Fire Season E-Book

Stephen Blackmoore

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

Seitenzahl: 414

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

In this chapter of Stephen Blackmoore's noir urban fantasy series, necromancer Eric Carter has to uncover just who—or what—is slaughtering magic users in Los Angeles. Because everyone thinks it's him… Eric Carter's whole world is on fire. And not just because the city's experiencing one of the most brutal, sweltering summers in recorded history. Ever since he visited the land of the dead in his quest to free himself from Santa Muerte—Aztec goddess of death—he's had a bad feeling that his reckless and ruthless actions would return to haunt him. And for once, he's about to be proven all too correct. Because when he visited the netherworld, he just happened to really tick off Quetzalcoatl—an Aztec god not known for his forgiveness. Or his sanity, for that matter. Carter has a hunch the deity may have something to do with a string of local mages getting scorched to cinders by an unquenchable fire. And he may have something to do with Carter being blamed for the killings. But there's something else at work in the City of Angels. Something even worse than a mad god. And if Carter can't figure out what it is, he's going to burn. And the entire city is going to burn with him. 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

FIRE SEASON

Copyright © 2019 by Stephen BlackmooreAll rights reserved.

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

Originally published by DAW in North America in 2019.

Cover design by Tiger Bright Studios.

ISBN 978-1-625675-30-9

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

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

About the Author

Other Books by Stephen Blackmoore

Acknowledgments

I set out to write a jaunty little list humorously talking about and thanking all the wonderful people who helped me get this book into your hands.

And then California burned.

In and of itself that’s not new. California burns every year. The whole U.S. West burns every year. But this year. Jesus. This year.

As I’m writing this California is recovering from the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire it has ever seen. Not one of the deadliest. Not in the top 10. THE DEADLIEST. It’s the worst the entire nation has seen since 1918. Eighty-six people dead. Almost 19,000 structures destroyed, more than half of them single family homes. Over 150,000 blackened acres. The entire town of Paradise wiped from the face of the planet.

The previous California record holder was here in Los Angeles in 1933 in Griffith Park. Only 29 people dead. Only. As if any number could be acceptable.

Every year we lose people, pets, homes, money. The sky fills with smoke, the flames race down the hills, and it always, ALWAYS, comes closer than you think it will. Even in this cement jungle surrounded by bonfire material it’s disconcerting. I’m always thankful that concrete doesn’t burn. Usually.

But you drive out a couple days later and you wonder. The sidewalks are black. The hills are naked of anything that isn’t stone. Abandoned cars are nothing but fire-mottled steel and molten lead. Glass has liquefied, run over the sides, pooled on the ground. There are no tires. They exploded in the heat and the treads burnt to nothing. You can see the places the fire jumped the freeway.

People ask me where I get my ideas. Well, now you know.

So first and foremost, I’d like to thank all of the men and women who risk their lives in the face of these wildfires. The first responders, the paramedics, doctors and nurses, dispatchers, pilots, ambulance drivers, search and rescue teams, animal rescue, evacuation coordinators. Hell, even the guys who mix the Phos-Check that gets dumped onto the flames and turns everything bright pink.

Thank you.

As to the book, well, there aren’t maybe quite so many who’ve helped make this a reality, but it feels like it sometimes.

My wife, Kari, who might be the only person on the planet willing to put up with allmost some of my bullshit. My agent Al Guthrie. My editor Betsy Wollheim, Josh Starr, and the outstanding staff at DAW. The incredible cover artist Chris McGrath who brings Eric alive to me more than any of my words could. Thanks for helping make this the best book it could be.

And then there are friends whose support I cherish, like Chuck Wendig, Richard Kadrey, K.C. Alexander, Jaye Wells, Jaclyn Taylor, Delilah Dawson, Lilith Saintcrow, Kat Richardson, Brian McClellan, Kristin Sullivan, Jeff Macfee, Brian White, Lela Gwen, Cassandra Khaw, Madeline Ashby, Margaret Dunlap, Jaime Lee Moyer, Andrea Phillips, Robert Brockway and holy fucknuggets so, so many more.

Not to mention all of the wonderfully sick people who talk to me on Twitter. Especially the Russian porn bots.

And finally, to my wonderful friend Kevin Hearne, he of the Iron Druid Chronicles (which you should totally read if you haven’t), beard aficionado extraordinaire, imbiber of impossibly large beverages. Because you see, Kevin killed me in one of his stories. Tore me apart piece by piece. Painfully. Horribly. On a whim!

Ball’s in your court, motherfucker.

Chapter 1

Necromancy 101: You’re too late.

Whether it’s watching empty Echoes playing their last moments over and over again, or talking to Haunts and Wanderers with their fading memories and draining personalities, they have one glaring thing in common; they’re all dead.

See, necromancers are like really bad ambulance drivers. We don’t get there until way after the body’s cooling in the middle of the road.

Ghosts aren’t really people. They’re tattered bits of soul left over from the dying. Shreds of memory, personality, will. Whether it was yesterday, last month, twenty minutes, two hundred years ago. Doesn’t matter.

