by SM Reine
The guy who met me at the front door of the house on the corner looked like he belonged. Sweat suit, nice sneakers, crew-cut hair. His tattoos were hidden by sleeves. “I was wondering how long it would take for you to make your way here.”
I sighed. “I didn’t want to bring this to your door, but I just…I’m out of options, man.”
Domingo pushed open the security screen and held his arms open. I stepped into his embrace, squeezed him tight. I’m not so much of a man that I can’t hug my brother hard when I’m having a shitty week. Domingo hugged back just as fiercely.
“You look like shit on a stick. Do I want to know why?”
“I fought off two assassins in the desert. Kicked their asses. Pulled out all the ninja moves.” I mimicked a few karate chops, and Domingo laughed.
“Sure you did. Couch in the den is yours as long as you want it.”
I didn’t want Domingo’s couch at all. It was stiff and old, and Domingo’s wife wouldn’t be happy to see me on it.
What I really wanted was his ritual space.
Domingo and I had gotten into a lot of bad shit together as teenagers, but we’d gotten into a lot of good things, too. Like magic. Abuelita had been the one to identify that we had the old magic in the first place, taught us how to tap into it, but we’d worked together to find the limits of our abilities. Domingo still had an altar in his basement—everything a guy needed to whip up a batch of strength and energy potions.
The house was mostly dark when he let me in. It was well after midnight, but that shouldn’t have mattered in my brother’s house. He was a night owl.
I leaned around the end of his stairs to check the second floor. All the doors were open and the rooms were dark.
“Sofia already in bed?” I asked.
“She isn’t here.” A sigh. “We’re taking a little time apart. And before you say it—”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“—she’s in love with someone else.”
She wasn’t my wife, but the announcement still felt like a punch to the face. I sucked in a hard breath. “You know who?”
“I don’t, and I don’t want to think about it.” He scrubbed his hands through his hair. He’d always been the spitting image of our dad, except without the mustache. Now, with heartache etched on his face, he was practically Dad’s twin. “Either she’ll break it off with him or me, and I’ll deal with either when it happens. You’ve got bigger problems. Sit down, I’ll get you a beer.”
“Shouldn’t I clean up first?” I gestured at my dusty jacket and jeans.
“I’m not the one in the house who cares about the upholstery, dude.”
There wasn’t anyone in the house who cared about upholstery anymore. And his home felt a hell of a lot emptier for it.
I was the one on the run from murder charges, but I’d take my week over Domingo’s. He was nuts for Sofia—she was his moon and stars and all that romantic crap. She was the reason he’d stopped knocking over 7-Elevens for petty cash and gotten a real job. She was the reason Domingo had a nice life in the first place.
I took the couch in the living room. It was a lot softer than the den couch.
“Anyone come looking for me?” I asked, eyeing Sofia’s footstool and trying to decide if I wanted to risk putting my dirty shoes on it.
“You busted out of jail. What do you think?” Domingo called over his shoulder as he went for the kitchen. “Agent Takeuchi hit up Pops first, so I got the courtesy of a warning phone call before she appeared at my doorstep.”
I whistled. “Suzy? Really?” I knew I’d probably been given a file like Isobel’s and assigned to an agent, but I never would have thought that the OPA would assign me to my desk mate. Weird that it was the OPA visiting my family instead of the LAPD, though. “Did Pops have fun with her?”
“He says she’s a gorgeous woman and you should let her catch you.”
Of course he did. “Tell me he didn’t hit on her.”
“What do you think? Seventy-two years old and the man’s still got it.”
“He thinks he’s got it, anyway,” I muttered.
Domingo emerged from the kitchen and with two bottles of beer. I took mine gratefully and drank deep. The cold felt amazing going down my throat. And in my hand. I placed the bottle to my forehead and winced when it hit a bruise.
“Tell me what happened,” Domingo said.
“What hasn’t happened? I don’t even know where to start.”
“The beginning works.”
