Wretched Wicked Read online

  Wretched Wicked

  A Preternatural Affairs Novella

  S M Reine

  OTHER SERIES BY SM REINE

  The Descent Series

  The Ascension Series

  Seasons of the Moon

  The Cain Chronicles

  Tarot Witches

  Preternatural Affairs

  War of the Alphas

  The Mage Craft Series

  Dana McIntyre Must Die

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  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  This book is sold DRM-free so that it can be enjoyed in any way the reader sees fit. Please keep all links and attributions intact when sharing. All rights reserved.

  Text, covers, and layout © SM Reine 2018.

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  Published by Red Iris Books

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  Reno, NV 89512

  Contents

  About Wretched Wicked

  Wretched Wicked

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Epilogue

  Next

  About the Author

  About Wretched Wicked

  Cèsar Hawke works for the Office of Preternatural Affairs. He’s an agent in the Magic Violations Department, hunting down witches who break the law, saving lives, and getting caught up in a lot more trouble than he’s paid to deal with.

  Fritz Friederling is his boss. The director. The heir of the Friederling fortune, earned by mining in Hell with human slaves. A man who puts away witches for life without trial. Inheritor of his father’s legacy, and his grandfather’s, and all the ruthless men who came before.

  But they didn’t always work together. Not before, and not after. Once they were strangers, and now they’re something else. More fatal than family, more permanent than marriage, closer than the oldest friends, until death do they part.

  A novella that should be read after the events of Preternatural Affairs.

  Wretched Wicked

  Preternatural Affairs #10

  Chapter 1

  It was a stale winter day when an unremarkable report quietly entered Fritz Friederling’s inbox and changed his life forever. This report was one of a dozen proposed investigations upon which he needed to perform triage. Which dangerous witches could the Office of Preternatural Affairs afford to hunt? Which ones could they not afford to ignore? Which would be delayed, deprioritized, or dismissed? And who should be dragged off in a black bag, erased from America’s landscape in a blink?

  As the director of the Magical Violations Department, Fritz oversaw so many investigations that they had taken on the mundanity of receiving his daily coffee from his butler, and he authorized only a small percentage. Few investigations distinguished themselves as meaningful; fewer still were memorable.

  At a glance, this proposal was like the others. A witch was using magic openly for unauthorized professional use. He had acquired no permits from the OPA. This was likely because he didn’t know the OPA existed—few Americans did—but that didn’t mean regulations wouldn’t apply to him. It would have been well within Fritz’s rights to black bag any of them.

  Still, Fritz tagged many such proposals as low priority and bumped them down the list for a quiet day that wouldn’t come for years, if at all. And he was about to rubber stamp that proposal until he saw the witch’s field of work.

  He was a private investigator.

  Los Angeles was lousy with private investigators. In a glitzy world of haves and have-nothings, entire industries bloomed around covetousness, for better or worse. Private investigators were the worst. They were lifestyle upskirts seeking scandal, slipping their fingers where fingers were unwanted. They ripped away the disguises that society’s upper echelons were entitled to wear with no regard for ramifications. They murdered entire stock portfolios in exchange for pocketing pennies.

  Private investigators were have-nothing men who destroyed men-who-have like Fritz.

  Bottom feeders, all of them.

  Fritz threw the rest of the proposals in the trash and began a new case based upon the magical PI. There was no need to mobilize a team for it. The witch in question hadn’t used his magic to hurt anybody, so there was not yet a crime scene to process or a specific incident to uncover. Agent Herd graciously offered to look into the business while dropping off dry-cleaning in that neighborhood. Fritz declined.

  Instead, aloof Director Fritz Friederling cancelled his afternoon meetings, bought a glamour, and booked a consultation with Cèsar Hawke, Private Investigator.

  Mr. Hawke kept an office in a strip mall near the apartment he called home. Fritz knew where both of these places were located because Fritz already knew everything that the law knew about Hawke. Everything. His juvenile record was sealed, but money crossing the right palm unveiled every unremarkable detail of his petty larcenies. There was no adult record. Since turning eighteen years old, Hawke hadn’t been in trouble once.

  Not officially, anyway.

  Fritz kept digging in the hours before the appointment. Every man had skeletons in his closet. The only question was how deep the closet went.

  The director looked for news stories involving Hawke’s name, such as celebrity exposés, but there were none. In fact, the only time he’d appeared in newsprint was when a poem he wrote in third grade had been selected for the Governor’s Award of Excellence. The article included a photo of a round-faced little boy proudly holding a gift certificate for Sizzler. Fritz had to do an internet search to figure out what Sizzler was. It had nothing to do with corruption, and Fritz discarded that information.

  There was no sign of wrongdoing in Hawke’s business, either. He kept up on necessary paperwork and state taxes in a manner Fritz would describe as flawless, were it not for the numerous mustard stains on the forms. Fritz imagined a witch hunched over his desk eating a hoagie, stacks of photos beside him, a cigar smoldering in an ash tray.

  Fritz dug and dug and dug, but he found no bones.

