by Paula Guran
“But where would he . . . ?” She twisted around, and only then seemed to realize that Jamie was not lurking anywhere nearby.
“Fuck,” Mick said between his teeth. But Jamie needed him, and he knew he’d never find his partner without help. He gambled on the truth. “We work for the BPI. We’re investigating the death of Brett Vincent, who was found out in Sunny Creek this morning.”
“BPI? Jamie Keller went to work for the BPI?”
Mick wondered tangentially what Jamie had been like when he had worked here, and if that was why he’d been so unhappy to come back. “Yeah.”
“And Brett?” Her eyes had gone even wider, and under her makeup, she’d gone pale. “Brett disappeared a week ago. Adler said he’d taken vacation, but Brett hadn’t said anything about it, and that’s not like him.”
“Jamie identified the body. It really was him.”
Suzanne thought a moment, her teeth worrying her lower lip, then turned to her pretty boy and snapped, “Give him your Cthulhu badge.”
“But, Suzanne—”
“Do it!”
Pouting, frightened, the boy unpinned the badge—black like the Inferno badge, but with Cthulhu written on it in lurid green black-letter.
“Trade,” Suzanne said. “Nobody wears both.”
Mick did so quickly, lucky to avoid stabbing himself to the bone with the pin.
“Good. Come on.”
“You don’t have a badge,” Mick said, getting up to follow her.
“I’ve worked here for years. They won’t stop me.”
Neither the bouncer at the top of the stairs, nor the bouncer at the bottom seemed at all inclined to argue with Suzanne. This was the job Jamie wouldn’t take, Mick remembered and showed his Cthulhu badge. The bouncer waved him on with no further interest, and Mick felt a pang at how completely Jamie would have been wasted on this job.
He got out, he reminded himself fiercely. And you’ll get him out again. Get him out and not come back.
Then he got his first good look at Neon Cthulhu. Mick was no stranger to S&M, and although he was not himself a magic user—and had no desire to be—he had been trained to recognize the more esoteric byways of the various disciplines. But Neon Cthulhu still rocked him back on his heels—almost literally—and it took him a moment to realize Suzanne looked as shocked as he felt. He remembered Jamie saying she didn’t know about Neon Cthulhu, and it appeared that had been the truth.
“Stop looking like you’re about to puke,” he said, low and fierce. “C’mon, Suzanne. Pull yourself together.”
“God,” she said. “I mean, I knew it was a heavy scene down here, but—”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, resisting the urge to shake her. “Help me find Jamie, and then you can get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Okay.” She took a deep breath and said it again, more firmly, “Okay. But where . . . ”
Mick looked around, a quick, comprehensive glance. “That door,” he said, with a jerk of his head toward the only other door that had a man on guard. “Can you distract the bouncer for me?”
“Can I . . . ”
“For Jamie,” Mick amended hastily, and that seemed to steady her. She nodded. “Good. Then pretend like this is all part of your stage act, and let’s go.”
That got her spine straight and her face, finally, settled, and they stepped away from the door together.
Having gone through all the stages from raw newbie to elite inner circle at more than one goth club, Mick knew perfectly well that the second most obvious sign of a tyro—after the wide-eyed gape—was the overdone look of blasé nonchalance. The trick was to look appreciative but not shocked, and he could manage that if he pretended strenuously to himself that the occult signs and mutterings and bits of ritual were just exceptionally impressive window-dressing for the S&M scenes being enacted in cages and on altars at various points around the room. He also reminded himself that Jamie had said Electric Squidland had a license for public occultism, and thus nothing going on here was illegal.
They stopped by a cage in which an ecstatic young man was being flogged by an Asian woman whose long braids snapped around her like another set of whips, and Mick pretended interest while Suzanne sashayed over, all hips and sex appeal, and engaged the bouncer’s attention. Mick ghosted forward, aided by a sudden rapturous scream from the man in the cage that turned everybody’s head for a split-second. Then Mick was at the door, wrenching the knob with clammy fingers, and then he was through, the door closed behind him, feeling his way down a much darker staircase, the bite of the cedar incense almost enough to make him cough. And he knew Jamie was close.
