Hannah Jayne: Under Attack

To my fifth grade teacher Suzanne Nunes who let me retest when I failed the language arts portion of my CBETs test; to my eighth grade teacher Cynthia Gore who awarded me language arts Student of the Year; and to my eleventh grade teacher JoEllen Victoreen who told me that my book report sounded like I copied it from the book’s back cover (I totally didn’t).

You made a difference.

First and foremost thank you to my amazing agent Amberly Finarelli for believing, listening, inspiring—and showing me pictures of Ruby when things get too dark in the Underworld. And to John Scognamiglio—you’ve ruined me for other editors—you are the best! Many thanks to my copyeditor Erin who humbles me with her red pencil and eagle eye. For you, I will rein in my cocky half-smiles and beelines. A big thank you to Lee Lofland and the entire staff of WPA, the Greensboro Police and Fire Departments for locking me in the slammer for “research.” Thank you to Dr. Jonathan Hayes for answering my questions on strangling, drowning and the menu at Gotham. Every woman should be lucky enough to have a gastronome/medical examiner on speed dial. To authors Juliet Blackwell, Sophie Littlefield, Penny Warner and Diana Orgain, thanks for showing me the ropes. A big thank-you to my Beta readers/cheering section at Club One: Shirley, Nadine and Penne.

Thank you to everyone in the city who knowingly (or not) supported me—especially Mike from Recycle Books, the staffs of the Pruneyard Barnes & Noble, M is for Mystery, Bay Books, Towne Books and especially, unequivocally, the gang from Crema Coffee in San Jose. There is no better place to get inspired.

Thank you is not big enough to express my gratitude to John and Joan Wendt for letting me hoard laundry quarters and stuff my purse with Google snacks. Thanks for being expert Beta readers and even better friends. We’ll be in Hawaii soon! To Oscar Varela—thank you for everything you do on a daily basis, but most of all for telling me to quit my job four years ago. I wouldn’t have done it without you.

To my best stalker fan (now friend and often roommate) Marina Chappie: thank you for reading, listening, plastering, and plotting with and for me. I can’t wait to share shelf space with Elle!

A very special thanks to my entire family, especially my parents for their unyielding and enthusiastic support, Dana and Officer Cousin for offering book tour security and to oil me up, and to my brother Trevor for understanding that not every novel can center around a quick-witted stockbroker with a heart of gold. And finally, to CTS—now I really mean it when I say “the check’s in the mail.”

It’s nearly impossible to get hobgoblin slobber out of raw silk.

I know this because I had been standing in the bathroom, furiously scrubbing at the stubborn stain for at least forty-five minutes. If I could do magic, I would have zapped the stain out. Heck, if I could do magic I would zap away the whole hobgoblin afternoon and be sinking my toes in the sand somewhere while a tanned god named Carlos rubbed suntan lotion on my back. But no, I was stuck in the Underworld Detection Agency women’s restroom—a horrible, echoey room tiled in Pepto pink with four regular stalls and a single tiny one for pixies—when my coworker Nina popped her head in, wrinkled her cute ski-jump nose, and said, “I smell hobgoblin slobber.”

Did I mention vampires have a ridiculously good sense of smell?

Nina came in, letting the door snap shut behind her. She used one angled fang to pierce the blood bag she was holding and settled herself onto the sink next to me.

“You’re never going to get that out, you know,” she said between slurps.

I huffed and wrung the water from my dress, glaring at Nina as I stood there in my baby-pink slip and heels. “Did you come in here just to tell me that?”

Nina extended one long, marble-white leg and examined her complicated Jimmy Choo stilettos. “No, I also came in to tell you that Lorraine is on the warpath, Nelson used his trident to tack a pixie to the corkboard, and Vlad is holding a VERM meeting in the lunch room.”

I frowned. “This job bites.”

Nina smiled, bared her fangs, and snapped her jaws.

Nina and I work together at the Underworld Detection Agency—the UDA for those in the know. And very few people are in the know. Our branch is located thirty-seven floors below the San Francisco Police Department, but we have physical and satellite offices nationwide—word is the Savannah office gets the most ghosts but has the best food. The Manhattan office gets the best crossovers (curious humans wandering down) and the good ol’ San Francisco office is famous for our unruly hordes of the magnificent undead, mostly dead, and back from the dead. However, we’re rapidly becoming in famous for a management breakdown that tends to make incidents like the fairy stuck to the corkboard barely worth mentioning. Some demons blame the breakdown of Underworld morals. I blame the fact that my boss and former head of the UDA, Pete Sampson, disappeared last year and has yet to be replaced. Thus, we’ve been privy to a semipermanent parade of interim management made up of everything from werewolves and vampires to goblins and one (mercifully short) stint with a screaming banshee.

So am I a demon? Nope. I’m a plain, one hundred percent first-life, air breathing, magic-free human being. I don’t have fangs, wings, or hooves. I’m five-foot-two on a good day, topped with a ridiculous mess of curly red hair on a bad day, and my eyes are the exact hue of lime Jell-O. My super powers are that I can consume a whole pizza in twelve minutes flat and sing the fifty states in alphabetical order. And that I’m alive. Which makes me a weird, freakish anomaly in an Underworld office that keeps blood in the office fridge and offers life insurance that you can collect should you get the opportunity to come back to life.

“There you both are!”

My head swung to the open doorway where Lorraine stood, eyebrows raised and arched, her blue-green eyes narrowed. Lorraine is a Gestault witch of the green order, which means that her magiks are in kind with nature and are deeply humane. Usually.

Her honey-blond hair hangs past her waist and her fluttery, earth-toned wardrobe reflects her solidarity with natural harmony.

Unless you got on her bad side, which, today, I was.

Lorraine glared at my slip. “Can you wrap up your little lingerie fashion show and meet me in my office, please? And you”—Lorraine swung her head toward Nina, who was holding my damp dress under the hand dryer—“can you please break up Vlad’s empowerment meeting and get out to the main floor? Vlad’s got nine vamps singing “We Shall Overcome” in the lunch room and I’ve got sixteen minotaurs in the overflow waiting room.”

I looked at Nina. “Vlad is still into the Vampire Empowerment Movement?”

Nina gave me her patented “Don’t even start” look, punched her fist in the air, and bellowed “ Viva la reva-lución! ” while slipping out the bathroom door.

I pulled my dress over my head under Lorraine’s annoyed stare, and then worked quickly to rearrange my hair. When Lorraine sighed—loudly—I wadded my curls into a bun and secured them with a binder clip, then followed her down the hall.

“Okay,” I told her as I tried to keep pace with her. “What’s up?”

Lorraine didn’t miss a step. She pushed a manila file folder in my hand with the blue tag— Wizards —sticking out.

“Nicholias Rayburn,” I read as I scanned the thick file.