Shadow Burns: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Preternatural Affairs Book 4) (12 page)

Guilt clawed up my spine. He’d found Isobel…because of me.

I was a little impressed, though. I hadn’t even seen her in weeks. He must have had a great sense of smell.

“You were my favorite, Hope,” Ander said. “You were everything that I ever hoped to get from a contract. I would have extended the term to keep you working for me until the day I die.” His eyes sparked. “And then you defied me. Didn’t I treat you well? Didn’t I give you the easy assignments, the most comfortable lodging, the most lenient curfews?”

“It didn’t change what I had to do for you.” Her voice was tiny, barely more than a rasp.

“Must I remind you that you came to me, and that you’re the one who requested employment?”

She clamped her mouth shut, shook her head.

This conversation felt too private for me to be privy to it. Sort of like listening to a father chastising his wayward daughter. It was actually a lot like any of a thousand lectures I’d heard Pops give my sister, Ofelia.

“And then I find you
here
. The worst of all places to be.” He shook his head and sighed. “Hope, Hope, Hope. What am I going to do with you?” She didn’t respond. “I think it’s past time that you fulfill your obligations.”

I stepped in front of Isobel to provide what little protection I could, acutely aware of the butcher’s knife in her hand and how easy it would be to bury it in my back. Isobel had never tried to kill me before, but it seemed there were a lot of things I didn’t know about her. Like the fact she’d murdered someone else.

“If you’re going to kill me, Ander, then just do it,” Isobel said.

He sighed. “Relax, both of you. I don’t want you dead. What would ever give you that impression?”

“The house of horrors?” I suggested.

“The house isn’t my horror. It only seems that my Gertie got a little carried away in the hubbub with Nichols.” Ander flapped a dismissive hand, as if to say,
What can you do about kids?
“I’ll have a talk with her later.”

“Then what were you doing there?” Isobel asked.

“Hiding. It’s not easy to retire peacefully when you’re like me.”

“You took on twelve new contracts,” she said. “Some retirement.”

Ander’s smile was just as patronizing as his tone. “Everyone needs hobbies. But they’ve been taken from me now, too. Gertie got
really
carried away. I have plenty of time to focus on your return to the fold, Hope.”

“The fold” being a traveling freakshow of semi-dead people and demons.

Yeah, I wasn’t sure that was better than dying.

I reached back and took the knife from Isobel. I was surprised at how easily she yielded it to my searching fingers. “If you want her, you’ll have to go through me,” I said.

I’d never been in a real knife fight in my life. I wasn’t Fritz Friederling, billionaire ninja. But I’d been training with the billionaire ninja, I’d learned a few moves, and Ander looked pretty frail for a demon.

My odds didn’t seem too bad.

Ander’s smile broadened. I wondered if he’d filed his teeth to make them pointy or if he’d been blessed at birth.

“Hope always had a way with the gentlemen. You’re very charming, young man. I also have no interest in you.” He wafted the air toward his nose, like he was trying to smell warm cookies baking in the oven. “You don’t have the desperation I seek in my contracts. There’s nothing I can offer you. We have no reason to fight.”

“If you’re out to get Isobel, then we’ve got plenty of reasons.”

He ignored me and focused on Isobel. “I don’t hold your contract anymore, my dear, so there’s nothing I can do for you at the moment. I will offer you safety from Gertie, though. She’s been unruly this week. I would hate for you to be caught in her tantrum. Hence the…change in scenery.” He waved his hand at the turbines.

“You’re so kind,” Isobel said faintly.

“I’ll see what I can do about Gertie, and then I’ll see about getting your contract back. We’ll make arrangements. See if we can’t finish out the service you owe me.”

She made a tiny whimpering sound behind me.

Ander took a step back. I realized too late that the demon was escaping. His form shivered around the edges, making him go blurry all over. My instincts said to let him go—that he was dangerous, that he’d kill me if I tried to stop him.

But the reality was that he was only leaving to search for a way to entrap Isobel.

If I didn’t get him now, Isobel might never be safe.

I leaped at him with the butcher’s knife. Dust kicked up around me as I skidded down the hill.

Ander wiggled his fingers in a gesture of goodbye.

He vanished before I ever reached him.

