Otherworld Nights (36 page)

“Not so much insensitive as failing to consider the possibility that the caller wasn’t who he seemed to be,” Lucas said.

“Which in our line of work …” Paige began.

“…  is pretty much a given,” I finished. “Especially with an anonymous tipster. Therefore it is better to keep my mouth shut, because if I say summoners deserve to die horribly, they’ll think I actually mean it.”

“I doubt the caller believed you’d be so callous,” Lucas said. “You were following a tip with no expectation of payment. Risking your life to help a summoner before he got hurt. One would not honestly believe you cheered this man’s demise.”

“The logical argument,” Paige whispered to me.

“I still
said
it,” I countered. “Which means I still
sounded
like a callous bitch.”

“True,” Lucas said.

“And considering the caller was young, he might not realize I obviously didn’t mean it.”

“Also true.”

Paige whispered, “The limitations of the logical argument. Rational? Yes. Comforting? Not so much. It’s done. You won’t do it again. You can’t undo it. You can just make sure the problem isn’t compounded by the boy finding his friend’s body. It was an easy mistake to make, because none of us has a very high opinion of summoners. With good reason. The death of Denver Brown is a tragedy. He did, unfortunately, bring it on himself.”

“Just best to not tell his loved ones that,” I said.

She squeezed my arm. “Exactly.”

We turned the corner.

“Doing this in broad daylight is less than ideal,” Lucas said. “Fortunately, when we drove past the building, there was no sign of a police presence, meaning the scene has not yet been discovered, and likely won’t be until nightfall, when I presume it’s being used by squatters.”

“It is,” I said. “Looks like they got it half constructed and ran out of money.”

“More likely a legal battle.” He listed a few potential reasons. Not that it mattered. Lucas likes lists. He’s also a lawyer. We humor him on both fronts. “The point being, of course, that as crime-scene locations go, it’s not an overly worrisome one. Still, someone will need to stand watch. Paige? If you could do the honors, I would appreciate that. Now, the ideal spot to guard—”

“Do I get a say in the matter?” Paige asked. “Or am I being assigned a task?”

“I’m simply suggesting the best use of our resources—”

“No, you’re barreling on as fast as you can, in hopes I won’t notice that you failed to give me a say in the matter.” She turned to Adam. “How bad is it?”

“Uh …” He struggled for a poker face and fell back on ignorance. “How bad is what?”

“And my question is answered. Can I ask what the demon did to Denver Brown?”

“Rather you didn’t,” I murmured.

“Adam?”

“I, uh, wasn’t there.”

She gave him a look that said that was no excuse. “Cortez?”

Lucas paused. When they first met, she called him by his last name, partly to say she wasn’t forgetting who his family was and partly because she knew he didn’t like the reminder. Yes, it hadn’t been love at first sight. These days, it’s usually “Lucas,” but she’ll still pull out “Cortez,” either to tease him or to warn him. This wasn’t teasing.

Lucas cleared his throat. “While I believe science has disproven the notion of spontaneous human combustion—”

“Ah. Okay. Got it.” She looked at me. “Messy?”

I nodded.

“And you’d like me to stay outside?”

“Please.”

She looked at the other two, who seconded my nods. Then she sighed. “All right.”

We didn’t just waltz into the building where two corpses lay—figuratively speaking. A solid twenty minutes of scouting preceded our entrance, as Paige, Lucas, and I all cast sensing spells to detect the presence of life. There
was
life, of course. The vermin variety, judging by the strength of the resulting pings. We then snuck in the side door and set supernatural alarms at the various entrances. When we neared the scene, we secured it with trip-wire illusions, which would scare the shit out of anyone sneaking up on us. In other words, we took all precautions.

Paige retreated to her post on the roof, and we headed for the death room.

Adam and I had taken the most direct route out of the building after I’d expelled the demon. In other words, he hadn’t lied to Paige—he’d never seen the carnage. No reason for it, and the farther we’d stayed from a potential crime scene, the better.

Now, as I led them to the spot, they both stopped short and stared. I remembered earlier, running down this hall, hearing Denver Brown summoning the demon. I’d caught one glimpse of him. Just a sliver through the half-open door as I ran toward it and he staggered back, and then—boom.

