Authors: Sezin Koehler
And curious who—or what—saved them again.
The Ethereals
Y
ou never expected anything could put asunder Mother, The Ancient One’s fury, but put it aside she does and helps you protect the human chosen for the last time. She uses every last drop of her power as well as yours to block Kaleanathi’s hungry spell.
You were never so grateful that Kaleanathi, bane of the heavens, was not here to see Mother so weak. She might have aimed to consume her. Subsume Mother, and assume her throne.
And for the first time you also understand what it must be like to be human and mortal, always needing protection, always fearing illness, worrying that one day you just might not recover, succumbing to an inevitable death.
You don’t recall ever feeling so spent, so completely drained of life force, a shell of yourselves with only the most superficial of traits to distinguish you from each other. Maga’s magical violet blurring with Amaria’s red aura melting with Ganza’s maroon vengeance blending with Lastyme’s blue tears melding with the gold of Veritas’s truth sliding into the iridescent shimmer of Prophesia’s new foretellings:
The cosmic fabric has been irrevocably torn and no amount of stitching can fix the rupture in time and space. Now it is only to wait and assess the damage.
Mother has returned to her resting place for now, but she will not return to her slumber until the reckoning to which you and The Elementals will have to submit, in recompense for the many disasters of this day.
You should return to your corners and rest yourselves. You know you need it, and especially for what’s to come.
But you can’t.
Instead you turn over in your collective mind all the intersections of choice at which you took the wrong turn.
You vow never to be so shortsighted again.
You hope you’ll have the chance to keep that promise.
8:45 PM The Barona Estate
T
he first wave of findings in the mansion and further out into the acres of land send Günn into an emotional tailspin, the likes of which she’s never experienced.
Based on the blueprints of the home, which do not match what the CSIs find as they work their way through, there should only be twenty-five rooms. Thus far, there are twenty-five rooms just on the first floor east wing. The house is an optical illusion.
Nobody can begin to process the reports of dozens of shallow gravesites around the property since identified by cadaver dogs as holding human remains. These will later be identified as Barona’s former household staff, the majority of whom were undocumented workers from Central and South America. The freshest grave is that of Consuela Bustos, a Costa Rican grandmother living in the US illegally with her American-born children.
A locked cabinet in Barona’s home office reveals files for all the children she’d adopted over the last decade, along with stacks of forged documents ranging from birth certificates to hospital records, including Janosh Barona, her butler and adopted son. They also find Janosh on one of the Countess’s tapes, a seven-year-old boy getting his tongue cut out. It’s the only video in which the Countess herself appears.
The investigators also find the blackmail tapes from Barona’s bordello, The Cove, some of which are as grotesque as her torture rooms. Not to mention all the familiar faces in political, business, and celebrity circles. These boxes are going to tear Los Angeles a new one. What’s left of the City of Angels after the blob’s rampage will soon have no more secrets to hide.
Fuck
, Günn thinks.
We’ll be investigating
this case for the next year. If we work fast.
Yes, it’s time to cash in those months of accrued vacation days. She cannot stomach the thought of all the dead children inside the mansion, a number that has since risen to fifty-two. And keeps rising as they find more hiding places for visual evidence. Not with the child growing inside her own belly.
Günn finds a clear spot and vomits again until she’s only dry heaving, but still she can’t stop until an investigator taps her on the shoulder.
“Boss,” CSI Mazzotti says, “you’ve got to come and see this.”
I don’t want to.
Günn puts thoughts of escape aside and follows her colleague into what will soon be known as Hell House.
The techs uncover a hidden wall panel that opens into a home video collection bigger than Blockbuster. “She filmed everything. The children don’t have names. They have numbers. And look here, from before VHS tapes. Eight millimeter film. And even older, Super 8. Reel number one is dated 1962. The newest tape is child number three hundred sixty seven.” He points to it with a hand shaking like DTs.
Günn’s mouth goes numb and her heart pounds.
Mazzotti goes pale and green at the same time. He doesn’t make it out the door before he joins the vomit brigade.
