The Eldritch Conspiracy Read online

  2

  The explosion attracted the notice of the U.S. authorities. They arrived in record time: Border Patrol, DEA, CIA. The hole in the desert floor was a popular place for the next few hours. I didn’t know any of the agents, but I had a few friends in high places I could call on to convince the guys on-site that I was trustworthy and on the side of the angels. It also helped that I had my current passport, concealed carry permit, and FBI consultant badge hidden in zippered pockets sewn into my pant legs. Modesty be damned. I was out of those jeans in two shakes to get to my IDs once I was in custody and in a clean, well-ventilated holding cell.

  The paperwork helped more than the friends, I think.

  “Just one more time, Ms. Graves. How were MagnaChem and the drug cartel connected?”

  I sighed. “As I have said to the last four people who asked, they weren’t. I was guarding new management who were sent to the MagnaChem plant after the CEO was arrested and her board was replaced. Paulo Ortega just happened to decide to use the same town as a base, so the arrival turned into an evacuation. Serena Sanchez was the last employee out. Paulo was very annoyed that I managed to keep him from getting his hands on rich Americans to use as hostages. He’ll also likely be annoyed that I told the agents on the scene how to find the drugs and guns I spotted in the tunnel.” The man questioning me nodded, just as the four other agency representatives had. Then he left, and I sat, waiting for the next interrogator.

  Finally, a day later, after painfully thorough debriefings by each of the agencies, I was allowed to go home. The agent who escorted me out of holding let me know that Serena had been airlifted to a hospital and undergone surgery on her broken leg.

  I nearly wept when I saw my beach house, I’d been gone so long. This was probably my longest out-of-town job to date and it had definitely been one of the most tiring.

  My first call was to my attorney, Roberto Santos. When I’m traveling out of the country and have no idea when I’ll be back, I have my mail forwarded to his offices. For a hefty fee, the nice secretaries and accountants attached to his firm pay my bills, respond to crank letters and fan mail, and deal with most other types of problems. Roberto was one of my friends in high places—he’s a very well-known attorney in government circles, which is why he’s my attorney.

  “Anything to report, Roberto?” I couldn’t help but smile as I sank into my favorite recliner with a tall glass of crystal-clear water. After weeks of drinking liquids that I tried not to think about too hard, I was thrilled to have water without things floating in it. I mean, really. Water shouldn’t come with chunks.

  “Nothing other than what you already know. You certainly caused a stir this time. Three different agencies are torn between giving you a medal and charging you with obstruction of a government operation.”

  The water took on a bitter taste. “I hope you convinced them a medal was more appropriate.”

  He chuckled. “What I convinced them is that with you involved, all of the agencies had both plausible deniability of the deaths at MagnaChem and access to a large cache of weapons and drugs to splash on the front pages. I also suggested that you wouldn’t claim any credit in the press. I hope I can count on that.”

  A snorting noise came out of my nose and I nearly spit water across the floor. Instead, I swallowed and replied, “No problem. They’re welcome to the credit. I’d rather nobody even knew I was there.”

  “I thought that might be the case.” I heard a voice in the background and realized I might have interrupted him.

  “If you have an appointment, we’ll talk later. I need a few days’ rest anyway.”

  “That sounds perfect, Celia. I’ll get your mail service restored and include our bill in the first batch. Be warned, it’ll be rather large.”

  That made me laugh. He’s nothing if not honest. Another reason I like him. “Well worth it, in my opinion. I’ll be adding your bill to my bill to MagnaChem. Charge what you will.”

  I drank my water slowly, savoring it, and turned on the television to catch the latest news. Big shock—there was no mention of a small town being overrun by drug cartels just over the Mexican border. No breaking-news alerts about the murderous bastard who intentionally herded people into tunnels to be slaughtered by vampires. There were stories about similar atrocities in Africa, Indonesia, and the Middle East. Just not too close to home. Heaven forbid.

