Sinners & Sorcerers: Four Urban Fantasy Thrillers (7 page)

Pushing through the bushes, I beat away the snarls of metal and stumbled into the cemetery.

The second I freed my jacket, I realized that I should have taken at least a few seconds to prepare before going after Stonecrow.

Mostly because I was suddenly suffocating.

I’m not much into big showy rituals, but I know what it feels like when someone else is doing one. The air goes thick with magic and it’s like trying to breathe underwater. That was what happened to me when I crossed over the invisible line of wards underneath the trees rimming Shady Groves. My chest clenched up, throat closed, eyes watering.

I sneezed into the elbow of my sleeve. And then sneezed again, and again.

Shit
. If I’d been on another OPA training run, I would have gotten so many points off on covert ops. Needed to clear my head. And my nose.

Necromancer or not, Stonecrow had real power. But I left my gun in my holster as I crouch-walked through the bushes, trying to make as little noise as possible for a six-foot-tall ape like myself. I plastered my back to the edge of a mausoleum and blew a few more muffled sneezes into my sleeve.

When I finally got control of my breathing, I heard the drums.

The rhythm immediately made me think of tribal things. The jungles of Central America. Wildcats and parrots. Those big bass drums that you pound with mallets before battle and make your enemies shit themselves because it sounds so badass.

The drumming was punctuated by a dry jangling noise. Not metal, but maybe wood.

A thickly accented voice echoed over the graveyard.

“By the light of the coyote moon, I summon the spirits,” she said. “By the dirt of these hallowed graves, I summon the spirits.” More rattling, another beat on the drums.

That accent didn’t sound like anything I’d heard before. I could barely understand a damn thing she was saying. But between what I did understand and the overwhelming sting of her magic, I knew that I’d found the suspect.

I peered around the edge of the mausoleum. Further down the hill, I glimpsed faint, flickering candlelight reflecting off of smooth brown skin.
Bare
skin, to be exact.

A woman was standing in front of a grave with her arms raised. Bone bracelets encircled her wrists. That was the only thing she seemed to be wearing above the waist, aside from a feathered headdress that had probably required the death of an entire endangered species to produce. There was some serious meat on those half-naked hips. The swell of her ass was covered in a strip of coyote pelt.

Beyond her shoulder, I could make out a pair of terrified-looking faces. They were far beyond the light from her fire. The candles lit their eyes with bright pinpricks. It was enough to tell that they were both wearing suits, like they’d be off to office jobs once they were done with the graveyard girl.

So this would be Isobel Stonecrow and her latest clients.

She was still talking in that thick, obscure accent. “Gods of the sky and stars! Deliver to me Brad Stewart!”

“Brian,” said the woman in the suit skirt. “His name was Brian.”

A pause, and Stonecrow called, “
Brian
!”

I sneezed repeatedly into my sleeve, trying to smother my face with my suit so that nobody would hear. The magic was too much for me. I slid to the ground with my arms over my nose and mouth, sitting on muddy grass that was still wet from yesterday’s rain.

Fortunately, Stonecrow was drumming again, even louder than before. She beat that damn drum until it sounded like the skin might break.

Then, suddenly, she stopped.

“Cindy?” Her voice sounded different, higher-pitched and with an American accent. “What are you doing here, Cindy?” The magic was still thick, but it had stopped building in intensity. It felt like the whole world had stopped to listen to Stonecrow’s voice.

The other woman gave a cry. “Brian!”

Magic surged, hard and sudden.

I sneezed.

There was no drumming to cover my ass this time. There was a clattering of bones as Stonecrow whirled to stare at me, only halfway concealed by the corner of the mausoleum. The candlelight from the tapers lit up the side of her face, giving me a glimpse of a very beautiful woman. She had big lips. I’d always liked big lips.

Crimson striped her cheeks, nose, throat, breasts. Was that…blood?

She lifted the mallet for the drums in one hand like she was going to hurl it at me.

“Who’s there?”

So much for sneaking up on her. I stood and put a hand on my holster. “Isobel Stonecrow, you are under arrest for necromancy.”

Her clients didn’t need to hear anything else. They turned tail and fled down the hill toward their red Lexus. The woman was wearing three-inch heels, so it was a slow fleeing. At another time, it would have been funny to watch her stagger through the mud.

Stonecrow flung the mallet at me. I ducked. It twirled harmlessly over my shoulder.

In two strides, I had crossed the space between us and seized her wrist. Her headdress held back straight brown hair. She wore a necklace of bones around her neck, interspersed with white and black beads. And holy hell, that really was all she was wearing above the waist. Her nipples were encircled by blood, too.

If Pops ever caught one of my cousins in public like that, she’d have been sitting tender for a week. Me? I didn’t mind so much. But it’s not good to stare at the suspects.

“Let go!” she cried, trying to yank free of my grip. She had obviously never fought a guy twice her body mass before. She didn’t get anywhere with it.

“I’m Agent Cèsar Hawke with the Office of Preternatural Affairs, Magical Violations Department.” I automatically reached for the cuffs on my belt only to realize that I didn’t have them. I never went anywhere without my handcuffs. What had I done with them?

Right. They had taken a vacation on my headboard the night Erin died, so the cuffs were probably in an evidence locker right about now.

My eyes swept over the ritual scene. Her circle was small, and now that I had crossed her salt line, it wasn’t resonating magic. The candles had melted into place on top of Brian Stewart’s gravestone. Add the drum and incense and animal bones to the mix, and I was certain I could prove she had been doing magic in front of mundane humans, if nothing else. Definitely an arrest-worthy offense.

Too bad I wasn’t taking her back to the OPA offices.

“We’re going to have a talk,” I said. Maybe in one of the mausoleums.

