Demon On Deck (Bedeviled AF #2) Paperback

Chapter 1

Spa visits were fifty percent less relaxing with a murder in the building. Even spas as painstakingly detailed and chic as Thermae, where no expense had been spared to re-create ancient Roman baths.

The corpse had been fished out of the tepidarium, the largest of four caves at Thermae, each one designed to immerse visitors in an authentic experience.

I looked up at the ceiling arching over the warm pool. The knotted-up tension in my neck and shoulders had eased thanks to the hint of lavender in the air and the soothing instrumental music piped in through speakers hidden in the rough-hewn rocks forming the walls and ceiling. Both were highly appreciated to tone down my amped excitement and nerves on my first solo lead case, even though I was still a level two operative.

Gently glowing pot lights and pillar candles in heavy glass containers painted the ripples golden. It looked heavenly. However, as tempted as I was to book a treatment, a dead person’s bathwater was not a selling point.

That said, this was far nicer than a normal crime scene.

Slipping on a pair of latex gloves, I crouched down next to the victim, careful not to slide on the damp pool deck pavers made of sumptuous blue stone, and winced at the soreness in my muscles. My glutes resented split squats with a fiery passion.

Mason Trinh, my fellow Maccabee operative, swiped beneath the woman’s thumbnail with a thin, moistened swab. “Three guesses as to cause of death and the first two don’t count. Or does that fall under higher critical thinking and knock you out of the running?”

A heart attack or drowning would have been reasonable assumptions, were it not for the fat wooden stake jammed through the woman’s heart.

“Oh, you’re in fine form today, you cranky old stump,” I said cheerfully.

His mouth kicked up in a half-smile, his bushy mustache twitching in amusement.

“Nice heft and girth, classic lines.” I nodded in approval. “This stake is a beauty for killing vamps, but it’s an odd choice of murder weapon for an Eishei Kodesh.” I hadn’t yet confirmed that our victim was a human with magic abilities, but it was a solid assumption. Had she been a vampire, all that would have been left of her was a clump of ashes, and stakes didn’t work on demons.

Ask me how I knew.

Mason sealed up the swab as evidence. His careworn expression deepened, the bags under his eyes seeming to develop new bags. “Forty years as an operative, I thought I’d seen it all, but staking someone?” He gestured to a hank of his graying hair with a latex-gloved hand, shooting me an accusing glare. “I’ve aged before my time. Idiots. What is wrong with people?”

I stood up and smoothed out my navy pinstriped trousers. “Don’t look at me. I’m neither stupid nor depraved.”

“True. I’ve got six or seven different adjectives for your list.”

“That’s still fourteen shorter than my selection for you,” I said sweetly. This was regular banter for us. Actually, I was one of the few people who looked forward to our interactions, and this was how he spoke to operatives he half respected and tolerated.

Come to think of it, I’d never met anyone who’d earned his outright admiration.

Other than Director Michael Fleischer, that is.

Mason was a legend in Maccabee circles for single-handedly solving several high-profile cases that had baffled the organization. However, the Vietnamese Canadian operative had moved from investigations to forensics about twenty years ago with a very public declaration that he’d rather spend the rest of his working days with corpses than the incompetent living.

Some days I didn’t blame him.

I returned my attention to the dead woman, whom I judged to be in her early forties. The top of her navy bathing suit was soaked in blood, one of the straps hanging off a shoulder. Funny how being stabbed ruined perfectly good swimwear. Less expected was that although her hazel eyes were wide open and her lips were parted in a slight gasp of surprise, other than that, there were no signs of tension like clenched fists, or any indication that she’d struggled with her attacker at all.

“This feels personal,” I said.

“Really?” Mason said scathingly enough to flay a person. “You don’t think someone happened to be carrying a stake, looked in at reception, and thought, I could book a facial, but that’s more of a Tuesday move.”

“Aw, there’s the tone of voice that makes newbs cry.”

