Deadly Wrong: Preternatural Affairs, #5

DEADLY

WRONG

A Preternatural Affairs Novella

SM REINE

​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.

Copyright © SM Reine 2014

Published by Red Iris Books

1180 Selmi Drive, Suite 102

Reno, NV 89512

​SERIES BY SM REINE

The Descent Series

The Ascension Series

Seasons of the Moon

The Cain Chronicles

Preternatural Affairs

Tarot Witches

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ABOUT DEADLY WRONG

Isobel Stonecrow’s life has an expiration date. She has one month, two weeks, four days, and six hours remaining.

Not that she’s counting.

When she signed a contract giving her soul and memories to a demon named Ander, she didn’t expect that she would ever have to face termination. But now Ander is dead and she’ll be following suit if she can’t find a way to dissolve the deal.

Too bad she can’t remember anything from the time before she signed the contract.

Fritz Friederling, a billionaire businessman who owns several ventures in Hell, isn’t ready to give up on Isobel. But she isn’t sure that working with Fritz is better than dying. She doesn’t know much about her past life, but she knows that she signed that contract for a reason—and that getting away from Fritz was a significant part of it.

Escaping her contract means remembering the life that she chose to forget. And it means trusting Fritz Friederling, who Isobel fears might be the biggest danger of all…

​For Teddy, whose surprising arrival interrupted this book.

I can already tell you’re going to be the best kind of trouble.

​CHAPTER ONE

​ISOBEL STONECROW NOTICED THE rot developing at the beginning of February.

The condition of her fingernails had become shameful in the last few weeks. It didn’t seem to matter how much she washed her hands; the pig’s blood she used in her rituals wouldn’t come out from the edges and underneath the tips.

None of the grave dirt would wash off, either. Every little stain was a permanent mark on her skin.

It got worse quickly.

She was speaking with the spirit of a man named Vance Hartley when she accidentally ripped a fingernail off. She was beating on her newest bass drum with mallets, and she caught the jagged tip of her nail on the drum’s beaded trim, and then it just came clean off. The entire thing.

Isobel finished the job anyway. She desperately needed the money—five hundred dollars—and she’d already spent the deposit, so she couldn’t return it to the client.

The spirit of the dead spoke through her while she was internally freaking out about the fact that losing her pinky nail didn’t even hurt the way it should have.

With Isobel’s help, Vance Hartley told his mother that he really had killed himself. That his death hadn’t been foul play. That he had been horribly depressed for months, addicted to gambling, penniless, and without a scrap of pride remaining. It had seemed so much easier to hang himself rather than admit that he needed help to his family.

So he had killed himself. He’d just lost the suicide note down a crack in the floorboards, and he hadn’t noticed until he was kicking at the end of the rope and couldn’t go down to fish it out.

It wasn’t the news Mrs. Hartley wanted to hear. She wrote a check for the remaining money and left the cemetery sobbing.

Normally, Isobel would have tried to offer a little extra help to Mrs. Hartley before she left. Crushed family members were outside of Isobel’s job description as necrocognitive; once she had spoken to the deceased in question, her role in the family’s affairs were over.

But most people did leave crying, so Isobel had printed off papers with phone numbers for resources. Suicide hotlines, grief-management therapists, that kind of thing.

That night, she let Mrs. Hartley go without speaking to her.

Isobel sat down on Vance’s grave, legs straddling either side of the cross on the top, arms hugging the figure of Jesus, and inspected her pinky finger.

It was definitely gone. The skin underneath was black.

Still, she didn’t feel any pain.

Oh no, Isobel whispered, turning her hand to get a better look.

She hadn’t been struggling to clean the pig’s blood and grave dirt off of her skin after all. Her skin was actually turning those colors.

The flesh was rotting.

Isobel lifted her buckskin loincloth and checked the scratch on her hip. She had gotten that particular injury while arguing with one of the other death priestesses in Helltown. Isobel hadn’t been paying attention to it; she’d always been a quick healer and assumed that wouldn’t change.

The scratch hadn’t changed in a week. It wasn’t red or swollen. It wasn’t scabbed, either. It was the same as the moment that she had scraped herself along one of the big wicker baskets they stored cadavers in.