You’re. Too. Late.

Because ghosts? They don’t just happen. You’re not getting a ghost if Grandma strokes out taking a shit on the toilet. No, it takes trauma. Mental, physical, spiritual. It can be sudden, or take a lifetime to build.

Suicides, homicides, accidents, gunshot wounds, stabbings, beatings, poisonings, car crashes, hangings, Colombian neckties, hacked to pieces by crazed cannibal killers. You get the idea.

We necromancers get to experience it all in nightmare color and THX sound whether we want to or not. Sure, any schmuck with some talent can talk to the dead, but we’re born to it.

There is no such thing as a pretty death. It doesn’t exactly paint a rosy picture of the human experience.

Some of us don’t care. They’re the scary ones. You get some serious Patrick Bateman shit with them.

Some of us care way too much. They’re the tragic ones. By thirty they’ve dug themselves into a hole, too afraid to keep living and terrified of dying because they know that’s not the end of things. There aren’t many necromancer suicides, is what I’m saying.

Like doctors or morticians, most of us land somewhere in the middle. Dying’s tragic, but shit happens. Death is something that needs to be accepted. It’s not good, it’s not bad. It just is.

But some deaths are a little harder to take than others.

Burn victims, for example. The ones who go from smoke inhalation or carbon monoxide don’t usually leave a ghost behind, but if they burn to death? Jesus fuck, it’s rough. It’s not just agonizing, messy, and loud, it can last anywhere from five minutes to an hour or more.

First time I saw the Echo of a burn victim was a car accident on a back road that had happened three or four years before. Middle of nowhere. Guy inside slow roasted for almost an hour before he finally died. He was conscious for way too much of it.

That’s what makes this particular Echo I’ve been watching for the past couple hours, a woman set on fire in a burned-out shell of a three-bedroom bungalow in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles, so unusual.

She starts at the door to the kitchen, becoming visible as she enters the living room. There’s panic on her face. Someone I can’t see shoots her in the back. Her legs go out from under her. She hits the ground screaming, but keeps dragging herself away.

Then the flames kick in. I see flickers of their light shining across her skin, though I can’t see them, yet. They won’t be a part of this scene until they’re eating her alive.

Doesn’t take long. They erupt around her in seconds, crawl up her legs as though she’s been dipped in liquid oxygen, bright blue flames dancing up her body, relentless, unforgiving.

She catches fast when the flames touch her. Her skin already blackening and cracking. The fire sweeps over her like piranha devouring a cow. Bits and pieces shred away as ash and char. Conscious and screaming until there’s nothing left but a blackened corpse that’s more skeleton than person lying among the ruins. Ash drops in clumps from her body as pieces of her disintegrate.

The scene disappears like a soap bubble, there one second, gone the next. I can still smell the stink of charred pork, hear the screams and the crackle of searing skin.

Then it starts all over again. It’s the fourth time I’ve watched it. I crouch down to look at it from another angle, time it with my pocket watch. The moment the flames hit her she goes up like flash paper. From ignition to ash can be measured in seconds.

Nobody burns that fast. Even knowing it’s obviously magic, it’s surprising how fast she goes from burning to ash.

At least, it would be if I hadn’t seen it before.

I take my phone out, dial a number. Hear a sleepy grunt when it picks up. “Hey,” I say, “it’s Eric. It’s happening.”

“Can we all die in a horrible rain of fire after I’ve had coffee?” Gabriela says. Most people know her as the Bruja, and she’s at least as powerful a mage as I am. Maybe more so. We fought once. Called it a draw. To say we’re friends would be stretching things. A lot.

“I think you got time for a cup.”

“Oh, good. I’d hate to meet the apocalypse uncaffeinated.”

“We should all be so lucky.”

“All right. Spill. What’s going on?”

“Xiuhtecuhtli’s fire.” I describe the scene to her. The man, the gunshot, the flames—particularly the flames.

“Fuck me. You’re sure about the fire?” she says.

“Well, I am standing in the burned-out shell of a house, so . . .”

“I meant about what kind of fire. Are you sure it’s Xiuhtecuhtli’s fire? You’re the only one who’s seen it in action.”

“Yeah,” I say, watching the flames consume the Echo in front of me one more time. The preternaturally blue flames turn it to char and ash in moments. “I’m sure. And I’m sure it’s Quetzalcoatl doing it.”

“You can’t know that for sure,” she says.

“He pretty much told me that this is exactly what he was going to do. Anyway, it gets better.”

“How so?”

“Last I saw him Q was a fifteen-foot-tall trash fire in the shape of a winged serpent. Not exactly in a position to hold a gun.”

“He’s got a friend,” she says. “You see the shooter?”

“No. Too far away. Didn’t get captured in the Echo.” Not that it probably would have, anyway. The shooter isn’t the one who died.

“You piss off the best people,” she says.

“What can I say? I’m a high achiever.”

* * *

About five hundred years ago, give or take, a Spanish dickhead by the name of Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca (a title he gets a little later), shows up on the Aztecs’ doorstep and proceeds to kick seven shades of shit out of them. It’s touch and go for a while. His attention’s split. He’s not the most popular guy with the Spanish government at the time. When they send troops after him he pretty much turns them into reinforcements.