He chuckled. “Worked on you more than once.”

“I’m older and deader inside now.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“Are you done with the sarcasm?”

He shrugged. “Eh. But please. Continue.”

“This wasn’t random,” I said, “and I’d also rule out a contract killing, unless the murderer had instructions to send a message. Off the top of my head, that narrows the possibilities to a vamp or demon compulsion to render her motionless.”

“White flame magic is also a contender,” he said.

Those Eishei Kodesh dealt in burning passions. They amped up people’s emotions, and a powerful one could magically flood someone with calm to the point of remaining practically comatose if attacked. Handy for them, but a pain in the butt to deal with as the operative bringing them in. I hated having my emotions toyed with, for more than one reason.

“True,” I said. “Still, an Eishei Kodesh would require a lot of upper-body strength to jam that stake through skin, muscle, and bone.”

Say what you would about vampires, the same magic that enhanced their speed, hearing, smell, and strength made them vulnerable to a simple wooden stake. That still didn’t make it easy to use one. I regularly did punishing weight training sessions and went on long runs to maintain my strength and stamina, and I didn’t expect to fight many vampires in my line of work. I mostly policed Eishei Kodesh crimes.

All of which brought me back to how it would be much harder to use a stake on a human. Especially for the average person with a desk job and perilously little in the way of shoulder strength.

Ooh, this case was going to prove fun to puzzle out. Not that I wished death on anyone, but I’d spent the last two days helping out on an embezzlement case involving a fried chicken chain, where I’d combed through reams of mind-numbing files that reeked of grease.

“What else do you read from the body?” Mason liked to lob pop quizzes at operatives that had only two grades: begrudging pass or withering contempt.

The woman sported gel polish—intact and recently touched up—on all her nails and her makeup was tastefully applied.

“She came here before work,” I said. “A business owner, maybe a CEO?”

Her shoulder-length strawberry-blond hair fanned out on the deck around her head like a peacock’s tail, though her cool undercut on one side was in need of a touch-up.

“Not any field that was too conservative,” I added, “given her hairstyle.”

“The spa owner said our vic ran a private consulting firm,” Mason said. “She’s been coming to Thermae every six months or so for a few years now.”

An elaborate tattoo of vines and flowers peeked out the top of her bloody bathing suit. Sometimes tattoos had significance and sometimes they didn’t. I made a note to get a photo from Mason and look into the design later.

“What else do we know about the vic?” I said.

Mason snapped a few photos of the body. “Only what she filled out when she booked the appointment. Emily Astor. Red Flame. There’s a number and address in her file.”

Businesses dealing with Eishei Kodesh in any hands-on manner were required to have them sign liability forms in case their magic was unexpectedly unleashed, but also so that practitioners knew which safeguards to have in place. Fire extinguishers, for example, if their client was a Red Flame. That magic devoured matter and burned things away—all it took was simple physical contact.

All Eishei Kodesh, translated from the Hebrew as Holy Fire People, had fire-based magic. The same flame that burned for eight days and nights in the Hanukkah miracle was used back around 150 BCE in a ritual, now lost in the fog of time, to create inherent magic ability. There was only one kind at first (the red flame ability), which, since it was the sole type of magic, didn’t initially have a color classification.

The magic spread over the centuries through other races and religions, and, like many a trait, changed and evolved. Maccabees catalogued the new powers using a system of colors seen from largest to smallest in a flame: red, orange, yellow, white, and blue. They coincided with the order of the most common power to the rarest.

I sidestepped a puddle. “There were easier ways to kill Ms. Astor. Easier places too.” Whoever had done this hadn’t taken her out in a parking garage, but in a place where Emily went to relax. Where she let down her guard. That was more evidence that her murderer had a serious beef with her.

Speaking of security, how did the perp get into the pool undetected by the owner? There was an emergency exit door in the short corridor outside the changing rooms, which led to the alley, but I’d verified that the crash bar was dead-bolted from the inside.

