Silver Bullet (2 page)

“They’re not venomous,” I said, bending down to scoop the harvestman up in my fingers.

Connie jerked back, shooting to her feet, sending her chair crashing to the ground.

“Oh
man
,” she said again, rubbing her hands over her face, raking furrows through her greasy hair.

I went to a cracked window. “There you go, buddy.” I ushered it off of my hand. It delicately stepped off of my fingers and vanished outside. Snow aside, it was a pretty warm night in Reno, Nevada—the harvestman would be fine.

When I turned back to Connie, she had plastered herself flat against the wall. She was shaking harder. Didn’t look like fear anymore. It looked like she might be having a seizure.

“It’s
her
,” she said again. “She saw me. She knows I’m talking. I’m dead.”

“Who is ‘she?’”

“She wants to find it—she—she knows that it’s there, down in my nest. She’s been asleep for so long and now she’s trying to wake up and she’ll come for me down there.” Tears rolled down her sweat-slicked cheeks. “I said too much. She knows that I said too much. She’ll kill me.”

My heart folded in on itself. “I can protect you. Let me help.”

There was something in Connie’s hand—something velvety black. For a moment I thought she’d snagged my wallet while I was distracted, but it was still on the table.

Whatever she was holding, it had shiny parts.

A knife.

“I need backup!” I shouted, drawing my gun, moving to take cover behind the stairs.

The informant moved too fast for me to stop her. But she didn’t attack me.

She dragged the blade across her throat.

It wasn’t sharp enough to cut with a single swipe. She hacked at her own neck, mangling the flesh. Black blood gushed over her hands. She cut herself open from ear to ear and exposed shining meat under the skin.

I forgot my gun and rushed to stabilize the wound.

“Connie—”

She sagged in my arms.

The back door to the restaurant exploded open. Agent Suzume Takeuchi ran in, gun drawn but aimed at the floor. “What happened?” she asked, scanning the surroundings.

Connie’s blood was stinging my skin. I dropped her and tried to wipe my hands clean on my jacket, but the blood started burning a hole through the breast. I took the whole thing off, swiped my hands dry, and dropped it.

“Jesus,” I said.

Suzy nudged Connie with the toe of her shoe. She didn’t move.

Our informant had killed herself.

MY NAME IS AGENT Cèsar Hawke. I work for the Office of Preternatural Affairs. You’ve never heard of my employer or me, but we keep the country safe from that which goes bump in the night.

Every story you’ve heard about the boogeyman is true. Witches? Oh yeah—I’m one of them. (I don’t ride a broomstick.) Werewolves? Yep. Demons and Hell? Unfortunately.

The existence of these creatures used to be accepted as fact, but our society has become skeptical. These very real dangers are considered myths by the general public.

That’s okay. It’s my agency’s duty to make sure that the average joe can live a happy mundane life, oblivious to the fact our entire world is teetering on the brink of the abyss.

My specialty used to be hunting down other witches, but I’ve been recruited to a special team that handles the worst of the worst. Trust me when I say that the worst is far worse than you can imagine. Fortunately, I’ve got great people at my back: Suzy Takeuchi, whose magical curses are only slightly less impressive than her verbal curses; Isobel Stonecrow, a necrocognitive that speaks with the dead; and Fritz Friederling, the brains and money behind it all.

We deal with curses, blood, and mayhem so that you don’t have to.

You can thank us later.

“I see that your meeting went well,” Isobel said as I dumped Connie’s body on top of the kitchen island.

I stepped back with a grimace. “Could have gone worse.”

We were in the penthouse at the top of the Dat-So-La-Lee Condominium Tower, a recent construction in downtown Reno that overlooked the Truckee River and surrounding casinos. The Office of Preternatural Affairs had obtained it for our team’s use while we were in town.

It was a secure location—a natural feature of being atop the tallest non-hotel building in the city. Plus, the lobby desk downstairs now was staffed by an admin assistant on loan from our Los Angeles office. Suzy had warded it with a dozen different spells. Fritz had stuck cameras in every corner, both inside and out. One of the other empty condos had been turned into a surveillance station so we could watch the whole damn city if we wanted to.

As far as temporary outposts went, it didn’t get more secure than this.

But the best part, if I was going to be honest with myself, was that it was swanky as
fuck
.