That out of the way, he turns his attention to not only conquering the Aztecs, but their gods, too. Cortés puts a lieutenant, guy named Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, in charge of the invasion of the Aztecs’ thirteen heavens. The ace up Cabrillo’s sleeve is an eight-thousand-year-old Djinn named Darius that Cortés loans him, and an alliance with the Aztecs’ own wind god, the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, who’s turned traitor for fuck knows what reason. Gods fall like dominos; Tlaloc, Ixcuina, Citlalicue, Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, Xiuhtecuhtli, Ometeotl, and on and on.

Then they reach Mictlan, the Aztec land of the dead, where its two rulers, Mictlantecuhtli and his wife, Mictecacihuatl, set a trap. Cue Epic God Battle. Doesn’t end well for anybody. The Conquistadores die, Quetzalcoatl is seriously wounded, Darius is trapped in his bottle, Mictlantecuhtli is turned to jade and trapped in a hole deep below Mictlan.

The only survivor is Cabrillo, who limps back to the mortal world with Darius in his backpack. Quetzalcoatl does a runner to licks his wounds, and Mictecacihuatl tries to hold what’s left of Mictlan together. The thing with Mictecacihuatl is that she’s a survivor. Flexible, changes with the times. By the time I ran into her she’d restyled herself as a folk saint in Mexico by the name of Santa Muerte.

She’s got other names. La Flaca. La Señora de Las Sombras. Saint Death. She’s a saint for the outsiders, the narcos, the disconnected. She’s not evil. She’s not good. She is death and blood, lust and love, vengeance and redemption and all the visceral things that make us human. She’s messy as life, inevitable as death. She is the Saint of Last Resort.

And I had to go and marry her. I didn’t know that’s what was happening at the time. I pledged myself to her for help in finding my sister’s murderer. Should have read the fine print. That bond turned me into her husband.

But as it turns out, the cosmos doesn’t like paradoxes. Mictlantecuhtli is the King of Mictlan. The King of Mictlan is married to Mictecacihuatl. I’m married to Mictecacihuatl. So, I’m the King of Mictlan. Except Mictlantecuhtli is the King of Mictlan . . .

The universe’s solution is to swap Mictlantecuhtli and me. That little detail about Mictlantecuhtli being turned to jade is kind of important, because I find out real fast that green is so not my color. I’m turning to stone. Mictlantecuhtli is turning to flesh.

Enter the wind. The spirit of the Santa Ana winds, actually. While I’m trying to figure out how to get a speedy divorce before I turn into a lawn ornament, I find myself needing some help, and they’re the best shot I have. They help me find a guy I’m looking for, and I give them . . . something weird. They want me to burn my home down. I was squatting in a rancid, little rat trap at the time, so what do I care? Sure. No problem.

Except they don’t mean my home. They mean the King of the Dead’s home. They mean Mictlan. Whole goddamn place. And why is that? Because all the wind spirits are connected. The spirit of the Santa Anas connects to the Chinook in Alaska to the Abrolhos in Brazil to the Zonda in Argentina and on and on, and eventually to a half-dead Aztec wind god, named—surprise!—Quetzalcoatl.

He gives me this spiffy Zippo that holds the fire of the god Xiuhtecuhtli. It could burn anything in the mortal world in no time flat and all of Mictlan with one flick of the wheel. I tried it out on a creepy little island outside Mexico City filled with the trapped ghosts of murdered children.

Since I’m heading down to Mictlan to divorce my death goddess wife and take out her jade statue ex-husband with extreme prejudice, it sounds like a win-win to me. Only it isn’t. Because burning Mictlan, I find out, means destroying the thousands of souls calling it their afterlife. I’m a bastard, but I’m not that big a bastard. Mictlan stays unburned. In the kerfuffle between me, Santa Muerte and her husband, I lose the lighter.

After seeing what happened to the house in West Adams I know for sure the lighter is back in play, and I can only think of one guy who’d try using it.

I’ve been waiting for Quetzalcoatl to show his face and burn shit down ever since I got back from Mictlan. He couldn’t have come at a better time for it. Triple digit temps, high winds, everything dry as kindling.

As the man says, the hills of Los Angeles are burning. The palm trees haven’t turned into candles in the murder wind, yet, but it’s just a matter of time. Brushfires spread through the green spaces like syphilis through a Victorian dockside. Laurel Canyon, Calabasas, Verdugo Mountains, La Crescenta, Griffith Park. No matter how many firefighters and tanker planes they throw at them, they can barely contain the fires.

Outside it’s well on its way to a hundred. I’ve rolled up my shirtsleeves, left my suit coat in the car. Some places it would feel weird with so many of my tats showing, but in L.A. they just figure I’m some white hipster from Silver Lake with too much money. All I need now is a fancy mustache and artisanal toast.

I stop on the sidewalk to look back at the house, streaks of soot radiating out onto the cement from the house’s blackened lawn, crawling up the trunk of a palm tree. There isn’t much left of the house to tear down. Exposed framing, disintegrated drywall.