One second I was looking at a guy, not enough to see more than that he seemed to have dark hair. Then he was gone. Burst like … well, at the time, I’d thought
like a human piñata
, but seeing the room again, I felt sicker about that than the actual gore within.

There wasn’t a big-enough piece of Denver Brown left even to say he’d been human. It looked as if someone grabbed buckets of blood and offal from a slaughterhouse and threw them on the walls.

But it
wasn’t
slaughterhouse slop. It had been a man whom someone had cared enough about to try to stop him from doing this. Who’d called us to stop him. I looked around that room, and even if I couldn’t see anything recognizably human, it had still been a person.

That’s why Paige wasn’t here. Not because she couldn’t handle gore, but because she’d walk in here and see a life lost, see a victim who died horribly, and she’d wake in the night seeing this room again, imagining what happened to Brown and feeling the horror of his death.

Lucas saw a victim, too. First and foremost. The tragic waste of a life. No nightmares for him, though. That wasn’t how he processed things. He saw tragedy, and he imagined solutions. Lucas would handle this with action, going after the black market
merchant, reducing the chance it would happen again, at least in our city. He’d mark Brown’s passing that way.

Adam’s tanned face was pale, brown eyes darker than usual. Seeing the horror of the death scene. Processing it a little slower, taking longer to make the jump to “this was a person.” But making it and dipping his chin, a moment to recognize a life lost before squeezing my hand and then unzipping his bag. That was how he dealt with it: get to work.

We didn’t sanitize the scene. That’s impossible these days, though according to most crime shows we were screwed the moment we stepped into that room, leaving behind some rare clothing fiber that could be traced back to our front door. Which is bullshit, of course. We took basic precautions—gloves, booties, burnable clothing—but we weren’t overly worried. Upstairs lay a corpse covered in Denver Brown’s blood. The street kid would be blamed for his murder.

Now, as I worked, I thought of that street kid. He would have been dead when Denver found him, probably OD’d, giving Denver a body for his summoning. Whatever had gone wrong in that kid’s life, someone still loved him and might spend the rest of his or her life wondering how he could have fallen so low as to murder a man. This is why, most times, I don’t mind whatever anti-empathy gene I inherited from my parents. It’s so easy to get crushed by those thoughts. When you lead the kind of lives we do, it helps if the mental leap from “corpse” to “victim with family and friends” is a tough one.

We removed the evidence of Brown’s death—teeth and bone and tissue. There wasn’t as much as there should be. While low-level demons aren’t overly powerful once they’re in a host, there’s a moment during transition when they can use their host as a conduit. That’s what the demon had done, decorating a room with its summoner.

The demonic force that exploded him seemed to have incinerated or otherwise consumed part of him, too. We picked up what remained, and we left the room spattered with blood. Any attempt
to clean it would be useless—the blood would still be visible under ultraviolet.

As we were ready to go, Lucas’s cell buzzed with a text.

“Paige spotted someone,” he said. “A young man is circling the building. He’s decently dressed.”

In other words, not another street kid looking for a place to hole up. My caller from earlier, I presumed. He had indeed managed to trace Denver’s phone here.

“Should we head him off at the pass?” I said. “Or slip out and let him see …” I looked at the red-sprayed walls. Under other circumstances, I’d have voted for slipping out. But after what happened on the phone, I couldn’t even finish that sentence.

“I’ll handle this,” Adam said.

I shook my head. “You can come, but I’ll talk to him. My mess; my cleanup.”

Lucas hefted the bag. “Paige and I will cover disposal. You deal with the boy.”

We followed Paige’s directions to the north side of the building. We’d made it to the first floor when she called back.

“Possible trouble,” she said. “There’s a car.”

“Yep,” I said. “Big city, lots of them.”

She ignored that. “A dark sedan stopped a block away. It seems to be tailing the boy. Now it’s turning the corner into a laneway. And … the car door is opening. Driver getting out. Passenger, too.”

“Dark suits and sunglasses?” I said. “Little metal wands that made you forget what you’ve just seen.”

“Try Portland’s finest.”

“Shit.”

“That’s worse?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Cops are real. And you haven’t finished making us handy memory-wipe sticks for them yet.”