Think wood floors made from rare, endangered trees. Think glass block showers. Think platinum fixtures. Think windows that change tint throughout the day so we’d have the most comfortable light level at all times.

And then think about how much nicer our penthouse was than that.

Far cry from the one-bedroom closet I occupied in Los Angeles.

Isobel donned a pair of blue latex gloves before lifting the corner of the trash bag I’d used to wrap up the demon’s remains. Her eyebrows climbed high on her forehead. “Did Connie try to screw you to death, too?”

“Ha-fucking-ha,” I said. I knew Isobel was joking, but I didn’t find it very funny.

I wasn’t a violent guy. I couldn’t even make myself pretend to threaten people who deserved it, much less rip a woman’s throat open with some kind of dull blade. But after killing a succubus that had been trying to claim my head for a bounty, I was getting a reputation.

It sucked.

Fritz breezed through the kitchen with his BlackBerry glued to his ear. When he saw the new décor, he paused mid-step and lowered the phone. He sniffed distastefully at the sight of Connie’s body. “Do you have to do that in here?” That was the problem he had with the situation: the fact that we’d just dropped a fresh cadaver in the kitchen, not that there was a cadaver in the first place.

“I could use your bedroom,” Isobel offered brightly.

He sighed and returned his attention to the cell phone.

Our fledgling team had only been sharing the condo in downtown Reno for two days, but that was two days too many. Three OPA agents and one consultant crammed into a single penthouse—even one as nice as this one—was just asking for trouble. We were all getting on each other’s nerves.

Some of us more than others.

Suzy entered and announced her presence by setting her new Beretta on the counter. She’d bought it at a gun shop in Sparks to replace the Glock that had been seized as evidence by the OPA. And she threw a pointed look at Isobel when she set it down.

Isobel looked right back at her, sharing silent woman-glares.

The two of them had been arguing over bathroom space for twenty-four hours straight now. They weren’t outright yelling, or even being all that rude. But they were civil in the chilliest way possible. Standing in the same room as the women was kind of like unexpectedly finding myself in the Arctic Circle.

I was about ready to quit my job and go home to my trashy bachelor pad just to escape it.

“Gloves?” Suzy asked, searching our cluttered counter.

Isobel offered the box to her. “Here you go, Agent Takeuchi,” she said in a polite, controlled voice.

“Thank you, Miss Stonecrow,” Suzy said in a similarly too-nice tone, taking a pair of gloves of her own.

They both looked at me. The full force of the woman-glares made my dick try to invert. Was I supposed to be involved in the autopsy too? I’d watched Connie kill herself. I’d gotten a front row seat to the show. I was done with that demon for the rest of my life. “Thanks, but I’ll pass,” I said, stripping off my tie. It was smoldering from a smear of Connie’s blood, so I tossed it in the trash. “Maybe I’ll get started on the report.”

Suzy rolled her eyes. “Just put on the damn gloves, Hawke.”

I put on the damn gloves.

It took teamwork to peel away the trash bag without splattering blood on anything else. We stuffed it into a stainless steel bin with biohazard symbols on the lid.

“It’s caustic,” Suzy said thoughtfully, inspecting a piece of plastic that had been in contact with Connie’s blood. It was bubbled and shriveled, like it had been held too close to a lighter’s flame.

I shrugged. “She is—was—a demon. Caustic blood is normal for a demon.” I managed to say it with enough authority that Isobel nodded along with me, but I wasn’t actually sure that was true. I caught Suzy’s eye. “That
is
normal, right?”

“I have no clue. We need someone with a background in preternatural medicine for this.” She used a pair of steel tweezers to pull apart the flaps of Connie’s ragged throat. “I’m not sure how much information we can get out of the body otherwise. I can’t even begin to guess at the cause of death.”

“I’m thinking…fatal ventilation in the esophageal region,” I said, totally straight-faced.

Isobel snorted.

That sound was the straw that snapped Suzy’s tenuous equanimity.

She ripped her gloves off. Flung them in the trash. “I’ll get the report started.” She went into the bedroom and slammed the door.

Isobel wasn’t smiling anymore.

I stared at Suzy’s door, wishing I could see through to the other side and all the way into my partner’s brain. I’d been having a rough week, but it was nothing compared to hers. She had spent a day incarcerated in a Union detention center, which was about a day too long for anyone’s sanity.

