Find the jinn, p.1
Find the Jinn, page 1
part #1 of Wilde Contracts Series
FIND THE JINN
WILDE CONTRACTS
BOOK 1
MAZ MADDOX
CONTENTS
Trigger Warning
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
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
About the Author
Also by Maz Maddox
Copyright © 2021 by Maz Maddox
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
To my parents for buying me my first Anne Rice book when I was a teenager. This sparked a love for vampires that I’ll carry with me always.
Also to Lestat. If you’re real, drop a girl a line.
TRIGGER WARNING
I’m giving some extra padding here for those who may have stumbled onto this page by accident and don’t want anything spoiled. Skip ahead! For those who do need trigger warnings, like myself, please view below.
This story does contain on page self-harm/suicide attempt.
CHAPTER
ONE
“Wilde Contract Killing and Fish Training, how can I help you?”
Barnaby’s annoyed sigh was so familiar, it almost felt comforting. Like an old friend who hated you and was always consistently pissed off at your existence.
His voice bit into my earpiece connected to my cell phone.
“Rent’s late.”
Climbing down from the top of a planetarium dome was not as fun as climbing up. Fresh rain had made the geometric orb a slick death trap, and I almost cracked my skull before I could get the last bits of my plan in place.
The irony of an old natural history museum being forgotten in time was not lost on me, but it did creep me the hell out. Half the building had been reclaimed by the planet it was so proudly celebrating, while the rest looked like a backdrop to a damn horror movie.
“Barnaby! How are you? Did you get that shipment of ceramic sex position tea cups you were excited about?”
“Don’t change the subject.” And because he couldn’t help himself, being the connoisseur of erotic antiquities he was, he added quickly, “And they’re not sex position cups. They’re early century ceremonial fertility ivory ware.”
There wasn’t any movement within the museum that I could detect, which was a good sign. It had taken me weeks to find this goddamn place, and the stitches across my shoulder blade still itched like hell.
My last run-in with this particular necromancer hadn’t been face-to-face. Like most of these slimy corpses, they hide away and send their monsters to do their dirty work for them. I was pulled in the middle of some drama involving a sexually repressed human, a jinn turned vampire, and a very flexible incubus yoga instructor I had the pleasure of having a sleepover with.
That last part was fantastic, but the rest of it sucked.
Including me getting my ass kicked by a big, badass vampire Thrall and losing any tangible leads to where the hell his boss was. One bright side of getting stomped by an immortal blood-sucking bastard is what they fail to realize they’re leaving behind when they’re cracking your jaw against their knuckles.
Sweet, sweet tracing elements.
The charm I constructed with bits of the Thrall’s blood hummed weakly as I finally made it down safely from the dome.
I adjusted my earpiece and refocused on Barnaby’s ill-timed phone call.
“So you did get them in.”
“Yes, well…” He sniffed, and I could hear the dam begin to break. “They’re very nice.”
I gave him the last little push he needed. “Oh, yeah?”
“The detail on these pieces is just exquisite, Dallas. They’re nothing like the phallic celebration dishware I got last year. These are expertly painted with the care and talent of a true master.”
Exhausted clouds were still lingering around, blotting out most of the sun but doing nothing about the heat. The humidity stuck to my skin like a soggy film, and I slapped a mosquito off my arm.
Barnaby continued, “Each piece is from the Succubus fertility calendar, so there are twelve total, which is just so rare to find. Normally people are familiar with the summer months since the positions are more erotic, but even the winter months have a strikingness to them that is just unmatched…”
I touched my earpiece to mute my audio so Barnaby didn’t hear me climb through the broken window of the building. Ancient glass cracked and busted under my boot, echoing through the crumbling building in the middle of a dead town. Mordin used to be a nice suburban area from what I could gather about it, with a museum, movie theater, rows of cute, boxy houses, and some schools. Whatever caused it to fold was beyond me, but bones of this place were overgrown and honestly creepy as fuck.
It was a perfect hideaway for a creature of death.
“And the brushstrokes…” Barnaby continued to describe the intricate detail of the sensual paintings on the inside of old cups while I explored the museum. An old banner announcing the new dinosaur exhibit was half peeled away from above the ticket counter, the thick canvas material draped over the dated light fixtures. Water pooled in areas where the roof had long ago given way, soaking the dirt and leaves into a swampy mixture. The sign for the wildlife section was barely hanging on, frozen in mid-fall.
Beyond the smell of dead leaves, rainwater and decaying wood, I could smell the unmistakable stench of body rot. Either something very big was dead somewhere in this relic of learning, or it was a lot of little dead things.
My money was on big dead things. Like people-sized dead things. Probably in lots of little pieces.
In my ear, Barns droned on. “The delicate positioning of the male body symbolizes…”
I would have actually listened to that part, but I had to focus.
