Authors: Stephen Blackmoore
Before I can say anything I wake up in a clammy sweat, shaking. It doesn’t matter. I didn’t have an answer, anyway.
I take a tepid shower in a scummy bathtub with no water pressure. It helps some, but not enough. I need to do something. I need to move. I doubt digging through the dead is going to get me any further that it did last night. I should talk to Alex, but I don’t want to. He’ll ask me what I found out, and for some reason I’m not entirely clear on I don’t want to talk to him about this just yet. I need to get my head straight. I’m running on too little sleep and too much punishment. My bruises are throbbing. My legs scream when I get up from bed. Sitting cross-legged for five hours takes a toll. My body’s getting tired of paying it.
I decide to take a drive, see if maybe that will jar something loose. I hop onto the 10, take the 110 through Downtown, cross over to the 5. Breakfast is a drive-thru burger joint on Los Feliz.
I take my grease bomb and fries over to Griffith Park and head over to Travel Town. Built in the fifties, Travel Town is an open-air train museum at the edge of Griffith Park. Locomotives and passenger cars from all across the nation ended up here. Heavy iron and history.
I eat my burger on the edge of an Oahu Railway passenger car from 1910, the wind whipping at the trees. The Santa Ana winds that were only beginning to gust the other day when I was in Koreatown have picked up speed.
I used to come out here a lot as a kid. Lucy and I would climb across the train engines, hang from the pipes and handholds. I can’t help but find trains soothing. After a night dealing with the dead I want to surround myself with solidity, sturdiness. Fifty tons of steel and iron fits the bill.
Besides a few Wanderers and a couple of faded Haunts tied to the boxcars I’ve got the park to myself. No one wants to be out here when the winds blow this hard. Rain threatens on the horizon in banks of crystal-white clouds shot through with streaks of dull gray. Waiting for that moment when the Santa Anas let up long enough that the clouds can swoop in and cause panic in the streets with nothing more than a light drizzle.
From the feel of the air that’s not going to happen soon. It’s too dry, too crisp. Red flag warnings will be up any day now in hopes that people will actually pay attention and not start a brush fire with a stray cigarette.
It takes me a long time to realize that I’m not really here for the trains, revisiting my childhood or anything like that. Comforting though it is, this is a rest stop. A place for me to pull up my big boy pants and go somewhere I’ve been dreading since I got Alex’s phone call.
Forest Lawn cemetery is right next door.
I know she’s dead. I watched it last night. That’s more real than any funeral or viewing or obituary listing can be. But I need to see her grave, anyway.
I don’t know why, exactly. It doesn’t make sense. She’s just ashes in an urn. Chunks of carbon ground down in a cremulator.
There’s really no point in putting this off any longer. I ball up the burger wrapper and toss it into a trash can, pass by the ghosts on my way to hang out with corpses.
The clerk at the cemetery office, a large black woman dressed in purple and black, horn-rimmed glasses perched on her nose, sells me a bouquet of chrysanthemums when I stop in to ask for directions.
I don’t know why I buy them. It’s not like the bodies care. Memories come flooding back as I drive past grave markers, the occasional mourner. I stop across from a funeral in progress, family and friends huddled under a large tent, copper casket waiting to be lowered into the ground.
The last time I was here was for my parents’ funeral. We had no casket. There hadn’t been enough of them left to bury. Cremation was almost redundant. We stood outside the Court of Remembrance, an open-air columbarium alongside movie stars and the not so famous but plenty loaded.
Nobody teaches kids how to mourn. Everything churns together and you don’t know which way is up. Sadness and anger and regret all ball up together in knots. That night I should have been there for Lucy. I should have taken care of her and protected her and sat with her while she cried for our parents. I should have been her older brother, the grown-up, the strong one.
Instead, I lost my mind.
I hunted down the man who’d killed them. Jean Boudreau. Hadn’t a hope in hell that I’d be able to do it, but I did it anyway. It was stupid. Would have been better if I’d failed. Even better if I hadn’t tried it in the first place.
I walk along the rows of interred ashes. A slot in the columbarium isn’t cheap. I’ll have to find out from Alex how much it cost so I can pay him back.