  He disguised himself before arriving at the appointment. Fritz had carefully cultivated a protective shell of anonymity, and people wouldn’t recognize him as readily as a Gates or a Zuckerberg. Yet as a billionaire heir of the Friederling fortune, there was no such thing as an overabundance of caution when approaching private investigators. The glamour made Fritz look shorter and darker and unrecognizable as a Friederling.

  Cèsar Hawke was not short, nor did he have the innocently round face of a child excited to go to a salad bar. He was over six feet tall and broad to match. His hair was such a smoky black that it looked as if it should have smudged against his square jawline. He had kind eyes. Fritz hadn’t expected those eyes.

  The consultation was very short.

  “I’ll pay you to look into Sadie Hackett,” Fritz said, using a voice that was a full octave deeper than normal. “She’s the leading lady in a movie I’m producing. I suspect she’s violated the terms of her contract by taking boxing lessons. Our insurance won’t pay if she’s unable to film for an injury unrelated to work—we’ll lose millions. Catch her boxing, and I’ll pay you a five-figure fee.”

  “All right,” Mr. Hawke said, “no problem.” And he produced an agreement for Fritz to sign. It was boilerplate stuff. Hawke looked embarrassed about asking him to read everything before signing. “My lawyer stuck in some confusing language.”

  Fritz pretended to read. Out the corner of his eye, he absorbed the details of Hawke’s office. The private investigator was cluttered but organized. Everyth
ing smelled faintly of cumin. Thumb-sized crystals cured on the windowsill where they could catch moonlight. The safe was barely large enough for a single handgun. Hawke had framed a poem—his award-winning third grade poem?—and it was on the wall next to a signed poster of a Jim Butcher cover.

  Within minutes, Fritz departed with blurry photocopies of the work agreement, (“For your records, if you have any,” the witch said). An hour later, without knowing that he was observed from a taqueria across the street, Cèsar Hawke left to investigate Sadie Hackett.

  This woman was indeed an actress and was indeed shooting a movie. Fritz had no professional affiliation with Sadie. He’d only slept with her once, after a Golden Globes party, and their night had been unremarkable. Starlets were dispassionate in self-prostituting for exposure. Fritz seldom got much out of the interaction, and Sadie had been especially dissatisfying, since she’d sneaked a shirtless photo of him and sent it to her friends. The leak had left Fritz with little more than a mild bitterness on the back of his tongue.

  Fritz had selected Sadie Hackett as a test. Her skeletons were buried deep, but she had skeletons aplenty.

  It only took a couple of days for Hawke to call Fritz back.

  “Sadie Hackett isn’t boxing,” Hawke said. “I kept her on twenty-four-hour surveillance and hacked her calendar. Nada. Mostly I just got a lot of pictures of the target with her boyfriend. Seems to be all she’s up to when she’s not on set.”

  “Who is she dating?” Fritz was watching Hawke through a scrying ball, which showed the man’s visage as if seen through an inch of water. Hawke was looking through photographs at his desk in that strip mall office. There was no hoagie with mustard. There was only a tall glass of some sludgy vegetable smoothie.

  “I didn’t investigate who Sadie Hackett is dating.” Hawke was looking at a picture of the actress in flagrante delicto. Sadie’s boyfriend was actually a girlfriend. Given that her agent had positioned her career atop the teetering pillars of Good American Girl roles in patriotic films, her status as a lesbian could torpedo the film Fritz claimed to produce. It would certainly torpedo her career.

  Sadie was a bitch. Fritz wasn’t worried about her. He was worried about Hawke casting a miniaturized circle of power on his desk, surrounding a small alchemical kit.

  “I asked you a question,” Fritz said. “Who’s Sadie Hackett dating?”

  Hawke picked up another photo, brow crimped as his too-kind eyes tracked over the actress’s face. She was leaning in to kiss her girlfriend. He had no idea that Fritz was looking over his shoulder, scrying the situation, yet he turned the picture over on the desk as if to conceal it.

  What did that expression mean? Was he…worried?

  “I didn’t investigate Sadie Hackett’s love life.” Hawke dropped the photo into a shredder.

  “I’ll see who she’s with when you give me the photos anyway,” Fritz said. “And if you don’t give me the photos, I won’t pay your fee.”

  “Of course you won’t, asshole,” Hawke said.

  He hung up and tossed the phone to his desk.

  Surprised, Fritz called him back. “You heard me say I won’t pay you if you don’t complete the investigation, right?”

  Hawke hung up again and continued shredding the rest of the photos he’d taken of Sadie Hackett. He also shredded his agreement with Fritz.

  Fritz watched from afar, hands steepled.

  He had a small stack of paperwork to close the case on Cèsar Hawke’s use of witchcraft, but he only needed to answer one of the questions: Was Cèsar a threat to society?

  Checking that box would be enough to get Cèsar detained for the rest of his life.

  Professionally, Fritz deprioritized the case and shuffled it to the bottom of his department’s to-do list, where nobody would see it. Privately, he continued scrying through Cèsar’s life, looking for a reason to detain him.

  Or worse. A reason to hire him.

