The thing wrapped the baby in Mrs. Case’s bathrobe while it squalled, setting it almost gently on the tile floor, and then stood over Mrs. Case while she stared at it, her eyes glassy and fixed.
“Consider us squared,” it said, and then leaned down and jabbed the knife into the hollow of Mrs. Case’s throat, twisting until blood flowed in small rivers down her neck. Her body was a ruin, and she lasted not even one more sucking breath before she went still.
The thing picked up the baby, and Jack waited. He’d been prepared for a dead kid, something small that could be left in a canyon for coyotes and other scavengers to devour. He’d been prepared for the sort of thing that considered child-flesh a rarified taste, or your basic sick human bastard who got his rocks off on killing a mother and her unborn baby.
But if it was keeping the child alive, that opened up a host of worse things. There were far blacker fates for children who stayed alive in the grasp of something like this creature. Jack felt his stomach knot, even though he didn’t really have a stomach in the vision. He was at the end—the smoke was wearing off and soon he’d be back, vomiting his guts into the Cases’ kitchen sink.
He tried to follow the thing, but the cold-water feeling was still there, and every step was agony.
At the door, the thing turned back to Jack, and locked eyes with him for the first time. “I see you,” it rasped. “But you don’t see me. Not really. You don’t have any idea what I am.” It laughed, and Jack couldn’t do a damn thing. He watched the creature, with the Cases’ child, disappear back over the wall. It laughed the entire time.
The eyes were bottomless. Demons riding human bodies had glassy, flat eyes—dead man’s eyes. These were alive, horribly so, a forest fire ravaging its human shell.
I see you.
A tremor went through Jack, unbidden, as he started to back himself off the vision, shut down the ebb and flow of the Black that washed across his mind, and try and make reentry into the real world.
They were just echoes, a memory that lived and breathed. The creature couldn’t see Jack any more than he could reach out and touch it, ten years past. Couldn’t. But had.
“Jack?”
Pete helped him sit up, and Jack tried to push down the wave of nausea. He’d managed to shoot smack for close to a dozen years without puking on everything. He could handle one bad trip.
“Fuck,” he said. His head was throbbing like a skinhead had taken a brick to it, and his upper lip was slick with cooled blood. The echos still vibrated in the Case house, like listening to faraway klaxons.
“You all right?” Pete handed him a wad of paper towels, and Jack shoved it under his nose.
“’M fine.” It came out muffled. His tongue was thick and dry from inhaling the smoke, and his chest felt like he had sucked down a tongue of flame.
“You’re a blood-coated mess, is what you are,” Pete said. She dumped the herbs from the pot into the sink and ran water on them.
“I’m a blood-coated mess who saw some real interesting stuff while he was under,” Jack said. The sky outside was creeping toward pink-gray, and he rubbed his face. “How long was I under?”
“A while,” Pete said. “I think we should go. Been here long enough to make people suspicious.”
Jack collected his kit and shoved it back into his sack, then followed Pete out the front door. On the sidewalk, a female jogger wearing tight hot pink leggings slowed down to stare at them. Jack nodded and flashed her a smile. “Morning, luv.”
She didn’t return it, but she sped up again and didn’t reach for her mobile to call the police down on the freakish British axe murderer squatting in the vacant mansion next door.
Jack watched her pert pink ass bounce away around the corner, and then tossed his kit into the back seat of the Fury. “Can we get some breakfast? I’m knackered.”
“Yeah, and I’m constantly starved,” Pete said. “Always thought that eating for two was crap, but I’d lick the paint off the bloody car, at the moment.”
They drove south along the 405 freeway. Traffic was already packed in, but it moved, and Pete jumped off near Venice. Jack saw the black sport utility vehicle come behind them, neither too close nor too far away, lights off even though it was barely light enough to read street signs.
“Pete,” he said, and pointed into his side mirror.
“Yeah,” she said after a moment. “I see ’em.”
The van followed them through a pair of turns and onto Venice Beach Boulevard, the only light coming from a coffee stand. Nobody was on the street except for dozing bums. No witnesses to bother whoever was following them around.