Xiuhtecuhtli’s fire really did a number on it. Surprisingly, it didn’t catch the houses on either side. Was that on purpose? And if it was, why this house in particular? Why this woman? It can’t be random. Q’s batshit crazy, even by god standards, but I don’t think he’s stupid. He’s got a reason even if I don’t know what it is.

I’m so preoccupied trying to puzzle out what’s going on that I almost don’t feel the flare of magic on my skin from the protection spells in my tattoos. Less than a second later I hear the gunshot behind me. The magic pushes the bullet away, but not enough. It rips my sleeve and runs a gouge across my left bicep.

I wonder who I’ve pissed off this time.

Chapter 2

I bolt for cover, the closest being my Cadillac Eldorado parked next to me. I get it between me and the shooter as three more rounds go off.

They’re too high and punch into the side of a scorched palm tree in front of the house. The last time somebody shot me I was partly jade and I couldn’t feel it. Bullets just ricocheted off me. But now, Jesus. I’d forgotten how much this shit hurts.

I pull my own gun, a Browning Hi-Power covered in Nazi Waffen marks. It’s an ugly piece of hardware and I always feel like I’m shoving my hand into a barrel of cockroaches when I pick it up. It’s filled with all the hatred and nastiness from the war and I can tap into that with my own magic, making a .357 look like a popgun.

I look under the car and see the shooter’s feet as he starts running toward me. More gunshots, more misses. One of them punches through the driver’s side door of the Caddy and dents the steel on the passenger side.

Sonofabitch. Shoot at me all you like. I’m used to it. Shoot my car? Fuck you.

The Browning likes to shoot people, and I can feel it pulling at me to pop this guy in the head. Somebody else might listen to it, but I’ve had years of practice at telling it to fuck off. I decide to do something a little less final.

Magic’s like improvisational cooking. But instead of spices, you’re using bits and pieces of negotiated reality. Mages don’t throw fireballs. They collect oxygen into a sphere, give it some spin, heat it up until it burns, tell gravity to fuck itself, and then shoot that bastard across the room.

In this case, reality and I have a conversation about loosening the binding of pavement, liquefying tar, stretching a little pocket of the world like it’s taffy. This all happens in less than a second.

I shouldn’t be doing this to a normal, but if it’s that or putting giant holes in his head, this is probably the better way to go. I slam my hand onto the street and let the spell loose, the magic bending the world around me. Thick ropes of pavement leap out of the street and wrap around the shooter’s legs. His yell of surprise turns into one of pain as everything just below the knee stops moving and everything above keeps going.

Including the gun, which is the important part. It skitters across the street, stopping at the curb. I step out from behind the Cadillac, the Browning in my hand and . . .

It’s a kid.

Late teens, early twenties at most. Rumpled shirt, stained pants. He clearly hasn’t slept, hasn’t shaved. Everything about him is haggard and raw.

He looks an awful lot like the ghost I’ve been watching all morning. His eyes are filled with rage. I know that look. I wore it myself when I killed the man who murdered my parents. Dragged him screaming across the veil and fed him to ghosts. If that was his mom in there I’m not surprised.

What is surprising is that he looks like he thinks I had something to do with it.

He screams at me, tries to yank his legs out of the pavement. I’m too far away for him to be a threat, and I’m not about to get any closer. He struggles for a bit, but then exhaustion gets the better of him and he gives up, his whole body slouching in defeat. I put the Browning away. I get a strong sense that the gun feels disappointed. I’ve been getting that feeling a lot lately.

“Fucking murderer,” the kid screams.

If the gunfire doesn’t get the cops coming, his screaming like a maniac will. The street’s empty, and only a couple of cars are in driveways in the next block. That should give me a few minutes to figure out what the hell is going on without worrying about police.

“Narrow that down a little for me. Who exactly do you think I’ve murdered?” I say, because let’s be honest, it’s not like he’s wrong. “Her? In the house? Who was she? Your mom? Sister? Aunt?”

“So, you did do it,” he says. “You fucking murderer.”

“Nope. Just saw her ghost. It’s kinda my thing.”

“Yeah, I know all about you and your fucking army of the dead.”

“I— What?”

“They told me you killed her. Showed it to me. Told me all about you.”

“Whoa, hang on. Who did what to the how now?”

He gives me a smile that never reaches his eyes. That’s when it occurs to me then that I have made a tactical error. Mages don’t go running around with hats that say MAGIC BOY in big, neon letters. The only way we know that there’s another of us nearby is if they either fire off a spell or start pulling power from the environment.

Magic collects in pools. Cities and towns have the most concentrated magic, people, events, the environment all mixing to give it a unique taste as individual as the city itself. But you’ll find it in the wild, too, if you know the right places. We can tap into it, draw some off if we don’t have enough of our own available for a spell.

If you drink from the pool fast enough, another mage is going to feel it. Drink it in sips over a few minutes or longer and nobody’ll ever notice until you’re good and ready to use it. It’s an old trick. I’ve used it myself lots of times.