  Cèsar Hawke met clients during normal business hours and followed targets in the evenings. When not at work, he seldom left his apartment, preferring to read comic books or watch Netflix DVDs. He had a girlfriend for the first few weeks that Fritz performed surveillance. After a while, she stopped calling him, and Cèsar, seemingly baffled but unhurt, moved on with his life.

  Aside from that, his only socialization was familial. He helped his grandfather haul trash, went to the gym with his brother Domingo, and enjoyed regular lunches with a teenage sister named Ofelia.

  Watching them through the scrying ball was boring, but not exactly a chore. All the Hawkes were well-proportioned people. Only in Los Angeles could such symmetry and quality of appearance be accepted as average. They easily could have been a sitcom family on any major TV network.

  See Cèsar walk in on Domingo having a spousal argument. Hear the audience laugh.

  See Cèsar investigate a cheating wife. Watch the credits roll.

  On Friday nights they made pupusas, and Fritz scried unseen from the next position on the counter, as if waiting to remove the sizzling dough from the skillet. The grandfather Cèsar called ‘Pops’ made a joke, and Fritz chuckled with the Hawkes while remotely signing off on the arrest of an entire coven of thirteen witches.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he observed Cèsar’s exercise routine. For a man as well-built as Cèsar, he spent very little time at his local club—a closet-sized 24 Hour Fitness in the same shopping center as his office. It was baffling how the man could have such defined trapezius muscles when he half-heartedly performed shrugs using the Smith machine.

  During Cèsar’s ‘leg day’ (which was every other Friday, spent watching Doctor Who on a treadmill at three miles per hour), a healer repaired Fritz’s shattered fists. The director had accidentally gotten into a bar fight with a werewolf. The werewolf had won the battle, but Fritz’s silver-armed agents had won the war. He’d nodded with satisfaction when the werewolf took a bullet to the brain. Cèsar apologized when he took too long occupying equipment at the gym.

  On Saturdays, Cèsar met Ofelia for lunch. Fritz nodded along with the conversation, dining upon shark fin caught freshly in Japan while the Hawkes ate Quarter Pounders.

  Interest surely would wane eventually. Fritz was confident of this. He was not obsessed with Cèsar Hawke; he was just bored with the routine occupying the rest of his life. Even cocaine-fueled yacht parties featuring big-breasted models got dull after a while. Soon he’d have an assassin on his tail, or he’d be roped into Friederling family drama. Soon he would forget about the Hawkes.

  Except that Cèsar’s routine broke before Fritz’s did.

  One Saturday, Ofelia didn’t appear for lunch.

  Cèsar was left sitting alone on a bench outside McDonald’s, checking his phone with that same worried expression he’d used for Sadie Hackett. Fritz almost reflexively checked his phone too, just to see if Ofelia had canceled on them. Of course she hadn’t. Fritz was not included in the Hawke family group text message.

  Fritz was called away to a meeting. He tried to forget the missed lunch. Despite her obvious adoration for her brother, Ofelia was still a teenager. There was no reason to think anything was wrong. And even if something had gone awry, the matters of Cèsar Hawke’s life were none of Fritz’s business.

  The instant his teleconference ended, Fritz returned to his office to scry.

  He waved a hand over the ball, and images swirled to the surface.

  The private investigator was driving his car, clutching the steering wheel like it had insulted his grandfather. Cèsar should have been indoors. A rare hurricane was descending upon Los Angeles, and rain pounded through a crooked car window he couldn’t roll fully shut. His left sleeve was sodden. There was a baseball bat in the passenger seat where Ofelia should have been sitting. The worry shadowing Cèsar’s eyes had sparked with anger.

  Once Fritz adjusted the scrying ball’s focus to peer into the car Cèsar was following, he understood.

  There were four incubi in that car.

&
nbsp; Demons.

  They bore the pallid skin and distinctive leather gear of the Silver Needles—a gang of incubi living in Los Angeles’s Helltown neighborhood. Human trafficking was the profession and passion of their clan. It didn’t take significant mental math to realize what had happened to a teenage girl who was almost as tall as her brother and almost as pretty.

  Fritz shot out of his chair so quickly that it tumbled to the carpet. Its upturned wheels were still spinning by the time Fritz had shouted his first orders to the Magic Violations Department.

  Cèsar Hawke, amusingly wholesome and dull, was going after demons.

  Of all the times that Fritz had looked in on Cèsar, there had been no indication that the man had anything to do with the infernal, or even any witches that he wasn’t related to. It was common for witches in America to have no idea there were other preternaturals. Witches were a dime a dozen, and demons rarer. There was no way that Cèsar would know how to protect himself from demons.

  The Office of Preternatural Affairs needed to find the incubi before Cèsar did.

  Yet the same unwitting competence Cèsar showed in his tax forms also showed in his stalking methods. He was an expert tail. He turned ruthless when motivated, and there was no indication of his quiet politeness in any of the glimpses Fritz scried during the chase. Cèsar drove over curbs. He blew through red lights. He parked, flung open his door, and vaulted over a low fence to slop through muddy sand toward the shore.

  Cèsar arrived at the storm-tossed beachside hut where Ofelia was imprisoned.

  It took ten minutes for the Office of Preternatural Affairs to follow.