6 Under The Final Moon Read Online Free Page A

remains with a clipboard. As the camera continued to pan, I could see little bits of someone’s life—a bright red boot now licked by soot and partially melted, framed photos, the glass warped and yellowed, the once-smiling subjects grotesque and stained black.
    “We will update you with more information as it comes in. For KNTV news, this is Patty Chan.”
    I muted the television, a heavy feeling of dread settling in the pit of my stomach. First Lance Armentrout, and now two buildings and a residence in quick succession . . . That familiar anxiety flared up again and I tried to quash it down.
    Fires happened. People died. It was unfortunate, but not supernatural. I kept repeating the mantra, but I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince. The old me—the me of about three weeks ago—would have jumped to screaming conclusions that there was a fire-breathing dragon or a witch gone hellfire crazy on the loose. I would have thrown on my yoga pants and sucked down a Fresca, then gone screaming across the hall to rouse Will—my Guardian; we’ll get back to that—or back down to the police station to get Alex while packing a crossbow and dragon bait into my bra.
    But the new me was taking the fires and Armentrout for what they were—whatever it was that they were. Coincidences? San Francisco is speckled through with pre-twenty-first-century electricity and an inordinate amount of solid wood buildings. The general shift of the super magnetic field that hovered around the city? That’s a thing, right? Global warming? I wasn’t exactly sure, but I wasn’t about to go ridiculously nerve-wracked on a dime again, either.
    Though San Francisco is, at its core, a supernatural town, inhabited by all manner of demons as they mix with their human counterparts, it is also layered by the pathetically normal: grocery stores, religious zealots, dim sum. Not everything is brimstone and graveyard dirt. Of course, your garden-variety breathing San Franciscans have no idea that they’re sharing a Muni seat with a decaying zombie corpse or that the local coffee shop serves the undead after dark. I’ve seen people look a troll right in the face and acknowledge nothing but the fact that he’s only three feet tall—and let me tell you, that’s not the first thing that hits you when you see a troll. It’s the stench. The mossy, blue-cheese-left-out-in-Hell kind of smell.
    And before you go saying that San Franciscans are crazy, envelope-pushing, leftist tree huggers and it’s no wonder we cohabitate with the undead, you should know that you’re doing it, too. The undead are everywhere, separated from our human vision by that thin, magical veil and the completely human rationale that there is no way the guy bussing the table at the local Chili’s is a centaur. It’s sort of a mythical hand-in-hand kind of thing.
    I, however, had the aforementioned honorable distinction of seeing through that magical veil whether I wanted to or not. So when a three-foot troll dressed in a velour track suit and smelling like the devil’s dung heap hit on me, I could see every one of his snaggleteeth and smell that horrifying scent that clings to my hair and clothing for hours after our encounter, like some sort of unholy bonfire smoke.
    And, since the supernatural super-vision also comes with the power to be completely unaffected by magic, I’d never be turned into a toad or charred by a pissed-off witch’s thunderbolt, but I couldn’t ever experience the beautiful incantation that puts a six-foot wall between me and that oversexed troll.
    So I couldn’t sing or dance, but I could see through supernatural veils and avoid magic and it had really never been more than a giant pain in my ass—except, of course, that my special abilities allowed me to enter the underworld and take a full-time job at the UDA. Even with the occasional death threats and sexual harassment via troll, running the Fallen Angels Division of the Underworld Detection Agency was