Shadows & Surrender: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Detective Series (The Jezebel Files Book 3) Read online

  Shadows & Surrender

  A Snarky Urban Fantasy Detective Series

  Deborah Wilde

  Copyright © 2020 by Deborah Wilde.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Book Cover Design by ebooklaunch.com

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN: 978-1-988681-45-0 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-988681-46-7 (Kindle)

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Excerpt from Revenge & Rapture

  Become a Wilde One

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Lying to the cops wasn’t generally something I advised, but it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind.

  The man in the photo possessed that specific shade of forgettable light brown hair generic to many a white boy and his facial features were unremarkable, but he was saved from obscurity by a purple birthmark shaped like a comet under one eye.

  “I’ve never seen him before.” I handed the photo back to Sergeant Margery Tremblay of the Mundane Police Force and the closest thing I had to a friend among cops. “Who is he?”

  “Can you confirm your whereabouts two nights ago between the hours of midnight and 3AM?” Despite her flawless makeup and cute silver pixie cut, her eyes were steely, and she asked the question with no trace of familiarity.

  I leaned back in the plastic chair. “I was asleep.”

  “Alone?”

  “Shocking, I know. My roommate was home.”

  “There’s no one to confirm you didn’t leave your place?” she said.

  “No.” I crossed my arms. “What’s this about, Sergeant?”

  She tapped the photo. “Yevgeny Petrov was shot dead.”

  My questions were legion, but I hurriedly crossed off the ones it would seem odd for me, a total stranger and supposed Mundane, to ask. Questions such as: “Why are Mundane cops investigating this when Yevgeny is Nefesh?” Or, “How was he shot when he can turn his skin to rubber? A fact I knew because that’s the form he’d been in when he attacked me, and I accidentally tried to rip his magic from his body. A girl never forgets her first time, don’tcha know.”

  “My condolences,” I said. “I’m sure his mother loved him. What does this have to do with me?”

  Margery massaged her temples. “He’s the one you allegedly attacked in that anonymous assault charge. When you were undercover as that old woman.”

  Yevgeny had never seen the real me, just the Lillian persona who I’d been illusioned to look like. However, when I went for his magic he’d recognized I was a Jezebel, enemy to the shadowy religious organization that he worked for called Chariot. Jezebels were a special breed.

  “You think I found out and shot him? Bit of a leap, no? The assault complaint was bullshit. I don’t have magic, so what’s my motive in taking him out, Sergeant?” I said coldly.

  Continuing to be listed as Mundane on public record had its uses.

  Margery made a sound of disgust. “All right. Quit it with the ‘Sergeant.’ I’m just doing due diligence. I don’t think you’re involved and you’re not being charged with anything, but you might know something. You’re sure his name doesn’t ring any bells?”

  I shook my head. “Where was he found?”

  “One of our squads took down a dogfighting ring. They found his body and called in the Nefesh homicide unit.”

  Last time I’d seen him, Yevgeny was laying on the floor, a whimpering wreck believing that ants were swarming him, an illusion courtesy of my partner in crime that night. Guess Yevgeny’d gotten over the trauma enough to continue being a productive member of the criminal fringe.

  “Yevgeny has magic?” I put the right amount of curiosity into my voice. “Is House Pacifica involved?”

  “No. He’s registered with House Ontario. He was just here visiting his sister. She’s been notified already as next of kin.”

  What a load of crap. Even if the sibling part was true, my investigations had revealed that he’d been in Vancouver working for Chariot, kidnapping marginalized teens in order to sever their magic. It was then sold at an auction where he’d also provided security.

  “Are we done?” I said.

  As I didn’t have anything more to add, Margery cut me loose with a sigh and instructions not to get in any more trouble until she went on vacation in the fall.

  “I light up your life,” I called and left.

  I legged it back to my car, Moriarty, and logged into the House Pacifica database. Look at that, Yevgeny did have a sister. Tatiana Petrov, a level five Weaver. Yikes. There weren’t a lot of people with level five magic in any specialty. What were the chances that she’d been the Weaver hired to set the security ward on House HQ, only to later null it and enable a German Chariot assassin to take out a person-of-interest?

  There was one way to find out.

  Getting her address was a piece of sleuthing cake. Starting my damn car was not. It had sprung a leak in the radiator hose. I went into my trunk and retrieved the relevant supplies from what I’d dubbed my “evil nemesis” kit.

  Wearing rubber gloves and sunglasses, because safety first when dealing with coolant, I dried the hose, then wrapped the leak securely in several layers of duct tape. Ah, duct tape, was there anything it couldn’t do? Lastly, I refilled the coolant reservoir. Add in bonus fun points for doing it all in the piss-pouring rain.

