Shadows & Surrender (The Jezebel Files #3) Paperback

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 was 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 mostly 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.”

The three of us exchanged smirks—as if that would be a problem.

Miles pulled out latex gloves and paper hats befitting a food services worker for himself and Arkady. It was kind of overkill for Miles, given his blond hair was buzz cut, but his attention to detail served him well as Head of Security.

Arkady shuddered as he slipped the paper hat over his black, chin-length hair.

“It doesn’t have cooties,” I said.

“It’s a fashion blight.” He brightened. “At least it won’t detract from my stellar good looks.” He wasn’t wrong. Dude had cheekbones for days, pouty lips, and overall supermodel hotness.

I clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit. Think positively.”

We entered the kitchen and I led them to the victim, motioning to the body with a flourish. “Meet Tatiana Petrov.”

“How can you be certain that’s her?” Arkady circled the body. “We can’t see her face. If she even still has a face.”

I pointed to a thick white streak in her dark hair. “She’s registered in the House Pacifica database and there’s a photo. Her brother has a purple birthmark under his eye. That streak of white is her birthmark.”

“I’ve met her before,” Miles said softly. “She was there when Levi first took over House Pacifica and keyed the new wards to his blood. I didn’t suspect her at all.” He clenched his jaw.

Arkady reached out to pat his back, then jammed his hand in his pocket instead.

“Don’t beat yourself up over it,” I said. “We had no idea how far-reaching Chariot was.”

We still didn’t. Sure, we had a general understanding of how they operated, but we didn’t know the players or the precise scope of their range. To all appearances, Tatiana had been a leader in her field with a trustworthy reputation. Literally anyone could be one of them. How did I protect myself and watch my friends’ backs when I didn’t even know where to look?

“Tell me about the brother,” Miles said.

“Yevgeny Petrov.” I filled them in on my first meeting with Birthmark Man, up to and including my visit with Sergeant Tremblay. When I finished, I frowned at the body.

“What?” Miles said.

“I can’t get past the fact that there weren’t any wards on this place,” I said. “Whoever shot her just waltzed in and judging from the angle of the body, caught her coming out of either one of the bedrooms or the office. She’s a Weaver. Her brother worked for Chariot and she likely did too. Did she really trust them so unconditionally?”

“Not everyone has honed your levels of suspicion,” Arkady said.

“It’s common sense when you work for the bad guys,” I said. “Villains aren’t known for their undying loyalty.”

“You work for the bad guys, too,” Miles said. “From her perspective. Hell, you are the bad guy. Yet, you’ve taken on a team. How do you know one of them won’t stab you in the back?”

“As if I need a knife,” Arkady sniffed.

“Could you not make a joke, just once?” Miles said.

Arkady rolled his eyes. “Ooh, right. The commandment according to Berenbaum. Thou shalt not make light of anything lest anyone mistake it for thee not taking thine job seriously enough.”

Their bickering had been an interesting glimpse into their current dynamic for the first minute. Now I was over it. “Back to Chariot.”

“Chariot believes in the rightness of their actions every bit as much as you do,” Miles said. “Forget that for a second and it’ll be your body we find.”

“Please. Mansplain the dangers to me. My point that Tatiana should have kept her guard up stands. Her brother Yevgeny was murdered. She should have been on high alert.”

“So let’s find out why she wasn’t,” Arkady said.

After a half-hearted search of the small bathroom, Miles and Arkady opted for the guest bedroom where Yevgeny had been staying, while I searched Tatiana’s room.

“It’s a bust in here,” I said.

A deafening clang rang out.

I sprinted into the guest room. Arkady stood half in the closet, bashing in a safe door with heavy swings of his now-stone fists. I stayed behind Miles who was a very handy shield until the door crumpled entirely, allowing Arkady access.

“And you were worried about me contaminating the scene?” I shoved Miles.

He started as the safe’s metal keypad fell onto the ground. “The homicide cops will either think robbery was the motive or that this was a red herring.”

“Not the point, dude. I’m a trained professional and this is just… not. At least concede I was right to search.”

“Depends on what we find.” Man, this guy wouldn’t give me an inch.

Arkady’s magic fists returned to normal. He reached into the safe and pulled out a camera. “Yevgeny, you perv,” he said, scrolling through frames.