Even with the rainstorm clouding the sun, it was too bright for Grunts or Messengers to be out this far. The museum was in bad shape, but the roof was still intact for most of the halls, including the domed planetarium that was somehow still standing.
They would be somewhere dark and quiet. And their daddy zombie and his jackass Thrall wouldn’t be far. I gave my chest pocket a pat, taking a long breath.
My Thrall charm hummed against my skin.
A very quiet, usually ignored part of my brain whispered that this entire mission was suicidal. I was outnumbered, outgunned, and my magical goodies were running low. The much louder part of me sounded like a familiar, stern, grizzled man with a missing eye and a scar down his face, telling me to stop fucking around.
I pressed on.
“And don’t even get me started on the symbolism of the reeds. Well, in a nutshell, it dates back to a time when specific water plants were seen as vessels for life…” The incubus in my ear prattled on while I searched for undead monsters.
The smell of rotting flesh seemed stronger toward the wildlife exhibit, and I pulled a vial of crushed owl’s eye gem mixed with a watery base from my pocket and gave it a shake. I always wondered if these things were actually stone owls with crystal eyes or if they were just one of those magically infused stones humans hurled around with reckless abandon. Either way, it worked wonders but stung like a son of a bitch when I added drops into my eyes.
It was like blinking raw sand into your eye sockets for a couple of seconds, blessing the torture victim with a boost of low-light vision without the need for pesky flashlights.
The downside was that it made natural light headache-inducing and nauseating for a little while, but it was handy when stalking nocturnal predators. I hissed in through my teeth as I blinked the gritty gemstone into my eyes, giving it a moment to stop stinging before testing my sight. The dark shadows swallowing the features of the grimy glass display cases relaxed, allowing more of the world to come into focus.
“The importance of nipples in ancient cultures is much more complex than it is today…”
“Nipples?” I had to ask, jerked out of my concentration.
“Oh, absolutely. Obviously, you don’t remember what I talked about with the breastplates of the pre-classic. Let me recap. The emperor Augustine started a religion around stimulation around…”
I stepped into the newly visible darkness just as a low tone in my ear signaled that I was getting another call. I switched it over while Barnaby was describing the curvature of a woman’s left tit. He was going to be talking about it for a while, since I think it was his favorite one, so I didn’t want to interrupt him.
“Wilde Contract Killing and Fish Training.”
“Dallas.”
Even in a disgusting, humid, vampire cesspool, Sias’s voice made my knees weak. I caught myself against an old informational stand about badgers and tried to not sound extremely hot and bothered.
“Hi.”
“I have a job for you.”
“Hand or blow?”
“A contract job.”
“Boo.” I pushed off from my swooning perch and kept going into the darkness. “I should have made you just leave a message.”
“This
“Most contract jobs are.” I grimaced at the taxidermy fox inside of the moldy wildlife display. Its face had been picked on by something, leaving the weird wooden skeleton poking out from its muzzle. Next to it a headless rabbit just had wool sprouting from its neck.
This place was so haunted.
“This place sucks,” I whispered to myself, easing past the broken glass.
“Do I have your attention, Dallas?”
I told myself that I was not going to look into the eyeless face of the stuffed bear, but then I did and regretted everything. What the hell was I doing with my life? Sure, the guy was a necromancer, but did he have to make this his lair? Why couldn’t these assholes make their hidden hideouts of death somewhere nice, like a candy factory or a beach?
“Uh-huh.”
“A former business partner of mine is causing issues and is refusing to meet about these circumstances. Normally I don’t have an issue locating him, but he’s gone dark. I think he’s gone into hiding.”
The smell of rot was close as I moved past the nightmare bear and eased into the hallway connecting the exhibit to the science center. In the hues of grays and blacks, the interactive learning tools used to show kids how gravity and physics worked were cracked and broken. At one time, they had been brightly colored, but now they looked like wilted ash on the floor.
“Well, does he know you want to kill him?” I asked Sias.
That damn sigh again. “He knew I would once he fucked with my money. But it isn’t like him to hide. He’s a stupid bastard, but he’s no coward.”
“He sounds fun.”
The building groaned, and something fell and shattered just past the giant model of the inside of a cell. I pulled my gun free silently and focused on the direction the noise came from.
“…for the last time. He won’t make that mistake again,” Sias was saying, his voice getting rough and distractingly sexy.
I hummed in agreement. “When I come visit, I’m going to get you mad at me. You sound hot like that.”
“You’re already good at doing that.”
“Yeah, but like in a sexy way.”
“I’ll have Claudia set up time for you to come by. Don’t be late, Dallas.”
The phone line clicked, and I tapped it to switch back to Barnaby. “Hey, let me call you back—”
“When can I have you inside of me again?”
That was not Barnaby, my asexual landlord. My confusion made me lose focus, and I blurted, “What?” just as I was attacked.
