Dead Things E-Book

Stephen Blackmoore

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

Seitenzahl: 367

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The first novel Stephen Blackmoore's noir urban fantasy series, in which necromancer Eric Carter returns home to find his sister's killer—and send them straight to hell… Eric Carter has a unique skill—he can talk to the dead. Specifically, communicating with restless spirits—or other, even worse entities—and getting them to move on or move out. Sometimes, they take a lot of convincing. And sometimes, they straight up try to kill him. It's not your typical way to make a living, but Carter's managed to make it work. Life is pretty good. At least it was. Because Carter's little sister has just been brutally killed. By something nightmarish. To find the killer Eric Carter is going to have to return to L.A., which he left fifteen years ago when he made a lot people—and paranormal entities—very angry. And those people have long, unforgiving memories. But Carter is no pushover. He's got more heavy-duty magical power than most of those with his skill set, and he's more than happy to use it on anyone or anything who tries to stop him from finding his sister's killer. And when he does, he is going to make them pray for death—and then he's going to answer their prayers… 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

DEAD THINGS

Copyright © 2013 by Stephen BlackmooreAll rights reserved.

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

Originally published by DAW in North America in 2013.

Cover design by Tiger Bright Studios.

ISBN 978-1-625675-27-9

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

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

About the Author

Other Books by Stephen Blackmoore

Acknowledgments

Writing is hard.

Not ditch-digging hard. Not cancer-curing hard. But there’s a lot to juggle, a lot to keep track of. It’ll eat your brain like it’s a Little Debbie snack cake if you’re not careful. Mmmmm. Munch-munch. Braaaaains. Just like that. And if you don’t have people in your corner, people rooting for you, helping you out, you’re screwed. I’ve been lucky to have some amazing people in my corner.

Many thanks to all of the friends who have helped make this book what it is. People like Chuck Wendig, John Hornor Jacobs, Chris Holm and other people too numerous to count. Your input and support has meant a tremendous amount to me. Brett Battles, who beat me up in one of his books so many years ago; I’ve returned the favor. A special shout out to Wenhsiu Hassan, who gave me the title for the last book when the one it had just wouldn’t do. My agent, Allan Guthrie, who helped me hammer the hell out of this thing until it looked something like a book. To my editor Betsy Wollheim and the superhero team at DAW. They make me look good. A Herculean task at the best of times.

Most importantly, my wife, Kari, without whom this whole strange writing trip wouldn’t have even happened. Thank you, darlin’, for asking me if I wanted to write a book all those years ago.

Chapter 1

When I pull up to the bar, the truck kicking up dust and gravel behind me, I know it’s already too late to help anyone. Of the eight or nine cars in the parking lot, two of them are Texas State Troopers’, their roof racks still flashing.

The car I’m looking for, a ’73 Cadillac Eldorado convertible I’ve been following since Miami, sits parked neatly in the dirt lot next to a couple of F-150s with gun racks and mud flaps decorated with chrome women.

I check to make sure I have my gear on me, making the sign of the cross as I touch each thing. Like that old joke: spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch.

Only this is a smudge of graveyard dirt on my forehead, my belt buckle (an intricate weave of braided iron to ward off the Evil Eye), a straight razor I stole from the man it’d been buried with, and yes, a watch. An Illinois Sangamo Special from 1919. Railroad grade. Keeps great time.

I hope I don’t have to use it.

Next comes the knapsack. I’ve looked inside fifteen times since I woke up this morning, but it pays to know where your shit is.

All the things the discerning necromancer could want: knucklebones, a noose from the neck of a hanged murderer, a pack of cards made up of aces and eights, and a pouch I hang from my belt full of powdered graveyard dirt, salt, ground bone, and blood dried under a full moon.

And a 9mm Browning Hi-Power made special for the Wehrmacht after the Nazis got hold of the factories and before the Belgians started sabotaging them. Thing’s got Waffen marks aplenty.

I’m not a big believer in evil, but this thing is just ugly. It’s a murderer’s gun, a sadist’s gun. Every kill is burned into it like the Third Reich stamps that cover its frame.

When a guy like me uses it, all that energy gives it a wallop that makes a .44 look like a popgun.

I don’t like shooting it. I don’t like touching it. Feels like cockroaches scurrying under my fingers.

But sometimes the best tool for the job is a tool that shouldn’t exist. It’s not as nasty as the watch, but it’ll do. I clip the holster on the inside of my waistband, hope I don’t blow my balls off.

