Rebels and Realms: A Limited Edition Urban Fantasy Collection Read online

  She didn’t need to answer me; She was a goddess. Of course She never answered me. Nemesis was the queen of enigma and ambivalence. As long as I did what She said and didn’t get myself into trouble along the way, we maintained a wonderful working relationship.

  The cloak began at the crown of my head, a rush of ice water that spread through my veins and filled my body until I shivered despite the hot summer night air. I paused, jerking out a hand to steady my swaying body against the Chevy. Nemesis’s power was mighty, and it made me feel drunk.

  The cool thing about Nem’s cloak was it made me invisible to everybody around me, but not to myself. Nifty little power. Not to mention I could scream in someone’s face and never be heard.

  I waited until the feeling settled inside me, and then strode for the police station, only stumbling twice under the blurry feeling left behind by Nem’s magic.

  Nem had a lot of powers at Her disposal. She was, after all, omnipotent. But Her powers didn’t translate to the human plane as easily as one would think. If She bestowed on me invisibility, She couldn’t let me be noncorporeal, as well. There was a limit to the way Her powers reacted on the human plane. Put two together, and the punch behind both diminished by half.

  So Nemesis’s cloak made me invisible, but it didn’t give me the ability to walk through walls. I could pick locks perfectly well, but not without people being able to see the door opening and closing by itself. As a result, I had to hang out in front of the department and wait for someone to exit.

  Just my luck, it took forever. I shuffled from foot to foot, amusing myself by counting the pebbles that had been kicked out of the flowerbeds and onto the asphalt parking lot. A great waste of time.

  Finally, a reed-thin officer with a handlebar mustache pushed through the exit door on his way out, one hand resting on his holster. I slipped in beside him, glad he wasn’t a larger man, and found myself stuck by a second set of double glass doors.

  I groaned. “You have to be kidding me!”

  I was tempted to hurl the nearest thing I could find through the plate glass, but I didn’t have ammo. I was pretty sure that glass was bullet-proof anyway.

  There were plenty of warm bodies moving around inside. I scratched a fingernail down the glass and attempted to send a psychic bat-signal to the cops inside — LET ME IN.

  Alas, telepathy was not my forté. Maybe I could get some pointers from our personal psychic, Caraway.

  I mostly tried to accomplish my missions with minimal help. Nem’s tech gurus were pretty awesome, but there were certain things they weren’t allowed to do. Fucking with government files was one of those things. I didn’t understand Nemesis most of the time, but She was big on morals.

  I whipped out my cell and scrolled through my contacts. This would make the most I’d ever had to call my assistant on a job. I usually went out of my way to avoid contact, though that was less about Ewan and more about me. I felt the need to be in control. There was a flush to my skin I couldn’t explain away as I hit “EWAN — Office.”

  “Yella.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Could you be any more of a dork?”

  “Dear, sweet Saffron,” he cooed. “So kind of you to call. I was just imagining you naked.”

  “Ugh, you’re a pig,” I said as a hypocritical burst of estrogen tiptoed through my girl parts. It was his voice, crikes, it was like some kind of mating call. Why couldn’t that voice belong to some handsome knight-in-shining-armor? Someone who didn’t use corny pick-up lines. “You don’t even know what I look like.”

  “When you call, your profile pops up on my computer screen,” he responded simply. “Date of birth, parents’ names, schools attended… ”

  “You’re lying. I don’t believe you.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He cleared his throat. “Marion Churchman — nice name, by the way. Born November 20th, nineteen-ninety. Mother’s name, Jolene. Father’s name, Richard. Dropped out of high school and got your GED, but just barely. Oh — and look. A birthmark on your left butt cheek in the shape of a lima bean.”

  I clapped a hand to my blue jeans over the offending birthmark. “I’m not sure how I feel about you knowing any of that, least of all the location of my birthmark. That’s not common knowledge, you know.”

  “Nemesis is thorough,” Ewan quipped. “You should see my file. She knows all my secrets.”

