Hotter Than Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Mystery (Preternatural Affairs Book 3) (18 page)

“That’s a damn good question,” I said.

I picked up the knife I’d put in the middle of the circle. It was scalding hot. I bounced it between my hands, blowing on my burning fingers.

Lucrezia prowled around the edge of the circle. I couldn’t help noticing the way her bony hips snapped from side to side when she walked. I liked my women with curves, which she definitely didn’t have, but there was something about her predatory stride that pushed my buttons.

Probably better not to notice how hot my future ex-boss was, but whatever. I might have been about to lose my memory anyway.

“Ridiculous,” she muttered, inspecting my work closely. “This is simply absurd.”

I didn’t bother keeping my mouth shut. Might as well speak my mind while I still had one. “You know what’s absurd? Expecting me to perform a twelve-hour ritual in less than a quarter of the time with shitty instructions. That’s what’s absurd. This circle’s just a byproduct of absurdity.” The knife wasn’t cooling off. I jammed it in my belt. “I don’t know what it does, but if it happens to make the OPA campus explode, don’t look to me for apologies.”

“It’s a binding circle.” Lucrezia held her hands out as though she could feel the invisible edges of my magic. “Definitely
some
kind of binding circle.”

“Not like any binding circle I’ve seen before,” said the brunette by the door.

Lucrezia shot a look at her. “Obviously.” She turned back to me. “Tell me how the ritual would proceed from here, Agent Hawke.”

I scoured my memory for that chapter from the handbook. “There’s some kind of verse. The witch uses the ritual knife to cut open his arm, and the arm of the kopis, and they share blood. Then they’re bound. Done.”

Considering how disapproving she looked, I was pretty sure that was the right answer.

“Fine,” she snapped.

“So this circle would work?” I asked. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

The vice president prowled and frowned and prowled some more. Finally, she looked like she was too disgusted to keep facing the chalky mess burned into the wood floors, and she flung her hands in the air. “None of this matters! I’m sure Fritz prepared you for this test. This result doesn’t mean anything.”

“If he had tried to help me cheat, he wouldn’t have prepared me for the whole binding circle thing,” I pointed out. “You kind of sprung that on me. Or, hey, if I’d been prepped, maybe I would have fucking done it right instead of doing…whatever the fuck this is. Did you think about that?”

Her eyes flashed. “What’s your point?”

“I don’t have a point. Why do you want me to fail? No wait, don’t tell me. Let me guess. I look like the stylist you fired for screwing up your two-hundred-dollar haircut.”

She lifted her chin to look at me down the bridge of her nose. It was an impressively disapproving expression. I wondered if she’d practiced it in front of a mirror. “I couldn’t care less if you fail, Agent Hawke.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“Enjoy your smug sense of satisfaction,” Lucrezia said. “It will not last.” She stomped toward the exit.

“Should I clean this up? Am I fired?” I asked.

“You can bind here tomorrow. We’ll have to have a crew wipe it out when you’re done,” she said. “It’s set in too deeply to easily remove.”

“Does that mean I passed?”

I just barely heard her say as she left, “Yes. You passed.”

Miracles do happen.

PASSING THE ASPIS TEST was just about the least satisfying victory I’d ever experienced.

Lucrezia had shaken me off like something stuck to her shoe, her lackeys had kicked me out of the room before I could figure out what the hell I’d done to the spell, and Fritz hadn’t been in his office when I went to deliver the news. I hadn’t gotten a single congratulations. More like an overwhelming sense of, “Yeah, I guess we won’t kill you this week.”

I’d won. I had my memories, my life, and my job.

I wasn’t sure how good I actually felt about that.

“Hey! Hawke!”

Suzy was sitting under a copse of trees outside the Magical Violations Department. She had a grocery bag beside her on the bench and a hot dog cradled in her hands.

Only one guy made hot dogs with that many sinfully delicious toppings. “I see that Crazy Ricky’s put his cart on the corner again,” I said.

“Yeah, doesn’t matter how many times we wipe that guy’s memory of the OPA campus’s location, he keeps finding us again. Stubborn stupidity must be his mutant power.” Suzy squinted at me. “Why do you look like crap and smell like smoke?”

I flopped onto the bench next to her. “I just cast a binding ritual.”

