“Dead Places”

When the supernatural clashes in Los Angeles, they call in Scarlett Bernard to hide all the evidence. Scarlett is on retainer to the city’s three most powerful magical communities, who send for her whenever a crime scene needs to be cleaned up in order to protect the existence of their kind. It helps that Scarlett is a null, a blank space in the supernatural world. Get too close to her, and whatever is magical about you ceases to be. Vampires and werewolves become human again. Witches can’t perform even the mildest spell.

Being on retainer suits Scarlett’s slacker lifestyle just fine, but one night she makes it to a grisly crime scene just a few minutes too late, and is spotted by an ambitious young LAPD detective. He proposes a deal: if she’ll help him solve the case, he’ll stay quiet about the supernatural world and their involvement in the murders. Scarlett reluctantly agrees, but when the city’s master vampire begins to suspect Scarlett herself was involved, and the werewolf she was kinda-sorta dating decides to play bodyguard, she’ll find herself racing the clock to solve the murder and get her life together before it’s too late.

“Lena’s Latest Issue”

Former Chicago police detective Selena “Lena” Dane has put her bad experience on the force behind her and opened her own private investigation agency. On the same day that she accepts a new case, however, Lena is surprised to discover that she’s expecting her first child. Pushing the pregnancy from her thoughts – and keeping it from her husband– Lena focuses on her new client, fourteen-year-old Nate Christianti, who is searching for his biological father. With his mother dead and his stepfather dying, Nate needs a guardian, and his time is running out.

As her friendship with Nate evolves, Lena is pulled in two directions: towards the baby, and towards her sense of herself as a cop and her own unwillingness to “grow up.” But when Nate’s father turns up dead and his murderer begins to target Lena, she has to find a way to reconcile the detective with the pregnant lady, and balance both roles enough to find the killer and protect Nate. And at some point she’s definitely going to have to tell her husband about the baby.