Shadow Burns: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Preternatural Affairs Book 4) (22 page)

I could feel that it hurt him to order me to do it. He was angry at his prosthetic leg, angry at the fallen angel who had destroyed his foot, angry at the disability that made him a fraction slower than his aspis. A few weeks earlier, I would have been the one struggling to keep up with him. Now he struggled to keep up with me.

And I might not be fast enough to catch up with the monster that was Calhoun.

I didn’t have the kopis speed, even with the binding active between us. I was just some guy who didn’t spend enough time on cardio at the gym.

“I’ll get him,” I said.

Hopefully that wasn’t bravado talking.

I raced after Calhoun, tearing through the damp air. Fritz opened the bond as wide as possible. I drank deep on his energy as he shoved it toward me, feeding his strength through the invisible chain. He couldn’t give me kopis muscles, but he burned away my fatigue, set my blood on fire, sharpened all my senses.

Calhoun bored a path through the fog, dispersing it with his momentum. The ground shuddered underneath his massive feet. He shook the whole goddamn canyon.

As the fog disappeared, I could see that the road leading out of Paradise Mile Retirement Village had changed.

Instead of the twisting dirt path that I hadn’t been able to escape before, it was a paved two-lane road. The mouth of the canyon opened up onto a dark night. Rows of townhouses. The kinds of cars you expected to see middle-class families driving, like ten-year-old sedans and minivans.

That was Suzy’s neighborhood. Calhoun was headed straight for it.

Now my fears were a lot more specific. Instead of imagining Gertie’s reign of terror all over Los Angeles, I was imagining it in Suzy’s townhouse. She’d been bleeding when we left her, throat ripped open. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine her completely disemboweled.

Calhoun’s not going to have her. Not Suzy
.

Fritz’s strength propelled me on. Faster and faster. I ran like lightning shot from the sky.

I drew level with the demon.

Good God, but he was a huge fucking monster. Even bigger when he was right on top of me. There was no way that I’d be able to tackle him, bring him down.

I jumped in Calhoun’s path instead. Lifted the butcher’s knife. Slashed it across his chest, down Gertie’s face. She didn’t raise her tiny arms in time to protect herself.

A cut opened on her forehead down to her jaw. Blood gushed over her features, and her shriek shattered my eardrums.

That got Calhoun’s attention. He skidded to a stop.

“Gertie!” He stroked his hand over her forehead. “Are you okay?”

She couldn’t respond. Not with words. She grabbed his fingers and tried to bite them. He jerked his fingers away from her teeth before they shredded his skin.

I jabbed at him with the knife again. He jumped back.

Calhoun was afraid of his own knife. It was satisfying to think that even he was intimidated by the power he’d been stupid enough to unleash.

“Drop Isobel,” I said.

He jerked her off of his shoulder. Held her between us. She was small in his hands, like a child.

“Okay,” Calhoun said.

The fog blurred around him. For an instant, I couldn’t see anything.

Once I could see again, his hands were empty and Isobel was gone.

I was too shocked to attack.

“We’ve tossed her somewhere else in the canyon,” Calhoun said, patting Gertie’s slimy head. She was clawing at her own face now, tearing the wound open so that she bled harder. It almost looked like she was enjoying it. “You can search for Isobel, or you can try to keep me from reaching Los Angeles.”

I stretched my senses toward Fritz, making sure he heard the ultimatum.
Isobel or Los Angeles
.

He heard. He’d been heading my way slowly, but he immediately rerouted, going back toward the house.

Not much of an ultimatum. We didn’t have to compromise on anything. I could handle Calhoun while Fritz looked for Isobel.

But Calhoun had to realize that…didn’t he?

I rubbed a hand over my eyes. My head throbbed with magic, blurring my thoughts, turning my brain to mush.

With my eyelids closed, I could see Fritz racing through the foyer. He had to tear vines away in order to make progress toward the rear of the room. Calhoun wasn’t making it easy to search.

Or was he?

In my mind’s eye, it looked like Fritz was beating at nothing at all. Struggling against empty air.

More of Gertie’s illusions. Fritz hadn’t even noticed yet.

What else were we missing?