I really should have seen it coming.

Everything happens too fast. I feel the magic flare out from the kid like an explosion, warping the world around it as it spreads. The pavement I’ve wrapped around his legs uncoils. A thick sheet of it peels up from the street to create a six-foot-tall wall between us. Sharp, thin spears of asphalt a few inches long form out of the wall.

I have a shield spell that I’ve used so often it’s become almost automatic. When the spears of asphalt forming in the wall shoot out at me, I’m already bringing it up. It catches most of them, but two get through. One screams so close past my head I can feel the air as it passes.

I’m not as lucky with the other one. My protection tattoos push against it to slow it down, but not enough. A half-foot-long spear of compressed gravel and tar drives itself an inch into my left shoulder right next to the bullet graze.

That little shit. The pain is blinding. I can feel the magic in my tattoos doing . . . something. I honestly can’t remember what half of them are for, but whatever they’re doing can’t be good.

I use the shield as a battering ram, shoving it so hard against the pavement wall that it explodes in a cloud of dust and debris all over the street. Halfway down the block a car alarm goes off.

I can feel him drawing more power from the pool. That and the pavement wall tells me he’s got skill but not a lot of his own power.

Since any of us can tap it, I could start pulling some in, too. Then it turns into a race to see who can pull in more the fastest. I did that in Mexico with a Cartel mage, effectively shutting him out completely.

But I haven’t tried it since. I had access to Mictlantecuhtli’s power then and could draw in a fuck-ton of magic in one shot. I don’t know if I can still do that, and now’s the wrong time to find out. If it turns out I can’t, then I’ll have wasted my time and given him an edge he doesn’t need.

So instead I push the shield out toward him. I have more than enough power, to the point of not having to draw on the pool to maintain it. I can’t remember if I had that much before I was with Santa Muerte, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t.

The shield reaches him, pulling in at the edges until I’ve got him in a bubble of force. Just as I finish wrapping it around he lets his spell loose.

The inside of the bubble goes bright as thousands of red and purple arcs of power shoot out from him, hit the shield and ricochet back. It looks like watching a plasma globe on acid. Within a second there’s nothing but light.

When it finally stops, and the globe clears, I see the kid collapsed, twitching, smoking. He doesn’t look too badly burned, but it’s clear that whatever he was trying for was lethal. I can feel him die right then and there, a tiny kick in the gut whenever someone nearby kicks the bucket. Yet one more side benefit of necromancy. Yay.

I lower the shield and run to him. Anybody else I’d probably just let go, but come on, he’s just a kid. I try to remember how to do CPR. I’m not in the business of keeping people alive so it’s not like I ever paid much attention.

I can feel the kid’s ghost starting to separate from him, and whatever’s left of his soul going wherever it needs to go. I’ve only felt this happen a few times before. Usually it all separates so fast it’s over before I even know it’s happening.

I’ve always wondered if I could do something about it. Now’s as good a time as any to find out. I can’t do anything from this side besides watch this all happen. But over on the dead side I might have a chance.

I will myself over to the other side, colors muting to midnight shades of blue and gray. There’s a rushing sound, like stepping through a waterfall. The city noises fade to a low, hissing wind. The cars on the street are missing, and some of the houses look different. Places leave a psychic footprint over here. With enough belief and history tied into a place or an object it’ll show up, regardless of what’s on the living side. There are whole buildings over here that were demolished decades ago.

The kid’s ghost hasn’t pulled away from the rest of his soul much. It’s more like a slow peeling than a clean break. The kid’s body is visible, though if he were alive he’d just be an indistinct blob of light. But he’s still in the process of shedding his soul, so it’s right here.

Neither piece, the ghost nor the soul, really looks like him, or even human. It’s too soon. They’re just ropes of white light splitting apart.

I don’t have a lot of time. This is a land of entropy. I can already feel it pulling my energy away from me. Stay too long and I’ll be just as dead as anything else here. Though the ghosts will probably eat me first.

The blood seeping out of my shoulder where the pavement arrow hit me (and there is a surprising amount of it) is already getting the attention of the local ghosts. They feed on life, and there’s a lot of life in blood. One of the reasons it’s used in so many rituals and spells to call and control the dead.

They can see me from their side the same way I see them. Light and sound, but like a girl in a peep show booth, there’s no touching. To me they mostly look like half-formed nightmares, caught in a form inherited from their final moments of death. Gunshot wounds, cracked skulls, stabbings. To them I look like a gourmet meal stuck behind glass. And now I’m on their side of the window.

This is probably a monumentally bad decision, but I’ve never been accused of making smart ones. I reach out with both hands, grabbing the kid’s ghost in one hand, and the soul in the other.

My hands sting as if they’ve just been flash frozen, but I hold on tight. I pull the two pieces together. They fuse into one as soon as they come in contact with each other.

Okay. Now what? This is brand new territory for me. I go with the first thing that pops in my head. I shove his soul into his body like I’m tamping down an overfull trash can.

