Authors: Caitlin Kittredge
CHAPTER 13
Sanford’s mansion was high on Sunset Boulevard, beyond even the homes of the movie stars and the techno-billionaires, in the oldest part of Los Angeles, where the old money and the old blood lived. Parker and Gator—Christ, he hadn’t been far off, after all—wrestled him back into the SUV, but Gator didn’t attempt to put a sack over his head again.
“Sorry I had to rough ya up,” Gator said when they were back in Hollywood, dirty palm trees drooping in the sun. “Mr. Sanford pays us to be on top of things. You understand.”
“Oh, yeah,” Jack said. Gator opened the door and ushered him out onto the sidewalk near a sex shop, a video rental kiosk, and a pay phone covered in obscene graffiti. “Hey, mate,” Jack called as Gator took a seat up front next to the silent Parker. “I ever see you again, I’m going to kick your teeth so far down your throat, you’ll shit molars for a month.”
“You take care now,” Gator said, giving Jack another rotted-out grin. With his rough-carved face and bushy sideburns, it had the same effect as a grizzly bear in a wig and Elvis Presley sunglasses grinning at you.
The SUV squealed away from the curb, and Jack sighed. He magicked the pay phone into calling Pete’s mobile, and waited on the corner of Sunset and Vine until the Fury hove into sight. The clerk in the porn shop looked at him, looked at the
NO LOITERING
sign pasted on the window, examined Jack’s bloody face, and thought better of it, going back to his copy of
Variety
.
“Oh, good fucking night,” Pete said when she saw him. Jack smiled, and felt dried blood crackle on his face.
“You should see the other bloke. Not that I got any shots in, but trust me, he’s worse off—face could stop a fucking clock. Looks like zombie Elvis with a bit of Burt Reynolds after an eight-day coke bender thrown in.”
“Who in the hell were they?” Pete said. “You leap out of a moving car and when I look back you’re being muscled by two villains straight out of a cheap novel.”
Jack twisted his spine to and fro, the last kinks from Gator and Parker’s ministrations popping free. “I think that was this city’s version of taking a friendly meeting.” He got down on his hands and knees and examined under the Fury’s bumper. Nothing appeared to be amiss, not that he’d know if it was. Cars made about as much sense as the Starship
Enterprise
.
“You lose your spare change?” Pete said.
Jack brushed the road grit from his hands and popped the Fury’s trunk, getting the gear for changing a tire and thrusting it at Pete. “Lift this beast up. I need to look at the undercarriage.”
Pete rolled her eyes but she obliged, and Jack shimmied through the broken glass and trash in the gutter to stare at the Fury’s innards. He breathed on his fingertips to give himself a little light, and the blue fire of his ambient talent gathered around his fist.
In the stark witchfire light, the Fury’s undercarriage looked like the intestines of an iron animal, twisted, rusting, and leaking viscous oil. For all the beauty of its skin, it was a twisted mess on the inside.
The hex was hidden on the short side of the muffler, carved sharp and straight, silver metal clean against the grime surrounding it. It was a simple enough trick—just a source to bounce a spell off of, an echolocation widget within the Black. As long as the person on the other end was casting, they’d know exactly where the Fury was at any given time.
Jack slid out from under the Fury and got his kit bag. Pete had a paper mug of tea balanced on the dashboard, and he gestured at it.
“You mind?”
“No,” Pete said. “Tasted like shit, anyway.”
He used the tail of his shirt to grind the chalk fine on the hood of the car, and swept it into the cup. “Got a knife?” he asked Pete. One of her eyebrows went up, just a hair’s breadth.
“Depends. What are you planning on stabbing?”
“Myself,” Jack said. Using blood in spells wasn’t exactly the first resort of most mages. Blood tended to complicate things, to attract those that populated the fringe regions of the Black, and to bugger your spell up one side and down the other, until it either summoned a demon or made your liver explode. For quick and dirty hex work, though, blood got the job done.
Pete handed over a small pocket knife, and Jack sliced himself in the familiar path across his palm. You couldn’t cut too deep or too often, or scar tissue would make it impossible to get a good amount when you really needed it. He squeezed the runnels into the cup, and then ripped up the end of his shirt and wrapped it tight around his hand.
The clerk in the video shop now had a cordless phone in his hand, and was staring at Jack with something close to alarm. “Please,” Jack told him. “I hardly think this is the strangest shit you’ve seen working in this piss-hole.”
