Authors: Caitlin Kittredge
“My name’s Harlan Sanford,” the man said. “I’m what’s called a money man, or a silent partner—I finance films, but I don’t need to get jerked off by having my name scroll up the screen.”
“Nice for you,” Jack said. He shoved his chair back and stood up. “I’ll just be finding my way home now.”
“Oh, I don’t think you’re going home any time soon,” Sanford said. “There’s a cash bounty on your head over there in the UK—not to mention bragging rights as the one who offed Jack Winter.” He held out his hand. “Sit. I promise we have things in common and a lot to talk about.”
Standing wasn’t working out very well, so Jack sat back down. Vertigo rippled at the edges of his vision.
“The film business is just a job for me,” Sanford said. “I reinvest, and I’m a collector. I think under different circumstances you and I could have had a nice afternoon chatting about magic.”
Jack tipped his head back. The sun was coming up, and it sent jets of sickly green light refracting from the pool into his face. “What are we chatting about instead?”
Sanford tossed back the rest of his scotch. “I know that Belial’s been in contact with you. Slippery bastard, isn’t he?”
Jack lifted one eyebrow. “You and he pals, then?”
“Oh, not at all,” Sanford said. “Hate fucking demons. Never had a transaction with one that didn’t end in a big hassle for me and some fork-tongued son of a bitch trying to screw me out of what I was owed. Like dealing with studio execs, except demons have better manners.” He took a pack of gum from his pocket and shoved a wad into his mouth. “Quitting smoking,” he explained. “Belial is a moron,” Sanford continued. “A power-grubbing, shortsighted moron, and greedy even for a demon, which should tell you something.”
Jack laughed. Sanford was either insane or stupid, and he’d find out soon enough that demons had a way of finding out when humans mocked them.
“I know why he’s here,” Sanford said. “He wants what I want, and that means you and I want the same thing, and we can help each other.”
Jack rubbed his forehead. “No offense, mate, but when somebody offers me an out that’s too good to be true, it usually means something worse is just out of sight.”
Sanford laughed. “Cynical bastard, aren’t you?” He stood up. “Come with me, Jack.”
He led Jack back inside, past Alligator, who grinned and nodded at him. Despite the stuffy air of the house, Alligator was wrapped in a ribbed, shiny turtleneck that stretched nearly transparent over his pot belly.
“Again, sorry about them,” Sanford said. “But in my line, good security is worth its weight.”
“And what is your line, exactly?” Jack said.
Sanford stopped at a door with a keypad and punched in a long sequence. “I told you,” he said. “I’m a collector.”
The door revealed a set of stairs leading down, cut directly into the stone beneath the mansion. “Wine cellar,” Sanford said. “This house was one of the first built on this stretch of Sunset. Doug Fairbanks lived here at one point. Very nice address.”
“If you want a round of applause,” Jack said, “I’ll try to muster it up.”
Sanford flipped a big old-fashioned circuit, the kind used to fry a bloke in an electric chair. “I started collecting when I was twelve,” he said. “I was a dumb kid from Ohio, and a neighbor down the street died. My friends and I went poking around the yard sale, and I found a little box, a box full of bones.
“She was a witch,” Sanford continued, as lights flickered on, bulbs strung along the length of the stairs, “and they were children’s knucklebones.”
Another door was set into the rock at the bottom of the stairs, brand new brushed steel, locked with a keypad and a submarine-hatch wheel. “I don’t have much in the way of my own talents,” Sanford said. “But I knew those bones had power, and I wanted it. I started looking for more, going out for weeks at a time in this old rusted-out pickup, all over the Midwest, poking through barns, pawing through junk shops, talking my way into dying men’s bedrooms and dark secrets.”
Sanford punched in another code and spun the hatch open. “This is my life’s work. Not many people ever see it.”
The small room under the rock was crammed stiflingly full, wooden shelves running floor to ceiling, with a glass display case filling the center. A small reading table, chair, and lamp were shoved into a corner. Rather than the somber atmosphere of a museum, or the crammed comfort of Jack’s own flat, this place was full and filthy, dust piled inches thick on top of the cases, the scent of closed-up air and human sweat wafting in Jack’s face. He’d never been so reminded of a troll cave in his life.
Sanford hit another switch and lights bloomed from hidden alcoves. “What do you think?”
Jack sneezed. “Your maid’s not doing a bang-up job, is she?”