My eyes shocked open. The monstrous witch was still standing in front of me. His meaty hands were definitely empty, raised in a mockery of surrender. He was pretending to wait for me to decide what to do about his ultimatum. But there was still a thread of illusion that I hadn’t noticed—same way that Fritz couldn’t tell that the foyer wasn’t filled with vines.

Through the bond, I saw the truth.

Isobel hadn’t been relocated at all. She was on the ground just behind Calhoun’s massive feet. His raised heel was poised over her skull.

If he took one step back—like if I attacked him—he would easily crush her.

“Okay,” I said, stepping aside. “You can leave. I’ll go look for Isobel in the house.”

Calhoun faltered. “But Fritz—”

I gave him even more space. Angled myself slightly so that I stood to his side instead of front of him, clearing his path to Los Angeles. I couldn’t stop thinking about Suzy waiting on the other side. Giving him space to escape made me feel like my heart was throwing up in my chest.

But I wouldn’t play his game. He wanted me to attack and accidentally kill Isobel, and I wasn’t going to do it.

Calhoun hadn’t considered that possibility. Indecision flashed over his twisted features.

Gertie’s hands strained from his chest, reaching for Los Angeles. She wanted to go. She didn’t care about screwing with my head. She wanted to consume Earth.

Once Gertie made her preferences known, Calhoun didn’t hesitate. He moved with such speed that it sucked the breath right out of my lungs.

Calhoun and Gertie raced for Los Angeles.

I leaped for Isobel.

She was already waking up. She sat up slowly with a groan. “Cèsar?”

Setting the knife on the grass beside her, I wrapped an arm around Isobel’s back to support her. “I’ve got you. You’re safe now.” Even if making Isobel safe had required releasing Calhoun into Los Angeles.

“Where is he?” she asked. But her eyes fell on Calhoun before I could answer.

The sight of him woke her up fast.
Really
fast.

Isobel bolted upright, snatching the anointed butcher’s knife from the grass. “Are you crazy? Why aren’t you stopping him? We can’t let him get out of here!”

She was on her feet in seconds. Isobel was fast, probably even faster than I was with Fritz’s strength.

But there was no way she could be fast enough to reach Calhoun before he escaped.

He was only a few short yards from freedom. The dark image of Los Angeles beyond the mouth of the canyon waited, oblivious to the horrors that were about to cross over.

“Stop!” Isobel screamed, raising the knife.

She only made it a dozen feet before the vision of Los Angeles wavered.

The road blurred, momentarily obscured by fog so dense that I couldn’t see the other side.

The vines shriveled, peeling away from the passage as though seared by heat.

When it came back into focus, I was met by a much more familiar sight than downtown LA: a grassy lawn dotted with trees and square white buildings. A woman stood at the center of the road, hands extended in front of her, bandages wrapped all the way around her throat.

Suzy had taken control of the entrance to the dimension from Gertie and moved it so that it came out at the campus for the Office of Preternatural Affairs.

Don’t ask me how, but she had.

She didn’t move as black SUVs tore past her. They were close enough that they ruffled her hair.

The windows were rolled down, letting men in black uniforms hang halfway out of the vehicles with their fully automatics trained on Calhoun. At the sight of them, the rampaging demon-witch skidded to a stop so quickly that his clawed feet dug deep furrows into the earth.

“Get down!” I shouted at Isobel.

No idea if she heard me, because at that moment, the air erupted with explosions.

Gunfire chattered. Muzzle flashes illuminated the foggy night.

The Desert Eagle hadn’t done anything against Calhoun, but even a big handgun was nothing compared to the might of several squads’ worth of automatic weapons.

Bloody spots peppered his flesh. Fluid gushed from him, and not all of it was red.

Gertie was shrieking. Isobel dropped to her knees, hands clapped over her head, and I could only hope that it wasn’t because she’d been hit. I was too far to be able to tell. I ducked, dodged a Union SUV tearing past me, raced toward Isobel’s side.

Bullets buzzed through the air like furious hornets. My skull rang.

Something hard struck me from behind—Fritz. He shoved me to the ground. We slammed into the dirt together.

His mouth moved. I think he was cursing at me. Calling me stupid. I couldn’t hear him, but I could imagine. The bond made his intent pretty clear even with my hearing wrecked.

An SUV zoomed just a few feet in front of us, close enough that it probably would have hit me if I’d taken another step.

Calhoun roared on the other side. I glimpsed his feet between the tires. Blood was streaming down his legs.

