Lou edged over to the curb, giving the birds a wide berth, so he thought there was something odd about them, too. I stopped about ten feet away and examined them carefully. As far as I could tell, they were pigeons.
I started to feel foolish. Staying alert is one thing; descending into paranoia quite another. And not a useful survival skill; one of these days I’d be focused intently on some peculiar-acting pigeons and something large and angry would come up behind me and take my head clean off.
I continued on, and just like every pigeon in every city in the world, they scuttled out of the way, their little legs speeding up like clockwork toys as they hurried along. But at the last moment, like a squirrel that almost makes it all the way across the highway and then unaccountably turns back, the fatter one reversed course and darted back under my feet. I tripped and stumbled, accidentally kicking the bird at the same time.
It uttered a most unpigeonlike squawk and fluttered off to the side. Its mate saw this as an attack and flew at me, flapping its wings and going for my eyes like a scene out of Hitchcock’s
The Birds
. It would have been funny, except that as it did so, its beak lengthened and sharpened, so that I was no longer facing the weak weapon of a pigeon. It was more like the bill of a woodpecker.
I threw up my arm to protect my face, and the bill gashed my forearm, leaving a long shallow groove. The first bird circled back and attacked from the opposite direction, pecking me on the back of my head, just below my right ear. I clawed at it, but it easily avoided my clumsy hand, veered off, joined its mate, and both disappeared into the darkness.
The back of my head was now bleeding, as well as my arm. The wounds were minor, but it was disturbing. Things were escalating. A minor dislocation, to be sure; mutated pigeons weren’t going to bring down civilization, but it wasn’t a good sign. If Jackie was experimenting, starting off small, the dislocations would be hardly noticeable. But once she got some confidence and tested her limits, things might get truly weird. The next things that slipped through might be worse than pigeons, even ones with razor beaks. Finding her was no longer just a hope. It was a necessity.
SIXTEEN
NEXT MORNING I WAS BACK AT VICTOR’S ONCE again. If I spent any more time there, I’d have to think about renting a room. Timothy was making breakfast and Sherwood was helping out, so that was one good thing about hanging out there.
“How are we going to find Jackie again?” I asked. “For all we know she’s already left the Bay Area.”
“I don’t think so,” Eli said. “She’s comfortable here; she has friends. She doesn’t want to leave. If she were planning to, she wouldn’t have bothered to try and get you out of the way.”
“That still doesn’t tell us where she might be. Maybe I should just call her cell and ask her. At least that would stir things up, to find out I’m still alive.”
“You’ve got her cell number?” Timothy said. “You can ping it, you know, and find out her approximate location within a couple hundred feet. Well,
you
can’t, but the cell provider can.”
“Of course,” said Victor, slapping his head in annoyance. “You didn’t happen to notice what kind of phone she had?”
“It was an iPhone,” Sherwood said. “I noticed it when we first met at Thinker’s Café. Why?”
“Because the newer phones have GPS chips in them,” Timothy said. “The cell providers can narrow down those phone locations ever further. You don’t even need to be talking on the phone as long as it’s turned on.”
“Don’t you have to be a cop for that, or get a warrant or something?” Sherwood said. Timothy laughed.
“Um. We’re talking about Victor, remember? He has friends.”
“Well, contacts, at least,” I said.
“Let me have the number,” Victor said, and when Sherwood gave it to him he pulled out his own cell and retreated to a corner of the room. It didn’t take long before he rejoined us.
“She’s at Sixth and Mission,” he said. “At least her phone is.”
“What would she be doing there?” Sherwood asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ll bet she’s back at the Hotel Carlyle. She must have friends there—I never thought to look for her there again.”
“Let’s get down there,” Victor said. “Mason, we’ll take your van. “
Even with the prospect of the world slowly unraveling, Victor had no intention of risking his beloved Beemer. If he parked it in that area of the city, unpleasant things were bound to happen to it. An eighty-thousand-dollar car acts like a beacon for street people, and peeing on it is the protest of choice. I may not approve, but I do understand where they’re coming from.
On the way over, we worked out a plan, such as it was. If Jackie was in the Hotel Carlyle somewhere, still shielding, it wouldn’t be easy to locate her position among all those close-together rooms. The tenants at the hotel weren’t the forthcoming type, and randomly poking around in rooms could lead to trouble, as my previous experience had shown.
But if Lou and I went in unshielded and wandered about asking questions, we’d come to her attention quickly enough. Just our presence there would unsettle her, and rather than confront us again she’d most likely bolt. Victor, Sherwood, and Eli would be waiting outside for her and the three of them together should have no problem scooping her up.
“Are you okay, Mason?” Sherwood asked. “You look drawn out.”
“Just tired, that’s all. I’ve been having a lot of headaches lately.”
“Me too,” she said.
Eli’s head snapped around. “What?”
“Headaches,” Sherwood said. “I’ve had quite a few in the last couple of weeks. Why?”
“Because I’ve had some as well, and so has Victor,” Eli said.
Okay, this was no coincidence. But we didn’t have time to discuss it; we were almost at the Carlyle. I parked the van a couple of blocks away and we set off toward the hotel. But once again things didn’t go quite according to plan. Who could ever have foreseen that?
When we were halfway to Sixth Street, I noticed a group of people on the corner. Nothing unusual there; hanging around on street corners is a long and honored tradition, especially for those who have no real place to call their own. But I recognized one of them, a small, light-skinned black woman with freckles across the bridge of her nose. She saw me about the same time I saw her. I stopped and grabbed Victor by the arm.
“That’s Cassandra,” I said, pointing her out. What the hell? Had she known we were coming? How could she have?
