Hate Machine E-Book

Stephen Blackmoore

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

Seitenzahl: 398

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Necromancer Eric Carter has to face the nightmares of his past if he's ever going to have a future in Stephen Blackmoore's brutally dark urban fantasy series… Eric Carter has lived a life few could imagine. Or want. He's raised the dead, been dead, become, battled, and buried a few gods, been forced to slaughter countless thousands out of desperate necessity, and is currently inhabiting the exhumed corpse of his own dirty rotten bastard grandfather. So, when it comes to revisiting his past, he's not exactly eager. But he'd better get real eager, real fast. Eric has received a mysterious call from Las Vegas. A call from one of his own dreadful creations known as the Oracle. It wasn't easy to make, what with having to saw a guy's head off and all. And it isn't easy to control, what with it being able to manipulate the future. And that's the problem. Because now, it's not only affecting the future. It's changing the past. For the worse. And if Eric can't reunite a team of his worst associates to get the Oracle back, the world is literally going to hell. 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

Copyright © 2022 by Stephen Blackmoore

All Rights Reserved

Published by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in 2023 in the United Kingdom.

Published by DAW Books, an imprint of Astra Publishing House, in 2022 in North America.

All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.

eISBN 9781625676269

Cover art by Tara O'Shea

Stock images © Dreamstime

Thumbs up icon is from Font Awesome and used under Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

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

Also by Stephen Blackmoore

Acknowledgments

About a week or so ago, somebody walked into a school and shot up a bunch of students and teachers. The obvious tragedy aside, you know what’s fucked up about that? You have no idea which one I’m talking about.

Apocalypse shouldn’t have a plural.

The last few years have been an absolute horror show. A pandemic, a government that can’t get its head out of its ass, Russian invasions, Chinese saber rattling. A mass school shooting on top of all of that just feels like a kick in the nuts.

We have lost too many, too quickly. And as is so often the case, we’ve lost a lot of the wrong ones.

So, a shoutout to all of you. You who have had to face this dumpster fire of a decade in ways you never expected and never wanted. You who have given so much of yourselves as nurses, caretakers, morticians, grief counselors. You who are just trying to get by in a world that feels like it’s against you more and more.

To all of you who haven’t given up, who’ve kept putting one foot in front of the other. You have been an inspiration to me. A reminder that no matter how bad it gets, it doesn’t mean I have to give up.

Thank you. This book of violent, profanity-laden bad decisions is for you.

Chapter 1

Everyone dies alone.

Doesn’t matter if you crack your head on the shower floor or go up in a fireball surrounded by a hundred-fifty people in a cratered Boeing. It’s unique no matter how it happens. It’s your death and yours alone. Your experience of it—and believe me, no matter how unconscious you might be, you’re experiencing it—is shaped by context.

Who you are, what you believe, the things you’ve done. They’re what make your dying an experience that no one else will ever have.

Let’s take Las Vegas. There are places on the planet that shouldn’t exist. Vegas is near the top of that list. An artificial oasis in the middle of a desert wasteland fed by the waters of Lake Mead, it’s about as fake a place as you can find. But there’s one authentic thing about it you won’t find anywhere else in the U.S.

See, Vegas is the suicide capital of America. You don’t get much more real than that.

You’d think it’s people who blew all their savings at the blackjack tables or the locals who just can’t handle living in Sin City, anymore, right? Not even.

The ones holing up in their hotel rooms with a fifth of Jack and a bottle of Ambien come to Vegas with a plan. They come to party, gamble, maybe hire a hooker or two, and then make their exit. A final blowout before their final blowout, so to speak.

This is where being a necromancer and seeing the dead gets to be a problem. We can’t shut it off. I get to watch the Echoes, Haunts, and Wanderers of the desperate and lost as I drive by the hotels on the Strip. Even the ones I can’t see directly, I can feel. I know they’re there.

You got those who went with guns; always a popular choice, particularly with the largest demographic, middle-aged white men. Hanging, of course. That’s number two on the list. Drugs and alcohol are a distant third. And that’s as true in Vegas as anywhere else.

There used to be a lot more jumpers, though. Last time I was here it was like watching a fucking waterfall. But hotels started sealing their windows a long time back and a lot of those ghosts have faded over time.

Sure, it’s only a couple hundred visitors a year offing themselves, but that stacks up fast. I was last here almost twenty-five, maybe thirty years ago. That’s something like six thousand new dead just on suicides and about a third of them leave ghosts behind.

And for however much all those deaths seem similar, every single one is unique. Every one. Viva Las Vegas.

Vegas isn’t all corpses and slot machines. Take Candyland, for instance. It’s not a strip club, though there’s a lot of that going on, and it’s not a sex club, though it’s got a lot of that going on, too.

To call Candyland high-end would be an understatement. Saudi princes, movie moguls, the wealthiest people you’ve never heard of. They’re here for the exclusivity, the mystique. Not just anybody gets in. Sometimes not even the Saudi princes.

