Authors: Caitlin Kittredge
“That’s one word for it,” Jack said. He tried the key, and after a bit of a struggle the door popped open. The air inside was stale, recycled by central air. The crime scene cleaners had done a good job of scrubbing blood out of the marble entry, but it wavered as silver film on Jack’s sight, luminous over the walls and floors.
He let the silver streaks guide them, through a media room with a giant blank screen taking up an entire wall, and into a kitchen roughly the size of two of his flat back to back. The pain and misery were much more ingrained here, in the walls and wood and bones of the house. Nobody who lived here would ever feel truly settled again.
The largest streak of psychic residue lay across the counters and floor, a great swath where Mrs. Case had met her end.
“There’s the pet door,” Pete said. The door led to a patio, which ended at a swimming pool lit from beneath the water. With Jack’s sight, the water turned black and bottomless, the light shading to orange and then red. A trail wandered from the back fence, across the patio, to the door, and when he looked it was gone.
Jack blinked. Something that could erase its psychic trail—that sounded like the sort of thing Belial was after. He took a breath in, and let his sight open up, and allowed the oppressive atmosphere of the murder house to overwhelm him.
He saw the blood, saw the wavering lines of pain from where the Case woman and her child had lain in their last moments, but he shoved it aside like cobwebs. The trail wavered, through the pet door and across the tiles, stopping over the silvery pool of spectral blood.
It blinked in and out, a line of white little more than smoke, curling and wavering back on itself. Jack tried to focus his eyes, but doing so produced the familiar spike between his eyes. Look too hard, and the sight would pulverize the parts of his brain that he cared about, leaving him a turnip with interesting dreams.
Just a little more,
he begged. The smoke wafted over the back wall of the Case house, down into the light-studded blackness of a canyon. Jack heard a faint whisper, nothing he could make out, and then his sight flared, the smoke twirling into a spiral, swirling around him and down his throat, choking him.
He came back to himself to find that his nose was dripping blood, gleaming black droplets on the Cases’ countertop. Pete sighed and wiped it up with her sleeve. “You think you could manage not to leave your DNA all over everything, genius?”
“Sorry,” he muttered. For the moment, he left aside thinking about what could set a trap for any psychic who might try to follow it, keep it on for years after the fact, and burn out every trace of its presence. Right then, breathing was enough of a headache. “You were right,” he told Pete.
“What is it?” Pete said. Jack thought about the smoke, trailing through his sinuses, burning with that ashes-and-dust scent that he recognized from his dreams. The scent of the wind in Hell. Belial’s missing nightmare was definitely the nasty git who’d hacked up the Case family.
Jack rubbed his forehead. His headache in the morning was going to be a thing of epics. “Something that doesn’t appreciate me sniffing after it, that much is certain.”
The creature had done a good job—it had left only a burn scar on the Black around the Case house. Nothing Jack could probe further, unless he relished his brain leaking out. But it hadn’t disappeared into thin air. It was a thing, with a form and a body, a thing that
had
to hide its passage, because otherwise any psychic worth his bad dreams would know it for what it was.
Pete tensed as a car passed on the street, headlights sweeping down the hall from the foyer. “Our luck’s probably up,” she said. “We should get out of here.”
Jack waited until he was back in the Fury to punch the dash, leaving a crack in the veneer.
“Oi!” Pete said. “I have to return this in pristine condition, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah, my fault,” Jack muttered. “You can tell Sal that Christine did it.”
“What’s your problem all of a sudden?” Pete demanded. “Throwing a tantrum isn’t going to get anything done.”
His knuckles were bleeding, and Jack swiped them against his jeans. Pete made a fair point. “With a ghost or a demon, I can track it or summon it, find its true name and compel it to appear. But all I’ve got now is ashes.” Belial’s boogeyman thought it was smarter than him, and Jack didn’t like creatures that thought that.
“I’m just a little frustrated, and I very much want to nail this bastard to the wall and be free to be on my way,” he told Pete.
“We, you mean,” Pete said. “Belial can act like I’m some shrinking flower, but I made that deal and this is as much my mess as yours.” She started the Fury with a rumble and pulled away. “
We’ll
nail him, and then you can go right back to your sordid little magic lifestyle and
we’ll
no longer be a bother for you.”
