Sinners & Sorcerers: Four Urban Fantasy Thrillers (22 page)

Gunfire exploded through the room. Eduardo was shooting. It did nothing to the spirits piling on top of him, tearing at him with translucent hands.

Once a spirit stepped onto me, I realized why he was screaming. A foot plunged into my chest. Icy shock froze my heart.

The room went black, and I spiraled toward death.

“Cèsar!”

Isobel’s voice broke through the darkness. I heard something skitter, felt metal touch my fingertips. Eduardo’s Beretta. She’d kicked it to me. I grabbed it and got onto my knees.

The spirit slipped out of my body, leaving me gasping.

Eduardo and the incubi had retreated toward the stairs, where the other incubi from upstairs had joined them. Four guys altogether. The spirits wouldn’t be able to hold them off for long.

Isobel had given us a distraction, but that was it. Just a fleeting moment to break free of Gregor’s thrall. And I could tell Isobel was going to lose control if we didn’t get out of there fast. She was shaking hard enough that it looked like she’d break apart.

“Isobel!” I reached for her through silver mist. She didn’t seem to see me.

The basement windows shattered. Black figures flew into the room and dropped onto the ground.

Men aimed their guns at us, shouting to each other, shouting at everyone. “Drop your weapons! Hands in the air!”

I caught a flash of black and white Union equipment out of the corner of my eye. Didn’t dare look too close, but I knew it was the cavalry. I dropped the gun, put my hands behind my head, stood stock-still.

Eduardo fired.

At least, I think he fired first. All the shouts turned to the chatter of automatic gunfire too quickly for me to tell.

Instinct carried me through the silvery spirits that Isobel had summoned, launching myself toward her with hands outstretched. Ice clutched my heart. But I wrapped my arms around her, slamming both of us to the ground as gunfire exploded overhead. Bullets whizzed over us.

Her eyes cleared the second we hit the ground.

“Cèsar?”

The ghosts vanished.

Eduardo struck the earth next to me. Unlike Isobel, his face was blank. Blood cascaded out of his mouth. And then Gregor landed behind them.

Both of them had been shot in the chest. Just like Erin Karwell.

It seemed like the fight ended real fast after that. The incubi went down fast, and there wasn’t enough time for them to summon up a nasty thrall to save their asses. Demons hit the ground, one after another—boom, boom, boom.

The Pit was secure. Isobel and I were safe.

As soon as everything was dead, the Union guys stepped aside to let the OPA agents step in. They weren’t from my department, Magical Violations. Considering that we were dealing with incubi, they’d probably come from the Infernal Relations Department—IRD—so I didn’t know their names. I’d seen them in the cafeteria at work, though. The faces were familiar.

And then there was another familiar face. Fritz kicked an incubus body down the stairs as he stormed into the basement.

“Cèsar,” he said when he saw me. Then his gaze fell on Isobel and his eyes lit up. “Belle!”

Fritz hauled Isobel to her feet and kissed her.

I’d like to say that was less shocking than coming up against the Needles at The Pit, but it wasn’t. Surprise squirmed right through my adrenaline haze. All I could do was stare at my boss and the necrocognitive he’d ordered me to find. A necrocognitive that he knew
really
well, apparently.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, cupping her face in both hands.

She pushed him away. Her face was bright red under the bruises. “Don’t do that.”

“They beat you, didn’t they?”

“Cèsar kept them from doing worse,” Isobel said.

Fritz barely glanced at me. “Well done, Hawke.”
Hawke
? Since when did we stop being on a first-name basis? “Belle, we need an EMT to look at you. Come with me.”

He dragged her away.

Isobel caught my eye and mouthed,
Just a second
.

I stared after her for a good two minutes, trying to figure out what the fuck had just happened.

Everything from the last week seemed disjointed, like a puzzle that didn’t quite fit together. I understood that Gregor had put a bounty on my head. I also understood that Eduardo and Joey had been going for the money. But how Erin and Isobel fit in—how my boss knew Isobel—I just couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

“Agent Hawke?” It was one of the guys from IRD.