The Union was the militaristic division of the Office of Preternatural Affairs. I wasn’t sure what she’d seen in their prison, but it had to be bad. She’d gone into the place spunky and crass and fun. She’d come out with a hair-trigger temper that had been fired twice over Isobel leaving puddles of water around the bathroom sink.

But who could blame her? After being released, Suzy hadn’t even been able to go home to feed her furry roommate, who was eloquently named Cat. We’d gone straight from picking her up at the detention center to our temporary outpost in Reno.

She needed a break. We all did.

I turned my glum gaze onto Connie. Unfortunately, none of us were getting a vacation.

“I thought it was funny,” Isobel said softly.

“Normally, she would have thought that was funny, too.” I kept my voice down so that Suzy wouldn’t be able to hear us through her door. “Cut her some slack.”

Isobel lifted her gloved hands in a defensive gesture. “I didn’t say anything about her.”

“I know. But she’s just—she’s not herself. Don’t judge her for this.”

“I’m not.”

“Okay,” I said. “Good.”

I distracted myself by grabbing a steel probe and using it to pry open Connie’s fingers. I hadn’t had time to examine the blade that she had used to kill herself, but I was very interested in checking out the murder weapon now.

Getting that close to her stiff, rubbery flesh made me cringe, but I guess I couldn’t complain. This was my job now. This was what the day-to-day was going to be like. Chatting up demons, watching them kill themselves, and then prying evidence out of their cold, dead hands.

I’d signed up for that. This was my choice.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss my paperwork shuffling.

“What do you have planned for tonight?” Isobel asked, leaning her elbows on the kitchen island.

I glanced up from Connie’s hand. “Huh?”

“You know. Once you’re off work.”

“I don’t think I get to be ‘off work’ while we’re here,” I said. “That’s the problem with a salaried job. All my time belongs to the OPA.”

“You can’t work twenty-four hours a day. At some point, this cadaver’s going to end up down a garbage chute. I think you’re due a little free time between body disposal and the next crisis.”

I wiggled the probe between Connie’s forefinger and thumb. “Guess I don’t have any plans. What about you? You’re not an OPA employee, are you?”

“No, I’m just here as a favor to Fritz. I can walk whenever I want.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and smiled up at me. “I was hoping you could teach me how to do magic. I obviously have some kind of magical talent, but no idea what to do with it outside the usual…you know. Ghost thing.”

“I’m not really the guy to ask,” I said. “Potions and stuff, yeah. But I’m no good at ritual.”

Isobel’s eyes went big and imploring. “So teach me to make potions.”

I did need to mix up a few new brews. Since I hadn’t been home in a while, I hadn’t had time to restock on strength and energy potions—everything an OPA agent needed to keep up with preternatural perps. I might as well allow Isobel to watch. “Yeah, sure. I’ll teach you everything I know. Which is about three different potions, but…”

Her grin brightened her entire face. “Great.”

I finally pried the blade out of Connie’s hand, only to realize it wasn’t a blade at all. The bottom half was leathery, brown, and covered in wiry hair. The shiny part was hooked and about as long as my hand. The point glistened with fluid.

Isobel pulled a face. “That looks kind of…”

“Organic?” I suggested.

“It makes me think of bugs.”

The whole thing was a foot long, from the bottom of its wrinkled pouch to the shining tip. “Big fucking bug.”

Fritz emerged from the suite’s office and tucked his cell phone in his pocket. A white apron was draped over his arm. “What have you found?”

“I’m not sure.” Isobel lifted the hooked blade with the tweezers. “What does this look like to you?”

He pulled the apron on over his head, tied it around back. Then he took the tweezers from her. “Hmm. Daimarachnid pincer, I think. Doesn’t that look like a daimarachnid pincer to you?”

I stared. “Oh, yeah. Right. Dime…arachnid… Whatever. Not sure how that didn’t occur to me.”

Fritz laughed. He’d never been much of a laughing guy, and I understood why every time he did. The sound was kind of dorky and nasal. Did not match his suave gentleman spy billionaire look at all.

“Sometimes I forget that you were only dealing with humans when I recruited you from the private sector, Cèsar.” He turned the pincer over and held it up to the light. “Both of you, lean close. See these markings?” He pointed at a slender line of symbols imprinted below the base of the claw. “Master demons brand their underlings like ranchers brand cattle. You can tell a lot about a demon from such marks: master affiliation, the level of Hell they originate from, whether or not they’re sentient…”