She glanced at her watch. “It’s not even eleven. You were gone for less than three hours.”

“I cast it in two.” I wasn’t trying to brag. Okay, maybe I was bragging a little.

Suzy did look satisfyingly impressed by the news. But not surprised. “Here, taste my hot dog. The jalapeños will burn the roof of your mouth off.”

“Yeah, that’s not a great sales pitch right there.”

She shrugged and took a giant bite with gusto. Her eyes watered, and she spit crumbs as she said, “Congratulations, Hawke. I knew you had it in you.”

“No you didn’t. Nobody knew.” I laughed hollowly. “I didn’t know.”

Suzy took another bite. Her mouth was too full to speak, so she just rolled her eyes.

“Look, it’s obviously not that you suck at magic, Cèsar,” she said once her mouth was clear again. “It’s that you
think
you suck at it. Your family is full of witches, right? And you think you’re not as good as them. They’ve probably told you that a few times, too. When your family talks like that, you get it in your head, you let it grow under your skin.”

I lifted my eyebrows at her. “Speaking from experience?”

“Add in your low ranking in the OPA database, the expectations of the test, even Fritz saying you’re not good enough to be his aspis…”

“I get it. Everyone thinks I suck.”

“Yeah, they do. And you
let
them think that.” She swept a few crumbs off her lap onto the grass. A pigeon hopped between her feet. “If someone tells me I’m not good at something, I try harder. I prove them wrong. You curl up into a little ball like a fucking pill bug and let yourself get poked with a stick.”

“I’m not a pill bug,” I said.

“You’re kind of a pill bug.” Suzy finished off her hot dog, leaving nothing but a smear of liquid cheese on the corner of her mouth. “Don’t let people push you around, Cèsar. You’re a better person than that and you’re a better witch, too. I shouldn’t need to tell you that, though, since you just kicked ass at that spell.”

I had kind of kicked ass at it. Hadn’t I?

Suzy pulled something out of her grocery bag and offered it to me. A donut wrapped in tissue paper.

“Is that the kind with jelly filling?” I asked.

She smirked. “I know what you like.”

And it turned out to be the best goddamn jelly donut I’d ever eaten.

Right after lunch, I got an alert on my phone that said Sister Catherine was about to be transported to a detention center. It was immediately followed by another alert that said the case was closed.

Officially speaking, we’d gotten justice for the murder victims. Suzy and I could have spent the rest of the day at Canyon Creek and gotten away with it. It was Tuesday, after all, which meant bottomless Buffalo wings. I could watch Suzy get drunk and eat chicken until I barfed.

Or better yet, I could skip all of that and sleep for about sixteen hours.

Unfortunately, life goes on, and serial killers keep on serial killing. Sister Catherine’s confession might have convinced the OPA that the danger was passed, but I knew better.

“I’ve got a theory,” I told Suzy once we reached our cubicle again. “Suspend all disbelief and follow along.”

She sat on the desk, folded her hands in her lap. “Belief: suspended. Go ahead.”

“Sister Catherine hasn’t been targeting victims and consorting with demons to kill them. She’s lying to protect a fallen angel. Locking her up isn’t going to change anything, and the killer is still out there.”

She had gotten the same alerts on her phone that I had. She knew that the case was officially closed. So she only said, “Huh.”

“Disbelieving yet?”

“Maybe a little. Sister Catherine lying to protect someone would fit her personality, but fallen angels don’t exist.”

“They definitely exist. They’re angels that pissed off God.”

Suzy folded her arms. “And you know this…how?”

I could have given her the whole Malcolm Gallagher story, but it felt wrong to share that. “I asked you to suspend disbelief,” I said.

“Okay. Fine.”

“I think the fallen angel is going after men who look like someone he knows—or somebody that he used to know. He’s not really after these guys.” I tapped my finger on Leubold Chambon’s headshot. “The murderer is confused. Desperate. He’s finding people who resemble his ideal victim and hoping that it will feel like killing the real thing.”

“Ergo severed body parts,” Suzy said.

“Exactly. His model didn’t have gauged ears, so he cut off the nurse’s body jewelry. Nurse Sullivan’s eyes must have been the wrong color, too—no problem, pluck ‘em out. Jay Brandon’s lips and nose were wrong, so those are gone. This other man lost strips of skin where he had tattoos.”

