Under a Spell uda-5 Read online

  I grinned despite the nap interruption. The Vampire Empowerment and Restoration Movement (or VERM, for short), was Vlad’s baby. Vlad, Nina’s 16-slash-113-year-old nephew, my boss, Kale’s paramour, and the roommate who would never leave, pushed the movement that sought to restore vampires back to their broody, Count Dracula countenance and insisted its adherents wear fashions that Nina couldn’t abide by. She was a member by virtue of being a vampire and being Vlad’s aunt, but she studiously avoided their meetings.

  “And I came in to tell you that Sampson wants to see you.”

  I straightened, my heart dropping into my stomach. Pete Sampson, resident werewolf and head of the Underworld Detection Agency, wanting to see me could only mean one of two things: I was fired, or yet another mysterious, gory, and seemingly supernatural murder had happened within San Francisco’s seven square miles.

  I would much prefer the former.

  I’d like to say Sampson called on me for those cases because I could sniff out bad guys like a mouse sniffs out cheese, but that wouldn’t be quite right. I find the bad guys all right, but usually just seconds before they try to bleed me dry, blow me up, or stake me through the heart. That last one is particularly bad since I am not a vampire. Or a werewolf. I’m just me, Sophie Lawson, sole breather in the Underworld Detection Agency, runner of the Fallen Angels Division, Sub-Par Napper.

  I headed down the hall toward Sampson’s office, holding my breath as I passed the break room where the VERM meeting was in full swing, then avoided the sweet, sparkly little pixie who made a cut-throat motion when I glanced up at her.

  Pixies can be total bitches.

  I went to make my usual shimmy around the hole in the floor where a senile wizard blew himself up—like everyone else, the UDA was low on funds so the hole was last on the fix-it list—but stopped dead, my mouth dropping open.

  “What’s this?”

  There was actually a piece of “caution” tape up, jerry-rigged to a couple of folding chairs to make a work zone. A guy in a hardhat was up to his knees in the hole, diligently sawing away at one jagged edge.

  He looked up and I could see from his gaunt, slightly green face and the hard cleft in his pointed chin that he was a goblin. From what I heard, they were brilliant at precision work.

  “We’re fixing the hole,” he told me, his gray-green eyes widening as he took me in. I flushed, sudden embarrassment burning the tops of my ears and, I was certain, turning my pale skin an unattractive lobster red.

  “So, it’s true.” The goblin pushed back his hardhat and scratched at the little tuft of hair on his head. “The San Francisco branch really does have a breather on staff.”

  The Underworld Detection Agency is like the clearinghouse for everything that goes bump in the night or bursts into flames during the day. We service everyone from Abatwas (teeny, tiny little buggers who could unhinge their jaw and swallow you whole) to zombies (who most often leave a hunk of their jaw while trying to eat a Twix in the lunchroom). What we don’t serve, however, are humans. As a matter of fact, the UDA—and all of its clients—are relatively unknown to the human world. I know what you’re thinking—how do people miss a three-foot troll walking down Market Street? The answer is a thin, mystical veil that prevents humans from registering what they see in terms of the para-not-normal. You see little person, I see troll. You see a homeless guy pushing a shopping cart full of cans, I see zombie pushing a shopping cart full of zombie body parts (seriously, they drop their stuff everywhere).

  So what makes me so different? I can see through the veil. And in case you’re thinking I’m some medium or Carol Ann or ghost whisperer, let me tell you that I am not. I’m a one-hundred-percent normal breather who is immune to magic: I can’t do it, it can’t be done to me.

  Okay, so maybe I’m only ninety-nine percent normal.

  “Ah, Sophie!” Sampson looked up when I walked into his office. He grinned widely, tugging at the collar of his button-down shirt. He’s a werewolf, but only after business hours. Right now he was regular old Sampson, close cropped, salt and pepper hair, sparkling eyes that crinkled at the sides when he smiled, pristine dark suit.

  I sat down with a nervous smile pasted on my face.

  “You okay?”

  I nodded, fairly certain that if I opened my mouth the words, “who’s dead now?” would come springing out.

  Sampson went immediately business-y. “So I was going over your third quarter performance review and I have to say—”

  I felt my spine go immediately rigid. Vlad was my boss at the office, but I screamed at him to pick up his socks at home. He may be one hundred and thirteen chronologically, but he would always be a sloppy, leaves crap all over the house, sixteen-year old boy in looks and at heart (if he had one). Weren’t teens revenge seekers?

  “Uh, sir,” I said, toeing a line in the carpet and working up a viable explanation.

  “—I have to say that I am really impressed with your progress. Not just in the community, but in the office, and personally as well.”

  I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding and every bone in my body seemed to turn to liquid. “Really?” I grinned.

  “Of course. You’ve worked on cases diligently and successfully, you’ve got glowing reviews from two of your clients which is especially good because—”

  “I know,” I wrinkled my nose. “Because most of our clients give me a wide berth, thinking that I bring death and destruction to creatures of the Underworld.”

  I had a very hard time convincing my previous clients that I didn’t bring death so much as it followed me around, like I had some sort of hell-fury GPS tracker shoved in my gut.

  “So, taking all that into account, I’d like to congratulate you on another successful year.”

  I gaped. “That’s it?” The words tumbled out of my mouth before my brain had a chance to examine them or reel them back in.