  “I didn’t call to flirt,” I admonished him.

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Can you do me a favor?”

  “Hit me.”

  “Can you get me into the police station? I’m stranded between two glass doors.”

  “Can I? The question is, will I?”

  “You’ve been working there for two months,” I reminded him. “Two. You aren’t as great as you think you are.”

  He gasped. “Oh! She hurts me! Which station?”

  I whipped around, eyeing the glass front doors for a precinct number. “I don’t see an address. It might be somewhere outside on the building.”

  “Stay right where you are. I’m going to track your phone.”

  “So I shouldn’t run out the door, then?” I remarked dryly.

  The line echoed with the sound of his fingers clacking away at the keyboard. A moment later, the fire alarm began to ring.

  I’ll admit it. I was surprised. “I have no idea how you did that, but I’m impressed.”

  “It’s what you keep me around for, right? Just don’t tell Nem. You know how She feels about the law.”

  “For all we know, She’s watching us,” I griped. It was hard to fly below Nem’s radar. The physics behind a god’s all-knowing omnipotence were beyond me.

  It was easy as sin to slip in past the steady flow of quickly departing uniforms, and sin was pretty damn easy in my world. I wove my way through the exodus, only jostling a couple people, and mainly on purpose. The looks on their faces were funny.

  I didn’t have a “plan” per se. It was more of a “get inside and then decide on a course of action” type thing. Not the smartest idea, for sure, but I had to work with what I had.

  The place cleared out fast, and I found myself alone. The fire alarm rang sharp in my ears. I jumped at the first unlocked computer screen I could find, thankful departing law enforcement had valued their lives over their computer security.

  Bingo. NCIC.

  I’d had training on the system eons ago. Well, a couple years ago, when Nemesis first recruited me. But a one-off tutoring on a computer system did not an expert make, and no matter how many buttons I clicked or hovered over, it was not like riding a bike.

  “Damn it.” I dialed Ewan again.

  “That was fast. Did you get the driver’s licenses?” he answered.

  “No, I’m still here.” The alarm suddenly cut off. The ensuing silence was deafening. I hadn’t realized how harsh the ringing was on my ears.

  “Saffron?” Ewan asked. “Are you all right?”

  I paused, touched by his concern. “Fine. Alarm stopped. They’re gonna come back. Quick, how do I search for driver’s licenses?”

  “Right.” He launched into step-by-step instructions, and I jumped into action.

  Before the first officer ventured back into the station, I had folded print-outs of both Amy and Andy McClore’s driver’s licenses in my pocket. Still safely ensconced in Nemesis’s cloak of invisibility, I left the station.

  I only shoved one cop. Just one.

  7

  When I keyed the address into my GPS, I was unsurprised to find Amy and Andy McClore lived in a low-cost, low-morale part of town. If you spend all your time and energy finding new and refreshing ways to torment and murder your fellow human beings, other aspects of your life become not-so-important.

  I followed the instructions barked out by my GPS, trusty McStudmuffin (Don’t ask. Better yet, ask Frank. She named it.) It led me straight to the McClores’ front door. I found an opening on the side of the street across from the one-story ranch, and threw the car into park.<
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  Cutting the engine, I stared at the dark house. A full moon rose above a roof that needed work. It looked like a hefty storm had come through and ripped off half the shingles.

  Nem, nightsight, I thought, reaching for my goddess where She dwelled deep within me. A moment later, I felt Her embrace, and my vision enhanced until the night landscape before me was bathed in a gray light.

  The car door squeaked as I opened it. I paused, one boot on the asphalt, and waited to see if anyone would notice. A beat passed, and I emerged silently into the night.

  Now that the sun had gone down, a cool breeze shifted down the street. I could smell salt in the air, even though the ocean was miles away. As I walked up the broken front walk to the McClores’ house, I longed for a proper vacation. With coconut rum and half-naked cabana boys holding bottles of oil.

