by Rowan Casey
"No."
"Then this is the blade I seek. Send me a questing."
"Carnwenhau waits where time runs at its own speed and man is always running to catch up," the old druid said, which was as close to some deeply portentous off a-questing the brave knight did go. I looked at my watch. I had a little under two hours ‘til sunset. And maybe six more until the sun went down on me.
I could have hit some fancy plastic surgeon over on Rodeo Drive, and put down my life’s savings to go under the knife, but for two things, one, the odds of even the most famous plastic surgeon to the stars wielding a mystical sigil cutting scalpel were slim, and two, my life savings were unlikely to cover the cost of an hour with the therapist I was going to need if I found a way out of this mess.
Grimm told me where to start looking, at least. The choice was Westwood to Union Station, which was sixteen miles through central traffic, or Griffith Observatory, which was twenty-two miles though the 405, up Sunset to Cahuenga, with potential for a food stop on the way given all of the fast food joints lining the side of the road.
I killed the call and headed down to my trusty steed. I kept the Colt close by, just in case. I figured a lot of what I was doing here was reacting, which meant it was probably predictable, and if it was predictable, then Holm could work out where I was going next and how I was going to try to thwart him, so having a little bonus firepower wouldn’t hurt–even if he could climb inside my mind and stop me from actually pulling the trigger. That was going to be a serious problem at some stage. For half-a-second, I wondered if a tinfoil hat might be the answer, and even before I could laugh, the old man’s mix tape offered up an answer all of its own, Black moaning in that deeply depressive baritone that it was a wonderful, wonderful life, which about summed up my feeling now I was about to lose it.
I drove as fast as the streets would allow, which given the hour was somewhere between a crawl and a dead stop. I was glad I had a couple of hours, because despite the relative nearness of the observatory, without a motorbike or a helicopter I wasn’t getting there in anything like the hour Google Maps suggested.
I couldn’t help but wonder what Grimm was up to, and more importantly what Holm and his psycho PA were up to right now, and how I was supposed to counter it, whatever it was, when I was always two steps behind and running to play catch up. The only positive as far as I could see was that it all came back to Evienne’s enchanted garden Never Happened party. Holm was going to use that bacchanalian orgy of the flesh to sacrifice whatever star it was she’d flown in especially for the fuckfest–and if those sigils were like batteries storing the kind of power that would be needed to tear down the veil to the Demimonde we were talking some serious kilowatts, meaning he was one bright shining star–it was going to go down after dark. She’d hired me to hunt Holm, but she’d already known exactly who and what he was. The notion of him working for her wasn’t so far-fetched but keep thinking like that and you start to see enemies in every shadow. Sometimes you just have to trust that you are on the path of the righteous, and your Mentor on the journey isn’t some twisted cow of a goddess.
But I didn’t like the way Evienne was at the center of this web. The woman gave me the creeps. She was dodgy. Everyone knew that. She was worse than Heidi Fleiss and those old school Hollywood madams: she was far more ruthless and held the secrets of every rising star and fading one just as tightly. I wouldn’t have put it past her to have Holm working as some sort of bag man, clearing up the messes she didn’t like from her parties. But, being ruthless about what I could allow room in my head right now, that was a problem for a few hours’ time, not for right here, right now.
12
There were other cars parked in the lot as I pulled into the visitor’s parking lot at the bottom of the hill. I could see the white dome of the observatory up on the hill, and, as I ran up the asphalt path, the golden gleaming dome of the most famous sundial in California.
Visitors looked at the mad man running up the hill. I could see the moment’s hesitation as they wondered if I was a terrorist or cop, and if there was bomb at the top of the hill–that’s how screwed up the psyche of LA has become. I didn’t care about any of them. I only had eyes for the lowering sun, and forced myself to run, Forest, run, as the heat burned in my lungs. I had no idea how far it is even in the failing afternoon heat from the visitor’s lot to the sundial, but that half a mile felt like five hundred with the Proclaimers ringing in my ears with the promise of five hundred more to come.