Sanford spread his hands. “Los Angeles is a nexus of power, Jack. It’s why when the lines were drawn, neither side claimed it. Nobody wanted to constantly defend their territory, so it became neutral ground. It draws these objects in like a tornado, and people, too. Los Angeles has serial killers and mass murderers like some cities have coffee shops and sports teams. I find them where I can, the relics and the memorabilia, and I keep them safe.” He sat at the desk and pulled a red cloth book to him. “Do you know the name Basil Locke?”
Jack examined the crammed shelves. Most of the objects whispered against his sight, and a few screamed. Sanford might be full of shit, but he was right about his collection. There was power here, bad mojo, enough of it to light up the Sunset Strip. “No,” he said. “Should I?”
“Movie star in the 1930s, mostly B pictures, crime stuff and screwball comedies,” said Sanford. “He never caught on the way Grant and Gable did. Birth name was Brian Chernik. Russian Jew, raised in England, fell in with a bad crowd.” Sanford shoved the book across the table. “Our old boy Basil kept a grimoire, detailing all his attempts to summon and control the forces of Hell.”
“Demons,” Jack said. Many of the things Sanford had collected seemed innocuous—costume jewelry, photographs of crime scenes and autopsies, one bloodstained woman’s pump—but they all vibrated, malignancy and terror bleeding through from the Black. The man knew the power of objects that had been in close proximity to death. “I’m guessing that ended well for him.”
“Better than you could’ve imagined,” said Sanford. “Locke found something else down there, something that could make a demon scream.”
Belial had certainly looked like he was pissing in his shorts. Jack left the shelves of bloody-minded objects and turned to Sanford. “All right,” he said. “You got my attention.”
“Hell wasn’t always the place for the Named and their legions,” Sanford said. “There were other things, older things. You’ve seen them.”
“I wouldn’t call brushing elbows with Nergal seeing,” Jack said. “In fact, I’d die happy if I never saw anything like him ever again.”
“The demons overthrew their makers, as is the way of all things,” Sanford said. “They couldn’t kill them, so they locked them away with the old gods. One slipped out here and there, and the demons hunted them and put them back—nothing anyone without a talent would notice as unusual. Wars and nuclear bombs and that sort of thing as cover.” He stroked the cover of the red book. “But your little stunt with Nergal cracked the door open, and now they’re out. They’re all out. Elvis has left the building.” He tapped the page. “Basil Locke was the one who first spoke to them, who realized that things other than demons could be called up from Hell.”
Jack looked at the scribbling and the diagrams contained in the loose pages of the red book, all of it with the distinct, manic edge of the deranged. He’d seen enough psychotic scribbling, both from his mother while she was on pills and from various mages who’d dipped a bit too deep into the pool of hallucinations and trance magic, to recognize crazy when he read it.
“How do I know this isn’t complete shit?” he asked Sanford. “And furthermore, what’s it got to do with me and Belial?”
“Belial thinks he can lock a lock that’s already been broken,” said Sanford. “He thinks if he’s the one to put this right by making you his hunting dog, he’ll move up the ladder in Hell. But he’s afraid of them, too, and we can use that.” He touched the sigil. “If we can get them on our side, Belial will never bother you or your wife again.”
“She’s not my wife,” Jack said reflexively. Sanford had to be munching on insanity for breakfast and shitting it out to think he could toe up to Belial using some nebulous spell to control the demon’s boogeyman.
“My mistake,” Sanford said. “But think of your child, at least. You really think Belial, or any other demon with ambitions, is going to let the child of the crow-mage grow up in peace?”
Jack shook his head. “I’ve already got that covered,” he said. Sanford was tanned and trustworthy, his graying hair and straight white grin making him appear as your kind uncle, to whom you could tell anything. Worse than a demon, because he was only a man, and still trying to cut a deal with things ten times worse than the population of the Pit. “My deal’s with Belial, mate,” he said. “Not with you.”
“Come on,” Sanford said. “I’m giving you the chance to slip this yoke once and for all. To never worry again about a demon troubling you and yours.”
“I get that, yeah, and it’d be grand,” Jack said. “But somehow, I think I’m missing your part of this. I don’t believe in altruism. Especially not from slimy gits like you.”
“Well, of course not,” Sanford said. “This isn’t the town of money for nothing, Jack. I’ll get what I want out of this, in addition to a warm fuzzy feeling.”