Carl and Diane Carter are in the north wing, third row from the bottom. Lucy is next to them. Even in death she kept the cartoon last name. I don’t know why it surprises me, but it does. It was hers, after all. She picked it.
I trace the letters on the plaque with my finger, feeling the weight of reality crashing down on me. Last night I could almost pretend that I was seeing someone else, or that it was distant, like watching it on television. But this is real, solid. A tangible reminder that she’s really gone.
I put the chrysanthemums in the holder hanging next to her plaque. They smell wrong. Like roses. And smoke.
“I grieve for you, Eric Carter.”
I spin around, call flames to my hand ready to let them fly. If my world were normal I’d think it was a tasteless if elaborate joke. Somebody stuck a skeleton in a wedding dress and plopped it behind me when I wasn’t looking.
The bones are bleached white, the eye sockets pitch black. The wedding dress is clean, if a bit tattered. She holds a scythe in one hand, a small globe in the other. Roses are braided in the veil pulled away from her face and along the sleeves and folds of her dress.
The last time I felt a presence like hers was in Carlsbad. She has the feel of one of the heavy hitters, like Baron Samedi, or Maman Brigitte. Not quite a goddess, but close enough as to not make a difference.
I’ve never met her in person, but I’ve heard of her. You don’t run in the circles I do and not hear about the Narco Queen herself.
I remember passing her shrines on my way through the desert. Remember thinking one of them had turned to follow me with its gaze as I drove past. Didn’t know she knew me. That can’t be a good thing.
“Thank you, Señora de las Sombras,” I say, bowing my head, letting the flames die around my fist. I have a general rule about showing respect around avatars of death.
She has a lot of names. Señora Blanca, Señora Negra, La Flaca and, it’s rumored, Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec goddess who watches over the bones of the dead in Mictlan. Mostly, though, she goes by Santa Muerte, patron saint of drug runners, murderers and thieves. Her cult numbers a couple million at last count.
I’m not talking the typical Día De Los Muertos crowd. These aren’t your Hot Topic goths and mariachi bands in white makeup who come out once a year to put out
ofrendas
and
calavera catrinas
. They’re not even in the same ballpark.
The Mexican drug cartels routinely lop off the heads of their enemies and burn them as offerings to her. Saint Death. The only goddess who always keeps her promise. She’s very popular on the other side of the border, particularly in places like Juarez where the homicide count is astronomical. Not so much up here, but that’s changing fast.
She reaches out her hand and the scythe she’s holding turns to dust to blow away on the wind. “Walk with me,” she says. Her voice is smoky like Lauren Bacall after three packs of Camels, her accent generically South American. “Take my hand. We have much to discuss.”
That’s where I draw the line. “I’ll walk with you, Señora,” I say, “but we both know the power of a touch.”
She nods her head. “Agreed,” she says, a hint of amusement in her voice. I think. The thing I hate most about skeletons is you can never tell when they’re smiling.
I follow her as she glides along the pathway between the walls of interred ashes then out onto the manicured grass and rows of grave markers. Though the wind is whipping at my tie and jacket, it leaves her untouched.
“Do you know what my supplicants ask of me most often?” she says, breaking the silence.
“Can’t say as I do.”
She’s got some angle. All these fuckers do. Gods, goddesses, nature spirits. She wouldn’t have appeared to me if she didn’t want something. The question is, what?
“That their babies survive to adulthood,” she says. “Young mothers with husbands gunned down in the streets of Juarez or the Arizona desert. Rotting in prison cells, hanging in meat lockers.”
I mull that over for a second. “Forgive me for saying this,” I say, “but that sounds unusually domestic.”
She laughs, long and loud. Fucking scary though she might be, she’s got a beautiful voice.
“It does, doesn’t it?” she says. “That’s only half of it, though. The reason they want their children to grow into strong and powerful men and women? So they can avenge their fathers’ deaths.”
“That sounds a little more like it.”
“At one time I watched over the Dead and brought their souls to Mictlan. Bathed them in sacred waters when they passed my tests, judged them, weighed their worth. And then the Spanish came.”
“Things went downhill pretty fast, I hear.”
“Almost overnight,” she says. “Instead of calling me to honor the dead, they called for vengeance. They didn’t want to sacrifice these enemies with honor, they wanted to slaughter them.”