The sun in West Texas is brutal, baking everything into a blur of burnt caramel. Why the fuck anyone would put a bar out in the middle of this limestone wasteland, I have no idea. Yucca, creosote, a scattering of agave and a wind-blasted Quonset hut are the only things to mar the endless landscape.

Charles Tyrone Washington is a real piece of work. Skipped out on a manslaughter charge in Detroit in the sixties and moved into a double-wide in Florida. Started up this bullshit Voodoo church where he bilked the locals and slept with their daughters.

Sweet deal if you can get it, I suppose. Helped that the guy’s the real deal. So, he talks to the dead, curses his enemies, divines the future. The whole shebang. Got some real muscle and he’s pissing it away on Evil Eyes and picking horses.

Eventually talking to Voodoo spirits paid off, and he pulled together enough dough in the nineties to pick up a burnt-out husk of an antebellum mansion in the middle of the Everglades. Six months later some of his followers came by and found his rotting corpse in the middle of a circle of salt and candle wax in the foyer.

And that’s when he really went to town.

* * *

“Hey, Chuck,” I say, looking at the carnage. “You’re getting creative.” I stand in the doorway looking over a grim tableau that would make Hieronymus Bosch blush.

It takes a lot to keep my cool and not throw up all over the place. I’ve seen death, but this is insane. The lucky ones died in their seats. Five, maybe six guys. Hard to tell in the tangle of body parts. He exploded their heads, leaving open stumps to dump a sea of blood onto the floor.

The others, particularly the Troopers, got the royal treatment. Pinned to the far wall with the blades of a ceiling fan, chests peeled back to show empty cavities, impaled on barstools, shredded by a thousand cuts from broken glass. One poor bastard is just a torso. Christ only knows what Washington did with the rest of him.

The worst one suffered an aborted transformation. Limbs stick out at odd angles, tufts of fur and chitin instead of skin. A dozen small mouths lie open, tongues lolling. The only recognizably human thing about him is his cowboy boots.

There are no ghosts around. This much devastation, you better believe somebody’d leave a ghost. Washington’s already eaten them.

He looks like a wiry, seventy-year-old black man in a Hawaiian shirt and khaki cargo pants. Round, thin-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. Typical Florida retiree. Plays some golf, maybe. Hangs out on his porch watching the Cuban chicas go by.

But that’s on this side. Over on the Twilight Side, that between world where the dead park their carcasses waiting for whatever comes next, he’s a burning, churning mass of faces. The Loa, those same Voodoo spirits who gave him enough keno numbers to keep him in booze and cigarettes, dance under his skin, glowing like hot coals. I’m not sure he’s even human anymore.

After Washington died, word started getting through the grapevine that he was doing some really nasty magic down there. It happens. Cheating death for a bit isn’t as hard as you’d think. He’d been screwing around with the Loa, feeding on ghosts he’d hunted down in nearby towns.

Nobody tried to stop him, of course. That’s not how wizards roll. The only interest anyone took was purely academic. We couldn’t give a rat’s ass as long as he doesn’t rain on our parade or draw too much attention from the normals.

Magic’s like Fight Club that way. You don’t talk about it. Can’t have the regular folk knowing this shit’s real. We might have to share.

“You are one tenacious motherfucker, Eric Carter,” Washington says. He tips back a Miller, takes a drag on his cigarette.

“It’s part of my charm,” I say.

On the other side, I see the faces in his skin flare up like gasoline dumped on a bonfire. Seeing the land of the dead overlaid onto our side has its uses, though it’s sometimes hard to see what’s real and what isn’t. But I’ve had years of practice. Mages are born with a knack. Illusions, transformations, divinations. Some people are just better at some things than others.

I got dead things. Yay me.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you. I knew you’d come here,” Washington says. “Once I killed enough people I knew you’d sense it. Come straight for me.”

I’m good, but I’m not that good. I point a thumb over my shoulder. “Nah. Just lucky. Got a scanner in the car. Heard the cops roll out. I was about to head south. I figured you’d fucked off to Mexico by now.”

Washington had been in his swamp palace doing his thing for a while. Not really dead, not really alive. At some point, probably about a year or so ago, he took things a little further off the reservation. Instead of begging the Loa for favors, he started trapping them, experimenting with them, slicing them into snack size pieces. Stitching them together and wearing them on his soul like a psycho killer’s skin suit.

This has made some things very not happy. As a general rule of thumb, you don’t fuck with things that have big brothers and sisters. They might come after you. Or worse, they might send someone like me.

