Read Night Call (Book 2): Demon Dei for Free Online

doing paperwork. She seemed so at home with a gun in her hand, facing down a werewolf, or stabbing a Primal in the back with a knife coated in Holy water.
    “Coffee?” Ivan asked, going to the machine.
    “No thanks. I’m hyper enough as it is. How have you been?”
    Ivan got himself a cup and sat down on the couch. He nodded to the seat beside him. I sat and waited. He sipped his drink, staring through the partially drawn blinds on the windows to the world beyond.
    My previous experience with Ivan had been a single phone conversation. I’d never met him during Erin’s investigation. He’d been drawn into Veilchen’s clutches all the same, though. She’d tortured him to get information about me. Kinda makes a guy feel something for him, even if it is only guilt. And that’s why Erin had threatened me, oh so subtly. She knew it hadn’t been my fault, but I’d been the reason, and that had almost been enough for her.
    “I’ve been good,” he said and I believed him. “I appreciated what you said on the phone that time. It helped.”
    “I’m glad. And I’m here because…?”
    “Yeah, sorry. I shouldn’t waste your time too much. You’re probably very busy.”
    I shrugged. Between Ivan and Nick Carson, I soon could be.
    Ivan carefully put his mug down on the table and faced me. “Did you hear about the murder at Geotech last week?”
    “Maybe. Refresh my memory.”
    “A physicist working on one of their projects was murdered in her lab. She didn’t work for them full time. She was just doing some contract work.”
    “I think I might have heard about it. Her husband did it?”
    “They have footage of him on the security cameras going into the lab, yeah. But he didn’t do it.” Ivan leaned closer. “This is really private. The police have clamped right down on all the details because they don’t want the press finding out about it.”
    “So how do you know?” I began to wonder if Erin was involved somehow. She used to be a police officer and perhaps she’d been brought in as a consultant. If that was the case, I would be telling Ivan thanks but no freakin’ way.
    “The woman who was killed, Geraldine Davis, was my partner’s cousin.”
    Phew. I nodded for him to continue.
    “Anyway, they have footage of Chris, her husband, going into the lab at the time of the murder, but he didn’t do it. And everyone knows it. You see, he was at work at the time.”
    “Where does he work?”
    “Police. He’s an officer. He was on the comms the night it happened. Dozens of witnesses. Recordings of the phone conversations he had. Images of him on their security cameras, as well.”
    “Ah, yeah. That’s a bit strange.”
    Ivan nodded. “Will you look into it?”
    I’m not an investigator. I’m a killer. If someone has trouble with vampires or a troll, or imps that like a little Chianti with their cat, then I’m more than willing to jump in feet first. Give me something I can put a bullet or several in or something I can toss Mercy at, then pig plus mud equals happy. Give me a mystery to solve and I’m more likely to wander around blindly until I accidentally run into something that bites back. Of course, before that little blunder with Veilchen, I was all sorts of confident. I thought I knew shit. Turns out, I didn’t. These days, I’m a trifle more wary about situations I know jack about.
    “I don’t know that it’s in my field exactly,” I said. “Making one person look like someone else is pretty easy in this day and age, and you don’t need something extraordinary to do it.”
    Ivan’s shoulders slumped, but he rallied with an earnest, “You investigate paranormal stuff, right?”
    “I wouldn’t say ‘investigate’, as such. More point and shoot.” Or, as Mrs Arnold would call it, pest removal.
    He raised a sceptical brow, as if even though he was after my ‘paranormal’ expertise he wasn’t quite ready to admit there was actually something there to shoot at.
    “You asked,” I