I made a note to ask the owner about other employees with keys.

The other way into Thermae was through the front door, and only the owner was currently working. Mason said she’d been up front until she locked that door to come give her client a massage and found her dead.

“Where’s the owner now?” I blotted my forehead with the back of my hand. It was muggy as shit in here. Good thing my suit jacket hid pit stains. “What’s her name?”

“Dawn Keller.” Mason fished an evidence marker out of his bag and laid it next to the victim’s chest as a size indicator of the stake. “Rachel offered to stay with Ms. Keller in her office.” Rachel, another forensics tech, was a calming presence in the worst of crises. “Ms. Keller was understandably hysterical.”

Or a good actor with a killer motive. Time would tell which it was.

However, if she was innocent, then she had my sympathies. It was bad enough finding a dead body, especially one she’d gotten to know as a regular customer, but if the media got hold of this, her business would suffer. A one-off murder didn’t generally warrant Maccabee intervention with the press, but maybe I could petition the director to keep the spa’s name out of any news reports in support of a local business.

“Did you sedate her at all?” I said, hoping Mason replied in the negative. It would counteract my magic ability to spot any weakness in Dawn when I questioned her.

I couldn’t determine if someone was lying—that was a different Blue Flame talent—but most people showed signs of strain when concocting a story. I’d read those weaknesses and draw my own conclusions. My gut insisted that given the potential negative impact on Ms. Keller’s spa, she wasn’t involved, but I’d keep an open mind until that was definitively ruled out.

“No sedative,” Mason said.

“I appreciate that.” I made some notes on my phone, along with follow-up questions for our coroner, Dr. Malika Ayad, back at Vancouver Maccabee HQ.

It was best to interview Ms. Keller as quickly as possible, but first…

There was no reason to use the magic I’d inherited from my unknown demon daddy to check if Emily was a half shedim. Emily’s death wasn’t anything like that of the six infernals who were murdered in brutal ritualistic killings for their blood. However, it had been less than a week since wrapping up that investigation. I couldn’t shake off the images of their tortured bodies, never mind the persistent inkling that they were part of a much bigger scheme, with more deaths certain to come.

I slid into my magic vision.

Each type of Eishei Kodesh magic involved one characteristic of fire. Blue Flames illuminated things. We shone light on that which was hidden, applying our powers to everything from mineral veins deep underground to flaws in existing physical structures or technology.

My specialty was people, and while my talent didn’t work postmortem, my half-demon powers allowed me to identify other infernals. It was trickier when they were no longer breathing, but not impossible.

See, all Eishei Kodesh magic was synesthete, though it presented differently for the various types. We Blue Flames experienced our magic visually. I saw blue dots or streaks in people.

The main part of my demon magic had the same synesthetic quality, though I had no idea whether that was always the case or it was because it piggybacked on my Eishei Kodesh ability.

Regardless, there were shifting blue shadows in the backs of infernals’ heads—in our primal brain. This was the section responsible for survival, drive, and instinct, and the place humans operated from during a loss of rationality, when we were overpowered by strong emotions. Generally, I saw them only on people who were alive.

But as I’d recently discovered, the shifting shadows in an infernal’s brain swam down to harden into a fat blue double knot in the middle of the chest when under stress. Like when they were being murdered. All people felt shock and fear in their upper chests, but with infernals, it manifested as that double knot—and remained there postmortem.

I checked the victim’s upper chest first, relieved it was knot-free. “Can I turn her head to the side?”

“There’s no blunt trauma to the skull,” Mason said.

“I want to examine it anyway, if that won’t compromise anything.”

He motioned his assent, no doubt thinking that I was a total idiot but liking me enough to let me be one.

I carefully maneuvered her skull. No shifting shadows here either. Not that I expected it. The two other half shedim I’d examined after their deaths hadn’t shown those shadows, but best to double-check.

Emily Astor wasn’t an infernal.

