Excerpt of Succubus Lost by Tiffany Allee

Chapter One

The smell hit me first. Not decay, like I’d expected after being called to the site of a homicide, but cremains and trash.

Spotlights and flashlights lit the darkened alley, casting eerie shadows onto the asphalt and against the brick of the surrounding buildings. It was enough to make a person imagine threats that didn’t exist, monsters hiding in the shadows. Surreal.

The alleyway behind La Maison wasn’t exactly as nice as the lobby of the chic Chicago hotel, and the night air was cooling quickly. I glanced longingly toward the back door of the building and clutched my blazer a little tighter around me, wishing I’d worn pants instead of a skirt for once. Inside the hotel door lay the kitchen, and past that was one of the nicest lounge bars in the city, as well as a first- rate restaurant. Putting on my cop face—a slightly knowing smile that my friend Mac called “smug with a touch of haughty”—I followed Astrid into the Dumpster-filled alley where a metal trash can seemed to be the source of the ashy scent wafting down the street.

“I’m Astrid Holmes, and this is Marisol Whitman.” Astrid flashed her badge at a police officer and a man in a crime scene investigator’s jacket. I did the same. This was her case, so I’d follow her lead. “What do we got?” she asked, her voice almost too official.

The CSI spoke first. “Freak squad, huh? Looks like a body, burned.”

Neither Astrid nor I so much as blinked at his rude greeting. It wasn’t the first time we’d been called freaks, and it almost certainly wouldn’t be the last.

At our lack of reactions, the CSI continued. “We won’t know for sure until we get the cremated remains back to the lab, but we’ve got bits of teeth, some melted fillings, and small pieces of bone.” Again the middle-aged man in the CSI jacket paused as if waiting for a dramatic response. The Chicago wind kicked up, and the ash smell grew even more pungent. Something living had definitely burned here.

“We’ve got guys going through this Dumpster again, and a couple of teams checking out the Dumpsters nearby,” the uniform said, giving the other man a bored glance. “Just in case some evidence was stuffed into one of them.”

“Who found the victim?” Astrid asked.

“Kitchen manager of the bakery.” He nodded to a building on the opposite side of the alley from the hotel. “Says he saw someone heading outta here fast, around four thirty this morning, but he didn’t get a good look at him. Big guy, he said.”

“No wonder he didn’t see much out here,” I muttered. Sure, there was a lot of light with our equipment in the area, but otherwise the whole shadowy space would only have been lit by a single standing streetlamp. I squinted at the light.

“Yeah, especially since it happened in the middle of the night—well, technically early this morning. The man who chased the guy called us, but since he couldn’t say for sure what the guy was doing, a unit didn’t get out here until ten this morning. It took us a while to figure out the ashes were human, then we didn’t know whether it was one of yours or not. Lieutenant said to call in your sensitive, though. That she’d be able to tell.”

Astrid’s attention had slipped away from our conversation, and her gaze was affixed on the metal trash barrel less than twenty feet away. As a sensitive—a human naturally gifted with the ability to feel magic and energy— she was probably itching to check out the remains.

“Why don’t you go have a look-see,” I suggested. “I’ll finish up here.”

Astrid’s eyes widened and she nodded, then hurried away. The girl really needed to work on her cop face.