  I nearly turned off the set, but stopped when the next story came on: an update on the M. Necrose pandemic that had begun sweeping across the country a few months earlier. I’d been one of the first victims of a bacterium that turned people into zombies. I turned up the sound.

  “Mortality rates have dropped for the first time since the outbreak started,” the silver-haired anchor read from his prompter. “Los Angeles General reported only five new cases this month and all were in early stages, treatable with antibiotics. The crematorium here in Santa Maria de Luna had only one disposal this week.” The anchor took a breath as a graphic appeared on the screen: a color-coded map of the United States, showing the heaviest concentrations of the disease. “Every U.S. state now has reported cases, with the exception of Alaska and Hawaii. Officials at the Center for Magical Disease Control speculate that extra security measures for flights into Anchorage and Honolulu might have stopped the mages who were hired to infiltrate the schools.”

  Wow. The CMDC had gone mainstream since I’d been gone. That’s the problem with having no access to television for weeks. It used to be that the magical branch of the CDC in Atlanta operated in secret. I hadn’t even heard of it until I was exposed to the disease. The general belief was that the public would panic if it learned there were magical diseases that could spread to the human population, so nobody had ever mentioned that the agency existed.

  It was true that there had been mass panic when the first cases appeared and there was no cure. People died. Lots of people. But we’d adapted. It had taken months, but parents were sending their kids back to school. Church attendance was up and telecommuting was giving way to heavy traffic. Pity about that part. I had liked the lack of traffic jams.

  “The M. Necrose pandemic has now become the fourth deadliest disease outbreak in history, surpassed only by the Black Plague, the Spanish Flu, and the Bird Flu. Next up, sports on News Center Eighteen.”

  I turned off the TV then and took another long drink of water. It was as though I’d never been gone. The world had gotten along just fine without me. I leaned back into the cushions and listened to the sounds of the ocean through the open screen door. I might have dozed off; I’m not sure. Suddenly I heard a bang, started, and looked out the picture window to see my neighbor, Inez, at my door. She was wrapped in a towel.

  Inez used to be the housekeeper for my best friend, Vicki Cooper, who had owned both my beach house and Cooper Manor, the mansion at the top of the hill. When Vicki died, she left me the beach house and left the mansion to Inez and her husband, David, who had been the groundskeeper. I trusted them to keep an eye on my place and to water my plants in my absence.

  I opened the door with a smile. I hadn’t seen her since well before leaving for Mexico. “Hey, Inez. How have you been?” I opened my arms to give her a hug but she just motioned behind her with a thumb.

  “I was pretty good until your puppy dumped seaweed in my pool. I was swimming at the time.”

  That was when I looked outside. “Crap!” One of the abilities of a siren, besides being able to mentally influence some people, is an affinity with the ocean. I’d been away from the water too long in the Mexican jungles; my control was fuzzy.

  So thinking about the ocean just now had caused the water to move inland. My cousin, Adriana, the Pacific siren princess, told me this was a common problem when sirens come into their power. The sea follows us. The water was up to the bumper of my car and had indeed dumped seaweed into the lower swimming pool. There’s an upper one as well, but Inez prefers the lower one because it’s on the beach. I doubted that seaweed was all that had b
een dumped in it; there were probably a few buckets of sand and a variety of small sea creatures playing there now. “Oh, man. I’m so sorry, Inez. I’ll clean it up.”

  I must have looked pretty stricken at the prospect of cleaning up after my mistake because she shook her head with a note of amusement. “It’s okay. Go swimming. It’ll follow you back.” I tried to protest, but she was firm. They would change the water, and I should go swim. “Really. David’s been meaning to scrub down the bottom. We’ll open the drains and let the water go back out to sea.”

  One of the things I like about David is that he never uses chemicals in the water, so he could let it drain back to the ocean with the blessing of the State of California’s environmental offices. Vicki had installed a very expensive reverse osmosis filter for the pool, so the water going out would be perfectly safe for whatever creatures it encountered.

  I vowed to add a thousand to the amount I’d offered them to watch the house. Refilling the pool isn’t cheap and despite her protests, I knew David had changed the water right before I’d left.