THE FIRST THING I did when we reached my apartment was cast warding spells. Lots of them.

Until recently, I’d been pretty bad at rituals requiring big circles, incantations, and complex ingredients. But while I’d been feeding Suzy a constant stream of sleeping potions, she’d been giving me lessons in being less of a shitty witch.

Spellcasting was as delicate as chemistry. It required incredibly precise conditions to produce a successful spell. But whatever it was that made me bad at spells in the first place meant that I couldn’t seem to cast by the book, the way that every other witch in the world did.

I had to operate on gut instinct, or else everything blew up in my face.

Suzy didn’t even let me look at Books of Shadows anymore. She would give me the general rules of the type of spell I was trying to cast and then hover nearby while I mucked around, screwed things up, and generally did my best to make my apartment explode.

She’d had to whip out a fire extinguisher to save my living room more times than I could count.

Did I mention that I’d always been really bad at chemistry?

But I was slowly figuring it out. I’d been doing wards most often, so I didn’t even make anything start smoking when I put five of them right on top of each other.

The first layer blocked out noise. The second and third formed physical barriers—not easy to do. Those left me sweating. The fourth bound those first three together.

And the fifth was the one that wouldn’t allow any demons to pass.

I wasn’t so sure I did that one right, but as long as the other four were solid, we’d be fine. Probably.

When it was all done, I faced Isobel down. She hadn’t attempted to help me with the circles at any point. She was sitting on the edge of my bed, dusty from our time out in the desert.

At least she’d given the enchanted knife back to me.

“Hope Jimenez,” I said.

Isobel wouldn’t look at me. “Don’t say that.”

“Why not? It’s your real name.”

“That’s the name that I had before. Isobel Stonecrow is the name I gave myself after I was liberated from Ander and everything that came before.”

“And what’s that, exactly? What came before?”

Isobel shook her head. “I don’t know.” Before I could say anything, she lifted a finger to silence me. “I’m serious. I don’t remember much from the time before I worked for Ander. One of my contract terms was forgetting everything.”

“Does that mean you also forgot that you died?”

I meant for that question to hit her hard, but she only looked thoughtful. She stepped into my bathroom to wash her hands. The water sluiced from her skin brown, mingled dirt and blood.

Leaning on the doorway, I could see both of us in the mirror. Me with my big hulking shoulders and sunburned cheeks and dusty dark hair. Isobel with her beads and feathers and shadowed eyes. We both looked like we were alive—we were too miserable to be dead.

“I know that I must have been on the brink of death at some point,” Isobel finally said. “All of Ander’s contracts depend on the victim being in mortal peril. I don’t know how it happened or why.”

“Might have to do with the murder you committed,” I said.

She turned off the faucet. Flicked the water off of her hands. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“What do you know?”

Isobel leaned back against the sink. “I know that I trust you, Cèsar. I know that I haven’t enjoyed keeping information from you.”

“You did pretty well at it, if you didn’t like it.”

“I didn’t have a choice. I was hiding from everyone I used to know, and I was willing to do anything to keep myself safe.” She drew in a shuddering breath. “I guess I don’t need to be careful anymore.”

Isobel stripped off her jewelry and set everything on my bathroom counter. The bone bracelet. The anklet. The feathers clipped to her hair.

And as she did, pieces of glamor fell away, too.

Glamors were tough magic. It was a way of taking one thing and changing it so that it looked like something else. Most commonly, that meant projecting a fake image over reality, like the way that Gertie made the kitchen at Paradise Mile look normal.

Isobel’s glamor was more advanced. It seemed to have altered her physically.

I wasn’t all that surprised to see the change in eye color, lightening to a striking shade of hazel surrounded by dark rings. I wasn’t surprised that her hair turned lighter and more coppery, either. But her heart-shaped face rounded. She had acne scars. Her lips were a little thinner, the bridge of her nose wider, her eyebrows plucked thin.

She was still beautiful. It was a more normal type of beauty, less exotic, but still someone you’d stop to stare at in public.

Most shocking was the spread of patterns over her bare skin. They looked like vitiligo—a condition that made pink patches appear on darker skin—except that these glistened like fresh burns. Burns that might never heal.