  A splash from my pocket turned out to be a file from Ewan. The profiles for the missing kids.

  I sighed, knowing I needed to look over them, but feeling heartbroken about it. I’d secure the property before opening the files.

  I darted up the stairs onto the small porch and peered through the front window of the house. It was inky inside, but with a little bit of nightsight focusing, I could see the room was empty. No furniture. Nothing but pale, stained carpet and a soot-covered fireplace missing a few bricks.

  I checked the doorknob — locked. The porch had no answers either, beyond an old, warped Adirondack chair tucked against the bricks.

  Leaving the cover of the porch, I stayed to the shadows and circled the house. Weeds overgrew the side beds, the bushes out of control and looming over me like gargantuan monsters. I found my way blocked by a privacy fence — new, unwarped wood. Not weathered. There was a gate, but it was locked from the inside. No amount of pulling on the tiny iron handle would open it.

  No matter. I wasn’t trained at a paramilitary academy for nothin’.

  I scaled the fence, landing on the other side with a soft thud. The backyard was shrouded in darkness, though I could make out a table and chairs on the patio, and a covered grill next to them.

  The back door was locked, too, but it didn’t have a deadbolt. Doorknob locks were a laugh to pick, and within moments, I stepped into the McClores’ kitchen.

  No furniture here, either. A cursory glance at drawers and cabinets found them bare, and a peek into the pantry proved the same. I made my way through the house, finding it as empty as a tomb.

  In the basement, by the light of my smartphone, I did find something that gave me pause: a wall covered in tick marks.

  If you hadn’t grown up doing the same thing, maybe you wouldn’t know. Maybe you’d think it was some fancy decorating. Abstract art. People had done weirder shit.

  But I knew it was growth marks, just like the doorframe of my bedroom at home, but not the way they should have been. Instead of being in a straight, vertical line, these tiny lines were all over the place, as if different kids had been marked beneath and around one another.

  I moved the light over the basement, searching for more evidence there had been children here. In a back corner, I found a section of wall scrubbed with tiny white scratch marks, as if someone had scraped it clean of something they didn’t want to remain.

  A chill tickled my lower back. I snapped a couple shots of the wall, and the tick marks, then got the hell out of there.

  I exited by way of the front door, leaving it unlocked and unlatched as a matter of principle. I had every intention of sending the police to this house ASAP, and I knew they wouldn’t make entry unless they had probable cause. An open door meant a “welfare check.” People didn’t just abandon their house and leave their doors wide open without there being a possible dead body inside.

  I sat in the Adirondack chair and sent the photos of the basement walls to Ewan. Then I opened his file on the kids.

  There was definitely a theme — all girls, all beautiful with golden hair and blue eyes. Their ages ranged from five to eleven, the most recent being a seven-year-old girl named Kiley.

  I thought of the woman I couldn’t save in Chicago. By the time I tracked the serial killer to his next victim, her wounds were fatal. She was dead before I came to after Nem’s take-over.

  Staring at Kiley’s face on my phone, I knew I didn’t want that to happen to her. I would be fast enough this time.

  “Who are you?”

  Startled, I leapt to my feet. I whipped around, my fists up and stance wide, already on the defensive. My phone tumbled from my hand, the back-plate falling off as it crashed to the warped wood. The battery flew out and skittered across the porch, coming to rest against the bricks.

  I needn’t have been ready for a fight, because I was met with a tiny, elf-like girl with a long chestnut braid and mocha skin. She stared at me, her hands clasped in front of her blue jean overalls. Her bare feet were dirty.

  “What are you doing outside so late, kid?” I asked, stooping to pick up the pieces of my phone.

  “Mommy’s at work.” Her dark eyes followed my movements, but she remained eerily still.

  I paused. “You’re home alone?”

  She shrugged but didn’t elaborate. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Neither should you.” I stood up and quickly pieced my phone back together before shoving it in the pocket of my blue jeans. I held out my hand. “Come on. I’ll walk you home.”