  After writing myself a reminder, I changed into my suit and went for a swim. The tide rolled out with me, following me into the water.

  There really isn’t any way to explain what it feels like to swim in the ocean. Once my body cooled to the temperature of the water, it was as if every wave was an extension of me. I dove through the breakers and swells until the surface was nearly flat. There wasn’t much of a breeze and the sun warmed my hair. A porpoise appeared and chuckled at me—probably commenting on the waste of using my arms. Feeling playful and relaxed at last, I played with the porpoise, diving right alongside his sleek gray form. We came out of the water nearly simultaneously, then dropped back in again. We must have done this about ten times before he bobbed his head in approval, tittered, and swam away to join a group that was tail-walking in the distance.

  I floated on my back for a time while the seagulls overhead swooped and dipped in approval. I’d been away from the ocean long enough to pine for the sea, and yes, to miss my noisy feathered friends. One of them flew down fast, as though dive bombing a ship, and I nearly dropped under the water to avoid being hit. But it slowed at the last second in a fluttering of snowy wings and delicately dropped a tiny pink conch shell onto my bare stomach. Then it flew back up to join its fellows overhead. How sweet. A gift from my admirers.

  I have weird admirers.

  I suppose I should have called some people to let them know I was back. But I really wanted peace and quiet for at least a day or two. So I put my new conch shell on the mantel with the others I’d collected over the years, called out for pizza since my fridge was bare, and opened a bottle of wine.

  I thought a lot about the wine before selecting a simple California white, ignoring the magically enhanced red I’d come to relish. I couldn’t drink that wine right now, not without conjuring up a whole lot of bad memories. I didn’t want to think about the man who’d created that wine. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow, either.

  It took two more days of swimming, sitting on my favorite rock overlooking the water, and just padding around the house before I felt ready to be part of the real world again. Finally I dressed and headed for the office one morning instead of the beach. I was looking forward to a nice, normal day dealing with a backlog of telephone calls and paperwork—and chatting with Dawna, my smart, savvy receptionist, who is also one of my best friends in the world.

  I run a private security business out of an office on the third floor of one of the last historic buildings in downtown Santa Maria de Luna. It’s an old, red-brick Victorian with gingerbread trim, a wide front porch, and a balcony on my floor that lets me get fresh air while offering partial protection from the California sunshine. Once upon a time it had been a stretch to afford the rent. Prices in Santa Maria aren’t as bad as in Hollywood or L.A., but they’re not cheap, either. After I inherited the building (and the headaches that go along with owning commercial property) that wasn’t an issue. I hadn’t even known Vicki had owned my office building until after her death.

  Pulling into my reserved spot in the parking lot, I found myself smiling. God, it was good to be back. I couldn’t wait to get back to normal, or as close to it as I could manage. Dawna’s car was in its usual spot. I wasn’t surprised. As receptionist, Dawna wasn’t scheduled to start for another hour, but she gets into work early more often than not. Maybe we’d get a chance to talk before the day’s craziness started.

  Ron’s car was not in his spot, for which I was grateful. One of my tenants, Ron is an attorney and an ass, but not in that order. I really wasn’t in the mood to deal with the level of bullshit his attitude creates.

  Gulls swooped and dived overhead as I climbed out of the car. They cawed and performed aerial acrobatics, trying to get my attention. I smiled and made a shooing gesture. “Go play. I’m going to be inside all day.”

  Anyone watching would be amused to hear me talking to them. They would be shocked to see the gulls obey, swooping one more time before flying off toward the shore.

  Dawna must have heard them, or me, because the minute I opened the door, she raced toward me and pulled me into a hug.

  “Thank God, you’re back!” I grunted a little as she squeezed me tighter. Dawna is petite, but apparently she’d continued the workout schedule she’d started before I left because she was much stronger than she had been.

  She held me at arm’s length, long enough for her dark eyes to take in every inch of me from head to toe. “You look like hell, girlfriend. What happened?”