Jack mixed the chalk and blood with his finger, and shimmied back under the Fury. He didn’t have time to look up any specific, proper symbols to block a tracking spell, but half of magic was the willingness to fly by the hair of your arse, and hope that you landed on something soft. If you didn’t have the balls to work spells on the fly, you had no business setting foot in the Black.
He whispered a few persuasive words to the chalk mixture, and then smeared it liberally over the spell, filling the divots the carvings had left with his own blood. The metal hissed on contact, and a little smoke curled that smelled like the inside of a creamatory furnace filled with hair. The hex wouldn’t hold for long—once whoever was running the spell tried to find them and smacked a brick wall of Jack’s blood magic instead, his trick would cease to be clever. But it bought them a little time, and he hoped it was enough.
“Right,” he told Pete, standing up. His knees and his skull let him know that a) he was an old man and b) he was an old man who’d just gotten the shit kicked out of him by two large, efficient goons who had a passion for their work. He could deal with that later.
“Where to?” she said, when Jack slumped into the passenger side of the Fury.
“Venice,” he said. “Going to see a bloke about a car.”
CHAPTER 14
Shocking Jack not one iota, Sal’s garage was locked up tight, doors pulled and padlocked, and lights dark.
“He better not have done a fucking runner,” Jack told Pete. “If I have to chase him all over California, my mood’s not going to improve one bit.”
“Try not to be a complete cunt,” Pete said. “Maybe he didn’t know.”
“For a man who gets that much of a hard-on over a piece of metal and a combustion engine,” Jack said, “he knew. Probably etched that spell on himself. Unlike Mayhew, he doesn’t seem like a bloody idiot.”
“Just don’t burst in there and start causing mayhem and disaster,” Pete told him.
“When have I ever, personally and deliberately, caused mayhem and/or disaster?” Jack spread his hands. He felt justified—the mayhem usually wasn’t his fault, and disaster was inadvertent at best.
“Oh, do you really want me to answer that?” Pete said with wide-eyed false innocence. “Because we’ll be here for a bit.”
“Shut it,” Jack told her. He banged on the metal door with the flat of his fist. Seconds went by, then minutes. Sal didn’t materialize.
“There’s a back door,” Pete shouted. Jack picked his way through the rusted field of auto parts that surrounded the garage and tried the lock. Pete rubbed a hole in the grime and peered inside. “Don’t see anything.”
“He’s there,” Jack said. “Hiding, probably.” He would, if he were in the business of screwing over mages. Jack put his hand over the lock and it popped open. The back of the shop was dark and smelled of stale coffee and motor oil.
“Wait here,” he told Pete. “Keep an eye open.”
A door marked
OFFICE
hung open, and Jack heard muted music from behind it. Sal sat behind his desk, a revolver in one hand and a mostly empty bottle at his elbow. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”
“Yeah, me,” Jack said. “You think I’d be good and gone by now?”
Sal shrugged. The revolver clunked against the desk. “It’s a .357 Magnum,” he said. “The most powerful handgun in the world. It’s a replica of the one they used in the Dirty Harry movies.”
Jack ignored his yammering. It seemed nobody in LA could tell reality if it bit them on ass.
“Who told you to put that spell on the car?” Jack said. “And I’m not going to believe it just happened to be there, on the special car you decided to give especially to me and Pete.”
Sal laughed and took a pull off the bottle. “You think I’m scared of you?”
“I think you’re pissing your shorts over something, yeah,” Jack said. “If not me, then I’d really like to know what.”
Sal raised the revolver. “Get out.”
Jack shook his head. “You don’t want to do that, mate. Believe it or not, I’m your friend in all this.”
“Friends, right,” Sal mumbled. “Got no fuckin’ friends left. Friends are leverage, Jack, you know? Friends can bleed if the sons of bitches can’t bleed you.”
Sal kept mumbling, but he dropped his eyes down to the bottle, and when the revolver dipped Jack grabbed it and punched Sal just under his left eye. Not hard enough to break his hand, or Sal’s cheekbone, but enough to get his attention.
Sal grunted, chair rolling backward, and his bottle teetered and smashed on the floor. A brown puddle bled slowly into the cracks in the concrete floor. “Well, shit,” Sal said. “Now look what you did.”
“You want your skull to keep its shape, you’re going to tell me whatever your scummy little part is in all this,” Jack said. He cracked the chambers of the revolver and emptied the bullets out before dropping it on the desk.
