Hotter Than Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Mystery (Preternatural Affairs Book 3) (23 page)

Fritz flipped the ritual knife in his hand and attacked.

I’d never seen my boss fight before. He was pretty badass when it came to moving paperwork from one side of the desk to the other, sure, but fighting? I never would have imagined he was any good at it—when, in fact, he was goddamn amazing.

He moved so quickly that I couldn’t keep up with him. His foot lashed out, and then a fist. He kicked, punched, dodged, ducked, leapt up to kick again. He wasn’t James Bond. He was a blond Jet Li.

My muscles tensed and jerked with his as I hauled myself back onto the landing. We were still bound. My body thought it was his. Every blow, every wound—I felt it. Both the satisfaction of landing a good punch and the pain of failing to deflect one of Mary’s kicks.

The fallen angel was strong, but Fritz was fast. He pinned her to the wall face-first with a hand in the back of her head.

He brought the ritual knife hacking down on her right wing stump, severing it from her body.

Mary’s scream made my eardrums tremble. I clapped my hands over my ears, but I could still hear it through Fritz.

She elbowed him in the face. One of my teeth went loose. No—one of
his
teeth.

He ducked under her next strike. Fritz wrapped an arm around her, pinning the angel to his chest, and hacked again.

The other stump flopped to the ground.

Mary arched against him, her wail echoing all up and down the tower.

There was no expression on Fritz’s face as he shoved her to the ground, but our bond told the truth. His sadness was overwhelming.

He dropped down to straddle her, knees pinning her arms on either side of her. She thrashed weakly. Without the remainder of her wings, she was too weak to overcome Fritz’s kopis strength.

He kept his expression schooled as he offered the knife to me. “Do you want to do it?”

I think he meant that as a gesture of respect, offering to let me kill a fallen angel and all. It was probably the only time in my entire life I’d have the chance. Plus, the first kill of our new partnership. A victory.

Gazing down at Mary as she gasped and bled on the ground, I didn’t feel victorious. I felt sad, too.

“No thanks,” I said. “Just make it fast.”

Fritz drove the knife under her ribs.

WE FOUND ISOBEL UNCONSCIOUS in the kitchen.

I set Fritz down in one of the overstuffed chairs before going to her side. I’d shut down the bond as soon as Mary died, but while I was thrilled to get my brain back to myself, it meant that Fritz was weak again. I’d had to carry him all the way downstairs. He definitely couldn’t stand up on his own.

But I also didn’t have to worry about the content of my thoughts as I pulled Isobel into my lap and checked her pulse. It looked like she had fallen and hit her head. Blood trickled from her temple. But her pulse was fine, and her eyelids fluttered at my touch.

She smiled faintly when she saw me. I liked that smile a lot.

“Cèsar.” Her eyes went suddenly wide. She sat up. “Mary!”

“She’s dead,” I said, steadying her with a hand on her back.

“Fritz?”

I pointed to the chair. Fritz gave her a small nod. His bad foot was propped up on a table, still black, still swollen, not looking good at all.

“Thank God,” Isobel said.

Thinking of what had happened to Mary—how an angel could have become that twisted
thing
that we’d fought upstairs, and how it had apparently been God’s design—I couldn’t help but grimace.

“Yeah, sure. Thank God,” I said. “Whatever.”

Isobel looked confused by my reaction, but didn’t remark on it. “I might have something to help with your foot in the RV, Fritz.”

Together, we staggered back to the foyer to find the RV intact and idling. Yelena waved excitedly at us through the windshield.

I tried not to groan.

Hey, being stuck in an RV with Yelena was a thousand times better than dying a horrible, messy death at the hands of a fallen angel. I could deal with it.

We holed up in the RV to wait for sunrise, sheltered within the church’s wards and the glow of Yelena’s magic. After Isobel rubbed some kind of smelly herbal salve on Fritz’s foot and bandaged the cuts on his back, the women went to sleep on the mattress above the driver’s compartment.

I stayed awake to make sure we didn’t get attacked.

At least, that was what I told everyone I was doing. The truth was that I was much too wired to sleep. The binding had given me a dose of energy a thousand times more powerful than any potion I could have brewed. I wasn’t sure I was going to sleep for the rest of the week.

So the ladies slept in the bed, Fritz crashed on the couch, and I held vigil.

