Suicide Kings E-Book

Stephen Blackmoore

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

Seitenzahl: 437

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Necromancer Eric Carter returns in Stephen Blackmoore's dark urban fantasy series—where he finds himself caught in a family feud with fatal consequences Being a necromancer is hard enough for anyone, but Eric Carter is far from just anyone. He died five years ago. Then he took the throne, powers, and personage of an ancient Aztec god. Then he was resurrected in his long-dead grandfather's renewed body. So, he's not too keen on taking on any more headaches. Of course, that doesn't last long. Initially asked to investigate a gruesome murder, Eric is reluctantly dragged into a power struggle within the feared and revered Werther wizarding clan. The lone surviving heir is desperate to protect herself and her father's legacy from an extremely violent takeover. And if she's going to come out on top, she needs a merciless magic brawler with Eric's guts, brains, and magical brawn. But in this fight, all those things combined still might not be enough to survive. 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

Suicide Kings

Copyright © 2022 by Stephen BlackmooreAll rights reserved.

Published as an ebook in 2022 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

Originally published by DAW in North America in 2022.

Cover design by Tara O'Shea

ISBN 978-1-625675-73-6

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

About the Author

Also by Stephen Blackmoore

Acknowledgments

There are four questions that keep me up at night. 1. Why do we park on a driveway but drive on a parkway? 2. Did they realize what it sounded like when they called it a “manhole”? 3. How do you solve a problem like Maria? and 4. The fuck do I write in the acknowledgments?

Those first three questions above I fear will remain unanswered. But what about the fourth?

As I write this, it’s just a few days into 2022, which I still have trouble believing isn’t 2019 or Year 227 of The Plague. It has been, put mildly, an absolute clusterfuck. We’ve got a new variant of COVID cramming people into hospitals, idiots making it worse by indulging in that most American of pastimes, “Fuck everybody else who isn’t me,” and a dreadful misunderstanding of the difference between tapeworms and viruses.

We have lost friends. We have lost family. We have had our lives turned upside down and changed forever. We have become connoisseurs of grief.

I don’t think I would have been able to survive it without the friends and family who cheered me on and kept me going.

And so, with the caveat that I know I will forget whole scads of people because that’s what I do, here are only a tiny handful of the people who helped make this possible.

My wife Kari, my agent Lisa Rodgers, Betsy Wollheim, Josh Starr, and the entire gang at DAW, dear friends Peter Clines, Chuck Wendig, Kevin Hearne, Jaye Wells, Lish McBride, ML Brennan, Kristi Charish, Jaime Lee Moyer, Lili Saintcrow, Jeff Macfee, Elsa Sjunneson, Meghan Ball, Enfys Book, Brian White, Nathan Long, and most importantly, you.

YES, YOU! THE ONE READING THIS. This is the seventh Eric Carter book. There is a lot going on, I know. And there are a lot of other things you could be doing.

Thank you. I appreciate you taking time to sit down with it, and I hope it is worthy of your attention.

Chapter 1

Wizard fights. They’re a thing.

Here’s what they’re not: Ancient, long-bearded men casting lightning at each other from distant mountaintops. Teenage children waving around wands while everyone around them ignores the phallic implications. They don’t happen in a boarding school, an enchanted forest, or far underground where the dwarves dug too deep.

Think a lot less Gandalf and a lot more Thunderdome. They are brutal, bloody affairs of magic and MMA in a no-holds-barred battle mixing fireballs with double collar ties. Even in a “respectable” fight—we’ve got our own league and everything—people still lose limbs, get disfigured, die.

“I remember a time you were down there,” Alice says. We’re watching a fight in the Pit between two mages who are kicking the living shit out of each other. One of them has mastered the art of pushing air with his punches so by the time he slams his opponent in the face his fist is really more of an afterthought.

“That was, literally, a lifetime ago,” I say. “I was young and stupid. Now I’m just stupid.”

Alice doesn’t really care who comes to fight or how they fight. Or in my case, how old they happen to be when they fight. I was seventeen.

Alice lets the fighters sort it out themselves for the most part. Before anyone goes in the Pit, the fighters fill out a card saying what they are or aren’t okay with. Standard league rules? No fighter leaves until one of them’s unconscious? No fireballs, lightning storms, or summoning dead rats? That last one wasn’t a thing until I came around.

The cards get sorted to the closest match and that’s who you fight. No match? Then you get the leftovers and hope you walk away at the end of the evening. And if a few mages die, well, that’s not Alice’s problem.

Animate a couple thousand dead cockroaches to go running up the other guy’s legs and pretty soon most people don’t want to fight you. The ones who do are the meanest, ugliest, hardest motherfuckers around.

More often than not they’d use their fists, not their magic. I learned a lot fighting those guys. Mostly how to get my ass kicked, but after a while, how to not get my ass kicked.

Alice and I are in their office overlooking the Pit, the bleachers, the money booths. There’s nowhere they can’t see when they watch the fights.

“You could have gone pro,” they say. I have to laugh at that.

“One, I wasn’t that good,” I say. “And two, nobody would have let me into the league.” There are certain knacks, the type of magic a mage is really good at, that are banned from fighting professionally.

Necromancers creep people out and everybody thinks we can do all sorts of shit we can’t, like summon their greatest fears: spiders, clowns, third-grade schoolteachers, alcoholic fathers. Mesmerists get the other guys to punch themselves in the face too often—it’s pretty funny to watch. Erotimancers . . . those fights tend to turn into something entirely different, though equally entertaining, on the mat.