He could hear voices; as he reached the bottom of the stairs, his eyes adjusting to the darkness, he realized that the stairs were masked from the room beyond by a curtain. Green-tinged light seeped around its edges, and he drew close enough to make the voices come clear.
“ . . . he must know something, or he wouldn’t be here!”
“Could’ve been just listening to the rumors again. You always were a gossip, weren’t you, Jamie boy?” A heavy thudding sound and a grunt: somebody had just kicked Jamie in the ribs. Mick’s hands clenched.
“He’s a threat, Adler,” the first voice insisted.
“And I’m going to deal with him.”
A beat of loaded silence, and the first voice said, appalled, “You’re not going to give him to Brett’s—!”
“I really don’t think it will care.” Adler sounded amused. “He certainly won’t. At least not for long.”
“We’re not ready,” the first voice said. “After last night . . . ”
“Oh, Jamie will keep. No one’s likely to come riding to his rescue.”
Wrong, asshole, Mick thought with considerable satisfaction, listening as Adler and the other man, now discussing logistics and supplies for what sounded like a very complicated ritual, moved away from the stairs, growing distant and more muffled, until finally, with the click of a closing door, they became inaudible entirely.
Mick pushed the curtain aside only enough to slip through. The room beyond would have seemed ordinary enough—a waiting room with benches and chairs along the wall—if it had not been for the terrible greenness of the light, and Jamie Keller lying like a foundered ship in the middle of the floor, wrists bound, ankles bound, mouth stopped with a ball gag that could have been borrowed from any of the scenes going on in Neon Cthulhu’s main room.
There was blood on Jamie’s face—it looked like it was from his nose, and Mick was cursing Adler viciously under his breath as he dropped to his knees beside Jamie and fumbled at the buckle of the gag, trying not to pull Jamie’s already disordered braids, trying not to hurt him more than he’d already been hurt.
He eased the ball out of Jamie’s mouth, and Jamie took a deep, shuddering breath, and then another; Mick hadn’t been the only one with visions of asphyxiation. Then Jamie let his head roll back on the carpet as Mick started working on his wrists, and croaked, “How’d you find me?”
“Had a flash,” that being Jamie’s term for the times when Mick’s latent eight blindsided him.
“No shit?” Jamie sounded amazed and delighted, as if Mick had given him a birthday present he’d always wanted but never dared to ask for.
“Yeah,” Mick said, and the leather thong around Jamie’s wrists came loose. “But enough about me. What happened to you?”
“Being a Grade-A Prime fool, I walked slap into Mr. Henry Adler on my way back to the stairs.”
“On your way back?” Mick said, untying Jamie’s ankles. “Did you find out—”
“Yeah,” Jamie said, his voice tight with the pain of returning circulation. “Only let’s get out of here before we have Story Hour, if you don’t mind.”
“You could hardly have suggested anything I would mind less,” Mick said and braced himself to help Jamie up. Jamie was perfectly steady on his feet, and Mick hoped that meant he had not been hurt too badly, despite the blood. He was glad to let J
amie take the lead as they proceeded cautiously into a positive rabbit-warren of storerooms and access tunnels.
“ ‘You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike,’ ” Mick quoted uneasily. “Where the hell are we going?”
“Back door. Heck of a lot easier than trying to get out the way we came.”
“And where’s it gonna get us? Atlanta?”
Jamie laughed, and Mick was ridiculously glad to hear it. “Alley in back of the Kroeger’s on Lichfield.”
“That’s three blocks away!”
“Halfway to Atlanta,” Jamie said dryly.
“Adler can’t own everything between here and there.”
“Steam tunnels. Hell, Mick, you know how this city is. Everything’s connected underground.”
“Fucking ghouls.” Much of the undercity of Babylon had been constructed in the late nineteenth century by a series of Reconstruction mayors who had preferred the local necromancers’ money—and at a choice between the necromancers and the carpetbaggers, Mick wasn’t entirely sure he blamed them—to the safety of their citizens. It was the ghouls, though, who kept those tunnels clear, as patient and industrious as moles.