Keeping watch in Helltown overnight wasn’t as bad as I expected. The nightmares bouncing off of the church’s wards had been harrowing at first, but it started to get kind of funny after a couple hours. They were relentless.

If I’d stepped out there, they would have eaten me alive. But I was out of their reach. The knowledge was way too satisfying.

My burned hand stopped aching a few minutes after I rubbed Isobel’s salve on it. I entertained myself by massaging it into my various bruises and watching them fade. Whichever witch friend had made that for her was pretty good. Soon enough, I was strong again—ready to wrestle oxen, if not another fallen angel.

Time passed. Night faded into the navy glow of pre-dawn.

One by one, the demons evaporated. The shadows faded. A sliver of sunlight glowed on the roofs of the buildings across the street, highlighting human architecture tainted by decades of infernal influence. It was kind of pretty, in a weird way.

Guess Isobel had been right about one thing: Helltown’s really not that bad once you get used to it.

“Doing all right?”

I turned to see Fritz dragging himself toward me, hair mussed and foot wrapped in bandages. He stunk of herbal salve. “Yeah, I’m good,” I said. “You?”

“I can’t feel my foot anymore.”

“Was Isobel’s salve that good, or is it the super fast kopis healing?”

“It could be either.” His grim tone said that he thought that neither was the cause of the numbness.

He couldn’t feel his foot anymore because the nerves had gone dead.

We were going to have to get him to the hospital to find out if his foot would ever heal. That would be a problem for later, once the sun was all the way up and Helltown was safe again.

He sat next to me.

I thought about telling him I was sorry for what had happened to him, but that was stupid. It hadn’t been anyone’s fault but Mary’s. Apologies wouldn’t fix his foot, either.

“You know what sounds good?” I asked instead. “A greasy, nasty diner breakfast. Scrambled eggs cooked in bacon grease, toast slathered in butter, that cheap freezer sausage…”

Fritz contemplated this. “I could go for that.”

“Bet your personal chef would be horrified if you asked for it.”

“Then I suppose we’ll have to go to Denny’s,” he said.

I tried to imagine Fritz rolling up to Denny’s in his Bugatti Veyron. That got a good laugh out of me.

Laughter felt amazing.

A rustling at the front of the RV told me that the girls had woken up. I glanced back to see that they’d closed the curtains on the bed to give them privacy. They were probably changing out of their pajamas.

We had two naked women just a few feet away with nothing between us but flimsy, floral-patterned cloth.

Fritz caught my eye and grinned. I didn’t need to activate the bond to know he was thinking the same thing.

“You’re a pervert, Director Friederling,” I said. “Completely sick in the head.”

“You are too.”

“Well, we can be sick as a team.” I turned away from the curtains and lowered my voice. “How did you know all that angel stuff, anyway?”

“You mean about Shamdan?” He sighed. “It’s an old family story. We’ve known that Naamah was likely to come back for generations. It’s only surprising that it took this long.”

“Naamah? You mean Mary?”

Fritz nodded. “My forefathers passed along the story of Shamdan and Asmodeus knowing that one of us would have to take care of Naamah someday.”

“And you did,” I said.

“I did.” He tipped his face toward the rising sun, eyes closed, letting it warm his face through the window.

“Do I want to know why your family thinks they’re responsible for Naamah?”

“No,” Fritz said, “you don’t.”

At another time, I would have asked more questions. I sure had enough of them. But I’d just enjoyed an overnight sleepover in Helltown, gotten bound to a kopis, lost a lot of blood, and watched a confused old woman get her heart cut out by someone who looked like her husband.

If Fritz said that I didn’t want to know more about Naamah, I probably didn’t.

“Cool,” I said.

Isobel and Yelena appeared behind us. They were fully dressed without a single feather, bone, or bead in sight. The two of them actually resembled normal women.

“I don’t think I formally introduced you last night,” Isobel said, focusing on the man sitting beside me. “Fritz Friederling, meet my intern, Yelena Katzenberg.” She planted a hand in Yelena’s back and shoved her at Fritz. “Yelena, this is Fritz. He’s a kopis. A demon hunter.”

Fritz arched a skeptical eyebrow, but his words were smooth. “Among other things.” He took Yelena’s offered hand and kissed her knuckles. I tried not to gag. “A pleasure to meet you.”

