Hollywood Dead: Elisabeth Hicks, Witch Detective Read online

  Hollywood Dead

  Elisabeth Hicks, Witch Detective

  Rachel Graves

  Copyright © 2021 by Rachel Graves

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Art by Taria Reed

  www.TariaReed.net

  Cover Model: Angelina Cavanaugh

  Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.

  And, sometimes, trust other people. They’ll surprise you.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Thank you for reading!

  About the Author

  Also by Rachel Graves

  1

  As private detectives’ offices go, mine was a little rough, but the ghost in front of me didn’t care. Ethereal and ephemeral the specter urgently needed to tell me something. Magic whispered to me about insanity, guilt, and fear until sunlight punched holes in the hazy shape. There wasn’t much time. Desperation pushed me to stretch out my magic, reaching for some way to help. Without any breakfast, my energy disappeared fast. Sparks of light gathered on the edges of my vision. I’d pass out soon. There had to be something. Anything.

  “She’s coming for him. She’ll kill you both.”

  The words burned into my memory just before I lost consciousness.

  I’d started the PI business, legally and officially, four months ago with the investigation of a missing necklace, a missing vampire, and my friend’s murder. That investigation let me with enough to buy a space downtown with an office on the bottom with an apartment upstairs. I could only afford to furnish one floor. Since most people wouldn’t trust a detective who asked them to sit on the bed, I’d gone with the office. Instead of a grand opening I set the houseplants my mother had given me as an office warming present in the window, and unlocked the door. After that the people who needed me, living and dead, showed up.

  I’d left the Army without the bottom half of my right arm and all of my left thigh thanks to a rogue vampire. My cloned tissue worked better than an old-style artificial limb. Thin bands of silver helped the nerve signals jump from each one-inch wide strip of Petri dish-grown muscle to the next. The fake tissue felt and functioned like the real stuff, but it didn’t always do what I wanted it to do. While I’d accepted it as part of who I was, lots of people still stared. Whenever I opened for work, I did it in a long-sleeved shirt to stop awkward questions.

  This morning, the client in front of me looked like she wouldn’t ask a question if I had two heads with three eyes between them. She wanted to tell someone she could trust about being rescued from small-town life by a big-shot Hollywood producer, Dan Goldman. The story came through in her jewelry, her clothes, and even her manicured hands. She’d driven to tiny little Osceola, California, a two hours from Malibu if the traffic wasn’t bad, because her husband was sleeping with another woman. She picked a detective no one had ever heard of, but she demanded photographic proof. The affair, even with proof, didn’t really matter. Some guy had handed her the keys to the world and she wasn’t ready to give them back. Anything I found would just be leverage.

  There’s still a lot for me to learn about being a PI, but I’ve already figured out the hard part: the clients. Since the war, I’d always done jobs that were just this side of legal. Going legit meant I got the tough stuff: cheating spouses, thieving employees, and parents who would rather pay me than ask their kids hard questions about dirty habits. Every once in a while, things worked out. He wasn’t cheating. She wasn’t stealing. Generally, those cases took more from me than doing the not-quite-legal stuff. I struggled to find a balance between the dangerous questionable jobs and the ones that were an emotional minefield.

  You don’t need balance to swim, and I retreated to my favorite sanctuary—the Rec Center Pool. Sometimes, when I was angry or pushed the muscles too hard, the composite tissue on my arm and leg cramped up, leaving me in all sorts of pain and utterly useless to the world. I never had problems when I swam. I could swim for hours. Sometimes when I was contemplating something really messed up, I did. Thankfully, the pool chemicals never hurt the silver bands that connected my fake muscles. Damage from the chlorine did keep my dark hair shoulder-length, but the benefits, mental and physical, were worth it.

  A morning tailing the producer and maybe cheating husband, Dan, didn’t produce much. My rates were hourly. If the wife hadn’t wanted proof, I would have asked for a flat fee then let her introduce me to him. When I brush up against people, I see a little bit of what they’re thinking. It’s not always enough but if I steer conversation the right way or ask the right question before a handshake, I get the answers I need. Unfortunately, a person’s word isn’t worth much and when that person is a witch it’s worth even less. Proof takes time though, and while Dan might be cheating, he didn’t that day.

  Guilt nagged at me for charging her with nothing to show for it, so I packed it in before traffic made her bill too high. My sister, Gina, had been pushing me to go for a night out in LA for ages. Now that I was tailing a producer the trip made sense, even if I didn’t enjoy the Hollywood nightlife scene. On the way back to town I called my boyfriend to set up a quick dinner date.

