Wretched Wicked Read online

  Black Jack’s surprise melted into an expression of open heat, anger swirling with disbelief and betrayal.

  The last card was placed by the dealer. An ace of spades. Fritz had a royal flush.

  He took every last chip from the table, now a million dollars richer.

  By the time Fritz cashed out with King One-Eyed, Black Jack had vanished.

  Black Jack jumped Fritz in an alleyway behind the Bellagio.

  Fritz had been walking alone to meet his driver, so he was unguarded and unready when Black Jack slammed his back into the wall.

  Knuckles met Fritz’s face. It was a hard blow, and it was quickly followed by harder blows—the kind that made Fritz’s ribs ache, his head swim, and his breath empty from his lungs.

  Friends or not, Black Jack never started fights he didn’t intend to finish.

  Fritz was much the same.

  He kneed Black Jack away and pinned him to the corner. They were squeezed between bricks that were crumbling from relentless desert sunlight and momentarily cooled to nighttime temperatures.

  “Assault doesn’t make me less likely to arrest you,” Fritz said, gripping Black Jack’s wrists. The witch was trying to strangle him. But Fritz was a kopis—a demon hunter imbued with legendary strength—and Black Jack’s hands couldn’t reach his throat to close around it.

  “You won’t have me arrested,” Black Jack said through his teeth, straining to push closer. “You know you won’t. I know you won’t. You’re bluffing.”

  “Want to bet?” Fritz asked.

  “You haven’t even collected on the last bet,” he said.

  “There’s still time.” The smile that crossed Fritz’s mouth was deliberately cold. He wanted to scare Black Jack into hiding. Wanted the witch to run away and vanish.

  Black Jack ripped free.

  But he didn’t run.

  He kissed Fritz hard, pressing their mouths together and jamming both their bodies into the same narrow space, tighter than ever before.

  Fritz had been thinking of doing the same thing for much of the night.

  He tangled his hand in the witch’s hair, pried his head back, and bit hard on the muscles of his neck.

  It wasn’t the first time that a poker game ended in such a way. Black Jack was an aggressive man. He’d made his intent for Fritz clear the first time they met, and Fritz, though accustomed to the company of women, hadn’t been averse to participating. Now it was a ritual they performed every few months when their paths crossed. They rubbed together like flint and steel, and they set each other on fire, and Fritz was going to arrest him soon.

  Instead of having his driver return him to Beverly Hills—a five hour drive from Las Vegas—Fritz instructed him to take them to one of his local penthouses.

  Black Jack and Fritz spent a few hours there together. They fought between starched white sheets. They bit and punched and tried to grip one another’s shoulders, and skin slipped where it met sweaty skin.

  Dawn was chasing the horizon when the driver knocked on the door of the condo. Fritz untangled himself from the limbs of the witch and rolled over to turn the alarm clock toward him. It was after six. Fritz would need his helicopter to get to a morning conference with the OPA directors.

  He sent a text message to his driver as he got dressed again, hunting for his tie, cufflinks, and wallet.

  “Where are they?” Fritz asked. Black Jack hadn’t even gotten out of bed. He was flipping through channels on the TV, one leg on top of the comforter, the other still all tangled up. His erection stirred again when he shot a smile at Fritz.

  “Where is what?” Black Jack asked.

  Fritz glared at him as he buttoned his shirt. “You didn’t win the bet. Where are they?”

  “Oh fine,” said the witch.

  He tossed Fritz’s sunglasses to him.

  “Remember what I said at the game last night,” Fritz said, tucking them into his jacket pocket. “It’s your last warning.”

  Black Jack rose from the bed. “I know.” He kissed Fritz goodbye. They hadn’t kissed like that before—like they weren’t trying to murder each other. The witch’s lips imprinted goodbyes upon Fritz’s skin, and they parted.

  Fritz was buttoning his waistcoat in the helicopter when he felt inside his jacket pocket and realized that Black Jack had gotten away with his sunglasses. The really nice ones that his late wife had given them on their last anniversary. They had been there when he played the poker game; They had still been in his jacket when Black Jack shoved it off of his body to suckle at his collarbone; And they had been returned to the pocket barely minutes earlier. But Black Jack had kissed him one last time, and they were forever gone.

