Bottle Demon E-Book

Stephen Blackmoore

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: Eric Carter
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 434

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Stephen Blackmoore's dark urban fantasy series continues as hard-edged, hard-hitting necromancer Eric Carter finds himself surrounded by enemies who want him to suffer a fate worse than death… by bringing him back to life. When Carter comes to, he feels like Hell. Worse than hell. Every part of his body is on fire, his stomach is boiling acid, and he's coughing up some horrific black substance from his lungs. He's not feeling—or looking—like himself. All in all, not a jolly start to the day. Unfortunately, that's about as good as its going to get. Because, as he soon learns, he's been dead for years—until someone with some serious magical muscle decided to bring him back. But who could Carter have ticked off so badly they would expend such power just to return him to the mortal realm? Oh, that's right: raging gods, sadistic demons, a very patient and vengeful djinn… pretty much every nightmare in the monster's menagerie. And if Carter doesn't figure out why someone—or some thing—is pulling the strings, his new life may have an even more gruesome end than his old one. Praise for the Eric Carter series: "Blackmoore employs Chandleresque prose to smoothly incorporate a hard-boiled sense of urban despair into a paranormal plot, with occasional leavening provided by smart-aleck humor." — Publishers Weekly on Dead Things "In a world where Aztec Mythology, dark magic and grim reality blend together, nothing is what it appears to be... Best of all, Blackmoore's chillingly good storytelling skills ensures that fans will enjoy every step of this adrenaline fueled journey." — RT Book Reviews (Top Pick) on Broken Souls "This series is so fucking good. Blackmoore can't write these books fast enough to suit me. BROKEN SOULS is hyper-caffeinated, turbo-bloody face-stomping fun. This is the L.A-noir urban fantasy you've been looking for." — Kevin Hearne, Author of The Iron Druid Chronicles "Carter's wry voice is amusing as ever, but the grief he carries is palpable, adding depth and a sense of desperation to this action-packed adventure. Readers will be eager for more after this thrilling, emotionally fraught installment." — Publishers Weekly on Ghost Money, Starred Review Series Order: 1. Dead Things 2. Broken Souls 3. Hungry Ghosts 4. Fire Season 5. Ghost Money 6. Bottle Demon 7. Suicide Kings 8. Hate Machine 9. Cult Classic

Leseprobe

Bottle Demon

Copyright © 2021 by Stephen BlackmooreAll rights reserved.

Published as an ebook in 2021 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

Originally published by DAW in North America in 2021.

Cover design by Tiger Bright Studios.

ISBN 978-1-625675-40-8

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

About the Author

Other Books by Stephen Blackmoore

Acknowledgments

As I write this the world is in the middle of a global pandemic that has killed over a quarter million people in the U.S., there’s a tin-pot dictator in the White House desperately clinging to power in the most laughable and destructive ways possible, and the McRib is back.

God help us all.

2020 has been… let’s call it challenging. Simply surviving it is a victory. Anything else is just frosting. I don’t know about you, but I know I wouldn’t have made it (provided I have—there’s still a couple weeks left to go) without the support of my friends and family.

I’m going to keep this short because otherwise it would be longer than this book and I’d forget somebody and feel awful when I realize I missed a couple hundred people.

My wife, Kari, who calls me on my bullshit. My dog, Phryne, who is a goddamn holy terror, but she gets my ass out of my chair whether I like it or not. My agents, Al Guthrie, who made this whole journey possible, and Lisa Rodgers, who is helping me push it even further. And finally, Betsy Wollheim, Josh Starr, and the entire crew over at DAW, thank you for continuing to give a madman a forum for his lunatic ravings.

And to everyone who joked, made me think, helped me consider new possibilities or helped me crystallize the ones I already knew.

Thank you. I hope you enjoy the book and I hope you stick around for more. I’ve no intentions of hopping off this ride any time soon.

Chapter 1

Let me tell you about Belize.

Few years back I get hired by this burnt-out software millionaire who’s convinced that the ghosts of his dead enemies are trying to murder him. All the normals he talks to think he’s crazy, which he is. Totally batshit. Doesn’t mean he’s wrong. My line of work, things like this are an actual occupational hazard. I was in New York at the time and had just gone through a bad breakup where the girl I was seeing tried to eat my soul, and I figured getting out of town might not be a bad idea.

So I take his money, fly down to Belize, meet him at his compound. It’s this weird Winchester House sort of thing with stairs that lead nowhere, doors that open onto windows, shit like that. Got a fifteen-foot-tall, razor-wire-topped wall surrounding the whole place. I’d have written him off as completely nuts except somebody’s carved runes and sigils into the walls to ward against everything from demons to cockroaches. He might have been a normal, but he knew enough to hire real mages.

I do my thing. The only possibility is a Haunt of a murdered neighbor about five miles away who hated him, but more in a “Get off my lawn or I’ll shoot you,” paranoid sort of way, rather than a “I shall seek my vengeance from beyond the grave” sort of way. Guy’s not a Wanderer, so he’s not going anywhere. I reassure Mister Software Millionaire that if anybody is trying to kill him, they’re not already dead.

Cue epic party. To be fair the epic party had started about a week before, and it was just finding its pace. He had like a hundred-and-fifty people in the place with him snorting, smoking, fucking. Real extroverted for a guy with an almost Howard Hughes level of paranoia. So, being a good guest, of course I joined in.

