Sun City is coming apart at the seams.
Lunar flares are on the rise, sending the cityâs appliances into meltdown, and bringing a new breed of supernaturals out of the shadows.
But for Lex Huntley, itâs just another day in the office. As one of the best Repo Agents in the city, sheâs known more for her muscle than her magic.
Sheâs a pro at chasing down stolen assets, until a routine coven raid takes her by surprise. Not only are they wielding magic far beyond their reach, but the witches have abducted the local alpha and are draining him of his powers. Lex has no choice but to free him, which puts her in the crosshairs of an Underworld conspiracy.
Suddenly, her simple life is besieged by vengeful witches, dangerous warlocks, and a handsome shifter with problems of his own. When a dead body turns up on her doorstep, the Underworld comes knocking, and Lex is forced into a confrontation that will change her forever.
Hide & Seek is the first book in The Repossessed Series, but can be read as a standalone. For fans of Kate Daniels, Jane Yellowrock and Alice Worth.
Sun City is coming apart at the seams.
Lunar flares are on the rise, sending the cityâs appliances into meltdown, and bringing a new breed of supernaturals out of the shadows.
But for Lex Huntley, itâs just another day in the office. As one of the best Repo Agents in the city, sheâs known more for her muscle than her magic.
Sheâs a pro at chasing down stolen assets, until a routine coven raid takes her by surprise. Not only are they wielding magic far beyond their reach, but the witches have abducted the local alpha and are draining him of his powers. Lex has no choice but to free him, which puts her in the crosshairs of an Underworld conspiracy.
Suddenly, her simple life is besieged by vengeful witches, dangerous warlocks, and a handsome shifter with problems of his own. When a dead body turns up on her doorstep, the Underworld comes knocking, and Lex is forced into a confrontation that will change her forever.
Hide & Seek is the first book in The Repossessed Series, but can be read as a standalone. For fans of Kate Daniels, Jane Yellowrock and Alice Worth.
I woke to a lunar flare, chips of ice spitting from my air conditioning unit as it inhaled the passing magic. The unit was so new, the sale sticker still glowed in the dim light, but I held my breath as it began to rattle. Iâd been so tired last night, Iâd just clicked it on and collapsed, too blissed out by the climate control to think of setting any wards. It was just my luck a flare would strike, painting the overheated sky in icy licks, and sending its feral magic out into the world. As I groped in the covers for the remote, I could hear the chaos the flare left in its wake â babies crying, dogs barking, and the sad splutter of appliances in unwarded houses.
I shivered as I brushed ice crystals from my eyebrows. Oh, the irony. Only yesterday Iâd raided the rainy-day fund and trudged into the nearest electronics store for the unit. It was eye-wateringly expensive, but we were ten days into a heat wave, and I was down to my last scorched nerve. I was also worried the tires on my twelve-year-old Jeep Wrangler would melt if I drove all the way to the Anderton mall. They were old. And mostly bald. And only still in use because I valued cool air over road safety.
Somewhere, the gods were laughing at me. Because now my comforter was covered in ice, and the fancy remote was slick in my hand. Naturally, Iâd found the time to peel the protective plastic off the device, because not even a house fire would distract me from that pleasure. But even as I pointed it at the unit, I knew it was a lost cause. No matter how many buttons I pushed, the AC unit kept rattling, interjected with a few alarming thuds, until it burped out a frosty cloud and went still.Â
I contemplated collapsing back onto my damp pillow and pulling the comforter over my head. But magic flares werenât just destructive, they were my call to arms. I sighed and dropped the remote on my nightstand. Even though my wind-up alarm clock told me it was 1.30 a.m., give or take, it was time to put on my big girl boots and go to work.
Out of habit, I brushed a hand over the light switch and hissed at the burn. Lunar flares did strange things to electricity. Some things it iced out, while others it left white hot. After a decade of suffering through the events, the science was still a mystery. But the end result was always the same. If your appliance was designed to cool you down, it went icy. If it heated things up, it gave you third-degree burns.