“You could just leave me be,” he says. “Drop this whole farce and let one of your own live his life in peace. One necromancer to another.”

I’m not a big fan of that word. Makes me think of towers on the moors and medieval skullcaps. Sure I bleed the occasional black ram under a full moon, but come on. It’s the 21st fucking century. Get with the program.

“Two things,” I say, ticking off points on my fingers. “One, you don’t have a life to live. I’m not sure you’re even human anymore, not that I have a problem with that. Different strokes, you know. And two, this is kind of my job. I have a contract. Sorry.”

“Don’t say I didn’t give you a chance, boy,” he says.

“Yeah, ’cause that worked out so well for you back in Florida.”

I’d hit him down at his mansion in the swamp. He’d been using that as a ritual and research space. Smart move. The place sat on top of a nexus of wild magic that bubbled up through the swamp like methane. Whoever built the place knew what they were doing. Gave his spells a lot more oomph.

I almost didn’t make it. Got lucky. While he was pounding the shit out of me and tossing me around the room, I saw a piece of one of the Loa hanging off him like a loose thread. That’s all I needed. I tossed a banishing spell at it, tore it loose and sent it home to mommy.

Like an unraveling sweater, it started pulling out the rest of the Loa. Washington’s hold on them wasn’t as strong as he’d thought. Scared the holy fuck out of him. He tossed me through a window and bugged out, salvaging what he could.

Took me three days to track him to Miami. Holed up in a four-star resort on Fisher Island. Thought surrounding himself with salt water would hide him. It did for a while. But like a lot of mages, he keeps thinking magic’s the only way to do anything.

I found him by grilling the local prostitutes until I found one he’d hired. Man spends a thousand bucks a night trying to hide from me and goes for a cheap hooker with a meth habit. Twenty bucks and a fake badge is all it took.

“Look,” I say. “We’ve been playing hide and seek now for the better part of a month. I know I’m sick of it. I figure you probably are, too.”

“You sound like you want to make a deal with me.”

“No, I just want to get this over with.” I draw the Browning, unload a couple of rounds at him, bolt for an overturned table. Even with damn near perfect shots, the bullets are just a, “Hey, how ya doin’?” If they make a dent in Washington’s defenses I’ll be surprised.

I hear a loud snap of splitting wood and the building shudders. A tremendous crack tears through the floor, ripping it in half. I jump aside, pop another round. That’s three. I don’t want to lose count.

Washington calls up a purple fireball and heaves it in my direction. He tried that crap in the swamp. I learned the hard way how to deal with it.

I pull a fistful of powder from the pouch on my belt and throw it between us, making a point of scattering as much as possible on the closest corpses.

The spell in the powder works a treat. It’ll do fuck all if he pulls out the good china, but this is just a warm-up. The fireball fizzles the second it passes over the line of scattered powder.

We could do this all day, but I’m really not in the mood. I haven’t had lunch yet, and the nearest tacos are twenty miles up the road.

I feint left, pop off a couple more rounds. Five. He levitates a table and throws it at me. I duck and it gets me closer to him. I don’t want to make this look too easy.

More gunfire. There’s a sense of wounded pride coming from the gun every time I purposely miss. Seven rounds total. It’s time to get this over with.

I dive under a thrown chair, smack right into Washington. Before I know it he’s got his hand around my throat.

He slams me hard against the wall. I’m beginning to think maybe this was a mistake, hope that the spell that I scattered onto the corpses is doing its job.

“You thought you could kill me with a gun?” Washington says. “You’re weak. And I’m gonna enjoy snackin’ on your soul.”

I make a croaking sound. It’s the best I can do under the circumstances.

“You got something to say, son?” I nod and he lets up his grip a little bit.

“Gotcha.”

He freezes as he feels the barrel of the Browning press against the side of his skull.

I’ve been keeping my distance this last month because I couldn’t think of another way to take him out. I needed to be close enough to get the drop on him while he was distracted. And I needed help to pull it off. How nice of him to leave me some corpses lying around.

The headless body standing behind him pulls the trigger and bullet number eight—made of silver and gold and engraved with the symbols for all of the families of the Loa: Ghede, Rada, Kongo, Petro, Nago, blessed by Baron Samedi and Maman Brigitte themselves—blows his head off his shoulders.

His body falls to the floor, green flames erupting from the stump of his neck. The fire spreads quickly and I pull his hand from my throat to keep from being consumed with him. He’s dying for real this time.

A little shred of his soul stands on the twilight side looking at me, dumbfounded. Then panicked as the Loa tear loose from him, each shadowy figure ripping its way free.