The beginning. Right. “I had drinks. A lot of drinks. My coworkers and I were celebrating, and I tried to chat up a waitress—”
“Erin Karwell.”
He knew her name. I grimaced. “Has it been on the news?”
“Oh yeah.” He pushed a piece of paper across the coffee table to me. It was a printout from a news website. There was a picture of Erin on the top—gorgeous, innocent, living Erin, with her hair wild and a huge smile. The words in the headline, “Waitress Murdered,” made me feel like I was falling down a deep, dark hole.
I skimmed the article. My name wasn’t mentioned. One of the few advantages of being a spook, I guess.
“How’d you know that I was connected?” I asked, folding up the article, sticking it in my pocket. I wanted to keep Erin’s face with me. A reminder of why I was doing what I was doing.
“The FBI agent,” Domingo said. “She told us.” He sank into the chair across from me, took a swig of beer. “She was acting real weird. I’ve never seen anyone that pissed in my life.”
That didn’t sound weird—that sounded like Suzy. I leaned back against the couch cushions, shut my eyes, rolled the sweating bottle over my face. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“You can’t even see me right now.”
“I don’t have to see you.” I opened my eyes. Domingo had schooled his face into something so innocent, it looped around about five times and landed right back on guilty. “I know what you’re thinking. I always know what you’re thinking. And Suzy didn’t frame me for the murder.”
“Someone did.”
Lord, it was nice not having to be the first one to say it. A weight lifted from my lungs. I breathed for the first time in days. “Yeah. Someone did. But it wasn’t Suzy.”
“How can you be sure?”
If Suzy had framed me for the murder, then why would she have let me sleep on her couch? She had been nothing but a good friend. A better friend than I deserved. But I said, “She doesn’t have a motive. Why kill a waitress?”
“You said you were hitting on this Erin girl, right?” Domingo asked. “Women get crazy when they’re jealous.”
Jealousy would have implied there was something between Suzy and me other than a cluttered desk and a four-foot wall covered in sticky notes. It didn’t fit. “No way. She’s on my side. She’s been helping me this whole time.” Aside from slamming the door in my face, anyway. But she’d get over that.
“Helping you with what, exactly? How are you going to get over this ‘on the run’ thing?”
“I don’t know anymore. There’s this other woman—”
“Another woman,” Domingo said, as if that explained everything.
I snorted. Unlike him, all of my problems were not of the curvy female persuasion. “This other woman is a witch. She said that she could speak to the dead, so Suzy helped me find her. But Isobel’s a fraud. That was a waste of time.”
A grin. “Isobel.”
“What?”
“I know that tone of voice. Can’t get her off your mind?”
Of course I couldn’t. She had lied to me, convinced me that she could be the solution to my problems. And she wasn’t. But the sight of her standing at the top of the stairs with haunted eyes, pleading with me, asking me to let her help… That was going to stick with me for days. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t have a plan anymore.” I ran both hands through my hair, sinking deeper into the couch. “I’m wasted—I can’t even think anymore.”<
br />
Domingo set down his beer, pulled out his phone. “That’s why you’re here. Leave the thinking to me. What do you need to get done?”
Shit, I didn’t even know where to start. “The SUV needs to go. It’s parked a few blocks away. It belongs to the, uh, the FBI, and I pulled out the GPS tracker, but they’ll still find it sooner or later.”
“Consider it gone,” Domingo said, typing rapidly on his phone.
“I need another car.”
“Done.”
A smirk crept across my face. “Really?”
“I still know people.” Domingo had been legit for a couple years now—about as long as I had been working for the OPA—but when he had been bad, he’d been really, really bad. People had looked up to him. It was no surprise that he was still in touch.
“I need to know who really killed Erin,” I said.
“That I can’t help you with, but your new car will be here in an hour and you’re welcome to help yourself to my basement. I’ve got some new stuff. Wanna check it out?”
Domingo didn’t even need to ask.