“And that would be?” Jack said. Sanford shut the book and drummed his fingers on the table.
“Belial,” he said. “Look, I’ve got every kind of damn thing in here—I have John Wayne Gacy’s paintings, I have Elizabeth Short’s hair, I have a guitar that belonged to Charlie Manson, and I have the dress Sharon Tate was wearing when his freaks cut her open. I’ve got objects of power, I’ve got mage’s grimoires, I’ve got a skull from a sorcerer who was killed by Vlad the Impaler. I have an original edition of
Dracula,
with blood spells written in the margins. But they’re things, Jack. And as I get older, things get less and less interesting to me.” He gestured at the blank back wall of the cellar. “I want a demon, a living demon, in chains. I want Belial. And if we find what Belial lost, what he fears, I’ll get him and you’ll get your peace.”
“You’re fucking nuts,” Jack said, before he could stop himself. “You think you can tie Belial down like some kind of pet?”
“I don’t plan to pet him,” Sanford said, lacing his fingers behind his head. “I plan to study him.”
“No,” Jack said. “No fucking way. I’ve seen what happens when men try and put one over on a demon, and I think I’ll just back away slowly and leave you to your little catacombs.”
“You could do that,” Sanford said. “Or you could watch while I let Gator and Parker murder your wife and unborn child, and guarantee that when they’re done, what Belial’s boogeyman did to those families will look like a flower arrangement.” He gave Jack the same slick smile, the let’s-make-a-deal smile. “Gator has certain … proclivities. Your wife is just his type.”
Jack didn’t realize he’d moved until he was there, hand around Sanford’s neck, slamming the man’s skull into the rock. He hadn’t had a blackout rage in a long while—heroin didn’t lend itself to much except nodding and jittering around looking for your next score. But here he was, slamming Sanford’s head into the rough wall until a smear of blood appeared, and he felt fucking fantastic about it.
“She’s not my wife,” he told the man. “And you leave her the hell out of this.”
A fist pounded against the other side of the door. “Sir!” Gator hollered. “You all right in there?”
Sanford laughed at him, as much as he could with Jack’s fist digging into his windpipe. “Security camera,” he said. “State of the art.”
“Sir!” Gator shouted. “We’re comin’ in.”
“You didn’t want her involved, you should have been there when Belial was whispering in her ear,” Sanford hissed. “But you weren’t. You let yourself get beat by something that crawls through the filth at the bottom of Hell and you left her alone. Now what are you going to do about it?”
The door groaned as it started to open, bolts and hinges protesting. Jack let Sanford go, feeling his heart throbbing and bile working its way up his throat. He hadn’t properly beaten the shit out of somebody in ages, and the wobbly, lightheaded rush had him flying.
Gator burst in, followed by Parker, and grabbed Jack by the arms, slamming him face first into the desk and scattering Sanford’s papers and Locke’s book like a flight of startled doves. “You piece of shit,” Gator snarled. “I knew I’d have trouble with you.”
Parker knotted his fingers in Jack’s hair and slammed his forehead against the edge of the desk, short and sharp. Jack saw the flashbulb, and felt the hot, spicy sting of blood in his eyes.
“That’s enough,” Sanford rasped. He rubbed his neck and fixed his collar. “Just a misunderstanding. Mr. Winter and I have it all worked out now.” He fixed Jack with his pale eyes. “Don’t we?”
Jack blinked the blood from his eyes. It’d stop, eventually, and leave him looking like he’d been doing battle in the arena. Sanford knew all about him and Pete, and could find him any time he pleased, that was clear. This whole summoning to his broken-down movie-star manse had been a display of might.
We know where you live.
He could accept Sanford’s insane plan and play along or he could run again, and know that Pete and the kid would never be safe. Crazy or not, Sanford was right—Belial might honor their deal, he might not, but somebody or something would always be just out of the light, waiting to step out and take their stab at the crow-mage and his offspring. It was why mages didn’t get married, didn’t reproduce if they could help it. Nobody would willingly dive into the Black, and nobody would put their kid in the way of demons and monsters.
But he had. Jack fucking Winter, father-to-be of the fucking year.
“Yeah, fine,” he told Sanford. “It’s sorted. You’ve got yourself a pet mage.”
Sanford grinned down at him. “My favorite kind. Get yourself cleaned up and get your baby mama on board. We’ve got work to do.”