Hard Spell

Praise for
JUSTIN GUSTAINIS

"A cool mix of cop show and creature feature. Gustainis had me at 'meth-addicted goblins'."

MARCUS PELEGRIMAS, author of the
Skinners
series

"A magical mystery tour of a murder case rife with supernatural suspects. Sit down for an enchanted evening of otherworldly entertainment!"

LAURA RESNICK, author of 
Unsympathetic Magic
&
Vamparazzi

"The cops act like real cops, the vampires act like real vampires, and the monsters aren't messing about. The plot twists and turns like a twisty turny thing, and moves like a weasel on speed. The real things feel real, and the supernatural things feel like they might be. The prose is a joy to read, and the whole thing was more fun than is probably legal."

SIMON R GREEN, author of
A Walk on the Nightside

"Punchy dialogue, a fun alternate history, explosive action, and a hero whose monsters haunt him even beyond the job… Gustainis has given us a fantastic supernatural cop story that just dares you to put it down."

CHRIS MARIE GREEN, author of the 
Vampire Babylon
and
Bloodlands
books

"I enjoyed every page of Hard Spell. If Sam Spade and Jack Fleming were somehow melted together, you'd get Stan Markowski. I can't wait to see what Gustainis does next."

LI LITH SAINTCROW, author of
Night Shift
 and
Working for the Devil

"A winning mix of urban fantasy and hard-boiled detective fiction."

JENNIFER ESTEP, author of the
Elemental Assassin
series

Also by Justin Gustainis

Evil Ways

Black Magic Woman

The Hades Project

Sympathy for the Devil

JUSTIN GUSTAINIS

Hard Spell

AN OCCULT CRIMES UNIT INVESTIGATION

To Karen,

white witch and resurrectionist,

who brought me back to life.

"Science cannot deal with the supernatural."

–
Michael Clough

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but

against principalities, aainst powers, against the

rulers of the darkness of this world…"

–
Ephesians 6:12

"Death is when the monsters get you."

–
Stephen King

This is the city – Scranton, Pennsylvania.

  It used to be a coal town, back in the days when anthracite was king. That was a long time ago – the last of the mines played out in the 1950s. But people here are tough, and they learned to adapt. Today, Scranton's got a healthy economy based on light industry, tourism, and retail. They've cleaned out a lot of the culm banks left by the mines, too.

  It's a good place to live and raise a family – apart from vampires, werewolves, ghouls, wizards, and the occasional demon.

  Scranton's got a "live and let unlive" relationship with the supernatural, just like everyplace else. But when a vamp puts the bite on an unwilling victim, or some witch casts the wrong kind of spell, that's when they call me.

  My name's Markowski. I carry a badge.

  Also a crucifix, some wooden stakes, a big vial of holy water, and a 9 mm Beretta loaded with silver bullets.

  I was never a Boy Scout, but "Be Prepared" is still a good motto to live by. Especially if you plan to keep on living.

America's been coming to terms with what law enforcement calls the "supernatural element" for more than fifty years now. It hasn't always been a real smooth adjustment.

  It was World War II that did it. I sometimes wonder if FDR would have been in such a hurry to send the GIs off to fight if he knew what some of them were going to bring back home – and I'm not talking about the clap or war brides, either.

  But I guess he would've done it anyway, FDR. Somebody had to stop Hitler and those other bastards. But I bet the troops coming home would have got a much closer look, if anybody in authority suspected that some of them were… changed.

  The experts figure that there were always a few supernaturals (or "supes," as most of us call them) in America. All those legends had to come from
someplace
. But the creatures were usually real careful to keep their heads down.

  The supes in Europe mostly decided just to stay there, and leave the New World to the humans. Until pretty recently, getting to North America involved a long sea voyage. It would have been pretty hard for a supe to keep hidden for all that time, and getting found out probably meant a quick trip over the side. Unless he did a Dracula and killed everybody aboard. Vamps'll do that – they're vicious bastards, most of them. But that solution presented problems of its own – like who was going to run the boat come sunrise.

  Anyway, most supes figured America wasn't exactly their land of opportunity. The early colonies had been founded by the Puritans, a bunch of tightass religious fanatics who'd left England because they decided the place wasn't righteous enough for them. And what guys like Cotton Mather had in mind for supes became pretty clear during the Salem witch trials, which took place after the European ones had died out. So supes generally stayed away for a long time.

  Some of them probably got to North America in 1918, following what they used to call the Great War. But the U.S. was only in that one for the last eighten months or so, and we didn't send nearly as many guys over as we would next time out. Still, I bet if you took a close look at the more than half a million U.S. deaths attributed to the flu epidemic of 1918, you'd find quite a few that were supe-related.

  Then came World War II. Millions of Americans got put into uniform and sent over to Europe. There, some of them were bitten by vampires and lived to carry their curse back home. Others were victims of werewolf attacks. And a bunch more made the acquaintance of various witches, wizards, sorcerers, necromancers, and other practitioners of the black arts.

  A few years later, easy access to air travel made it possible for European supes to migrate westward without any problems. Quite a few of them did. There wasn't much left of Europe by then, anyway.

  The revival of interest in monster movies after the war didn't happen by chance. It reflected a country that was starting to get used to what was
really
going bump in the night. Movies like
I Married a Zombie
weren't always fiction, if you know what I mean.

The 1940s also brought McCarthyism. Tail Gunner Joe started out by going after domestic Communists, but the political witch hunt soon turned into a real one when he widened his net to ensnare members of the supernatural community (who the right-wingers referred to as "Supies"). I guess we've all seen the footage of those hearings, with McCarthy browbeating the witnesses: "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a coven?" It didn't come out until long afterward that Roy Cohn, the Committee's top inquisitor, was actually a closet werewolf.

  McCarthy wasn't necessarily wrong. Some supes really
are
dangerous, take it from me. He just didn't know when to stop. He started out trying to unmask vamps in the State Department, and more power to him (he was smart: subpoenaed everybody who worked the night shift). But then McCarthy's early success made him arrogant. He figured it was his duty to take down every supe in America, along with those humans who supported them (he called them "Supesymps," for Supe Sympathizers, except when they were known as Fellow Flyers). A lot of innocent weres, witches, and trolls were caught up in McCarthy's inquisition before the public finally had enough and stopped backing him.

• • • •

The civil rights movement didn't openly include many supes, at first. But then Martin Luther King, Jr, gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. He said that he looked forward to the day when "black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, naturals and supernaturals" would live together in harmony.

  There was a rumor going around that J. Edgar Hoover had a tape of King "entertaining" a vampire, but I don't believe that. No human as good as Dr King was would mess around with vamps. Probably. But nobody's ever explained why the bullet that killed him was made of solid silver.

  It was Lyndon Johnson who really sealed the deal on supe equality. Riding high on the wave of public sentiment that followed JFK's assassination, he pushed through Congress a whole bunch of civil rights bills. One of them gave supernaturals the same rights and responsibilities as all other citizens.

  It didn't exactly hurt his credibility when Johnson revealed that one of his daughters, Luci Bird, had willingly succumbed to a vampire and planned to marry him. That nighttime White House wedding was quite an event, I hear – even if some in the media did start referring to the bride as "Luci Bat." Far as I'm concerned, there are worse things she could have been called.

You can find supes everyplace now, but they're not evenly distributed. There's lots in the big cities, of course. A big population means more potential "blood donors" if you're a vamp, a bigger client base if you're a witch or wizard for hire, and more to eat if you're a ghoul. It's true that some, like the werewolves, used to settle in mostly rural areas – simpler to hide, I guess, and farm animals are easier prey than people. But even that's changed now.