House of Ash & Brimstone Read online

  “Gisele? You do have it?”

  She ground her teeth, anger heating her as she remembered why she’d called.

  “Mhmm, but that’s not all. Apparently, I’ve got a new contract to go with it.”

  Silence.

  Then a groan filtered over the line before he preempted her. “Don’t be mad.”

  “Mad? I’m going to murder you. What the hell, Haywood? You were supposed to deliver the curio.”

  “I was supposed to deliver you. With this contract, I have.”

  Gisele laughed, a close-lipped m-hm that only held a tinge of hysteria. “When I find you, you’re going to wish you never crawled out of your hellhole to approach me.”

  A rushed exhale. “Hate to break it to you, but I already do.” A pause preceding the creak of…bedsprings? “Listen, it’s not like I did this for kicks. Not everyone has the freedoms you do, Gisele. You want to punish me? Come and meet me. Same place as before. But not tonight, right now. We’ll work this out. We’ll bang out an, uhm, rapport.”

  Gisele conjured an image of the fence in her mind—the memory hazy but matching the sultry demon’s bedroom voice. A crisp business suit. Summery blond hair. Tanned skin and an athletic build, like he was some late twenties, high-powered lawyer who played rugby every weekend.

  Like he was some kind of sex god.

  Not Gisele’s cup of tea. Too blond, too bronzed. Too…smiley. Not at all like a certain other demon who reveled in getting under her skin.

  “Giseraphel, come to see me. I’ll smooth this out.”

  The way the fence said her name was strange, his accent twisting the syllables.

  Gisele thought she should be mad at him, but… What had she been so furious about, again? It seemed so fuzzy now, trivial even as a pleasurable warmth suffused her chest.

  She squeezed her legs together in the rickety desk chair, surprised by the tightness there.

  “I guess I could—”

  A feminine voice broke through the background on Marcel’s end of the line, begging him not to stop. A second, huskier voice joined in agreement with a “The bed will get cold.”

  “Oh, for the love of Satan!” Had she blurted that aloud? “You’re not playing sports.” That last she definitely had.

  “No, you caught me on a job,” Marcel said jadedly. As if that explained everything. Or anything at all. “Listen, please. Come meet me. Right now. You want to see me. You’re upset, but you know I’ll make you feel better. Trust me, Giseraphel.”

  Maybe.

  His voice was doing funny things to her brain. Making her think that perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to meet in person, if only so she could snatch a greedy glimpse of his face. His tight body.

  The thought was so out of place, it stopped Gisele cold. She swallowed, realizing she’d gone hot all over but not understanding why. Marcel Haywood had already bamboozled her once in person. Somehow. He’d gotten her to sign a freaking deal with a Devil. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t be rash. You need me. I can take you to Felicitisia.”

  He had a point. A bad one. “I’ll manage.”

  She still had time to figure something out.

  “Don’t call me,” she ground out. “If I need you. I’ll reach out. And if you come slinking around here, I won’t be held responsible when my minotaur rips your limbs off, one by one.”

  She hung up, rubbed her fingers over her eyebrows.

  Great.

  Any idiot knew not to forge a contract with a demon, but considering she was half demon herself and dealt with legal proceedings on a daily basis, she’d assumed that line of caution didn’t apply to her.

  Clearly, she’d been dead wrong.

  She’d thought she’d agreed to a job for two payments of 50k. Instead she was sitting on a full fifteen million up front. She must have gotten herself involved in some sort of organized crime family; she had no other way to explain it. She’d just gone from pauper to princess, assuming she could figure out how to keep her head long enough to cash a check. Or rather, to transfer the funds into an elite (and painfully pricy) ‘magic tamper-proof’ secure money market account to ensure whoever granted her the funds couldn’t change their mind to take them away.

  Say that five times fast.

  “What are you, like, my long-lost fairy godmother?” she growled at the woman’s name on the contract, fearing that the reality of the situation was going to be far worse.

