Witch Hunt (18 page)

It looked so empty.

Aniruddha stopped by, tapping a knuckle on my desk. “Hey, Hawke. You’ve probably noticed something’s missing.”

My eyes were drawn to Suzy’s chair, pushed into the corner with nobody sitting in it.

“A few things are missing, yeah,” I said.

“All of your personal effects and work computer were taken down to processing,” Aniruddha said. “Friederling has requested that everything be returned to you as soon as possible. Luckily your effects didn’t get taken to the warehouse yet, but it’s still going to take a couple hours to find everything. You’ll be back to normal by tomorrow morning.”

Normal. Right.

“Thanks, man,” I said.

He glanced at the empty chair, too. “Never would have believed it. Didn’t believe it when they said it was you, either.”

“Thanks,” I said again because I didn’t know what else to say.

“I don’t think you’ll be able to get any work done until your computer is back. You should go for a walk. Get something to eat. Go home.” He shrugged. “Up to you.”

And then Aniruddha left, checking his clipboard for the next item on his to-do list.

Maybe that wasn’t a bad idea, going for a walk. But I wasn’t hungry. I was still jazzed from all the energy potions I’d been mainlining for the last few days and my stomach had cramped into one hard knot.

I headed down to processing instead. It was the office where they tagged and organized evidence before filing it away in a warehouse for the rest of eternity.

I’d only ever seen one woman working the desk there. Ivy was older than dirt but sharper than shale. She worked in a cinder block room in the basement of the OPA office. Its high windows were barred. There were three aisles of tables with evidence waiting to be filed. Everything was tagged with slips of pink, yellow, blue, and green paper.

I’m sure it seemed organized to Ivy, but it looked like insanity to me.

She snapped her fingers when she saw me come through the door and said, “Case File 4457-A. I’m on top of it.”

“Thanks, Ivy,” I said.

Ivy went searching for my case file number, shuffling between the tables, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose, muttering to herself.

A CD on the table next to me caught my eye. It was sitting in the sunlight label-down and casting a rainbow on the wall. It was tagged with green paper.

“What’s green mean?” I asked.

Ivy didn’t even look at me. “Evidence seized by the Union.”

“It gets mixed up in here too?”

“Oh yes. That’s a good way of putting it. ‘Mixed up.’ I swear to you, if they would just take care to label things
before
sending them to me…” Ivy sniffed delicately. “The Union is the worst about it, too. I just had two boxes of evidence from Costa and Dawes brought to me, and it’s like they were deliberately attempting to obfuscate their evidence! It’ll take days for me to review and sort through it all.
Days
.”

The disc had been taken from Eduardo and Joey? While Ivy was still distracted, I flipped the disc over. It had been printed with a time and date—the day before Erin’s murder. And Ivy was right about obfuscation. Someone had blacked out the case number with marker.

I grabbed it. Tucked it into my pocket.

Ivy turned around, setting a box on the table in front of me. It had a pink label. Why did the Union get to be green when Magical Violations was freaking
pink
? “The personal effects taken from your apartment will take longer to return. We need to seize them from the LAPD. Everything you need to do your job should be in here, however.”

I took the box from her. I managed a smile.

“Thanks.”

I WENT HOME TO check out the CD in privacy.

It was the first time I’d taken my work-issued laptop back to my apartment. I sat at my kitchen table as the disc drive whirred to life, nursing a tall glass of chocolate-flavored protein powder and almond milk. It wasn’t sitting well in my cramping stomach, but I needed the sustenance. Anything but another energy potion.

Before I opened the video program, I checked to make sure the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth were turned off—didn’t want the laptop reporting to the OPA that I was reviewing stolen evidence. It might have been paranoid, but whatever. I felt like I had earned some paranoia.

Then I clicked the video. I fully expected it to be surveillance of my apartment, or maybe The Pit.

But the gray picture that appeared on the screen was of Suzy’s house.