  “You’re in a bad mood,” remarked Cèsar when Fritz stormed into the office. Most people avoided Fritz when he was in a bad mood, but not Cèsar. He followed him through the hall, up the elevator, and past the break room into an office with a sign that read Director Friederling by the door.

  “Do you need something, Agent Hawke?” Fritz hurled his briefcase to the desk. It slid off the edge and crashed to the floor.

  Cèsar didn’t even take a step back. “Actually, I thought you might need something. You blew in here like a bat out of hell two hours later than usual. You don’t get worked up unless there’s a really bad case.”

  Fritz braced his hands on the edge of the desk. In truth, he tore around his house like this all the time, but he usually had more control when he went into the office.

  Control. Where was his control? He never lashed out like this. Not where he could be seen.

  He contemplated the angry burn in his gut and the red marks that Black Jack’s desperate grip had left on his wrists. He wished he had his sunglasses. They were the only pair opaque enough to conceal his worst emotions.

  Cèsar was not safe in the office with him.

  Nobody would have been, but especially not Cèsar.

  “I have meetings today,” Fritz said. “Get out of here.”

  Cèsar lifted his hands in an unworried gesture of surrender. “All right. I’ll get back to paperwork. Hit you up for lunch?”

  Fritz opened his mouth to tell Cèsar to fuck off, to leave, to quit the job and run while he still had a chance of a life.

  He said, “Sure.”

  Cèsar breezed out again. Fritz caught a glimpse of Agent Takeuchi slouched at her desk, feet up on the gray half-wall that formed the cubicle. She was using yellow sticky notes to form a collage of Bic illustrations that looked like an enormous dick.

  The door shut.

  On the other side, Fritz could hear Cèsar laughing at Agent Takeuchi’s dick collage. Cèsar laughed so easily. Even during the ‘really bad’ cases, there wasn’t a day that Cèsar didn’t find humor somewhere—usually his coworkers. He was loud and obnoxious and almost shouting, filling the air with his joy until there was no oxygen left for Fritz to inhale.

  Years had elapsed since Agent Hawke had shot his former deskmate, Agent Herd. They had been pleasantly uneventful years. Cèsar was a good agent. Not a spectacular agent, but good. His close rate on cases was twelve percent lower than Agent Takeuchi’s. She was the gold standard, whereas Cèsar was a standard of government mediocrity.

  But he was the person most requested as backup. The person most requested by dispatch. The person most requested for delicate work. When agents went out to bars each night after work, Cèsar was always invited along, too. Fritz wasn’t the only one who noticed how easily Cèsar laughed. The entire office wanted to work with Agent Hawke.

  The director settled in behind his desk, steepling his hands in front of his face. He didn’t need his sunglasses to feel calm. He wasn’t going to let Black Jack ruin him. Fritz was above and beyond such pettiness.

  He pushed a button on his phone to summon Cèsar back.

  The agent returned.

  “Pretty sure ten o’clock is more brunch than lunch territory,” Cèsar said. “It’s been five minutes since you chased me off.”

  “Clo
se the door,” Fritz said.

  He did.

  When Fritz gestured, Cèsar took the chair across the desk.

  “My late wife,” Fritz said, “my Emmeline. She gave me a pair of sunglasses a few weeks before she died. I made a trip to Las Vegas last night, and I lost them.”

  Cèsar rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “Shit, man. I’m sorry. That blows.”

  And so did Black Jack.

  “Yes,” Fritz said. “It’s unfortunate. I’m finding it hard to…remember…where I might have left them.”

  “So, there’s no chance you’ll find them?”

  “Possibly. I have good men on my payroll I can use to do a search for me.”

  “I hope it works out, Director,” Cèsar said.

  Fritz managed a smile. He picked a curl of black hair off of his lapel, flicking that final vestige of his night with Black Jack into the trash bin. He pulled a file out of the top drawer of his desk as he said, “How’s your caseload? Do you have time for a trip to Phoenix?”

