Girl's Guide to Voodoo Bounty Hunting 2: Shifty Business Nineteen-year-old witch Nessa Scott and her invisible cat Pim are in trouble. Nessa’s deadbeat dad skipped town owing an L.A. bail bondsman and Voodoo King big time. Only, the debt isn’t money. It’s magic and guess who Dad left as collateral? As if being chased by a Fallen Angel wasn't enough trouble for one witch, novice Bounty Hunter Nessa and her invisible cat Pim stumble into a Voodoo death ceremony, fall out with a murderous Fae, fight Zombies to rescue their boss, play tug-of-war with a new bounty hunter trying to steal her fugitive felons, and follow a bunch of pesky ghosts to stop a human sacrifice. And you thought the biggest problem to living in L.A. was the traffic. |
Excerpt from GIrl's Guide to Voodoo Bounty Hunting 2: Shifty Business
By Eden Crowne
Copyright 2021 by Eden Crowne. All rights reserved
Chapter One
Nessa hit the brakes on her scooter, grinding to a stop on the unpaved driveway in a spray of gravel. Pim meowed in protest at being thrown against the metal bars of the basket. She braced herself with both feet before flipping open the lock on the lid.
The Victorian mansion at the end of the road looked like the Psycho house on the Universal Studios backlot tour. To complete that image, a young woman sat on the porch steps with a cigarette dangling from her lips, a bottle of beer in one hand, and a double-gauge shotgun resting across her lap.
The girl was long-legged and lanky, inky black skin and hair in an old-school Afro. Nessa immediately thought of her boss, Roman Barracuda, and his Cool and the Gang seventies-celebration style. She wore cut-offs, a faded pearl button red plaid cowboy shirt, and lace-up leather work boots.
A row of black stitches made a frown line over her left eyebrow, bruises on her cheek were turning yellow, and her lower lip was split and scabbed.
“Did you bring the bottle?” she asked around the cigarette.
Nessa swallowed, her throat dry, watching the shotgun.
“The bottle,” the girl repeated. “Did you bring it?”
Shifting her backpack around to the front, Nessa reached in and pulled out a clear glass bottle about eight inches tall with a narrow top and a cork stopper. A braided leather cord was looped around the neck, long enough to make a handle.
She held it up.
The young woman gave a quick nod. “Hold onto it for now.”
Pim hopped out of the basket onto the loose gravel. Her Familiar was under an invisibility curse. Unless he transformed into his werecat form, only Nessa and a few other magic users could see him. That now included Mr. Barracuda. But since he was also a Voodoo king, maybe it was to be expected. Pim’s invisibility was her secret weapon. He could scout and spy unseen.
“Who’s your friend?” the girl asked, shifting the shotgun slightly.
‘What?’ Nessa thought in alarm.
"You can see him?”
The girl gave a quick toss of her head. “No. The gravel shifted in front of the scooter.”
Nessa frowned at her Familiar. That had been careless.
The cat bobbed his head and hung his tail in apology stepping silently to the side, not a stone shifting.
“He’s Pim. Pim’s Cup Whisker’s Rampant. My Familiar. Please don’t shoot him. Or me.” The last part just sort of tumbled out. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
The girl smiled then winced as it stretched her torn lip. “This isn’t for you.” She patted the gunstock.
Nessa and Pim had been sent by her boss to pick up an out-of-state Skip, Darryl Deschamps Fauvier. Darryl had missed his Infernal Court date in Colorado a few weeks before.
Infernal Courts for supernaturals worked a lot like judicial courts for humans. And Barracuda Bail Bonds operated much the same as any other office in that business for felons who run afoul of the law. Real-world or supernatural.
Barracuda’s main Skip Tracers were twin sisters Pansie and Rose Marie LaRue. Extraordinarily large red-headed warriors who looked human but most certainly were not. Nessa had only recently joined the team and not willingly. Her deadbeat dad skipped out on his Infernal bond with Barracuda leaving nineteen-year-old Nessa as collateral. Barracuda decided she was just the person he needed to collect on magical cases.
