Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  Anna followed Nail to the table, with Karyn close behind.

  “Are you ready to talk to me now?” Elliot asked. Anna felt a seasick anxiety she didn’t think had anything to do with her demon. Elliot’s weird FBI division freaked her out. “Non-Standard Investigations Branch,” Elliot had called it, a small department dealing with occult crimes. Its very existence had been news to Anna, and not good news, given the type of swag the crew usually dealt in.

  “Hi, Special Agent,” Nail said. “Sure is good to see you again.”

  “Hello, Mr. Owens. I didn’t know you came for the company.”

  “We’re here to make a deal.”

  Elliot gave him a grin that looked as though she was trying to cover up a scowl. “That didn’t work out so well for us the last time.”

  “You lost Sobell. That ain’t on me.”

  Elliot simply shrugged. “We can do witness protection,” she said. “If you can sign affidavits, we can get started this afternoon. You won’t regret it. It’s the right thing to do.”

  “That’s not the kind of arrangement we want,” Anna said. She should have let Nail handle it, she supposed, but the urge to act slammed against the inside of her chest like it wanted to knock its way out. She couldn’t remain passive any longer, and whether that was her own impatience or an impulse of the demon’s, she didn’t care. Let it have its fun this time.

  “Oh?” Elliot said. “What arrangement do you want?”

  Anna tried to gauge Elliot’s expression to see if she’d even be open to this sort of thing, but it was impenetrable. Nothing for it but to jump.

  “We want an information-sharing arrangement.”

  “A what?”

  “We bring you occult shit or info, you tell us all about it.”

  Elliot studied her for a moment, then slowly shook her head. “I’m sorry, but that’s over the line,” she said. “The FBI doesn’t share information with criminals.”

  “We ain’t asking you to tell us about a case or evidence,” Nail said.

  “Think about it, Owens. Suppose somebody ends up dead, and it traces back to a piece of information I gave to an informant. Careers are ended over this kind of thing. People do time.”

  “Sobell isn’t working alone,” Karyn said quietly.

  “Pardon?” The hungry expression on Elliot’s face sent a shiver of unease down Anna’s back.

  Nail waved them off. “You know, Karyn probably shouldn’ta said nothing. She just wants to cooperate so much—well, hell. That info gets traced back to us, we could end up dead. So, you know. Forget we brought it up.” It was petty, but Anna couldn’t help smiling. After being on the receiving end of all the jerking around these people had laid on him, Anna thought this was the most fun Nail had had in a month.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Owens,” Elliot said.

  Nail, Anna, and Karyn waited silently, as though they’d coordinated this part.

  “I will nail your asses to the wall for obstruction of justice,” Elliot said.

  Still, they said nothing.

  Elliot took another tack, softening her expression so quickly it was painfully obvious. “People are going to get hurt.”

  “Some of those people might be my friends,” Nail said. “I saw how you handled that shit at the prison, so maybe you get why I ain’t sure I want to drop this in your hands and walk away.”

  The silence in the room drew out. Anna could hear a television set blaring through the wall, though she couldn’t make out what was on.

  “I need to make a phone call,” Elliot said.

  “We gotta go feed the meter,” Anna said, quickly checking with Nail and Karyn to see if they wanted to contradict her. No alarms there, so she continued. “Give you a few minutes.”

  The three of them filed out into the hall. Anna was pretty sure it was all over but the dickering. They’d probably come back with some ugly terms, but the naked ambition on Elliot’s face was impossible to miss, and her weird-ass division of the FBI got all kinds of special privileges. She’d told Nail once before that there were some things they could do “off the books.” She’d find some way to get it done.

  Anna, Karyn, and Nail walked down to the end of the hall. Anna looked out the window there. There were a couple of dead locusts wedged in halfway under a piece of roof flashing, remnants of one of Sobell’s recent last-ditch maneuvers. How many last ditches did one man get? Still, the locusts were an unpleasant reminder of just who they were messing with here. A guy who’d bury L.A. in a carpet of bugs in order to get a little private time was a guy who wouldn’t stop at much when his life was on the line.

  “They are gonna put our asses in jail, right now,” Nail said.

  “If they were gonna do that, they’d have done it after that prison shit show,” Anna said. “They got nothing. They need info. So do we. This should work.”

  Karyn, as she often did, remained silent.

  After almost twenty minutes, they headed back to the room. Nail knocked. “You about finished in there?” he asked.

  Elliot opened the door and gestured for them to come in.

  Nail came in and stood behind his chair. “What’s the word?”

  “We can work something out,” Elliot said.

  “You even call anybody, or you just fucking with us?”

  “I won’t ask you about your business if you don’t ask me about mine.”

  Nail scoffed. “Your whole job is asking me about my business.”

  “Enough already,” Anna said. “How’s this going to work? We get you info, maybe some bits and pieces, and you help us out with the magic stuff?”

  “Information only. No magic.”

  “Depending on what?”

  Elliot straightened her shoulders. “I don’t think you fully understand the nature of the occult, Ms. Ruiz.”

  “I understand you’re being pretty fucking cheap with your help.”

