Shadow Burns: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Preternatural Affairs Book 4) (7 page)

And my bedside clock still read 11:59.

ON FRIDAY, I WENT to work like normal, answered a lot of emails, and told Fritz that I was going to spend my weekend finishing up the paperwork from the Paradise Mile case. Don’t call me, I’ll be busy. That kind of thing.

On Sunday, I went back to Mojave.

The official word was that the Paradise Mile was closed. I hadn’t been assigned a new investigation yet, but Fritz said he’d probably have something for me on Monday.

Whatever the OPA thought, whatever we were telling the families of the victims, the case wasn’t closed for me. And I only partially thought that because I couldn’t stop dreaming of that goddamn hallway.

“Shouldn’t we have brought more stuff with us?” asked Isobel Stonecrow, the woman sitting in the passenger seat of my car.

I turned onto the dirt road leading into the Paradise Mile canyon. “More what?”

“More…” She gestured vaguely at nothing. “Just
more
. More weapons. More staff. More body armor or something. If you think a demon’s responsible for these deaths…”

“It’s just a funeral.” I massaged my dry, tired eyes with my fingertips. “We’re not getting attacked today.”

My car bounced through a pothole and Isobel winced. “If you’re certain.” Her teeth clacked against each other audibly as the dirt grew rougher.

I hadn’t had an excuse to borrow one of the SUVs from the OPA’s motor pool, so we’d been enjoying a bumpy, janky ride all the way out to the desert. Isobel was tolerating it well. She hadn’t complained once.

Optimistically, I thought that driving my old sedan was kind of like having a massage chair working on my sore muscles.

Less optimistically, I regretted not taking next model year’s Corvette from Fritz’s house. He’d been nagging me to take one of his cars for weeks, claiming that my sedan was a death trap and that I should be driving something safer. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to take him up on the offer. Call it pride or whatever. I was starting to think Fritz was right.

Nothing charms a woman less than taking her for a ride in a car held together with duct tape and wishes.

“Are you okay?” Isobel asked, surprising me. I was the one shaking her apart in my car. I’d been thinking of asking her the same question.

“Why’s that?”

“You don’t look good.”

Suzy had said something similar when I’d seen her on Friday afternoon. Actually, she’d said, “You look like the shit I stepped in outside my townhouse this morning,” and then brandished her dirty shoe at me, but that was Suzy for you.

“Just having a hard time sleeping.” I rubbed my eyes again. They were so dry. My hands felt heavy, too.

Isobel made a sympathetic sound. Wonder if she would have been as sympathetic if I’d told her the whole truth: that I kept dreaming circles around the house in Paradise Mile, walking through that same hallway for nights on end, glimpsing red nothingness outside my front door’s peephole.

Suzy’s assessment was closer to accurate than Isobel’s. I looked and felt like shit, and I was probably insane for going back to that house.

We reached the mouth of the canyon to find news vans waiting for us. No more black SUVs, no sign of OPA control at all. Just news vans with satellites mounted on their roofs and a lot of reporters trying not to squint from the intensity of the lights beating down on them.

If the media was there, then the OPA hadn’t just closed the case. We’d decided that we had nothing to do with it. Otherwise, we never would have let the press get within miles of the canyon.

Isobel looked as alarmed by their presence as I felt. We’d have to drive right through them in order to get onto the property.

“We have to turn around,” she said.

I might have agreed if we hadn’t already been close enough that the cameras could catch us. Running away would draw a lot more attention. “Just keep your head down.”

Isobel was already pulling a jacket over her head, concealing her face from the cameras as I slid toward the barricades.

The media had left just enough space for me to creep through their vans. I eyeballed the nearest vultures as I passed them. There was a guy in a trench coat and fedora holding a microphone the size of my face. A freaking dinosaur who thought he was doing journalism back in the forties or something.

Another reporter tracked us with a camera, turning to keep us in his sights.

Checking to make sure Isobel’s face was still buried, I gave the reporters my statement for the press in the form of an upthrust middle finger.

They didn’t look bothered. Too bad.