The club sits in an old, squat office building, gutted and rebuilt with pure hedonism in mind. When most people find out about it, they’re surprised more people don’t know it. That’s just its magic at work. If you know about it, you’re supposed to know about it. If you don’t, you don’t.

The line for Candyland is half a block long. Men and women in sharp black suits open doors to help the uber-rich out of their limos while taxis disgorge the hoi polloi at the curb.

Everybody standing out here is a Las Vegas high roller or wants to be. The only thing they have in common is that most of them aren’t getting through those doors. But they’ll stand out here waiting and hoping. Why? Because it’s fucking Candyland.

I walk past the line to a group of well-dressed bouncers, stupidly wealthy clubbers glaring daggers at me. The bouncers are what you’d expect for a place like this, big, beefy, immaculately dressed. They’re well-schooled in the rules of Roadhouse: be nice until it’s time to not be nice.

One man stands at a podium checking names off of those allowed to get in tonight. I can tell he’s a mage. He’s got a subtle—for this town, at least—spell going. At a guess I’d say he’s turned up his senses and is sniffing around for any magic. I don’t have any spells going and I’m not drawing any power from the local pool, so as far as he’s concerned I’m just some random asshole trying to cut in.

Those are really the only ways you can identify a mage. Like we’re all walking around with concealed guns but nobody else knows about it until we either pull it out to load or start shooting. Mage fights are kind of annoying that way.

“End of the line’s down there, sir,” he says.

“Here to see the Twins,” I say. “I’m expected.” I better fucking be expected.

“Name?” The bouncer pulls a clipboard from behind the stool he’s been sitting on.

“Eric Carter.” The bouncer freezes. I can feel a tension in the other bouncers behind him.

“You’re, uh . . .” He swallows hard. “You’re not on the list.”

“Look harder.” He flips a page and the relief washing over him is like watching a cresting wave.

“Yeah, you’re good. Go on in. They’re in room one.”

“Thanks.” The men covering the door step aside as if they might catch something contagious from me. I stop right before stepping through. “Am I really that scary?”

“I saw your fight last week.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah,” he says.

I helped a friend out by fighting her cousin in a deathmatch. Complicated family politics. A group of people who make the Borgias look like amateurs. I thought I’d throw him off by having the ring owner make the fight public. I just hadn’t realized how public.

Thousands of people saw me in person, and thousands more streaming live or later online. Anything resembling anonymity among the mage community has gone straight to hell. Doesn’t help that I paraded the other guy’s severed head around the ring. They say any press is good press. I can tell you from experience that that’s not the case.

I don’t say anything else, just push my way inside and let them think whatever they’re going to think. There’s power in anonymity, but there’s power in being recognized, too. No matter what, I’m going to be different things to different people. The constant seems to be that they fear me or hate me. That’s okay. I do, too.

The inside is the classiest not-actually-a-strip-club you’ll ever see. Multiple stages with beautiful dancers, men and women, lots of dark booths, VIP rooms, bars. And loud, though you’re only going to hear what’s in your immediate vicinity once you get to a table. They use magic to bend the sound away. Gives it an air of intimacy and also lets you actually hear a conversation.

Another bouncer in a black suit and tie with a maroon shirt and a conspicuous bulge that isn’t happy to see me stands watching a staircase to the private rooms upstairs. That’s where I’m headed.

“Mister Carter,” the bouncer says, stepping aside to let me pass. “You’ll want room one. Great fight, by the way. Hope you do another one soon.”

Fuck, I don’t. If I hadn’t had an ace up my sleeve, I’d be a smear on the floor right now. I just nod and head up. The music fades a bit as I go up the stairs, leaving a persistent squeal in my ears.

I stop at the top of the stairs. Do I really want to do this? The place has changed drastically, which is probably just as well. I have, too.

I was murdered on a school blacktop in Los Angeles about five years ago. Because of a deal I’d made with an Aztec goddess, my soul went to Mictlan, the Aztec land of the dead. The deal was to act as a stand-in for the god Mictlantecuhtli. To sort of grow him, in a way, with my humanity as the core. It’s complicated.

About a month ago the human part of Mictlantecuhtli was pulled out of Mictlan and dumped into a new body. That would be me. Or us. I’m still not clear on what pronouns to use.

I’m also still having trouble adjusting to being human again. Breathing, eating, sleeping. It all still feels a little alien. The worst part is that, though I’m not Mictlantecuhtli anymore, I still have all his memories up to the point we separated.

Mictlantecuhtli’s been around in one incarnation or another for thousands of years. That’s a lot of memories to shove into somebody’s head. Sometimes I forget myself and start speaking Nahuatl or go on a rant about Spanish colonialism and how they should all burn. Most of the time it’s both.

So yeah, though Candyland’s changed, I suspect I’ve changed more.

If you’re looking for information in Las Vegas, the Twins are who you talk to. They’re tied into the mage community like nobody else. Some of that’s because they’ve been around so long, but mostly it’s because everyone really wants to get into Candyland and the best way to do that is to be their friend.