I felt a wave of shock at the sight of her familiar couches and coffee table. Cat was lying on one of her chairs, kneading a blanket in his paws. The windows were open—Suzy hadn’t been burgled yet. Clicking the fast-forward button, I watched Cat sleep at four times normal speed, his furry flank rising and falling rapidly. He got up, licked his ass, went back to sleep on a couch. Night fell outside. Cat chased a fly and then disappeared.

Motion flashed outside Suzy’s window, but the video was going too quickly for me to be able to tell what it was. I resumed normal speed. Reversed. Hit play.

A human figure crossed through the shadows outside.

I watched the next five minutes with my breath stuck in my throat. The intruder didn’t come through that window. She came in somewhere off screen and walked through the living room with her back to the camera. Fished around under the coffee table, searched Suzy’s filing cabinet.

Then the intruder turned as if she could feel the camera looking at her.

I paused the video.

Her face was square and framed with heavy brown hair. Her lips were full. I would know—I’d kissed those lips.

Isobel had broken into Suzy’s house.

As the video continued, I watched Isobel break into Suzy’s gun safe. She grabbed the Glock. It didn’t look like she was comfortable with firearms; she seemed to accidentally eject the magazine and struggled to reinsert it.

But then she turned suddenly, as if responding to a noise that the footage didn’t pick up. A man walked into the frame. He had a slender figure, long black hair, studded leather jacket—an incubus?

Isobel’s mouth moved silently. She aimed the gun.

He flashed across the screen, moving toward her with superhuman speed.

She fired. The muzzle flashed. Black blood spurted from the back of her assailant’s jacket.

And that was all of the footage.

I replayed it to make sure, searched for other files on the disc, but that was it. There had to be more after that—it just wasn’t on the CD.

I ejected the disc and checked the date again.

It was the day
before
Erin’s murder. Two days before I’d hunted down Isobel.

But there she was, breaking into Suzy’s house, caught on footage from a security camera that I was pretty sure didn’t belong to Suzy. The OPA had put surveillance in her house. I looked over my shoulder, thinking I’d see a guy in a black suit standing over me, and didn’t find anything. I was going to have to search my whole fucking apartment for cameras and microphones before I took another shower.

I didn’t put the disc back in. The image of Isobel struggling with a demon was still frozen on the screen even though I’d removed the CD.

The disc had belonged to my case, but been deliberately damaged by Eduardo and Joey. Why? What was it about Isobel’s fight with the incubus that they didn’t want anyone to know? Or was it the information that exonerated Suzy that they were trying to hide?

Because this definitely exonerated her—and implicated someone else entirely. Someone I never would have suspected.

Suzy had said that the Glock had been stolen from her house, and here Isobel was, doing the stealing. That Glock had appeared in my living room the night that Erin died.

I slammed the laptop shut and left the apartment.

The evening was growing long by the time I reached Helltown. I parked the Charger in the Walmart lot again before heading under the invisible arch.

This time, I thought to duck rather than getting a femur to the face.

The streets of Helltown were just as busy as the last time I’d been there—maybe even busier. It was getting late. The weaker demons were trying to get inside before night fell, and the stronger demons were preparing for another night of fun. A night that I didn’t plan on sticking around to see.

I’d gone in through the entrance closest to the Temple of the Hand of Death, and I sprinted straight there without looking back. I had to move through shadows to reach it. Every time I left direct sunlight, I felt a chill rake down my spine. Felt like eyes on my back. Creatures watching me. Waiting for a chance to feed. Maybe even Silver Needles closing in to try to kill me again.

I didn’t plan on giving them a chance.

The front door of the Temple of the Hand of Death hung off its hinges. And Isobel’s RV was parked next to the empty gas pumps.

Drawing my Desert Eagle, I threw open the door to her RV and checked inside. There was nothing there but the beaded curtains. No sign of a struggle—but no sign of Isobel’s whereabouts either.

I kept the gun aimed at the ground as I moved into the temple. There were no electric lights inside, so the shadows were deep. An oil lamp left smoky smears on the wall and didn’t penetrate the darkness all the way back to the altar. But it was enough light for me to see that the teenage priestess was sprawled on the floor in a mess of velvet skirts and blood. What had Isobel called her? Ann?