  “Arizona? This time of year?” Cèsar cast a miserable gaze toward the window. Los Angeles reached temperatures above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, and Phoenix was worse. “Do I have to?”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” Fritz said, “but there’s a notorious criminal in Phoenix we need to detain. The office down there is pressed for staff. They asked if we could help, since this witch recently charmed an ex-girlfriend’s car keys.”

  Cèsar’s face darkened. “What happened?”

  “She died,” Fritz said.

  “I can go to Arizona for a piece of shit like that.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  Fritz handed Cèsar an arrest warrant for Black Jack.

  It took six months for Cèsar to track Black Jack down.

  Black Jack had always been slippery, but Fritz had made the mistake of warning him that an arrest was imminent, so the witch had gone from elusive to downright invisible. For those months, Cèsar remained in Arizona, living out of a Motel 6. He filed regular reports on his activities. Fritz read them with as much obsessive regularity as he used to observe Cèsar through a scrying ball.

  If anything personal happened between Cèsar and Black Jack, it would not be in the reports. They were dry, poorly proofread, and utterly professional. Too many things could have been happening with Cèsar—and with Black Jack—that would never show on such reports.

  Cèsar would be catnip for someone like Black Jack. He perceived himself as the sexual equivalent of a feline toying with deadly mice, and it would have tickled him pink to seduce an agent Fritz sent for the arrest. Cèsar was unaware that he held any sexual appeal for other men. He wouldn’t see Black Jack’s intentions until his pants were around his ankles and his favorite pair of sunglasses were gone.

  These kinds of details, had they existed, were not included in any report.

  Fritz thought about closing the case and extracting Cèsar.

  But six months passed. And when the day of the arrest arrived, it was anticlimactic.

  A mundane slip-up led to Black Jack’s apprehension. The gambler had used his credit card once to get gas, and Cèsar caught him buying cigarettes in the station.

  Black Jack was admitted to a detention center in the Mojave Desert within hours. Fritz watched footage of Black Jack’s intake into the detention facility and tried to decide if he felt bad for putting Black Jack away.

  “Sir?” Cèsar stood in the doorway to Fritz’s office, looking travel-worn and tired.

  “Good work, Agent Hawke.” Fritz closed his laptop on the security footage of Black Jack. Even when running to the nearest Circle K for a nicotine hit, the witch had been wearing a slim, tailored suit that emphasized the narrowness of his form, like a sticky-fingered stoat. “Clean arrest, flawless paperwork, great procedure. That’s one for the books when we train new agents.”

  “If you’re teaching other agents with my work, your other agents must suck,” Cèsar said.

  Fritz couldn’t help but laugh, and he startled himself with the sound. He wasn’t like Cèsar. He didn’t laugh easily. It felt a little painful coming out.

  This time, Cèsar didn’t laugh along.

  “I searched Black Jack when I arrested him.” Cèsar set a hard case on Fritz’s desk. He’d found Fritz’s sunglasses. “When you said that you’ve got guys on payroll who can take care of stuff for you, you were talking about me.”

  Fritz pushed his sunglasses into his hair, relieved by the restored weight of the frames against his pate. “Is that a problem?”

  “Nah.” There was no conceit in Cèsar’s casual shrug, as always. “Wish you’d have told me, though.”

  “I’m not that kind of man.”

  “Guess you’re not.” Cèsar jerked his thumb toward the door. “The guys are going to The Olive Pit for drinks tonight after work. Wanna come? I know that Suze—Agent Takeuchi—wants to see how much tequila she can force into me. It’s bound to be hilarious.”

  The nape of Fritz’s neck prickled. “You don’t drink alcohol.”

  “Suze is hard to argue with.”

  That she was. “I have other work,” Fritz said, attempting to close the door on a rare opportunity to see Cèsar Hawke drunk. And then he fouled it up by saying, “I’ll make an appearance if I can.”

  Two hours later, Fritz was in the helicopter, on his way to the Mojave Desert detention facility.

  It was criminal for Black Jack to look so disheveled on the floor of an empty cell. His bespoke suit had been stripped away. The gel had been sprayed from his hair by a hose, leaving his curls wild and dripping. Without his glamours, he was only fractionally less pretty.