They’re all fair points, though why anybody has a problem with the erotimancers I honestly don’t know.

Necromancy has a stigma, and why wouldn’t it? Dealing with death is confronting and when you’re in the middle of doing something where you might actually wind up dead, people get weird.

Also, everybody seems to think we’ve all got huge armies of the dead. Like we’ve got that much freezer space lying around.

“Still,” they say. Alice, or Quick Change Alice as they’re known to most, is currently a tall Persian woman with glowing golden eyes. “I could have made a lot of money off of you.”

“You say the nicest things. By the way,” I say, “I like the look.”

“Thank you,” they say. They look down at their body and run their hands down their skirt, smoothing out a couple wrinkles. “I only have it for a few more days. I think I’ve got a Taiwanese stockbroker next. I have to check my schedule. A man this time. I don’t like him much, but you work with what you’ve got.”

Alice, in case you haven’t guessed, isn’t human. I’m not sure what they are. They don’t actually have a corporeal form, or if they do, I’ve never seen it. Instead, they borrow other people’s skins.

The skins are from those who’ve lost too much at the fights, or at one of Alice’s casinos over in Hawaiian Gardens. It’s their IOU. If you can’t pay your debts, Alice will take your marker; for a few days every year for the rest of your life, you’re going to black out and Alice gets your skin. I hear it hurts a lot.

“Well, this one suits you,” I say. “That our guy?”

One fight has just ended and another is about to start in five minutes. The Pit is in a converted airplane hangar at Long Beach Airport. It’s moved around a bit since the airport opened in the twenties, but it’s been there in one form or another as long as the airport has.

Alice has put wards and protections on the place that not only keep it invisible from prying eyes, but fold the space around it. A normal, or someone with insufficient magical ability, won’t see it, and the space that it exists in simply isn’t there for them. It’s impressive work.

Mages see it fine. The fold covers the hangar and a sizable chunk of parking space to accommodate at least as many people as she has seats.

Every one of which is filled right now. The place isn’t huge. Stadium seating to hold five hundred tops. Usually you’d see fifty, maybe sixty people here on a good night. But right now the place is packed.

In the middle of the ring stands an illusion of Quick Change Alice, a persona they’ve developed over the years that builds on their primary skill. It changes every few seconds, an old Asian woman, a young black man, boys, girls, men, women, announcing the next fight.

To hear Alice tell it, they can’t do anything like that. They take a skin, and yeah, they can do it fast, but not that fast. And once they’re in it, they’re stuck until the time runs out.

But over the years they’ve shown up to enough people in different guises to make capitalizing off the lie easy. Everyone assumes Alice could be anyone, which technically is true, but practically doesn’t really work that way. It’s a useful story they go out of their way to promote.

It’s helped keep the rabble away as well as helping Alice maintain some sort of public identity, something they need if they’re going to run an operation like this.

“Yeah, that’s him on the left.” Two fighters are getting ready in their respective spots, stretching, getting hydrated, whatever. The one Alice is pointing out is young, early twenties, got a physique you can only buy from the right sorts of mages. He moves like he’s still trying to figure out how his modified body works.

An airhorn blows and a countdown begins. When it hits zero, gates in the cage slide open, letting the fighters in and then closing up behind them.

The Pit’s different from when I was fighting. Used to be just dirt blocked off with sandbags. With all that magic flying around, if you sat in the splash zone you deserved what you got.

Now it’s an octagon with chain link fencing like you’d see at any MMA style fight, only more so. The entire thing is encased in a sphere of ensorcelled and warded chain link that keeps any magic from going out or coming in. More or less. It’s got some gaps.

The last thing the audience wants is to get flash-roasted from an errant fireball. The last thing the fighters want is the audience tossing random spells in to help their favorite.

The fighters come out onto the mat and it’s obvious that the guy who recently bulked up doesn’t know how to fight worth a damn. He’s running away from his opponent, blocking with weak shield spells, but he’s not engaging.

Then he gets close and throws out a palm strike that connects with his opponent’s chest, who immediately falls down limp onto the mat. Fight’s called, guy goes out on a stretcher.

At least, that’s what everybody else sees.

“Huh,” I say.

“You know what he did?” Alice says.

“Oh, yeah,” I say. “This happens every time?”

“One shot, guy goes down, doesn’t get back up again.”

“Yeah, they won’t. They’re all in comas now, right?”

“That’s been kept kinda quiet.”

“So, nobody’s connected them all together and looked at the one thing they had in common yet.”

“I’m not stupid,” Alice says, annoyed. “That’s why I asked you to come take a look. I think I know what he’s doing, but I need a professional opinion.”

“How long’s he been at it?”

“A month now? Maybe two. Noticed it the first week he was in the ring. I mean everybody else has, too, but all it’s done has shifted his odds.”

“And now his opponents’ odds are so bad that if a fighter bets on himself, he makes a fuck-ton of cash if he wins. Only he never does. You’re raking in cash on the backs of the desperate, ya know?”

“Well, duh,” Alice says. “Been my business model for a hundred years. Or it was. He was a hell of a draw. Still is. But he’s too good. He’s fucking with my bottom line. His odds are so high the payout sucks and nobody wants to bet on his opponents because everybody thinks they’re gonna lose.”

“Sounds like they’re right,” I say.