They were on her hands, her forearms, even her neck. Same kind of burns that had been on that one corpse.

No wonder she had looked so scared.

“I have a lot of witch friends.” Even Isobel’s voice was higher-pitched. “They made the jewelry for me.”

“Jesus, Izzy, what happened to you?” I asked, reaching out to take her hands.

She jerked back. Slipped out of the bathroom. “It was Ander. He’s a really powerful demon, a one-of-a-kind hellborn.” She said it like that was significant, like it should mean something to me.

“Sure,” I said, following her back to my bedroom. “I’ve heard of hellborn demons. The OPA deals with more than the occasional incubus.”

“He actually lives in Hell, Cèsar. I went to Hell when I was in his service. That’s where I got burned like this.” Isobel stared fixedly at my stack of eight-track tapes as she spoke, hands wrapped around her throat to hide the burns. For the first time, she showed a hint of shame in her body.

“You went to
Hell
?”

“For a year,” Isobel said. “Because I made a stupid deal. Because I did something terrible as Hope Jimenez and paid the price for it. That’s what Ander told me.”

“I didn’t think humans could go to Hell.”

She shuddered. “They can. It’s easier when the demon brings Hell to you. Ander travels—moves his domain around. When I knew him, the entrance to his house was in New York. All you had to do was knock on the right door.”

“So how’d it happen?” I asked. “You killed someone. Someone else killed you for it—what, in retaliation? So Ander picked up your soul.”

“I don’t know. I must have already been on Ander’s radar if he managed to pick me up before dying, and I must have thought survival was worth the cost of service to him,” Isobel said. “Five years with a demon to have my life restored. It sounds good on paper.”

“But you murdered someone.” I was still stuck on that part.

“That’s what they always told me.”

Who could Isobel have possibly wanted to kill? I stared at her, trying to see a criminal—more of a criminal than the woman who irked the OPA by talking to the dead for money.

If she’d killed someone, it must have been for a good reason.

It
had
to be.

At some point, I’d sat down on the edge of my bed. Now she moved to stand between my knees. Her skin was hot, even through my dusty slacks, and she didn’t shy away when I grabbed her wrists.

The burns were smooth and shiny and hairless. Like they’d healed to patches of plastic.

“Does it hurt now?” I asked. She shook her head, and I traced my fingertips over the edges, where healthy skin met scar.

There was nothing delicate about Isobel. She wasn’t like Suzy, who had such a slender frame. Isobel was sturdy. Big hands for a woman, big hips, a layer of fat over everything that made her jiggle just the right amount when she moved.

The skin of the burns felt fragile, though. Like touching them too hard might break the skin and leave her bleeding.

“Ander’s house was in Hell, but I often traveled to Earth to do his bidding. Before you ask, he didn’t have me killing, or being a thug, or anything like that. He just wanted me to talk to people. Dead people. Find out where things and people were hidden.”

“So that Ander could do the killing instead,” I said.

“Sometimes,” Isobel said. And then she said, “Many times.” Her voice cracked. A tear slid down her cheek. “I hated it, but I was in that contract. I didn’t have a choice. When he commanded me, it was like being a zombie.”

Was
she a zombie? I rested my fingers on her wrist. She definitely had a pulse. I was pretty sure I would have noticed earlier if she hadn’t.

“I got free,” she went on. “A kopis confronted Ander for what he’d been doing—the normal demon hunter stuff. The kopis obviously won. It created an opening in my contract, although I’m not sure how. I didn’t leave the others behind deliberately. I just wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to escape.”

“When you say the others, you mean Lynne and Nichols.”

She sighed, rubbing both hands over her face. “Yeah. There were a lot more than the two of them at the time, though. Ander had hundreds of employees in his corporation.”

Hundreds of desperate souls willing to do anything to survive.

“What did you do to Nichols?” I asked.

Isobel touched her hair as if expecting to find the needle-tipped feather there. It was strange to see her without any adornment. “When I left Ander, I wanted to make sure he couldn’t send anyone after me. One of my witch friends made me a special weapon just for Ander’s employees.” She bit her lip. “He’s dead. It was a mercy killing. I don’t know what Ander had him doing, but death had to be better than that.”