The Twins. Whenever anyone says it, you can hear the capital letter. Ken and Kendra. Not their real names. I hear they change them up every so often. Bob and Bobbi, Del and Delilah, you get the idea. When I was here last, they went by Vic and Vicky.

The Twins look identical so long as they have their clothes on, and even when they don’t it can be tough to tell them apart. They’re beautiful. Be careful or you’ll find yourself staring at them for hours—which they’re just fine with, by the way. Not too tall, not too short. Slight build, close-cut black hair, otherworldly purple eyes. I’d say they were contacts, but my eyes turn into pitch-black orbs when I’m pissed off, so I’m not really in a position to judge.

They have the same androgynous features, dress the same, sound the same, move the same. Neither looks any more or less like a man or a woman. They trade off who’s who. You think you’re talking to Ken and suddenly it’s Kendra, but it doesn’t actually make a difference because they’re finishing each other’s sentences anyway.

I hear they’ve been in Vegas since before Vegas was Vegas. Story is that they ran brothels when the place was just a watering hole in the desert for the railroad. Before then, they were in New Orleans, Paris, who knows where else.

Are they human? Who cares? Personally, I think they’re one person with two bodies. I couldn’t prove it if I wanted to, and they’re not saying.

But the most interesting thing about them is that they are two of the most powerful erotimancers in North America.

Yes, erotimancers. It’s a stupid word, but “Sex Wizard” sounds like something airbrushed onto the side of a van with a waterbed and a disco ball in the back.

Every mage has a knack, one thing they’re stupidly good at. Some people get sex magic. I got necromancy. We all have our crosses to bear.

Room one is, of course, the first along a dimly lit, carpeted corridor. The music from downstairs fades into a low whisper of bass and melody. I knock on the door, and when I hear a muffled “Come in” I open it, and stop.

What exactly is the etiquette for walking in on somebody with their head buried in someone else’s lap? I skipped that day in charm school.

“Bad time?”

“Oh no, it’s fine,” says a voice to my right. “My sister’s merely indulging. Kendra, dear? We have a guest. So terribly sorry, Stacy. We’ll call you up later tonight.”

The woman on the giving end of the evening’s festivities gets up, dabs a napkin on her chin, kisses both twins, and walks out the door, closing it quietly behind her. Her flushed and lucky recipient hikes up her pants.

“Eric, it is so good to see you,” Kendra says. “Forgive me?”

“For getting your rocks off? What’s there to forgive?”

This is their thing. Some people think sex magic is all tantric blowjobs, raw-dogging it in the middle of a pentagram, or some bullshit like that. Sometimes it is. Mostly it isn’t.

Most people think that an erotimancer’s most powerful trick is to make other people want them, like it’s mind control, which it totally isn’t. Not that some of them can’t do it on purpose. It’s more they have an instinctive empathy and understanding of what a person wants or needs, and like my seeing the dead, they can’t shut it off.

Like anything else there are good and bad aspects. Maybe you want to make the world a better place one handjob at a time. Or maybe you want to seduce secrets out of your enemies’ trusted companions.

Magic isn’t the Force. There’s no light side, no dark side. There are no sides. It’s just energy. It doesn’t care what you do with it. Feed a starving city? Murder a hundred thousand people? Magic’s got you covered.

The thing with erotimancers isn’t just their powers of desire. Unlike most mages, who can only get power from their own reserves or by tapping into the well of magic that’s everywhere around us, erotimancers get it from the raw energy of sex and desire itself.

They’re not unique. There’s a whole school of emotion-based mages out there. The scary ones are the ones who draw power from suffering. Ran into one of those once. He had a basement filled with dead boys and girls and a few live ones chained to the wall.

He kept them just barely alive and when they were spent, he’d just toss them onto the pile. When I got to them the three survivors were so broken that they each picked up the first sharp thing they could find and slashed their own throats.

This ability of erotimancers to pull magic from desire and sex makes Candyland like the Hoover Dam for sex mages. What do they do with all that energy? Fuck if I know. I’ve never been to a ritual. Nobody wants to invite a guy who can summon dead eyeball-eating rats to the orgy. Go figure.

Las Vegas is a popular city for them. The place is soaking in sex. You can’t go five feet along the Strip without having it shoved in your face.

They have a ridiculous amount of power, though they can’t do a whole lot with it on their own. Good for rituals, not as good for slinging spells. But the ones they do pack a wallop.

The biggest problem for them seems to be all the normals, the people without magic who see Satan in everything from porn to videogames and decide to take matters into their own hands. You might not hear about it but trust me, burning witches is still a thing.

See, a lot of erotimancers are sex workers, though by no means all of them. Makes them easy targets. The witch-hunter types are a nuisance at best and deadly at worst. Sex is a sin, you see. Killing the sinner is perfectly justified.

I don’t get the “sex is evil but violence and death is A-OK” crowd. They should get a load of me sometime. I can correct that thinking in about thirty seconds. And I have.