“They are. That’s the problem. I need him gone.”

“Ban him.”

“Tried it. The minute word got out that I might do that, everybody went all batshit. A lot of the folks down there watching, they’re getting off on this.”

“They don’t even know what he’s doing,” I say.

“They don’t care. They just like blood sports without all that messy blood.”

People are fucking weird, mages more so. I understand the thrill of watching a fight. It’s exciting, the energy’s infectious. But none of the people watching are aware that a murder is happening right before their eyes. If they did, they’d pay double to get in.

“I’ll go have a chat,” I say. “Don’t let him out of the building, and if any of your people see him, have them shoot him if he gets within twenty feet.”

“My people don’t carry guns,” she says.

“Might be time they did.”

* * *

The hangar has been partitioned into separate sections. The arena and seats, a set of locker rooms, showers, rudimentary medical—which is really just a closet with a bunch of first aid kits and a foldable stretcher.

The Pit has corridors made of the same ensorcelled chain link fencing leading to individual locker rooms. Each opens onto an octagonal corridor that rings the Pit and leads to a wide doorway that lets out next to the betting booth.

It doesn’t take long for me to find the right room. The fighter goes by the name Lightning Johnny. No idea what that’s all about. I didn’t see any lightning. Maybe Cold-Blooded Murderer Johnny was taken.

He’s standing at the sink staring into the mirror. I can see his lips moving in the reflection. Whatever he’s saying, they’re not his words.

From the door I can tell he’s definitely been enhanced through magic. It looks almost like one of those Halloween muscle suits but not as severe. There are bulges in unusual places that give it away, and he hasn’t gotten used to walking yet. Other than that, there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about him. Not quite six feet tall, red hair, light freckled skin. His skin is bright red from the fight, slick with sweat. For all that he’s shivering.

I go in and close the door behind me. The noise grabs his attention. He jerks around to face me but doesn’t say anything. He has prison tats, a couple of . . . I don’t know what the fuck they’re supposed to be. Really screwed up swastikas or Nazi SS symbols? One on each pec. The ensemble is completed with an 88 on his belly that looks like the artist was on too much meth at the time. Tats like that should get him into all the right parties.

But the thing that sticks out is his eyes. They can’t decide what color they’re supposed to be. Brown, blue, brown again. Shapes in his irises flow like clouds blown about by stormy winds.

“Nice fight out there tonight,” I say.

“Thanks,” he says. Distant, but at least he’s acknowledging me. The high must be wearing off.

“How many are you up to a week now?”

“Fights? Two, three. Hey, if you’re, like, a promoter, or something, I’m not interested.” He turns back to the mirror and ignores me.

“I get that,” I say. “You go pro, you’re gonna get a lot more scrutiny. Folks might start to put some things together. Maybe figure out what you’re really doing. Can’t have that.”

He turns back to me, startled as if seeing me there for the first time. “The fuck are you still doing here?”

“Having a conversation,” I say. “That’s all.” I don’t stop moving, just slowly walking toward him, hands at my sides, empty.

“Yeah, well, go fuck off. I’m not—”

“They’re like potato chips, aren’t they? Can’t eat just one. And the best part? Nobody knows what you’re doing.” He glances from me to the door and back. I can almost see the wheels turning in his head. “I don’t think you want to do that,” I say.

“What?”

“You think you can get through me and out of here. You won’t.”

“Who the fuck are you?” He starts to pull power in from the local pool of magic, but he’s not very good at it. He might not even realize he’s doing it. It’s like he’s an engine that can’t quite start.

“Nobody important,” I say. “Where’d you do your time? Corcoran?”

“If you don’t get the fuck out of here in ten seconds I’m gonna kick your ass.”

“That where it started? Prison? Stress can bring out latent talents.”

“I’m countin’, man. Ten.”

“Must have been easy there. You walk by, bump into somebody in the yard, and down he goes.”

“I ain’t killed nobody,” he says. “Nine.”

“Horseshit and you know it. They’re more dead than if you put a bullet in their brain.”

“Eight.”

“Bodies are just meat,” I say. “But souls are where the flavor’s at.” I’m about five feet away from him and he’s getting really nervous. He looks like he should be able to take me, but that’ll never happen.

“Seven, motherfucker.”

“How long have you been seeing the ghosts?”

Silence. “How do you know about that?” he says, his voice a terrified whisper.

“You thought you were going crazy. Nobody else could see them. And they’re everywhere. Fuck, a prison yard must be crawling with them. You saw them and they could see you. So you keep your head down, do your time, and when you get out it’s all phone psychics, carnival card readers, some weird guy in a dark room with a crystal ball. Not a one of them knew what the fuck they were talking about. That about right?”

“The fuck am I?”

“You’re a necromancer,” I say. “A really bad one. Not your fault, really. Your knack showed up too late and you only figured out one trick. But it’s a whopper. And stealing souls feels pretty fucking awesome, doesn’t it?”

“Shit, dude. It’s the best high I’ve ever had,” he says.

“Can’t stomach them myself. It’s like swallowing razorblades and puking up grenades. Kind of an acquired taste, I’ve heard. But see, once you got it, you want more and more and then I’m the guy who gets called to solve your problem.”

I see what he’s doing long before he tries it. He telegraphs too much. He throws himself at me as I step out of the way and he hits the floor. He scrambles to his feet. I put my hands in my pockets.

“Come on,” I say. “You can do better than that.”

