CHAPTER ONE
At ten o’clock at night,there were only two kinds of people on the San Amaro buses. One was people who had just gotten off shift and had the glassy look of an incredibly long day. The second was people who were about to go on shift and either had a half-awake look or were flat out napping on their way to their jobs.
It was usually a quiet time on the bus. No screaming babies; daycare closed hours ago. No college kids yet, either — the bars didn’t close for another three hours.
In fact, there was only one person anyone was avoiding on the bus: me.
Shifting in the uncomfortable plastic seat, dirt dribbled out of the cuff of my pants, even though I had crawled out of my shallow grave almost forty-five minutes ago. I could feel the soft, fine grit that made up the hills of San Amaro in every pore and almost all of my orifices.
No one wanted to sit near me. Whether that was because I stank of sweaty panic or because I kept muttering about exactly what I was going to do when I got to my destination was up for debate.Iwouldn’t want to talk to the filthy guy talking to himself in the back of the bus, either.
The upsetting thing was that usually I was a guy who dealt with weirdos and the things that made other people shiver. As the city’s top paranormal PI, I was the guy that someone called when they had a problem and the police wouldn’t help them.
The bus creaked as it pulled to a stop, the hydraulic brakes hissing. A woman in teal scrubs rushed to get off the back of the bus, glancing at me when I stood to follow her. She clutched her purse tighter when it was just the two of us on the sidewalk, the bus already trundling away.
She was probably the night nurse for some rich guy who still thought nurses should dress like they were pinup girls. Unfortunately for him, I was sure the agency she worked for had a uniform code which didn’t involve fishnets and high heels.
Her eyes were wide, and she looked around, but it was late at night and we were the only two people on the street. We were on the main road, which was flat. Stretching behind us in the dark hills were mansions so big they could probably fit my entire apartment building in their garages.
I could tell that she wasn’t going to move first. She didn’t want to give me the benefit of walking behind her, and possibly catching her unaware. After all, I was the guy covered in dirt with a bruise on his face that said a few hours ago someone had tried very hard to mess my pretty mug up permanently.
I didn’t want to touch the injury again, because every time I did I saw colors like I was sitting on the beach underneath the Fourth of July fireworks show.
“I’ll go first,” I said. “I’m not here for you.”
She frowned. “Are you okay?”
“Eh, I’ve been worse.” I offered her smile, but it must not have been very reassuring because she approached me like you might a wounded tiger.
She was the mouse, I had a thorn in my paw, and it was only in the fables that this ended in friendship instead of a very small appetizer for very hungry feline.
When she was close, she examined my face. “You need to get that looked at. Follow my finger.”
She moved her forefinger back and forth across my vision. Then she shook her head again. “You want me to call an ambulance?”
“Listen,” I said. “I get that it’s your job, but you probably want to go to work and forget you ever saw me, okay? You’re good people and what I’m about to do isn’t for good people like you.”
With that, I turned and began the hike up the street to Derek McCallum’s house. Maybe I did have a concussion, usually I wasn’t so chatty with people I didn’t know. Now she was probably going to call the cops, which was one thing I didn’t need.
Because, dirty or not, concussed or not, exhausted or not, I was going to murder Derek McCallum.
Derek McCallum lived in one of the recent additions to the Hills. His house bore the bland anonymity of a house built in the early ’00s which wanted to look modern yet not out of place from his more established neighbors. He was like some reptile who had snuck his egg into a bird’s nest and, as soon as the egg hatched, was going to eat all the chicks.
And he probably would get away with it, convincing the mother bird that he was harmless, scaly skin and all. After all, he’d managed to convince me that I should do business with him, even though if you’d asked me a few months ago,shouldyou do business with Derek McCallum?My answer would have beennever, no,anddo I look like I want to end up in the harbor wearing cement shoes?
When I approached his house, I was surprised to see the lights weren’t on. McCallum didn’t seem like the kind of person who kept an early bedtime, but maybe he was out celebrating his victory. Champagne for the thug who’d killed the PI stupid enough to get into business with San Amaro’s most notorious crime boss.
McCallum had a gate, and I was sure he had wards, but I was so angry that pushing through them only felt like the prickle you’d get touching something that came out of the dryer snapping from static electricity. The fence was a bigger problem, as I was tired after having dug myself out of the dirt and then walking several miles until I found a bus stop.
Magic bled from me, like sweat coming off a race horse. The job I had done for McCallum had me using magic almost nonstop for weeks. If you had asked me several hours ago, I would’ve said I was tapped out. But desperation and fury meant that my reserves were back at full capacity.
I couldn’t work with the metal fence. This angry, there was no way I could even attempt to finesse the metal. Moreover, metal is almost impossible for me to work with. On a normal day, I might test to see if I could manipulate it, but I didn’t want to waste time trying, in case I was wrong.
No, I needed an alternative route into McCallum’s house. Walking around the fence, I saw where some lazy groundskeeper had let a few branches of a shrub grow just over the top of the black-painted wrought iron, complete with sharp, stabby points at the top. I could work with that.
The fence was easily ten feet tall, and I had no desire to test how my knees would take a fall from that height. I could probably do it, but the last thing I needed was to hobble myselfon top of the concussion I was almost positive I was sporting. What I really wanted was for the bush to grow all the way down the opposite side of the fence so that it would be just like climbing a ladder down the other side.
Approaching the plant, I reached out a thread of magic and waited until I felt the shrub wake.
