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  Tainted Blood

  Meredith Bale Mysteries Book Two

  DC Malone

  © 2021 DC Malone

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  This is entirely a work of fiction. Any similarities to real people, places, or events are purely coincidental.

  Table of 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 1

  About DC Malone

  Other Books by DC Malone

  Chapter 1

  I stared out the window and watched the throngs of people march in their ragtag lines up and down the sidewalks on both sides of the busy street. The weather was the nicest it had been all month, which meant it was gray and unseasonably cold, but it hadn’t started raining yet. That last part might have put it in contention for the nicest weather in a few months, at least.

  I was standing in the lobby of the Charleston Eco hotel in Midtown trying to look a lot less conspicuous than I felt. The hotel staff had already interrupted my sullen loitering twice, and both times I had assured them I was still waiting for my friend to come down to meet me. Something told me they didn’t quite buy it, maybe it was the unsavory vibe I was giving off, and I had a feeling I was due for another polite nudge from a frozen-smiled staffer at any time.

  If I was going to get anywhere in this world, or this line of work, I needed to get better at lying.

  Part of the problem was, I wasn’t lying. Not technically, at least. I was waiting on someone to come back down from the upper levels of the hotel. He just wasn’t someone any of the staff would be able to see, and he wasn’t exactly what you would call alive either.

  “Five more minutes,” I whispered under my breath. “If he’s not back in five more minutes, I’ll go up myself.” How long did it take for a shade to make it up five stories anyway? It’s not like they had to worry about mundane things like elevators or walls…

  I spun around to the sound of a throat being cleared, fully expecting to see another member of the waitstaff standing behind me with their stink-eye at the ready. If this one referred to me as ma’am too, I was going to start throwing sucker punches. I was still firmly in the miss age range, and that many ma’ams in such a short time was just downright rude.

  It wasn’t another staffer. It was my spirit accomplice, returned to me at last.

  Why he had felt the need to clear his throat to get my attention—or how that was even possible for a noncorporeal entity—was a question for more learned minds than mine. Maybe it was an ingrained instinct from his years spent in the service industry.

  “That… took a lot longer than I expected,” I said, trying to keep my voice low enough so any passersby wouldn’t overhear and think I was talking to the empty air.

  “I forgot,” the shade replied in a spacey voice.

  “You… forgot? Forgot what?”

  He shrugged. “Everything.”

  “Uh, okay…” I sighed. You’d think I’d be used to this by now.

  The shade was a former worker in the hotel. From the way he was dressed, like a bellboy right out of the fifties, I assumed he had been dead for quite a while.

  He was my first solo summoning job. Hiram had been teaching me new skills over the phone for the last couple of months, and the bellboy was my first real attempt.

  I considered it a mixed success.

  On paper, it wasn’t a difficult task to summon a shade. According to Hiram, every part of Necromancy required an invocation of the Source. The patterns and specific steps differed, but the underlying activity remained the same. In this case, all that was needed was blood, intention, and an object that belonged to the shade of interest. The blood was easy—that was mine. The object was easy, too. The hotel building had been around for the better part of a hundred years, and it had been an easy thing for my sticky fingers to procure one of the vintage black and white photos of the hotel in its heyday that decorated nearly every wall in the lobby.

  Intention is the trickier element. It’s not just about what I wanted—to summon a particular shade—it’s also about purely and honestly projecting one’s explicit desires. That may sound easy, but it isn’t. Half the time a person isn’t honest about what they want—what they really want, and the other half the time I don’t think a person actually even knows. It takes a crazy amount of soul searching just to ask the right questions.

  But I knew the summoning skill would come in handy in my work as a PI. Even if the Congregation hadn’t thrown any work my way yet, I was still getting gigs with the Norms, and that put food on the table. So, having the ability to recruit the occasional accomplice or informant was something I couldn’t pass up.

  Even if they weren’t always the most reliable.

  “But then I remembered again,” he said slowly. “So, here I am. What do you need?”

  “What do I need?” What I needed was something strong for the headache that was starting to squeeze at my temples. “We’ve already gone over this… a lot, man. You were supposed to take a peek into room 519, remember? I showed you a picture of a man. You were supposed to come back and tell me if he’s in there.”

  I pulled the photo back out of my jacket and held it out to the shade, trying and failing to not look absurd in the process. At least the other people bustling through the lobby seemed wrapped up in their own business. In this city, you couldn’t take half a dozen steps without bumping into someone doing something a little peculiar, so holding a picture out for an invisible entity to inspect would probably rank fairly low on the average citizen’s weird-o-meter.

  “Oh,” the shade replied, not even glancing at the photo of the middle-aged man in my hands. “I did that. Pretty sure.”

  “Pretty sure?”

  “I did…”

  “Okay, is he in there?”

