Hotter Than Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Mystery (Preternatural Affairs Book 3) (17 page)

Suzy came out of the photocopier room. “Hawke! Look what I found!” She shoved papers in my face.

I pushed her arm down. “Not right now.”

“But I’ve found another one of the murder victims. Same victim profile—athletic blond guy, and he’s missing parts. Leubold Chambon.”

“What? Where?”

“Torrance,” Suzy said. “Three months ago. I’ve been trying to find the owners of the other body parts in Sister Catherine’s closet, and I got this out of the LAPD’s files. The case never made it to us because there was no sign of preternatural involvement.”

Three months ago. That meant the killer had been up to this crap longer than I’d expected.

I checked my watch. There were still ten minutes until I was due at the testing room. “Okay. I want to see.”

Suzy had already put the files on my desk. She pulled them apart, arranging the pages so I could see everything at once: the black and white crime scene photos, the report from the LAPD, the head shot of the victim from when he’d been alive. He was blond and blue-eyed with a weak jaw. According to the report, he had stood just under six feet tall.

“Just like the other guys,” I said.

“This one was missing his lower jaw,” Suzy said. “I don’t think the killer liked his overbite.” She pushed one of the crime scene photos at me. It was easy to look at them when they weren’t in color. The blood was gray. His upper jaw glistened white with exposed bone.

Leubold Chambon was also missing strips of skin—big rectangles of dark gray on light gray flesh. “Tattoos?”

“Bingo.”

Sort of like the way that the killer had cut off the nurse’s earlobes. “Uniformity,” I muttered.

“You think Sister Catherine wants them all to look the same?”

I’d hung photos of the other two victims on our cubicle wall, and now I looked at them again. They did look a lot alike. “Maybe the murderer wanted them to be the same person.”

“We could just ask her,” Suzy suggested. “It’ll make it easier to figure out what happened to all of the other bodies.”

I grimaced. “I don’t think Sister Catherine has any clue what happened to the other bodies, because I don’t think she killed them.”

A pair of white heeled pumps appeared on the carpet outside our cubicle, interrupting the conversation. My eyes traveled up those pumps to slender ankles and muscled calves encased in nude pantyhose. Her white skirt suit brushed the tops of her knees and was tailored to flare over her hips, making it look like she had more curves than she really did. Her wrists and neck were long, swanlike, and I had the brief mental image of sliding my lips up to the curve of her jaw.

This woman was well over six feet tall in heels—taller even than me—and her wispy hair was pale blond.

When I finally reached her face, my testicles attempted to claw their way into my body in horror.

I’d been checking out Lucrezia de Angelis. The possibly evil vice president who controlled the fate of my job and my memories.

She didn’t look happy to be there, but she was so Botoxed that she probably couldn’t have smiled even if she wanted to. “You’re late for the test, Agent Hawke.”

Lucrezia worked for OPA’s headquarters in Italy, and you could tell by the way she talked. Her accent was so thick that I expected her to go off about spicy meatballs at any second.

I stood, adjusted my suit, smoothed a hand over my hair. “I got sidetracked by the case. We’ve got an active murder investigation going.”

“I’m aware.” She turned on her heel and left. The expensive white suit was as flattering for her ass as it was for her nonexistent hips.

Guess I was supposed to follow.

“You can do it,” Suzy said. She punched me on the shoulder. One more bruise on top of all the others.

I grimaced and rubbed my arm. “Thanks, Suze.”

Before I left, I took a last, long look at my partner’s face. She had big eyes and charcoal hair. I’d been staring at that face every Monday through Friday for the last two years.

Seemed impossible that I could forget her. Seemed impossible to forget any of this.

Lucrezia’s clicking heels were retreating down the hall. I followed her.

The test was administered in one of our warded workrooms, which took up an entire floor in the Magical Violations Department.

I’d spent a lot of hours tearing my hair out in that room. Deconstructing and reconstructing circles by covens that had broken the rules so we could figure out how. Trying to duplicate spells from crime scenes. Testing dangerous enchanted objects.

Man, I missed that part of the job.