I wiped blood off my upper lip. Gregor’s beating seemed to have resulted in a broken nose. “What’s up?”

He asked me a few questions. How did I know the witch outside the perimeter? Why had I called in Domingo Hawke instead of backup? What was Eduardo’s role in what had happened here? I answered him on autopilot. Unlike the LAPD, the IRD agent actually seemed to believe me. Refreshing.

I’d witnessed the aftermath of more than a few investigations gone nasty, so the sight of the forensics team moving into The Olive Pit was actually comforting. It was so normal, in that “my life is weird” kind of way, that the residual panic from the fight finally began to subside.

The insanity of the week drained out of me, replaced the monotony of the status quo.

I stood back and watched as everything was tagged, labeled, and outlined. Ballistics experts started figuring out where all the bullets had come from. I could have told them it was pointless trying to sort that out, but nobody seemed interested in talking to me.

In fact, now that everything had calmed down, it was like I’d turned invisible. Spent a few days a fugitive and started feeling like I was important. Now Isobel and Fritz were having an intense conversation in the corner, like the kind of conversation that looked like it should happen in a locked bedroom somewhere, two IRD agents were questioning Thandy, and the photographers were taking pictures of everything but me.

I don’t have much pride, but what little I had was licking its wounds.

With nothing else to do, I drifted over to Thandy. Her face crumpled when she saw me.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. Blood poured out of a wound on her temple, rapidly soaking through a dishtowel pressed against it. She must have been hurt when the Union came in. The fact that it wasn’t clotting made me think that she wasn’t exactly human. “I only cooperated because of Erin.”

“Hold up,” I said. “What about Erin?”

“Gregor told me to tell everyone you were dating. He wanted them to think that you’d been beating her. He wanted you to have nowhere to hide.”

Hadn’t Eduardo said something about Erin, too? Something about the bounty?

“Thandy, was Erin human?” I asked.

The manager shook her head. “She was Gray, like me. We both got recruited into the Needles last year. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

So Thandy wasn’t a full succubus—she was a half-demon, a Gray. It explained why she was bleeding so profusely. And if Erin had been a half-succubus, too, then that would explain why I had been unable to resist her sexual allure. It hadn’t been chemistry. It had been thrall.

I was an OPA agent. I should have known better.

Damn
.

One of the IRD agents grabbed Thandy’s arm. “Do you have any other questions, Agent Hawke? We need to get her to a healing witch soon.”

“No, go ahead,” I said, backing away.

I watched him take Thandy upstairs with a sinking feeling in my gut. Erin hadn’t gone home with me because she wanted me. She’d probably wanted to feed, and I’d been throwing myself at her feet like a giant dipshit for months.

The other IRD agent touched my sleeve. “You need to see the EMT?” he asked, squinting closely at my face through his spectacles. “You look pretty bad.”

Just my shriveled pride shattering into a million pieces. Don’t mind me.
“I’m fine. Thanks.”

I couldn’t deal with the investigation anymore. I headed upstairs to the bar, snagging a bottle of wine out of the rack on my way up the stairs. I know I’d sworn to stop drinking, but it wasn’t hard liquor—a little wine never hurt anybody.

Sinking into one of the leather chairs on the first floor, I uncorked the bottle and took a swig. It tasted a little peppery, kind of woody. A lot like bitter self-hatred.

Isobel took the chair next to me and reached for the bottle. “I could use some of that.” Her bloody face had been cleaned and someone had given her an OPA-branded jacket that was way too big on her. She looked absolutely terrible.

I handed the wine to her. “That was pretty badass. The dead thing.”

She smiled shyly around the mouth of the bottle as she sipped. “It was a new trick. It’s kind of interesting how inspiring total panic can be.”

Inspirational was a word for it.

“I saw security footage. You left the Glock in my apartment. Did you kill Erin?”

Isobel blushed. “No, I’d been snooping in your apartment the day before, while you were at work. I guess I forgot it there. It was an accident.”