One morning as I’m staggering out of somebody’s bedroom, he comes up to me and says, “Eric, do you want to see God?”

I can say from recent experience that when confronted with a question like that the best course of action is to say no, but at that point I’d never met a god. A few powerful spirits like the Voodoo Loa Baron Samedi and Maman Brigitte, but nothing you could really get behind on the whole divinity thing. But I figure he’s talking metaphorically and grunt something that sounds like assent.

Guy hands me half a dozen pills of some shit he got from Singapore that’s so new it doesn’t even have a name yet. And before he tells me I should take half of one, I’ve already swallowed all six.

When I come back to myself it’s two months later and I’m standing in the Belizean jungle, half-naked, covered in mud, waving a flaming machete around at some poor bastard who turns out to be my guide. He doesn’t mind the machete so much, crazy fucking gringos are kind of a thing out here, but the fact that I’d cast a spell to wreath it in fire has him a little freaked out. I have no idea why I’m there, how I got there, or why the Belizean police are currently looking for me.

So when I wake up lying on my side, naked and sweating, vomiting black bile onto a cold concrete floor, lights swimming around me, with no idea how I got here, where here is, or why I’ve got a hole in my memory so big I can barely see the edges, all I can think of is Belize.

Somebody hammers on my back, dislodging more of the black crap from my stomach, lungs, sinuses. I don’t even want to know what’s happening on the other end. The hacking and dry heaves subside, and I’m rolled onto my back, and someone wipes my face with a rough towel.

A face dips into my vision. Goggles, respirator, surgical cap. A hand gloved in purple nitrile comes up and waves. “Hello!” A woman’s voice, British accent, muffled behind the mask.

She pulls the mask and goggles off. They catch a bit in the surgical cap, but eventually she gets it all off with a motion like she’s slapping mosquitos off her face. Eventually I can see a woman with Indian features, black hair, a vibrant smile that says, “I’m batshit crazy, how are you?”

I have absolutely no idea who this person is.

“Sorry,” she says. “I do hate those things. But, you know, fumes. Can you hear me? Oh. I probably should have started with that.” I try to say something. Anything. But all I can do is twitch my fingers. She sees the twitch and amazingly her smile gets a little bit wider, like the Cheshire Cat on meth. I manage to make a vague sound that at a stretch could be considered speech.

“I haven’t the foggiest idea what you just said,” she says. “But you’ve gotten most of that crap out of your system and you have air in your lungs, and your larynx seems to work, so yay!”

My mind feels like it’s been run across a belt-sander, my thoughts too smooth to get a grip on. Like I’m looking at a shattered funhouse mirror, each piece reflecting back a distorted view of who I am. None of them quite sync up.

“Did it work?” A man’s voice, deep, rough, like a rockslide. I can’t move my head to see him, but the scorn in his voice and the disapproval on her face tell me these are not the best of friends.

“If it didn’t, I wouldn’t bloody well be talking to him, would I?”

“That’s what you said last time.”

“The fuck just happened?” I force the words out, straining not only to get the sounds, but simply to remember them.

“Oh, nothing much,” she says. The nonchalant tone disappears into bubbly excitement. “Just the most amazing piece of magic no one’s done for a few thousand years. And it worked. Go me!”

“Yeah, this time,” says the unseen man.

“Piss off, Joseph,” she says over her shoulder. “Don’t mind him, darling. He’s just jealous that you’re not dead and he is.”

I hear the muffled pop of gunshots in the distance. “That was fast,” says the man. I can hear metal on metal as he racks the slide on a gun.

“Of course it was fast,” the woman says. “Everyone in a bloody thirty-mile radius knows something happened here, and at least a dozen know what it was. Now give me a hand getting him out of this circle.”

“Not my job,” he says. “I’m here to kill shit, not do manual labor. Exit plan’s your department.” I hear the metallic shred of a rusting door open and close.

“I swear that man is such a cunt,” the woman says. “Now, where were we? Ah, yes. Escape. This is so exciting.”

She grabs my wrists and begins to heave me across the room, grunting with the effort. I try to move my head to get a better idea of the space, but I can barely twitch my eyelids.

“If I had a pound for every dead-weight naked man I’ve had to drag across a room, I’d be richer than the Queen, let me tell you.” She finally gets me where she wants me and lets my arms fall to the floor. I try to move but nothing’s quite working. She stands over me, feet on either side of my chest, and crouches down to get a good look at me. Long black hair spilling over her shoulders, strands glued to her forehead with sweat. She’s wearing one of those lab bunny suits with the hood down.

She listens to my heart with a stethoscope, pulls out a penlight, shines it into my eyes. Feels like my brain’s being stabbed with an ice pick. I try to wince, but I just don’t have the strength.

“Everything appears to be in order. All the things in all their right places. No extra limbs. None missing. Heart’s beating. Now I must say the tattoos are a bit unexpected. You’ll have to tell me about that, but right now darling, we’re a bit pressed for time. If we both survive the next few hours, perhaps we can get together over tea and you can tell me all about it. If not, it was simply lovely to have met you. Ta!”

She touches my forehead with two fingers, the coolness a sharp contrast against my fevered skin, and everything goes black.

* * *

I dream of Nuestra Señora de las Sombras, Mictecacihuatl, Santa Muerte. She hasn’t been more than a thought away for what feels like a thousand years, but I can’t remember most of it.