Soon he’s nothing but a withered image, glowing dull as wind-blown coals, and then gone.

Chapter 2

There’s no point cleaning anything up. I wouldn’t even know where to start. More Troopers will be here soon and I’d rather not have to talk my way out.

I leave the truck in the lot. It’s stolen and I like Washington’s Caddy better. It’s a sweet ride. I throw a don’t-look-at-me spell on it and head north to New Mexico. About ten miles up I see a line of State Troopers barreling down the highway.

I’d hate to be them right now. They’re going to need a shovel to pick up all the pieces. I pull over to let them pass, watch them disappear in the rearview mirror. And that’s when the shakes start.

You’d think by now, after a lifetime of dealing with the dead, after years of honing my craft and seeing horrors even worse than what Washington did in that bar down the road, that I’d be used to it. That it wouldn’t get to me.

You’d be wrong.

I get out of the car and throw up all over the side of the road. Bodies I can handle. The dead I can handle. But what he did back there, what he could have done to me if I’d fucked it up.

I get back into the car, wipe my mouth on a crumpled up map, pull onto the road. Take all those thoughts and shove them deep in the back of my head where they can’t get in my way.

I cross over into New Mexico about an hour later, make good time and roll into Carlsbad before sunset. Hit a motel on the outskirts of town by the college. Twelve-unit deal with cable TV, wireless internet, a cafe and grocery next door. I grab a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red from the store.

I pick up a few wanderers on the way to my room, untethered ghosts that aren’t tied to a place. Most of them are trauma patients from the nearby hospital. Burn victims, car crashes, gunshots. Yeah, I run with the cool kids.

Ghosts come to me like moths to a flame. I can see them and they can see me. They hover like groupies. I scatter a handful of sunflower seeds outside the door, stick a couple of Post-its with palindromes written on them to the doorjamb. If I really wanted to get rid of the ghosts I’d nail a dead cat to the windows, but that’s always struck me as a bit extreme.

They stop at the door, counting the seeds, reading the palindromes backward and forward and doing it all over again like good little obsessive compulsives. I close the door on their empty faces.

I take a shower, wash off the sweat and dust. Adrenaline had me going back at the bar and I didn’t notice Washington had smacked me around pretty good until I was ten miles down the road. Bruises, cuts, one of my ribs feels like it’s been hit with a sledgehammer. Butterfly bandages take care of the worst of the cuts.

It’s hard to see the bruises. I’m tattooed over most of my body. Neck to wrists to ankles. Wards and sigils. Symbols in dead languages to help ward off threat, divert attention, help me focus my magic. Started collecting them years ago and I keep adding ink.

I’ve got one that looks like a starburst in an eye that wards off spells that affect the mind, another of an armadillo that’s pretty good against gunshots. Does fuck all for baseball bats. Found that out the hard way in an alley in Philadelphia.

Got a murder of crows in flight that covers my chest from shoulder to shoulder. I can’t look at it too long in the mirror. It keeps moving. Gives me a headache.

Compared to me, the Illustrated Man’s got a tramp stamp he tore off a yoga mom from Orange County. One patch on my left forearm is bare of tattoos, but covered in small scars. A lot of my spells need blood, and there’s not always a black ram around when you need one.

I crack open the bottle of Johnnie Walker and pour some into a glass that’s been thoughtfully sanitized for my protection. I sit in the one chair in the room, a recliner that only goes partway back. Feels like home.

Which it pretty much is. I don’t do well staying in one place for very long. Roots are not something I want to lay down. Been there, done that. Didn’t work out so well. My life is a succession of rest stops and cheap hotels. Walmart fashion and estate sale finds. I’ve got three suits from Goodwill that were in fashion in the sixties. Most of my stuff belonged to dead men. Like my new Cadillac.

I’m getting settled in with my second glass of whisky when there’s a pounding on my door. I pull the Browning, look through the peephole. Hotel staff. I thumb back the hammer of the gun, open the door onto two men and a woman I’ve never seen before.

Then I notice one of the men isn’t wearing any pants.

“Oh, it’s you. Come on in.”

The woman and one of the men step into the room with an almost regal bearing. The pantsless one half-lopes, half-skips in. Thank god he’s at least wearing briefs. And for some reason, his socks and shoes. I offer the chair to the lady, let the men figure out where they want to be. I stand next to the door.

As Loa go the Barons Samedi and Kriminel and Samedi’s wife, Maman Brigitte, are about as high-ranking as you get. They head up the Ghede family, the Loa that oversee the Dead. Loa aren’t the only spirits that do that sort of thing, of course, but they’re some of the better known.