The Grunt came out of fucking nowhere, materializing from the guts of the science center. Before I could fire a shot, I was thrown onto my back into the discarded debris of a human heart display. Red splatters from the creature’s dripping eyes landed on my face, gnashing teeth just an arms’ length away. Its vice grip was around my throat, boney body pinning me to the ground with its weight.
“Fuck!”
“Yeah, I knew you missed me,” the stranger purred as I was being strangled. The creature trying to kill me screamed and dug its fingers into my throat, but its grip failed as I slammed my fist into its side enough times to snap something.
“What the hell are you watching?”
“Horror movie,” I coughed, muting my earpiece as I tried to roll away. A piece of the plastic human heart bit into my arm, and the Grunt grabbed at my weapon belt. I was tugged backward, but I was able to kick the thing in the mouth to shake it loose.
“I just couldn’t stop thinking about you,” the stranger was saying as I scrambled to find my gun in the dark. The owl’s eye gem dust made everything monochrome and textureless, so my black gun looked like every other black thing on the ground. The Grunt howled and rushed me, screeching as I kicked its legs out from under it and slapped it across the jaw with a massive replica of a pulmonary artery.
“The other night was…so wrong. So dangerous. Gods, if he found out about us…I can’t even think about it,” the stranger went on in my ear, sounding breathless and excited. It would’ve been hot if I could remember who the hell it was and didn’t have a vampire trying to chew on me.
I made another mad dash to find my gun before ripping my dagger free, spinning it in my fingers so the blade faced the correct direction. The Grunt launched itself, driven by hunger and rage, without any sense of self-preservation or intelligence, and grabbed for my throat again.
My dagger sank into its temple, the crunch of bone against the magically infused blade echoing through the metal. The final twist turned out the lights, and the Grunt collapsed into a melting heap of charred bone and carnage.
“…care anymore. I just need you to fuck me like you did before.”
I caught my breath, wiping off my dagger and replacing it back into its holder as I fished out my phone from my side pocket. The cracked screen said “Dancer,” and it took me a moment to place a name to a face. His throaty chuckle helped push the memory along, and I was reminded of a quick-and-dirty hookup behind a club building last week. He was a cute little imp twink with a tattoo of a demon tail on his lower back.
“Dancer, Dancer, Dancer,” I said playfully, but mostly trying to implant the name into my brain better so I didn’t slip and call him “Dan” or something awkward. “You naughty little thing.”
“When can I see you again?”
“Soon. I’ve got some work to take care of.”
“Aw.” He sounded like he pushed his lower lip out and talked around it like a pouty child. “Fine. I’ll be at the club most nights this week. You’ll know where to find me.”
I had no idea where to find him.
“I sure do.”
“Hmm. Bye, Dallas. Don’t keep me waiting.”
“Bye, Dan…Dancer,” I tacked on quickly and hung up. “Damn it.”
“I know, it’s completely atrocious,” Barnaby agreed passionately. “A little professionalism is not hard to achieve.”
“Oh shit—yeah. Yeah.” I stumbled, recovering with a wince. I had forgotten all about Barnaby rambling on the other line. Hopefully my surprise made me sound enthusiastic. “Honestly, it’s a rare trait these days. No one is professional anymore.”
I found my gun kicked under half of a ventricle and blew off the museum dust before holstering it.
“I couldn’t agree with you more.” Barnaby sniffed, and I could hear ceramic being shuffled around. “I suppose I should get these put back since we’ve gone through the set. I have a client coming by soon to examine the wooden penis walking stick of the Harem Dynasty.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a busy day ahead.” I stepped over the vampire soup on the floor.
“Very. I’ve fooled around enough on the phone for now. Don’t keep me waiting on the rent much longer, Dallas. I’m serious.”
“You’re a true friend, Barns.”
“No, I’m not.”
The line went dead, and I checked to make sure there wasn’t another person I forgot about before tugging the earpiece out of my head. One of these days, I needed to hire an assistant. For about a week, I thought I had gotten Kevin trained to answer calls, but the jerk hung up on most of them that weren’t fish related.
My charm hummed low and constant as I moved into the next exhibit. That damn Thrall was close, and I took a calming breath to corral my heart rate. Rot and death permeated the air, burning my nose with the metallic sting of decay. It was somehow poetic that there were gnawed bits of human bone scattered around the prehistoric skeletons frozen in time. Towering beasts from another era loomed overhead, stripped of their skin and personalities, stuck in a permanent, silent roar.
A low creak of whining metal came from the brittle wiring holding a giant winged thing onto the ceiling. Unlike its fellow dinosaurs, this one had fake skin of fiberglass and paint stretched out over large wings. It swayed dangerously as the building settled, apparently not fully installed before the museum closed down. One of those industrial ladders was abandoned beside it.