Sighing in relief that this wasn’t a hate crime on top of being a terrible way to die, I pulled off my gloves with a sharp snap and thanked Mason.

He grunted, removed a pair of scissors from his bag, and cut open Emily’s bathing suit. The stake had been jammed in with so much force that it was splintered at the entry point.

Her tattoo covered her torso. It was misshapen from the swelling and bruising on her chest, but once the design was revealed, an odd detail emerged.

A perfect two-inch circle of the tattoo was missing around the wound.

“You know,” I heard myself saying, “somehow I don’t think she got herself tattooed specifically with a big stake-me-here piece missing. That’s…huh.”

“Emily Astor,” Mason said slowly, “said she was a Red Flame.”

I gestured to the perfect circle. “This is not normal⁠—”

Mason held up a hand. “Say she lied. Say she was a Yellow Flame, the kind with inherent healing magic.” He sighed. “That would explain the tattoo removal, but it would have kicked in while her killer was staking her, and also fixed her ribs. Any guesses as to how many of those are still broken?”

I scowled. “I’m going to guess it’s not the answer it should be for a Yellow Flame healer, which would be zero.”

“Two.”

“Then what’s going on here?” I threw my hands up. “Is this another teachable moment?”

“No.” His seriousness alarmed me. The most experienced forensics expert on Maccabee staff was honestly perplexed about something?

“The gap definitely isn’t on purpose. It’s not part of the design.” I narrowed my eyes, comparing the ink-free area with the rest of the tattoo. “It’s as if the stake broke the magic anchoring the ink in place and that much of her skin healed before she died. Except humans don’t require magic to prevent automatic tattoo healing.” A chill came over me. “Only vampires do.”

Vamps’ fast-acting healing abilities meant they couldn’t keep a tattoo on their body without Eishei Kodesh magic pinning it to their skin. Without the assistance of this human magic, or in a case where that magic pinning was broken, say with a stake, a vamp’s tattoo would start to disappear.

Except, there was one enormous problem with that line of thinking.

“Vamps don’t leave a body behind when they’re killed.” Mason muttered under his breath about clusterfucks happening three months away from his retirement. Operatives died in our line of work, and while most survived to live out their golden years, that downtime was well-earned.

I barely registered his comment over my heartbeat thudding against my chest like a car careening into a concrete barrier. In a world where 99.99% of all vamps were turned humans, supernatural beings who thoughtfully vanished without a trace when staked, there existed a legendary rarity.

Born vampires, also known as Primes.

The odds were against Emily being one, given that even with all my Maccabee intel, I knew of only a single existing Prime. However, in the pro column was the tattoo disruption and how born vamps were the sole undead who could grow their hair. Our vic had that undercut in need of a trim, whereas for a made vamp they couldn’t grow their hair unless they got extensions.

If my hypothesis was correct?

A breath shuddered out of me.

Say hello to Emily Astor, rare bloodsucker and giant liar. No Red Flame for her, oh no. She was a Prime, the one breaking the undead mold. I didn’t know if Primes left a body when they were killed, because there were no records of Prime murders anywhere in the Maccabee archives.

Believe me, I’d checked after I broke up with my ex.

How had someone gotten a jump on a Prime? That should have been impossible.

I took a deep breath, but inhaling a field’s worth of lavender wouldn’t calm me down. Even other vampires or demons shouldn’t have been able to compel Emily to meekly comply with her own death.

Vampires cared a lot about power. They were obsessed with presenting the image of being unkillable, untouched by the ravages of time. If word got out that a Prime, the flagship symbol of their immortality and unbeatable strength, was murdered, well, that very dangerous population was not going to be pleased.

They would, in fact, seek to restore that image of unassailable power at any cost. Knowing vampires as well as I did, that PR maneuver wasn’t going to be pretty. It would, in fact, be antonyms of “pretty.”

I raised my eyes to the ceiling. Bravo, universe, you just turned what should have been a fun murder puzzle into a terrifying mess.