The Loa possess their followers, riding their bodies like horses, rather than appear on their own. If they don’t have a member of their flock around I suppose some random housekeeper will do in a pinch. Their hosts won’t remember any of this. Which is probably good for the guy with no pants.

“Barons,” I say. “Madame. I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow night.”

“We come when we fucking well want to come,” Kriminel says in a thick Haitian accent that sounds weird coming out of a middle-aged white guy in tightie whities. He snarls, spit running down his chin. He’s always like this.

“We thought it wise to come sooner, Eric,” Maman Brigitte says.

“Is something wrong?”

“Wrong?” Samedi says. Compared to Kriminel, his and Brigitte’s accents are almost unnoticeable. “No, nothing’s wrong. Our children and brothers and sisters have come home to us.”

When they hired me, Samedi told me that he was representing all of the families. Washington had stolen Loa from each one. They weren’t afraid of Washington per se, but they were concerned. He had ensnared so many of them that the Royalty didn’t want to take any chances and end up in his hands.

“Okay. So . . .”

“We wanted to say thank you and give you your payment,” Brigitte says.

“And a warning,” Samedi says.

Ah, I knew something was wrong.

“Piss on his payment and his warning,” Kriminel says. He’s cracked open the bottle of Johnnie Walker and is pouring it into his open mouth. Most of it ends up down his shirt. Glad I didn’t buy anything expensive.

Brigitte pulls a small leather purse from her handbag, hands it to me. I open it up. Doubloons.

“This isn’t what we agreed on.”

Kriminel gets right up my face, spitting as he says, “Who do you think you are, making demands?” The longer they stay in their hosts the more the hosts will begin to resemble them. Already Kriminel’s host is starting to smell like grave dirt and decay. I push him away from me.

“I know,” Brigitte says, hesitating and looking like she’s bit into a lemon, “but we are having trouble. Kriminel agreed too hastily and we were bound by it. We don’t understand what a ‘bank transfer’ is.”

And apparently couldn’t find someone who did. “Don’t you blame this on me, Brigitte,” Kriminel says.

“I understand,” I say. There’s no helping it. “Not a complaint, merely an observation. This is more than adequate.” I know a guy in New Jersey who can move the coins, so that’s not a problem. “You said something about a warning?”

“Beware what you trust,” Samedi says.

“Oh, it’s one of those warnings.” Some things like to be cryptic, some things have to be cryptic. And some are bound by old laws to be cryptic only about certain things, like prophecies and fortunes. Seems this falls into one of those camps.

“I wish we could say more,” Brigitte says. “We like you.” She glances over at Kriminel, who’s finished the scotch and has moved onto the shampoo on the bathroom counter.

He scowls at her. “Fuck him,” yells Kriminel. “Fuck him to hell.”

“Well, Samedi and I like you,” she says.

“We would hate to see anything untoward happen,” Samedi says, “and lose one of our most talented friends. So please, take care.”

“Can we leave now?” Kriminel says. “I’ve run out of things to drink.” Good thing he hasn’t noticed the minibar. His shirt and face are caked with shampoo, scotch and shaving cream. I feel sorry for the guy he’s taken over. That is going to be one nasty hangover in the morning.

“Yes,” Samedi says. “You have your payment, we have given your warning.”

Kriminel is the first out the door, muttering something about black roosters, Samedi right behind him. Brigitte stops at the threshold, turns to me, puts a hand on my cheek. She searches my eyes for something.

“Truly, beware. Things have already been set in motion, but your part has not yet begun. It starts tonight.”

What would be so bad that they would hand deliver a warning? And get Kriminel to go along with them?

I close the door behind them, wondering what Brigitte meant, when the phone rings.

I stare at it like it’s a rattlesnake. Coincidences are few and far between with magic. I wait for it to stop and kick over to the hotel’s voicemail. It’s got to be a wrong number. Nobody knows I’m here.

And I mean nobody. I’ve got so many redirection spells inked into my skin it’s a wonder I can find myself on a map. Sure, I can be tracked, but it’s not easy.

Five rings. Ten, twenty. I disconnect it from the wall. It keeps ringing.

That’s what I was afraid of. It’s that kind of call.

We get into a rhythm, the phone and I. It rings. I don’t answer. I can do this all night. I let it go and toss back a couple more drinks.

There’s a banging on the wall from my neighbor, a muffled shout telling me to answer the goddamn phone. I let it ring some more.

