And magical incense.
I sneezed again.
“No, I didn’t get that far.” My voice was embarrassingly stuffy. Couldn’t breathe through my nose anymore. “I’m not hungry.”
Suzy muttered some choice insults about all my favorite body parts and slammed around in the kitchen. She also said something about “stupid men.”
I snorted and kept reading.
Isobel Stonecrow didn’t have an address. She’d never had an address, in fact. No place of employment. No medical history. No Social Security number. No coven affiliations. If it hadn’t been for three furious families short a wad of cash, we wouldn’t have even known she existed. So her name was probably a pseudonym. If I could find her real name, I could find where she lived—if she lived anywhere at all.
With wandering feet like that, maybe she was mobile. Sleeping in the backseat of a car or something.
The information in the files was limited, but there might’ve been more in the OPA database. Witness testimony, for instance.
“Hey Suzy,” I called, marking a few notes in the margins, “you got any—”
I looked up and forgot all my words.
For a tough little pixie of a woman, Suzy’s legs looked awfully long when they were bare. It took me a few long seconds to get from her bare, dainty feet to the swell of her thighs and to realize that she was wearing a nightgown that didn’t cover much of anything. If she walked too fast, she would flash panties.
Her charcoal hair was loose around her shoulders and she was holding two bowls of food. Like every man’s wet dream.
“Uh, broken,” I said. That didn’t make any sense. Shit. “Your window’s broken. So’s your mirror.” That wasn’t what I’d meant to talk about. It wasn’t even what I had been thinking about.
She set the bowls down. “Some dick broke in while I was at work two days ago and stole a few things. This neighborhood’s going downhill fast. But you get why I didn’t want you opening a window now, right?” She stepped into the kitchen again.
Yeah, I got it. The thought of Suzy living alone in a neighborhood like this was enough to get my guts twisting. “Because you’re afraid of being attacked again.”
“No, because I’ve cursed my windows.” She smiled devilishly at me as she set a pair of plates on the coffee table. “Next bastard that touches them is going to have more boils than a sailor’s prick. Rice?” I didn’t say yes, but she spooned some onto my plate anyway, topping it with chicken that smelled citrusy. “Eat it, Hawke. You look like you’re about to pass out.”
She was eating with chopsticks like she was born with them attached to her hands, but she’d brought me a fork. Bless her.
My appetite returned the instant the chicken touched my tongue. I gave a low groan. “That’s good stuff.”
Suzy grinned. “Yeah, it is.” She was sitting on the coffee table, not the other couch. Her bare knees brushed against mine.
Jesus, that was distracting. She was never this distracting in our cubicle.
“What’s that?” Suzy pointed at the Stonecrow folder.
“Oh. Uh.” I rubbed the back of my neck and tried not to look at her legs. Don’t look at her legs, Hawke. “It was the last case assigned to me before… It was assigned yesterday. It’s for this witch, some flavor of necromancer, who might be talking to the dead. I thought that I could get her to talk to Erin and find out what happened.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. You need to get out of town, and fast.”
“What, and give up my job, my family, my life?” My collection of special edition Star Wars DVDs?
“The OPA’s not going to give you any help with this case, Cèsar. It looks bad. Really bad. Worse, it doesn’t look like anything infernal or magical. They’re prepared to let you go through the mundane court system.”
“I can’t believe Fritz is letting that fly,” I said. Fritz loved me. At least, I thought he did.
“Even Friederling has bosses.” She sighed. “Look, I’ll do what I can about the case while you’re gone. But for now you need to get away from Los Angeles, and you need to do it before the OPA decides that they should have a witch tag you with a tracking spell.”
I would’ve liked to see them try. I might not have been doubling the size of my apartment with magic, but I could detect and blast away passive spells like that in my sleep. “There had to be someone else in the apartment with Erin and me. That means there’s evidence. A trail I can follow. If I leave, that trail goes cold.”
“And if you don’t leave, you get to go to prison.”