Witch Hunt (20 page)

“More,” I said. The word came out unbidden. My balls were getting tight, on the verge of erupting. My hands were empty—I’d dropped the Beretta, too.

This is thrall, you have to shake it, you have to get free…

Knuckles met the bridge of my nose. Felt something snap. Tasted blood.

It was good. So damn good.

“You ruined my life!” Gregor said. “You made me look impotent in front of the Needles when you took that bitch away. And I had to cut a fucking deal with the Union
to get out of the detention center
.
Do you know what that did to my pride?”

Why was he so angry with me? I just wanted to please him—whatever it would take for him to keep pleasing
me
.

“I thought I’d settle for your head,” he said, grabbing my shirt in both hands, jerking my face close to his. “But this is better than that. I’m
much
happier killing you myself.”

“More,” I whispered again.

“I’ll give you more, you motherfucker.”

Gregor threw me.

I was flying.

The room hurtled past me. My back hit something hard, something that didn’t feel like liquid sex. Heard glass shatter. I collapsed to the dirt and wine bottles rained around me.

The shelf hit me a second later.

That one hurt.

The pain was almost enough to snap me out of the incubus’s thrall. I remembered fighting him on the beach after saving Ofelia. I remembered slamming him into the rocks, cracking his head open, watching the blood gush over the sand.

Incubi were weak. Any injury could make them bleed to death.

Easy.

But I had to hurt him to exploit that—I had to
want
to hurt him.

Eduardo was shivering as he fought against Gregor’s thrall. Kopides were less susceptible to demon attack. It still must have hurt like hell. “If you kill Agent Hawke—if you don’t pay me that bounty—we’re going to have a major problem, Gregor.”

The incubus’s laugh was like a deep tiger growl. “I don’t think so, Costa. It sure doesn’t look like you’re the one killing him.” A boot slammed into my temple. My vision blurred. I bucked against the ground, pleasure hardening my abs.

“I’ll send you back to the detention center,” Eduardo said.

Gregor grinned. “You’ll have to tell them how I got out in the first place.”

He kicked me again and I groaned.

I was screwed. Isobel was screwed. She needed me, and here I was, about to shoot my load on the ground while an incubus fucking beat me to death.

Through the haze, I focused on Isobel.

She must have been hit by the incubus’s thrall too, even though Gregor was focusing most of his power on me. She was breathing hard, cheeks flushed, tongue darting out to wet her lips. But she’d broken free of the chair. Apparently, her embarrassing experience in Helltown had taught her how to momentarily shake off incubus thrall—and a moment was all she needed.

Isobel extended her hands over the dirt floor. Her eyes were rolled into the back of her skull. She trembled all over, from her bottom lip to the tips of her fingers.

Magic surged hard, like a fist that squeezed my lungs shut. I couldn’t sneeze. I couldn’t
breathe
.

Silvery mist rose from the ground around her. Ten different locations around the room—no, more than that. There were graves all over the place. Under the rubble of the wine rack. Under Isobel’s chair. Along the walls.

The Needles had been burying victims under The Pit.

And now Isobel was calling them.

Holy hell
.

Gregor stopped kicking me and focused on the silver figures that had just appeared around us. They were all bald and eyeless and glowing, and they surrounded Gregor and Eduardo.

“Get them,” Isobel said. The lips of every spirit she had raised moved with hers. She spoke in many voices, deep and tremulous and echoing.

The spirits rushed.

The incubus’s thrall couldn’t do anything to the dead. He roared as they fell on him, beating his fists at empty air, unable to touch them. The weight of his demon powers lifted from me fractionally, and I searched wildly for the guns I had dropped.

My Desert Eagle was only a few feet away.

I struggled onto my knees, shoving the toppled shelves off of me. I was glad it actually hurt. It helped clear my head, shoving all the scraps of Gregor’s thrall out of the corners of my skull.

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.”