The more it goes on, the more pissed off I get. Somebody’s gone to a lot of trouble to track me down. I’ve got a voicemail number I check every few days for clients and job offers. It’s easy to find.

Finally, after the ringing’s gone on for almost half an hour, I pick it up, say nothing.

“Hello Eric,” says the voice on the other end. Quiet, hesitant. “I know you’re there.”

Now there’s a voice I haven’t heard in a long time. No use denying it. “Been a while, Alex. What, ten years?”

“Fifteen.”

“Tough to track me down?”

“Yeah. You’re not easy to find.”

“Good. I’m not supposed to be.” I hang up the phone. It starts ringing again before I get the handset into the cradle.

More ringing. More shouting from the neighbor.

I might as well talk to him. It’ll just keep going. I pick it up. “I give up already. What?”

A beat of silence, then, “Lucy’s dead.”

I want to ask “Lucy who?” but I know who he means. I haven’t seen my younger sister since I left Los Angeles behind. Is Alex right? Has it been fifteen years? That would make her, what, thirty-two?

“What happened?” I say.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Alex, the fuck happened?”

There’s a pause on the other end of the phone. If he’s expecting me to wail and gnash my teeth he’s going to be waiting for a long time.

“Murdered,” he says. “Something attacked her in her home.”

“Some thing? I assume you’re not talking about an animal.”

“No. Though the cops are saying that. They don’t know what else to call it. Eric, she was torn apart. It’s bad. And it stinks of magic.”

“When did it happen?”

“Couple weeks ago. Been trying to track you down since.”

There’s no question in my mind that Alex might be wrong. Lucy wasn’t powerful at all, but she would have known enough to buy wards for her home, something. Unless she blew through the inheritance and trust fund she got after our parents died, she’d have been able to afford it.

This numb feeling is shock. I’ve been here before. A wave of grief starts to crack through. I want to scream. Beat something. I slam that feeling down, bury it where it can’t get to me, where it can’t get in the way. I can control it or it can control me.

“Do you know who did it? Or why?” My voice doesn’t even crack.

“No. I tried a divination when I was in the house, but whatever did it covered its tracks really well. But I’m wondering . . .”

“What?”

“Well, I know it’s been a long time, but, Boudreau? That is why you left, right?”

“Yeah, that’s why I left.” That’s a name I haven’t thought of in years. Haven’t let myself. Put it behind me, never looked back.

“Well?”

“Hang on. I’m thinking.”

I left L.A. in a hurry. Didn’t tell anyone I was leaving, but everybody had to know why I disappeared. I killed a guy named Jean Boudreau. I was as surprised as anyone else when it happened. I was raw then. Angry. I’ve learned a lot since.

He ran a mob that was fucking around with magical types. Had some powerful mages on his side. Pissed off a lot of people when I killed him.

“No,” I say. It can’t be him. “I don’t think so. You ever hear of a guy named Ben Duncan? Black guy. Probably be in his fifties now. Was working for Boudreau.”

“I stayed out of that mess, man. As much as any of us could.”

“Smart. He was pretty high up the food chain. Got hold of me after it happened. Gave me a choice. I bail or he’d kill me, Lucy, and pretty much everybody else I know.”

The silence on the other end of the line stretches a long time.

“Well, that explains a lot,” Alex says, though something in his voice tells me it doesn’t excuse anything.

I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. Now’s not the time to get into it.

“There’s no reason he would have done anything,” I say.

I’m trying to treat this like it’s a job. But my control’s wavering.

“Where are you now?” Alex says.

“New Mexico.”

I haven’t thought about Lucy in a long time. Our parents are long dead, and I’ve never heard of any other family.

Fuck. Somebody needs to make arrangements. Set up the funeral.

How do I do that? I don’t go to funerals. Hell, I don’t go to cemeteries. I hang around real dead people. Nobody dies in a fucking cemetery.

I’m getting dizzy, short of breath.

“Funeral. I need to . . . Fuck. Alex, I need to set up a funeral.” The room starts to spin around me.

“It’s okay,” Alex says. “It’s done. She’s with your mom and dad. I took care of it.”

Suddenly I’m angry at Alex. I was supposed to do that. I’m her brother. I couldn’t make her safe when I was there and I couldn’t make her safe when I left. The least I could have done, the least Alex could have let me do, is set up her fucking funeral.

Did a lot of people show up? I don’t know even who her friends were. Was she dating anybody? Did she get married? Holy fuck, what if she had kids?