I walk through the temple pyramid deep within the heart of Mictlan, the Aztec land of the dead. The home of Mictecacihuatl, a goddess who has adapted to the times and more often than not goes by Santa Muerte, Saint Death. I search through empty halls and silent rooms. When I reach the top where the altar stone sits, heavy, and dark with blood, I find her.

She pays me no attention—Santa Muerte, Mictecacihuatl, and a woman named Tabitha. A saint, a goddess, a mortal woman. Those three identities died by my hand, and became something new, something that had never existed before, and took up the name and the role as the protector of Mictlan.

But Mictlan cannot be ruled by only one. She needs a consort. She needs Mictlantecuhtli. At one point she wanted me to take that role. Insisted on it. But I don’t remember what happened. And I don’t understand why he’s standing next to her.

Because I killed him. As completely as a god can be killed. I sacrificed myself, and in that moment, I broke his hold on me and shattered him into a thousand shards, a jeweled shotgun blast of deep green jade.

Yet here he is. Slowly I pull the knowledge from my mind, like hauling a truck out of mud, that he’s supposed to be here. But I don’t know why I would think that. He is powerful, immense. Frightening, but not in and of himself. Something else about him terrifies me.

He turns around, eyes black as midnight, the power of death radiating off him like the cold of a dying sun. He sees through me as if I’m beneath his awareness, and I realize why I’m so afraid.

He’s wearing my face.

* * *

I snap awake in a motel room with a wet scream. Sweat soaked sheets, stink of Febreze, cigarette smoke, a thick chemical burn in my nose. Curtains drawn; a single dim lamp bolted to the wall fills the room with a fluorescent buzz. The room is too loud, too bright, too everything. My body feels wrong, like I’ve just been stuffed into a suit three times too small.

I have no memory of this place. I’ve lived the last several years out of motels like this one, and sure, they tend to blur together, but they all have something that stands out just a little bit, and I don’t remember this one at all.

Blackouts are weird beasts. Sometimes, you don’t remember anything’s happened. Other times you can feel enough of the edges that you can tell you’ve got a big fucking hole in your memory.

After Belize, the worst blackout I had lasted a week and ended with me waking up naked and screaming in a burned-out cabin in the Mojave. I’m sensing a bit of a theme here.

The last thing I remember is landing on my back on a school blacktop after a demon by the name of, I shit you not, Hank beat the crap out of me. Hank was working for the djinn Darius, who’s been trying to get out of the bottle he’s been trapped in for thousands of years, and they knew I had it.

I thought I was safe in an extra-dimensional pocket that looks like a 1940s hotel room, but apparently, I was wrong. Hank got in, I got hammered, and I barely got out of there in one piece.

And then I’m lying on a concrete floor with an Indian woman and some guy named Joseph. There’s a dream of Santa Muerte that’s already fading. Did I dream the woman, too? The bunker? But what happened before all that?

My thoughts get shunted aside as my body decides that it really wants to throw up again. I peel the sheets off of me, roll myself out of the bed, and face-plant into the carpet. I grab the nightstand and slowly pull myself up, which turns out to be a really bad idea. Once my feet are on the floor everything inside me rebels. I vomit up more of that black gore, the heaving taking me to my knees. It goes on. And on, and on. I don’t think I’ve puked this much since I drank three bottles of mescal in Tijuana and got in a bar fight.

Eventually, there’s nothing left, and all I’m doing is dry heaving. The black liquid soaks into the rug and gives off a sharp, burning stink. My mouth tastes like the inside of a chemical toilet, my hands are covered in the stuff. But the vertigo is gone, the nausea is gone. My hands are steadier, the fatigue in my muscles I had just minutes ago is fading. But holy fuck are my abs sore.

I am covered in so much of this black filth I look like an oil worker at a pipeline break. And it burns. I am not going to do another goddamn thing until I have this shit off my body. I leave tar colored footprints into the bathroom. I flick on the lights, fluorescent tubes making everything look slightly green and far too bright. A stabbing pain shoots through my eyes and I close them tight against the assault.

The afterimages swim behind my eyes as I fumble for the shower and turn it on as hot as it will get. I crack an eye open and it’s almost dim enough to not burn out my retinas before I have to close my eyes again. The scalding water washes the filth away, turning the bottom of the tub into the shower scene from Psycho. The sense of being crammed into my body like it’s a sausage casing is beginning to fade. My head is clearing up. Even the pain in my eyes from the light is fading. All things considered, I feel okay. Nothing hurts.

Wait. Nothing hurts.

I can’t remember the last time something didn’t hurt. I’ve spent years popping Vicodin and OxyContin from the beatings I’ve taken, the bones I’ve broken, the cuts, the scrapes, the gunshots, the stabbings. I force both eyes open against the light and get a good look at myself.

I don’t see scars that I should have. Tears, cuts, a set of three ugly puncture scars in my left hand where I got stuck to a table with a nail gun. Nothing. But that’s not the weirdest bit.

Over the last twenty years or so I’ve been getting tattooed with protection and enhancement spells. I’m covered in tats from throat to wrists to ankles, a network of magic ink that covers every inch of skin with wards, tricks, traps. Healing spells and pain avoidance spells and spells to dodge bullets, knives, harsh language.

Our identities are made up of who we think we are, how we see ourselves. My tattoos are as much a part of me as my skin is. I can’t imagine not having them. I don’t even remember what I looked like without them. From what I can see, and what I can feel, they’re all here.