“A hug,” Ken says, standing and wrapping his arms around me. I wince and of course he notices.

“Oh dear. From the fight?” Of course they know about the fight. Probably bet against me. Anybody with a bit of sense would have.

“The fight,” I say. “The day before the fight. The day after the fight. The day after that.”

“Dear god, that was just four days ago.”

“What can I say? I’m a busy little beaver.”

“Let me get a look at you,” Kendra says, turning me around and looking at my face. The bruises are already fading, but I don’t think that’s what’s got her attention.

“You’re different,” she says. “No. That’s not it. You’re the same. You haven’t aged a day since we saw you last.” She tugs at my shirt collar to reveal the mass of brightly colored sigils and spells I have tattooed all across my body. “The tattoos are new.”

“Throat to wrists to ankles,” I say.

Ken cocks an eyebrow at me. “Oh, we must see this for ourselves, sometime.” Kendra’s still examining my face with the attention of a dermatologist going over a freckled redhead.

“Uh, I think we all need to sit down,” I say. It takes her a second to get what I’m talking about and when she does her eyes pop.

“Oh, I am dreadfully sorry,” she says, letting go of me and stepping back. I sit in a chair across from them and adjust my pants. The thing with the Twins being as powerful as they are is that the effect they have on people is intense whether they want it to be or not. Being around them is like walking through Chernobyl. Do it too long and you’re not coming back.

“No, you’re not,” I say. She knows exactly the sort of effect she has.

“Oh, I have missed you,” Ken says. “You are adorable.”

“You’re sweet,” I say, “but let’s be honest, nobody’s missed me.”

“I was trying to be polite,” he says.

“You know I don’t do polite.”

“Fine, have it your way,” Kendra says. “What can we do for you?”

“Looking for somebody. You’re two of the least likely people to try to kill me in this town. I figured I’d start with you.”

“Ah, business,” Kendra says. “We don’t do business without alcohol. It’s uncouth. You still drinking old fashioneds?”

“I’ll drink whatever’s cheap,” I say.

“My dear boy, you must raise your bar on alcohol consumption,” Kendra says.

“You know he only does that because he likes to punish himself. Don’t take that away from him.”

“How dare. I absolutely will not serve swill in this club,” Kendra says.

“As you wish, ma sœur.” Ken taps a button on the table between us. “Clarice, can you send up, oh, let’s say five old fashioneds, please? Top shelf, of course. You’re a dear.”

“Now, while we wait,” Kendra says, “How are you? Are you staying in that stinking jail cell with your deceased friend?”

“I am not,” I say. “I’m in a grown-up hotel room and everything.”

“And your ageless, battered beauty?” Ken says. “I know how we do it, how do you?”

“I died,” I say. “Also, I moisturize.” I’m not crazy about being interrogated, so I throw it back on them. “The club’s changed.”

“A moment,” Kendra says. “Did you say you died?”

“Yep. Gutted on a playground in L.A.” They look at me, willing me to go on, but I don’t elaborate.

“You are always such a surprise,” Ken says after a moment. “Like a piñata filled with snakes. As to your question, everything’s changed. Oh, the glamour, the glitz, the illusions we spin to take well-earned dollars and stuff them into our G-strings are still the same. But there’s a certain je ne sais quoi about the place that’s been lacking since they started blowing up the old hotels and building new ones.”

“It’s absolutely criminal what they’ve done to the Strip,” Kendra says. “Mandalay Bay is simply hideous.”

“They should have kept the Hacienda,” Ken says.

“It felt honest, somehow,” from Kendra. “People knew why they came to the city. Now, I’m not entirely sure. Now it’s so . . . so . . .”

“So Disney-fied,” Ken says. As they talk their voices merge together in my head and it’s like listening to one person talking.

Took me a while to get used to that. I met the Twins a few months after I got to town. Mages don’t really need to work to get money. Magic a few ATMs and you’re flush for a good long while. But I was bored.

Heard the Twins were having trouble getting some information out of a guy on account of him being dead. Well, dead’s right in my wheelhouse.

I’m asked to retrieve a safe combination out of a fresh corpse. I get the combination, give it to the Twins. Suddenly I’m on speed-dial.

Pretty soon me and a few of the Twins’ protégés are working together knocking over mansions, museums, a couple banks. It was fun for a while.

We believed we were friends for no other reason than we spent a lot of time around each other. It was a seductive lie.

There’s a knock on the door and a shirtless waiter in leather pants sporting a six-pack carved out of marble comes in with a tray of drinks, sets them down, and leaves.

“Randal is such a dear,” Kendra says. “He knows exactly when not to speak.” Ken hands me a drink and they each take one themselves. “Now that we’re well liquored, what is it you’re here for?”

“The Oracle,” I say.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You know, the Las Vegas Oracle. Don’t tell me you think he doesn’t exist.”

“Oh, we know it exists,” Kendra says. “The question is how do you know? Not a lot of people are aware of that fact.”

