Devil's Business bl-4

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “You’re some big-shot badass where you come from,” Mayhew muttered. “I get that. But this isn’t London, and I’m not fucking impressed. I did what I had to do to get you here and put a stop to these murders. You don’t scare me.”

  That was the problem with losing your temper—you didn’t think beyond the violence, and now Jack had the choice of propping Mayhew back on his bar stool or beating the shit out of him, neither of which particularly filled him with joy.

  “Hey, man.” One of the hungover hipsters tapped him on the arm. “Gonna have to ask you to cut that out.”

  “Fuck off,” Jack said. “This ain’t your business.”

  “Actually, I think it is,” the git said. He flicked his sunglasses down, and Jack caught a flash of pure white eye.

  “Ah, shit,” he muttered.

  “You can leave now, or you can go through the wall,” the creature said. “Either way, let go of Ben.”

  Jack let Mayhew drop. He hadn’t clocked the creature coming through the door. Not human, not dead. That didn’t narrow it down a whole hell of a lot.

  “You let any sloppy drunkard who’ll deal with a demon into your pub?” Jack asked it. “Bad for business.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that.” The creature gripped Jack’s forearm. “I do know strangers busting in and starting fights isn’t something we allow. Now are you going to move, or do I move you?”

  The touch spread cold through his entire body, and Jack placed the sightless eyes and the pale corpse-colored skin. “All right, all right,” he told the wraith. “’M not here to cause you trouble.”

  He knocked open the door to the alley behind the bar, and stepped out, patting himself down for a cigarette.

  The wraith came after him, shutting the door. “Sorry about that. For what it’s worth, Mayhew had that coming, but nobody causes trouble in my bar.”

  “Your bar? Monsters Incorporated, is it?”

  The wraith shrugged its narrow shoulders. “Not a lot of safe havens for us. Even in this city.”

  “Might have something to do with the whole draining people of their blood and leaving them frozen to death bit,” Jack said. “Humans tend to get upset about that.”

  The wraith grinned. “You don’t seem to be afraid of me, Mr. Winter.”

  “Ah, my reputation precedes me,” Jack said. “Tell me, did it piss on the carpet or just pass out in the corner?”

  “Somebody like Jack Winter, the man who nearly ripped Europe in half over a pissing contest with necromancers,” the wraith said. “He lands in your city, you hear about it.”

  “Seems unfair,” Jack said. “You know me, but I don’t know you.”

  “People call me Sliver,” the wraith said. “I don’t have a name where I come from.”

  “Sliver.” Jack held out his hand. He didn’t relish touching the inhuman thing, but he also didn’t relish Sliver thinking he was some kind of racist prick. “Pleased to meet you, I suppose.”

  “Not surprised Mayhew’s mixed up with demons now,” Sliver said. “He always had his head up his ass in one way or another.”

  “Yeah, well,” Jack said. “My problem now, isn’t it?” Not that Belial had been any help at all. The demon loved being cryptic almost as much as he loved his poncey black suits.

  “You looking for his phantom killer?” Sliver chuckled. “I’ve heard that sad story so many times I could tell it myself.”

  “The demon thinks there’s something to it,” Jack muttered.

  “Yeah, well,” Sliver said. “That’s a demon for you.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “So you went ’round the pub, tried to beat seven colors of shit out of Mayhew, and wonder why this whole thing isn’t working in your favor?” Pete said. She sat crosslegged on the bed in Mayhew’s spare room, the photos from the case file spread around her.

  “It’s not my favor,” Jack muttered. “It’s not working at all.”

  “It’s a good thing I’m here,” Pete said. “Because you’re hopeless.” She held out a photo to him. “Look at this.”

  Jack took the photo, showing a back door bookended by blood spatter. A small dark rectangle in one corner was marked with a yellow ruler. “What am I looking at?” he said.

  “It’s a pet door,” Pete said. “The Cases had a dog, which was also never found.”

  Jack tossed the photo back into the pile. “The dog did it. Mystery solved in time for tea. Agatha Christie’s ghost should tongue-kiss me.”

