Shadow Burns: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Preternatural Affairs Book 4) (21 page)

I THINK I’M A pretty easy guy to get along with. I like just about everyone when I meet them, and it takes a lot to lose my trust. I can’t say I’ve ever had a real enemy in my life—though some of the witches I’ve arrested while working for the OPA might disagree.

The fact that I hated Calhoun Deppe on sight meant a lot.

I actually
hated
him. Wanted him dead.

It takes a lot to make me feel that much anger.

“I was right about Ander, wasn’t I?” Fritz asked. It was weird to hear him talking to Calhoun with the same tone he used on any of his underlings at the Magical Violations Department. “His corporation really was developing a method to produce hybrids of demons and witches.”

“Right in one. I’m impressed,” Calhoun said.

“I’ve had a few years to study the files Ander didn’t burn when I took over.” Fritz waved his handgun at Gertie. “She’s the one you’ll be merging with.”

“That’s the plan.” Calhoun squeezed the little girl’s hand. She buried her face against his hip. “If it makes you feel any better, it would have been one of Ander’s employees if it hadn’t been me. I’m not such a bad guy, am I? Better that I have the power instead of Ander. He’d have made an army. I just want to merge myself.”

“Merging?” I asked. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

I might as well have not spoken at all. Fritz and Calhoun didn’t even look at me.

Gertie did, though. She smiled at me with those sharp, nasty little teeth.

“While I’m doing such a good job with my guesswork, I’ll posit that the ritual requires twelve ordinary human deaths, as well as a thirteenth for power,” Fritz said. “You killed everyone at Paradise Mile to start it off. Now you needed Ander to fuel the act of merging itself.”

“His blood is much more powerful than Hope’s,” Calhoun agreed.

She stiffened against me. Tried to step toward him, clenching her fists. She could barely stand up on her own, so letting her attack Calhoun seemed like it would have been a terrible idea. I held her back.

“Los Angeles will be almost as good as New York,” Calhoun said. “I think I’ll like running Helltown. Gertie?” At hearing her name, she turned to look at Calhoun. “Go ahead. Now. While the blood’s fresh.”

Gertie reached up, dug her fingers into Calhoun’s stomach, and ripped him apart.

Guts spilled over the waistband of his jeans. Blood poured over her hands. Calhoun’s crimson eyes burned, throwing his head back, teeth gritted.

But he kept standing. He kept standing, and he kept breathing, and he didn’t die as the little girl completely gutted him.

I’d have been lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit impressed.

Then Calhoun picked Gertie up with a hand under each arm. Pulled her against his body.

She crawled into the cavity that she had made underneath his chest.

Don’t ask me how she fit. She was small, but not
that
small, and she didn’t seem to change size. He didn’t change size, either. They just fit. She was outside, and then she was inside as Calhoun folded his arms around her, and it didn’t make any rational sense but that was definitely what I was seeing.

Now I wasn’t as impressed so much as disgusted. I tasted vomit on the back of my tongue.

The spirits of the dead outside of the circle blurred as Calhoun drew on their power.

The flames burned brighter. Calhoun shone a vibrant shade of crimson.

Fritz’s fingers dug into my arm. “The knife, Cèsar, the knife!”

I handed it to him. It was still drenched in Ander’s blood.

Way too much blood in that room for my taste.

Fritz moved fast and smooth, attacking Calhoun with the knife. But in the same way that Gertie magically fit inside of the witch, Calhoun magically wasn’t where Fritz kept trying to strike. The air flickered around them. Fritz swung wildly, stabbing and thrusting, but Calhoun was never
there
.

And now he was growing.

His arms bulged. Swelled. His shoulders popped as they inflated like fleshy balloons.

The spirits of the Paradise Mile victims flooded the circle, punching into his chest like shots of darkness straight to the heart. Each one made him bigger and bigger.

He bulked up until he was bigger than the biggest powerlifter I’d ever seen, bigger than two of the biggest powerlifters. He was half again as tall as Fritz and more muscular than me. His skin turned gray and veiny. Calhoun’s face squared, eyes sinking deeper into his skull. Scraggly hair flowed down his cheeks.

Vines erupted from the hole in his stomach, wrapping tightly around his midsection to lock Gertie into place. Only her head and arms stuck out. The rest of her was buried deep inside of him.