Except they look freshly inked, like I just got out of the chair. And they’re… colorful. All of my tattoos were done in blacks and grays over the course of twenty years, maybe some dull red here and there.

But now? Blues and greens, reds and yellows, all bright as sun-kissed gemstones. I am not a jewel-tone sort of guy. You see bright colors; I am not the first person that comes to mind. But every piece is almost painfully colorful. I look like tropical bird bukkake.

I have one tattoo that takes up most of my chest, a circle with birds inside it. The birds move, shifting position and pose. Watching them gives me a headache. I got that as a sort of last-ditch strike: triggering the spell releases the birds, raven-shaped bolts of magical energy.

At least they used to be. When I got the tattoo, the birds were ravens and the circle was Celtic knotwork. A while back, after I got mixed up with Santa Muerte and her crazy Aztec family, the tattoo changed from Celtic knotwork to an Aztec design. The ravens became stylized eagles. Before, it was just a spell I’d have to charge every time I used it, like loading a shotgun.

But the eagles are different. They have a mind of their own, and they don’t always listen to me. Sometimes they’ll come out, sometimes they’ll protect me, but not always. Like they can’t be bothered by trifles, the snotty little pricks. But they’re intimidating as fuck to look at, and now that they’re green as polished jade, they’re downright terrifying.

I close my eyes against the hot water, center myself. I’m beginning to panic, and I don’t have time for that shit. My mind snags on the Indian woman with the British accent. That wasn’t a dream. Can’t have been. She performed some ritual, in which I apparently played a starring role. But what was it, and why was she doing it? And what is all this black shit I’ve been puking out?

I’m not going to get answers standing in the shower. I’ve scrubbed as much of this gunk off me as I can and rinsed my mouth to get most of the burning chemical taste out of my throat and sinuses. I’m tempted to gargle with body wash, but that feels a bit much. Then I say fuck it and do it anyway. I shut off the water and get out.

The mirror’s fogged. I almost leave it that way, but I really need to see. Tattoos have changed, scars are gone. What else is different? I wipe the mirror clean with my hand and see myself through streaked glass. My face disappears as steam covers the mirror.

In that short glimpse my face looks wrong. Not a lot wrong. It’s like the way getting new glasses or a haircut feels wrong until you get used to it. Only I can’t pin down exactly what’s different. No scars, sure. Nose looks like it’s never been broken before. But there’s something else.

I towel off and plan out next steps. Okay, priorities. Clothes would be good. I’m not crazy about walking around with a bedsheet wrapped around me like Caligula.

Get oriented. Where the fuck am I? How much time has passed since I blacked out? My mind is trying to grab onto something else, but it keeps slipping. Is anybody trying to kill me?

Get the hell out of here and on the move. I don’t know what’s happening. Staying in one place is just going to make me an easier target. Sure, you might think that’s paranoia talking, but trust me, there’s a reason I never stay anywhere for long.

I check the closet hoping somebody left behind at least a pair of shorts and am more than a little surprised to find my clothes hanging in there, or somebody’s clothes, at least. Suit, socks, shoes, boxers. Did I stash all this here before whatever the hell happened to me happened? If I did, it’s as lost in the crater of my memory as everything else.

My messenger bag is on the closet floor. I pick it up and empty it out onto the table on the other side of the room. Most of what I usually carry is still in there. Some useful, most not.

Ingredients for rituals, salt, powdered iron, grave dirt, ground-up bone, a Hand of Glory in a Zip-loc bag—that last after a hard-learned lesson that a desiccated hand covers all your shit in flakes of flesh and gristle if you don’t wrap it up.

There’s a straight razor, a couple Sharpies, some HI, MY NAME IS stickers to make the normals think I’m somebody I’m not. A ledger, thin, bound in leather, with more pages than should fit inside listing decades worth of magical garbage kept in storage, items ranging from the stupidly useless to the downright terrifying.

I find the key to the room at the Ambassador Hotel in the bag’s outside flap, probably the only thing left of the hotel not made out of old memories and ectoplasm.

Along with the key is a pocket watch, a gun, a lighter, all things that are more than they appear. The watch, a railroad grade Sangamo Special, keeps excellent time, and also twists it into pretzels in ways I still haven’t figured out.

The gun is a Browning 9mm Hi-Power pistol my grandfather got off a Nazi in WWII. It’s an ugly piece of hardware through and through. To most people it’s just a cold hunk of metal. To a necromancer it’s a hell of a lot more. There’s so much death in this thing that my magic gets ahold of it and it wakes up. It has some awareness, more every time I fire it, and it’s a raging asshole.

I get a vague sense of surprise from the gun. Holding it feels like I’ve stuck my hand in a bucket full of spiders, but it makes unusually large holes for a 9mm. I understand it does other things, too, but I haven’t really let it off its leash. It feels expectant, like it’s waiting for me to use it right. I’m told that I should be okay as long as it doesn’t start talking to me.

And then there’s the lighter. An old Zippo, brass, dented, scratched, an unrecognizable image on one side made of flakes of turquoise. It holds the power of Huitzilopochtli, a god of war and fire who wielded Xiuhtecuhtli, the Turquoise Serpent, whose fires would burn everything it touched.

Quetzalcoatl killed Huitzilopochtli during the invasion of the Spanish and stole his power. The mad wind god stuck it in a lighter and gave it to me to burn down Mictlan. I refused, so he used it to burn Los Angeles to the ground instead.