  My client, Maggie Besson, was convinced her husband, Mark, had been involved in some extracurricular activities for the last few weeks. She’d even managed to find credit card charges from several local hotels, which he had dismissed as charges for business lunches at the hotel restaurants. After that initial confrontation, there had been no new charges, which only led Maggie to conclude that her husband had switched to cash.

  I had been shadowing Mark for the last few days but catching the man in the act was harder than I thought it would be. He was smart, and if he did have a tart on the side, I hadn’t yet seen them together.

  I couldn’t shadow the guy everywhere he went, so in addition to my little spirit helper—if he turned out to be any help—I had greased the wheels with a few of the employees at the three hotels listed on Mark’s credit card statement. It’s amazing what a promise of fifty bucks will buy you when it comes to invading someone’s privacy.

  So, the call had come, and I was at the hotel, but I needed to make absolutely certain he was in the room and not alone. I could have played it safe and set up shop in the hallway outside of 519 and snapped some photos when he emerged,
but Maggie said she’d give an extra five hundred dollars if I photographed him in a situation he couldn’t lie his way out of… and that meant bending the law just a little by letting myself into his room with my camera at the ready.

  “Hey… buddy? Did you hear me?”

  I was treated to about thirty more seconds of blank, distant staring, and then the shade nodded slowly. “Yes, she’s in the room. Fifth floor, room nineteen. 519.”

  “That’s great work,” I replied, trying not to scream. “But I’m looking for a guy, not a woman.”

  “He’s in there too.”

  “You’re certain?”

  The shade didn’t reply, and I had had about as much as I could take of the conversation anyway. It was the best I was going to get, so I was going to have to chance it.

  I really hoped I wasn’t about to break into some rando’s room.

  I left my shade friend to continue his staring into the great beyond and took the elevator up to the fifth floor. I needed Hiram to show me how to summon more helpful spirits… and soon.

  The halls of the fifth floor were empty, so I pulled out my trusty ring of tools and made sure my cheapo digital camera was powered on before making my way to Mark’s room.

  This wasn’t my first official case as a newly registered—and falsely credentialed—private investigator. I had been employed twice to deliver subpoenas and, on one of my meatier gigs, I got to harass a little old lady that was suspected of insurance fraud… Glamorous stuff.

  But this case was a little more my speed. It required more of my time, which meant more money, but it also had more action. The cat and mouse aspect was a major draw. Plus, I got to nail a cheating jerk and get a five-hundred-dollar bonus for doing it. Win-win.

  I pressed my ear up against the door to 519 and listened. The cold metal surface felt good against my dully aching head, but I couldn’t make out any sounds from inside. Maybe that was a good thing, I thought. At least, it probably meant someone wasn’t about to burst out through the door.

  I gently wedged a flexible band of metal from my tool ring between the strike plate and the short latch bolt of the door’s lock. The hotel doors didn’t have overly sophisticated security for the rooms. There was probably a chain on the other side, but I would deal with it when the time came.

  The lock disengaged like it thought I was a paying customer, and I inched the door open to check for the chain lock. There was one, but the room’s occupants hadn’t bothered to use it.

  Money shot time.

  I readied the camera and glided into the room. Now that I was inside, I could hear the sounds of two people engaged in… vigorous activities. I tried, and mostly failed, to suppress the creepy Peeping Tom feeling I had, then tiptoed through the short hall and into the main room.

  I focused all my attention on the tiny screen on the back of the camera, hoping that it would act as a kind of filter between me and the people on the bed in front of me. Cheater or not, there were boundaries, and I was about ten feet on the wrong side of this one.

  I smashed the shutter button on the top of the camera and snapped off about a dozen photos before spinning and dashing back toward the door.

  “Meredith.” A female voice froze me dead in my retreat.

  I turned, keeping my eyes averted as much as possible until I was sure the speaker had time to cover herself.

  “Did you get any good ones?”

  “Good ones?” I looked up to see Maggie Besson sitting on the edge of the bed. Mark was beaming in my direction from the other side.

  “Good pictures, silly,” she said with a wide smile. “I really hope you did. You want to earn that bonus, don’t you?”

  Chapter 2

  “So… he wasn’t cheating?” Francie asked, giving me a look. Her expression said she was trying to decide whether to laugh at me or slide me a free drink. She had cut her dark, wavy hair into a long bob. It suited her, but it also made her look shrewder somehow, like she could look into my soul and pluck out what I was feeling.

  But maybe that was just my embarrassment showing through.

  It was a Friday night, which was typically the busiest night at Francie’s, but tonight there were only about a dozen regulars who all seemed to be content to nurse their drinks and ruminate on their own personal woes. I thought the weather had something to do with it. Only the most diehard patrons would be up to the cold waste the city had been of late, and even the relative dryness of the day had finally given way to precipitation that was too wet to be called snow and too hard to be called rain.

