Under Suspicion

Nina rolled over and blinked up at me, her lips spliting into a smile. “Oh, Soph. You always know the right thing to say. I’ll drive.”

It didn’t take us too long to find a restaurant in North Beach that served homemade gnocchi and had a cache of blood donor waiters—mainly because there is only one restaurant in North Beach with homemade gnocchi and blood donor waiters. I noshed my way through the bread basket while Nina scanned the waiters passing by, deciding whom to order. She frowned, pulling on her bottom lip.

“I can’t decide what I want,” she groaned as a particularly anemic-looking blond strode by. “Why didn’t you tell me this was going to be so hard?”

“Ordering lunch? You usually go for that meaty guy, Toby.”

“Not eating lunch! And yes, Toby sounds good. I mean with my career!”

“At UDA?”

Nina’s eyes rolled back like slot machines. “No! My writing career!”

“Oh?” I popped another piece of bread in my mouth. “That.”

I learned early on to keep my nose out of Nina’s extracurricular activities—except for the one time she decided she had a real future in toddler beauty pageant coaching. Then I had to bail her out of jail and explain why a grown woman trolling elementary schools for “Auntie Nina’s Perfect Princesses” was a very bad idea.

I was pushing around the remaining bites of spaghetti and meatballs, and Nina was polishing off what remained of a bag of Toby, when I put down my fork and took a deep breath. Nina cocked an eyebrow, knitted her hands, and rested her chin.

“I heard you coming in awfully early this morning.” She grinned, her fangs tinted a healthy pink. “Anything you want to tell me?”

It had been close to dawn when Will and I had returned from Bettina’s hotel. Though I know Nina doesn’t sleep, her door was closed and all the lights were out, so I decided against disturbing her—especially since what I needed to tell her was so disturbing to me.

“Alex called.”

Nina’s ears perked. “Ooh, I bet he heard about all this time you’re spending with Will. I bet he’s jealous.”

“He wanted Will and me to go to a hotel.”

“Jealous and kinky!”

“Nina, I went to a hotel where Bettina checked in. She wasn’t there. It was a crime scene.”

Nina stopped. “What do you mean?”

“Bettina ...” I gulped. “Her body wasn’t there. Oh, Nina, it was horrible. There was blood everywhere.”

“What happened?”

I swung my head, pushing my plate away. “It looked like she had been attacked. It looked like someone pushed her into the ground, and there was blood everywhere. She couldn’t have survived it, Neens. There was no way. The person who attacked her must have come back. He must have come back, and now she’s dead.”

Nina looked away; her bottom lashes glistened. “This is real, isn’t it?”

I swallowed hard. “It’s real, and it’s not going away.”

Nina pressed her keys across the table toward me. “Will you take the car home?”

I reached out and squeezed her marble-cold hand. “I can drive you home, Neens.”

She gathered her purse and started to scooch out of the booth. “I need to go see Harley right now.”

I flopped on the couch, blowing out a miserable sigh.

ChaCha, my ever-faithful companion, was snuggled up in her dog bed. She cracked one dark eye open to witness my misery; then flopped around and went back to snoring. I tried to soothe my jangled nerves with a tall glass of ice water and something on KQED—okay, it was a bottle of Yoo-hoo recovered from the back of the fridge and a Real World marathon—but I was still filled with the overwhelming sense of dread. I had sat and watched, frozen, as Nina’s black hair swished across her back when she walked out of the restaurant to go find Harley—a man who wrote off demons for a living.

In print.

And it made him millions.

My breath caught in my throat and I hiccupped chocolate Yoo-hoo. I fumbled through the highbrow reading material we kept stacked on the coffee table—InStyle, US Weekly, a three-month-old Cosmo—until I found what I was looking for.

Nina’s copy of Harley Cavanaugh’s book Vampires, Werewolves, and Other Things That Don’t Exist was on the bottom of the stack. I ran my fingers over the raised letters and groaned when I read the message Harley had inscribed to Nina in his quick, slanted scrawl: To the beautiful woman standing before me—maybe I should reconsider whether angels exist? Truly, Harley.

I gagged so loudly that ChaCha jumped from her bed, yipping.

“Sorry, Cha,” I mumbled, turning the page and settling in for the read.

I paged through Harley’s introduction, where he established himself as one of the foremost debunkers of so- called spooks, haunts, and legends. I yawned when he opened chapter one with a meant-to-be-humorous anecdote about dressing up for Halloween. I was halfway through his description of a drugstore-purchased Dracula costume when I jumped to the index, looking for trigger words.

Is Harley more than just a bigoted blowhard?

I flipped until I found Underworld, The pg 67.

I found the page and scanned. The Underworld is just that—a world under our own.

I snorted. “Way to use a dictionary, Professor Cavanaugh.”

I continued reading.

There are many differing beliefs about this Underworld. Some will argue that it is a parallel universe that encompasses all manner of human evils. Here on Earth (the “upper” world) exists God (or central protector/creator), light, growth, life, and humanity. The Underworld is looked over by Satan and embraces demons, fire, chaos, and death. It is signified by its absence of light.

I thought of the brightly lit UDA hallways, the orderly lines, and the neat stacks of paperwork that were handed over by my smiling (well, for the ones that had lips) UDA regulars. Then I thought of the fires that I’d experienced—my father’s house, my old job—and the chaos that ensued. Both were in Harley’s “upper world.”

The description continued:

The inhabitants of the Underworld are demons with horrible features, faces, and traits, and those not demonic have been banished to this alternate world for being obstinate in their evil. Some well- intentioned humans have slipped into the Underworld via portals, curses, or mistakes, and those poor souls are tortured and fed upon by the demonic population.

I scanned Harley’s reasoning about the fallacy of the Underworld (Earth-core drilling has not encountered Satan’s underworld bachelor pad, for starters) and started to feel a little better, betting that Harley’s book was nothing more than a scientist on a soapbox, until I got to the chapter titled “Demon Races.” I sucked in a breath and read over Harley’s vampire mathematics (wildly flawed, as vampires do not “turn” or kill every person on whom they feed) and grimaced at his detailed description of loony bin–ready “vampire slayers.” I tossed the book back on the coffee table, but it thunked on the ground, instead. It fell open to a handful of colored pages right in the center. The book fell open on a page entitled simply “Weaponry.” And under that, “A cataloging of actual tools used in the hunt and eradication of demon races.”

There was an ornately carved wooden stake (vampires), a clefted silver knife (Kishi demons), silver bullets (werewolves).

A long, thick club.

Banshees.

My heard thudded in my chest.

Bettina.

I kicked aside Harley’s book and beelined for the kitchen, tearing through our newspaper recycling stack. I found last week’s Chronicle, with a big, torn hole in the “Books” section, and groaned.