It’s not like I could look at my watch and know ah, in twenty-six seconds it will be officially sunset. All I could do was run and hope I got there in time to work out how I was supposed to reach into the shadow realm and pull out white hilt.
No problem.
Ish.
That ish is becoming my least favorite word.
I reached the huge metal globe that was the sundial, which, to be horribly blunt looked like two giant dildos piercing either side of an even more gigantic hole. I didn’t know if I was supposed to grab the dildos or rather slip an arm in through the hole. I saw the shadow creep across the brass plate that was the clock laid out beneath the weirdly phallic sundial, and decided to grasp the problem by the two rather spectacular horns…
Grimm had talked about power and about righteous souls. I figured I was 0 for 2. I didn’t have any words of magic. I wasn’t like some cartoon Disney version of Arthur pulling a sword from a stone, either. I hadn’t thought any of this through. I mean how do you make a dagger lost in the shadow realm suddenly manifest in your hand when you have maybe sixty seconds of pure sunset to conjure it forth?
Yeah. Really hadn’t thought it through.
And the clock was ticking.
I tried to picture it in my mind, but all I could actually remember about Carnwenhau was the mess it had made cleaving through the witch. I mean it had bitten clean through her vertebrae, meat, bone, it didn’t matter. The edge was honed to such a fine cut it could have sheered through lesser blades, and it was imbued with the magic of another world. It was special. But whenever I thought of it, all I could picture was the witch’s blood. So I tried calling its name instead, "Carnwenhau. Come to me." But I felt like a total prick talking to myself in the middle of one of the main tourist attractions. Still, I forced myself to focus, staring into the creeping shadow and knowing I only had seconds left before any weakness closed and it was lost to me for at least twelve more hours, meaning forever. "Carnwenhau," I said again, more forcefully this time, like I was commanding it, not requesting it.
And I felt a tingle. A ripple. A thrill.
It was all I could do not to recoil, but rather tighten my grip on the weird dildo-like blade that cast the shadow, and slowly and steadily draw back on it, pulling the shadow blade out of the shadow realm. The white hilt burned fever hot. So hot I couldn’t hold onto it. I dropped it even before it was all the way free of the shadows, and it clattered on the brass plate of the clock, searing the time of its return forever onto the sundial’s face.
I looked down at the dagger before me, with its white hilt pointing toward my hand. "Come, Carnwenhau, let me clutch thee," I said, grasping the hilt with a lot more success than the cursed Scotsman when he made his decision to kill his king. But then Jonas Holm was no king of mine.
I turned it in my hand, to the left and the right to offer both sides of the blade up to the last of the sun’s rays. This was it. My chance. But I really didn’t want to cut myself. It was one thing to think about it in the abstract but holding the otherworldly weapon in my hand, it was suddenly a whole lot less abstract.
I needed to go somewhere private, with a mirror, to cut myself. Not something I expected to say when I woke up this morning for the second time.
I didn’t want to drive all the way back to Westwood to do it in the comfort of my own four walls, and I was hungry, so I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone. There was an In and Out Burger back in the direction of La Brea I’d seen this morning. Who can resist
a restaurant with a special hidden menu? Not I, that’s who. Especially when you can finish your order with the classic words, "Animal Style."
The condemned man ate a hearty four-by-four animal style, and washed it down with enough Coke to purge my bladder for a week, then I went to the washroom and stared at myself in the bathroom mirror for a full minute before I opened my shirt.
The scars were a mess.
I couldn’t decipher the pattern of sworls Holm had carved into me, but there was no denying the fact that his workmanship was solid, and the sigil itself was a work of art. I could have stared at it for an hour and not worked out every little intricacy of the knife. It was as though he had carved out an entire spiral galaxy in my skin.
I rested the tip against the left pectoral nebula and drew Carnwenhau’s blade down, deep enough to slice into the muscle.
The pain of it was incredible.