  “I’m not a practitioner.”

  Anna gaped. “You’re—what? You have absolutely got to be shitting me. You’re up to your ass in this occult craziness every single damn day, and you can’t actually do any of it?”

  “Do you know what happens to practitioners, eventually? If they work enough magic over a period of time?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Magic is . . . corrosive. Eventually, it opens a giant rip in some kind of, for lack of a better term, metaphysical membrane inside the practitioner, through which a demon invariably passes and assumes total control of the body. There’s quite a debate about whether the person inside is still there or not in any meaningful sense, but what we do know is that they are totally subsumed. Gone. Forever.”

  “Yeah, I get that, believe me,” Anna said. It was relatively new information, a recent, gigantic point of contention between her and Genevieve, and still unsettling. “So you never touch the stuff? Ever?”

  Elliot leaned forward and put her elbows on her knees. “Think about it for a minute. Do you think the United States Government would entrust any important mission or sensitive information to a person who is guaranteed to flip over to the dark side at some point? There’s actually a directive that prohibits it, except under very, very controlled circumstances, and I can assure you those individuals are not just out wandering around, let alone in charge of any kind of investigation.”

  “So it’s not just you,” Nail put in. “Your whole weird-ass division doesn’t have the juice to light a candle between ’em.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Jesus,” Nail said.

  “We’re not helpless,” Elliot pointed out. “We’ve simply decided not to use one class of weapon that has a tendency to blow up in the user’s face.”

  Anna paced a short section of floor and fought the urge to punch something. “Mmm-hmm. So what can you do?”

  “I told you.
Information. I may not be an occult practioner, but the bureau has access to a wealth of information.”

  “We’re going to need some assurances,” Karyn said.

  “What kind of assurances?”

  “Something on paper. Blessed by an attorney. We share info with you—”

  “You don’t use it to fuck us,” Anna said.

  Elliot sat and smoothed her skirt over her lap. “There are two ways to do this. One is totally off the books. No paper, no guarantees. No attorneys. You take my word, and that’s it. The other way is on the books. Attorneys, deals, an official seal of approval—and I can tell you right now, the only deal I’m willing to make on the books is the one where you testify.”

  “We can pay you,” Anna said. Karyn glared at her.

  “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Elliot said.

  “I don’t think this works,” Karyn said. “We’re done here.”

  Elliot crossed her arms.

  “Belial,” Anna said. A flicker of alarm crossed Elliot’s. A second later, she was all business, but Anna knew she hadn’t misread that.

  “Where did you hear that name? What do you know about it?”

  “Call if you change your mind,” Anna said. She left the room with Karyn and Nail following close behind. To her slight surprise, Elliot let them go.

  The elevator ride down to the ground floor was deathly quiet, and if Anna had wanted to punch something before, now she wanted to pull somebody’s head off. She stalked out of the municipal building in a furious haze, still fuming at Elliot’s pigheadedness. What the hell was the woman thinking? Did she want this or what?

  Nail was the first to speak. “I don’t believe you guys just did that,” he said as they hit the sidewalk. “We gotta go back.”

  “No way. We lose all credibility if we do that now.”

  “You gotta understand, I don’t think this situation is what you call symmetrical.”

  “No, it’s not,” Anna said. “They want what we’ve got more than we need what they have.”

  “Are you shitting me? We got no occult support. It’s like we’re—”

  “If you say we’re bringing a knife to a gunfight one more time, I’m gonna kick you in the knee.”

  “I’m with her,” Karyn said mildly. “Not one more time.”

  “She’s probably bluffing anyway. She’ll be calling you up in a day. Maybe two.” Anna slapped a parking meter as she walked by.

  “Elliot wants this,” Karyn agreed. “Did you see her face? She wants this so bad it hurts. She’ll come back around.”

  “Meanwhile, I have other sources,” Anna said. “Other contacts. I’ll hit them up. We’ll find something, so stop worrying.”

  Nail’s longer legs pulled him next to her. “You can’t flash that prophecy—or whatever it is—around town. It’ll get back to Sobell, and right now the only advantage we have is that he might not know we’re looking for the same thing he is.”

  They rounded a corner. Ahead, a food truck was selling spaghetti and meatballs, which Anna found inexplicably irritating. It was hot as hell, and whoever heard of a spaghetti truck anyway? Her stomach growled, and she walked faster. “Yeah. Well, too bad we don’t know what it is.”

  * * *

  Anna hit the streets that evening determined to scour the city for anything that might be of use, no matter how many rocks she had to turn over, no matter how many terrible things came scuttling out. Her first several stops were a bust. Two guys who’d heard nothing relevant, seen nothing interesting, and didn’t seem to give the tiniest shit about relics or saints, and another couple who weren’t around. Anna wondered if they’d also heard from a particular attorney and reached the same conclusion that Rissa had, that maybe Sobell was going down and maybe he wasn’t, but anybody close enough for him to grab was at severe risk of being drowned. She’d try again tomorrow but she didn’t expect much. Rissa was no fool, and whatever else she thought of the other various fences and lowlifes she sometimes worked with, they had a cockroach’s sense of self-preservation. Fuming a little more at every stop, Anna had done all she could do to keep her anger in check. The demon—she thought it was the demon, though it was hard to tell—stoked her anger, burned for her to express it. She wanted to key a car or kick a dog or punch a cop, just for spite.