  Flanagan’s didn’t specialize in California cuisine, or worry too much about what you were wearing. Most nights the only entertainment came from a shiny green jukebox situated underneath a neon Guinness sign. Ted was examining the song lists when I walked in. A pulse of desire ran through me at the sight of him - the only guy in town with designer jeans and blond tips on his brown hair. Our three-month-old relationship remained a carefully kept secret, so I stomped on my desire to kiss him hello.

  Fit but not buff, with none of the extra fat most of the men carried, Ted didn’t look like everyone else. Gina adored coloring his hair so I never mentioned how I liked the rich brown of the hair that lightly covered his chest better than the fake stuff. The metrosexual California-chic sense of grooming made the town busybodies think he was gay, but I knew better. Ted liked being clean in a way most people didn’t understand. It was a holdover from some nasty things in his childhood. He kept those things to himself, the same way he kept his time in the war private. I was the only person in town who knew Ted was a veteran.

  “How was work?” I asked, leaning up against the jukebox.

  Ted gestured to one of the sturdier wooden tables where two bottles of beer
waited for us to put them out of their misery. We took seats across from each other, looking more like friends than lovers. “Spa’s doing great, lots of massages, blah blah blah. I hear you’re going into La-La Land tonight to catch Jo’s singing.”

  “I am indeed.” I took a long pull of the beer, wishing it was something stronger. “But since Jo is, well—”

  “A night person,” he supplied.

  Like most people who’d survived a vampire attack I wasn’t too keen on the undead. Jo was the exception. Mostly because I thought of her as my best friend and not a vampire. I couldn’t do that for the two or three others I knew, so they still spooked me. The rest of the world might be happy to accept supernatural citizens, I stuck with cautious respect. “Right. Show starts at eleven. We won’t even need to think about leaving town until nine.”

  “Well then, I guess I shouldn’t have ordered for us. There’s no rush.”

  I gave him my best leer and told him there was a rush. Dinner arrived after a few minutes; Flanagan’s was famous for good Irish food that came fast. I dug into Shepherd’s pie that tasted like it could have come from County Cork. Across from me, Ted dived in to a pile of fish and chips. He didn’t eat red meat so there weren’t a ton of options, but the chips made up for it. I stole one from him as his hand slid onto my knee under the table. The thoughts that filled my mind were definitely naughty. He knew how my magic worked, so none of that was an accident.

  He smiled at me. “How much time did you say we had before your night out?”

  My head swam through the haze of emotions, him wanting me, me wanting him, the heat of his hand as it moved in lazy circles over my jeans. “Not enough. Eat fast.”

  We took separate cars from the bar, a necessary evil, but parked side-by-side in his two and a half car garage. Ted had bought the American dream house just before he’d opened the day spa that gave my hair dresser sister a job. His life was the picture-perfect image of a small business owner in a small town but I preferred the parts he didn’t share with everyone – the time in the war, the things we did in his bedroom. He got out of his car at almost the same instant I got out of mine.

  “Did we get here fast enough?” he asked with one eyebrow raised.

  “Hmmm, maybe not. I might just have to take you on top of the car here.” I grinned, knowing he’d never go for it.

  “After all the time you spend on that little couch, you’d ignore the great big bed just a few feet away?”

  I laughed and walked into the house ahead of him. Ted’s bed was huge, an enormous California king to make up for all the nights he’d spent on a skinny cot in the war. It was a good thing I loved his bed – he wouldn’t have sex anywhere else. We went from the laundry room to the house with a smile. It was a pretty good night with good music to come and a good meal leading to things in the bedroom that would be better than good.

  Something in the living room pricked at my magic. A vampire. An old one, a dangerous predator. I didn’t want to go any farther. Worse, my fear made me speechless.

  “Uh, the bedroom is still at the back…” Ted flipped on a light behind me.

  “Hello, Edward,” the vampire said, in a rich voice free of any accent. I studied him: male, white, wearing a dark suit with a navy tie, short brown hair, and a strong jawline. The spirit witch part of me looked at him another way but it didn’t see anything that easy to categorize.

  “Hello, William.” My boyfriend’s voice took on a toneless quality I’d only heard once before, it belonged to who he’d been during the war; Edward, an OPS interrogation agent. Using that voice meant he was working, and he’d closed off the part of himself that had emotions to get the job done. I didn’t like it. He turned back to me. “You should go.”

  “I don’t think I want to leave.” I knew I didn’t. Even if he recognized the vampire in his living room, I wanted to shoot the damn thing until it burst into ash. I was mentally counting the bullets in my gun, trying to think of how long it would take me to draw, glad I hadn’t had a chance to take my weapon off before dinner.