I’m more aware of that fact than probably anyone else, seeing as I’m one of the people who made him.

The Oracle is a severed-but-still-living head with two souls stuffed inside: the person the head belonged to and a demon that can predict the future. Something about the combination turns it into a sort of uber-Magic 8 Ball.

“Ran into someone who worked with him,” I say.

“I see. And you, what, want revenge?”

“Oh, Christ no. Need some information. I’ve exhausted all my other sources. I just need to ask him some questions.”

“The Oracle doesn’t answer questions, Eric,” Ken says.

“The Oracle makes things happen,” Kendra says. “It’s dangerous. I hope whoever made the damn thing burns in Hell.”

“I get it,” I say. “I know he . . . twists reality. Sees different futures and what needs to be arranged to make the one he wants to happen happen. That kind of shit is terrifying.”

“You’re surprisingly well informed.”

“I prefer to do my homework before jumping headlong into a situation,” I say. Apparently, that’s the funniest thing they’ve heard in ages. I sip my drink and wait for the laughter to die down.

“Oh, my boy,” Ken says, wiping a tear from his eye. “I needed that. You are a poster child for poor impulse control.”

“People grow,” I say.

“Not that much.”

“Fair enough. Look, I need to find the Oracle. You know everyone in this town. I just need a lead. I mean, I could go around busting heads until somebody tells me something, but I don’t know which heads to bust so I’d just bust everybody’s. Might not make a guy popular.”

“You have changed,” Kendra says. “I’m impressed at this newfound restraint.”

“Like I said, people grow. Plus, it takes too long.”

“Well, I am so very sorry to disappoint,” Ken says. “But we don’t know.” He takes a sip of his drink.

“It was a long shot,” I say. I know they’re lying. They know I know they’re lying. They’re wary about these sorts of questions. I just don’t know why. Maybe I need to tackle it from a slightly more oblique angle.

“I’m also looking for a couple of mages,” I say. “Would have been here around the time I was, and they might still be.”

“My memory’s not that good, Eric,” they say together, their voices creating weird harmonics in the room. Kendra sips at her old fashioned while Ken keeps talking. It feels weirdly like watching a ventriloquist dummy act.

“I’m sure there are others in town who would remember better than we would,” Ken says. “Why not go to one of them?”

“Because nobody here likes me.”

“I like you,” Kendra says.

“No, you just dislike me less than anybody else does.”

“I’d like to argue that point, but I don’t think I can. All right, who are you looking for?”

“Sebastian McCord,” I say. The glass is halfway to her lips and she freezes. “You know him.”

“Know of him,” she says, smoothing over her surprise with practiced ease. Ken’s face is impassive, his eyes boring into me. “He died around the time you left. They found him shot to death in a half-built house in a suburban development. Grisly scene. Plastic tarps covered in blood, a headless body strapped to a table.” So, Sebastian’s dead. I can’t say I didn’t expect that.

“How about Nicole Hawthorne?” A flicker of surprise, then it’s gone.

“Never heard of her,” Ken says. Bullshit.

“Well, like I said, it was a longshot,” I say.

Sebastian was a two-bit casino owner. His girlfriend Nicole was the smart one. They’re the ones who came to me about making the Oracle. They tried to double-cross each other, each wanting me to use the other’s head to make it. I could see what was at the end of that road, a quick knife in my back.

So, I stabbed first. I drugged both of them with a paralytic, propped them up in a corner and duct taped a gun to each of their hands, fingers on the triggers, before leaving the Oracle with them. Whoever came out of their stupor first would have the better negotiating position. Sounds like Sebastian lost that round.

The rest of the evening was me and a saw and a guy whose screams cut short as soon I got through his windpipe. It was messy, loud, and by the end of it I had a talking head with a tarred over neck stump that could tell the future, and enough nightmares to last me a couple of years.

The Twins exchange an uneasy glance. “Rachel may know,” Kendra says.

“She does keep her ear to the ground,” Ken says.

“McManus? Last I recall she didn’t much like me.”

“It’s been almost thirty years, Eric,” Ken says.

“She shot at me,” I say.

“From what I recall, several times,” Kendra says. “And if she truly didn’t like you, she wouldn’t have missed. Some people don’t carry grudges their entire lives.”

“Hasn’t been my experience, but you do you.”

“If you hold people by who they were in their youth,” Ken says, “you’ll always be disappointed.”

“I’m offering possibilities,” Kendra says. “I know you have bad blood with your old crew—”

“They were never my ‘crew,’” I say. “They were clients with jobs that needed particular expertise. And when that ended, we went our separate ways.”

“Eric, we funded those jobs,” Kendra says. “We know why you left and what David did. You did the right thing. And if the rest of them knew about it they would have agreed. But you disappeared. Hard for a man to clear his name when he’s not around. While you were here you were as tight knit as a bunch of childish reprobates could possibly be.”

“In other words,” Ken says, “they were your crew.” Goddammit. This was why I didn’t want to come back to Vegas.