I howled, and instantly regretted it, knowing my screams would draw someone from the dining room–probably some poor bastard in the In and Out uniform who wasn’t paid anywhere near enough to deal with the shit I was about to dump on them–but I couldn’t stop. I needed to utterly destroy the sigil, which meant unmaking it. And without the skill of the original enchanter all I could think to do was vandalize my flesh. Which meant scoring the knife down my chest again, hand shaking as I made sure Carnwenhau’s tip sliced through each and every line Holm had carved out, deep enough to ruin the sigil, and, I hoped, save me from a fate worse than death.
The door opened, and the fry cook stared and me, seeing the blood pouring down my chest and the knife in my hand. The first thing he did was look for a second attacker, and realizing I was on my own in there held up his hands to placate me, probably worried I’d turn the knife on him.
"Is everything okay, sir?"
"Does it look okay?" I said, a little more bluntly than was fair.
"That would be a no," the kid said without skipping a beat. Good for him.
"That’s because it isn’t," I peered at the name on his badge. "Dion. This morning I woke up dead, well technically the dying part’s not happened yet, but we’re getting to it. Then I was hired to hunt a psycho serial killer whose got a thing for young actors and actresses, hired by a madam, no less, then I pissed on the serial killer’s bed, and he carved the crab nebula into my gut…so no, everything is not okay. But it’s getting there, because I’ve got myself a magic knife."
"That’s good, sir. That’s great." He backed up out of the door, eager to get the fuck away from my crazy. "I’ll be out here if you need anything."
"You’re a smart kid, Dion."
The door swung shut and I was alone again, naturally.
I needed to make myself pretty because I had a party to go to and a psycho to kill.
13
I was bleeding through my brand-new shirt as I walked into the enchanted garden. It wasn’t a good look. Thankfully it wasn’t an expensive shirt. I’d stopped in at Goodwill on the way to Sunset. I figured given I was only going to be needing it for a couple of hours I didn’t need to spend a small fortune on looking good. Of course, I’d kinda spaced on the whole ‘this is the shirt I die in’ thing and my mind was running riot with ‘I see dead people’ images of me wearing the same cheap bloody second-hand shirt for all eternity. I should have thought it through.
I was met at the door by a butterfly girl, or a fairy, I’m not really sure which look she was going for. She had gauzy wings on her bare back. I couldn’t work out how they were attached. The effect was good, and with her raven black hair she carried off the waifish look pretty well. She steered me though the earliest arrivals towards the madam’s cabana. The garden was prettier at night, with Chinese lanterns strung up across the pool area to offer soft lighting. It wouldn’t do to throw things into stark relief; no Hollywood star, rising or fading, wants to be reminded of real life things like cellulite and zits.
I felt the Colt pressing into my spine, hidden away beneath the new shirt. I fully intended to use it before the night was out, ideally on Holm.
"Still alive, I see?" she said, as the butterfly girl delivered me.
"Not for want of trying," I said. "So how about you tell me the truth this time?"
"Truth?"
"You know the bright shiny thing every church is convinced they’ve found?"
"If they’ve all found it, and they’ve all found different things, can there ever be a subjective truth?"
"How about we keep it simple, why did you feed me to Holm?"
"What makes you think that?"
"He sure as hell knew I was coming," I said, not mentioning the whole breaking into his Beverly Hills mansion and pissing on his bed.
"But that doesn’t mean the knowledge came from here. I told you, he has been torturing and murdering my pretty ones. I can’t let that happen. All I wanted you to do was keep him away from the party tonight so that my special guest doesn’t end up going back to New York in a box."
"See, I don’t think that’s particularly truth, or at least not all of it. Sure, you may well be protecting some superstar, but there have been enough bodies along the way, all of them prepared in some way to act as vessels for creatures from the Demimonde–oh yeah I know about that whole thing, and I know you know who I was, that’s why you picked me. You wanted to wake me up, just like Grimm. And the one thing I know about this new life is that everyone in this day and age has an angle. I’m trying to work yours out. Because I don’t for a minute buy that it is concern for dead hopefuls who have come into LA all bright eyed and bushy tailed from Buttfuck Alabama chasing the dream, because if that were true you’d have found me ten victims ago. There’s more going on here. We both know it."