  “You are such a bloody idiot, it’s amazing you can walk and talk at the same time,” Pete said. “Whatever came into those houses had a physical form, yeah?”

  Jack shrugged. “A poltergeist doesn’t usually hack women open.” Or steal their babies. Or get a Named demon of Hell in such a lather he was recruiting human mages to go after his mistakes, contract-killer style.

  “So, both of the houses had security systems,” Pete said. “On, and not compromised. Neither alarm company reported any pings the night of the murders.” She waved the photo. “This is the only way into the house that’s not alarmed.”

  Jack took the photo again. The door was small, undoubtedly for one of those miniscule, hairy yapping things that rich women carried in purses. “You’d have to be a fucking midget to get through that thing,” Jack said. “And I’ve seen a lot of strange shite in my time, but murderous demonic dwarves is stretching even my credulity.”

  “It’s a start,” Pete said. “There was a way in, and that means at some point, whoever did this had a body.” She gathered the photos into a stack. “If they have a body, somebody saw them.”

  Jack doubted that Belial’s boogeymen would let themselves be seen unless they wanted it, but Pete’s idea was better than any he’d managed to come up with. How he’d hunt these things—well, he wouldn’t. He’d leave them the fuck alone, like any sensible person. Something bad enough to spook Belial wasn’t anything he wanted to meet face to face. He couldn’t tell the demon to go fuck himself, for Pete’s sake, but neither did he have to toe the line like a good boy. Chances were, whatever Belial was after could be convinced to move along from Los Angeles if Jack offered not to snitch to the demon. Belial wasn’t the only one who could make deals.

  “The old crime scene’s address,” Pete said, waving one of Mayhew’s files. “Have a look around, talk to any neighbors that are still about—what do you say?”

  “Haven’t got a better idea.” Jack shrugged. “Let’s go to it.”

  CHAPTER 10

  The Cases’ home was in Westwood, a tony spot populated by shiny, beetlelike cars and nice-looking white people. The UCLA campus kept the bars along the main drag hopping, even at the late hour. Pete rolled slowly with the ever-present molasseslike slog of traffic, guiding the Fury onto side streets, along a row of gates and low-hanging trees. Each home was more brightly spotlit than the last, security systems gleaming like the metal teeth of cybernetic dogs. Look, the neighborhood whispered, but don’t think you can ever be a part of what’s behind these gates.

  The Cases’ home was dark, and an estate agent’s sign sat crookedly on the fence, faded by sun and wind.

  Jack wasn’t surprised—even if you weren’t psychic, who wanted to live in a murder house? The Black had an effect on mundane sorts, too, except they wrote it off to “intuition,” or bad dreams, or Jesus appearing in their cereal.

  Pete eased the Fury to the curb and shut off the lights. Jack got out and examined the gate. The alarm was a good one, but the estate agent’s key box gave him an in. He passed his fingers across the slot and whispered a few words of persuasion he’d picked up long ago, when his talent was primarily aimed at breaking into places and nicking things. The box popped, and he found the alarm code and a front door key in his palm.

  Locks were his faithful lady—he and locks understood one another, and they understood his talent. Now if he could just get his sight to mind, he’d be ahead of the game. But you were never really ahead—look over your shoulder and you�
�d see the hounds snapping at your heels.

  Sprinklers hissed on as he and Pete crested the walk, wafting the scent of something sweet and earthbound through the air. The Case house wasn’t a screaming void like the Herreras’, but there was a dome of oppressive air over the low, rambling stucco palace, a prick of chill in the warm night that warned anyone with a modicum of talent to turn the fuck around and run.

  Pete wriggled her shoulders inside her cotton jacket. “Spooky, isn’t it?” she said.

  “That’s one word for it,” Jack said. He tried the key, and after a bit of a struggle the door popped open. The air inside was stale, recycled by central air. The crime scene cleaners had done a good job of scrubbing blood out of the marble entry, but it wavered as silver film on Jack’s sight, luminous over the walls and floors.