“Fine, they were my ‘crew,’ whatever the fuck that means. So, why Rachel?”

“She’s connected to parts of Las Vegas mage society that we aren’t,” Ken says.

“We move among a particular class of people,” says Kendra. “Rachel’s circles are a little more . . . rough around the edges.”

“You’re saying she hangs around people like me.”

“No,” Kendra says. “Maybe? All right, yes. Though you are better dressed than most of them.”

“And that does make all the difference,” Ken says.

“What’s she doing these days?”

“Runs a, what does she call it?”

“A prepper school,” Kendra says.

“Right. A prepper school. Out in the desert. Survival training, weapons, how to drink your own urine, that sort of thing.”

“Expecting the Apocalypse?” I say.

“Aren’t we all?”

“Know how I get there?”

“It’s the twenty-first century, Eric. God made Google for a reason. I’m sure you can figure it out.”

I finish my drink and stand. I’ve learned all I’m going to here. Any longer and we’ll start talking about other things that happened years ago, and that’s a conversation I don’t need right now.

“Thank you,” I say. “This helps.”

“Eric,” they both say with that weird harmony that I never got used to. “You said we don’t like you. Just that we dislike you the least. That’s not true. We do like you. Because we know you tried to do the right thing.” I open the door and shove down the memories.

“Thanks for the drink,” I say, and take my leave.

Chapter 2

Death is a lot of things. Simple isn’t one of them.

With death, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking in binaries. This or that. On or off. Dead or alive. I’m still struggling with it and I was dead for five years myself.

A lot of magic is an answer to a question. Need a fire? Want to fly? Kick the shit out of that guy who looked stink-eyed at you at the baseball game? Magic’ll do that easy. Pyromancy, aeromancy . . . I don’t know if there’s a kick-the-shit-out-of-somebody-mancy, but there really should be. You have a problem, magic gives you a solution.

But necromancy? It asks way more questions than it answers. How dead is dead? How alive is alive? At what point does a corpse become meat? What exactly is a ghost? A soul? Where does it go? Necromancy blurs lines and reveals more questions the more it answers.

I had a roommate my last few months in Vegas. Guy named Jimmy Freeburg. Not too bright. Had a little magic but didn’t know it. Not until I told him about it. It was all subconscious. Guy was like a black hole. Divination, tracking spells, that sort of thing just slid right off him. If you’re trying to keep a low profile, he was a great guy to hang around. Spend enough time with him and nobody could see you either.

Around this time these two mages get their hands on a spell book that shows how to make this thing called an oracle. Funny thing, it’s mostly a necromancy spell. They don’t understand it.

Thing reads like a recipe that’s missing every third word. Unless you know enough about cooking to fill in the blanks, you’ll never figure it out. They needed a necromancer.

Lots of things are called oracles, but this one looks like it might be the real deal. Less Delphi, more Genuinely Magic 8-Ball. At least that was the goal. I should have read the fine print.

The idea was that you take a person, slam their soul against a demon’s like a high-speed car crash until they’re pretty much one thing, then cut their head off and seal both of them inside.

Boom. Talking, demon-filled, fortune-telling head.

That was the easy part. The hard part was when Jimmy volunteered. He was dying. Cancer. Scared shitless about where his soul was going.

I had no answers. I’m, like, twenty years old. I know ghosts. I know fuck-all about souls. I mean, I’ve got some ideas, but it’s not like I’ve got firsthand experience with dying. That bit came later.

Anyway, he’s convinced he’s going to Hell, which, yeah, probably, and he’s convinced that being a talking head is better than getting buttfucked by demons.

Jimmy asks me if it’s gonna hurt. Of course it’s gonna fucking hurt, I’m sawing your head off, not giving you a blowjob. I tell him I won’t do it. Over and over again. No, nada, nein.

I honestly don’t want to cut anybody’s head off. In fact, I’m planning to bail with the spellbook before I have to do the ritual, so nobody loses their head.

Up to that point I had killed exactly one person and I was damned if I was going to kill another. I’d beat the crap out of somebody if I had to, sure, but kill? Fuck no. See enough ghosts, you don’t want to murder anybody.

But like I was saying to the Twins. People grow.

Except. I kinda screwed things up when I was doing a dry run and summoned the demon early without an appropriate sacrifice. So basically I’ve got twenty-four hours to cut somebody’s head off or the demon’s coming after me and there’s no way I’m gonna win that fight. And here’s Jimmy asking me to cut his head off. Him kinda dead or me very dead? Not a tough choice.

That, I thought, was that. But like I said, I should have read the fine print.

* * *

The Twins weren’t a total bust. I know more than I did when I walked in there, that they know something about Nicole, maybe where Jimmy is. And they’re pointing me toward Rachel, which I’m not crazy about.

This whole situation is fucking with my head. How much coincidence is at work here? How much of it is Jimmy’s doing? Did he not want me to find him? Or find Nicole? Or did he want me to learn something else and I just can’t see it?

