazy-ass Irish jig powers that make you fast as a freak?”

Fritz smirked. “Possibly.” A few more swift jabs at his invisible enemy, plus a roundhouse kick fast enough to knock someone’s head off. “It’s early. Let’s go another round.”

“Sure you don’t want me to pull out a punching bag for you?” My face already felt like ground beef.

“It’s a tempting suggestion. Punching bags don’t complain nearly as much as you do.”

“A punching bag also doesn’t have to show up for work in an hour,” I muttered.

Of course, Fritz wasn’t worried about that. He was the director of the Magical Violations Department. Training with him in the mornings was a free pass for showing up so bruise-riddled that I couldn’t interview witnesses without traumatizing them for life.

I’d had to interview a kid last week. Some girl, about eleven years old, who had seen her alcoholic mother cast a curse on her stepdad. The child had cried when she saw my face. Suzy had been forced to finish the interview.

Making kids weep doesn’t do good things for the ego.

That titanium foot rushed at me again. I had no choice but to throw myself to the mats to keep from getting my teeth scattered across Fritz’s training room floor.

“Good,” he said approvingly.

I rolled to my feet and lifted my arms to block a few punches, retreating across the length of the hall. It was a big room—more than enough space for me to tuck tail and run without getting cornered.

Turns out that richer-than-God demon hunters like to leave as much room in the budget for elaborate home gyms as they do Bugattis.

When I managed to nail a kick in Fritz’s midsection, he stumbled across Macassar ebony floors and caught himself on a training dummy that had been sculpted by Buddhist monks. When he knocked me flat on my back, I found myself staring at rafters that had been wired with a Bose stereo system that could play Fritz’s awful jock jams at ear-splitting volumes.

And when he decided he was done pulverizing me for the morning, I’d mop up my blood with towels hand-embroidered with Fritz’s “FF” logo. Because, hey, why not put the monogram from his Italian graphic designer on everything?

Having all that space to escape meant I didn’t immediately end up flat on my back again. I focused hard on watching Fritz’s torso and trying to figure out how he was going to attack me next.

I wasn’t getting anywhere near kicking his ass, but after a few months of training together, I was getting slightly better at escaping without broken bones. I deflected most of Fritz’s strikes now. But I was slowing down. My muscles were burning, and I desperately needed to eat another strength poultice.