“This is all fascinating, Señora, and please don’t take this the wrong way, but why are you telling me this?”
“I know something of vengeance, Eric Carter. I know what you need to avenge your sister.”
“Thanks,” I say, “but—”
“I know who killed her.”
My heart stops. She glides forward a few steps before realizing that I haven’t kept up and turns to me, that perpetual smile on her face.
“You know who murdered Lucy?”
“Yes. Would you like me to tell you?”
There’s a catch here. There’s always a catch. Everything has a price and things like her don’t barter in cash.
“It’s something I’d consider,” I say carefully.
“You’re a rare breed, Eric Carter,” she says. “Not many can bend the dead the way you can. How many do you know who can even see them without the aid of powerful rituals?”
“I’m nothing special,” I say, not liking where this is going.
“On the contrary, you’re very special. You’re, how do they call it? A natural. And you’ve made quite an impression. You’re a topic of conversation more than you know. I hear Baron Samedi and Maman Brigitte were very pleased with your work in Texas.”
“I pride myself on customer service,” I say. “But I’ll admit, I haven’t really followed up with them the last couple of days,” I say. “I’ve been a little preoccupied.”
The last thing I want to be is watercooler talk around the demigod offices.
“Nonetheless,” she says, “you’ve built yourself quite the reputation over the years. I could use your particular expertise.”
“You want to hire me.”
“No,” she says. “I want to own you.”
Chapter 8
“Come again?” I’ve had weird job offers before but this is a bit much, even by my standards.
“Do you know how many of my followers I can communicate with directly? How many I can appear to the way I’m appearing to you now?”
“I wouldn’t even hazard a guess.”
“None of them. My will comes to them in dreams, flashes of insight, a half-remembered whisper in a cocaine-fueled frenzy. Even my mages must perform rituals to hear me speak.”
“Must make it a little hard to get them to do what you want.”
“We get by. It’s the particulars that are a challenge. Detail and nuance.”
“So you’re looking for a high priest?” I don’t know what the hell she’s getting at here.
“No. Let the Catholics have their Pope. That’s something I don’t need.”
I stop at a marble sarcophagus at the edge of the building and lean against it. Try to look nonchalant, but the truth is that I’m scared shitless. I’m getting the sense that this is one of those offers I can’t refuse.
“Then what do you need?”
“A courier. Someone to carry out my will.”
“An errand boy,” I say.
“No. An enforcer. A champion.”
“You’re looking for a thug?” I say. “Considering most of your followers are murderers and drug runners, don’t you already have somebody better qualified for the job?”
“Killers of men,” she says. “How many demons have you destroyed?” she asks. “Ghosts you’ve banished? Vampires, lamiae, ghouls? You’ve destroyed things almost as powerful as I.”
“Yeah, and?”
“I have, as you’ve pointed out,” she says, “an abundance of murderers. But can they survive a Redcap? Face the Jersey Devil and live?”
Things I’d rather forget. Things I’ve never told anyone. “How do you even know about that?”
“As I said, you’re a topic of conversation. I’m truly not asking you to do anything you don’t already do.”
I make a pretense of thinking about it. I already have my answer.
“Say I sign on with you,” I say. “What do I get?”
“You’re already a powerful mage. You have control over the dead. You see things that only a handful like you can. Now imagine my power coupled with your own. Imagine that power tenfold.”
“I’m listening.”
“With me as your patron I can enhance your already impressive abilities. And give you things you’ve never dreamed of.”
Take what I already know and tack on what she can give me? The things I can learn. It’s tempting. Incredibly tempting. Only there’s a catch.
“You own my ass,” I say. “You tell me where to go, what to do.”
“More or less, yes.”
“I’m nobody’s meat puppet.”
“Which is why I want you for the job. I don’t need an unthinking drone. That would defeat the purpose. Your will is your own.”
“So long as you keep me wrapped around your finger. Steep price.” I pull my jacket tight around me. The wind has picked up, chilling the already cold fall air. “No,” I say. “I don’t care if the job comes with full dental and a weekly blowjob. It was nice meeting you, Señora. Good luck filling that position.”