I’m overthinking it, I know, but when you’re dealing with something that can shape today from events set in motion ten years ago you start to wonder what else it’s done, and then free will gets into the mix, and thinking about that shit just gives me a headache.

Then there’s my very existence. I died. I took over for Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec god of the dead, for five years, and then got a piece of me pulled out and shoved into my grandfather’s corpse. Voila, instant necromancer. With some reshaping and plumping out and puking out lots of embalming fluid.

Mictlantecuhtli’s several thousand years old. Grand-dad died in his, I dunno, eighties? I don’t remember meeting him. All I know is that he tried to murder me when I was a baby, so it’s probably just as well.

Then there’s me. If I’m doing the math right, I’m pushing fifty, but I look like I’m in my late twenties, maybe early thirties. But technically, I’ve only been alive for about a month.

And I seem to have their memories. All of Mictlantecuhtli’s stuck in my noggin, though I can’t always remember them. And grand-dad’s kind of sneak up on me.

Keeping my memories and Mictlantecuhtli’s separate is easier than I expected. He’s just so different from me that I know right away if something’s from his experience. Robert Carter could be a problem. So far I’ve only had a couple of flashes of his memories. If that’s as far as it goes, I’m fine with it.

But I’m told he and I were alike in more than just our looks. The memories I’ve had of him have taken a bit of effort to separate out. If I can’t tell where he ends and I begin, that’s going to be a problem. The last thing I need is more people in my head.

Not for the first time I find myself wondering why I’m even doing this. I don’t mean being in Vegas, I mean any of this. I was dead, for fuck sake. I liked being dead.

But now that afterlife is closed off to me. If I kick now, where does my soul go? Back to Mictlan? Or will one of the various gods I’ve pissed off grab me to use as a celestial punching bag for eternity? I don’t know where I belong.

Outside in the parking lot I get some distance from the crowd and call Amanda. Amanda’s the scion, I guess head now, of the Werther family, one of the most powerful groups of mages in the world. She’s nice. Family’s horrible. Like lock them all in a room and set them on fire horrible. Fortunately, I managed to kill the worst of them. Amanda inherited everything when her uncle murdered her father and things pretty much went to hell from there.

The fight where I killed her cousin that has everybody either scared or pissed off at me was to help her. Actually, it was more because I ran into some of her asshole family members and they pissed me off, but it worked out the same way.

Those people. Jesus. By the end of this last weekend we had a load of corpses who totally deserved it, and her father in a weird half-dead state where his body had stopped but his soul was still tethered to it.

All courtesy of Jimmy Freeburg. Ten years ago Amanda’s uncle had an audience with the Oracle. It told him how to take over the family. Actually, it told him how to safely bump off his family. Once that happened, the dominos started tipping.

Which is where it gets weird. The payment for all this was to tell me that Jimmy Freeburg gives his regards, or wants to talk. Something like that. I don’t exactly remember. I was too rage-filled at that point.

And why was I burning with so much anger? The spell that hit old man Werther also hit Gabriela Cortez, a mage who went by the street name La Bruja. Gabriela is Amanda’s girlfriend and my . . . I’m really not sure what we are. Friends, though that’s been iffy a time or two, and more recently something more, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what that is. She was the one who brought me back from the dead, if that’s any indication.

Needless to say, Amanda and I have a shared interest in the situation. Hence why I’m looking for Jimmy.

“Hey,” Amanda says, yelling into her phone. I can hear the staccato thud of EDM in the background. Amanda likes clubbing. It also helps that a lot of mages in her particular circles like it, too. Now that she’s the head of her family she needs to show the flag. For her, dancing is business the way golf is for old white men.

“I can hear you just fine, you know,” I say. I hear a door open and close and the music fades away.

“Sorry about that. How’s Vegas?”

“Oh, you know. Bat Country. I just had a talk that at least gave me a name, though I honestly don’t expect anything to come of it. How about you?”

“I’m spending too much time getting across to the stupid that I’m the new sheriff in town,” she says.

The Werthers have been well known in L.A. for decades. Scratch that. Old Man Werther has been well known in L.A., Amanda, not so much. She’s twenty-three years old. Her father Attila was over two hundred. A lot of people probably don’t even realize he had a daughter. With him gone, people see a power vacuum. Amanda’s making sure they know it’s been plugged up.

“You kill anybody?”

“Not yet,” she says. “A couple of them will be walking funny for the rest of their lives, but they’re still breathing.”

“I’m sure you’ll be very popular,” I say.

“If the three guys coming up to me are any indication,” Amanda says. “Looks like they followed me from the last place I twisted somebody’s nuts into a knot. We parted on less than cordial terms.”

“Go figure.”

“Bringing some friends looking for a rematch.”

“Have fun,” I say. “Stay safe.”

“You too,” she says.

“When have I ever done that?”

“Fine. At least don’t die. Again. I gotta go,” she says. “Looks like they want to do this here in the parking lot.”