“Works in our favor this time,” Jamie said, and a voice said in answer, “It might.”
Mick and Jamie both whipped around, and then Mick shied back, right into Jamie’s unyielding bulk. He might have screamed; later, he could not remember and could not bring himself to ask.
The thing that had crept into the corridor behind them had once been human. It might still be able to pass, to anyone except a clairvoyant, although the way Jamie’s arms tightened around Mick for a breath-stealing moment before letting him go suggested otherwise. Mick could see the broken wings it dragged behind itself, black as tar and shadows, and the way its eyes glowed fitfully sodium orange in the dim light. But the way its voice blurred and doubled, as if it were neither one person nor two, but perhaps one and a half—that, he thought, registered on the material plane, where Jamie could hear it just as well as he could.
And then there was the way it crawled, like a spider or a crab, and the fact that its legs ended in stumps where the ankle bones should have been; even if it could have passed for human, it could never have passed for normal.
Jamie said, his voice unnaturally steady, “You used to be Shawna Lafayette, didn’t you?”
“ ‘Used to be?’ ” Mick said, hearing the shrillness of his own voice. “Then what the fuck is she now?”
“I am ifrit,” the thing said, its eyes flaring brilliantly, its voice warping and splintering, and it raised itself up like a cobra preparing to strike. Then it sank back again, the light in its eyes dulled. “And I think that, yes, this shell was once called Shawna. Much is lost.”
There were several thousand questions demanding to be asked, and Mick couldn’t find the words for any of them. Jamie cut straight to the heart of the matter: “What do you want?”
“I am hungry,” the ifrit said in a plaintive, unconvincing whine. “I am hungry, and I am tired, and I am starting to lose my grip on this shell. You carry pain with you. You could release it to me.” It licked its lips, not like a human being, but with the darting, flickering motion of a snake.
“No, thank you,” Jamie said. “I did figure out what they’re doing with Neon Cthulhu, you know. You got all the pain—and all the sex—you ever gonna need.”
It hissed, again like a snake. “It would be better this way. Brighter.”
Mick suddenly figured out what they were talking about and lurched back into Jamie again.
“He is eager,” the ifrit said, its voice warbling with its own eagerness.
“He is scared out of his mind, thank you very much,” Mick snapped. “Jamie, what—”
“Shut up, Mick,” Jamie said, and very gently put him aside. “I have a better idea,” he said to the ifrit, advancing slowly. “Why don’t I help you let go of that body, before things get really ugly, and then you can go your way, and we can go ours?”
“Jamie—!”
“Shut up, Mick.”
“You will not kill this shell,” the ifrit said. “You know its name.” It sounded certain, but it had backed itself against the wall, and it was watching Jamie with wide unblinking eyes, very orange now.
“And if you understood thing one about human beings, you’d know that’s why I’m willing to kill you. That body’s in misery, and it used to be someone I knew.” He stopped, just out of arm’s reach, and stared down at the ifrit. “It’ll be quick, and then this whole clusterfuck will be over.”
“I do not want . . . ” But the ifrit’s voice trailed off, as if it could no longer be certain what it did want, or didn’t want; Mick remembered for no reason that mongooses were supposed to mesmerize their prey by dancing for them.
“Hold still, Shawna,” Jamie said, his voice terribly kind, and then he moved.
Greased lightning had nothing on Jamie Keller, and Mick was still shocked at the idea that anyone so big could move so fast when he realized that small dry noise he had heard, like a twig breaking, had been Shawna Lafayette’s neck. The body was just a body now, slumped and broken. The ifrit was gone.
“Is it dead, too?” Mick said hoarsely.
“Fucked if I know,” Jamie said, and it was clear he didn’t care, either. “Shawna’s better off, though. I’m sure of that.”
They reached the Skylark half an hour later, without another word being exchanged; Jamie folded down into the driver’s seat with a sigh of relief and reached for the handset.
Mick caught his wrist. “Tell me first—are you okay?”
“Yeah. Adler got me down with a hex, not a cosh. Hadn’t gone face-first, I wouldn’t even have the bloody nose.” He sounded disgusted at his own clumsiness.