His body’s eyes and mouth snap open in shock, or terror, or something. But it clearly worked. He’s blurring and brightening, and soon all I can see is a man-sized form of shapeless light.

The sound of Wanderers is getting closer. Though they look like they’re running, their feet never touch the ground. And if there’s a wall over here, they can’t go through it. They’re constrained by their own memories of how human bodies and the world work.

Which is a good thing, because otherwise they’d probably be flying overhead and dive bombing me, instead of running at me like Labradors after I just rang the dinner bell.

That’s my cue. The last thing I need is to get gnawed on by Wanderers. Just like coming in here, I have to will myself back to the other side. Used to be it took me a good twenty minutes to cast this spell. But I’ve done it so many times now I can do it in between heartbeats.

I pull myself over just as I see the first running Wanderers round a corner. There’s that jet engine blast of sound, a searing light, and then I’m back on the living side.

The kid’s gone. A silver Audi heads jerkily down the street, then straightens and picks up speed. I suppose motor control takes a minute to come back when you’re raised from the dead.

I turn to run to the Cadillac, maybe I can catch him before he’s gone, but the burst of pain in my shoulder reminds me that I’ve got a fucking arrow in my arm.

I limp over to the Cadillac, pull the pavement arrow out of my shoulder. I’m starting to get woozy. Can’t be from blood loss. Haven’t been bleeding enough yet.

My tattoos are still doing something. The hell did that kid do to me? I run through what I can remember of my tattoos and the only thing I can come up with is that it might be poison. That or demon brain worms. I really hope it’s poison.

I slide into the driver’s seat, grab my suit jacket and tie it tight around my arm. It’s a shit job and I don’t know if it will do anything, but direct pressure’s all I’ve got until I can get somewhere safe. I don’t have time to do any kind of first aid. I can already hear sirens.

I pull the Caddy away from the curb and round a corner just as the first cop car pulls up. The Caddy’s got some spells engraved in its frame to make the normals not pay attention to it. They’ll see it as any other car on the street, but it’s never going to seem out of place.

Police aren’t usually more than a pain in the ass, but I need to get this arm dealt with. The wound’s bleeding pretty heavily. Hospital’s out. I don’t have time for questions there aren’t any good answers for.

There’s only one place I can think of.

Chapter 3

I pull up to the warehouse gate just east of the L.A. River and honk the horn. My heart started hammering in my chest about ten minutes ago and I’m having trouble seeing straight. The wound in my shoulder is still bleeding, soaking through my shirt. I look like I’ve rolled around on a slaughterhouse killing floor. I really hope Gabriela knows a good back-alley doctor. Or better yet, a mage who’s a good back-alley doctor.

Nobody comes out, so I lean on the horn again. They know I’m here. Gabriela keeps snipers on the top floor in case somebody gets through the gate. Normally she’s got three armed men in the parking lot, but today the lot’s empty.

If nobody’s here, I’m in trouble. Of course, if there is anybody here I might still be in trouble. Gabriela’s one of the more stable mages I know, which isn’t saying much—mages and pragmatism aren’t something that usually go together. She might think it’s easier to let me bleed out in my car than it is to let me inside.

I don’t think that will happen. Unlike most mages, Gabriela actually cares about people, whether they’re human or not.

She had a hotel Downtown a while back where she was taking in the supernaturals of Los Angeles: vampires, aswang, naga, ebu gogo, xana, and so on. We’re very multicultural out here. There aren’t many, and the ones that can pass for human mostly hide among the homeless, eke out a living on street corners, try not to grab too much attention.

Problem is, nobody was going to take a five-foot-tall sorority girl with an advanced sociology degree seriously as a mage protecting homeless vampires. She looks less Morgan le Fay, and more Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Sexism is alive and well in magic land.

So, she went all Baba Yaga on everybody and made up this ancient, withered hag called La Bruja. Carved a swath through the gangs and Mexican Mafia in her little corner of Downtown. Left calling cards, messages written in blood, skinned corpses, that sort of thing.

The whole time these guys are thinking they’re dealing with a hundred-year-old monster witch. Even her own people thought so. Until a bunch of Russian thugs followed me to the hotel and burned the place to the ground. And I kinda got a bunch of her people killed. We didn’t talk much after that.

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 she was still very much not someone to fuck with.

Considering that I’ve probably brought a pissed off Aztec god to L.A. looking for revenge, letting me die would really be the best move.

I honk the horn again. Longer and louder this time. My vision swims for a second before going clear. My heart’s really getting a workout.

Finally, someone comes out of the warehouse and opens the gate. I drive in, the car lurching, and park crookedly in one of the empty spaces.

I’m going downhill fast. I’m fever-hot, hotter than can be explained by this weather. I can’t tell if it’s from whatever I’ve been dosed with or my tats really doing their best to keep me alive.

I push the door open. A step turns into a stumble turns into a fall and the next thing I know I’m face-down in the parking lot as everything goes black.

* * *

When I bolt back into consciousness my heart’s slamming in my ribcage like a monkey on a tambourine, but at least now it’s got some rhythm. My breathing is fast, but not as bad as before. Most importantly, my tattoos aren’t reacting. Whatever I was dosed with isn’t in my system anymore.

