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CHAPTER 1
I was sitting at my desk in the front room of our offices between Stillman’s Janitorial Supplies and Perfume and a health-food store, looking up information on how to get a private investigator’s license in Texas when the djinn rushed in, the scorching heat from the Texas summer outside rushing in with him.
Of course, back then I didn’t know he was a djinn. Not at first, anyway. “I need your help,” he announced over the sound of the electronic doorbell jingling as the door swung shut behind him.
Startled by his sudden entrance, my gaze flicking up and snagging on him. Then I sat staring up at him with my mouth hanging open and stayed that way for several seconds.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t used to people asking for my help—it had happened before, after all. Most recently, with my now-dead, then-vampire, apparently-always-evil ex-husband.
But it hadn’t happened in a few weeks. And never from a stranger. it wasn’t like our offices were all that easy to find. We’d only been in them a couple of months, and we didn’t even have a sign up yet.
In the time it took for all that to flash across my mind, the man spun around and flipped the bolt on the swinging glass door, peering out through the slightly wavy remnant of the last tenant’s signage stickers left behind when Elijah had peeled them off not long after we moved in.
My mouth snapped closed, and I said, “Excuse me?” Not because I hadn’t heard him, but because it gave me a moment to examine him a little more closely.
He was an attractive man with high cheekbones, smooth brown skin, and thick, wavy black hair. When he turned back around to look at me, I saw his enormous brown eyes. I wasn’t sure if they were huge all the time, or if it was simply an effect of the obvious fear wafting off him in waves.
“Do you have a back room?” he demanded, already striding past the desk where I was seated. Technically the desk belonged to Helen, the beautiful trans woman who had, through a feat of hyperorganization, managed to become our part-time secretary, as well as full-time monster hunter, along with my best friend—and Helen’s boyfriend—Elijah.
I stood, my face creasing in a frown. “Yes. My office is back there, but?—”
My voice trailed off as he disappeared into the short hallway.
“What the fuck?” I muttered to myself as I trailed along behind him.
I stepped into my office after him, then quickly retreated back to stand in the doorway with my arms crossed, suddenly deciding I didn’t want the possibility of being trapped in that tiny space with a crazy man.
But the crazy man was already peeking out between the slats of the blinds and speaking aloud. “I don’t think anyone’s here. Maybe they haven’t found me yet.” He brightened at the prospect. “Maybe they didn’t follow me.”
“Maybe who didn’t follow you?”
He spoke with that beautiful accent you sometimes get when Indians speak English—British enunciation overlaying what I had always presumed was the lilt of Hindi tones.
Yeah, yeah, I know. That accent is the result of years of British oppression in India. But the accent is still beautiful.
As was he, I realized.
“Who hasn’t found you yet?” I narrowed my gaze, trying to put some authority behind the words as the man’s eyes rolled around in his head as if searching for an exit—or maybe somewhere safe to hide.
My question froze him in place as if he finally noticed me for the first time despite having been speaking to me for the last several minutes. “The king’s men. They’re coming to kill me.”
Encouraged by him finally answering a question directly—though admittedly less enthusiastic about his “king” comment, since I suspected it might hint at delusions on his part—I stepped over to the other side of my desk, pulled out a pen and a notebook, and gestured at him to take a seat.
Then I sank down into my executive chair—the pretty leather one I had gotten on sale at Costco more because it looked official than because of its comfort level, which, in case you’re wondering, is zero—and held my pen poised over the paper to write as I tried to maintain an air of calm authority.
“I think you’d better start from the beginning,” I said.
* * *
Projecting authority isn’t as straightforward for me as it might be for other people.
For one thing, I’m awfully young to own a business like this. I graduated from college less than two years ago and sort of… fell… into supernatural bounty hunting about a year later when Elijah, stoned out of his mind and as unable to find gainful employment as I had been, suggested we try our hand at capturing Nick Savas, a billionaire werewolf wanted for murdering his ex-wife.
As it turned out, we didn’t so much capture Nick as allow him to use us to prove his innocence.
Okay, allow might be a bit of an overstatement. I don’t think we could have stopped him if we’d wanted to—but in the end, we had picked up the $50,000 bounty plus another 50K from Nick and decided to go into the business full-time.
To be fair, my obvious youth probably wasn’t the only reason I had a hard time looking like an authority figure.