My uniform from yesterday was in a pile on the bedroom floor. It was really too hot for denim, but I required two things from my work wardrobe â it had to be comfortable, and it had to be durable enough to survive the night. Jeans were the universal staple even amongst magical folk, and my Leviâs had yet to let me down when it came to the tracking and repossession of assets. The shirt was matte black and marketed as combat wear, with mesh panels and bicep pockets. It was anti-static, anti-microbial, and anti-moisture, and could practically drive the jeep on its own. It also gave me a serious law enforcement vibe that I wasnât above milking in a tight spot.
When Iâd laced up my police-issue tactical boots, I grabbed the warranty to the AC unit off the bureau, then headed into the mud room down the hall. Sitting in the trough was an isolation pack I used to transport infected equipment and assets. It was still a little damp from last night, but the things werenât cheap, and I was saving for a backup. When I had it slung over my shoulder, I caught sight of myself in the mirror glued to the back of the door. The bag was basically a big fanny pack, not that anyone had ever called me on it. But that wasnât what I was looking at.
Aw, dang. My tires werenât the only ones suffering from a bald patch.
It was going on three months since Iâd discovered I was losing my hair. Just one spot, but it was right above my left ear. I preferred to wear my hair in a no-fuss ponytail or braid, but it was getting harder to hide the shiny circle of skin. Iâd never been overly obsessed with my looks, but I liked my hair. It was long and shiny and smelled as if my shampoo didnât come from the bottom shelf at the supermarket. Maybe it was time to ask my aunts for a remedy, but right now I just pulled it into a low bun, and covered it with a Navy Street cap. The real kicker? I was pretty sure the bald spot was growing, but that was a problem for another day.
After my complicated beauty routine, it took another three minutes to get through my front door. Like everything else electrical, the flares affected security systems, so most of us were back to good old-fashioned reinforced steel. I had iron deadbolts on all my doors and salt-laced double-glazing on every window. Maybe it was overkill, but Iâd yet to be visited in the night by one of my targets, pissed at having their high-value asset seized. Not to mention the beasties who trolled the neighborhood during a flare, looking to scratch a magical itch.
My partner was waiting for me at the curb. He was behind the wheel of his beloved gunmetal gray Pontiac. A pre-seventies model, heâd kept all the original components to reduce the effect of the lunar flares. As far as I could tell, he spent most of his paycheck fine-tuning the fifty-year-old beauty. And the only time Iâd been with him when it stopped running, heâd shamefacedly admitted to a lazy gauge. Weâd run out of gas.
âPartner,â I drawled as I rounded the car. He muttered something I took as a greeting. Robert Willis was a fifty-something former detective of the Anderton police department, and despite all those hand signals you see cops using on TV, he still believed grunting was the most effective form of communication. I might have labelled him a barbarian, if he wasnât always slamming out the Thursday puzzle in the Times.
Yes, Willis â he didnât respond to Robert, and Bob made him grit his teeth - was a man of contradictions. He still insisted on wearing a suit to work, but rarely shaved. Carried a sidearm at all times, but bitched about lax firearm laws. Hated coffee, but downed cans of Monster throughout our shifts. And while being a grump who didnât keep so much as a fern at home, he liked kids, checked every missing pet flyer we passed, and volunteered at the Sun City Nursing Home three times a week.
His stubble was looking particularly wild tonight, but I didnât comment, given my own awkward hair situation. Instead, I tugged down the peak of my cap and buckled up. But within five minutes, I knew something was off. âWhy are you heading north? Arenât we going back to Barrenridge?â
âNope.â An actual word. He must have been in a chatty mood. âNew case.â
I raised my brows at him, but he was already dropping the file into my lap. Faulty electrics played havoc with computer systems, so most workplaces also kept paper records. After years of going green, we were back to driving gas guzzlers and killing our planet, one filing cabinet at a time.