She snorted. “I’ll get on that. In the meantime …” A few murmured words as Lucas must have reached her. “We’ll take the police. You focus on the target.”

She signed off, and I told Adam what she’d said.

“Cops? Shit.”

“My words exactly,” I said. “Personally, I’d rather face demons. I can dispel
them
.”

We continued toward the side exit. At least the trip-wire illusion hadn’t gone off yet. We’d know if it did. The screaming always gave it away.

I calculated our speed on the way to the door and compared it with our target’s estimated arrival trajectory. I may have stopped taking math the moment they let me drop it, but summer vacations with a werewolf Pack gave me top-notch hunting skills. So when I cracked open the door, I should have seen our target five to ten feet away, depending on how much he’d slowed once he reached that laneway. Instead, I saw an empty passage.

I swore and backed up. Paige said he’d been heading into the service lane. Even breaking into a run, he wouldn’t have made it through the door that fast. Nor could he have run to the other end of the lane by now.

“Changed his mind?” Adam said.

“Must have.”

I was halfway down the lane when my phone buzzed. Paige.
Pull back. Something’s not right
.

A squeak sounded behind me. Adam wheeled first. A man stepped into the lane. Shades and a suit.
Not
a cop. I hit him with a knockback before he could show me what he really was.

He staggered back. Another man flew around the corner, his hands out to cast a spell. My energy bolt was faster. So was Adam, barreling toward him. He engages; I cover. It’s not my natural choice, but anyone who’s played an RPG knows that rear line is where a good spell-caster belongs.

Another energy bolt, this one for the first guy, now charging Adam. Then something flickered right beside Adam. I caught a split-second glimpse of a figure—smaller, male, brown hair. I shouted, “Adam!” and he disappeared.
Adam
disappeared. One second he was there, the other figure flickering beside him like a hologram. Then they both vanished.

“Adam!”

The sorcerer recovered from my energy bolt and threw one of his own. I dodged it. Fingers clamped on my shoulder. I spun, spell on my lips, but there wasn’t time to cast before the lane disappeared and I landed ass-first on …

Linoleum?

I blinked and looked around. I was sitting on the floor of a darkened office. Fingers gripped my arm again, and I yanked free a half second before I recognized the touch.

“Adam?”

“Shhh,” he whispered against my ear. “Someone’s here.”

We both scanned the room. Definitely an office. Unused for a long time, given the stink of dust and the tattered motivational posters. Even before the dust, it would have required some serious motivation to work here. I joke about my office at the agency. It’s a closet. No, really—it’s our supply closet. Once I graduated from receptionist to investigator, Paige rearranged the supplies to give me a place to work in private. I use it for storage. My real “office” is Adam’s, chair pulled up on the other side of his desk. We say it’s for convenience, but the truth is we just like it that way. Also, my office is a closet.

This one might not have been an actual closet, but I’m guessing that’s what the builders intended. Four desks had been crammed into an area less than six feet square. A dust-crusted phone on each said “telemarketing” to me. So did the fact that two of the phones had been smashed to bits of plastic and wire.

There was clearly no one else in the room. Adam and I barely fit inside without standing on a desk.

“Where—?” I whispered. My phone vibrated before I could finish.

I flicked it on, ready to send a quick
Not cops!
message to Paige and Lucas. Paige had already done so, her text managing it in a single and more useful word:
Cabal
.

I resisted the urge to send back,
Which one?
Obviously not the Cortezes. There were three others. Well, four actually. The Nast Cabal had split in two. My brother Sean runs one half; my uncle the other. If it was my brother’s side, they’d never have jumped us. My uncle’s? We’d be lucky to have survived. Family feuds. Always interesting. Rarely lethal. Unless you’re the Hatfields and McCoys. Or the Nast Cabal.

There was no sense asking Paige which Cabal it was. If she knew, she’d have said.

I popped back a
Yep
, meaning
Already know; already dealing; still alive
. Adam touched my arm, getting my attention. I followed his gaze to the door, but I couldn’t hear anything. He gestured. Right, spells. My
job
. I cast a sensing one and, sure enough, it brought back the blip of someone right on the other side of—