She stirred as I dropped to her side. She wasn’t dead. Thank God.

I holstered the gun. “Are you okay?”

“What do you think?” She pushed her skirts aside to reveal the hilt of a dagger jutting from her fleshy leg. She had been stabbed. My stomach lurched at the sight of it.

She needed medical support. An ambulance. The kind of help that couldn’t come into Helltown.

“Are you alone here?” I asked.

“I am now,” Ann said. She sat straight up, scanning the ground surrounding her. When her gaze fell on the stone scepter that had fallen a few feet away, she immediately seized it. Hugged it to her chest. “They took Isobel.” Still clutching the scepter tightly, the girl yanked the knife out of her thigh.

“Whoa there,” I said, standing back with my hands lifted, unsure if I should try to help her. “Be careful. The femoral artery—”

“It didn’t hit anything major. Don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine.” She sounded calm, but she was sweating. She glared at me with furious blue eyes. “This is sacred ground. Isobel should have been safe here.”

“What happened? Was it an incubus?”

Ann frowned. “No, it was a guy dressed like you.” I was dressed for work—so, black suit, white shirt, black tie. OPA standard. Probably Eduardo.

“Do you know where he took her, Ann?”

“He said something about a pit when he dragged her out of here,” Ann said. “That’s all I know.”

“Wait.
A
pit, or
The
Pit?”

“Dunno.” She wiped her blood off the dagger with her forefinger, then rubbed it on the shaft of the scepter. I couldn’t help but recoil. The blood was…vanishing. Like the scepter was drinking it up. Any urge I’d had to protect this girl was suddenly gone. Isobel was right. Ann didn’t need to be saved by anyone—definitely not my responsibility.

“Do you need me to take you to a hospital?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

“We’ll be fine,” Ann said.

We?
Hadn’t she said that she was alone? I backed away from her, eyeing the darkening streets outside the shattered windows. I needed to get out before the Needles realized I was there—and before the worse demons came out to play.

I left Ann alone in the darkness.

THE OLIVE PIT SHOULD have been open at six o’clock in the evening, but its neon sign was turned off and the windows were dark. I sat across the street in the Charger for a good long minute, arguing silently with myself over how I should approach it: Go in alone, or call for backup?

Procedure said that I should call for help. We were expected to work with a certain level of autonomy—probably more than the real FBI were—but when it came to situations potentially involving firearms, we were supposed to get Union support. If a witch cast a spell at me, I could cancel it out with my own magic, but magic didn’t do much against bullets. And Eduardo would definitely be armed.

But I didn’t know whom to call anymore. Suzy had been arrested for a murder she couldn’t have committed by the company we worked for. Eduardo and Joey were definitely bad guys. And Fritz—who knew about Fritz? He had contributed to Suzy’s arrest, too.

I sent a text message to one of the only phone numbers I had memorized then got out of the car.

The windows were unlit, but the curtains were open, so I peered inside. There was a light on in the kitchen, but everything else was turned off.

Silhouettes moved in front of the illuminated doorway. I counted them.

Five distinct men. I could tell them apart by their heights and clothing. And those were just the ones I could see.

I sat against the side of the building as I considered my odds, hiding out of sight from the men inside. Handling a single witch was easy. That was what I did best. Stalking them, figuring out their patterns, slipping a sleeping potion into their coffee. No confrontation necessary.

But five guys—I didn’t know where to begin.

“You really think this is time for a drink?”

I whirled. Domingo stood in the mouth of the alley. He wore another comfortable sweatsuit and carried a brown paper bag.

“You got here fast,” I said.

“I saw on the news that Agent Takeuchi is going to trial for the waitress’s murder, so I figured you were declared innocent. I was already on my way to bring you dinner at your apartment. Up for celebratory junk food?” He tipped the bag and the smell of cheeseburgers wafted through the air.

I hadn’t been hungry until that moment. I snagged his sleeve, pulled him down to the ground with me, tore into the bag. “We’ve got a problem,” I said around a mouthful of burger. “There are at least five men inside this building and they’re holding Isobel captive.”

Domingo tensed. “So you texted
me
?”