“All right,” Pete said. “Hold on.” She jerked the wheel and the Fury fishtailed onto a side street, laying a thick strip of rubber.
Jack slammed against the passenger door. The handle caught him sharply in the ribs, and he grabbed it to avoid being tossed around like a doll.
The SUV came screeching after them, and Pete cursed. “They know what they’re doing. And I don’t know these fucking streets.”
In London, Pete would be able to lose a tail, either in the maze of pre-automobile streets in the city center or in the myriad one-way roads of Hampstead. Here, though, she wasn’t able to shake the black car. Jack winced as the Fury nipped a curb, undercarriage scraping.
“Slow down up here,” he said, as Pete steered them into a back alley behind a row of bungalows. She gripped the wheel, knuckles pale.
“What are you going to do?”
“Just don’t worry about me,” Jack told her. “I’ll be fine.”
“Jack…” she started, but he shoved open the door and dropped out, pavement rushing up.
The trick was to let yourself fall—ball up your head to protect it, and let yourself go limp. Your body will absorb the impact. You tense up, you try to fight the falling, and you’ll break, smash your bones against the pavement, and end up roadkill.
Jack tucked his head down, gravel and shards of broken bottles raking his arms, and rolled to a stop amid a collection of bins. The SUV jerked to a stop, and a pair of legs emerged. Jack stayed where he was, letting his heart slow down and feeling himself over to make sure nothing vital had broken in the fall. He could still wiggle all his fingers and toes. The road rash would heal. All in all, not the worst landing he’d experienced.
One pair of legs was clad in black denim and boots with flat, rounded toes, the kind specifically made for kicking seven kinds of shit out of a person. A second joined them, sporting a pair of alligator shoes and blue slacks that came to a stop above knobby ankles.
“Nice tuck and roll, brother,” said Alligator. “Didn’t need it, though. Just wanted to talk at you for a minute.”
“You always chase down blokes you want to speak with in a spook car?” Jack asked.
Shitkicker drew back his foot and drove it once into Jack’s abdomen. It was a strong, enthusiastic kick delivered by a man who enjoyed his work. Jack jerked, folding around the knot of bruise, and fought hard not to vomit. He had a feeling Alligator wouldn’t appreciate him redecorating his shoes.
“He said he talks, not you,” said Shitkicker, and drew back.
“Jesus, Parker,” said Alligator. “We need him not pissing his own blood, you stupid piece a’ shit. Slow your roll, all right?”
There was a click as Parker lit a cigarette, and Alligator leaned down into Jack’s vision. “Howdy,” he said. “Sorry about that.”
“Piss off.” Jack sat up. His guts rolled back and forth. The seasick throbbing in his skull would fade, eventually, but it wasn’t helping him any.
“’Fraid not, partner,” said Alligator. “We all need to have a chat.”
Jack tried sitting up, which wasn’t a day at the park, but he managed it. Standing was a little easier. “I don’t talk to flash gits who chase me down and knock me around,” he said. “Sorry to disappoint, but you’ll be deprived of my sparkling wit and charm.”
Parker, the big one, snorted. He blew smoke from his
butt into Jack’s face and looked at Alligator. “We gotta listen to him yap?”
“We’re not kidnapping him, for fuck’s sake,” Alligator said. “He’s a guest.”
“A guest of what?” Jack calculated that there was no way he could break for the end of the alley, not unless he wanted the bulge under Parker’s leather jacket to materialize into a pistol. For now, he’d have to have Alligator’s little chat.
“Come on, now,” Alligator said. “Get in the car.”
“Sure,” Jack said. “Got nothing better to do than run off with strangers on mysterious errands.”
Jack had to admit he was curious—the person who’d bought the trance herbs from the dead girl in the bodega would be the one wanting to talk, he’d wager, and he wanted to see exactly what they were about. He wouldn’t put it past Belial to use competing mages to get his job done, not one bit. And if Jack failed, Belial would have an excuse to void his bargain with Pete, and keep his claws in her for who knew how long. These two didn’t seem to want to bash his skull in just yet, so he could play their game and see what they really had in store for him.