âNope,â I mimicked him as I scanned the highlights. There werenât many, so after a cursory read, I tossed the file on the dash. âA name and credit history does not a new case make.â
âItâs on the light side,â Willis agreed, âbut Gerald said itâs a must-do. Weâll get more details when we meet with the client.â
I squinted at my partner. Client meetings were for our investigators, not Repo Agents. And we both knew âmust-doâ was absent from my vocabulary, while âright to refuseâ was hard-wired into my contract. Gerald might have been our boss, but I liked to think of myself as an independent contractor, with an emphasis on independent. Since I also liked my paycheck, I grabbed the file and gave it another quick look. It was enough to make me toss it back onto the dash. âThe âOtherâ box is ticked next to practitioner,â I sneered. âWhat other? Itâs witch, mage or necromancer, unless someone rewrote the Amp Act without telling me.â
Willis ignored my rant. âThe client is someone with pull. And they asked for you personally.â
I screwed my nose up at that. Anyone who knew me personally knew I didnât do favors, freebies, or exceptions. And if someone was pulling, that was usually a precursor to me digging in my heels. Besides, tonight I was one hundred percent invested in closing out our active coven case. âMaggie said the witches are meeting tonight, and itâs highly likely our asset is in their possession. How about we put a ribbon round the coven, and then look at the new case tomorrow?â I tapped my knuckles against his windshield, where the celestial event looked like three smears of silver paint. âThe witches will be getting twitchy with the flares up. They might burn out the asset, or even go to ground after using it. This could be our last chance.â
I was piling it on a bit thick, but Willis knew as well as I did that clearing the case was time sensitive. The asset in question was old, powerful, and had no business being in the covenâs hands. There was also a rumor the client had another repo agency working the case. Losing out to the competition was not an option, and Willis finally gave a tight nod. âWe check their place, but if theyâre not around or you canât pick up its signature, we start on the new file.â
I shrugged. Maggie, our investigator, rarely gave us bad intel, but predicting how a magical perp was going to act wasnât always easy. Not that it would change our game plan. Unlike the real cops, Repo Agents werenât detectives. Most of the investigating happened behind the scenes, while Willis and I were the muscle.
Our job was as simple as SSS - subdue the target, seize the asset, and shift it back to base.
Subduing could take many forms, but like with cops, a key tactic was giving the criminals enough rope to hang themselves. And there was never a better time for it than during a lunar flare. I assumed Willis was thinking the same thing until he said, âYou need to take the edge off. Thereâs a packhouse ten minutes away in Thomastown.â
I knew that better than he did, but I looked at him in surprise. Willis rarely initiated uncomfortable conversations, and my personal issues were at the top of his cringe list. âIâm good.â
âYou need a fight,â he said. âBase says the shifters are having one of their full moon retreats.â
I looked up at the bright white orb. It was the last day of April â Walpurgis Night to the witches â and it hung in the sky like a candy melt. Unlike the werewolf myths, the full moon was traditionally the most peaceful time for the shifter community, when they communed with their beasts and rested easy in their skins. But not since the lunar flares had started showing up. Not only did they play havoc with appliances, they made shifters lose their minds. And with the icy smears hanging in the sky like claw marks, all the meditation in the world wasnât going to stop their beasts from going berserk.
And dang if that didnât make me want to grab the wheel and drive us straight to the wolvesâ den.
âIâm fine,â I told him again, careful to keep my hands loose in my lap. Last thing he needed to see was me white-knuckling the dash. âBesides, thereâs no time. This window is going to be a tight one.â
Willis grunted, but finally altered our course, heading towards Barrenridge. He didnât argue with me about how much time we had to SSS the witches. He knew I could read the moon and her flares the way he could read his cryptic crosswords. And as previously stated, my partner didnât like to waste words.
