Witch Hunt(2)

It was red. It was slick. It smelled like a slab of rare steak.
It definitely wasn’t lubricant.
Once I realized that I smelled meat, I smelled more of it. It was thick in my sinuses. I wasn’t just nauseous because of the stiff neck and the hangover; I was nauseous because I smelled something dead.
In my apartment.
Funny how much faster I could move once I’d stepped in a puddle of blood.
I slipped back into the living room, dropped my suit on the chair, grabbed the Louisville Slugger from where it was propped on the wall. Everything was so much brighter and clearer than it had been a few seconds ago. My heart was hammering and every beat was a shot of adrenaline.
As I curled my fists around the bat, my peripheral vision seemed like it widened. The whole world was quiet. The air conditioning clicked on and cool air whispered against my ankles.
The apartment narrowed to the bathroom door as I approached. I didn’t hear anything moving on the other side.
I opened it.
The blood into the carpet was the end of a smear that crossed the linoleum and terminated at the other end of my bathroom—which, until that second, had been my favorite room in the apartment. The toilet and counter and fluorescent lights were standard Home Depot cheapies, but the bathtub was not. It was one of those big corner tubs with the jets that feel like sin after a hard workout at the gym. I’m enough of a man to admit to loving a hot bath. Sometimes even with bubbles and fizzy salts.
And there was the woman that had given me such a wild ride. Legs like a colt. Firm, perky breasts. The kind of pouty lips my eldest brother, Domingo, used to call “beejay mouth” until I punched him hard enough to shut his stupid face.
The mystery woman was real pretty. I knew her name—I was sure I knew her name. For sure she worked at The Olive Pit, a favorite bar for my office. It was where we relaxed on Fridays at six o’clock and held retirement parties and the annual Christmas gift exchange.
This waitress had laughed at me the first time I asked for her name, and the second time, and the third, but eventually I wised up and just took a look at the schedule in the kitchen. I couldn’t remember making love to those long legs and perfect breasts, but I remembered her ridiculously feminine handwriting.
Erin. Her name was Erin, punctuated with a smiley face encircled by a heart.
She was dead in my bathtub.
Hell of a night.






 
    Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure,   Magic
    
 


 

CHAPTER TWO

My name’s Cèsar Hawke. I’m a witch working for a division of the government you’ve never heard about.
The world’s not what everyone thinks it is—unless you think that our world’s a pawn in a game of chess between Heaven and Hell, and riddled with as much magic and wonder as it is with evil.
In that case, the world is exactly what you think.
My place of employment—the Office of Preternatural Affairs—takes a modern approach to an ages-old problem. It used to be that inquisitors would burn demons and the people in league with them. Now we get warrants, perform arrests, put the suspects on trial, and send guilty parties back to the Hell from whence they came with the travel forms filled out in triplicate.
Everything you’ve ever heard about demons, angels, and witches is true. I would know. I’m a witch myself. But the world’s in denial about us. The Industrial Revolution brought about an era of people too smart to believe in the boogeyman and everyone has spent long decades telling themselves comforting lies about the mundane world they think they live in. Aside from some priests, renegade demon hunters, and victims of demonic crime, nobody knows the truth.
Nobody but me and the other magically inclined special agents I work with, anyway. And we work hard to keep it that way.
This stuff I do with the OPA, it saves lives on most days.
Most days, I said.



I was still standing in the bathroom doorway and didn’t know how long I’d been like that. My arms were hurting from holding the bat with such a tight grip. My breaths were choppy and loud. It was the white roar of an approaching tornado.
Erin had long, lacquered fingernails that were attached to long, shapely arms that were draped over the side of my previously favorite bathtub. The nail on her right-hand ring finger was missing. The one on her pinkie was cracked. They were the kind of fingernails that would leave gouges on a man’s arm during sex if she was having a real good time—or if she was trying to fight off a murderer.
Glancing at the scratches on my arm a second time didn’t fill me with the same proud warmth it had the first time.#p#分页标题#e#
Swallowing down the acid taste of bile, I took another step into the bathroom, careful not to smear the blood more than I already had. I needed a better look at what had happened in my apartment—in my damn home.