  She ignored me. Her pointy little chin lifted towards the house, and she shuffled her feet. “They’re not nice.”

  I knew who she was talking about, but I asked anyway: “Who?”

  “Amy and Andy.”

  “Do you know them?”

  The little girl shook her head. “Mommy says they’re devil people.”

  Your mommy’s right, I thought. Devil people. Inventive. I motioned to the house with its empty living room. “Do you know where they are?”

  “They left,” the girl said simply.

  “Where’d they go?”

  “I dunno.”

  This was why I didn’t want to have kids. They were maddening.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lissie.”

  “Lissie. You need to go home.” I swooped down and grabbed her hand, tugging her from the porch. “Which house is yours?”

  She led me two houses away, where a splash of warm light from the front window illuminated the yard. I walked the kid up to the front door and knocked, and then thankfully handed her off to a sleepy fellow with stubbly gray hair who became suitably upset when he found his granddaughter had slipped out.

  “Thank you,” he told me in his sleep-clogged voice. “I swear, she’s a handful. Just like her mother.”

  “No problem.” I eyed him. “Sir, I’m a private investigator. I’m looking into claims of illegal activity by your neighbors, the McClores. Lissie informed me they moved out of that house. Would you happen to know where they went?”

  He shook his head, one hand resting on the doorframe. In the dim globe light, he looked weary. “Those people… they’re trouble. I don’t know where they’re living, but the husband owned a video store. I’m not sure where. Called… Tapes, I think.”

  Back in my car, I stared ahead, not really seeing the street. Most of the time, I followed the whims of Nemesis without really paying attention — or shit, caring, about what I was doing. But that little girl, with eyes like dinner plates and the sweetest little voice…

  I was infuriated to know that those bastards could have harmed that kid if her mother hadn’t been so astute. I couldn’t wait to destroy Amy and Andy McClore.

  8

  On the way back to my car, I was on alert. Sure, I was strolling through a normal suburban neighborhood, and most of the houses were dark. A hose ran somewhere, the mechanical tick-tick-tick of a sprinkler filling the air. Dogs barked. Down the street, I could just barely hear the canned laughter of a television.

  Despite the normality, I felt… stalked. As if I walked through a fog under observation.

 
As I drew near my car, I noticed an SUV parked a block away. I wouldn’t have given it a second look if it hadn’t been such a coincidence.

  I mean, black SUVs weren’t uncommon. It seemed that in the past few years, SUVs had become the preferred means of transportation for soccer moms, beating out minivans by ninety percent. But this car just looked too damn familiar. It felt familiar.

  Plus, this sighting made three times I’d seen one in the space of forty-eight hours.

  I shoved my car key in my pocket and pulled out my switchblade. I didn’t like carrying guns. I was too much of a klutz, too likely to shoot myself in the foot. In this lifestyle, we couldn’t afford to go without, so I always carried the blade. Frank was the weapon-obsessed assassin: she carried two guns and multiple knives, as if she were running into some kind of apocalyptic situation.

  Hitting the button to release the blade, I held it out to my side and approached the vehicle.

  As I suspected, a Cadillac Escalade. That was not a coincidence.

  Nobody inside. The engine was cooling, the hood still hot. I peered through each tinted window, including the back, and found nothing out of the ordinary.

  Nothing out of the ordinary, except noticing a black Escalade everywhere I went.

  “I’m back to square one,” I said into my phone.

  I sat in my car in the parking lot of the diner, watching the few patrons shuffle around inside. A waitress — not mine from earlier in the evening — scrubbed at the floors with a sponge mop, stringy dark hair falling into her eyes.

  “Sounds like a personal problem.” I could hear rock music on his end, punctuated intermittently by blasts.

  “Are you playing video games?” I asked Ewan, amused.

  “No.” His answer came a little too quickly, and the blasting stopped.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So about that date… ” he said, changing the subject.

  But I was the queen of subject changes. “Can’t She just show me where they are?”