  I got behind the wheel, wet hair plastered to my forehead. “I don’t have time to take you to a mechanic right now and get the hose changed, so you’re going to be grateful for my MacGyvered fix and work properly, or I’ll drive us straight to a scrap metal yard. Got it, car?”

  With my day off to a grand start, I cranked the heat and drove to Tatiana’s place, situated in a rural area of Langley, about an hour away from Vancouver. I made one brief stop, a much-needed Starbucks drive-through jaunt for a mocha latte with extra whipped cream and a chicken wrap, both of which I consumed long before I arrived at my destination.

  Parking on the side of the road next to a neighbor’s driveway, I engaged in some gold-medal skulking around Tatiana’s good-sized acreage. There were no buildings other than the ranch house with its sweeping maple tree in the front yard. An SUV with a cold engine w
as parked on the square of dead grass to the side of the dirt lane that served as a driveway. Her property wasn’t within walking distance of anything interesting, and as only Brits and masochists appreciated a ramble about the woods in the soaking rain, unless she had another car, she was at home.

  The house was far enough removed from the country road that the only sound was the wind in the trees, so the squeak of the back door easily carried to my position. Keeping lower than window height, I snuck around the side in time to see a car with muddy plates peeling away—not the SUV—the tires kicking up tiny whirlwinds of dust. The driver wore a baseball cap, obscuring them from identification.

  I made my way up the stairs of the back porch, my Sherlock senses on high alert and a sharp red dagger made from my blood magic gripped tightly in one hand. Ready with a cover story about my car needing a jumpstart, I knocked on the kitchen door, but no one answered. There were no signs of a struggle visible through the glass, but her brother was dead and her visitor had been in an awful hurry to leave.

  A few minutes later, I once more approached the kitchen door, slipping on the thin gloves and toque that I’d retrieved from my car. I carefully tucked my dark wavy hair inside the knit cap and pressed my fingertip to the doorframe. No magic. I frowned. Wards weren’t as common on private residences as they were on major public buildings, but Tatiana was a high-level Weaver and at the very least, her brother, who had been crashing here before he died, was involved with some dangerous people. There should have been a ward to sense hostile intent and then hold potential attackers. It would freeze them in place and neutralize their magic, if they had any.

  Since wards didn’t deactivate when the Weaver who’d cast them died, an active ward would have effectively gift-wrapped the visitor for the cops to apprehend.

  Cautiously, I tested the knob, which was unlocked. No siren blared when I opened the door. There was no keypad inside, so a silent alarm seemed unlikely. All of this made sense if Tatiana had been relying on a ward to guard her, but she wasn’t. I’d met a lot of recklessly trusting people and they didn’t tend to be the ones with mad magic. Maybe Tatiana thought that living in such a rural area meant that her only visitors would be well-intentioned neighbors.

  Somehow I doubted it.

  If the person in the car had been an innocent visitor, then why had they raced off?

  “Hello?” I called out loudly. When there was no answer, I slid off my motorcycle boots, leaving them on the outside mat so as not to leave tracks, and tiptoed inside, eyes darting around for anything obviously out of place.

  I crept into the hallway and gasped.

  Tatiana Petrov lay face down, limbs splayed crookedly in a puddle of still-congealing blood from the hole blown through the back of her skull. Probably instantaneous death, so that was a mercy. Had she known what was going to happen to her or had it caught her by surprise? The naked violence of the scene didn’t yield answers, but my mind kept circling back to gunshot angles, and the image of a woman smiling to meet a guest and then faltering for a second as she realized what was about to happen.

  I gulped down air, bent over double with one hand splayed on my tight ribcage. Suddenly, that Starbucks run’s added trip time made me incredibly grateful. I was a professional, sure, but the reality of how close I’d come to having a front row seat to a murder prickled along the back of my neck. Had the person I’d seen race off been Chariot, or connected to them?

  Was this a preview of my own fate?

  Trembling, I stuffed my haywire emotions into a very deep box until I was able to regard this situation with a cool head. The smart thing to do would be to call the crime in anonymously to the Nefesh cops. On the other hand, if Chariot was behind this, a golden opportunity had just dropped into my lap. As a Jezebel, I’d take any edge on my enemies that I could get.

  I called Miles Berenbaum, Head of Security for House Pacifica.

  “What?” he growled. Wow. Grumpy really needed to perfect his phone manner with me, especially since we were going to be working together for a good long time.

  “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I’m 99 percent certain how the German hitman got past House wards to kill Yitzak.” I gnawed on my thumbnail. How many more times would the price for answers be death?