I settled back and turned my gaze to the street. There was always something to be on the lookout for in Sun City. We had the second-largest magical community in the state, and the lunar flares forced everything supernatural out of the shadows. Like a giant spotlight, flare nights made shifters hyper, witches twitch, and vampires sparkle. Well, it was more of an undead glow, but since the flares also made the bloodsuckers thirstier, it was bad news for anyone with a pair of eyes and a pulse.
Barrenridge was a subdivision like plenty of others in the city, with the added bonus of backing onto a nature reserve. Twelve acres of protected forest, it had once been an urban escape for families who wanted a greener life. But the storybooks didnât get it wrong when they said witches liked to live near woods. Over the last decade, most of the original homeowners had sold up and left, and now it was almost exclusively a coven community.
In terms of paranormal territories, Sun City was broadly divided between the vampires downtown, the werewolves in the national park, and the witches in the burbs. The flares had been pretty ruthless in piercing the veil of secrecy, but unlike the shifters and vamps, the witches made little effort to hide their magic. Even though they were technically human and had the best chance of staying hidden, it seemed to go against their witchy code. Which was why driving through their streets was like crashing a Halloween party the night before the world ended.
âScrying Street. Moonblood Crescent. Foxglove Lane,â I snorted, as we navigated through roads lined with oleander, poke berry and nightshade. âI guess theyâre not above spelling the city planners.â
I wasnât kidding. The more ruthless members of the magical community saw humans as either pawns to be used, or obstacles to be eliminated. The government had wised up to this eventually, and now employed magic practitioners to even out the playing field. Humans still outnumbered the magically blessed by a thousand to one, but when youâre a fire mage who can level a city block with a snap of your fingers, the balance of power was always going to be a tricky thing.
â66 Creeper Street,â Willis murmured, and pulled up outside our targetâs house. As I cracked the door, he asked, âThink anyoneâs home?â
I gave him my best eye-roll, since the two-story Gothic Revival was shaking with the force of pagan drums, percussion bells, and ululating voices. Definitely loud enough to be heard from the street, despite the house being almost completely covered with Virginia creeper.
When we were both out of the car and Willis had secured it to his satisfaction, we studied the house. The thick vine covered everything from the gable roof to the columns on the portico, and even trailed down the garden path a way. I figured it was the covenâs version of home security, especially with all the slithering going on under the greenery.
Willis was busy documenting everything with his camera. It made its distinctive whirring sound, then spat out a shiny Polaroid print. Willis flapped it a few times to get the image to settle, then pulled a Sharpie from his suit pocket. He scrawled the address on the bottom and checked the time code on the back against his old Seiko. When he had it all stowed away in his own version of a fanny pack, we approached the door.
âJeepers creepers,â I muttered, watching a patch of vine undulate right where I needed to stick my hand. Snakes I could handle, but this was definitely the black magic variety, and that stuff tended to cling.
âEver seen anything like this?â Willis asked, and I shook my head in response. Mother Nature â including our forked-tongue friends - often featured in witchâs spells, but this was on a whole other scale. âMaybe an earth mage owed them a favor.â
I shrugged, because earth magic usually smelled clean, while this creepfest definitely had some dark undertones. âLetâs go ask them, shall we?â
While I had a lot of confidence in my work uniform, I always wore a protective shield when I was on the job. Both magical and invisible, it covered my whole body, but was concentrated over my torso, and weakest at my hands. To combat that flaw design, I also wore a version of gauntlets: thin, but resilient gloves, made from a material close to chain mail. Pulling them from my pack, I rolled them on, and felt my magical shield lock them into place.
Bracing my arm, I stuck my hand through a tangle of vine. I couldnât feel a doorbell, but there was a knocker shaped like a coiled snake. âTheyâve definitely gone over to the dark side,â I told Willis.