“You ain’t what I expected,” Alligator said, sliding into the back seat of the idling SUV after Jack and boxing him against the door. “Heard you was a USDA Grade-A choice badass, and look at you. You couldn’t hardly swat a fly.”
Parker gunned the engine into a U-turn and Jack watched the morning, tinted by the SUV’s black glass, roll past. “So now that I’ve disappointed you, where are we going?”
Alligator grinned, displaying one front tooth rimmed in gold, and the rest a startling shade of two-pack-a-day brown. “Now, Jackie. If I told you that, it wouldn’t be a surprise.”
PART TWO
JUDGMENT
“We are your fathers, brothers and sons, and there will be more of your children dead tomorrow.”
—Ted Bundy, American serial killer
CHAPTER 12
On the freeway, Alligator pulled out a black canvas sack. “You understand,” he said. “Our boss is pretty privacy conscious.”
“Fuck off,” Jack said. “He wants me so bad, he can bloody well take me without a sack on me head.”
Alligator sighed. “Figured you might say that.”
Jack felt a prick in the side of his neck, and whipped his head around to see Alligator holding a disposable syringe. “Nothin’ to worry about,” he told Jack. “Just a little shot of dream-time. You’ll be right as rain by the time we get where we’re goin’.”
Jack tried to reach for the man’s thick, sweaty neck, or even merely curse at him, but his mouth was stuffed with cotton wool and his brain was flying out the window, lifting up and then falling into crushing depths.
He tasted the hot wind and felt embers land on his exposed skin, face and chest and arms. Belial stood with him at the lip of a chasm, smooth sides made from riveted iron plunging into blackness his eyes couldn’t fathom. Far away, the fires of Hell burned, keeping the souls of the damned hot and aware of every second of their torture as they powered the great city that shredded the horizon like the claws of a beast in the tender pink flesh of the sky.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Belial told him, but Jack couldn’t step away, couldn’t stop staring at the blackness below.
“This is an old place,” Belial said. “A damned place. Nobody should be here. How did you slip away and find it?” His face in Hell was different, reptilian and slit-eyed, two sets of lids blinking against the hot wind. A forked tongue raked over his pointed teeth. He put his hand on Jack’s shoulder, black nails digging bloody half moons. “I’m not finished with you yet,” he said. “It’ll be a long time before I put you down there, Jack. You don’t need to start making friends just yet.”
The blackness rippled gently far below, the slightest echo across his sight. Just a match flare in the endless dark, and then it was gone. At the time, panic and fear had overridden his senses. He’d managed to slip from his cell, cross acres of bone and ash, turning to glassy sand and finally to foot-shredding rocks, before he’d fetched up here. Now Belial was leading him back toward the fires and the cities of Hell, to start his sentence all over again, and the next time escape wouldn’t be simply a matter of physical pain.
But now that he was remembering, he heard a whisper drift up from the ravine, from that ripple across his sight.
Hello, Jack.
Jack came awake when the SUV guttered through a rut, and slit his eyes open to get his bearings before Alligator caught on. Another mansion, another gated drive—but this wasn’t the cookie-cutter glass-and-rock type that the Herreras had been murdered in. This was an actual mansion, a pile of rocks that looked like William Randolph Hearst could have put his feet up and felt at home.
“Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey,” said Alligator, jabbing Jack in the tender side of his ribs.
The drugs left him thickheaded and slow, but Jack shook off Alligator’s fat, gold-encrusted hand and walked under his own power. The mansion had double doors, banded in iron, a giant Mission-style statement that whoever lived there was better than you.
Iron bands could mean other things, too, and Jack looked up as Alligator and Parker skirted him through the door. A protection hex hung above. A magic user, then, and somebody who either knew what he was doing or knew somebody he could pay to do the job right. The hex was strong, and Jack felt it examine and discard him as he crossed the threshold.