Sawhorses had been erected to keep the press a safe distance from the house. I presented my crumpled invitation to a woman standing beside a gap in the barrier. She was kind of a pretty lady, maybe in her forties, waifish, with red hair down her back.

She read the name on the invitation and smiled.

Whoa
. Those were some nasty teeth she had going on there. They were crooked, pocked with cavities. Flashing them made her a lot less pretty.

“Parking is to the right of the house.” She stepped aside.

When I saw the other cars waiting for the memorial, I felt another twinge of annoyance at myself for refusing to borrow the Corvette. There was a sports car that could have easily been in Fritz’s garage. There were also minivans, a semi without a trailer, a couple of sedans. Even an old car with wooden paneling that looked like it should have been driven by gangsters—like, uzi-in-a-violin-case gangsters.

I parked next to a banged up old truck that made my beater look awesome, then got out to look around.

The grieving families had done a good job cleaning up the retirement village. Standing outside the house, I couldn’t tell that anything bad had happened there. The windows were bloodless and opened to the morning air. Definitely an improvement.

Isobel finally lowered the jacket from her face, so I opened the passenger door for her. She took my hand and stepped out.

Until that day, I would have said that I liked seeing Isobel in her work “uniform” the best. She pretended that she was a native princess in order to make her powers seem more mysterious. Apparently, her clients were impressed by it. I was only impressed by the fact that she was bold enough to go to work wearing nothing but an animal-skin loincloth and a headdress.

And I really do mean
nothing
.

Not that she had anything to hide. Baring those shapely thighs, breasts, and everything in between was a goddamn public service.

But when Isobel wanted to dress like a normal person, she looked amazing in an entirely different way. Think hip-hugging black cotton. Think slinky. Think modestly cut, but leaving absolutely nothing to mystery.

Isobel was as graceful in heeled pumps as she was in bare feet. She stood beside me on rocky ground, smoothing her hands over her hair—which she hadn’t been able to resist decorating with feathers and beads—as she studied the retirement village.

Mourners were moving from the parking area toward the recreation hall in the back. I hadn’t seen that many people wearing black ever since I staked out a Black Death concert to pick up some lethe-stoned witches.

“Don’t you think that having a group service where the mass murder occurred is kind of…tacky?” Isobel whispered.

I thought it was tacky as hell, but what could you do?

“Our priests cleansed the place. An exorcist didn’t find anything to exorcise. There’s nothing dangerous here. So yeah, it’s tacky, but that’s all it is—tacky. Anyway, everyone died in the house. Service is in there.” I nodded to the rec hall.

She rubbed her upper arms like she was cold. “Tacky and morbid.” Despite being a death witch, Isobel wasn’t much of a fan of dealing with the dead. I sympathized. Really.

“I told you that you don’t have to do this.”

“And you don’t need to protect me.” A smile crept over her full lips. “I appreciate it, though.”

I offered my hand to her. She looped her arm through mine.

Impressively, Isobel didn’t lean on me at all as we walked across the grass and uneven paving stones. Don’t ask me how women can manage to look composed, even graceful, while wearing stilts for shoes. It’s got to be some kind of inborn power for the female species. I would have broken my ankle in three steps or less.

A little girl played on the lawn. She was wearing a white dress, kinda like a nightgown, and her hair looked like it hadn’t been brushed in weeks. That never would have flown in my house as a kid. Pops had always been after my sister’s hair with combs and scissors. Used to say that an unkempt kid reflected an unloving family.

Maybe this girl did have an unloving family, since she was ripping grass out by the fistful and flinging it at the empty house. Her fingernails were dirty. She made little growling noises as she rampaged through the garden.

“Classy,” I remarked. “Bringing a monster to a group funeral. Real classy.”

“What?” Isobel looked too distracted to notice the kid’s behavior. Her fingers were digging into my arm.

“Never mind.”

Everything about the recreation hall was as cramped, old, and dreary as the house itself. The chairs looked like antique torture devices. Nobody in the early twentieth century knew anything about ergonomics, let me tell you. Ten minutes sitting in one of those tiny seats with a rigid back and I’d be more uncomfortable than a thirteen-year-old boy at a nude beach.