  Oh, Warrick was going to be so pissed. Shade’s discarded handwritten note—Don’t do anything stupid—was starting to feel like a chiding.

  “It should have said, ‘Don’t do anything else stupid,’” she sighed.

  It was another four hours before Warrick and Susanna came in to open up shop. She and Shade weren’t required to be in until closer to nine a.m., but this morning Shade was right on Susanna’s tail when she unlocked the front door.

  He didn’t have a key yet, but that hadn’t stopped him from dropping by after-hours the night before to leave Gisele a message she couldn’t easily ignore. Unless he’d done it between ditching her at the crime scene and breaking into her apartment, the thought of which bristled her even more.

  “Morning,” she shot at him as he passed her desk for the break room. The glare she pinned him with could wither daffodils.

  He glanced over at the sound of her voice. His eyes were gray as a stormy midday sky, and she thought there must be something he wanted to say. But instead he looked away and continued walking, ignoring her.

  She felt her pulse fall flat. She smoothed her hair and rearranged the pens on her desk.

  Damn him for existing.

  So he was here—two hours early—on damage control, but that didn’t entail making nice with her. Just peachy. Well, she didn’t want to make nice with him either. She wanted to make sure he never worked in her godforsaken town again. She wanted to grind his aspirations to dust and send him packing back to the Hellmouth he’d wandered out from.

  A loud racket from the backroom let her know Shade had stumbled upon Beast. She smiled into her coffee mug, half expecting the ruckus of a fight, but instead she was met with an eerie stretch of quiet.

  Unease stiffened her shoulders. If those two were talking things out, her life was about to get a lot more complicated than she cared to deal with, real quick. She’d look forward to the two siding against her in their next argument about as much as she’d enjoy a knife in the back.

  “You’re in early, child,” Susanna greeted Gisele. Her voice was raspy, thickened and veiled by twenty years of chain smoking. She was wrinkly as a turkey, had big, yellowed teeth, and was always wearing tracksuits, but Gisele loved her.

  “Working a tough one this time,” Gisele admitted.

  Susanna shook her head and tsked as she lit up a long Newport. “Don’t run yourself into the ground, Gigi-baby.”

  Susanna Shaw was fully human, and thanks to the hellacious onslaught of tanning beds, booze, and other vices she’d put her body through over the decades, she looked a good twelve years older than she should have. She was their notary, receptionist, bookkeeper, and legal aid. She did a hell of a lot to keep the lights on in the place, but she wasn’t a bounty hunter, and for good reason.

  “Thanks,” Gisele answered, and meant it. “But I’ve got a handle on it.”

  The lie slipped out so easily. She’d said it a million times before. But this time, things were nowhere near okay. She’d have to be deluded not to realize her life was careening out of control.

  “You know, when she says that, she’s having trouble,” Susanna commented, sliding Warrick a look from across the room.

  “I know this. You think I don’t know this?” He shook his head, orange-gold eyes watching his ward, wary.

  Warrick was a grimgolem born and raised in Noir. He hadn’t lucked into a good family name or much of a future prospect, so when he was barely 300, he’d popped through the Hellmouth in Maine and made his way south ’til he settled in Baltimore. Or
that was the story he usually told. Sometimes he liked to tease her by saying he was actually just an unlucky son-of-a-bitch who’d been cursed in a deal with a Devil gone awry.

  She didn’t know much about grimgolems, a larger and rock-skinned breed of imp, but she assumed it was more likely that his family had just been broke.

  The old grimgolem wasn’t any more capable of shape-shifting than she was, but he did try. Despite his dark gray, pebbly skin, he managed to look like a mid-fifties Sylvester Stallone or a body builder that had gone pudgy around the middle. His hair was slicked, black, and he had a crooked nose that seemed to fit with his amber eyes. His muscles were molded concrete. He could bench-press cars.

  When his true nature revealed itself, the only real difference was that he shrank two feet and sprouted a tail the size of a fat snake. Oh, and sometimes when he got really mad, darkness would waft from his mouth and nostrils like cigar smoke.