But one thing is missing. And it’s the most important one. A bottle. Old, multi-colored, Islamic glass with a rune-covered stopper held in place by pine tar and magic.

It holds an eight-thousand-year-old djinn named Darius. He’s destroyed entire civilizations while bound to masters who kept him on a very short leash.

Wherever the bottle is, I hope it’s in a really good hiding place. The last thing I remember I was holding onto it. After that it’s all Blackout Central. The bottle was sealed by Mictlantecuhtli during a battle in Mictlan five hundred years ago that nobody walked away from unscathed. It ended up with Juan Cabrillo and stayed with him for the next twenty years until he died from an infected bone break.

There it sat in a hole on Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles while Darius tried to work out what to do about it. Eventually he figured out that though he couldn’t get out of his pocket universe, he could let others in.

And that’s what he did. He created doors all over the city. Some obvious, some hidden. To some he was a legend, an urban myth. Tales of the djinn’s bottle brought people from all over to look for it. It was the Maltese Falcon, the Holy Grail, and a blowjob from Marilyn Monroe all rolled into one.

The people who found it, archaeologists digging on Catalina Island, had no idea what it was. But their security guy, a mage by the name of Robert Carter, did. He stole it, hid it in a place nobody was ever going to find, and laid clues that would eventually lead someone from his family to it.

Which is where I come in. See, our boy Robert was my grandfather. I followed his leads, got the bottle, and when I thought I had it safe and secure, I got jumped by Hank the Friendly Neighborhood Murder Demon.

There are a few scenarios I can think of right off the bat to explain why I don’t have it. Scenario one: Darius has a new master and they figured out how to open the bottle and make Darius do what they want him to do. When Hernan Cortés, the Spanish conquistador, had control of him, he kicked the crap out of the Aztecs and managed to murder most of their gods.

Scenario two: There isn’t a new master, Darius figured out how to get the bottle open himself. He’s a free agent. He can do what he wants. After eight thousand years, I’m thinking he’s built up quite an extensive shit list.

The third and most optimistic option is that neither of those happened and the bottle is, if not safe, at least not where Darius can do anything with it.

I’m not much of an optimist.

Chapter 2

The harder I try to remember where I put the bottle, or at the very least what happened to it once I blacked out, the more it slips by. I give up after a migraine threatens to settle in for the long haul. That’s not normal blackout behavior, but then nothing about what’s going on right now is particularly normal.

Technically, the only one who can open Darius’s bottle is the one who sealed it, Mictlantecuhtli, who is way, way dead. But because of assorted and sundry cosmic fuckery I’ve been roped into taking his place. Last time I took a really good look at the bottle I could see all of the interlocking spells sealing it up. It was like suddenly understanding Greek while on vacation so you can’t stop seeing all the SOCRATES ♥ PLATO porn on the Acropolis.

Not only did I know how the bindings were built, I knew how to take them down. Mictlantecuhtli might be dead, but apparently his shitty understudy is good enough to carry the show.

So as long as I didn’t open it while I was blacked out, it’s all good. Or mostly good. I’ll take the lack of scars, and pain, and even the tattoos, but not knowing why makes me worry. But there really isn’t a whole hell of a lot I can do about it right now, so I file it all away for later.

I put everything back into the messenger bag except for the Hand of Glory, which, true story, when I was a kid, I thought was a euphemism for a handjob. This one goes in the trash. I got it like ten years ago from a mortician in Portland. Maine, not Washington. It’s seen better days, and I don’t mean just at the end of the arm of the guy it came from. I doubt it even works anymore.

I pull the clothes out of the closet and take a good look at them. They’re new, neatly pressed, shoes polished. That’s a little unusual for me. I’m so hard on clothes that bothering to keep them in good shape is kind of pointless. But clothes are clothes and I can’t go walking around with my dick hanging out. Everything fits perfectly. Also a little weird for me. I buy shit off estate sales if I buy it at all. Retail theft is easy with magic. So a good fit is a rare thing.

I slide the pocket watch and straight razor into a coat pocket, the Browning into its holster at the small of my back. The lighter stays in the bag. I don’t trust myself enough not to burn everything down around me and I’ve had more than enough of that shit already.

Now what? Get my bearings. Talk to some people. Carefully. If Belize taught me anything, it’s that though you can never be sure what you did during a blackout, you likely pissed off a few people. If you’re me, that likelihood cranks up significantly. But I’ve got questions, like what the hell is going on?

The clock on the nightstand grabs my attention. It shows the day and month, and I know for a fact that it’s wrong. But I can’t remember what it should be. That’s all lost in the blackout hole swirling in the center of my mind.

I don’t have a chance to really think about it because that’s when the room’s phone rings. I don’t have a good track record when it comes to motel telephones. Nobody wants to talk to you when you’re holed up in some seedy shithole like this one, even if they know that you’re there. No, not even that Vegas stripper you gave your number to after a drunk night full of lapdances. No, you did not “share a moment.”

The calls I’ve gotten on motel room phones have ranged from horrible family news to one from a pack of ghouls gunning for me in North Dakota, who wanted to make sure I was in the room before crashing a van through the wall. I got lucky. They hit the wrong room. That actually happened twice. The second time they used a semi.

