Silver Bullet (3 page)

“Looks like someone decorated the crease on a saggy ball sack to me,” Isobel said.

Fritz lifted an eyebrow. “You would see that, wouldn’t you?” He set the pincer down. “I could tell you what these brands mean, but maybe we should use it as an educational opportunity. What do you think? I’ll requisition a copy of
Hume’s Almanac
. Let you two interpret them.” It was only then that Fritz seemed to realize that we were missing a person. “Where’s Agent Takeuchi?”

Isobel opened her mouth to respond. I spoke first.

“She’s getting a head start on the reports.”

“I admire her initiative.” Fritz dragged a barstool over to the table. “Are you ready to continue interviewing the informant now?”

I glanced down at Connie’s body. She seemed even greasier now that she was dead. Her skin was bloodless and sagging, like the bones inside were starting to melt away. “She doesn’t look to be in a chatty mood.”

“She will be in a moment,” Fritz said. He was looking at Isobel.

Oh
.
The necrocognitive. Right.

Being able to speak with the dead was such a rare talent that I kept forgetting Isobel had it. She seemed too sweet—and too damn normal—to have such a freaky ability. Of course, the first time I had met her, she had been half-naked, painted in animal blood, and stalking around a cemetery at night. But I didn’t hold that against her. We all had weird hobbies. Personally, I liked to watch anime in the original Japanese even though I couldn’t speak a single word of the language.

My hobby was slightly less useful than Isobel’s.

She rubbed her hands together nervously. “I’ve never tried to speak with a dead demon before. I’m not sure I can do it.”

“You spoke with a half-succubus,” I said.

“Half,” Isobel said. “That means half-human, too. I just tried to talk with her human side. But this thing doesn’t have one.”

“I believe you can do it,” Fritz said. “Give it an attempt.”

“Okay, but…no promises.”

Isobel extended her hands over Connie’s body. Her eyes unfocused. Her fingers stretched out as though feeling some invisible texture to the air.

The magic hit me hard, like being shoved in the chest by a linebacker. I actually took a step back and gasped. My lungs closed, my throat tightened, and my sinuses itched. I would have sneezed if I’d had any oxygen left in my body.

Fritz didn’t react at all. He watched with calm interest as I clutched at my throat.

“Connie,” Isobel said, her voice growing deeper and more resonant. “Come here, Connie.”

That was all it had taken her to raise a ghost before—calling their names, like they were on opposite sides of a room and she just needed to get their attention. But now her brow furrowed and she frowned.

“Connie?”

Her hands flexed. My head began to swim from the force of the magic.

“Isobel,” I croaked. “Can you turn it down?”

She didn’t seem to hear me. She shut her eyes. “Connie!”

Silvery mist lifted from the body.

I knew what came after this. The mist would turn into a human shape. That human would have no clothes or hair or eyes. And then Isobel would be able to speak with the voice of the dead. Creepy, but kind of getting to be normal at this point.

That wasn’t what happened.

The mist formed into eight legs and a low-slung body. The empty eyes were numerous, glistening bulbs. And below those dangled a pair of pincers like the one that Connie had used to kill herself.

It was a spider the size of a small car, and it was in the middle of our kitchen.

I gave a strangled shout and jumped back, tripping over one of the barstools. It crashed to the floor. I was about two seconds behind it.

Fritz raised a hand toward me. “Wait—be silent!”

But Isobel had been shocked by my yell and she lost her concentration. She stumbled away from the spider. When she saw what she had summoned, she screamed.

The spider evaporated, taking the crush of magical pressure along with it.

Suzy’s bedroom door flew open. Her gun was already drawn. “What’s going on out here?”

I gaped up at her. She was only five feet in her work shoes, so I’d never seen her taller than me before. “I have no idea.”

Realizing that nobody was about to die, Suzy holstered her gun. She offered me a hand. I took it and Suzy hauled me to my feet. “What the fucking
fuck
was that?” I asked, staring between Isobel and Fritz.

“That,” Fritz said, “was a daimarachnid.”

I filed that definition away for later reference.
“Daimarachnid” means huge fucking spider. Gotcha.

“Why did a daimarachnid come out of your dead informant?” Isobel asked. She was still clutching at the counter behind her, like she thought she might fall over without it.