  “Three days, Gigi. Time is money.” The grimgolem’s words came out in a chastising singsong. When he added, “Tick tock, child,” she knew she was toast.

  Warrick only singsonged when he was Category 3 or more irked with her.

  Great.

  If she didn’t catch Samuel soon, Warrick was going to take the losses out of her paycheck. Not that her bank account needed the money anymore, a disconcerting thought in its own right.

  Of course, he didn’t know the hell that this particular run had put her through. The grimgolem could be a real brute, but he had a soft spot for his so-called ‘child,’ the girl he’d taken in off the streets. The one he’d brushed off and said, “Get your gob-blasted shit together,” to when she was only a skinny, lice-infested, fourteen-year-old shoplifter.

  Warrick had been more of a caregiver to her than any of the Sisters at Our Lady of Sorrows. He’d tried to take her back, at first. Then they’d explained to him how it was the sullied state of Gisele’s soul that had led her mother to abandon her.

  He’d ripped a hymnal in half right in front of Father Patrick.

  After, he’d written up a ten-year contract—said once you run the first time, you’re twice as likely to do it again. More than a job offer, it’d been an offer of commitment, and she’d been happy for it at the time.

  Now he waggled a finger at her. “You know I don’t like to hurt your paycheck, baby. Maybe Shade should take this case, since you didn’t catch the arsonist yesterday.”

  She wanted to tell Warrick that their target had been dead yesterday, but there seemed little point in arguing. She didn’t understand it herself.

  “Can it. That porker burned my apartment down this morning,” she said instead. “No one wants to roast his ass more than me.”

  “He what?” two masculine voices exclaimed simultaneously, followed by the sharp clatter of a dropped coffee mug.

  Shade stared down at his shattered mug and the steaming, dark coffee running across the white linoleum tile floor. When he looked back to her, his face was a mask of anger.

  “If you’re playing me—” he growled.

  Warrick grabbed her hard around the forearm, and she winced. “Say it again.”

  “I saw him killed yesterday. But this morning he was in my apartment. He lit the damn place up like a firecracker.” Gisele gritted her words against the bruising pressure of his vise-strong grip. “Look, I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I saw him. If it wasn’t him, then it was someone who wanted me to believe it was.”

  Warrick released her, much to her relief. He was livid, and might damn well punch a hole through the wall, but Gisele had known him long enough to realize that mostly meant he was scared. When things were out of his control, when people he cared about got hurt, he often lashed out in response.

  And heaven help anyone caught in his path.

  “Susanna!” he barked. “Ring the chief. I need to rip that rat bastard a new one. He puts this in the slush, and I swear to Satan, I’ll shove him through the Seventh Gate myself.”

  “Oh, honey,” Susanna replied, beige phone receiver pressed to her ear and a cigarette balanced between her hot pink lips. “Already on hold.”

  Warrick pointed a pebbly finger at Gisele in a silent scolding that pinned her to her chair as he stalked over to Susanna’s desk to take the phone call.

  She was already regretting having said anything about it at all.

  Shade offered little reprieve, his face a dark storm, looking like he’d just swallowed glass as he hunched over the shards of his broken mug and mopped at the spill with a fistful of paper towels. He closed the distance to her desk and tossed the soaking wad of towels into the wastebasket at her feet. Then he leaned in, speaking low so they wouldn’t be overheard. This close, she could see the pulse beating in his neck.

  This close, she could have traced the fading bruise along his jaw.

  “This is why I told you to get rid of that thing.”

  He healed faster than a human, naturally, but he didn’t heal half as well as she did. Contusions didn’t last the hour when it came to her. She’d been damned near decapitated at least once in the past two years and it hadn’t even left a mark.

  “Yeah, well, it’s not so simple anymore.”

  Shade responded with a look that questioned, What did you do? “Don’t drag them into this. You’ll regret it if they get hurt.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  He threw his hands up, exasperated. “It’s a statement.”

  She still didn’t trust him, but he was right. The less they knew, the better.