  I had been using her bar—the back room, at least—as the headquarters for my PI persona. It worked well enough on paper, and the limited interaction I had had with the Congregation’s people suggested they were happy enough with it.

  “Not really,” I said with a sigh. “Unless you count Maggie’s role-play character as another person.”

  “I don’t,” Francie replied.

  “Yeah, me either.”

  “Well, it’s a little weird, sure, but the pay is the same… I say you should consider it a win.” Francie filled a tall glass with ice, then poured gin and tonic water over it and slid it to me.

  The pity drink, then.

  “I thought this was my first real case,” I said, sipping at my prize. It was delicious, as always. “And it turned out I was just the unwitting accomplice in a couple’s overly elaborate bedroom play…”

  “Are you getting the bonus cash?”

  I sighed again. “I looked over the pics I took and… yeah, I think I’ll be getting that bonus. Pretty sure they’re just what Maggie and Mark were looking for.”

  “So, you did your job, and you did it well,” Francie said. “If that Mark guy had been cheating on her, you’d have caught him red-handed.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one, they wanted to get caught. And two, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the first hotel room they had booked hoping that I would break in on them. I’m not feeling like there’s a whole lot of celebrating to do for this one.”

  “Eww…” Francie said after a moment’s consideration.

  “What?”

  “I was just picturing them going to hotels over and over, getting it on, and hoping you’d pop up each time.”

  “Eww…” I agreed. “I’m not going to cast aspersions on their rec time, and to each their own and all that jazz. But they should at least give a girl a heads up… I’d really rather know what I’m walking into.”

  “Cast aspersions,” Francie repeated.

  “What?”

  “You said cast aspersions. That’s not a phrase you hear much from people anymore.”

  I shrugged. “Guess I’m a woman out of time.”

  I took another sip of my drink. “This is particularly good by the way. Did you do something different?”

  “Extra gin,” she said, shaking her head. “I swear, one day you’ll just be drinking gin on ice.”

  “That might work for me.”

  Francie shuddered. “I don’t know how you drink the stuff. Tastes like grout cleaner to me.”

  “You’ve tasted a lot of grout cleaner?”

  “Well, it tastes like grout cleaner smells, smarty pants.”

  “You don’t like any of the poisons you’re peddling, Francie. What does it say about a bartender that doesn’t like alcohol? Isn’t that like being a vegetarian butcher or something?”

  Francie shrugged. “It worked for Sam on Cheers.”

  “Yeah, but he was a recovering alcoholic and fictional. You’re just an anomaly.”

  “Just the way I like it,” she grinned.

  The night went like that into the wee hours. There were stretches of amiable silence during which I nursed my drink and my wounded pride, and there were stretches of familiar conversation that suited the night just as well. For a day that had started kind of crummy, it was wrapping up on a high note. Or, at least, a not-quite-as-crummy note.r />
  “Why do you think the Congregation hasn’t had a case for you yet?” Francie had just locked up after the last two customers and took a seat on the stool next to me. “They seemed keen to have you on their team… and it’s been a while.”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. I had been thinking about that a lot lately, and it was probably the reason I was so gung-ho to come through on a Norm case. Some kind of shell company for the Congregation had been sending me a small but appreciated check every couple of weeks for the past few months, but it had been all silence beyond that. I hadn’t even heard from Luka. “Maybe there’s just not a lot of crime that would require my particular skillset. Or…”

  “Or what?”

  “I don’t know… It’s just something Hiram was saying about Necros not being well-liked within the Gifted community. Maybe the Congregation putting me on the payroll is just their way of trying to pay me off to be a good girl.”

  “I’m sure it’s the first one,” Francie said, patting me on the leg reassuringly. “There can’t be all that many Gifted people in the area, so maybe there simply isn’t much crime that would require you. I mean, it’s not like they’re going to call you out over a simple dispute or anything. Your gift would really only be useful in the biggies—murder and the like. That’s probably not an everyday occurrence, you know?”

  I couldn’t help but smile like an idiot at her. “You know, you are an excellent bartender, Francie. If more people had bartenders—or friends—like you, a lot of psychiatrists would probably be out of business.”

  “I appreciate that,” she said, standing, “But that’s my cue to get you back home and into your bed.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because that’s just north of the I love you, man speech, and you’ve had one too many.”

  I scoffed a little but still joined her standing. The room wobbled a tiny bit, but I was sure that was only a silent earthquake or similar. “I’ll have you know that I can hold my liquor with the best of them.”

  “I’m sure you can, sweetie, but it’s still time to go.”

  “Alright, alright.” I draped an arm around her shoulders and started toward the exit. “But you know what?”