He just grunted, so I grabbed the brass snake and gave it a firm tap. I doubted they could hear me through the pagan party going on inside, but it was procedure. The vine shuddered, something foul and slippery rolling over the back of my hand, but the magic was no match for my gauntlets. Or for my kick-ass boots. I gave the bottom of the door a friendly nudge and the hinges popped. âGoing in.â
Willis was one step behind me as I shoved against the glass-paneled wood. It opened without a hitch, the vine rearing back as we stepped into an entryway. Pale walls, slate floors, and exposed beams greeted us. Country chic in the burbs, with some interesting bits of art on the walls. The pagan revelries were too loud for conversation, so Willis just nodded towards a nearby archway. I went first, a gloved finger pressed to the badge stitched onto my combat shirt. We didnât have flashy tactical vests like the FBI, and wearing your ID around your neck was just inviting someone to grab it and use it as a strangling device, so my aunts had the contract to stitch the Repo Agency emblem on all our shirts. The fact they wove stay safe spells and back off hexes into the fabric was one of those locker room myths I didnât confirm or deny.
As we reached the archway, I caught a glimpse of puffy white couches pushed back against the walls, and flashing black robes swirling in a circle. This was definitely the epicenter of the party, and I cleared my throat as I stepped inside. âEvening, ladies. Repo Agents on the premises.â
I wasnât being sexist; witches were predominately female. They never married, always lived in their coven group, and had zero interest in outsiders. Power was their jam, and they got it through intense study, spellwork, and rituals. Their homes were usually dominated by their kitchens and libraries, which were often located side-by-side. There was always a community cauldron, which was kept in the house of the head witch. No matter how much incense they burned, the components of their spells left a lingering scent that seeped into the furnishings. Not so much boil and bubble as dead animal parts, poisonous herbs, and whatever else went into their special sauce.
While a coven was occasionally caught dabbling in dark magic, witches were skilled at operating in the gray of M.A.D. guidelines. Many of them held respectable jobs in the human world, and some of the older covens were Sun Cityâs most-revered philanthropists. If I was to pigeonhole the traits of your average witch, Iâd say theyâre intelligent, arrogant, and able to spell their way out of most situations. In short, theyâre the MacGyvers of the magical community, able to brew a nifty spell out of a ratâs tail, a corn chip, and a toothpick.
But none of that seemed to be playing out when I stepped into the living room of 66 Creeper Street.
For starters, the witches were all wearing rubber owl masks, complete with realistic beaks, wild yellow eyes, and silky gray feathers. But it was the massive werewolf at the center of their parliament that stopped me dead. Buck naked, he was pierced in each extremity by a silver stake, and bleeding all over their expensive carpet.
The first in a series, Hide & Seek, by Simone Leigh Martin, is a paranormal, comedic page-turner.Â
The novel follows Alexa "Lexy" Huntley, a paranormal repossession agent who's quick-witted and street smart. She lives in a world where magic use is a regular occurrence, lunar flares that mess with anything electronic, and witches, warlocks, vampires, and shifters make up the populace.Â
Out for a routine collection, having been tracking a magical object needing repossession with her hardened partner Willis, things go cosmically askew. The creepy coven of witches has conjured up some very black magic involving holding a shifter hostage as a sacrifice. Unfortunately, when Lexy tries to investigate the coven, she ends up in over her head.Â
Martin's writing style is descriptive but well-paced, thoughtful, and engaging. The characters have well-conceived backgrounds, even making the side characters have depth not typical in other paranormal, urban fantasy novels. Lexy's background and magical prowess are a mystery that appears to be something the author will reveal with time throughout the series.Â
Also atypical to the urban fantasy genre, there is a minimal romance sub-plot in Hide & Seek. I thought this was refreshing, and it ensured the spiraling mystery, world-building, and character development were stars of the show. Martin does an excellent job of making the story meaty without any filler, once again proving the series has been plotted out so that each novel will boost the depth of story and character in the books to come. There are some refreshingly dark parts that Martin handles well, leading the morally grey areas to create a believable tale and impart some reality to the urban fantasy world.
What happens moving forward is intriguing, and Martin has created a fierce female lead that will draw in fans and keep them engaged and wanting more.Â