My vision is still spotty. It takes a minute to focus on where I am. Then a woman stands over me, silhouetted by a light behind her. It takes a few seconds to realize who it is.

“Vivian?” She’s grown her red hair out and there are a few more lines around her eyes than I remember.

“Eric,” she says.

“What are you doing here?” I’m in a plain room that almost but not quite feels like a doctor’s office, lying on a portable surgical table. The scene is far more familiar than I’m comfortable with. If this is a dream, it’s a pretty shitty one.

“Saving your life,” she says. “You really need to get some healing charms in that mess of tattoos, if you can find any more space for them.” There’s no sarcasm there, not even a resigned sigh. The last time I saw my ex-girlfriend, she was handing me the deeds and paperwork for my sister’s house and a bunch of properties and storage units that my family kept from my sister and me while they were alive.

It was cordial, but final. I never expected to see her again. And sure as hell not after passing out in front of Gabriela’s warehouse.

“Thanks,” I say. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You know I wasn’t asking why you were here here, right?”

“Yes.” She pulls off a pair of purple nitrile gloves and tosses them into a wastebasket with a biohazard sticker on the side. There’s a nicely bandaged dressing on my shoulder covering both wounds. The arm’s a little numb, but it seems to mostly work, as long as I don’t lift it very high.

“Where’s my shirt?” I say.

“You’re not going to want to wear that again,” she says. She gestures over at the wastebasket with a bright red piece of cloth sticking out of the top.

“Ah, right. I was doing a lot of bleeding in it.”

She looks warily at my chest and carefully puts her stethoscope against my heart, all the time looking like touching me is going to shock her. She hands me a white tablet. “Here. Put this under your tongue. Sublingual lorazepam. Should help calm things down a little pretty quickly.” She slowly lifts the stethoscope off my chest and quickly steps back.

“Is there something wrong I should know about?” I say.

“One of your tattoos tried to eat my stethoscope.”

That’s new. “Let me guess, the birds?” One of the tattoos on my chest, right in the middle, is a circle of Celtic ravens. When they’re charged with power I can turn them into actual ravens that fly out and make somebody else’s day really miserable. Until I use them they shift position within the circle, changing configuration from moment to moment. After they’ve been used they’re just another static tattoo until I charge them again.

At least they used to be.

“They’ve changed,” she says. “Didn’t they used to be Celtic or something? Because they don’t much look like it now.”

When I was turning to jade all my tattoos stayed intact. But this one changed. Instead of Celtic imagery, they look more Aztec, and they’re not ravens anymore. I think they’re eagles.

They also seem to have acquired a mind of their own. When I was in Mictlan they saved my life by coming out without me triggering them. I haven’t done anything with them since it happened. They should just be a static tattoo of birds, but they’re still moving around on my chest.

“I’m really not sure what their deal is,” I say. “You said they ate your stethoscope?”

“Tried to.” She shows it to me. There’s a small dent in the disk.

I have no idea what to do with this information, so I change the subject. I’ll think about it when I’m not lying on a hospital table.

“Thanks for saving my life,” I say. “Poison and blood loss really do a number on a guy, huh?”

“Double whammy. You’d been pumped full of . . . something. An anticoagulant, something like oleander and warfarin, I’m thinking. You weren’t clotting. Your heart rate was cranked way up, making you bleed out faster. I’m honestly surprised you’re alive.”

“I lose a lot of blood?”

“Enough. But I gave you a charm that should get your blood volume back up without a problem. And the lorazepam should help with the heart rate.”

I’m surprised she saved me. I got her fiancé, Alex, probably the best friend I’ve ever had, killed. Then I brought more trouble to her doorstep in the form of a face-shifting Russian gangster. And now this.

“I don’t think my heart’s slowing down,” I say. Vivian starts to put her stethoscope to my chest and pauses.

“It’s okay,” I say. “They won’t do it again.” I hope. The birds stay calm as she listens to my heartbeat.

“Take a few minutes,” she says. “It was a lot worse an hour ago. I got the poison out of you, but there are some effects that we just have to wait out.”

“How did you—”

She shows me a disposable, plastic water bottle filled with a tarry, black liquid.

“Come on, Eric. You know I’m not a regular doctor. I see you haven’t broken your nose again.”

“You did such a good job with it last time, I’d hate to mess up your work.”

“Doc’s on retainer for us,” Gabriela says, stepping into the room. I catch a glimpse behind her. She’s built this surgical suite inside her warehouse. Between the infirmary and a mage doctor on her payroll, I wonder how much use she’s getting out of it. She doesn’t do anything without a reason, so things must be worse for her than I thought.

Now that she’s not doing her Old Hag of the Woods shtick, she’s gotten a lot more colorful, and clearly gives no fucks about it. Purple jeans, sparkly Doc Martens, a t-shirt for some punk band called Bad Citizen Corporation.

She dyed her hair since the last time I saw her. Red fading into purple, with blue highlights. It’s pulled back in a ponytail, and despite her My Little Punk Pony getup she gives off this sixties rebel, Che Guevara vibe.