  He let the silver streaks guide them, through a media room with a giant blank screen taking up an entire wall, and into a kitchen roughly the size of two of his flat back to back. The pain and misery were much more ingrained here, in the walls and wood and bones of the house. Nobody who lived here would ever feel truly settled again.

  The largest streak of psychic residue lay across the counters and floor, a great swath where Mrs. Case had met her end.

  “There’s the pet door,” Pete said. The door led to a patio, which ended at a swimming pool lit from beneath the water. With Jack’s sight, the water turned black and bottomless, the light shading to orange and then red. A trail wandered from the back fence, across the patio, to the door, and when he looked it was gone.

  Jack blinked. Something that could erase its psychic trail—that sounded like the sort of thing Belial was after. He took a breath in, and let his sight open up, and allowed the oppressive atmosphere of the murder house to overwhelm him.

  He saw the blood, saw the wavering lines of pain from where the Case woman and her child had lain in their last moments, but he shoved it aside like cobwebs. The trail wavered, through the pet door and across the tiles, stopping over the silvery pool of spectral blood.

  It blinked in and out, a line of white little more than smoke, curling and wavering back on itself. Jack tried to focus his eyes, but doing so produced the familiar spike between his eyes. Look too hard, and the sight would pulverize the parts of his brain that he cared about, leaving him a turnip with interesting dreams.

  Just a little more, he begged. The smoke wafted over the back wall of the Case house, down into the light-studded blackness of a canyon. Jack heard a faint whisper, nothing he could make out, and then his sight flared, the smoke twirling into a spiral, swirling around him and down his throat, choking him.

  He came back to himself to find that his nose was dripping blood, gleaming black droplets on the Cases’ countertop. Pete sighed and wiped it up with her sleeve. “You think you could manage not to leave your DNA all over everything, genius?”

  “Sorry,” he muttered. For the moment, he left aside thinking about what could set a trap for any psychic who might try to follow it, keep it on for years after the fact, and burn out every trace of its presence. Right then, breathing was enough of a headache. “You were right,” he told Pete.

  “What is it?” Pete said. Jack thought about the smoke, trailing through his sinuses, burning with that ashes-and-dust scent that he recognized from his dreams. The scent of the wind in Hell. Belial’s missing nightmare was definitely the nasty git who’d hacked up the Case family.

  Jack rubbed his forehead. His headache in the morning was going to be a thing of epics. “Something that doesn’t appreciate me sniffing after it, that much is certain.”

  The creature had done a good job—it had left only a burn scar on the Black around the Case house. Nothing Jack could probe further, unless he relished his brain leaking out. But it hadn’t disappeared into thin air. It was a thing, with a form and a body, a thing that had to hide its passage, because otherwise any psychic worth his bad dreams would know it for what it was.

  Pete tensed as a car passed on the street, headlights sweeping down the hall from the foyer. “Our luck’s probably up,” she said. “We should get out of here.”

  Jack waited until he was back in the Fury to punch the dash, leaving a crack in the veneer.

  “Oi!” Pete said. “I have to return this in pristine condition, you know.”

  “Yeah, yeah, my fault,” Jack muttered. “You can tell Sal that Christine did it.”

  “What’s your problem all of a sudden?” Pete demanded. “Throwing a tantrum isn’t going to get anything done.”

  His knuckles were bleeding, and Jack swiped them against his jeans. Pete made a fair point. “With a ghost or a demon, I can track it or summon it, find its true name and compel it to appear. But all I’ve got now is ashes.” Belial’s boogeyman thought it was smarter than him, and Jack didn’t like creatures that thought that.

  “I’m just a little frustrated, and I very much want to nail this bastard to the wall and be free to be on my way,” he told Pete.

  “We, you mean,” Pete said. “Belial can act like I’m some shrinking flower, but I made that deal and this is as much my mess as yours.” She started the Fury with a rumble and pulled away. “We’ll nail him, and then you can go right back to your sordid little magic lifestyle and we’ll no longer be a bother for you.”