The workroom had a great view of the OPA campus. The walls were nothing but window so that we could see the exact position of the sun. Grassy lawns and square government buildings stretched around us. I could see guys heading to work, a couple of secretaries eating breakfast in the shade by the fountain, some black-uniformed kopides jogging in formation.

Lucrezia stood in front of a cardboard box at the center of the room. “This is your test, Agent Hawke.”

“What, no Scantron?” I asked.

“It’s a practical test using standardized supplies.” She twisted her watch on her wrist to check the time. “I’ll assume it’s safe to skip the dull formalities of the basics. We’ll skip to the end. Agent Hawke, I want you prepare the circle for the binding ritual between kopis and aspis. You have two hours.”

That spell wasn’t in the appendix of the aspis manual. The Union handles the binding of kopides and aspides all the time, so they have a room where the circle is permanently erected. It’s a lengthy ritual, too. Redoing it every time they assign a partnership would have meant letting witches take days off of work to prepare—days we often didn’t have.

And I was pretty sure it couldn’t be done in two hours.

“You’re kidding, right?” I asked.

She waved impatiently at her entourage, who’d followed us into the room. One guy lifted the lid off of the box. The other handed me a barebones diagram of the circle without any instructions.

“I’m too busy to waste time on this,” Lucrezia said. “It’s eight o’clock. I’ll be back to inspect your finished circle at ten.”

She definitely wasn’t kidding.

Lucrezia left and her lackeys stayed. Guess they had to make sure I wasn’t going to cheat by pulling a miracle out of my ass or something.

I picked through the supplies in the box. There was all the standard stuff you’d expect: chalk and salt and even yarn, which some witches—my brother included—preferred to use for the perimeter of a circle.

There were also some less-standard supplies, like a wand and a crystal bowl. Then all the candles. Tons of candles. And the statuettes? I had no idea what those were for.

The terribly photocopied diagram had little dots around the edge of the circle. Maybe those were meant to represent statuettes.

I did know what to do with the ritual dagger. The super sharp steel blade was split into two down the middle. Its handle was engraved with a pentagram, some runes, a few thorny flowers. The knife was an athame, more form than function, meant to bleed the kopis and aspis so their blood could mingle.

Then I twisted the top off of a bottle of oil that I found at the bottom of the box and sniffed it. This was more familiar territory—identifying herbs. I smelled some dragon’s blood, St. John’s wort, arrowroot. Maybe some sage, too.

It was like being handed a disassembled machine and being expected to build it. And find a way to give it electricity without having a power cord.

All within two hours.

I’d once missed a week of high school because I’d driven Domingo’s getaway car after a 7-Eleven heist and gotten caught by the cops.

I hadn’t driven the getaway car on purpose. I hadn’t even known Domingo was planning another robbery until the alarms were going off and he shoved a bag of money into the glove box and started yelling at me to drive fast. I’d just obeyed him like I always did because he was my brother and he’d kick my ass if I didn’t.

When they caught us, the justice system was gentle with me. Everyone knew Domingo was the source of the trouble. By age seventeen, his record was longer than a Robert Jordan book, and I was just his confused, scared kid brother.

Still, I ended up missing a week of school, and my teachers didn’t feel very forgiving once I told them why.

Anatomy finals had been the Tuesday I came back from juvie. Open notes. Should have been easy…if I’d had any notes.

My friend Tiana had let me copy hers, but I’d had to sneak into the teachers’ lounge to rush them through the shitty Xerox machine, and I’d ended up missing half the pages.

Bullshitting my way through that final had been one of the hardest things I’d ever done, especially the practical part. I’d mutilated the pig fetus because I hadn’t known what half of the organs were. Plus, Tiana’s handwriting would have been too sloppy to read even if it hadn’t been an awful photocopy, so I wrote a lot of dumb answers like “urine is made in the thymus.”

I’d failed that test something like fifteen years ago now, but I still had stress dreams about it: being wrist-deep in pig blood, with the clock ticking toward the end of the school day, and Tiana’s incomplete notes smeared with formaldehyde fingerprints.

I’m always naked in the dream, too, because that’s literally the only way that test could have gone worse.