When the real-world police picked Fauvier up in Pasadena on a local assault charge, his prints came up in the system and pinged Barracuda on the Dark Net. The man had run from an Infernal Court date in Colorado. Once he was out of state, her boss explained, it was open season after ten days on Infernal felons no matter who put up the bond.
“Easy job,” Barracuda had said, handing her the paperwork. “There is someone on-site already, she’ll bag him for you. Then take him to the Infernal Court in Redondo Beach.”
“On my scooter?”
Nessa’s lack of four-wheeled transportation was a source of friction with Barracuda. She couldn’t afford a car. Most of her money, what little she could make, went to tuition at Santa Monica City College or into savings for Long Beach State. She and Pim got around greater L.A. on her bright orange Suzuki.
“It will be fine. Here.” He’d given her the bottle. “You’ll need this.”
Looking around the front yard, if you could call a stand of acacia and a patch of dried grass a yard, Nessa didn’t see anyone who might be runaway Darryl.
“Barracuda said you’d have our Skip.”
“And I will.” She took a long pull on the beer, then gave Nessa a toothy smile. “Very soon.”
There was something ominous in the way she said it that made the hair stand up on the back of Nessa’s neck. Pim felt it too. He ran back to the scooter, jumped on the seat, and turned a couple of tight nervous circles. Pim wanted them to leave.
Should they go? Nessa was barely one week into the job of Bounty Hunter. The rules of the game were still a mystery. But if she wanted to get paid, and she did, she needed to bring in Darryl. School fees at Santa Monica City College were due in a month. No Skip, no pay.
The girl dropped the cigarette on the porch steps, stubbing it out with her work boot. “Put the scooter around the back. Stay on the porch until I tell you otherwise. Keep the bottle ready.”
Not sure what else to do, Nessa followed her instructions. She carefully stepped around the girl and the large gun on her return. Pim didn’t need steps. He jumped up through the porch railing. His fur was bristling. Not completely standing on end, but getting close.
“Do you want to talk?” She made a motion toward her backpack. The Speak and Spell was zipped inside.
Pim shook his head.
Cat’s vocal cords – even magical cats – are not made for human speech. Pim had six claws on his front paws, the extra one working as an opposable thumb. He could read and write -sort of e- but his paws were too awkward to type on most keyboards.
Pim had been her grandmother's Familiar before coming to Nessa. Grandma’ Hattie had hit on the Speak and Spell with its chunky keyboard back in the day. Since then, they’d modified the electronic toy until it had as much computing power as a tablet computer. Nessa always carried the little red machine in her backpack.
Nessa sat in a frayed rattan patio chair to wait for she wasn't sure what. Pim jumped in her lap. The chair sagged and creaked under their weight. She put her hand through the looped string so she wouldn’t drop the bottle.
It had taken her and Pim almost two hours to travel across the city from the Bail Bonds office in Compton to Pasadena. She couldn’t take the scooter on the freeway. The little machine’s top speed was only forty-five miles an hour. Once they’d reached the hills it had been the map-app and many wrong turns before finding the house on an unmarked dirt road. She still wasn’t sure how she was going to get this Darryl guy all the way to the Infernal Court in Redondo Beach on the back of her scooter.
“The bastard did this to me,” the girl said, startling Nessa. “In case you're wondering. Sucker punched me and I hit my head falling. Knocked me clean out. Probably a good thing. He was high and lost interest after a couple of kicks, I guess. I called the cops, pressed charges. It’s been about a week. He made bail this morning. The asshole made it very clear he’s coming for me.”
Vagabonding around the country with Deadbeat Dad, Nessa had seen her share of abusive men. Judging from the girl’s tone, Darryl was not going to get any free kicks in this time.