When everyone thinks they’ve uncovered all of the mansion’s gruesome secrets, a crime scene tech whose specialty is skeletal biology notices that the Countess Barona’s china sets are not ceramic at all: they’re bone. He finds ornately carved teeth ground, shaped, and colored to look like semi-precious stones in the dozens of fine art paintings adorning each room’s walls. And in a cabinet tucked away, a display of teapots, each the size of a child’s skull.
For the majority of witnesses in Hell House, this case would be the last they’d work with the LAPD before finding new employment as teachers, mailmen, car salesmen, dogwalkers. Any banal job to afford more time at home with their families and less time to think. Even so, each one of them would wake up in the middle of the night for the rest of their lives screaming, unable to forget the tiny bodies in their death rooms and the unimaginable fact that a woman not only tortured children, but got away with it for decades. The thing that will haunt them all, almost as much as the bodies and the videotapes, is that nobody even suspected.
9:00 PM West Hollywood PD
G
ünn drives up in a borrowed patrol car. She looks pale as a blood-loss victim, a fleshly ghost, driving like a drunk after a bender.
Red Feather sits on the stoop outside the station smoking a cigarette. “Jesus, partner, what the hell happened to you?” Red Feather calls.
Günn parks the car, missing the spot by half a car width, and stumbles out. Red Feather crushes his cigarette and goes to her, worried. She throws her arms around Red Feathers neck and sobs into his shoulder. Wild, wracking sobs that almost pull him to the ground. She’s incoherent; the news hasn’t properly reached the stations yet and Red Feather’s been busy resettling the survivors, to whom trouble seems to have a gravitational pull.
Günn’s sobs quiet and she wipes her eyes. “Can I have one of those?” She nods at the pack of cigs in his front pocket.
Red Feather hands one over, takes one for himself, and walks them back to the stoop. He’s never seen her this inconsolable.
She lights her smoke and takes a huge drag, appreciating the burn in her lungs and the fact that if she decides to keep the baby she won’t enjoy these for a long time.
“I thought that Barona cunt was evil in a Beverly Hills bitch kind of way, but I had no idea she’s some next level antichrist shit.” Günn tells him only some of what they found at Countess Barona’s Hell House. The mummified children. The decades of numbered tapes. The falsified papers. The bodies. So many little bodies.
She doesn’t even get to the part about the porno basement with the perverts and that demon woman turned to stone before Red Feather lurches from the stoop and up comes all the ethnic food he sampled with the survivors, along with what feels like a gallon of bile. He finds his sea legs and on wobbling knees settles back down next to his partner. He has no idea what to say.
“Oh, and by the way, I’m pregnant.” Might as well hit him with it all.
“Wait. What?” He’s actually relieved to not talk about Barona until his stomach settles.
“Remember Spaetzle?”
Red Feather nods, and his eyes widen as the truth dawns.
They pulled lead on the Spaetzle case a few months back. Franz Spaetzle locked his daughter Melody in the basement for seventeen years after telling his wife she ran away from home. Spaetzle sired four living children by Melody, seven who didn’t make it, bones buried out back. Severe deformities, even in the ones who lived. Only reason anyone found out was because Melody collapsed in the underground lair and he brought her to the hospital. She went into a coma, from which she never awoke.
The Spaetzle case shook them both bad. Seeing the children with their malformed heads like inbred Appalachians was a scene from a horror movie. The 30-year-old daughter looking a decade older than her own mother. The basement complex, meticulously soundproofed for Melody and brood’s total isolation. Chilling. Red Feather had his first thoughts about leaving the LAPD after that case. Günn was on the verge of a meth relapse.
When they closed the case Red Feather and Günn went for a drink that turned into a bender and led to a two-week affair. The Spaetzle monstrosity left them clinging to companionship in a way no other case had done before. The affair ended as quickly as it started. Red Feather knew there was a spark between them missing, nobody’s fault. Günn reverted overnight to her withdrawn and clinical self, no room for emotion with the debriefing over.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Red Feather asks.
“I just did.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I made an appointment for next week. You know I’m up for promotion. And I’m so not the mom type. I feel guilty saying it, but there are way more negatives than positives.”
“Makes sense, Syn. Just tell me what you need and I’m there.”