I don’t bother to answer the phone. Either it’s going to be a van/wall sort of scenario, which includes anything from the van/wall category, truck/window, sedan/door, etc. Or it’s going to be horrible news, like Darius has gotten out of his bottle, or the city’s burning down. Again.

Of course, it could just be a wrong number, or some lonely soul wanting to chat.

Yeah, I crack myself up. Whoever it is, the message is clear. Time to bug out. I sling the messenger bag over one shoulder and across my chest, draw the Browning, chamber a round, and go outside.

I thought everything was off inside. It’s worse out here. The smoke from the fires has reduced to the point where it just looks like any smoggy day in Los Angeles, but it’s not a Los Angeles I completely recognize.

The Downtown skyline is off. For one, there is a skyline. Last time I saw it, more than half of the buildings were burnt-out shells or piles of rubble. Billions of dollars in commercial real estate went up like Kleenex in a fireplace.

But now? New buildings have sprung up like mushrooms. A lot of them are still under construction, but holy shit that was fast. You can measure the timeline of new construction in this city by geological epoch.

So, either these were all in the works way before the fires burned everything down, and they were ready to go up immediately, or everything moved really, really fast. Or—and much as I don’t want to think about it, it’s hard to ignore the possibility—maybe this blackout went on longer than I think it did. The more I consider it, the more I think that might be the truth.

My thoughts are interrupted by a high-end Mercedes peeling into the parking lot. I don’t know who’s in the car. I don’t know if they’re here for me, but let’s be honest here. Much like my luck with motel telephones, waiting to find out who’s speeding into an empty parking lot I happen to be standing in has rarely been a positive experience. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s a time to ask questions and a time to start shooting. This is not a time for questions.

I draw a bead with the Browning and fire, not really expecting to hit anything. Was a time when all the gun could do was make bigger-than-usual holes in things. But for a while now I’ve been feeling something inside it waking up, paying attention. My shot should have gone wide, but instead it punches into the windshield right in front of the driver.

Seems magic pistols are no match for modern ballistic glass and the shot does nothing more than spiderweb the windshield. I pick up a sense of burning hot rage coming from the gun.

Brakes screech, the car spins, smoke bubbles up from underneath. It comes to a halt, but three of the four people in it are out their doors before the car stops moving.

Two have guns, one an extendable security baton. I bring up a shield spell and the bullets ricochet off. Guess they’re not here for a friendly chat. The guy with the baton is luckier. It also helps that he’s another mage. I feel a flare of magic as he triggers a spell and leaps impossibly high, coming down behind me in the blink of an eye, getting inside my guard because stupidly I had my shield blocking only one direction.

He swings, but he doesn’t have good footing after that jump. Though the baton sails by, it’s a little too close and it forces me back. The two guys behind me are still a threat, so I keep the shield up between us, bullets bouncing and sparking off it. It’s splitting my attention and I almost get the baton in the face. Another swing of the baton, and I step back again. He’s forcing me into the other two.

I need to get closer, but this guy’s good and lightning-fast, his reflexes boosted with magic. Every time I step in, he pushes me back out again. I have an idea. It’s an old trick, one I’ve gotten really good at the last few years. I scan around me for ghosts, and only find a couple of Echoes nearby, scratchy images of dead men and women who didn’t leave anything behind except for the last moments of their lives played over and over again.

The ones I have to worry about are Haunts and Wanderers, ghosts with awareness and agency. Haunts are rooted near the spot they died, and they’re only a problem if I’m close enough. Wanderers are what they sound like, ghosts that aren’t stuck in place. They tend to be smarter, faster, far more dangerous. They have a lot more will than your typical Haunt.

It’s easy to forget that ghosts aren’t people. They’re cast-off shells that look and act like, and even believe that they are, the person who died. Not everyone leaves a ghost. It takes trauma, and there’s a whole lot of trauma in Los Angeles.

There are no Haunts nearby, but a couple of Wanderers across the street. I’ll have to be quick, and though I feel fine now that I’ve puked up all that black crap, I don’t know for sure that I can still do this. Something has happened to me. I have no idea what, but now would be a bad time to discover that I can’t do something I should be able to.

I don’t have a lot of choice, though. I can’t back up far, the two guys behind me are pressing in forcing me to pull the shield closer to my back. Without enough space to bring up the gun, it might as well be a stapler for all the good it can do.

I step in as the baton swings toward my head. Right before it connects, I slide over to the other side of the veil. I can’t stay here long. On the living side I can see the ghosts, and they see me, but we can’t really do much to each other. But now I’m on their turf, they’re gonna start looking at me like lunch. Ghosts eat life. Pretty soon those two Wanderers will catch my scent. If I’m over here too long, I’ll have bigger problems than the guy with the baton.

It’s so quiet over here I can hear my own heartbeat. It’s not always like that. There’s often a shrieking wind, or maybe it’s the ghosts that are shrieking and causing the wind. All the colors here are drained until they’re almost black and white. It’s not just the ghosts but the place itself that will kill me. The whole environment is entropy. It wants life, sucks it out of you if you stick around too long.

So I don’t stick around. From this side my opponent looks like a vaguely man-shaped blob of light, his baton barely an afterimage swinging through me, a cold trail like a finger of ice running through my face. I give it a second, duck down as he goes for a backswing, and then slide back to the jet-engine roar of life and sound and air all coming at me at once. The baton sails just over my head.

