Dick and demon keeley an.., p.1
Dick & Demon (Keeley & Associates Book 4), page 1
DICK & DEMON
KEELEY & ASSOCIATES #4
LAYLA LAWLOR
Dick and Demon
Copyright © 2021 Layla Lawlor
All Rights Reserved
www.laylalawlor.com
Keeley & Associates
1. Dragon & Detective
2. Ghost & Gumshoe
3. Fae & Flatfoot
4. Dick & Demon
5. Ghost & Gambler
6. Shamus & Shifter
7. Sleuth & Psychic
Also available
Keeley & Associates Collection 1
Collecting #1-#3 + a bonus story
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
Epilogue
Author's Note
Also by Layla Lawlor
Other Works & Social Media
CHAPTER ONE
"The auklets are plotting,” Dolly said, appearing without warning in the middle of James's basement office.
James dropped a handful of pens. One went into his coffee cup.
"Sorry," the ghost said, contrite. "I thought you knew I was here."
"No." He carefully fished it out. "No, I did not."
In his old upstairs office he had been able to tell when Dolly was in the vicinity by the slight whiff of cigarette smoke that she carried around with her, but the newly renovated basement office had that smell embedded in its bricks, legacy of a century of being haunted by a chain-smoking ghost.
These days, Dolly came and went as she liked. Right now she was wringing her hands fretfully, jostling the beads on her decorated shoulder wrap with a sound like far-off rain.
"The auklets. Right." James had to rewind what she'd said to figure out what was upsetting her. Actually, he still wasn't sure. "What are they doing?"
"I don't know," Dolly said. "They've been coming and going more than usual for the last day or so, and now there's just one of them up there, I think one of the sisters, and she's upset."
"I figured they were going to try something eventually." The auklet colony on the roof used to be a sibling team of hired muscle who had invaded his office intending to beat the crap out of him. One battle involving a magic spellgun later, they had ended up like that. They had always been able to shift, but were now permanently locked into their shift forms and had been living—as far as he had been able to tell—in the building's air conditioning unit. He'd hoped that winter would trigger some migration instinct in their avian brains and send them elsewhere, but apparently not.
"Any idea what they're up to?"
Dolly shook her head. "I felt you should know. Oh!" She tilted her head to the side, as if listening. "She just took off, I think. I—"
There was a sharp rattling sound at the window. Dolly winked out. She still had a tendency to vanish when startled.
James stood up. The windows in the basement were at ground level, up near the ceiling; he had to stretch to his full six-foot height to open it. Outside, there was slushy snow in the alley and a dark gray, pigeon-sized bird with a yellow-orange beak and a rakish feather curling over its head like a quail. As soon as he opened the window, it flew in.
"Hi," James said, as the auklet plunked on the edge of his desk. "Make yourself at home."
He left the window cracked open despite the cold draft so that it could leave if it wanted to. Hopefully soon.
Instead, the auklet hopped around on his desk. It picked up a pen in its beak, tilted its head both ways, then—with a visible look of frustration—dropped it and kicked over a tray of paper clips and pushpins instead.
"I have absolutely no idea what you're doing, but Oz is going to have a fit. He just got done sorting those by size and color." A tidy office was one of the benefits of having a slightly OCD dragon around, and also one of the drawbacks.
The auklet made no reply except to ruffle its feathers. It hopped around, poking at the paperclips with its beak and its webbed, orange feet.
"So is that a picture?" James tried tilting his head to the side, but it didn't help; the assortment of paperclips still looked purposeful yet random, as if it almost formed meaningful patterns, but not ones he could decode.
The Kowalczyk siblings had been stuck as auklets since last summer. Was it possible they were losing their human minds and giving in completely to their avian side?
"Listen," he said as gently as possible, hoping the auklet could understand him. "I can't read that. I'm sorry."
Bird anatomy was unsuited for sighing in exasperation, but it ruffled up its feathers and huffed a little, then spread its wings. In a burst of flapping that scattered papers all over the office, it fluttered to his keyboard, and then squawked in frustration: the computer was logged off. The bird looked up at him with one pale, bright eye.
Maybe not as far gone as all that, then. He logged in and pulled up a word processing document. The bird began typing—literal hunt and peck. It was clearly not a fluent typist, having to examine the keyboard for each letter and then glance up at the screen. Gradually the message emerged.
don't you know morse code you idiot
"Oh. No, I don't. Wouldn't it be easier to write it down?"
have you ever written anything with a beak
"True. Which one are you, anyway?"
ali—
"Aliette?" he interrupted, rather than wait through the entire slow process. The other two transformed siblings were Adric and Ada.
Aliette ruffled her feathers and began pecking again.
message for you stupid. someone is—
He was distracted from the glacial pace of her typing by a sudden green flash that flickered across the walls of his office. It was the spellgun in its holster, hanging over the back of his chair. It had just lit up, brief but fast, with a strobing light that flowed through the runes seared into the handgrip, shining through the shoe polish he habitually used to cover them up. The light was even dimly visible through the holster itself.