Gross
.

Fritz attacked again. Calhoun backhanded him. The kopis went flying, smashed into the wall of the cave, and broke the circle of power. The magic snapped. Crashed into us like waves. Sucked the breath out of my lungs.

Calhoun chuckled as he studied his massive hands. Looked like he could have popped the head off of my shoulders. It was weird that he was so massive, but he still sounded like the same normal-looking guy that had been there a few moments before.

“To Helltown,” Calhoun said. “Good base of operations. Don’t you agree, Agent Hawke? But it feels like I’m missing something.”

“Your sanity?” I suggested.

“Companionship.” He crossed the cavern in a few steps, ripped Isobel away from me, and tossed her over his shoulder.

“Cèsar!” she shrieked.

I tried to grab her hand, but he wrenched her out of my reach.

For one painful moment, Calhoun was right fucking there, within convenient reach for me to attack.

But I didn’t have the knife. I’d given it to Fritz, who had carried it with him when he went flying.

The Desert Eagle leaped to my hand. I fired on instinct, tracking him across the room. The slope of his back was broad and muscular. Like shooting at the side of a barn.

I fired. Gunshots filled the air.

Calhoun pounded up the slope to the trap door, still carrying Isobel, and exploded out of the basement without reacting to a single one of my shots. I must have hit him at least a couple times. I wasn’t
that
terrible at aiming.

Fuck
.

The candelabras went out, casting the room in shadow. All of the spirits were gone. The magic had gone with them, too. The basement was shockingly quiet, aside from Fritz’s panting and the sound of his feet slipping over the bones as he stumbled toward me.

“What the hell just happened?” I asked.

“Calhoun successfully merged with Gertie,” Fritz said curtly. “He’s going to seize Helltown.”

“Yeah, I caught that part. Do we care? Shouldn’t we let him have it?” I could think of a lot of things much more upsetting than someone fucking with the Silver Needles.

“Calhoun’s placed the current entrance to Paradise Mile in Agent Takeuchi’s neighborhood. There are miles of civilian territory between her street and Helltown.”

And now he looked like the freaking Hulk.

“I can see how that might be a problem,” I said as Fritz shoved me toward the basement door. “But why take Isobel?”

“So that I’ll follow. So that I’ll have to see him using the magic that I’d originally hired him to acquire for my purposes.” Fritz’s shoulders tensed, fists trembling. “To make me angry.” It had worked. Fritz was so fucking angry that I could feel it through our bond, and we weren’t even actively piggybacked.

Calhoun had made escaping the basement look so easy. I had to crawl up that slope on all fours, and it was painfully slow.

“No bad blood between you and your former employee, huh?” I asked, offering a hand down to Fritz.

He ignored it and attacked the slope on his own.

“Good help is so hard to find.” It took him two tries, but he got out of the trap door. “If Calhoun acquires Helltown as his territory, he’ll be able to take the energies of the demons living there to make him even more powerful. It’s called an ascension. Relatively routine in Hell, but hasn’t happened on Earth in centuries. It’s a bitch to clean up. It would mean a lot of overtime for the OPA. Overtime we can’t afford.”

Considering the OPA’s budgetary issues, he might have meant that we literally couldn’t afford that much overtime. But I doubted it.

I could imagine Los Angeles with Gertie in charge: rotten with vines, eternally shadowed by fog, every house filled with carnage. Some of it would be illusion. A lot of it wouldn’t be.

Sure, it would be an appropriate way to celebrate Halloween. But it wouldn’t go away after Halloween. Once Gertie sank her claws into the city, I doubted that she’d ever go away again, no matter how many Union squads we threw at her.

“Okay,” I said. “We can’t let Calhoun out of Paradise Mile. But there’s a problem with that.” We’d emerged from the trap door to the basement to find ourselves in the servant’s hallway once more. It stretched into endless nothing again—just like it had on the way down. Calhoun was nowhere in sight. “How do we get out of here?”

“Piggyback,” Fritz said.

“Piggyback” was the colloquial term for activating the bond between kopis and aspis. It would allow us to draw off of each other’s energy. Make us both stronger. And, hopefully, also make us impervious to Gertie’s mind-altering powers.