I stand up fast, shove the barrel of the gun up into the crook between his jaw and his neck, and pull the trigger. The Browning doesn’t disappoint. The top half of the mage’s head explodes in a fountain of bone and meat, and he drops.

I hear car doors slamming shut. The two men who were behind me jump into the Mercedes, panic on their faces, the driver already slamming the car in reverse. I let loose with the Browning, and this time the bulletproof glass doesn’t stop it. The round hits the guy in the passenger seat, going through his eye and clipping the forehead of the guy behind him, enough to run a furrow through his brain. I feel a sense of sick satisfaction from the Browning. I really need to get rid of this gun.

I don’t shoot the driver. I have questions and he’s going to have at least a couple answers for me. I don’t want him to escape, but no worries on that front. Seeing as I’ve killed everyone else, he doesn’t have much to lose. Not that you could tell from the look on his face. I don’t think he’s changed expression since I first laid eyes on him, blank-faced, apathetic. He throws the car back into gear and stomps on the gas to run me down. The whining of his transmission and the split second before the gears engage give me all the time I need to prepare.

I stand there, gun at my side, waiting for him to slam into me. At the last second, I slide back over to the dead side, feeling a cold wave pass through me as the car plows through where I was standing. I slide back a moment later to the sound of a hissing radiator and a horn that won’t stop going off. He’s rammed the car into the brick wall at the end of the parking lot, destroying its front end. I run over, hoping the airbags kicked in. They fired, the seatbelt is still locked in place. But he’s not there. Instead of a driver there’s a pile of what looks like soft clay covering the seat.

Huh. The other guys didn’t disintegrate into clay. I’d say the driver was a golem, but there are only a few types of those and none of the ways of destroying them include running them into a brick wall in a car with airbags.

I was hoping the driver would survive long enough to tell me who I pissed off, or at the very least would die relatively intact. I can work with dead, but I know fuck-all about what to do with clay.

Dead is easy. I can do dead in my sleep. If any of them had left a ghost, I could get some answers that way. Even without a ghost, I’d be able to reanimate them long enough to ask, except that I shot them all in the head. Hard to get anything out of a reanimated body with pulped brains.

It’s probably just as well. The ritual I know to do that is long, complicated, and needs a lot of space and materials I don’t have. Plus, time is a factor. Every second the brain rots a little more inside the skull.

Speaking of time, I catch sight of the motel manager through the office window with his phone to his ear, looking at me bug-eyed and panicked. I think time’s just about up.

No great loss. I’ve learned that if someone wants to kill you badly enough, they’ll be back. I’ll bump into more of these guys soon.

I’m just glad it wasn’t a kidnapping. Give me a straight-up pissed-off “I’m gonna kill a motherfucker”-type fight over that whole stick-a-bag-over-your-head and “go for a ride” shit. I am so over that. All it does is lead to some jackass threatening to kill me if I don’t give them what they want. Half the time they don’t even know what they want. I’ll take cold-hearted murderers over kidnappers any day of the week. At least with an assassin you know where you stand.

Sirens getting closer. Thinking maybe it’s time to hit the road. I pull out a HI, MY NAME IS sticker, write NOT THE DROID YOU’RE LOOKING FOR on it in thick black Sharpie, slap it to the front of my jacket, and pump a little magic into it. I feel the magic take hold. That should keep the cops off me for a little while. But best to check.

I walk up to the office window and wave at the manager. He sees me, frowns, eyes glaze over. He waves back. Good enough for me. I’m on the sidewalk two buildings down by the time the black and whites show up. Nobody comes after me.

So, now what? Find someone who can tell me what the fuck is going on. Find some place to regroup, get my head together. Little flashes of memory snap into my head like bursting popcorn. Something about Mictlan. I can’t remember. Maybe I should write a guidebook. After all, I did a fair bit of running for my life there. Things To Do In Mictlan When You’re Dead. That triggers another fragmented memory. Cloaks made from the feathers of tropical birds. Standing at the top of a pyramid. I’m missing something, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what.

From what I can see it looks like I’m on the east side of the river. The closest person who’ll have information is about five minutes away. Gabriela Cortez. Gabriela is about twenty-five, five-foot-damn-near-nothing tall, cute as a button. She was a sorority girl at USC, Master’s in Sociology. Honestly wants to make the world a better place. And she will murder anyone who gets in her way. She’s one of the most dangerous people I’ve ever met, and that’s saying something.

Gabriela’s a mage. At least as powerful as I am and I’m no slouch. We threw down when I first met her. She thought I was somebody else. We beat the ever-loving shit out of each other. She likes to say it was a draw, but I’m the one who had a straight razor to her throat.

Not that I’d disagree with her, of course. Like I said, she’s dangerous.

I find a Suburban nearby and a minute later I’m pulling away from the curb. I make a point of driving a circuitous route to Gabriela’s warehouse. She used to own a converted single room occupancy hotel Downtown, before things went pear-shaped and she moved herself and her people to a warehouse on the other side of the river.

See, there are a lot of supernaturals in L.A. that can pass for human most of the time: lamiae, ebu gogo, aswang, vampires, naga, ghouls. You name it, we got at least half a dozen out here and probably two or three trying to get into the movies. We’re very multicultural that way.

Problem is that they tend to be homeless. They can only blend in so well. Sometimes their appearance is a little off, or they have dietary requirements that get in the way of holding down a nine-to-five job. It’s a rough life. Sometimes rougher for them than it is for humans. They can’t out themselves. Forget what would happen if normals knew about them, mages would come down on them before the normals had any idea what’s going on.