“And at least one victim was circumcised, so the killer knew what was going on in his ideal victim’s dick region. They were probably sexually involved.”

“It could be a familial relationship,” I said. “Like a parent or sibling.”

“Dismemberment and murder. Fucked up family.”

“Reminds me of Hawke family Christmases when I was a kid. I’m feeling nostalgic.”

Suzy hopped off her desk. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“What, that my family needs therapy?”

“No. Well, maybe they do. But we can make a mockup of the ideal victim by assembling a face out of the parts the killer didn’t remove. If we know what he looks like, maybe we can get ahead of the murderer.”

That was exactly where I’d been headed. I offered Suzy one of the victim’s headshots and a pair of scissors.

“Let’s put the puzzle together,” I said.

It felt morbid to cut up the photographs in the same way that the killer had mutilated his victims. We used the ears and eyes off of Jay Brandon. We took the lips and nose from Nurse Sullivan. We took the neck, shoulders, forehead, and hair from Leubold Chambon. Then we taped them together and stuck it to the corkboard.

Earlier, Suzy had attached a new cluster of sticky notes to that corkboard. Each one had a different obscene drawing on it. There was even a disembodied dick with a butt instead of testicles, and its glans was smiling.

Murder victim on one side, dickbutt on the other. We were a classy team, Suzy and I.

“The only other commonalities between victims are physical build and age,” Suzy said, flipping through the files. “There’s no connection between jobs, religions, or ethnic backgrounds, so I’m thinking this is a purely physical attraction. What you see is what you get.” She brandished her hands at the creepy as hell photograph we’d assembled. “Ta da!”

Our ideal victim looked like any of the pretty boys who came to Los Angeles hoping to become actors. Square jaw, straight nose, killer cheekbones. Generic pretty boy.

“Great,” Suzy said. “So all we have to do is put every single attractive blond guy in LA into protective custody and we’ll have stopped the killer in his tracks.”

“You think this man is attractive?”

“He’s a little bit perfect,” she said.

I rolled my eyes.
Women
.

She caught my expression. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re thinking nasty things at me, Hawke. Let it out.”

“I don’t get why women like pretty boys. That’s all.” I jerked my thumb at the assembled victim. “That’s my sister’s type, too.”

Suzy pinched my cheek. I allowed her to do it with a stony-faced glare in return. “
You
have a problem with pretty boys? That’s fucking cute.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, forget about it. Let’s focus on the case.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Good idea.”

“I’ll send this picture to the LAPD,” Suzy said. “Ask them for cold cases with victims matching the profile.” Suzy dropped into her computer chair and opened her email program. “You know, it’s kinda funny, but our ideal victim looks an awful lot like Director Friederling.”

I heard Lucrezia de Angelis’s high heels rapping against the floor from a hundred feet away. I peered over the top of our cubicle wall to see her coming right for me, entourage in tow.

And she looked pissed.

Lucrezia stopped in our doorway. She was practically haloed in storm clouds. “Where is he?”

“Who?” I asked.

“Director Friederling. He’s not in the office and he’s not answering his BlackBerry. Where is he?”

I couldn’t help it. I looked at the picture that we’d assembled on the corkboard of the ideal victim yet again, but in a totally different way.

Suzy was right—he really did look a lot like Fritz.

“Oh shit,” I said.

LUCREZIA DE ANGELIS SENT a Union unit to Fritz’s house. They didn’t find a body. They didn’t find anything else, either. His servants didn’t know where he’d gone, all his cars were intact, and there was no sign of an intrusion. Not even a muddy cloven hoof print in the garden.

Strangely, Fritz’s security footage from that morning was blank and all of his clocks had been stopped at exactly four-thirty in the morning.

Unless Fritz had accidentally triggered an EMP in his foyer, then there was only one other option.

He had been taken.

I managed to reach Sister Catherine before they relocated her to the detention facility. Harding, the Union aspis I’d met at the Brandon house, was dragging her out of her holding cell.

“Hey, wait,” I said, grabbing Harding’s shoulder to stop him. He had the nun in handcuffs that glowed with some kind of restraining spell.

Sister Catherine looked worried to see me. “What’s wrong?”

“Where is he?”

“Who?”

“Bob fucking Saget. No, you know who I’m asking about. The fallen angel.”