Free Hotter Than Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Mystery (Preternatural Affairs Book 3) by S.M. Reine Page B

others looked, they couldn’t see it.
    What had Suzy said to do next?
    The crystal .
    I couldn’t walk over the line without ruining the spell. I had to pick up the ritual knife—something else Suzy had pulled out of Fritz’s bag of magic tricks—and use it to cut an invisible doorway into the energy dome. That was something I already knew how to do: Bury the point of the knife in the base of the circle, drag it up the magical wall, open it like a veil. The energy parted easily.
    When I stepped through the door I had cut open, the circle didn’t break. The energy continued to pulse around me. I took shallow breaths through my mouth to keep from sneezing as I approached the body.
    The colors weren’t as vibrant now. The blood was gray, the nurse’s skin was white. It didn’t look so grotesque.
    I placed the focus crystal on the body.
    Immediately, the whole room changed. Lights flickered to life where all the bulbs had blown. The equipment that we had brought into the room vanished, leaving a smoky haze where they had stood.
    Nurse Sullivan suddenly appeared on the stairs. He looked as real as any one of Isobel’s apparitions, so perfect and so detailed that I could even see the glassy plugs in his earlobes.
    “Nice,” Janet said. Everyone could see what I was seeing now.
    Fritz took a quick step away from the vision of Nurse Sullivan, betraying his usual composure. “Well done. That’s the best reconstruction spell I’ve ever seen.”
    High praise. It would have felt nice if it had been aimed at me.
    As I watched, Nurse Sullivan took cigarettes from his pocket. He was already holding a lighter. A Zippo with one seriously ugly flaming skull stamped on the side.
    “Did anyone find that?” Suzy asked.
    Chekov shook his head. “We’ll look again.”
    We wouldn’t find it. I already knew the ugly flaming skull Zippo had gone missing, just like the pieces cut from Jay Brandon.
    Another trophy.
    Nurse Sullivan’s mouth opened in a silent cry. He pitched off the stairs, twisting as he fell, slamming the back of his head into the floor. The cigarettes flew from his hand.
    Another apparition had pushed him. This one was human-sized, draped in bleached white blankets. Stolen hospital linens. It was enough to hide the attacker’s head, shoulders, upper body, but it wasn’t enough to hide its feet—although cloven hooves probably don’t qualify as feet.
    “Definitely a demon,” I said.
    The killer was on Nurse Sullivan before he could get up. Human hands pinned him down by the throat. The demon wasn’t holding hard, but the victim couldn’t move.
    I didn’t want to see this. I didn’t want to watch him die.
    Movement on the stairs made me turn. Our murdering demon wasn’t alone.
    Another human-like figure stepped briskly into the basement wearing a baggy black sweater. The hood was lifted and I couldn’t tell if the wearer was male or female, fat or thin.
    The second figure lifted a hand into the air. My sinuses exploded, and I hit the ground on my knees, sneezing so hard that it felt like my nose was going to fly off my face.
    My throat clamped shut. I wheezed. Struggled to breathe.
    A hand gripped my shoulder. “Agent Hawke?” I couldn’t respond to Fritz. The magic was attacking me, plowing along the tracks of the spell Suzy had cast to crush the heart. “Agent Hawke? Cèsar !”
    His fist pounded into my back.
    The magic vanished. Air rushed into my lungs, filling me with dizzying oxygen.
    I blinked rapidly as my vision cleared. Everything looked normal again and the apparitions were gone.
    In fact, the magic was gone from the room, too. All of it. Every scrap of the circle that Suzy had cast, the apparition of the demon attacking Nurse Sullivan, the gray haze.
    I wiped my upper lip. I was surprised when my hand came away wet with blood.
    Hell of a sneeze.
    “What the fuck was that?” I asked.
    Suzy looked just as shocked as I felt. “In my professional opinion? I think we just saw a witch