  She’d gotten herself into some real shit. The cops would want a detailed statement regarding the condition of her apartment. She’d have to explain how a dead man had broken in during the middle of the night and burned it down. And after that, she had a non-negotiable appointment to keep in Hell.

  She was feeling like she could use some help right about now. And call her crazy, but maybe Shade wanted to give it to her. What do we do now? It was right on the tip of her tongue. But as tempting as it was to rely on someone else’s strength for a while, she didn’t think it should be his.

  His hand, with its scabbed-over knuckles, the one he’d used to attack Beast in her apartment, had inched closer to hers on the flat of the desk. He was staring at the space between their fingers, so close to touching, and somehow she just knew he was about to suggest it—something like ‘we can handle this’—the idea of him and her as a thing, as partners or even friends, facing her problems together.

  But how could she accept a partner she couldn’t trust?

  “How did you know I had it?” she asked, voicing a niggling in the back of her mind that had been waiting to surface all morning. Before he could answer, she added, “Why did you leave me with the corpse?”

  Shade was silent for a moment, jaw clenched against whatever false promises fought to slip past his lips. His brows drew together and the muscles of his throat worked as he swallowed hard, fighting a frustration she didn’t understand. All he had to do was answer. Instead he closed himself to her, his expression hardening. He’d shut himself off, and just like that, she was staring at the face of the stranger she knew so well.

  “Don’t ask like you don’t know.” He pulled away, leaning back to look down on her.

  She was hit with the full force of his arrogant stare, and it was breathtakingly hurtful.

  “I’m not a good guy,” he said, and then he walked away.

  He might as well have scrawled Stay away from me on that note in her desk.

  Message received.

  “They want you down at the station, kiddo. Best get a hurry on.” Warrick slammed the phone into the cradle damned near hard enough to crack the plastic, but the show of force was from triumph rather than anger. He was back to his usual slow-simmering self. “Me’n Susanna, we’ll stop by the apartment, start the paperwork for the insurance claims.”

  He knew she wouldn’t want to see it—the state of her stuff. But she was already well aware that it was gone, obliterated.


  “I’ll head out as soon as you leave,” she agreed, mind already racing in a thousand directions. “But I need to stop at the coroner’s office first.”

  The grimgolem rumbled in thought, the sound low and deep in his chest and utterly inhuman. It was the soft sound of a big cat’s growl. He was worried. “Shade. Go with our Gigi. I don’t want this child alone today, you hear?”

  “I’m not a child,” she protested, but it was a pointless and tired argument. To a grimgolem of Warrick’s experience, her paltry twenty-two years on Earth was the equivalent of a mewling newborn. “I can take care of myself,” she grumbled, though it was a halfhearted protest. She already knew neither Warrick nor Susanna would hear of it.

  “You most certainly may not!” As if on cue, the older woman ashed her cigarette into an old paper coffee cup. “I won’t have none of that, I won’t. What you think we’re going to do when you come back deader’n a doornail? Hire a new office girl?”

  Gisele rubbed the back of her neck. There was no winning an argument when the two of them banded together against her. Shade offered no help, looking bored and irritable at his desk.

  “Okay. I get it,” she said at last. “He can tag along to babysit if it’ll stop you two from fussing like a couple of old hens.”

  It wouldn’t be that hard to ditch him if he got on her nerves.

  “Get your shit,” she tossed at him, a hand on her hip as she passed him for the break room. “And weapon up. We’re going to visit Maisie.”

  There was nothing more harrowing than a trip to see the county coroner and chief medical examiner at the Office of the Paranormal. And now she was going to have to do it with a sullen demon in tow.

  7

  As soon as Warrick and Susanna were halfway out the door, flipping the ‘open’ sign to ‘closed’ in the office window and reminding her and Shade to lock up after, Gisele was hotfooting it into the break room.

  It wasn’t that she needed an urgent infusion of caffeine—her Little Miss Naughty mug sloshed and clanked where it landed, discarded in the stainless steel sink. She needed to speak with the minotaur.