He puts his arms out wide and tries to tackle me, but he’s too cumbersome and I’m out of his way before he can get close enough.

“Dude, I’m right here. I’m not even trying to fight you.”

“I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you.”

“Tell you what,” I say, stepping close. “Free shot. Go for it.” He gets his hand around my throat and does what he’s been doing in the ring for weeks. I can feel him going after my soul. I let him take hold of it.

Like a fish taking bait. Suddenly the energy reverses as I reel him in. I get under the spots where his soul attaches to his body and go through them like a crowbar through a windshield.

If he were much more powerful or knew more about his own magic, I wouldn’t be able to do this. But he’s young, untrained and stupid. His grip slackens and he tries to pull away, but now I’ve got my hands on him and I’m not letting go. He’d been pulling out souls in one quick yank. Messy. Left a lot of shreds behind. Just enough so the body keeps breathing.

This way’s cleaner, if you can call ripping a man’s soul out of his body like pulling off a sheet of toilet paper clean. I get the whole thing. His eyes roll up in the back of his head and his body hits the floor.

It’s always weird to me how souls, no matter who they belong to, look like thin gold and silver lace. They’re beautiful things even when they’re owned by monsters. I hold Johnny’s in my hand, feeling it struggle to move on.

Normally, it would drift off to wherever it’s supposed to go, and if I release it, that’s exactly what it’ll do. But who knows where that will be. I doubt any kind of Hell is waiting for him. Justice doesn’t exist in this universe.

The first few bars of NWA’s “Fuck tha Police” plays from my pocket. I don’t give my number to too many people and that ringtone is reserved for Letitia, a friend . . . -ish? Anyway, she’s a mage who stabbed me in high school. I don’t remember why, but I’m pretty sure I deserved it. I fish the phone out of my pocket and accept the call.

“Hey,” I say. “What’s up?”

“Got a situation could use your expertise,” she says.

“Messy?”

“Very,” she says. “You busy?” I close my hand into a fist, squeezing Lightning Johnny’s soul into a burst of heat that fades away to nothing.

“Nothing important,” I say. “Text me the address.”

Chapter 2

Who are you? Not your name, not your title, not your gender. All those are things about you, no matter how much you identify with them. But what makes you you?

Your memories. Everything you remember is a building block of your identity. They’re what sets you apart from everyone else. You can witness the same event with a thousand other people, but your experience of it isn’t going to be like anyone else’s.

Memory gives us context, meaning. Yesterday builds the foundation for today, which builds the foundation for tomorrow. Take away your memories and you stop being you.

What happens when you add some? What happens when you add a lot?

I am Eric Carter, necromancer, smart ass, maker of poor life choices. I looked into a god’s eyes as I murdered him.

I am Mictlantecuhtli, Aztec god of the dead, guardian of Mictlan, thousands of years old in one incarnation or another. I looked into a man’s eyes as he murdered me.

Eric Carter died about five years ago and took on the role of a god as part of a deal he . . . I? I can’t tell, anymore, struck with Mictecacihuatl, Santa Muerte, goddess of Mictlan.

Then somebody wanted Eric Carter back and performed a ritual to chip off a human-sized chunk of Mictlantecuhtli and dump it into a corpse.

I feel like I’m driving a badly abused but well-restored used car. A family heirloom, if you will. It’s my grandfather’s body. He’s one of the few people in my family tree who wasn’t cremated.

I’m a man, a god, my own grandfather. Who am I? What am I? It’s hard to deny my own humanity considering that I am, for all intents and purposes, human. But that’s just meat.

At the moment I’m some guy standing outside a small, five-story Art Deco building in the Downtown L.A. Broadway District wondering why I’m bothering doing people things: walking, breathing, existing.

The building’s been gutted and turned into lofts that’ll only set you back about fifteen thousand a month. Too close to Skid Row to be bougie, too close to Bunker Hill to be lowlife. Open plan, exposed pipes, beams, cement floor, walls that don’t meet the ceiling. It has its own parking lot on the first floor and a private elevator. Nice place if you can afford it.

I take the elevator up and get off on the penthouse floor. Door’s open. I let myself in. The décor’s different than you’d expect in a hipster hovel like this. Instead of paintings from some little art gallery in Silver Lake you’ve never heard of, the walls are covered in posters for a mage fighter named Fireball Freddy. A distant memory of the guy floats to the surface. Saw him fight once. Quite the asskicker.

It’s been a weird month since I’ve been back. Teasing out Eric Carter’s memories from Mictlantecuhtli’s. Considering Mictlantecuhtli spent the last five hundred years trapped in jade, you’d think it wouldn’t be that hard. Just pull out the last forty or so and you’re golden. But when all you can do is think, you do a lot of thinking.

Like, I have this irrational, to my mind, at least, hatred of the Spanish. The most I remember about Spain is a week I spent in Ibiza, and most of that is a drunken blur.

Mictlantecuhtli, however, saw his people enslaved and almost his entire pantheon wiped out. Those are clearly Mictlantecuhtli’s feelings. Still, I find myself feeling weirdly enraged anytime the subject comes up. Don’t even get me started on colonialism.

“Eric?” Letitia calls from one of the rooms.

All the Fireball Freddy memorabilia gives me an idea whose loft I’m in. I don’t know if Freddy ever fought at Quick Change Alice’s, though it’s a pretty good bet. A lot of good fighters cut their teeth in the Pit.