Gabriela thinks this is bullshit. And for the most part I agree with her. I don’t have her trust of vampires, but then L.A. vampire society is kinda weird. I still haven’t completely figured them out. But the rest? Absolutely. I’ve worked with ghouls. Hell, before she tried to eat my soul, I dated a lamia in New York for two years. That’s actually a pretty good run, all things considered. My grandfather, though, he was with one for decades. Apparently caused some family disputes. Name’s Miriam. Met her a while ago. She seemed on the up and up, but what do I know?

Point is, Gabriela doesn’t sit back and just let shit happen. She does something about it. Not walking around with protest signs. She looks for solutions—usually very violent solutions, but solutions. Which is what led to her buying the hotel Downtown and using it as a supernatural halfway house. All her residents could be open about who and what they were, and the real monsters, us humans, got shown the door.

And that’s where things took a turn. Gabriela was so successful at helping out her people, giving them a place, some self-respect, that the ones who were drug addicts stopped using.

It cut into somebody’s profits. Mexican Mafia, Armenian Power, 14K. Doesn’t really matter. Gabriela looks less Morgan le Fay, more Manic Pixie Dream Girl. So they tried to take her out.

What’s the worst that could happen?

They found out the hard way. But no matter how many enforcers she sent back headless, skinned and stuffed into beer coolers, they couldn’t believe it. So they kept coming. And they kept dying.

Finally, Gabriela took a page from Baba Yaga and made up this ancient, withered hag called La Bruja. La Bruja carved a swath through the gangs and Mexican Mafia in her little corner of Downtown. Left calling cards, messages written in blood, heads in duffel bags, that sort of thing.

They weren’t going to take Gabriela Cortez seriously, but an old witch who throws down the evil eye and fucking means it? Goddamn right they’re gonna take her seriously. Got them to back off, and even got her a crew of humans who hung on her every word. Provided that those words came from La Bruja, through her “secretary.”

From that point on, everybody’s thinking they’re dealing with a hundred-year-old monster witch. Even her own people. Until a bunch of Russian thugs followed me to the hotel and burned the place to the ground. And I kinda accidentally outed her.

Word that she was La Bruja got out fast. Things went south. Chunk of her army bailed, Mexican Mafia started sniffing around. A lot of boys who thought they were men had to be forcefully reminded that they weren’t.

She had a backup place, a warehouse on the Eastside. Pulled up stakes, headed there and started over. But now she didn’t have to hide herself. She’d made her point.

She is La Bruja and you do not fuck with La Bruja.

Not as much has changed during my blackout as I thought. More construction, a lot of rebuilds, a lot of teardowns. Vacant lots are choked with weeds, trash, and homeless encampments. But as to brand new buildings, not a lot. They probably rammed the Downtown work through as fast as they could and let everywhere else deal with the usual red tape.

Some things are different enough that I get turned around and end up on the other side of the river. I finally find the new Sixth Street bridge leading back across and immediately miss the old one. The utilitarian concrete and iron bridge was replaced before the fires by a sweeping modernized monstrosity made of massive looping struts holding it up. It survived the flames with nothing more than soot and some heat-cracked concrete, and now it’s gotten a new coat of paint and looks like nothing happened.

But there’s one change I was totally unprepared for. Gabriela’s warehouse is gone.

Not abandoned, boarded up, in disrepair. Gone. The warehouse, parking lot, everything. The whole property has been bulldozed. It’s nothing but a vacant lot of dry, packed dirt surrounded by a chain-link fence with signs that say PRIVATE PROPERTY—KEEP OUT at various points along it.

I check the location. Yeah, this is the place. How long did that blackout go on for? I try to remember anything that might have led to this, but I’m drawing a blank.

The last time I recall being here, I was getting patched up and learned I had multiple brain injuries I wasn’t even aware of. Did I have a stroke? My last memory before waking up in a ritual circle was being at the Ambassador and taking a beating from Hank, Darius’s pet demon. That must be what caused the blackout. I remember reading somewhere that brain injuries can cause problems weeks, even years, after the injury occurs.

The gate is chained, but it snaps with a spell. The dirt is hard-packed and furrowed from a bulldozer’s scoop. Weeds poke up through the ground in clumps, amid previous years’ dead grasses. This place has been like this for a long time.

Even with magic, bureaucracy is bureaucracy. This didn’t all happen over a weekend. I’m actually starting to worry now. Between this and the skyline, I feel like I’ve stepped into a new world.

How long to bulldoze a site like this? How long before the city approved the demolition? How long before that did Gabriela and her crew leave? A year? No. Longer. Two, at least. Maybe more.

Goddammit. Something happened recently and I can’t remember the last couple of years. Did my memory get erased in whatever the hell that ritual was the other night?

I close my eyes and feel around for any sign of magic. A good enough illusion can hide a building and trick you into thinking you just walked through where it should be. But I’m not feeling anything.

I am noticing some ghosts, though. A couple of Wanderers, some Haunts in nearby buildings along the street. A lot of Echoes. The fires didn’t hit this area as badly. Gabriela’s crew knew what to look for and was able to keep a lot of it from going up in flames. But that’s just nearby. Further up the street, people burned to death working the night shift, or dancing at a warehouse rave, or otherwise being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But nothing here.