Shadow Burns: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Preternatural Affairs Book 4)
SHADOW
BURNS
A Preternatural Affairs Novel
SM REINE
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Copyright © SM Reine 2014
Published by Red Iris Books
1180 Selmi Drive, Suite 102
Reno, NV 89512
SERIES BY SM REINE
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ABOUT SHADOW BURNS
When more than a dozen people die at a retirement home, the official story is carbon monoxide poisoning. Cèsar Hawke is convinced the reason is less mundane and more infernal. But that’s his job. As an agent working for the Office of Preternatural Affairs, he’s always looking for supernatural answers to deadly questions.
Isobel Stonecrow agrees to help him find the truth. With her powers of necrocognition, she can speak to the dead and get the real story.
But when they return to the crime scene, they find a lot more than cadavers. They find a nightmare that they can’t escape—a nightmare from Isobel’s past, which even she can’t completely remember thanks to the contract that signed away her soul.
Cèsar will have to disinter Isobel’s secrets to save her. He’ll learn who Isobel used to be, what she’s done, and the price she paid…no matter how deadly the knowledge might be.
For my bug and my bear:
All my love, all my books.
AS AN AGENT WITH the Office of Preternatural Affairs, getting assigned new cases is always exciting.
Sometimes it’s even exciting in a good way.
When I roll into work on a Monday and find a new case on my desk, it feels like waking up on Christmas morning. I just don’t know if I’m going to get the He-Man action figure I’ve been begging to get for weeks, or if it’ll be a cylinder of stinky cheese with cat bite marks on the rind gifted by senile Aunt Marisela.
On a good week, I might nail a coven of misbehaving witches for something hilarious, like accidentally cursing an entire high school with hirsutism. Coming up with solutions for a team of magically hairy cheerleaders was the kind of stuff I lived for.
That would be a He-Man case.
On a bad week, it would be another gruesome murder by a powerful demon far beyond my ability to kill. You know, the kind of cases that end with running, screaming, and months of visits to an OPA-appointed therapist’s couch.
Those were definitely the half-masticated Munster cases.
I had no way of telling what case was inside the manila folder being gripped by my partner, Agent Suzume Takeuchi. The excitement flushing her cheeks definitely wasn’t any indicator, either. She got excited over weird things.
“What is it this time?” I asked, wheeling around to follow her back to the elevator. I’d only gotten halfway down the hall when she intercepted me.
Suzy flapped the folder at me. “No idea yet! Not much info.”
There was a single page inside the folder, which I skimmed on the way to the parking garage. We’d received a tip about a possible haunting from someone who lived in Mojave. The town was a good two hours’ drive north of the office.
Possible haunting? It was definitely going to be a He-Man day.
Visiting Mojave meant four hours of driving round trip. Throw in an hour for lunch, and we would be gone for an entire work day.
Plus, there’s no such thing as ghosts. That means there’s no such thing as a haunting, either. There wouldn't be any actual work waiting for us on this work trip.
It was practically a vacation tossed onto Suzy’s desk.
Normally, the OPA didn’t have the budget to investigate tips like this. If it didn’t involve immediate peril, a major threat to our finances, or dead bodies, we stuck it at the bottom of the to-do list and ignored it for months.
“Why’d we get blessed with this one?” I tossed the folder into the backseat of one of our company vehicles. Suzy had already checked it out of the motor pool. One more piece of paperwork I didn’t have to do.
“I thought you could tell me that.” Suzy held the keys out of my reach when I tried to take them. “Director Friederling dropped it off.”
“So this is a special case,” I said.
Officially speaking, Suzy and I worked for the Magical Violations Department. Less officially, we were also part of a team that handled special projects led by Fritz Friederling, the Germanic Jet-Li of Beverly Hills—one of my closest friends.
“You’d know better than I do if this is a special investigation,” Suzy said. “What did Director Friederling say about it?”
“Didn’t even mention it to me.” I swiped for the keys again. My reach was superior, but at five feet tall, Suzy was fast as fuck. She was in the driver’s seat in about half a heartbeat.
I feigned disappointment. I didn’t even want to drive the two hours out to Mojave; I wanted to catch up on some reading. But if Suzy had caught wind of that, you bet your balls I would have been behind the wheel. Her favorite thing in the world was being difficult.
Tucking my briefcase under the dashboard, I discreetly removed the newest Brandon Sanderson novel before buckling in.