Freddy went professional and stayed at the top of his game for a good long while. He retired before he started losing. Living the rest of your life as an unbeatable legend is better than becoming an old man who got his ass kicked by some up-and-comer.

Being a pro, Freddy never killed anybody. Intentionally, at least. You really have to hold back. Even some amateur pit fights have that rule. Not Alice’s, of course.

It’s hard for a manager to build up somebody’s career if they’re just going to get ganked three fights in. You start murdering your opponents, you get dropped fast.

As I’m sure you can guess, Fireball Freddy’s signature move was the fireball. Turned them into an art form. He’d shoot these rapid fire, four-alarm nightmares that make the opening of Apocalypse Now look like a grease fire. Amazing he never cooked himself in the process.

But he sure as shit cooked his opponents. He didn’t kill, but if you went up against him it was a pretty good bet your career was over. He was big on disfiguring other fighters. Real bastard, that Freddy.

Folks knowing they might get their face melted off worked out pretty well for him. Guys would get in the ring and throw in the towel after he burned all the hair off the top of their heads.

So yeah, this is a nice place. With Letitia saying things were messy, I wasn’t really expecting a nice place.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I say, stepping into an equally nice bedroom with a walk-in closet, king-sized bed. The gutted corpse leaning against the corner wall, nailed upside down to a cross and wrapped in vines and duct tape is an interesting design choice.

“Bold statement,” I say. “Clashes a bit, but still makes it work. I’d love to talk to his decorator.”

He’s held in place with honest-to-god real thorn-covered vines. I didn’t think you could find them out here, but no, there they are. Wrapping around his forehead in a crown, around his waist as a belt, and around his ankles. I always use barbed wire myself. Easier to get hold of.

He’s been gutted from crotch to jaw, his insides pulled out, intestines hanging in front of his face like rope. From the way the blood is spread on the floor, bed, walls and ceiling, I’d say dude here was trussed up first and killed after. Big guy. Fully clothed. So he didn’t get hit in his sleep.

Funnily enough there’s blood spatter on the walls, which I would expect, but there are no gaps in it. No footprints, either. If a normal did this, they’d be soaked in the stuff. But that’s just an interesting detail. Simply the fact that somebody took this guy out tells me it was a mage.

If this is Fireball Freddy, likely, but hard to tell with his guts hanging in front of his face, he would not have been easy to take down in a fight. And if it is him, he never got a shot off with his signature move. There’s no charring on the wall.

“Yeah,” Letitia says. “We’re trying to get hold of them now. Dude, you look like hell.”

“I’m not sleeping great,” I say. Or at all. At least not for the last four days, or maybe it’s five. I’m running on caffeine, Adderall, and occasionally some cocaine just to mix it up.

Besides being a mage, Letitia’s an LAPD detective, but don’t hold that against her. It’s really more of a cover for what she spends most of her time doing. She’s part of a group called the Cleanup Crew. Sounds like what it is. They clean up magical shit to, hopefully, keep all the normals from realizing that there really is more to Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in their philosophy.

These days that’s a tall order. There’s a toxic fog of poisonous gas in South L.A. that hasn’t moved in over five years, for example, kept in place with magic so it doesn’t spread further and kill more people.

To say folks are suspicious is an understatement. But the Cleanup Crew does what it can with mage scientists and studies and conspiracy theories and a whole lot of feasible-sounding bullshit that nobody really buys, but nobody really knows how to explain otherwise, either. The Crew has been trying to figure out how to get rid of the fog without killing everyone left in Los Angeles ever since the god Quetzalcoatl blew up the industrial city of Vernon to send me a message.

“You doing all right?” she says.

“Peachy,” I say. “I don’t see any black-and-whites outside,” I say.

“This is Crew business,” she says. “At least for me it is.” She tilts her head toward the corner where I have totally missed a young blonde woman standing with her arms crossed and a grim face.

“For me it’s personal.” Amanda Werther. Letitia I was expecting. She’s the one who called me. Asked me to swing by to give her my professional opinion as a necromancer.

I know Amanda, but I don’t know much about her. We met last month under not-exactly-ideal circumstances. She’s the daughter of the man many think is the most powerful mage in Los Angeles. From what I hear she’s no slouch herself.

Pieces start connecting and though I don’t know why this has happened, I think I know why I’m here, and it’s not to give my professional opinion on necromancy.

“What exactly are you looking for from me?” I say.

“I wanted—” Letitia starts but Amanda cuts her off.

“Do you recognize him?” she blurts out. I can feel her drawing in power from the local pool of magic. Add that to what she’s probably already packing and somebody’s looking to be in a world of hurt. Possibly me.

I may not know Amanda well, but I do know she’s cool under fire. If she’s reacting like this, she’s off her game, which might sound like a ‘yeah, no shit,’ sort of observation, but any mage with her background has seen her share of dead bodies.

“Hard to say with his intestines in his face,” I say, ignoring her tapping the pool. I’m not sure she realizes she’s doing it. “But I’m guessing this is Fireball Freddy. Never met the guy. Saw him in New York once. Hell of a fighter. I don’t see any footprints in the blood so neither of you has actually gone over and looked, have you?”

“It’s pretty obvious how he died,” Amanda snaps. She is pissed.

“Yeah, but there’s a lot more than that going on here,” I say, turning to Letitia. “Kind of surprised you don’t have this one already zipped up.”