  “I’ll be fine. He’s an old friend.”

  I glanced from him to the thing in the living room. The vampire didn’t react. His face was stone. It didn’t make me feel any better about him. “He’s a monster.”

  “Oh dear Edward, doesn’t she know you’re a monster yet?” The vamp laughed.

  “Shut up, William.” Edward’s voice was harsh. I could understand acting different around different people. I could even understand using a different name. I was Hicks when I worked and Elisabeth at home. But asking me to leave him alone with a strong scary vampire was crazy.

  My boyfriend didn’t seem to think so. “I promise you, he’s not a threat. I can handle this.”

  I wanted to scream. To warn him the vampire was thinking terrible thoughts, things no one should ever think. A vampire had broken into Ted’s house. The thing’s presence was a threat no one should ignore. Suddenly, I wanted to tell Ted how much I couldn’t handle losing him, how good we were together. A million things he needed to know rushed together in my head. All I could say was, “I love you.”

  I’d felt it but never said it, a stupid mistake. This wasn’t how I wanted to tell him, but the look on his face was worth it.

  “I love you, too. Drive home safe, okay?”

  I nodded and kissed him goodbye. A chaste kiss, brief—the best I could do with that thing watching us. The door was almost shut when I heard it speak again.

  “You really should have told her ages ago.”

  Ted or Edward. The massage therapist and spa owner who helped people feel better or the OPS agent who knew how to make people hurt. My mind flipped back and forth, wondering which man I left with the scariest vampire I’d seen in a long long time. OPS, Office of Psychological Services, was the military group that did things people didn’t ever want to know about. They were the worst kept secret in the world because they didn’t want to be a secret. They left behind bloody destroyed bodies as a warning. “Tell us what we want to know or you’ll look like this.”

  I drove, not really seeing the streets. Instead my memories served up visions of a half bombed out restaurant outside of Bucharest. We’d gotten word it was a waystation for women being stolen, a place where young girls were brutalized into submission. My unit had gone in hot, machine guns ready, moving forward in pairs, swapping the lead. The screams came before we opened the door. Someone was in pain, bad. Our training took over, slowing our pace as we’d gone from the empty dining room to the basement.

  It was easy to shiver at the memory of what we’d found—three calm people. One leaning against the door, two playing cards. Behind the door someone screamed and begged for their life but those three didn’t seem to notice it. When the noise ended, their expressions hadn’t changed. An entire army squad in full gear holding machine guns on them and they didn’t blink. The one by the door had held up an OPS ID. Everyone in my unit flinched when the screams started again. The man at the door hadn’t. He just told us to come back tomorrow for the clean-up.

  When we’d come back, there had been bodies. The one I’d helped move didn’t have any eyes. Those wet holes haunted me. Ted could have been behind that door with the vampire in his living room next to him, helping. I knew Ted had made bodies look like that for six years but tried not to think about it. The same way I struggled not to think about my time in the war. My instincts screamed at me to turn back and fight, but I shoved them down deep as I parked.

  A light peeked out of a high window, welcoming me back to the house I grew up in—a standard two-story with a semi-finished attic that had been my room for a while. I knew without having to check that the light was on an autotimer, installed after I’d left. My mother had run away to California so she could live in a white picket fence Ozzie and Harriett world. Always leaving a light on for me was a big part of that for her.

  Living at home I’d felt like an outsider, someone who didn’t quite fit in. I wasn’t been a spirit witch befor
e the war, or maybe I was and just didn’t realize it. Either way, when I got back from saving the world from human traffickers and liberating girls sold into sexual slavery, I hadn’t meshed very well with my family. The day-to-day life of the Hicks clan, with its many unspoken confessions and unasked questions, didn’t work for me. Moving out cleared a lot of that up—being able to leave after dessert made family dinners easier. Still, I sat in the driveway for a few minutes, getting my head together.

  In Mom’s world, I should be dating someone and working at a 9-to-5 job or in college. A daughter who worked as a private detective didn’t make sense to her, but she made do. When I walked into the kitchen, she smiled at me like I was homecoming queen or a good housewife, the kind of lifestyles she could get behind.

  “I hear you’re going into the city with your sister.” Mom beamed at me from a sink full of dishes. When I lived at home, I made a point of volunteering for dish duty. Mom had already cooked and if I did the dishes, she could watch TV with Dad. It didn’t look like Gina had picked up my habit, so I grabbed a towel and started drying.

  “Yup, she’s been after me to go watch Jo sing.”

  “Good. I know you and Ted are friends but it’ll be nice for you to get out with girls. I know I love my girlfriends and our weekly Bunko games.”