“That was the ghost,” I said. It only occurred to me as I said it. “Connie was somehow a daimarachnid, wasn’t she?” The body didn’t look like a daimarachnid. It looked increasingly like an empty rubber suit. But like I said, demons have some crazy powers, and I don’t even know what half of them can do.

“Why don’t we find out?” Fritz pulled on a pair of gloves. “Would the three of you like to help me with the autopsy?”

My feeling of surprise was mirrored on Suzy’s face. She was the one who said, “
You’re
doing the autopsy?”

Fritz was the director of the Magical Violations Department, where I had been assigned before “volunteering” to join our new team. As far as upper management went, he was good at his job. He treated the men and women that worked for him well. He interfaced with the other departments spectacularly. But that was all managers were trained and expected to do—I’d never seen him do anything that was
actually
useful.

“Believe it or not, I had a life before I was recruited to the OPA as well,” Fritz said. “Drag the lamp over here. And get comfortable, because this is going to be very long and very interesting.”

“INTERESTING” TURNED OUT TO be the wrong word for a demon autopsy. I could think of a lot of words for it—“nasty” and “horrifying” being the first two that came to mind—but “interesting” was not one of them.

Fritz spent hours slicing and dicing Connie’s rubbery flesh. An hour in, Suzy made a bottle of bourbon appear out of thin air, then made several ounces disappear before another hour passed. She offered to share, but I wasn’t in a drinking mood. Actually, I was never in a drinking mood, but now even less than usual. I needed a clear head for this crap.

I migrated to the window to avoid having to watch what was happening in the kitchen. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much of a city to look at outside. All I could really see in our neighborhood were aging strip motels and pawnshops and souvenir shops that sold novelty t-shirts with filthy slogans on the chest.

Out the western windows, I could look beyond the city to the sun disappearing behind the snow-capped Sierras. The sky was pink and violet and gold. Much more scenic than anything in my part of Los Angeles.

Today, the sight of the sunset made me feel strangely, inexplicably grim.

“Do you like coffee?” Isobel asked, stepping up to my side. She offered a mug to me.

It was a better offer than the bourbon, but not by much. My stomach was knotted after watching Fritz work with the scalpel. “No, but thanks.”

“That bad, huh?” she asked.

I eyed the body on the table over Isobel’s shoulder. It turned out that Connie’s greasy skin was actually nothing more than a skin-suit that somehow concealed a lot of long, furry legs. Fritz had said something about dimensional pockets by way of explanation. I hadn’t listened all that closely.

I was too distracted by the way that the skin-suit’s gushing fluids mingled with the black blood and turned a strange brown color—not too unlike the coffee.

“Yeah,” I said. “That bad.”

Fritz finally stepped back, mopping the sweat from his forehead with a dishtowel. He was soaked in blood up to his elbows. “That pincer didn’t come from Connie’s daimarachnid form. Both of her pincers are intact, and it doesn’t match her species anyway.”

“So there are multiple types of daimarachnid running around.” My mind flashed through the possibilities. The harvestman demons, the black widow demons—oh shit, maybe tarantulas twice the size of Connie’s ghost.

I was going to go ahead and try to not think about that.

Suzy took another long drink as I sat next to her on the couch. “And the cause of death wasn’t esophageal ventilation, was it?” she asked, mimicking my tone.

“The poison definitely killed her,” Fritz said. “The informant had been prepared for suicide.”

His phone rang and the BlackBerry buzzed along the edge of the counter. Isobel reached for it, but Fritz lunged across the kitchen to catch it first. He clenched it in his fist and shot a warning look at Isobel. “Don’t touch my phone,” Fritz said. He pointed at Suzy and me in turn, too. “That goes for all of you.
Never
touch my phone, or there will be literal Hell to pay.”

Isobel rolled her eyes as she turned away.

Fritz answered the call on speakerphone. The voice that responded was pleasant and female. I wasn’t sure if OPA dispatch was staffed by actual people or if the response was computer-generated. It always sounded like the same woman on the other end, day or night.

“Director Friederling, your appointment has been arranged. The manager of Craven’s is expecting to meet your team outside his office at nine o’clock.”

I glanced at the clock. A lot of time had been consumed by Connie’s autopsy; it was already seven.