Nessa and Pim sat quietly waiting. Tessa was good at waiting. A childhood spent aiding and abetting her scamming dad had taught her patience. Crickets chirped and locust buzzed in the scraggly acacia tree and the scrub dotting the hillside. It was late afternoon and still hot. Pasadena and the hills were much hotter than the South Bay cities by the seas where Nessa lived.
They heard the truck long before they saw it, roaring up the rough road.
The girl set her beer bottle on the step, the rifle still resting in her arms. She looked totally relaxed. Nessa couldn’t say that about herself. Her insides clenched tightly and she wished she’d asked to use the bathroom.
A red pickup sped dangerously along the road, weaving from side to side.
'Drunk or high?' Nessa wondered.
The driver managed to execute a masterful drift turn in the gravel of the driveway, coming to a stop a few yards from where the girl stood.
A man jumped out, yelling before his feet hit the ground. “Desiree! You stupid bitch.”
He was a white man, medium-sized with lots of muscle bulging out of a tight white tee-shirt. Thick neck and dirty blond curly hair. That’s about all Nessa could take in before he turned to the bed of the truck, still yelling.
The expletives were strung together thick and fast. The basic message between the swear words being: I am going burn your god damn house to the ground with your screaming body in it.
Nice.
They must have been dating. Lust made people do stupid things. That’s why she didn’t date. Boys were a danger she could not indulge in. Not with Frank on her tail.
Darryl pulled up a pair of red metal two-gallon canisters. “You think you can call the cops on me? Me?” He was spitting with anger.
Setting the canisters on the ground, he yanked a knife from a sheath across his chest. It was almost a foot long with a serrated edge.
Nessa scooted back in her chair, holding her breath. Pim jumped onto the porch rail, pacing, a growl rumbling in his chest. He began the rippling body movement that singled an imminent shift to werecat mode.
If necessary, Pim could take this guy. As a cat, he was twenty pounds. After transformation, he weighed close to seventy and had the strength to snap bone with a single bite. He could even break a man’s neck. The werecat had the uncanny ability to unhinge his jaw like that extinct Tasmanian Wolf. It was the creepiest thing to see. Nessa didn’t know if all werecats could do that or not. Pim was the only one she’d ever met.
Darryl stalked over, knife up, his face ugly.
Desiree, that’s what he’d called her, did not seem upset at all. She calmly stood, stepped off the porch, shifted the shotgun, and pumped both barrels into his chest.
The bullets blasted a bloody hole big enough to put a man’s fist through.
By Eden Crowne
Copyright 2021 by Eden Crowne. All rights reserved
Chapter One
Nessa hit the brakes on her scooter, grinding to a stop on the unpaved driveway in a spray of gravel. Pim meowed in protest at being thrown against the metal bars of the basket. She braced herself with both feet before flipping open the lock on the lid.
The Victorian mansion at the end of the road looked like the Psycho house on the Universal Studios backlot tour. To complete that image, a young woman sat on the porch steps with a cigarette dangling from her lips, a bottle of beer in one hand, and a double-gauge shotgun resting across her lap.
The girl was long-legged and lanky, inky black skin and hair in an old-school Afro. Nessa immediately thought of her boss, Roman Barracuda, and his Cool and the Gang seventies-celebration style. She wore cut-offs, a faded pearl button red plaid cowboy shirt, and lace-up leather work boots.
A row of black stitches made a frown line over her left eyebrow, bruises on her cheek were turning yellow, and her lower lip was split and scabbed.
“Did you bring the bottle?” she asked around the cigarette.
Nessa swallowed, her throat dry, watching the shotgun.
“The bottle,” the girl repeated. “Did you bring it?”
Shifting her backpack around to the front, Nessa reached in and pulled out a clear glass bottle about eight inches tall with a narrow top and a cork stopper. A braided leather cord was looped around the neck, long enough to make a handle.
She held it up.
The young woman gave a quick nod. “Hold onto it for now.”
