Devil's Business by Caitlin Kittredge Read Free Book Online

to be the howling of the air was in fact screams, his own and others. Screams as the vast plain before them shifted and changed, the red sands shifting and forming faces, which stared at him with lidless eyes before vanishing under the next gust.
    He tried to shut his eyes and shut out the grit, close his mouth and gulp down a breath, but his eyes and lips were pinned back, fine hooks through his flesh. His blood turned to crystal the moment it hit the air, and all he could do was scream until he suffocated.
    This was the first part of his time in Hell, the torture before the demon who’d pulled him into the Pit got down to the real business.
    He was dead, and in Hell, and never going free.
    “Jack.” Something poked him hard in his biceps. “I swear, you could sleep through a missile raid,” Pete muttered. The Fury sat at the foot of a driveway that snaked up a landscaped hill and ended at a small imitation castle.
    “We here?” Jack stretched and consciously did not run his hands over his face. His old face, needing a shave, broken bottle–induced scar down his cheek, no flayed flesh or flowing blood.
    “No, I liked the view and thought I’d sit a while.” Pete withered him with a glance and got out, slamming the door. Jack took his time.
    If he was starting to remember Hell, that would just be one more fuck you from the Morrigan. One more bit of shit to heap onto his psyche. Well, he already had a mountain of it. What were a few more bad dreams?
    That’s all they were. Dreams or, at the worst, faded memories he couldn’t be sure were ever real, or had happened at all.
    Pete had made it halfway up the drive, and he followed. The house was, up close, even more of a horror. They were up in the hills now, looking down at the bowl of smog shot through with the tops of skyscrapers populating downtown LA. Plaster gargoyles glared down at Jack from every available flat surface, and the door had been made to look like the entrance to a particularly upscale sex dungeon. The knocker was a demon head, and you grabbed the tongue to shove the door to and fro.
    A flash black car, the kind favored by plainclothes policemen, was parked in the circle drive, nose pointing toward the hillside. The demon door opened, and the selfsame policeman stepped out. His suit was cheap and his eyes were hard as the rock that made up the facade of the fake Gothic mansion.
    “Ms. Caldecott?” he said.
    “One and the same,” Pete told him, accepting his handshake.
    “Detective Shavers,” he said. “Ben’s partner. Well. Used to be.”
    He ignored Jack, and Jack mentally subtracted good detective from his mental checklist of Shavers. If he were a copper, he’d be all over shifty gits like himself.
    “So Ben’s told you about his pet serial killer theory?” Shavers asked.
    “He certainly has,” Pete said. “With visual aids and everything.”
    Shavers flinched. “Sorry about that. You know, I don’t normally allow civilians to just wander around an active crime scene, but I want to make something clear to you, Ms. Caldecott.” He stood aside and gestured them inside.
    The front hall was done in black tile, inlaid with the head of Bahopmet. The goat’s heads, except for horns, had been covered with a cheery rug, and paintings and photographs covered the burgundy walls, in stark contrast to the aggressively dark décor. Evil Chic, Jack thought. Early Gothic Trying Too Hard.
    “House belonged to some cult rocker in the 80s,” Shavers said. “Been a rental since, with the condition that nobody change the decoration. They shoot movies in here sometimes—that’s a real good way to make some cash in this town.”
    “Never would have guessed,” Pete said, but Shavers didn’t pick up on her attitude. “What did you want to make clear to me?”
    “That Ben is retired for a reason,” Shavers said. “That there’s nothing to this case to connect it to his old murders. Yes, they’re similar. But that’s it.”
    “They’re a