  Sampson’s eyebrows went up. “Uh . . .”

  “No, no!” I jumped up. “I didn’t mean that, Sampson, like, that’s it how about a raise. I meant, that’s it? You know, every other time you’ve called me in here someone was dead or I ended up back in high school.”

  Sampson shot me a relaxed smile. “That’s true. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off since I terrified you, and I’ll see what I can do about that raise?”

  I was stunned. “Really? Really, Sampson?”

  “Yeah, take a long weekend.”

  No sea of death, murder weapons, or crazed schoolgirls and a long weekend? My eyes went to the ceiling.

  “What are you doing?” Sampson wanted to know.

  “This can’t be right,” I told him. “I’m looking for the piano that’s going to fall on my head.”

  I grabbed my shoulder bag, said something that may have sounded like, “see you Monday, suckas!” and hopped into the elevator. As the Underworld Detection Agency was a cool thirty-six stories below the San Francisco Police department, I used the long ride up to mop my red hair from “business chic” into “reality TV marathon ponytail,” and shrugged out of my suit jacket. I was halfway to couch bound.

  When the elevator doors slid open at the police station vestibule, they perfectly framed Alex Grace.

  Alex Grace—fallen angel, delicious, earthbound detective—the man I had an on-again, off-again, more off than on or something in between relationship with over the last few (mortal) years. We had moved past that awkward, bumbling, he-caught-mein-my-panties stage of our relationship and into a more mature, open, adult one.

  But I tended to have a habit of crashing us back down to bumbling and awkward every spare chance I got.

  “Alex!” I said, trying to keep my cool as every synapse in my head shot urgent and improbable messages: kiss him! Tear his clothes off! Maniacally mash the CLOSE DOOR button and hide under your desk!

  Alex had his hands on his hips, his police badge winking on his belt, his leather holster nestled up against the firm plane of his are-you-kidding-me chest. Hi
s shoulders looked even broader, even more well muscled if that were even possible, making his square jaw look that much more chiseled. His lips—full, blush-pink lips that I had pressed mine against more than once—were set in a hard, thin line. His ice blue eyes were sharp.

  “We need to talk.”

  While normally those words would make me swoon and rethink today’s lingerie choices (white cotton panties dotted with pastel pink hearts, no-nonsense [and no cleavage] beige bra), the set of his jaw let me know that this wouldn’t be a tea-and-cookies kind of chat.

  My stomach flopped in on itself.

  Alex led me to his office, one hand clamped around my elbow as if I might dart or steal something at any moment. It was awkward and annoying, but I guess he had just cause: I may have occasionally pilfered a cup of coffee, a jelly donut, or a piece of pivotal evidence in an open investigation once or twice.

  I sat down in the hard plastic visitor’s chair and he sat behind his desk in his I’m-the-boss chair, arms crossed, eyes holding mine.

  “What do you know about Gerald D. Ford?”

  Heat pricked all over my body. I had just finished a case at a local high school, going under cover as a substitute teacher, but I “taught” English, not Social Studies.

  “Uh, he was our twenty-sixth president and, uh, something about his teeth?”

  Alex cocked a brow. “That’s Gerald R. Ford and he was the thirty-eighth president. Our Ford was a homeless vet who took up residence at the bottom of the Tenderloin.”

  My saliva soured. “Was?”

  Alex opened his ever-present manila file folder and handed me a photograph. “He was burned to a crisp two weeks ago Sunday.”

  I glanced down at the photo—a half-charred body sitting on the sidewalk, what remained of his torso propped up against a pink, stuccoed wall advertising Panadaria Chavez. Bile burned at the back of my throat. I slid the photo back to Alex.

  “That’s awful, but what does it have to do with me?”

  “He was ultimately identified by his dental records.” Alex passed me that sheet then, stamped with a military ID and government info. There was the standard image of disembodied teeth—top set and bottom—teeth randomly marked by ballpoint ink x’s for a missing molar and a handful of cavities. But the ballpoint pen was used for something else, too—Ford’s dentist had drawn two narrow images, one on each incisor. Rounded at the gum line, then each tapering to a fine point.

  “Vampire.”

  Alex nodded.

  I stood. “I’ll bring this down to Sampson. I can’t recall a Gerald Ford in any of our records.”

  Alex’s face remained unchanged. “That’s not why I asked you here, Lawson.”

  Fireworks shot through my body as thoughts pinged through my brain. Let’s get back together! Let’s make wild monkey love on this desk! Yes, my pre-pubescent twelve-year-old boy mind could go there sixty seconds after seeing a photo of a charred dead guy.

  I wasn’t so much sexually morbid as I was sexually frustrated.

  “When the paramedics initially got there, Gerry was still alive, still talking.”

  I stepped back, interested. “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Find her.’”

  I slipped back into the chair and leaned forward. “Find who? An estranged wife, a daughter?”

  Alex shook his head, blue eyes intent on me as he handed me a scrap of paper sealed in a clear-plastic evidence bag. I looked down at the paper; its edges were curled, licked by fire, but the words were clearly legible. A cold stripe of needling fear made its way down the back of my neck as the words swam before my eyes, then burned themselves into my brain: Sophie Lawson, Underworld Detection Agency, San Francisco, California.

  Find her.

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