The vehicle pulled up right alongside him.

A Union kopis plugged him right in the chest, and, finally, Calhoun dropped.

The only way that I could tell they stopped shooting at that point was because the air stopped humming. My ears were completely blown out. It was going to take a few visits to the OPA healing witches to restore the frequencies I’d lost that day.

“Isobel,” I said, shoving Fritz away from me.

She was already on her feet, and I was relieved to see that she hadn’t been hit by any stray gunfire. She had the butcher’s knife in hand. Between her blood-soaked body, her wild eyes, and the weapon, she looked almost as much like a demon as the thing sticking out of Calhoun’s chest.

One by one, the muzzles of the guns shifted to aim at her.

“Don’t move!” shouted one of the Union men. It sounded like he was yelling from the other side of the canyon.

Fritz stood. “No,
you
don’t move. None of you move! Hold your fire! Remain by your vehicles!”

There seemed to be some debate among the Union as to whether they should obey him or not. The Union was a separate entity from the OPA; not everyone recognized Director Friederling at a glance.

The moment of hesitation was enough for Isobel to reach Calhoun, clutching the enchanted knife, hatred twisting her features into something ugly.

He rolled over onto his back.

“No, Hope,” Calhoun said as Gertie shrieked within his stomach cavity. There was nothing human in her sounds.

“Hope is dead,” Isobel spat.

She brought the knife down swiftly. It buried deep into Calhoun’s stomach, severing the vines that clutched Gertie.

A few swift cuts, and the child-demon ripped free. She flopped wetly out of Calhoun’s gut.

I blinked, and Calhoun was a man again. The leathery skin and bulging muscles vanished. His stomach was mostly healed, aside from a few slices where Isobel had done the cutting. Gertie writhed beside him like a nasty little larva.

Fritz approached, holding one of the guns that the Union kopides had brought. He leveled it at Gertie.

She flopped onto her belly and tried to crawl away.

He opened fire and didn’t stop firing until the magazine was empty and the demon was nothing but a bloody smear on the grass. Then Fritz tossed the weapon aside.

A pair of Union men came over with handcuffs and rope.

“Calhoun Deppe,” Fritz said, “consider yourself under arrest.”

THE PARADISE MILE DIMENSION started folding in on itself shortly after Gertie died.

It was a pretty spectacular mess.

The house of horrors that had been haunting me for days crumbled from the foundations up. Windows shattered, the roof rotted before my eyes, and those fluttering curtains turned to ash.

Then the ground yawned open wide and swallowed it all. The wreckage, the cemetery, the canyon—everything.

Luckily, I got to watch it happen from the outside, safe on the grassy lawn of the OPA campus. “Holy shit,” I said as the opening between universes popped into nothing. It shriveled up on itself like a puckered asshole and left nothing behind.

Suzy stepped back, wiping her hands off. The aura of magic rapidly faded around her. “It’s gone. We don’t have to worry about any of that anymore.”

“Excellent work, Agent Takeuchi,” Fritz said.

“I’d love to take credit for the cleanup, sir, but it was obviously rigged to collapse when the creator died. It probably started losing integrity when Gertie and Calhoun were separated.”

The big bad witch himself was being shoved into a black vehicle as we spoke. Calhoun’s face was hidden underneath one of the Union’s hoods, and I was glad not to have to see him again.

Fritz patted Suzy on the shoulder. “I look forward to reading your analysis of the incident.”

“My analysis?
My
analysis?” She swatted his hand away. “I’m not doing a single piece of paperwork for this bullshit case.
You
get to explain what the fuck happened here.”

His lips thinned. “Agent Takeuchi—”

“Just because you boys are willing to work off the books doesn’t mean that I am,” Suzy rasped. “First time one of you did that, I ended up in a Union detention center. And now getting mauled by a creepy little demon? No. I’m not writing up the justification for this. If you don’t like it, then you can suck my giant monster dick.”

“Monster dick?” Fritz echoed dryly. “Well, isn’t today full of revelations?”

“Don’t patronize me,
sir
.” She jabbed her finger into his chest. “I mean it. If we’d done everything through the official channels, I would have summoned Gertie in a secure OPA location. There would have been backup. I wouldn’t have this.” Suzy tipped her head back to flash the bandage, as if we could have forgotten.