“This way,” Alligator said. Parker broke off for parts unknown, and Jack found himself escorted through a high-ceilinged sitting room where dust filled his nose, and out to the ubiquitous pool. This one was surrounded by statues, pitted and chipped from wind and sun to be faceless and in many cases limbless. A thin scrim of algae floated on top of the pool and a dead squirrel bumped against the filter.
A single figure stood with his back to them, looking out over the water and to the drop into the canyon beyond.
“Mr. Winter,” he said, and turned. “Thanks so much for agreeing to meet me.”
“He didn’t exactly agree, boss,” said Alligator. “Had to dose him up.”
“That’s unfortunate.” The man approached Jack and turned his head this way and that with a strong, tanned hand. “You five by five, Winter?”
“I’ve felt a lot worse,” Jack said. Nothing sparked when they touched. So far nobody except Parker had pinged his radar as talented in any way besides paying people to do dirty errands for them.
“Good to hear,” said the man. “Give us a minute.”
Alligator glared at Jack from under his thick eyebrows, but he drew back into the sitting room, watching Jack from behind the stained-glass French doors.
“Sorry about my man,” Jack’s host said. He went to a poolside bar and dropped two ice cubes into a glass, covering them with scotch. “Drink?”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t want to go any further down the rabbit hole,” Jack said. He was still slow and sounded as if he were shouting at himself from down a long tunnel, but he could at least move and speak under his own power. Running and screaming might soon have to follow, so he was counting the small favors.
“That wasn’t my intention,” the man said. He sipped the scotch, nodded as if it had said all the right things, and gestured Jack into a high-backed wicker chair poolside. It creaked under his weight and smelled of mold. “I have to say,” his host said, “it really is a thrill to have you sitting here.”
“Your life’s not very exciting then, is it?” Jack asked. “Who the fuck are you, mate? What do you want with me?”
“My name’s Harlan Sanford,” the man said. “I’m what’s called a money man, or a silent partner—I finance films, but I don’t need to get jerked off by having my name scroll up the screen.”
“Nice for you,” Jack said. He shoved his chair back and stood up. “I’ll just be finding my way home now.”
“Oh, I don’t think you’re going home any time soon,” Sanford said. “There’s a cash bounty on your head over ther
e in the UK—not to mention bragging rights as the one who offed Jack Winter.” He held out his hand. “Sit. I promise we have things in common and a lot to talk about.”
Standing wasn’t working out very well, so Jack sat back down. Vertigo rippled at the edges of his vision.
“The film business is just a job for me,” Sanford said. “I reinvest, and I’m a collector. I think under different circumstances you and I could have had a nice afternoon chatting about magic.”
Jack tipped his head back. The sun was coming up, and it sent jets of sickly green light refracting from the pool into his face. “What are we chatting about instead?”
Sanford tossed back the rest of his scotch. “I know that Belial’s been in contact with you. Slippery bastard, isn’t he?”
Jack lifted one eyebrow. “You and he pals, then?”
“Oh, not at all,” Sanford said. “Hate fucking demons. Never had a transaction with one that didn’t end in a big hassle for me and some fork-tongued son of a bitch trying to screw me out of what I was owed. Like dealing with studio execs, except demons have better manners.” He took a pack of gum from his pocket and shoved a wad into his mouth. “Quitting smoking,” he explained. “Belial is a moron,” Sanford continued. “A power-grubbing, shortsighted moron, and greedy even for a demon, which should tell you something.”
Jack laughed. Sanford was either insane or stupid, and he’d find out soon enough that demons had a way of finding out when humans mocked them.
“I know why he’s here,” Sanford said. “He wants what I want, and that means you and I want the same thing, and we can help each other.”
Jack rubbed his forehead. “No offense, mate, but when somebody offers me an out that’s too good to be true, it usually means something worse is just out of sight.”
Sanford laughed. “Cynical bastard, aren’t you?” He stood up. “Come with me, Jack.”
He led Jack back inside, past Alligator, who grinned and nodded at him. Despite the stuffy air of the house, Alligator was wrapped in a ribbed, shiny turtleneck that stretched nearly transparent over his pot belly.
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