Sal grunted, and fished in his drawers for a pill bottle. He popped the cap and dry-swallowed a handful of small white caplets. “Said I’m not scared of you. What can you do?”
“It’s either Mayhew, Belial, or Sanford doing it,” Jack said. “So which curtain, Sal? Who wants me kept track of, and why?” He leaned across the desk and grabbed the greasy front of Sal’s uniform, lifting him halfway out of his chair. “As for what I can do … do you really want to find that out firsthand?”
Sal drove his fist into Jack’s gut, and his air went out of him, along with his balance. He went down, bouncing his chin off the edge of Sal’s desk and bloodying himself all over again. Sal grabbed the revolver, thick bourbon-numbed fingers fumbling with the bullets, sending copper slugs rolling in all directions.
A decade ago, Jack could’ve gotten his wind back, smashed Sal’s kneecap with his boot, and gotten on with the hard questions. One less trip to Hell, and he could’ve swallowed down the blood coating his tongue and stood up to trade lumps. But it wasn’t, and he hadn’t, so he struggled up as far as one elbow, sucking in air that felt like razor blades embedded in his lungs, before Sal aimed the gun at him.
“Adios, you fucking Limey cocksucker,” Sal said.
The office door creaked, and Jack expected Pete, and tried to yell. He had a vision of the slug in her chest, the red blossom growing on her skin, the exit wound spraying crimson mist over the hallway behind her.
“Salvatore,” a voice said. A man, not Pete. “You know better than that.”
Jack let himself fall back to the floor. The concrete was cool, and a flourescent tube buzzed above his head, throwing spider-legged shadows into every corner.
Sal’s face was wan, the boozy colors fled and a rime of blue in their place. His eyes were wide and black with panic, and the gun hung limp in his fist before slipping to the floor. “No,” he said. “No, I did what you asked.”
“Shooting Winter in the face isn’t part of the deal, friend,” said the man.
“He’s working for that demon!” Sal shouted. “The one who’s got his teeth in your ass. I was doing you a favor.”
“Belial can nip at my heels all he wants,” the man purred. “But he’s never going to bite down. He’s a spineless maggot like the rest. You know what I do with maggots, Sally? I squash ’em.”
Sal raised his hands, backed behind the desk, and sat down. “Whatever you say.”
The man extended a hand to Jack but kept his eyes on the mechanic. “It is whatever I say, Sally. Don’t forget that again.”
Jack didn’t take up the man’s offer. He was pleasant enough looking, what old ladies would describe as a nice young man. His slightly flat features were familiar, too, but Jack didn’t bother playing twenty questions with himself on where he knew the face from. He got up, knee and then foot. His head was swimming and his guts still roiled.
“You’re a tough guy, huh?” said the man.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Jack said. “But who the fuck are you?”
The man spread his arms. “You don’t remember? That’s hurtful. I’m the man with the plan, Jack.”
Jack lifted one eyebrow. “Lots of stupid cunts have plans.”
The man laughed, displaying perfect movie star teeth. “Fair enough. I’m Don.” He held out his hand again. A small star sapphire ring glittered on his pinky finger, like an eye protruding from his flesh.
Jack found a whisper of familiarity in the voice as well, but couldn’t place it. It bothered him, but not as much as the rest of the mess.
Don retracted his hand when Jack didn’t take it. “Careful sort, huh?” He grinned wider, face almost in rigor mortis. “Don’t blame you, seeing as I’m the one you’ve been looking for.”
CHAPTER 15
Jack took a step back. A human reaction, to get as far away as you fucking could from predators and the unnatural. A reaction that made him look like a coward, and when Don laughed, it just felt all the worse.
“Don’t worry, Jack. I’m not here to make a steak and kidney pie out of you and the little woman,” he said. “Depending on how our conversation goes, we could be great friends.”
“I seriously fucking doubt that,” Jack said. “What’s your game, Don?”
“Survival.” Don shrugged. “Same as you, Jack. Same as Belial. Lions and zebras both dislike hyenas. Little motherfuckers will eat you clean and laugh while they’re doing it.”
“And three guesses, but I’ll only need one, you’re the hyena?” Jack said. Don shook his head.
“No, Jack,” he said. “I’m the fuckin’ big bad wolf.” He pulled a nail file out of his jacket and cleaned under each finger with a short motion. “But enough about me. Let’s repair to someplace a little more hospitable.”