He took me downstairs. He had completely redone the place since my last visit. The walls were paneled half in oak, half in fancy-ass wallpaper. Sugar skulls hung from the walls with candles in their eye sockets. He had a circle of power permanently imprinted on the floor and an altar as big as a bed.
I sneezed as I set foot on the bottom of the stairs.
“Damn,” I said, scrubbing at my nose with my hand. “Nice.”
“Been thinking about starting a coven. I thought, with Sofia out of the house…” He trailed off, gazing around the room with a lost look, as if he didn’t really recognize it. She had never been a fan of the witch thing.
He had some gemstones in a bowl of salt on his altar. Judging by the fact they were directly placed in a puddle of moonlight, I was thinking he had to be infusing them. “What are you working on?” I asked, trailing my fingers through the air over the bowl. I could just make out sparks of blue and white from the corner of my eye.
“Trying to figure out a spell to help me sleep.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Haven’t been resting well ever since…you know. Brain keeps me awake. But I can’t seem to get it right. Last batch made my dreams too vivid. Kept waking up screaming.”
That was a real problem. Couldn’t have Domingo going crazy while he waited for Sofia to get her shit together.
I skimmed his shelves, looking through the herbs. I picked out agrimony and elder root.
“Got any passionflower?” I asked.
Domingo frowned. “Why?”
“You need passionflower.”
I sprinkled the herbs I’d picked out on his gemstones. The aura of magic shifted—couldn’t tell you how, but it did. I’d never been real analytical about my magic. Failed chemistry in high school twice. But I instinctively understood what Domingo needed.
His eyes were shining when he stepped up to look at it. “It’s perfect.”
“Test it out before you thank me,” I said. “Hopefully it won’t make you comatose.” Although it looked like he could have used a few weeks of solid sleep. Maybe going comatose wouldn’t have been the worst thing for him. I kept my eyes on the infused gemstones as I asked, “How long has she been gone now?”
“A month. Every morning I wake up and think she’s making breakfast downstairs just to remember all over again,” Domingo said. “I’ve distracted myself with the basement. Pops even did the floor for me.” His gesture encompassed the room. “Now the remodel’s done, but Sofia’s still with him.”
“Shit, man.”
He socked me in the shoulder. “Keep the bitch eyes to yourself. Take whatever you want.”
I took another pass around the shelves, looking for finished products rather than herbs. Domingo had been making poultices, too. I grabbed a bowl of strength he’d brewed and sniffed. My sinuses tingled, but no sneeze—he’d never been as good at poultices as I was. “I’m gonna take all of these. I’ve been away from mine a couple of days and feeling weak.”
“Whatever you want,” he repeated.
I stuffed my pockets with strength poultices, a few potions in plastic bottles, anything that looked vaguely useful. When I was done, I weighed an extra fifteen pounds. Or maybe that was just the exhaustion hitting me hard.
“Can I sleep in the guest room?” I asked. “Just for a few minutes.”
“Why not?” Domingo agreed. “I’ll make dinner happen while you nap. No shimmying down trees while I’m distracted, though—you need to get some real rest. And I’ll know you’ve ducked out on me.”
“Hey, if it worked on Pops…”
“Don’t even. What do you want for dinner? Pizza? Burgers?”
“You could give me your moldy leftovers and I’d be the happiest man alive.”
Domingo snorted as he pulled out his cell phone. “Not with the way I cook.”
It felt like it’d been days since I smiled. I patted him on the back. He smiled back.
It was good to be home.
15
I didn’t shimmy down the tree outside the guest room, but I also didn’t stay for dinner. I crawled into the shower to rinse off the dirt, tossed back a few shots of energy potions, and crept out the back door as soon as the shock of consciousness hit me.
Every minute I spent at Domingo’s house was another minute begging for him to be dragged out to the desert next.
My new car was a Dodge Charger, newest model year. Bumblebee yellow with two sexy black stripes up the hood. I gave a low, appreciative whistle. Domingo’s “friends” were richer than I expected. That worried me—the idea that Sofia was gone and Domingo was suddenly tight with his old contacts again. But I’d deal with that later.