She wasn’t healing anymore.

Worse, she was rotting.

I’m out of time, she told the indistinct figure of Jesus on Vance Hartley’s grave.

He didn’t offer any sympathetic words for her. Probably for the best—if a statue had started talking, Isobel would have started suspecting that her brain was rotting, too.

She shouldn’t have been out of time, though. The only thing keeping her alive at the moment was her agreement with Ander, a demon crime lord who used magical contracts to bind people who were on the brink of death to his service. Like all his employees, she’d been almost dead when he’d picked her up, and the length of her service had a timer on it.

Isobel should have still had one month, two weeks, four days, and a few hours until her contract expired and she met the final death.

An entire month and a half to find a solution.

Yet her fingers were rotting, the cut on her hip wasn’t healing, and Isobel was definitely running out of time.

It no longer seemed important that she was out of money to refuel her RV and feed herself.

Mrs. Hartley was the last client that she serviced.

​It used to be that Isobel didn’t have to worry about money at all. That had been a long time ago—literally another lifetime—but she remembered it in bits and pieces.

Before she had died and entered Ander’s service, Isobel Stonecrow had been a lawyer. Her name had been Hope Emmeline Jimenez. She had come from modest beginnings in Manhattan, earned a lot of scholarships, and attended an Ivy League school. She had opened her own law firm and, by all accounts, done very well for herself.

She had also married a millionaire. Money really hadn’t been an issue after that. Not for survival purposes, anyway.

But that had been another life.

Money was a problem now. It was the now that mattered.

After Mrs. Hartley left, Isobel climbed onto the roof of her RV to watch the sunrise. Even though her panic was growing after losing her fingernail, Isobel didn’t have many alternatives.

Her gas tank was running low. She’d have to cash that check in order to refill, which meant waiting for business hours. In the meantime, she couldn’t reach any of her usual camping spots outside of Los Angeles.

So she rested on the RV’s roof in the parking lot of a cemetery, waited for the sunrise, and lost herself in thought. The stars were dim, reduced to hazy blurs by the Los Angeles light pollution. Hard to tell how long she had until sunrise. She settled in for the long haul.

Isobel tried for the hundredth time to remember her wedding. She recalled some kind of gauzy white cloth. White heels. Ridiculously restrictive white underwear, corset and garters and all. She wasn’t really sure that she had summoned those images from her memory or if they were just what she expected from someone like Hope Jimenez.

But she did remember meeting the groom at the altar. One brief moment where her veil was lifted, allowing her to see the man who she had agreed to marry. A handsome man, as angular and blond as Isobel was curvaceous and dark-haired.

Fritz Friederling. Demon hunter. Inheritor of his family’s billions.

Her husband.

Isobel lifted a hand to look at her fingernails again. It was dark enough that her hand was a silhouette without detail. But she could tell that she had nails on three fingers and a thumb, and then a twisted pinky with no nail at all.

Fritz would probably want to know that she was rotting.

It had been months since she’d spoken to Fritz or his aspis, Cèsar Hawke. If she didn’t want to involve Fritz, then Cèsar might have been helpful for her not-so-little problem. He’d been a private investigator once; he had a penchant for brute-forcing his way through problems with a mixture of dumb luck and sheer enthusiasm.

Unfortunately, Isobel had hooked up with Cèsar before remembering that she used to be married to Fritz, and she had no idea what she was going to say to Cèsar about that. She didn’t feel very sorry, but she also didn’t want to continue her relationship with him, and he wouldn’t take it particularly well.

He was a sensitive man, that Cèsar Hawke. And Isobel was allergic to awkward encounters.

It was stupid to avoid someone who might help because she didn’t want to have to give him the it’s not you, it’s me and my impending death speech. Isobel knew that. But there were slightly less stupid reasons to avoid Cèsar, too.

He would have to use resources from the Office of Preternatural Affairs to help her. If the OPA caught on to the death witch who was dying from a bizarre, one-of-a-kind contract with a demon, she very well might have been added to the OPA’s shelf of