Miles and I crowded around him and I gasped. They were photos of my Jezebel predecessor, Gavriella Behar, and her former workplace, the Star Lounge, including the placement of security cameras and the back door from various angles of the parking lot.

“Gavriella was kidnapped at work,” I said. I’d suspected as much, but confirmations were always valuable. “Yevgeny stalked her and cased the joint to figure out how best to snatch her without being seen.”

Arkady handed the camera to Miles and leaned into the safe. “There are a couple more things in here.”

The Android phone he removed was password protected so I said I’d take it to Priya Khatri, my best friend, part-time employee, and hacker extraordinaire. The other item was a thin metal lockbox. The lid had been busted open and there was dust in the crevice of the hinges.

I ran a fingertip over a hinge and rubbed the dust between my fingers. “Wood. An under-the-floor safe?”

I pulled out a handful of photos, but it took me a moment to recognize the girl. “It’s Gavriella again.” Her childhood through to early adulthood was captured in dozens and dozens of photos. “Given the lid was broken open, the contents, and the fact that Gavriella liked her hiding spots, this lockbox could have been taken from her apartment.”

“Did Gavriella have a ward on her apartment door?” Miles said.

“Yes, and it was active when Levi and I went there,” I said. “Oh, fuck. Level five Weaver. If anyone could disable it and then rearm it, it would have been Tatiana. They must have searched Gavriella’s home after she’d been kidnapped. I wonder what they were hoping to find?”

“You think the cell is hers?” Arkady said.

“Possibly,” I said. “Levi and I couldn’t find it when we searched her place.” I quickly sifted through the rest of the photos, hitting something hard at the bottom of the lockbox. A book with a reddish brown spine, it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, his first novel featuring my beloved Sherlock Holmes.

“Props to her fine taste in literature, but why lock this puppy up?” I flipped the front cover open and frowned. “What’s this?”

Under the title on the first page was a message printed in block letters—perfect for someone who didn’t want their handwriting recognized.

On the first line was a “3.”

On the second was a “1.”

And on the third line was another “1” paired with a question mark.

Underneath that said, “Thursday. Steam clock. 8PM.”

“The steam clock could be the one here in Gastown.” I rifled through the pages but there was no way to determine how old the message was and there was nothing else of interest.

Well, not until I got to the back page.

The men peered over my shoulder at the shaky drawing of a giant sunflower.

Miles made a disgusted noise. “Kids defacing books. Little brats.”

“Dandelion,” I said.

“Wrong. It’s a sunflower,” he said.

I stroked a finger over the flower as if I could draw warmth from it. “The Crayola color on the petals. Dandelion yellow. My favorite.”

It was a happy color, like my home. Talia had joked about me going through my “monochromatic phase” which was much preferred to “the sassy sixes” of my peers. Dad had praised my prodigious artistic output, and my finished drawings crowded the front of our fridge.

“I don’t understand,” Arkady said.

“This was my dad’s copy.” Buzzing filled my ears. I felt like I was spinning in place, a hollow shell in a reality comprised of a thousand shards of glass, flaying me alive.

“Are you sure?” Miles said. “Lots of kids draw flowers.”

I tapped the happy face in the middle of the flower with a small “A” for a nose. “I’m sure.”

I dragged in a breath. I wasn’t that child anymore, helplessly riding out the shockwaves of other people’s actions on my life.

“Pickle,” Arkady said, concern in his eyes, “there’s blood crawling over your skin.”

Fire laced my veins and snaked up my spine. I stoked that bonfire with a dark rage that blazed behind my eyes, threatening to ignite everything.

Sherlock Holmes famously said, “…when you have excluded the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

This was mine: My father had taken away my magic. He’d then reached out to a Jezebel with some kind of coded message, making him more deeply entwined with this mystery than I’d ever imagined. Had he somehow always known what I was? Was this book part of some long con?

Was I?

“Hey, breathe.” Miles kept his breathing slow and measured until I had matched it. “What do you want to do?”

I bundled up all my complicated emotions around my dad and shut them down along with my sputtering blood armor. I’d spent the past fifteen years in a state of uncertainty around him and I’d had enough of the past hanging over me. It was time for answers—and for closure. “Find out Adam Cohen’s game once and for all.”

And hope it didn’t cost me everything.