Fresh tears seep from her eyes. “I also can’t help but think that the baby saw everything I saw in that house today. I think it might be irrevocably damaged before it even had a chance.” She starts weeping again, her uterus spasms.
“Fuck, Syn. I’m so sorry.”
Günn nods, sniffling. “You’ll see. It’s worse than the worst things you’ve ever imagined.” Her stomach turns, she gags again.
No more puking. Please.
“They’ll want both of us over there.” Günn fights flashbacks.
Right now Red Feather has never wanted to see anything less in his life.
“I didn’t want you blindsided. And I needed to get away from there,” Günn says, shaking her head as if to dislodge a host of bad memories. “Since we’re having a heart to heart or some shit, I think I might be gay.” From now on Günn plans to have all her cards on the table, all the time, face up.
“Say what?” Knock Red Feather over with a feather and he’ll never get back up.
Günn’s confession comes out in a waterfall. “I’ve always felt so detached from myself. Like I’m watching this blonde chick living my life and not even caring. I mean, dude,
you’re
more emotional than me.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I don’t think I ever gave anyone a chance, and I never learned how to love healthy. And I was fine with that. I had work, and drugs, and then booze replaced the drugs. And work, always work.”
“None of this is news to me, Syn.”
“Fuck, ’Cus, just let me get it out!” Günn’s voice raises a hysterical pitch.
Red Feather holds his hands up.
Don’t shoot
. She used his nickname. This is serious.
Günn continues. “You know that survivor, the dancer from Vegas?”
“The one with the pheromones?”
“Cherie, yeah.” Günn finds herself smiling just thinking about her. “We had the most amazing connection. For the first time in my life suddenly everything made sense. She felt it, too. And that’s why I had to go after Lily. Because suddenly
I knew.
Everything came into focus. And it was because of her.”
Red Feather nods, considering. “I’m all for your happiness, Syn, but how do you know it wasn’t her mojo power?”
Günn shrugs. “After Hell House? Everything else today? I don’t even care. I want to give a real relationship a chance. I deserve it. And so do you.”
“And the baby?”
“I told her. She’s cool with whatever I decide to do. ”
“You told her before you told me?” And he thought nothing else would surprise him today.
“Man, I told you, her and I, we have a connection. It just came out.” Günn side smiles, “Sort of like you telling the werewolf about doing peyote.”
Red Feather blushes. “Touché.”
Günn takes another long drag from her cigarette. It doesn’t taste good anymore. She stubs it out.
Red Feather does the same. “This is the most you’ve ever spoken in one go in all the years I’ve known you.”
“Shut up or I’ll never do it again.” Günn smiles.
“It’s good. I like it.” Red Feather puts his arm around her in a sideways hug.
“And if you tell anyone you saw me cry I’ll have your nuts.” Günn warns. “I shit you not, partner.”
Red Feather mimes locking his mouth, throwing away the key.
“Thank you,” Günn says. “For everything. I mean it.”
“Thank you
right back,” Red Feather replies.
Detectives Günn and Red Feather enjoy a silent moment of comfort together. Partners first, briefly lovers, and finally friends.
“What’s been going on over here? Everyone inside?” Günn asks, anything else to distract from her thoughts of Hell House.
Red Feather shakes his bandaged head. “Jeez. No, the survivors aren’t here anymore.”
“What? Where are they?”
“You just want to see your girlfriend and tell her you
lurve
her,” Red Feather teases.
Günn elbows him for real, hard enough to leave a bruise. “Piss off.”
“Jesus, Günn. You need to get some meat on your bones, you’re gonna cut me with that thing.”
Günn flips him the bird.
Red Feather smiles, rubbing his side. “We had another situation, so they’re at the safe house down on Magnolia.”
Günn nods. “Yeah, so? Spill, partner.”
Red Feather lets out a deep breath and tells Günn about the localized earthquake, the lightning, and what could only be considered some sort of metaphysical attack on West Hollywood PD that targeted only the Crane Mansion Massacre survivors. He also fills her in on the Roswell Institute battle.
Günn listens and accepts his account without arguing or trying to put a forensic spin on it.
Red Feather feels that shiver come over him again, the one that’s telling him it’s time to move on from this chapter of his life.