"What the hell?" He'd had it for five years, and in all that time it had never done that before.
Aliette pecked him hard on the back of the hand.
"Ow! Jeez, lady . . ." Rubbing his hand, he looked at the rest of her message.
—trying to kill you.
"You could've said that first!"
He reached for the gun. Aliette ruffled her feathers and began a flurry of vicious rat-a-tat typing. She'd gotten as far as imbecile when something impacted the side of the building with a tremendous FLOOMPH.
James dropped the spellgun's holster, grabbed her like a feathery football and hurled both of them to the floor. In mid-fall he twisted, trying to avoid crushing her under his weight. His shoulder slammed into the corner of the desk and his hip hit the floor with a crunch, taking most of his weight. He rolled, covering the auklet with his body arching over her. He could feel her heartbeat pattering against his palm.
There was a still, frozen moment of silence. Pain washed back in, a hot throbbing in his hip and a sharp ache in his shoulder where the edge of the desk had hit it. Then he became aware of something pattering softly around him, falling like snow. There was a sweet smell in the air.
Aliette pecked him hard at the base of his thumb.
James slowly began to uncurl. Flower petals were heaped on his desk and scattered across the floor in a gentle, many-colored tide. They were in his hair, up his jeans legs, and drifted to every corner of his basement office space.
"James!"
The muffled voice was Ozymandias, his dragon intern, whose large, spiky metallic-blue head had just appeared at the window. One giant dragon claw pried the window open wider, dislodging drifts of bright-colored petals on both sides of the recessed glass and sending an icy swirl of winter air into the room. "James, are you all right?"
"Fine." He spat out some petals. Aliette, frustrated with being pinned against his body, had settled into a steady pecking at his wrist. Her beak wasn't that sharp, but it was increasingly painful. "Yeah, you're welcome," he muttered, and released her from his careful grasp. She waddled a few feet away; auklets were not graceful birds on land.
"Someone appears to have attacked your building with what I believe is a rocket launcher," Oz reported. "A rocket launcher that shoots flower bombs."
"I don't think it started out as flowers." James got to his knees, clutching the edge of the desk, and cautiously reached for the spellgun. It was lying in a snowdrift of petals, still in its holster, completely inert now. "I'm pretty sure someone just attacked me with another magic weapon, and mine countered it. Did you see where it came from? Can you go after them?"
"On it!" Oz declared, spreading his wings with a cracking boom. Snow and a small blizzard of petals whirled through the window as his enormous shape vanished into the thin winter sunshine.
James brushed flower petals off the seat of his chair and sank down into it, his hip creaking and popping. Then he pushed himself up to look over his desk at Aliette, who was pecking at flower petals on the floor.
"You knew about this. Who's after me?"
Ali
James swept a few palmfuls of petals off the keyboard. Aliette tapped out with her blunt beak: no payment no deal
Of course she wanted payment. "Yeah, make your offer. What's your price?"
turn me back
He stared down at her. There were petals lodged in the curling feathered crest on her head.
"You think I can turn you back?"
She gave him the coldest look that a bird's face was capable of.
"Aliette—I didn't do it on purpose. I have no idea how to undo it."
Aliette continued to stare at him. Her pale eyes, each with a black dot of a pupil, gave her a strange, walleyed look. Then she deliberately tapped four keys.
liar
"Aliette . . ."
All this time, they'd thought he was keeping them bird-shaped intentionally? No wonder they dive-bombed him at every opportunity. He was lucky they hadn't tried turning the gas on or birdhandling a sniper rifle up to the rooftop.
"It was the spellgun, Aliette. I don't have any control over it. I didn't know what it was going to do. It could have paralyzed you or turned you all into butterflies or, hell, I don't know, maybe just shot you."
Aliette stared at him for a moment. Then she beat her wings hard and fluttered, pigeonlike, up to the windowsill, the same way she'd come in. Petals swirled in her wake.
"Wait! Don't go! Damn it . . . I can try to find a way to turn you back. The spellgun did it, so there's got to be a way to undo it, right?"
She glared at him balefully and shuffled around on the windowsill. Her wings rustled, half-spread, and settled against her back again. James wondered if he could catch her if she decided to take off. He doubted it, especially without hurting her fragile bird-bones.
Then she seemed to come to a decision, launched herself from the windowsill and thumped on the desk again. Petals lifted around her like a ring of ripples on a pond and then settled back.
Aliette typed with neat thrusts of her beak:
trade u. fix me & I tell u
"Yeah, okay, that's fair. I can't promise anything, I don't even know if it's possible, but I can promise that I'll try." He laid a hand on the desk beside her. "I'm going to need some information up front, though. Like who's after me."
no fix no deal.