Pim hopped out of the basket onto the loose gravel. Her Familiar was under an invisibility curse. Unless he transformed into his werecat form, only Nessa and a few other magic users could see him. That now included Mr. Barracuda. But since he was also a Voodoo king, maybe it was to be expected. Pim’s invisibility was her secret weapon. He could scout and spy unseen.
“Who’s your friend?” the girl asked, shifting the shotgun slightly.
‘What?’ Nessa thought in alarm.
"You can see him?”
The girl gave a quick toss of her head. “No. The gravel shifted in front of the scooter.”
Nessa frowned at her Familiar. That had been careless.
The cat bobbed his head and hung his tail in apology stepping silently to the side, not a stone shifting.
“He’s Pim. Pim’s Cup Whisker’s Rampant. My Familiar. Please don’t shoot him. Or me.” The last part just sort of tumbled out. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
The girl smiled then winced as it stretched her torn lip. “This isn’t for you.” She patted the gunstock.
Nessa and Pim had been sent by her boss to pick up an out-of-state Skip, Darryl Deschamps Fauvier. Darryl had missed his Infernal Court date in Colorado a few weeks before.
Infernal Courts for supernaturals worked a lot like judicial courts for humans. And Barracuda Bail Bonds operated much the same as any other office in that business for felons who run afoul of the law. Real-world or supernatural.
Barracuda’s main Skip Tracers were twin sisters Pansie and Rose Marie LaRue. Extraordinarily large red-headed warriors who looked human but most certainly were not. Nessa had only recently joined the team and not willingly. Her deadbeat dad skipped out on his Infernal bond with Barracuda leaving nineteen-year-old Nessa as collateral. Barracuda decided she was just the person he needed to collect on magical cases.
When the real-world police picked Fauvier up in Pasadena on a local assault charge, his prints came up in the system and pinged Barracuda on the Dark Net. The man had run from an Infernal Court date in Colorado. Once he was out of state, her boss explained, it was open season after ten days on Infernal felons no matter who put up the bond.
“Easy job,” Barracuda had said, handing her the paperwork. “There is someone on-site already, she’ll bag him for you. Then take him to the Infernal Court in Redondo Beach.”
“On my scooter?”
Nessa’s lack of four-wheeled transportation was a source of friction with Barracuda. She couldn’t afford a car. Most of her money, what little she could make, went to tuition at Santa Monica City College or into savings for Long Beach State. She and Pim got around greater L.A. on her bright orange Suzuki.
“It will be fine. Here.” He’d given her the bottle. “You’ll need this.”
Looking around the front yard, if you could call a stand of acacia and a patch of dried grass a yard, Nessa didn’t see anyone who might be runaway Darryl.
“Barracuda said you’d have our Skip.”
“And I will.” She took a long pull on the beer, then gave Nessa a toothy smile. “Very soon.”
There was something ominous in the way she said it that made the hair stand up on the back of Nessa’s neck. Pim felt it too. He ran back to the scooter, jumped on the seat, and turned a couple of tight nervous circles. Pim wanted them to leave.
Should they go? Nessa was barely one week into the job of Bounty Hunter. The rules of the game were still a mystery. But if she wanted to get paid, and she did, she needed to bring in Darryl. School fees at Santa Monica City College were due in a month. No Skip, no pay.
The girl dropped the cigarette on the porch steps, stubbing it out with her work boot. “Put the scooter around the back. Stay on the porch until I tell you otherwise. Keep the bottle ready.”
Not sure what else to do, Nessa followed her instructions. She carefully stepped around the girl and the large gun on her return. Pim didn’t need steps. He jumped up through the porch railing. His fur was bristling. Not completely standing on end, but getting close.
“Do you want to talk?” She made a motion toward her backpack. The Speak and Spell was zipped inside.
Pim shook his head.
Cat’s vocal cords – even magical cats – are not made for human speech. Pim had six claws on his front paws, the extra one working as an opposable thumb. He could read and write -sort of e- but his paws were too awkward to type on most keyboards.