“If you can, take a selfie with the bodies. I could use a laugh.”

“I’ll text it to you,” she says and hangs up.

Las Vegas. Never thought I’d see this place again. Learned a lot out here. Can’t deny it. Hardcore necromancy, good ways to steal shit. Just how thoroughly I can piss people off.

The night I made the Oracle, the night I killed Jimmy, was the last night I spent here. I was in Salt Lake City by the time the sun came up. Never looked back.

God fucking dammit, Jimmy. I thought I was quit of this place. Now that I’ve talked to the Twins, it’s just a matter of time before news gets out I’m back and looking for the Oracle, if it hasn’t already.

I wasn’t lying when I told the Twins they were the ones who disliked me the least.

Speaking of. Footsteps behind me. My razor appears in my hand. Maybe I don’t know if there’ll be trouble, but the razor sure as hell thinks so.

“You’re actually here.” I know that voice. I turn around to see a man with a crooked smile, shoulder-length blond hair with too much product in it. He’s wearing the same black leather jacket he did thirty years ago and his jeans are still too tight. It’s like I never left.

Except that his face is too gaunt, his eyes too sunken, too haunted. Sallow skin, lines around his eyes, his mouth. Thirty years of hard living. He doesn’t look great. Hell, he doesn’t even look good.

“David,” I say. I don’t move other than to shift the razor in my hand so light glances off it. His eyes flicker to it and the smile falters.

“Heard you were in town,” he says. “I didn’t believe it. Because the Eric Carter I knew wasn’t stupid and wouldn’t have come back here.”

“Oh, I think we both know Eric Carter is plenty stupid.”

Now he looks full on at the razor. He knows I use it for ghosts. And he knows I use it for people.

“Hey man, water under the bridge. If you still got a beef with me, fine. But I ditched my grudge with you a long time ago. How about we call a truce? Go somewhere quiet. I’ll even buy you a drink. Think of it as a frenemy thing.”

I fold the razor closed and slide it into my coat pocket. Water under the bridge, my ass. Last time we saw each other we exchanged words, then fists, then magic. We beat the crap out of each other. I knocked his teeth out with a crowbar then summoned a bunch of dead cockroaches to run up his body and into his bleeding mouth. Pretty much ended the fight when he ran away choking and screaming.

“Sure. Thought I saw a Denny’s down the road. Let’s go there.” Brightly lit, good sight lines, no cover.

“I was kinda thinking my casino. There’s at least one quiet bar in it. We could—”

“You know that’s not gonna happen.”

“Jesus. Fine. Denny’s. Want a ride?”

“I’ll see you there.”

“Dude, come on. I got a new car. I don’t get to show this thing off to anybody.” He walks to a slick black Tesla at the curb.

“Looks great,” I say. “Very you.”

He shakes his head and gets into the car. He tries to rev it and, well, it’s a Tesla. I can almost feel him seething as he drives off.

David Jewel. Looks like he hit the big time. Always had big dreams. A casino, huh? Wonder who he killed for it.

I steal a Porsche and head down the half mile or so to Denny’s. These places are fucking everywhere. Open twenty-four hours for all your greasy-burger, overdone-pancake needs. Almost as good as Waffle House. Almost.

I’m not crazy about this development, but I’m not surprised. David’s on my list of people not to talk to. It’s a long list, but he’s at the top of it. Pretty much guaranteed I’d run into him eventually. Just wish eventually had taken a little longer.

The list used to be bigger, but I’ve crossed most of the names off as I’ve learned they’ve left town, died, or otherwise disappeared. Tragically, David wasn’t in any of those categories.

He was the de facto head of what the Twins so irritatingly called “my crew.” Not because he was particularly good at planning jobs, he just liked believing he was in charge. The real work was all done by the rest of us, Lucas in particular. We didn’t do anything too elaborate. Get too complicated and things have a tendency to fall apart.

The part of Vegas near the casinos and strip bars is a twenty-four-hour town like no other. You go into a casino and you could be there for hours and not realize it. They’ve got no windows, they’ve got no clocks. They pump in oxygen to keep you awake. You lose all sense of time or place and everything is flashing lights and ringing bells and the waterfall coin crash of the occasional jackpot.

Out here it’s a little tamer. People know when the sun sets, know when it comes up. They’ve got jobs to get to, children to raise. Even so, any part of Vegas has its nighthawks. The Denny’s isn’t full, but it’s full enough. David isn’t stupid enough to start any shit here. Not in a diner full of normals.

I park the Porsche next to David’s Tesla and resist the urge to key his car. For one thing I don’t have any keys, and the straight razor would go through the door like warm cheese.

David is sitting in a closed off section near the back at a table in a sea of empties. Three sides of the room are glass, so no matter where I sit, I’m going to have my back to a window. I join him and sit down.

“You’re still a dick, I see,” I say. He shows me that crooked smile that makes me want to punch him.

“I thought by now you’d have gotten over your whole sitting-with-your-back-to-a-window paranoia.”