Bouquets of lilies and white roses decorated the aisles, roped together with gauzy white material leading to a pulpit. There was no priest in sight. A few family members stood against the wall talking, and half the chairs were filled.

When Isobel and I entered, the conversations died off. Dozens of eyes turned on us.

There was no way that any of those people could have recognized me. I’d never seen any of them before, and they’d never seen me. Even if some douchebag had given them my address for an invitation, I was a spook, like Herbert had said.

But they still looked accusatory. Hateful.

Angry.

I felt real conspicuous as I moved to sit in the back row, but Isobel stopped me. “Where are the bodies, Cèsar?”

I looked again. There were no caskets for viewing anywhere in the room where the service was being held.

Weird.
The invitation had said the memorial would include a viewing of the bodies.

I patted my pockets down for the invitation. I found it inside my jacket.

The crumpled card was blank. No time, no address, no list of events. Both sides were as clean as though they’d never been touched by a drop of ink.

My heart rate jacked into high gear. “What the fuck?”

My cell phone rang and the tone sounded distorted, as though it were ringing from inside a toilet bowl. Fritz’s name blinked on the screen. But when I pressed the button to answer it, the screen went black, as though the battery was dead.

Just like Fritz’s phone had drained in the basement, too.

“Cèsar,” Isobel hissed.

I punched the power button, trying to get my phone to turn on again. “What?”

Finally, I looked up.

We were alone in the rec hall. The chairs had moved from organized rows in the center of the room to stacks along the walls. They were piled up against the windows as though waiting to be burned on a pyre.

I hadn’t heard them move. Not even a scrape of wood.

Isobel was starting to hyperventilate. I pulled her to my chest. I wasn’t sure if it was to comfort her or me.

The flowers wilted around us. Petals shriveling, falling to the uneven floor like brown snow.

Dense fog pressed against the outside of the recreation hall, blotting out our view of the canyon walls, the grassy lawn, the house, the press waiting by the dirt road.

Suzy had been right. I never should have gone to that memorial.

It was a trap, and I’d dragged Isobel right into it.

“Let’s get out of here.” I hooked my arm around her shoulders and turned to the door.

A man stood in our path, greasy hair caked to his scalp, scrubs covered in muddy handprints. His skin was the same color as the fog, but dotted with black pustules. His lips were swollen sausages.

I’d been looking at this guy’s autopsy photos a lot over the last week.

It was the orderly, Nichols.

You know, the person that Suzy had shot in the head.

“Hope.” His shoulders trembled as he extended his hands toward us. A line of black blood trickled between his eyebrows and down his nose to touch his chin. “No hope!”

Isobel screamed. “No!”

She shoved the man aside, and he actually stumbled as though she had been able to touch him. When he hit the floor, I heard a wet
splat
, like he’d landed on balloons filled with blood.

Before I could catch her, Isobel flung the door open and shot out into Paradise Mile canyon.

NICHOLS WASN’T FAST ENOUGH to keep me from chasing Isobel outside.

Scary as it was to be assaulted by a dead man, I was a lot more scared of losing Isobel.

The air outside the recreation hall clung to my sweaty skin, making my suit drag as though I’d just emerged from a lake. The fog only gave me a few feet of visibility. The world was made of indistinct gray shapes on a paler gray void.

“Isobel!” My voice didn’t seem to travel very far. Her name fell flat.

A feminine figure flashed through the gloom. Couldn’t tell if it was her or the woman with the bad teeth.

Glancing back at the open door, I saw a man moving in the darkness behind me—a pale shape with a perfect circle in his forehead where Suzy had planted a bullet. Nichols was getting to his feet, every motion making wet popping noises. Bones rattled inside the sack of his body.

I really should have brought my gun.

Isobel’s distant cry brought my attention snapping back to her. I chased after her, feet crunching against grass, breath choppy in my ears.

Forget the bodies that should have been on display, forget the dead orderly, forget the fog. I had to catch up with Isobel. Keep her safe in that oppressive gray nothingness.

The same shock of entropy that had screwed up the rec hall had also hit the parked cars. The sports sedan was flipped onto its side. The ragged rubber of its tires looked like clothes hanging off a shambling zombie. Shattered glass sparkled on the lawn.