“Thank you, Nancy,” Fritz said.

“You’re welcome. Can I help you with anything else?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Have a good night, sir,” she said, and the call disconnected.

Fritz scrubbed his arms clean in the sink. “You two heard that, didn’t you?” he said to Suzy and me.

“We can’t meet the manager of a demon casino,” I said, kicking my feet up on the coffee table. “We don’t know enough about dealing with the infernal community. Hell, we don’t know
anything
about dealing with the infernal community. I don’t know if you’ve forgotten, but there are OPA regulations about level of training required for teams before going on active duty.”

“We’re not operating entirely under OPA regulations, but I do have a solution for your inadequate training.”

Fritz dried his hands, retreated into his bedroom, and returned with a box moments later. He placed it on the counter to remove the contents: four small pieces of black plastic the size of my thumb.

I took one and turned it over. It had a rubbery loop attached and a single button on the flat side. There was also an attachment that looked like an earplug.

“Bluetooth earpiece,” Fritz explained. “And here are the receivers. You’ll clip these to your belts so that the earpieces will work even if you’re somewhere without wireless reception. They connect directly to a team line and OPA dispatch.”

I’d seen folks wearing similar earpieces, but usually they were just douchebags talking too loudly on their cell phones at grocery stores. Now I got to be one of those douchebags. Professionally. “Thanks,” I said, placing it over my ear. It was surprisingly comfortable once I got it angled correctly, and the rubber insert canceled out most room noise on that side.

“The button on the side is for initiating and terminating calls.” Fritz handed a second earpiece to Suzy. “I’ll be capable of listening to your conversation with David Nicholas and send information to you as the meeting progresses.”

Isobel reached for the fourth earpiece, but Fritz tossed it back into the box before she could take it. Guess she wasn’t coming along.

“I’ve requisitioned secure smart phones with access to the OPA database for more convenient access to information, but those won’t arrive until tomorrow,” Fritz said. “You’ll have to settle for this tonight.”

“Tonight? As in right now?” I asked. The meeting was two hours away, and I’d promised Isobel that I would teach her to brew potions. I also really wanted to make myself a fresh pot of strength enhancers before I faced another demon.

“Yes, tonight, right now,” Fritz said. “Your meeting is at nine o’clock.”

“With all due respect, I think that going into a casino filled with demons after sundown is a terrible fucking idea.”

The corner of my boss’s mouth lifted in a smile. “Most demons won’t agree to meet us during the day.”

So much for getting the cauldron a-bubbling. Hopefully, I wouldn’t need any magically enhanced strength that night. Shouldn’t be too hard, right? Just had to avoid getting into a fight with David Nicholas, enigmatic demon manager of an evil casino.

Easy.

I tossed my latex gloves in the trash, grabbed my leather jacket out of the closet. I’d normally only wear suits on the job, but Connie had ruined the last one, so leather was all I had left.

“Rain check on potions class?” Isobel asked, following Suzy and me to the door.

“Rain check,” I agreed.

She smiled. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

I’D THOUGHT THAT LEAVING for our meeting almost two hours before we were scheduled to arrive would make us embarrassingly early. Turned out Fritz wasn’t being as pushy as I’d thought. Suzy and I had to walk laps around the block for over an hour before we found Craven’s Casino.

It wasn’t that it was particularly difficult to reach; the problem was that it was warded almost as much as the entrances to Helltown, and it resisted being seen. Suzy only discovered it when she realized that she couldn’t look at the space between two other buildings—an old hotel and a convenience store—and then she pointed it out to me.

“There,” she said.

I had to tilt my head to look at it from the corner of my eye. I glimpsed a building jammed between the others, one that was awkwardly tall and skinny. Its windows were boarded up. The sign was red neon—of course it was red neon—and it said “Crave’s.” The “n” had gotten smashed, leaving a gap in the word.

Once I managed to focus on it the first time, seeing the casino got easier. I rubbed my eyes and took a better look.

The streets downtown were still frozen and slushy from the last snowstorm, but the sidewalk in front of Craven’s was perfectly dry, as if warmed from underneath. The black paint on the exterior walls was peeling. The front door was guarded by a guy who had two giant tusks jutting out over his bottom jaw.