She punctuated it by hitting the period key so hard her beak almost went through it.
"I'm no good to you if I'm dead, Aliette."
u no good to me now. no fix no deal.
There was a tremendous thump and a slight judder as Oz landed outside the window, accompanied by another petal-and-snow blizzard. Aliette nearly fell off the desk. James caught her and put her back.
"See anything?" he called up to the window.
"Yes! I saw the miscreant! The accursed poltroon escaped down a flight of stairs too narrow for me. Base cowardice!"
"Did you get a good look at them? Male, female . . ."
There was a long pause, and then Oz said, "Human?" He cleared his throat. "Or at least generally human-shaped. Bipedal."
"Thanks, that narrows it down."
"Do you have any idea how small you people are? Not to mention how complicated it is to tell what sex you are visually? And humans become so distressed if one gets it wrong . . ."
"Oz, you have a damned photographic memory. Describe them."
On the desk, Aliette shuffled back and forth in an excited little shorebird waddle, but didn't offer any additional information.
"Oh! Well. Two legs, two arms, the usual—"
"Clothing? Hair? Come on, Oz, give me some details. Did you say something about a rocket launcher?"
"Oh, yes, that," Oz said dismissively. "A mortar weapon of some sort, like a large tube carried over the shoulder. And they were wearing a cloak, one of those hooded affairs that you lot seem to like when you're feeling sneaky about things. It was dark gray and long enough to cover everything except a pair of black boots. And they wore gloves. Red ones."
Aliette's smug little shuffle was getting on James's nerves. He planted a hand firmly on her feathery back, wrapping his fingers around her to hold her still. "Where were they when you first saw them?"
"On the roof of the abandoned fish processing plant on Front Street. There's a direct line of sight down the alley to your building, though it's rather a long way. They must have extraordinary aim—"
"Where did they go from there?"
"Down the fire escape," Oz said. He made a disgruntled hissing sound. "I fired a jet of flame—"
"Oz!"
"I hardly scorched the paint!" Oz said indignantly. "They tried to . . . er, to flower you to death, I suppose. In any case—"
"You missed?"
"They jumped," Oz said with a sigh. "And landed near a stairwell to the basement of the building, much like the one here. I took the precaution of dropping a dumpster down the stairwell to make sure they couldn't—"
"Wait, they jumped from how high up? Carrying some kind of mortar weapon?"
"I don't know, perhaps forty feet or so? Fifty?"
"Oz, humans can't jump fifty feet straight down and just walk away."
"Oh," Oz said. "Really?"
"Really. We're not that resilient. Generally speaking, anyway."
"Oh," Oz said again, and then, thoughtfully, "The dumpster might not stop them from getting out, then."
"Probably not, no."
"I'll go have a look," Oz said, and took off in a great downbeat of wings and a whirl of petals and snow-devils.
James looked down at Aliette, who looked up at him from underneath the canopy of his hand. He carefully lifted it away. She stayed put.
"You know who that was," James said.
Aliette nodded. The solemn and very human gesture was deeply unnerving when the rest of her looked like a sort of elongated, walleyed pigeon.
"And what they were."
Another nod.
"And you're not going to tell me until I find a cure for you and your brother and sister."
This time, unexpectedly, there was a vehement headshake. Aliette shuffled around and began peck-typing again.
ada and adric are helping
James stared at the words on the screen as that sank in.
"Huh. Your brother and sister sold me out, right? But you're bringing it to me instead of taking their side."
Aliette shuffled around in front of the keyboard, not looking at him.
"Why, Aliette?"
She hesitated, then typed:
i don't want to be beholden to THAT.
She actually went to the trouble of hitting the caps lock to add emphasis to the last word.
To the best of his knowledge, the Kowalczyk siblings had few scruples about taking work from just about anyone. On top of that, they blamed him for the death of their brother Adrian. For Aliette to break ranks and come to him, effectively turning on her brother and sister . . .
What the hell was after him?
CHAPTER TWO
"James, you can't just leave!"
"She's right," Oz growled, as Dolly's ghostly outlines wavered in her distress. "You shouldn't deal with this alone."
James was sitting on the edge of the desk in the office lobby, which had turned into the site of an impromptu meeting. Six months ago, the basement had been unfinished and dark, haunted by the ghost of a murdered 1920s flapper and otherwise unoccupied. The remodeling was still a work in progress, but it was starting to show results. Now a wide set of stairs, capable of accommodating Oz's bulk, descended into a carpeted lobby with a reception desk and some couches and chairs. Oz's workspace was in the adjoining tunnel, an old bootlegger's passage leading to the river. (Oz said he liked it there. It was cavelike and cozy, and he had his own private exit to the riverbank.) Behind the lobby there was a conference room, also dragon-scale, and a few smaller rooms, including James's private office.