  I tried for humor. “I look a lot better than I did two days ago. I even trimmed the singe off my hair and scrubbed off the blood.” Her eyes widened but I didn’t elaborate. I wasn’t ready to talk about it, so I made a show of looking her over in turn. I might look like hell, but she looked great. Part of it was just good looks. She’s part Vietnamese and has the kind of exotic features that attract a lot of attention. She also knows exactly how to make the most of her assets. Today she wore a black pinstripe skirt suit with a snow white blouse, accessorized with a delicate diamond necklace and matching earrings. And of course there was that big honking rock on her finger.

  After a whirlwind romance I sort of instigated by realizing, while on a date with a certain guy, that Dawna would make a much better girlfriend for him, she was going to become Mrs. Christopher Gaetano. Being engaged definitely agreed with her. She was practically glowing with joy.

  I was happy for her, but thinking about it made me all too aware of the absence of John Creede from my life. “There’s too much to talk about without coffee. Besides, if you have a minute, there are a couple of things I’d like to discuss with you.”

  “Uh-oh. That sounds ominous.” Releasing me, she gave me a wary look and turned away to shut the door.

  “It’s not bad.” I gave her a smile. “I promise.”

  “Good. You head on upstairs. I’ll forward the phones to the service and pour coffee.” She gave me a gentle push toward the stairs, followed by a shooing motion that was almost identical to the one I’d given the gulls.

  “Thanks, Dawna.”

  “No problema.”

  The familiar words brought back my smile—a smile I held on to clear up until the moment I was standing outside the open door of the empty office on the third floor where John Creede had created the magical wine currently sitting undrunk in my beach house. Though he’d had other offices, he’d rented this one to be close to me while we were dating. The room was empty now; the floor was damaged where someone had pulled up the temporary flooring that had been where he’d performed his magic.

  He was really gone.

  Shit.

  I blinked back tears. I was not going to cry, damn it. Absolutely not. I’d done what I had to do. I really did believe that. I’d do it again. But it didn’t make it hurt any less seeing that empty office, remembering when Mexico had started to really go wrong.

  “What do you mean you reassigned him?” I kept my
voice down. The office door was closed, but the walls of the building were none too thick and I didn’t want anyone overhearing this argument.

  “I decided I needed to have Jorge help with the spell work on the vans.”

  “You decided you needed? And you didn’t see any reason to check with me first, even though I’m the one in charge? Humberto was depending on Jorge to watch his back, and I assigned Jorge to him precisely because he could cast a protection spell in case there were booby traps. Which there were, so now I’ve got an injured man. What the hell, John!”

  John gave me “the look.” It was an expression I’d seen far too much of over the past couple of weeks: superior to the point of condescending. The men had seen it, too. It was undermining my authority with them and with the clients. People had begun to run my orders past John before actually following them, and to obey his orders before mine. That was unacceptable.

  He spoke carefully, as though addressing a child … or at least that was how it felt. “You hired me for my expertise.”

  Really? When did I say that? “No, Creede, I hired you because you have good men and good equipment, and I thought you were capable of following orders. Apparently I was wrong about the last part.” I spoke softly, but my voice was cold enough to frost the windows, despite the Mexican midday heat.

  His face darkened, anger making his golden eyes, filled with magical flame, flash menacingly. “We both know you needed to hire me, Celia. You’re not qualified to handle this kind of project. Bodyguard, sure. But a full-fledged evacuation with a multiperson crew? I can’t believe you agreed to handle the evacuation without a soul to back you up. Remember, you called me. Hired me to cover your ass so you didn’t embarrass yourself in front of the clients.”

  Embarrass myself? Embarrass myself? Oh, no. Oh, so fucking no. “I called you because you had people available. Maybe I didn’t mention you weren’t my first choice. I called because your business has sucked lately. Remember that part? That I said on the phone I wanted to do you the favor of a quick paycheck? But screw it. You’re fired. Get your Miller & Creede people together and get your butts back to L.A.”