  Standard procedure dictated that I couldn’t touch the body, but something in me needed to see Tatiana’s face. Why? I’d seen death before. But this was different. Like Yitzak’s empty stare, it would remind me exactly what was waiting if I didn’t keep my wits about me.

  “What’s the bad news?” Miles said.

  “You’re gonna need a new Weaver if you want to set up any more wards.”

  I appreciated a good old-fashioned bout of “fucks.”

  “Where are you?” he demanded. I gave him the address. “Where’s the body?”

  “In the hallway.”

  Miles made a pained noise. “You broke in?”

  “No.” The truth was so freeing. As were lies of omission.

  “Uh-huh. Why must you always ruin my day?” Miles said.

  I methodically searched the kitchen for any evidence tying Tatiana or her brother to Chariot. “Think of it as broadening your horizons.”

  “Get out of there and call it in.”

  “Give me an hour.”

  “It’s a crime scene,” Miles growled. “You’ll contaminate it.”

  “Who do you think you’re talking to? Gloves on, hair covered, shoes off, no touching the body. No grasping any handles or knobs directly so as not to smudge any prints.” The kitchen yielded nothing more than kitchenware. Even the ancient address book tossed in the junk drawer was blank. I shoved the drawer shut. “You might have Chariot informants on the Nefesh force and if they get their hands on anything of note before we do, I guarantee it won’t make it to the evidence locker.”

  “If Chariot did this, they would have swept the place already.”

  “I don’t know, they didn’t seem too keen on lingering.” I shivered.

  “You saw the murderer?” Miles sounded like he wanted to reach through the phone and strangle me. “Did they see you?”

  “No.” I was confident about that fact, though it had been way too close for comfort. “I couldn’t identify them, either. The plates on the car were muddy and the person wore a baseball cap, which I only glimpsed from behind.”

  “Levi is going to freak the fuck out.”

  “Then be creative with your report so that he doesn’t,” I snapped. Like this was my fault. Chariot was bent on acquiring immortality; they weren’t playing by a rule book, and they definitely weren’t playing it safe. Neither could I.

  “If it weren’t for the known Chariot connection to Tatiana’s brother, who was killed a couple nights ago, I wouldn’t have come in the first place.” I searched the freezer in a last-ditch hope that the kitchen would yield something useful, but it, too, was a bust. “My Jezebel duties take precedence. I accepted the Mantle and I don’t get to run away because it’s scary. I’m checking the place out.” I hung up on him, ignoring the persistent buzzing in my back pocket for the next ten minutes.

  Tatiana was an interesting woman. She didn’t own a TV, but she did have a CD tower full of classical music. While she had Weaver magic, she also enjoyed the good old-fashioned kind of weaving, as evidenced by the large loom with the unfinished tapestry that dominated the living room. Her house brimmed with artistic expression and no sign of religious conviction, so what had drawn her to Chariot? Had she been promised immortality or did it come down to cold, hard cash?

  And why wasn’t there a damn ward?

  Her unprotected laptop on the coffee table failed to yield much beyond the bookkeeping records for her ward business and emails from clients.

  Unlocking a phone with a dead woman’s thumb wasn’t my finest hour, but I kept my promise to Miles and managed to do it without touching the body. I airdropped her contacts list to my phone to go through later, so that was something. The texts were mostl
y social plans with friends. I left her phone where I found it.

  Miles must have run every red light because he got here in a scant forty minutes. He and Arkady Choi, my friend, fighting mentor, and new neighbor, piled out of a pickup truck.

  I met them at the back door.

  Arkady not only worked for the House on hush-hush jobs, but he was part of the Nefesh Mixed Martial Arts League and was a thrill junkie. Their high-speed race here should have elated him, but his face was grim.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Go fast, go hard, pedal to the metal. Would it have killed him to stop for a coffee?” Arkady’s dark eyes flashed. “Make conversation?”

  “It was a drive to get from point A to point B.” Miles, a six-foot-four mountain of a man with muscles that begat muscles, slipped off his black shoes and left them next to mine on the doormat. “You knew that getting into the car.”

  “I guess my understanding of a ride is different than yours,” Arkady said.

  “That bad, huh?” I said, dying to call Priya about how these two had totally slept together.

  They turned to me with identical expressions of surprise, like they’d forgotten I was there.

  Arkady flung an arm theatrically across his forehead. “My life flashed before my eyes.”

  “Scale of one to ten, how well did you live your best self?” I said.

  “Pickle, please,” he said, slipping off his shoes. “It was an eleven. ”

  “Did you find anything?” Miles said.

  “Not yet,” I said. “There’s still the bathroom, two bedrooms, and what I presume is an office, though it’s locked.”