I pull myself together. Take a deep breath.

“Right. Thanks. I’ll be out there in, fuck, give me a couple of days. Where can I meet you?”

“I run a bar in Koreatown. I’m there every day.” He gives me the address, a place on Normandie, and his phone number.

I’m not sure which of us is more surprised. Him about me coming out there or me that he owns a business. Last I saw Alex he was running short cons down in Hollywood using magic to bilk marks out of cash. Jesus, what else has changed?

“There’s a bouncer,” he says. “Tell him you’re there to see me. He’ll let you in.”

“Sounds like an upscale joint,” I say.

“I prefer to keep the riff-raff out.”

“I’ll see you there.”

I hang up the phone, realize too late I didn’t ask any of those questions about Lucy. I’d get him back on the phone, but that wasn’t the kind of call that leaves a return number. I get my breathing under control, fight the urge to throw the phone across the room. Do it anyway.

They say you can’t go home again. Guess I’m about to find out if that’s true.

Chapter 3

The early morning sun bleaches the landscape. Scrub brush, dirt. Miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles. Kind of view that’ll drive a man crazy. I’m exhausted and look it. Spent the night running scenarios in my head, coming up with a plan. Too many unknowns. Anything beyond, “Get to L.A.” is pretty pointless. But I keep trying, anyway.

The desert isn’t helping. I’ve had everyone from the guy at the motel counter to the woman I bought my coffee from tell me it’s a dry heat. Yeah. ’Cause that somehow makes it better.

As a guy I know from Texas is fond of saying, “Fuck all y’all.”

I’m not a fan of the desert. Not the heat, the dryness, or the magic.

Most of us don’t have enough power to light a monkey’s fart, much less chuck a fireball, so we tap into the local pool. The way the flavor of soil leaches into wine grapes, so the character of a place leaches into its magic.

The desert tastes dry like dust and wind. Air spells are easy here. Water spells take a bit more effort. Go down to the Everglades and it’s a different story.

Down there it’s all wild green and wet, loamy earth. The insane growth and deadliness of the swamp is great for plant magic, fertility magic, death magic.

I cut up through to the 82, head west and down to Alamogordo and Holloman Air Force Base. The magic tastes of airplane fuel and oil, hot metal and order. The feeling stays until well after White Sands.

Each city is different. Their character is in their people, their history. New York is heavy like brick and mortar, metallic like hammers. San Francisco is dark and intricate like gold-filigreed chocolate. Vegas tastes like despair.

I don’t know what L.A. tastes like, anymore. It changes. Tears itself down, builds itself up again. Recreates itself a thousand times in one day. One block it’s the heaviness of Kabbalah, the next it’s the dust of Africa. Take two steps and you’re steeped in Aztec magic brought up by Mexican immigrants mixed with the not as old, but just as powerful illusions of Hollywood.

Cities turn to counties turn to states. I’m popping Advil and Tylenol for yesterday’s fight. Ease my bruises, tear up my stomach. Every mile I get closer to home the urge to turn back grows. But I keep going.

I start to see shrines on the side of the road. Ones I’ve seen in Juarez, or closer to the border in Texas, dedicated to Santa Muerte, a skeletal version of the Virgin Mary. Patron Saint of drug dealers and killers. I haven’t met her myself, but I’ve heard things. She’s got quite a following. Not just among the Narcos, either, but by families living in war zones where two guys can go into a club, gun down twenty people and walk away.

Place like that, you better believe they’re praying to Death.

I pass another shrine coming into Arizona on the shoulder of a blind curve, withering flowers at the skeleton’s feet. Most of the ones I’ve seen have been carved from wood, about half life size. But this one’s more than five feet tall, skeletal hands peeking from the sleeves of an ornate wedding dress, skull visible beneath a gauzy veil.

I look in the rearview as I pass, and I swear it turns its head to watch me.

* * *

I stop at the Chiriaco Summit above Indio not long after I cross the California border. Gas up, stretch, toss back a couple Red Bulls. Haven’t stopped for more than gas and taking a piss since I left Carlsbad. The sun’s starting to set and I’m fighting exhaustion.

I grab an overcooked burger at a diner next to the George Patton museum, a plain building surrounded by World War II-era tanks that were used for training. They sit in a field of gravel and scrub brush, weeds growing up against their tracks.

Not a lot of men died in these tanks, but there were a few. Haunts in tanker gear tied to their machines. Sitting on the turrets, leaning against the tracks, watching me.