She fumbled for something in her pocket, got it out, and stabbed frantically at it. An amulet, a power object? No, but something equally effective. A cell phone. It was no coincidence Cassandra was down here; she was acting as a lookout for Jackie.
“Let’s get a move on,” I said. “Cassandra’s warning her, and Jackie will be gone in half a minute.”
We all broke into a trot, although only Lou can actually trot since you need four legs for that. Cassandra stepped toward us and raised her hand. She had ability, I knew, but there was no way she could face us all. But she didn’t have to face us; all she needed to do was delay us, and that was a lot easier. Instead of attacking us, she turned and spread her hand out toward the street.
The wave of cold and damp that came off her hand was palpable, even at a distance. The street glistened where she’d cast out her talent, and then a thin layer of black ice, invisible and unexpected, covered the asphalt. A cab came by, speeding along and taking the corner a bit too fast even if there hadn’t been any ice. The driver lost control, skidded, overcorrected, and the cab slid sideways. It jumped the curb right where the group of street people had gathered. They scattered as the cab bore down on them, barely getting out of the way, and one slower-moving individual was saved only by an old-fashioned iron lamppost that the cab slammed into. The horn went off and its blare kept up a constant wail, drawing onlookers like a magnet. People crowded around the cab, blocking the sidewalk. Most rushed over to help; some were undoubtedly looking for a way to profit off the situation.
“Fuck!” Victor yelled as another car rolled down Mission Street, headed for the ice patch. He thrust out his hand in a gesture very much like the one Cassandra had used, but this time I felt heat rolling off. A second later, the driver of the oncoming car hit the brakes, having seen the accident on the corner, but this time the car came to a screeching halt on dry pavement.
Meanwhile Cassandra had melted into the crowd and disappeared. She’d gained all the time she needed. The four of us stood in the middle of the sidewalk and looked stupidly at one another.
“An unfortunate setback,” said Eli.
“Can you get your people to ping her cell phone again?” I asked Victor. “We can still trace her.”
Victor nodded, and stepped into a doorway away from the noise of the street. The rest of us waited impatiently. A few street people approached us with the intention of hitting us up for spare change, but they all veered off at the last moment and walked on by. Maybe their street sense told them there was something a little off about us, or maybe our impatience and bad mood told them it was a hopeless proposition. Victor finally came out from the doorway shaking his head.
“The phone hasn’t moved.”
“So she’s still here?” Sherwood asked.
“Hardly. The phone hasn’t moved at all. She ditched it. She must have finally realized she could be tracked by the phone, or maybe one of her friends reminded her of that fact.”
“Whatever,” I said. “She’s gone now, so we’re back to square one.”
We trudged back to the van in silence, discouraged. As we were about to climb in, Lou’s ears perked up and he stood up on his hind legs like a meerkat, the way he does when he wants to get a better look at something.
I followed his gaze to see what he was looking at and got a glimpse of someone turning the corner, not enough of a look to recognize anyone but enough to get a sense it was someone familiar.
“Hold on a sec,” I said. “I want to check something out.”
I walked rapidly to the corner, but when I got there the sidewalk was crowded with pedestrians. By the time I sorted through the various random bodies and focused in on the figure I’d glimpsed, he was almost at the end of the block. I picked up my pace, but a second later a Muni bus pulled up to the bus stop and he climbed aboard.
His back had been toward me, but as he boarded the bus I got a good look at him in profile. I wasn’t positive, but he looked an awful lot like someone I knew, although it was someone I’d never expected to see walking the streets of San Francisco again.
Malcolm.
THE FIRST THING I DID AFTER DROPPING OFF everyone back at Victor’s was to head back to Mount Davidson. Neither Victor nor Eli had any explanation for Malcolm’s reappearance; in fact, Victor basically dismissed the idea.
“Lots of people look alike,” he said. “He was dead, you say. So it seems highly unlikely it was actually him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sherwood said, coming to my defense. “If Mason said he saw him, he saw him. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing that’s ever happened to one of us, would it, now?”
After that, Victor shut up for a while.
I found the place where I’d left Malcolm without any problem. There was no doubt it was the right place; the leaves and brush I’d carefully piled over him were scattered over the hillside, and there were traces of blood, still not dried in the dampness of the soil. But no Malcolm.
I could accept that Malcolm had fooled me, though I didn’t know how. Or why. But it was a good thing I hadn’t had the time nor the inclination to bury him in a grave six feet deep.
He’d been hanging out near the Carlyle, looking for Jackie, obviously. But was he hunting her or was he working with her again? Had they patched things up? If I could find him, I could get the answer, and maybe even find Jackie as well. But there was a problem—those tattoos that rendered him immune to spells might screw up Lou’s tracking ability as well. I needed an edge, and luckily I had one. Malcolm’s blood, smeared over the dirt and leaves. I gathered up as much of it as I could and rolled it into a ball. I wasn’t sure this would work, but it was worth a try.
Now I needed a location, somewhere for Lou to start tracking. What had Malcolm told me after he’d been stabbed? Something about having found a place to stay, out by the zoo, where he could commiserate with the animals. He shouldn’t have revealed that. Even if you’re not planning anything at the time, it pays to be paranoid and secretive when dealing with adversaries and magical practitioners, and doubly so if they’re both. Bits of information given away that seem innocuous at the time have a way of coming back to bite you.
The zoo is no more than a ten-minute drive from Mount Davidson, so I headed over there. Malcolm might not be around, but the bus he’d boarded was headed away from downtown, away from the city, so maybe he’d been headed for home.
I parked outside the zoo gates, which are located just a few blocks from Ocean Beach, and let Lou out of the van. I took the dirt and leaves I’d collected at Mount Davidson and fashioned them into a crude stick figure. Voodoo lite. Lou watched with interest.