I grabbed the keys out of the wheel well and booked it.
My leads were dry. Erin had been murdered two days ago and I still didn’t know anything about what had happened—only that Stonecrow was a dead end and that Suzy was sick of me.
If a case was going cold, then all I needed to do was heat it up. And we have a saying at my office: “There’s nowhere hotter than Helltown.”
The agents weren’t talking about the weather when they said that. Helltown is just another neighborhood in Los Angeles, much like Chinatown, and it enjoys the same temperate winters and steamy summers that the rest of the city does.
But if you’re looking for a murderer, or missing evidence, or a stolen item on the black market—chances are real good that you would find it in Helltown.
You just had to know where to look.
I drove around until sunrise, then parked the Charger at a Walmart and walked three blocks east. I stood outside Helltown with my arms folded, eyeballing the empty street in front of me.
It didn’t look like anything special—definitely not a demon hideaway. From the outside, all I could see were rows of uniform housing with barred windows and sunbaked lawns. The fact that I was seeing those houses at all meant I was allowed to enter. Meant that someone inside of Helltown was expecting me.
Most humans weren’t going to stumble into Helltown by accident. It was drenched in enough wards and diversion spells to render the average mortal stupid. There were lots of accidents on the intersections outside because people drove too close and got zapped with old magic. But I walked right up to the edge of the block and didn’t get turned away. My invitation was open.
Not the most cheerful thought.
I stepped over the line in the sidewalk—and got smacked in the eye with a femur.
“Jesus,” I growled, slapping it away, spinning to look at what I’d walked into.
From this side, I could see that the entrance to Helltown was marked with an iron arch that had bones dangling down the middle, kind of like Isobel’s beaded curtains. I rubbed my face hard where the bone had touched it.
Lord, I hope the sun’s bleached all the bacteria off of that.
Then I turned around to get my first look of the morning at Helltown.
&n
bsp; As soon as I had passed under that archway, the seemingly empty street had become populated. Demons and witches and idiot humans with death wishes bustled through the road, pushing along wheelbarrows and dragging sacks behind them. The road hadn’t been maintained since it vanished into Helltown in 1968, and the pavement was all but dust under my feet, making me stumble when I stepped off the sidewalk. My foot squished in something red-brown and rotting. Graceful, Cèsar, very graceful.
The yellowing lawns I’d seen from outside were nothing but dirt pits in here. The bars and glass were missing from most windows, letting me see to the seething darkness within the houses. All of the street signs had been torn down and replaced with sheets of engraved steel—all decorated with spikes, of course. Demons love putting spikes on everything.
It was a neighborhood out of a nightmare, twisted and perverse.
It was my only hope of finding a lead now.
“Welcome to Helltown,” I muttered under my breath.
I was talking to myself. Three days since going rogue and I was already going nuts.
Keeping my head down, I walked fast toward the intersection of Grim and Blacksburg. Demons and witches had self-segregated within Helltown, so there are neighborhoods within the neighborhood. All the higher demons, like incubi, live on the northern streets with the mortals that feed them; I was heading south, where the less powerful demons hid out.
I never went to the north side of Helltown. Never.
Moving quickly, I watched my feet instead of watching my surroundings, trying to look like I belonged. I didn’t want to see what I was passing anyway. The ramshackle buildings had human skulls over most doorways. Several of the houses had converted the yards to pens for exercising human servants. Vendors had carts set every few feet, selling crafts made of demon and human byproducts, selling kebabs of flesh, clothes woven from human hair. Those were the worst. Just the smell of them made me want to barf.
It wasn’t a nice place, Helltown. Kopides had been trying to shut it down ever since a coven of witches and duke from the City of Dis collaborated to make those streets disappear from Los Angeles. But you can fit a lot of evil in a couple square miles, and we couldn’t trust automatic weapons to operate around all that infernal power. It didn’t leave a lot of options for slaughtering the residents of Helltown.