Of course, that just might be because of the big fucking machete in a scabbard across her back.

She throws a white button-down shirt at me. “That should fit. I understand you and the doc know each other.”

“Not anymore,” Vivian says before I can open my mouth. The pause goes on a little longer than anybody’s comfortable with.

“Okay, then,” Gabriela says. “Moving on.”

I pull the shirt on, wincing as I lift my arm. Even with healing magic, that’s gonna suck for a few days at least. The shirt’s a little too tight across the shoulders, but it’ll do.

“I like the My Little Pony look,” I say.

“Thanks. Since I can’t scare the shit out of the Mexican Mafia as somebody’s nightmare grandmother, I figured I’d go the other direction and really make them underestimate me.”

“Is it working?”

“You want to see the heads I’ve collected?”

“Maybe later. How bad was I?”

“Almost dead,” Vivian says. “A couple more minutes and you would be. Dan could have done a hell of a lot worse to you.”

I slowly slide off the table. I accidentally brace myself with my left hand and pain shoots through my arm. Yeah, I’ll be popping Vicodin like breath mints for the next week or so.

“Wait. Who?”

“Dan Malmon,” Gabriela says. “I had one of my guys run the address you gave me. The guy who died in the fire was his mother, Kate. She was one of us.”

“Dan’s a real winner,” Vivian says. “I’d heard Kate had died in the fire, but I thought—hell, I’d hoped—Dan had gone up with her. If for no other reason than to get a menace off the street. I didn’t hear anything about him so I figured he was either dead or bailed. When I got here Gabriela told me where you’d been and what was happening. I assumed you had a run-in with Dan.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “His knack is poisons?”

“Poisons, drugs, whatever. Let’s call it creative chemistry,” Gabriela says.

Every mage has one particular area that they’re stupidly good at. Divination, protection wards, predicting the weather, whatever. I got dead things. Dan, apparently, can give Pablo Escobar a run for his money.

“A guy who can make his own ecstasy must get invited to a lot of parties.”

“Not anymore,” Vivian says, anger bleeding through her professionalism. “He’s a serial killer. He’s murdered at least thirty people, that I know of.”

“Normals?” I say.

“Of course,” Vivian says. “So of course nobody cared.” Nobody important, at least. That’s the thing with mages; we don’t have any laws per se. And let’s face it, when you can bend reality around your pinky, some of us don’t see normals as real people. You have to draw too much attention, piss off enough of the wrong people, whatever, before someone decides you need to get stomped on for messing with normals.

“Then he killed a mage last year,” Gabriela says.

“And then people cared? We kill each other all the time.”

“Yes, but we usually have a reason for it,” Gabriela says. “Even if it’s just ‘Hey, I want your stuff.’ He said he wanted to see what it would be like.”

“They blackballed him,” Vivian says. “That’s all. He’s murdered more than thirty people and people just kind of shrugged their shoulders.”

“‘Excitable boy, they all said,’” Gabriela says.

“Hang on. He’s what, nineteen now? Twenty? How long had this been going on?”

“I think since he was, what, twelve? Thirteen?” Vivian says. “Apparently it was an open secret among the sorts of people we don’t hang out with.”

She’s pissed off about it, and doesn’t like it any more than I do. Normal, mage, inhuman, people are people. A lot of us can’t see that. I’ve never been in the loop much, mostly because I hate people, other mages in particular. But this seems like something I’d have heard about.

“Don’t look at me,” Gabriela says. “I can’t kill every motherfucker in this town. I got shit to do.”

So do I, but if he comes for me again I will kill him. I’m really regretting not letting him die on the street back there.

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. His mom gets killed, he comes after me, poisons me—”

“Yeah, about that,” Gabriela says. “Did he hit you with an arrow or something?”

“The street.”

“He poisoned the street and threw it at you?” Vivian says.

“Shot it at me, but yeah, pretty much. Here’s what I don’t understand. Why? He said I’d killed his mom. Only I didn’t. I haven’t killed anybody.”

“Recently,” Gabriela says.

“Uh huh. How’s that head collection coming along? Stones and glass houses, chica. I didn’t even know who the hell either of them was until just now. So why did he think I’d killed his mom?”

“Not just his mom,” Vivian says, not meeting my eyes. “All the other ones, too.”

Chapter 4

“Other ones?” I say. “Back up. What the hell are you talking about?”

“Kate’s not the first to die that way,” Vivian says. “Over the last month this has happened to at least seventeen families scattered around the city. All mages. House burned down, one person in it, nothing but fragments of bone left.” And too hot to find a bullet, probably. Just a little dot of slag in a pile of ash and bone.

“How did I not hear about this?” But I know how I didn’t hear about it. I didn’t hear about it the same way I didn’t hear about a serial killer mage who was poisoning people.

We’re a secretive bunch, us mages. We don’t talk to each other much and what little community we have is tight-knit and paranoid. Probably nobody started putting pieces together until it hit critical mass. And even then, information wouldn’t just get out there. The ones who knew would keep it close.