"I’m sure there is," she said sweetly.
A minx crossed the wet paving stones around the pool, bringing two colorful cocktails with her on a silver tray. Evienne took one and expected me to take the other. She sipped at hers. I took the little paper umbrella out and stuck it behind my ear.
"Here’s to you," she said.
I felt like a bit of an idiot sipping through the straw, but when in a perverted orgy of sex, drugs, and drink, do as the perverted revelers do with their sex, drugs, and froo-froo drinks, I guess.
"He’s going to come tonight?"
"I’m guessing a lot of people are, more than once," I said.
"That’s not what I meant."
"I know. And yes. He is. Like you guessed, he knows your superstar is coming and he’s intending on using him like some form of sacrifice to build up …I dunno...magic, I guess, for want of a better word."
"There is no better word for Maleagent. He is an incubus. He feeds off the devotion of the world. It doesn’t just have to be sex, you understand, as potent and heady as sex magic is, all forms of adoration give him strength."
"Hence the draw to Hollywood where we make new gods and goddesses to worship every single day."
"Yes," she said. "Exactly that. And he has been getting stronger for years now, culminating in congress of award season where he was feted by the world for his genius. That was better than any mere fuck could be. It elevated him."
"And you knew what he was?"
"I had my suspicions. We get all sorts here, and over the last few years some stranger pleasure seekers have turned up in the garden, Jonas Holm among them."
"Just how dangerous is he?"
"Plenty," she said. "You should know. You faced him."
I didn’t need reminding how it felt to lose control of my own body and be at the mercy of whatever movie Holm wanted to direct me into being the fall guy of. It was, and I’ve been trying to avoid the word because I know all of the weight that comes with it, a form of rape. And no amount of scrubbing was going to get my mind clear of his invasion.
I really didn’t want to think about it.
She pointed at my shirt, "You don’t look good."
"I would say you should see the other guy, but, well, you already know."
I didn’t open
my shirt to show the sigils. I didn’t want anyone knowing I’d found a way to destroy them. That was my ace up my sleeve. Worst case I still died here tonight, but our boy wasn’t using me to host some demon spawn, or power his magical gate. And maybe, just maybe, my dying with the wrong sigils would screw up his whole portal to another world crap and save us all from his demons. I could only hope.
"I need to know one thing, angle wise. Are you on the side of the angels?"
"Assuming you consider yourself an angel?"
"Least angelic soul in the place, and what I’m intending to do tonight will almost certainly seal my place in hell. I just want to know if you’re one of the good guys."
"Would you know if I lied to you?"
"I’d like to think so," I said. "I’ve got a pretty good bullshit detector."
She looked at me, really looked, and for a moment it felt like I was looking into the black eyes of a hurricane, but I felt something, a connection, barriers coming down, and saw all the way into her. "I am doing the right thing," she told me, and she absolutely believed it, which was good enough for me.
"So I can count on you, no matter what happens?"
"You have my word," she said, as solemn a vow as I had ever heard in this life or the other ones.
"I am going to kill him," I promised her.
"I know you are," she said, and again it felt like she was saying this stuff from experience, not hope. I couldn’t shake that feeling that she, like Grimm, knew I’d done this all before. But what did that mean?
More revelers had begun to enter the garden. I needed to think this through. There were a lot of private villas where the players would, I assumed, go to swap fluids, and do their things rather than get their freak on in the main pool area. I could, in theory, bait a trap and make sure the right kind of victim brought Holm to me in one of them. That would probably be the easiest way to do it, but even as it occurred me, Evienne took a feathered mask from the table that I hadn’t seen and donned it. When I looked around everyone wore them. Some were incredible and seemed almost real. I saw wolves and foxes and rubber masked politicians, though I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to get their freak on with that coiffured mess hunched over them. But maybe that was the fun? The guy in the mask did a passable impression: I heard him saying he could grab any pussy he wanted, and the guy beside him said, "Correction," and took the guy’s hand and put it on his groot. And boy did that little wooden fella dance.