She kicked at my knees with sandaled feet. I grunted and hauled her down the hill toward a slightly more hospitable-looking tomb.

“Let me go! This wasn’t supposed to happen tonight! He told me I could do another job!”

What the hell was she talking about? And more importantly… “Are these cat bones?” I interrupted, shaking her wrist.

She gave her bracelets a surprised look, as if seeing them for the first time. “Raccoon.”

Well, at least Cat was safe from her.

Eyes on the road watching for other OPA agents, I pushed her toward the tomb. She stopped dead when we came out from behind the trees.

“Where’s your SUV?” Stonecrow asked, glaring at the parking lot.

Shit. She had obviously seen us before. We drove big black SUVs, much like the Union, though ours had lights and plates like the FBI’s did. And the fact that I didn’t have one now was, apparently, a big fucking giveaway.

I really should have borrowed Suzy’s handcuffs.

“Traitor!” she hissed.

With surprising speed, Stonecrow wrenched free of my grip. The bone bracelet snapped, leaving me holding a fistful of raccoon ribs and what looked like a car key dangling among them. I wasn’t even sure how she’d escaped me. She must have been feigning weakness when I first grabbed her.

Stonecrow reached into her animal skins and pulled out a fistful of gray powder. My eyebrows lifted, and I couldn’t help but grin a little bit. She looked like she was naked under her butt-flap. Did I want to know where she had been storing that dirt? Probably not.

“Stand down or I’ll shoot,” I said.

I made it two steps down the hill before she flung the powder into my eyes.

It was like having a beehive tossed in my face. I crashed to my knees with a roar, clawing ineffectually at my eyes.
Fuck
, that burned. Fire swept up my jaw, cheeks, forehead. Blisters bubbled under my hands. They popped. Gushed down into my collar.

There was no surge of magic and not a single sound, but by the time my running eyes cleared, Isobel Stonecrow was gone.

I staggered into the public library as soon as the librarian unlocked the door. She stepped back, giving me a wide berth and a shocked look.

“Oh my,” she said, crossing herself as she scurried inside. I might not have been popular with the ladies, but I wasn’t “turn pale and run away” ugly. That was a bad sign. Real bad.

Slamming into the lobby bathroom, I flipped on the light switch. Considering how old and musty the building had looked from outside, the place sure got painfully bright, like jabbing huge fucking knives into my eye sockets. And, unfortunately, it let me see what Stonecrow had done to my face.

My square features were covered in boils. The left side was bad, but the right side was worse. My eyelids were swollen, lip sagging with the weight of pustules.

Fuck
. This was
not
one of my better weeks.

I splashed water on myself to get off the last of that nasty gray powder and tried to decide what, if anything, I could do about it. It was more uncomfortable than painful now. Little Tylenol and it probably wouldn’t ache.

I poked one of the boils on my chin. It broke and made an audible
splat
against the porcelain sink. Underneath, the skin looked raw and red.

Pops’s wise advice about popping zits echoed out of distant teenage memory.

You should pop every zit that you want to turn into a permanent scar,
he’d said. And he had punctuated that with,
Dumbass
.

He hadn’t intended that advice for magicked boils, but it probably applied.

Yeah, maybe I’ll just leave them alone. For now
.

On the bright side, Stonecrow had given me a great disguise. A disguise that made it feel like my entire face was peeling apart, with pus dripping down my neck. But I couldn’t manage to feel grateful for it. I swore right then and there that I was going to see that woman behind bars—even if it meant turning myself over to the OPA, too.

I headed out of the bathroom, keeping my head down and trying to look like any other homeless bum making his way for the computer desks. I parked my ass in the first empty desk chair I came across. The old woman next to me didn’t even look up when I sat down. But Gramps across the table cringed at the sight of me, grabbed his jacket, and left.

“Hey, ugly fuckers are people, too,” I muttered at his back. The corner of my mouth cracked.

I pulled Stonecrow’s case file out of my coat, opened a map site on the computer, and started correlating the coordinates of her previous sightings to the website. The locations of the last families she had scammed—the ones I’d read about earlier that night—got little flags first, smack dab on the big population centers in the state. If I’d been at work, that would have been enough for the computers to do a quick sweep and figure out the connection. But I wasn’t at work. I’d have to do all the thinking for myself.

As I added the rest of the sightings aggregated from the OPA’s network of security cameras, a pattern started to appear. I absently scratched my chin while I looked at them and felt something warm ooze down my jaw.
Okay, no scratching, either.

I focused on the Stonecrow sightings. And when I pulled out her raccoon bone bracelet for another look at the car key I’d grabbed, I realized it wasn’t a car key at all.

It was a key for an RV.

The old lady at the neighboring computer lumbered out of her chair and vanished. She left all of her crap on the desk, including an empty water bottle and a cell phone. It was scattered everywhere. Encroaching on my space. I didn’t care if she was going to look for another book or going to take a piss. No one was respectful of public space anymore.

I picked up the phone and dialed Suzy.

“Why the fuck are you calling me?” she said when I identified myself. “Tell me you’re out of town, Hawke.”

“Nice to talk to you, too. Listen, I need you to pull files for me.”

“What? Are you
working
right now?”

She tore me a new one for a minute, and except for a quick look around to make sure Grandma Space Hogger wasn’t on her way back, I kicked back and let Suzy’s vitriol wash over me. It was soothing, in its own way. Familiar. The dulcet background sounds I was used to at the office.

“Feel better?” I asked when she wound down.

“Hmph. That’s what you get for taking off without leaving a note, asshole.” I heard the clatter of computer keys on the other end of the line. “Okay, what files am I pulling?”

“Any RVs that have checked in at more than five of these California RV parks in the last three months.” I listed the locations off. Suzy typed furiously.