Snooping? Just like she’d been snooping at Suzy’s place?

“Who the fuck
are
you?” I asked.

“Isobel Stonecrow is a friend of mine,” Fritz said, wiping the blood off of his hands with a monogrammed handkerchief as he sauntered over.

Friend
, he’d said. Right. The kind of friend that you fondled after saving her life.

“We met a couple of months ago because he needed to speak to his late grandfather,” Isobel said. She flashed a smile at him. “He wasn’t fooled by the drums and animal skins either.”

“I saw right through all of your pretense.” Fritz smiled back at her. “She proved trustworthy with my grandfather’s spirit. When I realized that my department had been infiltrated by the Needles, I needed someone outside the organization I could trust, and Belle was that woman. She’s been investigating the Needles and all of my agents for the last several weeks.”

I remembered how she’d told me that nobody called her Izzy, and now I knew why. She preferred the OPA agents wrapped around her pinkie finger to use a different diminutive.

“Ergo the snooping,” she said.

Fritz was speaking to me, but he could barely take his eyes off Isobel. “I believed you were trustworthy, Cèsar, but I had to be sure. Agent Takeuchi was high on my list of suspects. You’ve been close with her, and you had previous connections with the Silver Needles.”

“Was that why you assigned Isobel’s investigation to me?” I asked.

He nodded. “The Needles had identified Belle as my ally and a threat. I wanted to see how you handled the investigation. Unfortunately, we had that little problem with Erin Karwell first. Speaking of which…”

“Cèsar killed her in self defense, Fritz. She was a half-succubus. She attacked him,” Isobel said. “Erin Karwell and her coworker, Thandy Cannon, were Gray planted at The Pit to watch the OPA.” A smile flashed over her lips. “You’re going to have to find another bar to hang out at after work.”

Fritz looked disappointed. “I’m going to miss dollar rib night.”

I was going to miss living a normal life where I thought I could trust people. But you know, priorities. “Where’s Joey? Agent Dawes?”

“He’ll be arrested by now. Another unit went to his house at the same time this one moved in on Costa.”

Guess I should have felt relieved about that, but I was too exhausted. “So…what now? What about Agent Takeuchi? She didn’t have anything to do with Erin or the Needles. Her only crime was being unlucky enough to work for the OPA.”

“Ah, yes. I’ll make some calls,” Fritz said.

He whipped out the Blackberry and walked off again.

Isobel reached out, grabbed my hand. “I’m sorry I lied to you, Cèsar.”

The memory of her kissing me in the RV flashed through my mind, shortly followed by the memory of Fritz kissing her. I got up and abandoned the wine bottle on the table between our chairs. “I’m gonna get some air.”

“Thank you for saving me. Again.”

The way she said that turned my guts to hamburger.

Not going to think about it.

I managed to tear myself away from Isobel. Walk through the swarm of OPA agents moving in and out of the building. Bump past a photographer.

Domingo was sitting outside The Pit on the tailgate of a black SUV. He was smoking again, and he hadn’t smoked since getting married. When he saw me, he offered the cigarette in my direction. “Better not,” I said. “I think I’m technically on the job right now.”

“Your loss.” He dragged deep. The end flared with light. As he blew smoke out of his nostrils, he nodded toward the window. Isobel was on the other side talking to Fritz. “That’s the woman, huh?”

I sighed. “Yeah. That’s the woman.”

“And that’s your boss, isn’t it?”

“Yup.”

“Tough cookies.”

My thoughts involved a lot more expletives than that, but he’d gotten the gist of it. I sat on the tailgate next to him. “Your spell sucked. Everyone woke up.”

“Your friends broke the circle.” He patted the SUV. Its tire straddled the salt line.

I wasn’t sure I’d call the Union “friends.” Even if Eduardo and Joey had been double agents, I wasn’t feeling real warm and tingly about that particular arm of the OPA at the moment. On the other hand, every scrap of brotherly rivalry I’d ever felt about Domingo was suddenly magically forgotten. “In case I forgot to tell you earlier—thanks for coming out to help me.”