Mick hadn’t really meant physically. “Jamie . . . ”
“I’m fine, Mick. Let’s report in and get this over with, okay?”
Mick couldn’t argue with that, although he had a vague feeling he should. He listened as Jamie called in; neither of them was surprised when Jesperson’s voice interrupted to pepper Jamie with questions. Jesperson really didn’t sleep, and he almost never went home. The first was the result of being a class nine necromancer—a necromancer dux, they called it in Britain—even if officially non-practicing; Mick often wondered if the second was as well.
“Did you find out what killed Brett Vincent?”
“Yes, sir. And Shawna Lafayette, too. Well, part of Shawna Lafayette, any way.”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“No, sir. Because Adler’s hosting ifrits.”
Jesperson’s vocabulary became briefly unprintable. “Are you sure? Adler’s only . . . ”
“Class four, yessir. That’s what happened to Shawna Lafayette. And Brett Vincent.”
“That . . . oh. Oh, bloody hell.”
“Yessir. Adler and his boys, they’re talking ’bout it like a ritual, and I know for a fact Henry Adler ain’t got the math. He can’t figure a tip without a calculator.”
“I like this even less than I thought I would. How long do you think this has been going on?”
“Dunno, sir. But I know what happened to Brett Vincent’s body was on account of them getting the phase wrong, and the stupid bastards didn’t even know the word.”
Becoming aware of Mick’s goggle-eyed stare, he covered the mike with his palm and hissed, “What?”
Mick just shook his head, and Jesperson said, “ ‘Brett Vincent’s body.’ You don’t think—”
“I think Brett Vincent’s been dead for a long time. Same way I would’ve been if Echo hadn’t come and got me out.”
“Yes, what was November Echo’s part in this evening’s escapade?”
“Echo was invaluable, sir,” Jamie said, and elbowed Mick hard in the ribs to make him stop laughing.
“Good,” Jesperson said. A pause, probably while he wrote something on one of the legal pads that littered his office like shed snakeskins. “How many ifri
ts do you think there are in Electric Squidland?”
“There can’t be that many,” Mick said, and now it was Jamie’s turn to look goggle-eyed at him.
“How do you figure that, November Echo?”
“Yeah,” Jamie said. “How do you figure that?”
“Well, you said it yourself—and how did you get to learn so much about necromancy, anyway?”
“I don’t spend my off-hours fornicating like a bunny rabbit. Go on—what did I say?”
“That they didn’t know what they were doing. I mean, I don’t either, but if they had to repeat the spell every so often—?”
“Yeah. ’Bout once every five years. Ifrit starts losing its grip, and that ain’t pretty. Well, you saw.”
“Yeah. And they’ve fucked up twice that we know about in the last three years—they can’t be maintaining an army of ifrits, or we’d be up to our asses in Missing Persons.”
“They must’ve lost the person who knew what they were doing.”
“Carolyn Witt,” Jesperson said, startling them both. “She was part owner of Electric Squidland. Sold her share to Adler just before her arrest. And she was class seven. I think a word with Ms. Witt might clear up a great many questions.”
“Yessir,” Jamie said and yawned.
“Go home, November Foxtrot and Echo,” Jesperson said, and for a moment the rasp in his voice sounded less like irritation and more like concern. “You can finish the paperwork when you’ve got some sleep.”
The BPI raided Electric Squidland that same night, discovering things in the rooms beneath Neon Cthulhu that would keep the state Office of Necromantic Regulation and Assessment busy for years. Suzanne Parker was not among those arrested; she had taken Mick’s advice and gotten the hell out of Dodge.
At 11:34 the next morning, Mick set two cups of coffee on the desk he and Jamie shared, and sat down opposite his partner. Although his head was clear this morning, and the world was coloring within the lines, Mick had a gloomy feeling today was not going to be a good day at all. They were facing a mountainous stack of paperwork, including closing the closing of the file on a seventeen-year-old boy named Daniel McKendrick who had disappeared from a Nashville suburb in 1983. His fingerprints matched those of Brett Vincent.