She giggled. My gag reflex remained under control. My rolling eyes didn’t.

“He was injured killing a fallen angel tonight,” Isobel added helpfully.

Yelena just about swooned. “That’s incredible. You must be so strong to have survived with only a foot injury.”

“It’s very painful,” Fritz said in a dignified, self-sacrificing kind of way.

I gave Isobel a hard look.
Are you trying to set your ex-boyfriend up with your intern?
She only gave me an innocent smile in return.

“You two can get acquainted on the way to the hospital,” Isobel said.

Yelena giggled and crawled onto the bench beside him. “I’ll be happy to take care of you, Fritz.”

Guess there were some benefits to getting abducted by an angel after all.

After one short stay in the hospital and several long visits with physical therapists, Fritz was missing a foot.

Permanently.

“It’s not that bad,” I said. “The prosthesis makes you look like Robocop.”

Fritz scowled from the passenger’s seat of his Bugatti. I wasn’t sure if he was annoyed because the titanium-boned foot was uncomfortable or because, as his driver, I had refused to play jock jams on the way into the office.

Just because he was missing a limb didn’t mean I had to put up with his shitty music.

Especially since I’d become his temporary chauffeur. He had a real chauffeur on staff, of course. Probably a few of them. But I’d offered to take him back and forth to work for a while, and he’d agreed without asking why I was volunteering.

The fact is that I’m a lot better company than a hired driver. I’m definitely more fun. Handsomer, too.

Plus, he’d kind of lost his foot because I hadn’t saved him fast enough. Made me feel a little responsible.

“It’s only temporary,” Fritz said, hiking up the leg of his slacks so he could get a better look at his new fake ankle. It was some kind of black plastic with the metal joint partially exposed. Maybe not quite Robocop, but it really did look cooler than a real foot. “If you think this one is impressive, wait until you see what I’ve commissioned.”

I got out to open his car door, but Fritz got to it before I could. He emerged with a cane—titanium and black, to match his new foot—and stood straight-backed in the parking garage as though nothing on his body had changed.

“I’m going to ask you to stay with me this morning,” Fritz said, setting a brisk pace for the elevators. He was limping a little, but I was pretty sure he’d be faster than me once he got used to his bionic addition. “Just for an hour or so.”

I got into the elevator with him. “What, big baby doesn’t want to be all on his widdle wonesome? Need me to escort the baby-boo to his desky-wesky and—”

He interrupted me. “Shut your ugly face, Agent Hawke.” He was trying not to smile as he said it. “Lucrezia de Angelis is still in my office. She expects me to resign now that I’m disabled. I just thought you would enjoy her face when she sees that nothing has changed.”

I couldn’t help but grin. “I might not mind seeing that, yeah.”

“That’s what I thought.”

The elevator opened on a bright, sunny day. I escorted Fritz to the Magical Violations Department, but he didn’t even let me open the door for him. He got there first and stood back to let me in.

“Damn. You’re a feisty cripple, aren’t you?” I asked.

“I could fire you.”

“Yeah, but you’re still stuck with me for the rest of your life.”

“Or
your
life,” Fritz muttered.

He loved me. It wasn’t a serious threat.

Probably.

I breezed into the office. Now I wasn’t bothering to make sure that he could keep up because I knew he could. His cane rapped against the floor in a rapid cadence, one hit for every two of my steps. He was barely even leaning on it.

Cubeville looked more like a field of prairie dogs this morning. It was the director’s first day back at work—everyone had popped up over their half-walls to stare.

Nobody but me had seen the way he’d fought Mary, and I wasn’t sharing details, but I’d told a couple of the guys the bare basics: The fact that Fritz had been taken into Helltown at night, my role in releasing him, and that we’d taken care of the murderer together.

My coworkers didn’t know anything, but rumors had spread the way they always do. The last time I’d heard the story repeated back to me, I’d been using Force lightning and Fritz had beheaded the angel with a flaming sword.

Yeah, they all looked suitably impressed.

I spotted Suzy’s charcoal hair near the windows. She was the first to start cheering. And once she got it going, everyone else followed suit.

The applause and whoops were thunderous.

Fritz jerked his sunglasses off and gave a thin smile. “Thank you,” he said. It was so loud that I could barely hear him even though I was right by his side. “Thank you all very much.”