  “You know it won’t matter if I give it all up,” Jack said quietly. “Something will still come knocking.” He wished he could force Pete to believe him, by screaming or shaking her or any other way, but he couldn’t, and trying to do so now was just burning daylight he could be using to finish Belial’s latest exercise in ant-farm sadism.

  So he stayed quiet, and she stayed quiet, and things went on exactly as they’d been for months. Pete drove for a bit, until Jack couldn’t take the confined space and the wanting of a cigarette any longer. “Let me out here, yeah?” he asked Pete. She braked and gave him a stare.

  “Why?”

  “Need to walk a bit,” Jack said.

  “Right,” Pete said, but she let him get out of the car without anything further. “See you back at Mayhew’s?” she called.

  “Maybe,” Jack said. Dealing with Mayhew again was somewhere on his list of activities after letting a ferret chew on his balls, but he didn’t want to give Pete more problems.

  She followed him for a few feet before pulling back into traffic. Jack stopped on a corner and lit a cigarette. He was on Hollywood Boulevard, near an on-ramp to the 101 freeway. At night, the low cinderblock buildings were mostly dark and gated. A pair of hobos dozed in a doorway, cradling their paper-wrapped bottles close. “Hey, brother,” one said. “How about a few bucks?”

  “Sorry,” Jack told him. “Not from around here.”

  “Then how ’bout a smoke?” the other said. Jack sighed and handed over the rest of his pack.

  “God bless you,” the hobo said, snaking the fags inside his jacket faster than a stage magician.

  “He’s got fuck-all to do with this, hasn’t he?” Jack said, walking on. He clocked the shadow half a block down, along a dark section of unoccupied storefront. Cars swooped past, but the streetlamp above was burnt out, creating a slice of dark perfect to pull someone close and stick a knife in their kidney.

  Jack slowed his steps a little at a time, then stopped and dropped his cigarette, crushing it under the toe of his boot.

  The shadow was silent, just a ripple in the psychic airflow, but it was there, hanging back and taking its time. Jack spread his arms. “I haven’t got all night,” he said. “Come on out, then.”

  Sliver melted from the shadow of the storefront. “They said you were good. That’s just spooky, though.”

  “Says the shadow-walking wraith to the mage with bad knees,” Jack said. “’M not that good. Maybe you’re just crap at this spy gig, you ever think of that?”

  Sliver looked at his feet. “I wasn’t going to actually kill you.”

  “What a comfort,” Jack said. He didn’t try to throw a curse on the wraith. That would only slag
Sliver off. He could turn tail and run, or cut down the alley to the next street, but if a wraith really wanted to catch up with you, it could have a hand inside your ribcage before you could draw your last breath.

  “This is all Mayhew’s fault,” Sliver said. “He brought you here.”

  “Yeah, it was pretty fucking convenient that you wanted to be my best friend back at your bar,” Jack said. “But I thought maybe you just fancied me.”

  Sliver looked up and down Hollywood Boulevard, studying each pool of light and neon sign, silver eyes reflecting like pools of oil. “I don’t know who wants you dead, Jack, but they reached out.”

  “Lots of folks want that,” Jack said. “Too many to list.”

  “Nobody has that kind of influence in this city,” Sliver said. “Not anyone who followed you. But these people do. They’re tossing around threats and cash like it’s Mardi Gras.”

  “How mysterious,” Jack said. Sliver fell into step beside him when he started walking again.

  “I was just keeping an eye on you,” the wraith said. “There’s a lot of mean and hungry bastards in this city who wouldn’t think twice about erasing you for the kind of things these dudes are offering.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time I banged a stick against somebody’s cage,” Jack shrugged.

  Sliver blended with the shadows for a moment, then reemerged. “You need to watch your ass,” he said. “This isn’t merry England. The Black here, this is the Wild fucking West. And you’re stomping around in those big boots of yours across the top of everyone’s bridge.”

  Jack thought about what Pete’s father, a detective inspector with bad lungs and a worse temper, had once told her. “When somebody tries to kill you, means you’re getting somewhere,” Jack said to Sliver.

  “And are you?” the wraith said. “Getting anywhere?”