Mages kill each other all the time. We tend not to poke our heads into each other’s business unless it becomes a big enough issue for a large enough number of us. Otherwise the law of the land is pretty much whatever you can get away with.

“Tried to tell her, but she wanted to wait for you,” Letitia says. She doesn’t sound thrilled about it, and I can guess why. As the scion of the most powerful man in L.A., I’m thinking Amanda’s used to getting her way. Snapping out orders goes with the territory.

I gesture at the blood on the floor and the walls. “You got everything you need from all this?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Whatever you want to do, knock yourself out.”

“You might want to stand back,” I say. “I’ve been practicing, but this one’s kinda new.” This spell isn’t necromancy per se. Let’s call it necromancy-adjacent.

“Old dogs learning new tricks?” Letitia says.

“Give me a break,” I say. “I’ve only been alive for a month. Everything’s fucking new.”

I should have just been one more soul going to, well, wherever it is I would have gone to. But like I was saying, I’d made a deal with the Aztec goddess of death, Mictecacihuatl in her guise as Santa Muerte, to take the place of her dead husband and help rebuild Mictlan. We had a complicated relationship.

I went and did the death-god thing. And over time I sort of grew into the role. Literally. I was kind of a seed for the god. It was a good gig. I liked it. I was happy.

But nothing good lasts forever.

I step to the edge of the blood, put my hand out, and concentrate, shaping the spell in my mind. It’s something from Mictlantecuhtli’s memories. I know everything he did and how he did it. More or less. Thus my occasional existential issues.

The blood, dried and coagulated, suddenly turns liquid, the pool pulling in on itself like quicksilver bouncing across a table. The blood is drawn off the walls, the ceiling. Framed posters and lampshades jerk when the blood is yanked off of them.

Same for ol’ Fireball here. Every drop of blood, on his clothes, covering his face, even whatever he’s still got inside shoots toward me into a swirling mass about the size of a soccer ball. Soon it’s all spinning, clouds and eddies forming and breaking up.

Now this is the tough part. I’ve done manipulations like this, but they weren’t all liquid. This is the part where either I have it or the Cleanup Crew is going to have a lot more to clean up.

I squeeze my hand and the ball begins to shrink. Displaced water pours out as steam and the room begins to warm as the ball gets smaller and smaller. Over the space of a couple heartbeats, the loft feels like a sauna and I have a marble of compressed blood floating in front of me. I release the spell and the marble falls to the floor with a heavy thunk. I pick it up. Not bad. I put it in my pocket.

“When the hell did you learn how to do that?” Letitia says, opening a window. “Smells like burning metal.”

“Either last week or sometime in the third century,” I say. “Take your pick.”

That spell took a lot out of me and vertigo makes the room sway. I shake it off. It wasn’t that it was too much magic, it’s that it was something only a god should be doing.

I’m not sure how to explain it. The spells I’m remembering from Mictlantecuhtli aren’t for humans. They taste different. Metaphors for magic don’t really hold up. It has a taste, or a smell, or just a feeling, and it will be different everywhere you go. New York tastes like hammers and metal girders, Mexico City tastes of blood and dust, ancient and new.

Los Angeles is all over the place, all the different cultures and identities running through it like colored fabric through a braided rug, though it’s changed since I was here last, changed since the fires.

Mictlantecuhtli’s magic compared to human magic is like cooking with the same ingredients, but using a different recipe. Or, hell, maybe it’s like music. I don’t fucking know. Like I said, metaphors for magic don’t really hold up.

See, resurrecting me without Mictlantecuhtli would be like trying to unmix paint. Eric Carter and Mictlantecuhtli were all one big, swirling mass. So instead Mictlantecuhtli was summoned and shoved into a human corpse. A human body isn’t going to contain a god for very long. There’s just not enough room for the power.

When the body filled up, it got capped off, and the rest of Mictlantecuhtli went on its merry way, leaving me behind. I’m whatever parts of Eric Carter–Mictlantecuhtli will fit inside a human body.

And voila. A necromancer is born. Or reborn. With an extra helping of god sauce.

“Somebody wasn’t happy with this guy,” I say, “but I don’t think it was personal.” I walk across the floor to the grisly crucifix, bend down to get a closer look at the corpse. I pull a pen from my pocket and use it to lift the loop of now-desiccated intestines covering his face.

“Yeah, that’s Freddy, all right.” There’s that flare of magic again coming off of Amanda. See, with mages there are only a couple of ways we can tell there’s another one nearby: when we cast a spell, and when we pull in power from the local pool. Magic’s everywhere there are people, and a lot of places there aren’t, and a mage can tap it like a keg. Thing is, any other mage in the area will feel it.

“How about I answer the question you’re not asking?” I say. “No, I didn’t kill him.” Amanda looks at Letitia, who nods to her. She knows I’m telling the truth. “Also, you need to learn how to not show your hand, princess.”

“Excuse me?” Amanda says. Not just anger, but indignation.

“He’s right,” Letitia says. “You’re lit up like a fucking bonfire. If you’re really thinking of doing something with all that power, everybody in the surrounding dozen blocks will be ready for it.”

“I—Shit. Sorry. I’m not—Never mind.” I can feel the energy drop. “I’m sorry for thinking it was you.”

“Why? I’d be your first pick. If you didn’t hit me up thinking I’d done it, I’d have thought you were an idiot, and we all know you’re not an idiot.”

“Why are you saying it isn’t personal?” Amanda says.