Sweet, sweet fantasy novel, here I come.
Suzy whipped out of the parking garage and I checked my phone. No messages from Fritz. Not many emails at all, actually. It had been a quiet couple of weeks around the OPA campus. We’d cleared a lot of our backlogged workload and nothing urgent had popped up recently.
That was probably why we had time to look into this tip, especially if Fritz didn’t have anything to say about it.
Definitely
a He-Man case.
I tossed my phone into the cup holder, kicked back, and reclined my seat.
Suzy gave me a suspicious sideways look. “You’re in a good mood.”
“I just have a feeling it’s going to be a good day, Suze.” I pulled down the visor for a little extra shade. “A real good day.”
And I thought that all the way to Mojave, too.
Mojave was an odd town. There's not much to it. A couple of gas stations marking the place that train tracks and freeway aligned, surrounded by miles of barren desert. Exactly like any other remote shithole in the wastelands of southern California.
Except that this particular shithole had front-row seats to some of humanity’s stranger landmarks.
The nearby hills are covered in wind turbines—hundreds of tall white fans with skinny blades whirling all day and night. It’s also near an airplane graveyard, which is exactly what it sounds like: one big-ass trash dump of old machinery that nobody could be bothered to recycle.
As if those aren’t good enough, it’s also not unusual to see rocket launches in the sky over Mojave. Yeah, like let’s-go-to-space-type rockets. Cool science stuff that’s about as far from my supernatural job as possible.
Mojave is the perfect place to try that kind of experimental crap because there’s nothing to be destroyed out there. They could probably nuke the whole place and you’d never be able to tell the difference. Might even be an improvement to the gas stations’ décor.
The GPS led us to that shithole and, mercifully, right on out again.
Soon, the turbines and airplanes disappeared, along with all the yellow dust. Our turnoff from the highway cut through rocky cliffs in the foothills. The road was shadowed by cones of igneous rock marking volcanic vents.
Suzy muttered to herself as she drove, taking so many hard turns that I finally had to give up on reading my book. I’m not a nervous guy, but stick a woman behind the wheel of a car on a road that looks like it was scribbled on a map by an angry toddler, and it gets my adrenaline going.
“You sure this is the right way?” I asked.
“It’s right. The GPS says it’s right.”
The GPS didn’t have any fucking clue where we were. This road wasn’t on the screen.
Pavement turned to dirt. The SUV jittered around me. Felt like being a kernel tossed around in a heated Jiffy Pop popper.
“Maybe we should call Fritz.”
“Yeah, sure,” Suzy said. She didn’t take her eyes off the road.
I checked my phone—no reception. So much for that.
The road soon widened and the canyon changed. Creepers took over the barren cliffs. Trees dotted the rocky path. Grass flanked the dirt road—actual grass, green and glistening with moisture that shouldn’t have existed in the desert.
The trees became denser until the sunlight couldn’t touch us at all. Low fog clung to the ground.
A manor big enough to house my entire extended family appeared out of that fog. It was a three story thing with dormers, shuttered windows, and aging purple roof tile. I could just make out the shapes of smaller buildings in the mist beyond it. Looked like some sheds, some cottages.
The sign at the end of the road said “Paradise Mile Retirement Village.” The right post was cracked, and only a vine curling around the boards kept the whole thing from falling down.
A retirement home. Fritz had sent Agent Takeuchi and me to a goddamn retirement home.
Suzy parked on the grass. Sliding my sunglasses down the bridge of my nose, I glared at the house beyond the ramshackle sign. It looked like it belonged in a Southern gothic, not in some muggy canyon oasis.
Paradise Mile. Funny, real funny.
I’d never heard of retirement homes in Mojave, but it seemed like a reasonable place to ditch old people. Airplanes, the infirm, whatever. Why not?
The real question was, why had Fritz sent
me
there?
I wasn’t the only one grumbling as I climbed out of the SUV. My partner groaned loudly, stretching her stiff muscles out after the long drive.
When she reached for the sky and bent to touch her toes, I got a pretty good look at the tight little body she hid under her tailored black suits. The slacks were especially flattering when she bent over.
I made sure to be looking at the house again by the time she was standing upright. Even with my sunglasses, Suzy knew when I was enjoying an inappropriate eyeful. It was some kind of magic power of hers. I’d managed to go all morning without getting punched in the stomach and wanted to continue that trend as long as possible.