Now I was staring into that box of supplies for the aspis test and I was having pretty powerful flashbacks.

Two hours was definitely not enough time to cast the binding ritual.

I wasted twenty minutes just trying to decrypt that goddamn diagram. There was a pen in the box, so I used it to fill in the blanks wherever the bad printing had left holes in the image. It required too much guesswork. I didn’t know which part was the pig’s right kidney and which was the liver, metaphorically speaking.

Once I gave up on that, I tried to start drawing the circle on the floor of the workroom.

Lucrezia’s lackeys weren’t talking but I heard the occasional snort. They were probably witches too. They knew where I was fucking up.

“Any help here?” I asked the woman by the door, a square-jawed brunette who looked to be silently laughing at me.

“Why? I’m having so much fun,” she said.

“What if I put this candle here?” I asked. “Am I getting warmer? Colder?”

She smirked. “Cold.”

“How cold? Slightly cool? Frostier than Lucrezia’s scrotum?” I moved the candle between two points, looking to her for any sign of where it should be placed. The diagram was missing that whole part of the circle.

No help from the peanut gallery—the witches just schooled their expressions and stopped talking to me at all. They weren’t going to help me cheat.

And following the diagram definitely wasn’t working.

I paced between the walls, arms tightly folded, pig dissection nightmares swirling through my skull.

At least I’d just had to repeat that anatomy class over the summer to earn credit. I hadn’t forgotten my entire high school career.

I can’t do this. There’s only an hour and a half left. I’m so fucked.

The realization that I was going to fail settled over me with calm certainty. There was nothing I could do to make the situation worse now. Fritz wasn’t going to have an aspis, he wouldn’t be able to hunt down the fallen angel, and I was going to go back to being a private dick without any clue that I’d taken a hiatus to work for the government.

I stopped pacing. I turned back to the box.

If Lucrezia de Angelis was going to fire me, I might as well try to fuck up the spell really thoroughly first—and do it
my
way.

I’d always sucked at instructions. Precise magic just didn’t work for me. I didn’t use recipes for my potions or poultices—I used a heaping dose of old-fashioned instinct.

So I crumpled the diagram into a ball and chucked it across the room.

“Salt,” I said. “Oil. Fine.” I could work with salt and oil.

Fuck the yarn. Yarn was for sissies. I threw that at one of the windows.

Starting over on the circle might not have been the most time-efficient maneuvers, but it felt good. I drew a pentagram and the circle enclosing it in chalk. Then I put the box of supplies in the middle and started picking through it again.

I picked up the statuettes and rolled them over in my hands to feel their energy. One felt hot, like it had been in the sun all day—it got to go in the south, the cardinal direction that was associated with fire. One of them made my fingers go numb with cold. Figured I’d stick that one toward the east.

There was a whole spectrum of sensation in those statuettes, smells and textures and temperatures. Wood and stone, electricity and wind. I put them in what seemed like the right order around the circle.

Chances were good I was wrong, but it felt right.

Dribbling the oil inside the circle
didn’t
feel right. Once I started rubbing it around the outside of the salt, though, I sneezed—hard.

The air got thick. The salt sparked with magic.

I put the double-bladed dagger in the center of the circle and the energy only grew more intense.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I said.

I had to smooth out the diagram page to see the symbols again. I couldn’t totally bullshit that part. But I only glanced at it to see what kind of marks they’d placed in which quarters, and then I went back to the absolute basics: the magical alphabet of runes that Suzy told me to use when I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.

And I
really
didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.

After about a thousand tiny runes in chalk, I could barely breathe through the lump in my throat, my head was swimming, and my nose was streaming down my upper lip. I didn’t stop. I threw my jacket in the corner, blew my nose on the shitty diagram, and kept drawing.

Then the salt started to burn deep grooves into the wood of the floor. The candles lit even though I hadn’t touched them. The oil started to smoke.

And someone said, “What in the world is this?”

Lucrezia de Angelis’s voice was low and dangerous.

The clock on the wall said that it was ten on the dot. I looked down at the floor to see a mess of chalk, salt, and candle wax that looked nothing like the drawing that I had been given.