“You know it won’t matter if I give it all up,” Jack said quietly. “Something will still come knocking.” He wished he could force Pete to believe him, by screaming or shaking her or any other way, but he couldn’t, and trying to do so now was just burning daylight he could be using to finish Belial’s latest exercise in ant-farm sadism.
So he stayed quiet, and she stayed quiet, and things went on exactly as they’d been for months. Pete drove for a bit, until Jack couldn’t take the confined space and the wanting of a cigarette any longer. “Let me out here, yeah?” he asked Pete. She braked and gave him a stare.
“Why?”
“Need to walk a bit,” Jack said.
“Right,” Pete said, but she let him get out of the car without anything further. “See you back at Mayhew’s?” she called.
“Maybe,” Jack said. Dealing with Mayhew again was somewhere on his list of activities after letting a ferret chew on his balls, but he didn’t want to give Pete more problems.
She followed him for a few feet before pulling back into traffic. Jack stopped on a corner and lit a cigarette. He was on Hollywood Boulevard, near an on-ramp to the 101 freeway. At night, the low cinderblock buildings were mostly dark and gated. A pair of hobos dozed in a doorway, cradling their paper-wrapped bottles close. “Hey, brother,” one said. “How about a few bucks?”
“Sorry,” Jack told him. “Not from around here.”
“Then how ’bout a smoke?” the other said. Jack sighed and handed over the rest of his pack.
“God bless you,” the hobo said, snaking the fags inside his jacket faster than a stage magician.
“He’s got fuck-all to do with this, hasn’t he?” Jack said, walking on. He clocked the shadow half a block down, along a dark section of unoccupied storefront. Cars swooped past, but the streetlamp above was burnt out, creating a slice of dark perfect to pull someone close and stick a knife in their kidney.
Jack slowed his steps a little at a time, then stopped and dropped his cigarette, crushing it under the toe of his boot.
The shadow was silent, just a ripple in the psychic airflow, but it was there, hanging back and taking its time. Jack spread his arms. “I haven’t got all night,” he said. “Come on out, then.”
Sliver melted from the shadow of the storefront. “They said you were good. That’s just spooky, though.”
“Says the shadow-walking wraith to the mage with bad knees,” Jack said. “’M not that good. Maybe you’re just crap at this spy gig, you ever think of that?”
Sliver looked at his feet. “I wasn’t going to actually kill you.”
“What a comfort,” Jack said. He didn’t try to throw a curse on the wraith. That would only slag Sliver off. He could turn tail and run, or cut down the alley to the next street, but if a wraith really wanted to catch up with you, it could have a hand inside your ribcage before you could draw your last breath.
“This is all Mayhew’s fault,” Sliver said. “He brought you here.”
“Yeah, it was pretty fucking convenient that you wanted to be my best friend back at your bar,” Jack said. “But I thought maybe you just fancied me.”
Sliver looked up and down Hollywood Boulevard, studying each pool of light and neon sign, silver eyes reflecting like pools of oil. “I don’t know who wants you dead, Jack, but they reached out.”
“Lots of folks want that,” Jack said. “Too many to list.”
“Nobody has that kind of influence in this city,” Sliver said. “Not anyone who followed you. But these people do. They’re tossing around threats and cash like it’s Mardi Gras.”
“How mysterious,” Jack said. Sliver fell into step beside him when he started walking again.
“I was just keeping an eye on you,” the wraith said. “There’s a lot of mean and hungry bastards in this city who wouldn’t think twice about erasing you for the kind of things these dudes are offering.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time I banged a stick against somebody’s cage,” Jack shrugged.
Sliver blended with the shadows for a moment, then reemerged. “You need to watch your ass,” he said. “This isn’t merry England. The Black here, this is the Wild fucking West. And you’re stomping around in those big boots of yours across the top of everyone’s bridge.”
Jack thought about what Pete’s father, a detective inspector with bad lungs and a worse temper, had once told her. “When somebody tries to kill you, means you’re getting somewhere,” Jack said to Sliver.
“And are you?” the wraith said. “Getting anywhere?”