“We don’t have time to piggyback,” I said. We’d only done it once before. I wasn’t sure I could do it again without practice under less pressure.

Fritz grabbed my lapels in both hands, and the raw emotion on his face was painful to see. He was usually suave and calm. Never broke the professional mask. “I’m not going to let Calhoun kill Hope again.”

“Isobel,” I said. “Her name is Isobel now.”

But I reached deep within myself, seizing upon the core of power from which all my magic flowed. It wasn’t much of a core. Stronger than it used to be, after all the exercise I’d been giving it with Suzy’s help, but weaker than I would have liked.

My first two grabs for it failed. The magic trickled out of my grip like river water through a sieve.

I took a deep breath. Tried to push away the stress and fear.

The third grab was weak, but it held.

It was enough for me to drag it out, hooking myself into Fritz. The magic secured us to each other like an invisible chain.

For a shocking moment, we shared our thoughts and senses.

We even shared our memories.

I was no longer in the canyon. I was kneeling on the stained carpet in an abandoned office building with a woman’s body at my knees. She wasn’t as voluptuous as the woman I knew now. Maybe twenty pounds lighter. Her nose was broader, her hair a paler shade of brown, her clothes more professional.

She was also dying.

Hope Jimenez.

Her blood stained my hands. I rubbed my thumb over my fingertips, feeling the warmth of the fluid. The warmth was comforting. It meant she wasn’t dead yet. It meant there was still a chance to save her.

I pulled out a cell phone. Dialed an emergency number that would have Care Flight on the roof within minutes.

I didn’t recognize the square, short-fingered hands handling the phone, but I did recognize the Blackberry. I was in Fritz’s memory of discovering Hope right after Calhoun tried to kill her.

“This isn’t going to cause a problem with our professional relationship, is it?” That was Calhoun himself, leaning against the opposite wall. He hadn’t changed much over the years. The only difference was that his eyes were brown, not red.

The memory blurred. I knew that Fritz had chased Calhoun, tried to fight him, tried to kill him. I felt the burn of his anger.

And I saw the moment when he returned to the office building to discover that Hope Jimenez was gone. Ander had arrived before the paramedics and taken her away. Part of the contract Hope had previously established with him.

Fritz hadn’t known that at the time—he’d just been angry, confused, and…in love?

I was surprised by how much love he’d felt toward her, even then.

When my vision cleared of the memory, Fritz wasn’t looking at me, and his expression was unreadable. He had to know I’d seen into his memories. Had to know that I was getting a picture of the secret parts of his life that we didn’t discuss.

“This way,” Fritz said.

He bolted down the hallway.

It looked completely different now. There were curves that had been masked by Gertie’s powers, and it formed a big loop folding in on itself. Not nearly as scary once I saw how it fit together.

The walls also weren’t completely solid. There were doorways hidden behind the illusion of wallpaper. Most of them were closed.

Most, but not all.

“Here!” Fritz announced triumphantly.

We emerged from one of the doors into the drawing room.

There were bodies everywhere. Rotten bodies bloated with their own gases. The mangled corpses of naked old people were draped over the furniture and half-tucked under the white blankets. The puddles of their blood almost looked black.

Even Herbert was at my feet, veins lacerated by the knife.

He was the one who brought me out of my momentary shock.

His body wasn’t in Paradise Mile. It was at an OPA morgue. He’d already been autopsied, which meant that there should have been a Y-incision on his chest. I’d seen the photos.

There was no Y-incision here. This was just another illusion.

As soon as I realized it, the bodies vanished. They were only images layered over the barren, dusty reality of the room. One more of Gertie’s illusions. But she had no power over Fritz and me, not now that we had activated the bond.

She didn’t keep us distracted long enough to make her escape. Gray flesh flashed beyond the exit doorway.

Calhoun.

I chased him to the front door, ignoring all of Gertie’s illusions—the creeping vines, the dripping blood, the pieces of human meat splattered across the floor. By the time I got outside, Calhoun was a huge, dark shape retreating into the fog. Isobel dangled over his shoulder, arms limp, hair swaying with every step.

“What’s the game plan, boss?” I asked Fritz, pausing to catch my breath.

He handed me the butcher’s knife. “You’ll have to be the one to catch up. Take all my strength and
run
.”