I wave, and one of them gives me the finger. I’ll take Haunts over Wanderers any day. They’re stuck. Tied to a house, a car, a spot on the road. The ones who didn’t move on and couldn’t move out.

Of course, Haunts tend to be a lot pissier. How’d you like to spend a couple hundred years staring at the same four moldy walls somebody sealed you into to die?

I leave the Haunts behind and head down into Indio. The Eldorado glides over the 10 Freeway, deep rumbling bass of the V-8 chugging along, and the cities stream by. Magic shifts from place to place. It’s like a tasting menu at eighty miles an hour.

Top down, wind in my hair. I can almost forget about my dead sister. Lucy was what the circles my family moved in called “special”. Not Jerry’s Kids special, though you wouldn’t know it the way they talked.

The magic set’s a bigoted lot. Race, wealth, family, none of that matters. It’s whether you can read next week in a pig’s entrails, curse a man with a piece of string, call down the moon.

Lucy could barely manipulate a coin toss. That puts her ahead of most people with talent, but still at the bottom tier.

I wouldn’t say she was a disappointment to our parents, but she was the black sheep. Mom and Dad had power to spare. Some of it got to me. Almost none of it went to Lucy. She practiced relentlessly. Kept telling me one of these days she’d get that coin toss down pat and show me. She never did.

I pull over for some dinner in Riverside. From here on in, the freeway’s a parking lot. All I can do is wait it out.

Growing up near-normal around magic types is tough. Lucy was the problem child we couldn’t talk about. Not because we were embarrassed by her, but because she was too weak to defend herself. We did a good job hiding her. Most people didn’t even know I had a sister. Magic and money helps hide a lot of sins.

The traffic clears up to a sea rather than a tsunami and I down more Red Bulls. Should last me until I can find a place to crash in L.A.

Two hours and I can’t go any farther. The caffeine and guarana are useless. My eyes are blurring and I’m driving the Caddy by Braille. Should have gotten hold of some cocaine. A couple lines right about now and I could drive this thing to Hawaii.

Instead I pull over onto a side street in Pomona, tell myself it’s just a nap. Few more hours and I’ll be on my way.

Seven hours later, I wake from a dream of my parents on fire, screaming in our house as they burn, Lucy running in after them.

I stopped her that night, saved her when I couldn’t save them. But in the dream I’m too late, and she burns with them.

Chapter 4

The motel is full of ghosts. This is, oddly enough, a good thing.

A lot of the time they can be annoyances. Visual clutter and background noise. But they can also be camouflage. Ever since Alex called me, I’ve been wondering if my redirection spells are holding up. Magically speaking, a crowd of ghosts is just as good a hiding place as a crowd of live people. The harder it is to see me, the better.

“Forty bucks a night, whether you use the whole night or not.”

The woman behind the counter is wearing a pink babydoll three sizes and twenty years too small for her. Bad dye job, painted-on eyebrows. A half-smoked Marlboro hangs from her lip.

I hand her a couple hundreds. “I’ll be here a few days.”

She snatches the bills from my hand. “Few days, huh?”

“More or less.”

She hands me a key. “Number eight. In the back.”

The room is pretty much what I expected. A hole. It could use a good bug bombing, but the sheets are relatively clean. Not like I’m going to spend much time here.

I draw some half-assed charms on the walls to keep the ghosts and gangbangers out. Spend the next hour pacing, wondering what I’m going to do now that I’m here. Don’t want to hit Alex’s place just yet. Need to get a feel for the city. It’s been such a long time, I’m a stranger here.

I take a shower, put new bandages on my cuts. They’re scabbing over and the rib isn’t giving me as much trouble, but I still feel like I’ve gone a round with Tyson. I stare into the mirror, try to see how I’ve changed, try to remember what I used to look like. Hair’s shorter, I’ve lost weight. The rings around my eyes are probably darker.

Let’s face it, I look like shit.

I’m not in the desert anymore. Jeans and boots get replaced with a suit and tie. Almost convinced myself I’m out here on business. That if I treat this like any other job I won’t let sentimentality get in my way.

I’m here to find out who killed Lucy. And return the favor. That’s all. In, out.

Yeah, right.

I blow that idea in the first hour of cruising around. Things are gone that should have stayed, things have stayed that should have been demolished. The Farmer’s Market on Fairfax is a giant outdoor shopping mall. Hollywood Boulevard’s full of hipsters. Some asshole tore down The Ambassador. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?

L.A. pisses on its history. Tears it down or spackles it into something different. Always changing, always trying to be something new. Always failing. An ugly town to grow old in.