  The witch’s eyes sparked with the barest mirth when Fritz came inside, careful not to pass the outer boundary of the pentagram on the floor. That magic not only guaranteed Black Jack couldn’t cast his way out of custody, but also protected Fritz from attack—as long as he stayed outside.

  “Took you long enough to get here,” Black Jack said, climbing to his feet. He wore the same stiff black linen the Union used to dress all their prisoners. Black concealed blood marvelously. “Let’s go.”

  Fritz didn’t move. “Go where?”

  “I don’t know. Your place or mine. I don’t care, but I bet your place is nicer.”

  “You’ve committed a crime. You’ve been arrested. You will be detained for the rest of your life. I can’t change anything about that at this point.”

  “Bullshit!” Black Jack’s eyes were warier than Fritz had ever seen them, but his tone remained playful. “You’re a kopis. I’m a witch. This here—this arrest, our fights, the whole investigation—is just courtship.”

  “I’m not gay.” Fritz wasn’t feeling defensive. This was a fact. He was not gay, not courting Black Jack, not flirting via apprehension.

  “We’re talking about something a lot bigger than that. More fatal than friendship, more permanent than family, closer than the oldest friends.” Black Jack bared his inner wrist again, much like he had during that night at King One-Eyed’s poker game. He wasn’t asking to be arrested now. He was asking to be bled. “You don’t have an aspis, so take me. You know you want me.”

  It was true that Fritz could have taken him as an aspis, with or without Black Jack’s consent. The Office of Preternatural Affairs preferred that all kopides be partnered to aspides, as they provided a degree of innate protection from demons, angels, and other witches that a kopis couldn’t get elsewhere.

  But Fritz could only ever have one aspis. One soulmate. It was a card he kept close to his chest, waiting for the right hand to play it.

  “I don’t want you,” Fritz said simply.

  “Come on. You wouldn’t have arrested me if you didn’t.” Black Jack was getting desperate, and that too was an unflattering look on the man. “Just like how you wouldn’t have sent that cute little fish to nibble at my tackle if you hadn’t wanted him to bite. What was his name? Agent Cèsar Hawke?”

  Fr
itz reached into his jacket. In one pocket, he had discharge papers that could pardon Black Jack, hopefully now wise enough to stop selling hexes in Fritz’s jurisdiction. In the other pocket, he had sunglasses.

  He tossed his sunglasses at Black Jack’s feet.

  “Your consolation prize for losing our bet,” Fritz said. “Enjoy eternity in darkness.”

  Black Jack was pounding on the door and screaming before the director got ten feet down the hall. Fritz dropped the discharge papers in the recycling bin before returning to the helicopter.

  As soon as Fritz had cellular reception, he got a phone call. He would have answered to no name except the one on his BlackBerry’s screen in five bold letters. For a moment, he was beside himself, lost in his own past, remembering the scent of his sweat on a copper-skinned woman’s flesh. Then he lifted the phone to his ear. “Belle,” he answered huskily.

  “It’s your target, the guy I’m investigating,” she replied. “He’s in trouble.”

  Fritz wanted to talk to this woman right now, but not about this. Isobel Stonecrow was the only woman on the planet he trusted. He had conversations to offer her that were much more delicate and personal than the matter of investigating Agent Cèsar Hawke.

  It was a formality, really. Fritz had studied Cèsar long enough on his own to be sure that it was safe to induct him into more secretive operations. But Belle had a good head on her shoulders. She saw things differently than Fritz. If anyone was going to find a problem with Cèsar Hawke, it would be Belle.

  Still, Fritz had doubted she’d find anything.

  “What kind of trouble?” Fritz asked, pinning the BlackBerry between his ear and shoulder while strapping himself into his seat. “Did he forget to mail his DVDs back to Netflix again?”

  “He murdered a woman,” Belle said. “He’s on the run.”

  Chapter 4

  At fourteen years old, Fritz Friederling attended a boarding school in the German Alps specifically for young men such as him. Men who were not raised by parents, but nannies and tutors. Men from families with money red as blood and old as time. Men for whom anything less than total mastery of the world was unacceptable.