Pim had been her grandmother's Familiar before coming to Nessa. Grandma’ Hattie had hit on the Speak and Spell with its chunky keyboard back in the day. Since then, they’d modified the electronic toy until it had as much computing power as a tablet computer. Nessa always carried the little red machine in her backpack.
Nessa sat in a frayed rattan patio chair to wait for she wasn't sure what. Pim jumped in her lap. The chair sagged and creaked under their weight. She put her hand through the looped string so she wouldn’t drop the bottle.
It had taken her and Pim almost two hours to travel across the city from the Bail Bonds office in Compton to Pasadena. She couldn’t take the scooter on the freeway. The little machine’s top speed was only forty-five miles an hour. Once they’d reached the hills it had been the map-app and many wrong turns before finding the house on an unmarked dirt road. She still wasn’t sure how she was going to get this Darryl guy all the way to the Infernal Court in Redondo Beach on the back of her scooter.
“The bastard did this to me,” the girl said, startling Nessa. “In case you're wondering. Sucker punched me and I hit my head falling. Knocked me clean out. Probably a good thing. He was high and lost interest after a couple of kicks, I guess. I called the cops, pressed charges. It’s been about a week. He made bail this morning. The asshole made it very clear he’s coming for me.”
Vagabonding around the country with Deadbeat Dad, Nessa had seen her share of abusive men. Judging from the girl’s tone, Darryl was not going to get any free kicks in this time.
Nessa and Pim sat quietly waiting. Tessa was good at waiting. A childhood spent aiding and abetting her scamming dad had taught her patience. Crickets chirped and locust buzzed in the scraggly acacia tree and the scrub dotting the hillside. It was late afternoon and still hot. Pasadena and the hills were much hotter than the South Bay cities by the seas where Nessa lived.
They heard the truck long before they saw it, roaring up the rough road.
The girl set her beer bottle on the step, the rifle still resting in her arms. She looked totally relaxed. Nessa couldn’t say that about herself. Her insides clenched tightly and she wished she’d asked to use the bathroom.
A red pickup sped dangerously along the road, weaving from side to side.
'Drunk or high?' Nessa wondered.
The driver managed to execute a masterful drift turn in the gravel of the driveway, coming to a stop a few yards from where the girl stood.
A man jumped out, yelling before his feet hit the ground. “Desiree! You stupid bitch.”
He was a white man, medium-sized with lots of muscle bulging out of a tight white tee-shirt. Thick neck and dirty blond curly hair. That’s about all Nessa could take in before he turned to the bed of the truck, still yelling.
The expletives were strung together thick and fast. The basic message between the swear words being: I am going burn your god damn house to the ground with your screaming body in it.
Nice.
They must have been dating. Lust made people do stupid things. That’s why she didn’t date. Boys were a danger she could not indulge in. Not with Frank on her tail.
Darryl pulled up a pair of red metal two-gallon canisters. “You think you can call the cops on me? Me?” He was spitting with anger.
Setting the canisters on the ground, he yanked a knife from a sheath across his chest. It was almost a foot long with a serrated edge.
Nessa scooted back in her chair, holding her breath. Pim jumped onto the porch rail, pacing, a growl rumbling in his chest. He began the rippling body movement that singled an imminent shift to werecat mode.
If necessary, Pim could take this guy. As a cat, he was twenty pounds. After transformation, he weighed close to seventy and had the strength to snap bone with a single bite. He could even break a man’s neck. The werecat had the uncanny ability to unhinge his jaw like that extinct Tasmanian Wolf. It was the creepiest thing to see. Nessa didn’t know if all werecats could do that or not. Pim was the only one she’d ever met.
Darryl stalked over, knife up, his face ugly.
Desiree, that’s what he’d called her, did not seem upset at all. She calmly stood, stepped off the porch, shifted the shotgun, and pumped both barrels into his chest.
The bullets blasted a bloody hole big enough to put a man’s fist through.