“Not for him, it wasn’t,” I say. “This is all for your benefit.” Amanda turns a little green as she gets what I’m saying.

“It was staged,” Letitia says. She joins me over by the corpse looking it over. “Something immobilized him, and then he was tied up and gutted. This was for show.”

“Oh, fuck,” Amanda says.

“Tell me how close I get,” I say to Amanda. “You walk in here, see him like this, recognize that he’s been strung up for a necromantic ritual. You don’t know what kind. Since I’m the only necromancer in town that you know of, it stands to reason I might have done it. So, you call up Letitia and tell her there’s a mess the Crew needs to clean up and use her to bring me here so you can find out if I killed him. That about right?”

“Yes,” Amanda says, voice quiet. I can see where her brain is going. This is her fault. He’d be alive if it wasn’t for her. The first isn’t true, but the second one is. He would be alive if it weren’t for her, just like my sister, or my friend Alex, would be alive if it weren’t for me. Or the hundred-thousand people who died when Quetzalcoatl lit the fires that burned down Los Angeles. Doesn’t matter that we’re not the ones who pulled the trigger.

“Now I’m insulted,” Letitia says. “You used me to get to him.”

“I wasn’t lying,” Amanda says, suddenly defensive. To her credit, she doesn’t deny it.

“I know,” she says. “That just makes it worse. I didn’t catch it.”

“What’d she tell you?” I say.

“That there was a ritual you might know about and a mage corpse the Cleanup Crew should probably do something about. She didn’t lie.”

That’s where Letitia’s knack falls down. A skilled liar can get past her simply by not giving her all the information. It really works better with yes-or-no questions.

“Not like you had a reason to think she was,” I say.

“I’m right here,” Amanda says.

“Yeah, I’ll get to you in a minute.” The more I think about it, the more pissed I am. “What do you want to do?”

“Take her over my goddamn knee.” She turns to Amanda. “You don’t fucking do that. I don’t care who you are. You want my help, you fucking ask for my help. Don’t ever try to manipulate me. I barely know you other than your daddy’s a scary motherfucker. If you want to know how few fucks I give about that, go ask him about the time I ran him over with an F-150.”

Amanda is speechless. She’s processing all this and it looks like some of it is getting through. Mostly, though, she looks like a deer in the headlights.

“I . . . I am so sorry,” she says. “I didn’t think. I found the body and—no, there’s no excuse.”

“Damn right there isn’t,” Letitia says. She points at me. “You want to talk to him, just call him. I am not your go-between. I’ll have some people come to collect the body. It’ll take a few hours. I don’t want to see your overprivileged white ass here when I get back.”

We follow Letitia into the main room. She gets into the elevator, stabs a button, and glares at Amanda as the doors close.

“I am such an asshole,” Amanda says.

“You kinda are.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“What, you want me to lie to you?”

“No,” Amanda says.

“To be fair, she’s being kind of an asshole, too.”

“And you?” she says.

“I’m always an asshole.”

She flops into a leather club chair. She’s exhausted. She hid it pretty well, but now she’s letting it out. Probably doesn’t have the energy to hold it in anymore. Tears in her eyes are threatening to spill over and she’s holding them back by a supreme force of will.

“Is there another necromancer in L.A.?” she says.

“If there is, they didn’t do it,” I say. “That stunt back there wasn’t necromancy. It was more like a toddler drawing dinosaurs.”

“I don’t know necromancy,” she says. “But I know what some of the rituals look like. That looks like a necromantic ritual.”

“It was supposed to,” I say. “And it kinda is one. This one is to make the dead speak the truth. The thorny vines are okay, but they’re expensive and hard to get hold of. Barbed wire is easier. Duct tape’s definitely a thing I would use.”

“It sounds like they got everything right.”

“Except one big thing. Spell grabs whatever residual life energy is still in the body. You ask a question it knows the answer to and it tells you, provided there’s enough brain that hasn’t rotted.”

Amanda cocks her head. Now it’s a puzzle. She gets up and goes back into the bedroom. Whatever feelings she has on the situation have been shunted aside like she threw a switch.

“It wouldn’t work,” she says, pointing to the crotch-to-throat tear all his guts are hanging out of. “This wound tore through his diaphragm. His lungs couldn’t inflate, so there’d be no air to push past the vocal cords. He wouldn’t be able to talk. The entire ritual would be wasted.”

“Right. Though I suppose if you were a good upside-down lip reader it might kinda work.”

“Goddammit, Freddy,” she says. “I am so sorry.”

“Who would go to all this trouble to make you think I did this? And what was Freddy to you? Whoever did it wanted to get him off the board and tried to keep me from coming on. This thing stinks of politics. I don’t like politics.”

Mage politics. They’re like normal politics only with more assassinations and curses, and even bigger assholes. I hate it. I’ve tried to stay out of it. I knew it wasn’t going to last. I’m too visible. Have too much of a reputation. But I would have liked to be alive again for more than a month before getting roped into this shit.

Somebody’s trying to force my hand, or Amanda’s, or, fuck, I don’t know whose. Whatever’s going on, I don’t like it. I’ve been used as a pawn too many times already and it’s left friends and family dead.

“Otto,” she says. She stands up and faces me. The weariness is still there, but there’s a determination that she clearly gets from her old man. This woman’s made of iron. I’d feel sorry for whoever has pissed her off, but they’re at the top of my shit list now, too.

“Otto?”