  The last stop, at around three in the morning, was Bobby Chu’s party warehouse. He’s gotta have something. He’d fucking well better, or I’m gonna go berserk. Anna wasn’t sure what Bobby’s trick was, but information seemed to drift to him and pile up as if he were some kind of deadwood or snag in the flow of gossip and news. Over the years, he’d told her about heists before they happened, stakeouts that had been staged, occult items that were moving through town supposedly in secret. It all came to Bobby. He didn’t even seem to have to do anything other than keep throwing his parties.

  Anna found the party at the warehouse in full swing, with so many cars overflowing the cracked asphalt parking lot that she had to go two blocks down the street to find a place to put her car. A thudding four-on-the-floor dance beat pounded its way through the corrugated metal walls of the warehouse and hit her in the chest while she was still a hundred yards away, and she clenched her fists.

  I could lay waste to this.

  The thought was sudden, alien, yet it made a perfect sort of sense. If she closed her eyes and concentrated, she could see the outlines of the diagram she’d need, almost hear the incantation weaving around the thumping bass. She would need some things—candles and oils, chiefly, probably also blood—and she would need some study, perhaps some practice, but churning somewhere in the back of her mind, sealed behind a heavy iron door, was enough power to melt the whole building to slag, send the walls pouring down into the parking lot like streams of lava, the screams of the people inside barely audible over the cataclysmic hiss and roar of the boiling metal.

  Somebody opened the warehouse’s door, sending a shriek of synthesizer lead and hair-raising cymbal crashing out into the night and pulling her attention away from the pictures in her head.

  How long was I standing there? She checked her phone. Ten minutes? More? She wasn’t sure what time she’d arrived. There were spaces in the parking lot, though, that she didn’t think had been there before.

  Just another minute, and I can—

  She cut off the thought. Another minute, another hour—if she wandered off down that tangent again, there was no telling when she’d rejoin the regular world again. And God forbid she actually figured out how to wreak the destruction that had seemed so seductive to her a moment ago.

  All things considered, she thought it was a very good thing indeed that she’d left her gun back at the loft with Karyn.

  She made herself walk to the warehouse, made herself pull open the door and take the blast of noise in the face. The music was killing her. Unusually discordant tonight, played loud enough to rattle the fillings loose from her teeth, loud enough that it seemed the metal walls of the warehouse must be pulsating in time like something out of a cartoon. Karyn would have liked this shit, Anna thought—enough chaos and noise to drown out the visions, and equally fun to dance or zone out to. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d gone out just for the hell of it, though.

  She pushed her way through the crowd. Bodies jostled against her, kicking up warring reactions inside her. The thrill of contact, the sudden seduction of a stranger’s touch, scraped against a bilious rage that any of these careless, heedless, mindless fucking people would dare invade her space like that. The first reaction was foreign, the second vaguely like the irritation she would have felt under normal circumstances, only intensified beyond all proportion.

  Somebody slammed into the small of her back, sending her plunging forward. Her hands formed claws, which she clenched into fists. She closed her eyes, willing herself not to react. There were smaller workings than the o
ne that would melt the building. She could start the guy on fire. Drop a lighting truss on his head. Work up a more insidious curse—insomnia-inducing nightmares for him and his for generations.

  “Sorry!” somebody shouted.

  Don’t touch me, she thought, at the edge of panic. If you touch me—

  She ran. She dove through gaps in dancers, shoving them aside to cries and curses. Better that than she turn and wipe some poor dancing bastard off the face of the planet. The gauntlet of hips and hands, knees and feet seemed interminable, cuffing her on the shoulder, tearing her shirt, sending her stumbling—

  And then she was through. Sweat dripped into her eyes and slicked the small of her back, and her heart raced, but she hadn’t killed anyone.

  Somebody close to her shouted, the words slipping by, dragged from comprehension by the undertow of the bass. She looked up. Bobby was sitting on his platform, a youngish Asian guy in the brown corduroy jacket he never took off, phone in one hand and tipping a fluorescent yellow drink dangerously in the other while he wiped at his leaky left eye with his sleeve. He looked at her as though he was waiting for an answer.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Who’s chasing you?” he asked, a smirk teasing his mouth. “Cops? Dragons?”

  “Fuck you, Bobby.”

  “Come on up.”

  She took his hand, and he pulled her up on the platform, lifting a black velvet rope over her head.

  “What is this shit?” she asked, gesturing at the whole area. The platform hadn’t been here the last time she’d been around, nor the ropes. There were five tables up here, spread reasonably far apart, and eight or ten people crowded around each, including Bobby’s.

  “Thought I’d try my hand at bottle service. You’d be amazed at the ROI on the bullshit cachet that comes with sitting up here over the rabble.”

  “Gross.”

  “I haven’t stolen anything this month,” he said pointedly. The woman to his right looked at Anna like she was something she’d stepped in.