“No, not really,” Jack said. The missing trail of the thing that had murdered the Cases dogged at him, though he tried to ignore the obvious solution. That would open him up to all kinds of nasty things, lay his mind bare and at the mercy of his sight. He could go catatonic and never come back if he did what most psychics would do in this situation. But he wasn’t most. A mage with the sight was a time bomb as it was, without inviting the entire world of the dead inside his skull.
“Then what?” the wraith asked. “You’re going to wander around Hollywood waiting to get offed?”
Jack shook his head. “No, I do have one idea.” A stupid idea, but the only one, as was usually the way with him. “You know where I can find somebody who deals esoterica around here?” he said.
“Yeah,” Shiver said. “There’s a shop on Cahuenga that I’d trust to sell, and not drop a dime on you after you leave.”
“You want to get off me bad side, take me there,” Jack said, and tried to ignore the prickle on the back of his neck while Sliver walked them to his car. The feeling that he might have just had his last stupid idea, and the fear of what he was going to have to see. When he’d been shooting heroin, it had kept the fear at bay, along with everything else. Now there was nothing—a few tattoos to keep him from going completely around the bend when his visions kicked in, but beyond that, there was his sight and the void it looked into.
Sliver’s car was roughly the same vintage as Pete’s loaner, but dented on every sharp edge and pocked with rusted continents floating in a primer-colored sea. “It’s a piece of shit, I know,” Sliver said, “but who’d steal it?”
“Fair enough,” Jack said. A spring poked out from the upholstery and into the small of his back. They drove east, and Shiver pointed out a bridge across a concrete trough. “That’s the LA river,” he said. “Site of one million movie car chases.” He jerked his thumb at the ironworks lamps flashing by. “The bridge is famous too. Fourth Street Bridge. Look it up.”
“What is this city’s obsession with the movies?” Jack demanded. “Every bloody person I’ve met had some precious anecdote about the silver fucking screen.”
“Before the movies, this place was mostly orange groves, train tracks, and a few shitty apartment buildings,” Sliver said. “Not a lot of real history, so we take ours from films.” The shadows under the bridge rippled as they passed, and Sliver pointed ahead. “This is East LA. Badass neighborhood, my girl lives in, too. Don’t wander around here on your own.”
A few more turns, and Sliver pulled up in front of a bodega, saints’ candles lining the window. “Just tell the old lady I sent you,” he said.
“Cheers,” Jack said. The shop wasn’t anything special—graffiti covered one of the front windows and the door was bright red, but he could feel the protection hexes vibrating from the sidewalk. Somebody who knew what they were doing had put a tight net over the whole building, and Jack got the distinct feeling he wasn’t welcome. Not that it had ever stopped him. He pushed open the door and a bell jangled to announce him.
The front of the shop was crammed with dusty junk, rosaries and bundles of sage, more candles, prayer cards, and plaques of the Virgin and the crucifixion dangling from the ceiling. Most esoterica dealers had this sort of window dressing, to discourage the daylight world in general from looking too closely. What was true in porn shops was also true for magic shops—the good stuff was behind the curtain.
Jack pushed the red glass beads aside, setting up a clatter, and found himself in an even more claustrophobic back room. A small circle on the floor was painted with a
veve,
to a
loa
Jack wasn’t familiar with, but the white paint was far less engaging than the woman behind the pile of wooden crates serving as a counter.
“Well,” she said, setting down her magazine. “Look at you.”
Jack flashed her a smile. Charming women wasn’t any harder than picking a recalcitrant lock—it just took a little time and a light touch. And working on the assumption that his mark went for scars, leather, and tattoos. The girl behind the counter returned his smile.
“Don’t get offended, but how the fuck did you get in here? This shop is reserved for select customers.”
“Didn’t see a doorman,” Jack said. He leaned on the counter, pulling her into the radius of his smile while skimming the surface of her talent. It was there, strong and bloodred. “So explain something to me,” he said, gesturing around the room. “Your select customers, they all
vaudaun,
into Santeria, and advocates of Santa Muerte at the same time? Because that’d get a touch confusing, speaking for myself.”
“We specialize,” said the girl. “We don’t discriminate.”
“Brilliant,” Jack said. He stuck out his hand. “And you are?”
She looked at his hand, looked at him, smiled with an expression that could razor flesh. “Out of your league.”