PROLOGUE
The fact that I had killed a man was really putting a
crimp in my love life.
Well, okay, to be
strictly accurate, I hadn’t killed him.
But I had helped. And I had watched enough of the Emmy
Award-winning cops-and-lawyers drama Crime and
Punishment on TV to know that cops weren’t very
understanding about that sort of thing. I had even auditioned for
the role of a murderess in a C&P
episode the previous year, but I didn’t get the part. So, since I
had never even played a killer, actually being one now was something of a
novelty.
It was also rather
awkward, since I was dating a cop. Or at least trying to date one.
And he was a straight-arrow cop who didn’t look the other way when
it came to breaking and entering and vandalism (two more awkward
secrets I was keeping from him), never mind murder.
Which is not to say
that I had done anything wrong. On the contrary. I stand by my
actions. I was fighting Evil.
And if that sounds
absurd to you, well, that’s understandable. It sounds pretty damn
absurd to me, too.
The man I had helped
kill—and I’m using the word “man” in its broadest possible
sense—was a demented sorcerer’s apprentice who tried to take over
New York City by summoning a virgin-raping, people-eating
demon.
You probably think
I’m kidding.
In a series of events
that I was trying hard not to think about now that they were over,
I had helped Dr. Maximillian Zadok, Manhattan’s resident sorcerer
and local representative of the Magnum Collegium—a secret
organization whose worldwide mission is to confront Evil—track the
villain to his underground lair. There we had faced the demon
Avolapek (an individual about whom the words “biliously repellant”
are far too kind), had defeated him in what might loosely be termed
combat, and had slain his maniacal creator, the rogue apprentice
Hieronymus.
I am not making this
up.
How Max had
eliminated Hieronymus was not entirely clear to me. Most things about Max were not entirely clear to
me. He and a fellow mage, a man named Lysander—whose day job is
keeping Altoona, Pennsylvania, safe from Evil (yes, really)—had
done some chanting in another language, and Hieronymus had
vanished. According to Max, this was dissolution, which he
described to me as “something remarkably similar to death.” Since
it was a permanent, all-dimensions solution to the problem of
Hieronymus and his evil plans, I had no objection. But I also had a
feeling that a jury might consider any legal difference (if one
existed) between murder and dissolution to be so piddling as to
make no difference at all in our conviction and sentencing, should
these events ever come to light.
By the time Max
arrived at Hieronymus’ secret lair to save me from becoming demon
dinner, I had already beaten Hieronymus to a pulp with a candelabra
and then thrown him as a decoy at the virgin-raping Avolapek (who
did not refuse a free meal, so to speak). So a jury might
reasonably conclude that I had actively assisted in the evil
apprentice’s demise—or at least softened him up for it. I figured
Max and I could both be in big trouble over those events—unless a
jury also believed the part about
Hieronymus summoning a demon and trying to kill a bunch of people
(including me) at the very moment we snuffed out his
life.
I pictured myself
saying in a court of law, “Well, Your Honor, there was this evil
sorcerer’s apprentice and a flesh-eating, power-granting demon he
summoned from a primordial dimension . . .”
Even I couldn’t see a
way to make that script work.
Which was why I felt
it was imperative that Detective Lopez, who’d dogged our steps on
that case, should never find out what had happened that fateful
night. Happily, no one was pressing charges about the breaking and
entering and vandalism that Max and I had previously committed
(hey, we were trying to prevent more innocents from getting hurt,
okay?), and Lopez had dropped that particular subject by now. He
was, however, still perplexed about what had happened the night
that Max and I, along with several missing persons (Hieronymus’
victims, whom we rescued when we defeated him), suddenly turned up
at an obscure Morning-side Heights magic club without explanation,
all looking (and smelling) as if we’d been to hell and back. There
was also a white Bengal tiger with us—but I digress.
The problem was . . .
I really liked Lopez. He liked me, too. But I was jumpy about any
topic that might lead to his asking about that night. He sensed I
was hiding things, and that raised his cop hackles. So our first
couple of dates hadn’t gone that well. Nevertheless, he asked me
out a third time. Obviously, it would have been smart for me to say
no. From the beginning, actually. It would have been wise to avoid
Lopez altogether, to stay off his radar.
But, come on, I’m a
single woman in New York City. It takes more than a morbid fear of
doing life in prison for homicide to make me turn down a date with
an employed, attractive, single, heterosexual man who has nice
table manners, listens when I talk, and knows how to
kiss.
So I said yes to a
third date.
We both worked
nights, so we’d met for lunch on our previous two dates. This time,
Lopez wanted to take me out for dinner. He said he had something to
celebrate. He was a detective in the Sixth Precinct and usually
worked second shift, getting off around midnight. I was doing eight
shows per week as a chorus nymph and unrewarded understudy in the
new off-Broadway musical Sorcerer! So
Lopez traded shifts with another cop so he would be free on Sunday,
the one night I wasn’t working.
Unfortunately, it
turned out to be a bad night for me. Also for my love life. And
things soon got worse. Before long, someone was trying to kill me.
And Lopez.
So maybe he’d have
been better off if he’d never asked me out a third
time.