“My cousin. Otto Werther. He’s trying to box me in. And he will unless—fuck, I don’t know why I’m even trying to fight this.”

“He seems to think I can do something to break you out of that box,” I say. “What’s this special help he thinks I can give you?”

“I need you to kill him for me.”

Chapter 3

The Nickel Diner is one of the holdovers from a bygone era. At least, the building’s been there a long time. It’s named not because anything on the menu’s a nickel, and by the way try the maple bacon donuts, they’re to die for, but because it’s on Fifth Street. Like that Tom Waits song about Skid Row, “On the Nickel.” A few blocks east is Skid Row proper, or what used to be. That whole area was the hardest hit when the firestorm ravaged the city. Too many dead to count. Too many ghosts.

We’re sitting in a corner booth at the back of the diner. Good sight lines and neither of our backs to a window. I can see the living walking the street, or driving by. They are heavily outnumbered by the dead.

I don’t put my back to windows because I’ve been shot through them enough times to be sick of plucking glass splinters out of bullet wounds.

Amanda’s excuse I can only guess at, but despite her social standing and her father’s power, or maybe because of it, it’s clear she’s walking around with a target on her back.

I don’t recall how old she is, but right now she’s wearing an oversized sweater, eating French fries dipped in a chocolate shake, and she looks impossibly young.

Outside the world is flooded with ghosts: Echoes, Haunts, and Wanderers. So many that the barrier between the dead side and the living gets thin in spots. In here there’s light and warmth and French fries and chocolate shakes. The world is a very strange place.

“When you got shot in that warehouse party,” I say. “How old were you?”

She stops, a fry halfway to her mouth. “Seventeen,” she says. “I’m twenty-three now.” When Quetzalcoatl set out to burn down L.A., he had a psychotic sicaria from Mexico with him to sow as much chaos as she could. Killed a lot of people. Got folks looking at me for the murders. That was fun.

She started with Amanda. Walked up to her in the middle of a warehouse party and blew her brains across the dance floor. At least that’s what everybody thought. But if you’re the scion of the most powerful mage in the city, you make damn sure you have some safeguards built in.

The ghost situation Downtown is better than it was, but I can still see some areas where ghosts might break through. And if that happens it’ll be a complete shitshow. Ghosts eat life. When I want something out of a ghost, I’ll bribe them with some fresh blood. A few drops is all it takes and it drains the life in nothing flat. Imagine what just one ghost can do if it slipped through.

Fortunately, that’s not too likely after I sealed a bunch of the holes about five years ago. Stay on this side of the veil and you’re fine. Slide over to the dead side, though, you better have your running shoes on. The Echoes aren’t a problem, they’re just recordings, the dead’s last moments played over and over again on a loop. Even Haunts aren’t too bad. They’re aware, more or less, but they’re stuck in one location. They’re pretty easy to outmaneuver.

But the Wanderers will fuck you up. You know that scene from every zombie movie ever where the horde runs at the camera? Yeah, that’s Wanderers. They’ll sense life from miles away and come running.

And there are a lot of Wanderers in Downtown.

“Was it actually you who got shot?” I say.

“Sort of? I can’t really go into detail. Not the first time it’s happened.”

“Fair enough. So, Cousin Otto. Seriously? Otto?”

“My father’s name is Attila,” she says. “Trust me, in my family Otto’s downright pedestrian. How much do you know about my family?”

“As little as I possibly can,” I say. “I try to stay out of the politics. Your dad tried to kill me once. He and my grandfather ran together back in the day. Oh, and he’s over two hundred years old. And I thought you and he were the only Werthers in the States.”

“We are. Otto’s based in Germany. He manages the family businesses in Western Europe with his brother Hans and my aunt Helga. Uncle Liam covers Scotland, Northern Ireland, and England down to Leeds. Ireland and Wales are under my aunt Siobhan.”

“Ambitious. What about the other mages in those areas?”

“Most of them leave us alone, but every couple weeks someone will try to move in on one of our territories. Sometimes they succeed, but not often. We’re really more likely to kill each other. We’re very good at that.”

“How many people are in your family?”

“Immediate family? A dozen or so, though only a handful are actually important. Overall, hundreds. Only the immediate family have any real ability, but even that’s pretty garden variety. Magic thins out the further out on the family tree you get.”

Something’s not adding up. “You and your dad are the only ones in North America,” I say.

“Americas in general,” she says. “It’s complicated. Like everything else about us isn’t. The rest of them aren’t allowed to set foot here without permission. After the fires when everyone thought I was dead a few decided to do exactly that. It wasn’t pretty.”

That’s one thing about her father I have to respect. He doesn’t fuck around. I’m still amazed how I managed to survive his coming after me a few years back.

“Yeah, I can believe that. But why?”

She’s thinking about how to answer that, chewing her lip and tapping the table with a finger. “Fuck it,” she says. “Dad’s a couple hundred years old. Every fifty, sixty years or so he figures, ‘hey, maybe I can have something resembling a normal life,’ like that’s ever been an option.” Things are starting to click into place.

“He’s had other kids,” I say. “They were all killed?”

“He’s been married twice before and had three other children,” she says. “I’m all that’s left. Not for lack of trying.”

“Jesus. And this is all because of your relatives?”

“Isn’t family great?”

“What about the other mage families? The Rochambeaus, the ‘Aumākuas? They haven’t had a hand in any of it? I know you’ve all been fighting.”