I offered Vigil the cigarette again. He considered it for a long moment and then shook his head, curtly. “You know exactly what Ankou and his needle-eared country club buddies see when they look at me.” Vigil’s voice was cold slate. “Product—a commodity, a resource—a half-breed, trap-house thug his people recruited straight out of prison.You know what being a ‘short ear’ means in their society, their world. It’s the same shit I dealt with before I even knew what the fuck the Fae were—being invisible in broad daylight, or the center of fucking attention, like you’re going to jump someone or steal something every second. Being disposable, anonymous, to being feared and mistrusted. Getting told silently every goddamned day that it’s not your world, not your home. You feel that acid eat away at your insides, day after day, year after year, until you’re empty, hollow, but still walking around. Hell, the color of my skin barely lowered me another rung in their estimation once they found out I was half-Fae.
“I owe Ankou a debt, do you understand that?” I nodded. “I didn’t give a damn about myself or anyone else, and it locked me up so tight I couldn’t feel a scrap of daylight, couldn’t feel the sun warm on my skin. I rebuilt myself one promise at a time, one unbreakable line at a time. That’s the power of discipline, of a code. It’s your armor, no one can take it from you but you. I made an oath to keep you alive, to find Caern, and make sure she’s safe. I made that oath not just to a man I owe a debt of honor to, I made it to myself. If you don’t got a code, you have nothing.”
“Codes won’t save you,” I said. “Honor won’t save you. I’m the ghost of Christmas-yet-to-come. You cling too tight to that shit, when it fails you—and it will fail you—you go under fast and you go under deep.”
“So what does save you from yourself?” he asked.
“Let me get back to you on that,” I said.
Vigil sighed and shook his head.
“Look, my job is to be the shield,” he said, “even if that means protecting you from you. I kill people; I lay the mighty low. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at—killing—since I was thirteen. I gave my word—that’s all life has left me—so you let me do my job and keep you alive.”
It was quiet for a time, the traffic of the boulevard muffled by the buildings. In the ruins of a life full of lies and violence, failures, and terrible mistakes, we’d each navigated the rubble by the guttering light of our better selves. Vigil and I locked eyes. I nodded. Vigil nodded back. “Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “Where to next?”
* * *
Tucked away at 7734 Santa Monica Boulevard is a secret shrine, a monument to lives and souls hacked and hewn upon gilded beds. It is a haunted place of fallen street saints, chewed up and spit out by Moloch, by Hollywood’s honeyed lies, devoured by you and by me. It is a temple that holds testament to the loss of the dearest of commodities, and it is home to a hidden goddess.
Vigil and I parked on the street and walked back. It was close to midnight. The theater was partially hidden behind a large Moreton Bay fig tree. The marquee declared STUDS THEATRE. When I had lived in L.A., it had been called the Pussycat. This old porn movie palace was the site of the skin-trade’s version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The handprints, footprints, and signatures of the stars and starlets of porn’s “Golden Age” were arrayed along the sidewalk in front of Studs.
I walked up to the ticket window. “Two tickets for the main screen,” I said.
“What are you doing?” Vigil asked.
“Taking you to the movies,” I said. “You buy the popcorn.”
* * *
There was a stale smell in the dark theater. The feature currently playing was a classic piece of cinema called Rude Boyz 3. Vigil and I stood by the lobby doors, and I began to count rows and seats silently.
“What are we doing here?” Vigil whispered. There were about a dozen shadows occupying seats in the theater. I carefully counted down four rows from the back and then counted over eight seats over from the far right wall.
“Ritual,” I said. “I learned about it from a pornomancer who owed me five ounces of cocaine, blessed by the Antimatter Buddha. Fucker turned out to be full of shit, but he taught me this in trade.”
“Why would you even need blessed…” Vigil dismissed the troubling thought with a wave of his hand. “What does this ritual do?”
“I’m consulting a local expert on our missing princess.” I spotted the seat I needed and moved down the aisle toward it. The seat was occupied by a man who looked like a guilty suburban husband. I sat down in the row behind him and Vigil sat a few seats down from me. “Hi,” I whispered to the man. He practically jumped straight in the air. “I really need your seat. It’s kind of got sentimental value for me. It’s where Dad proposed to Mom after she got out of prison.” I dangled a hundred-dollar bill beside his face. The man snapped the hundred out of my hand, got up, and left the theater without a word. I moved to the now-vacant seat, and Vigil sat down next to me.
“Okay,” he said, “you got the seat you had to have, now what?”
“Now,” I said, “I masturbate.”
“I’ll see you in the lobby,” Vigil said, standing back up. “Someone tries to kill you, you got my number if you can’t bludgeon them to death.” I couldn’t help but laugh softly.
“Hey, you’re the one who insisted on coming along,” I said. He gave another dismissive wave.
“Who the fuck you trying to contact?” the Elf muttered as he exited the theatre. “Pee-wee Herman?”
The room settled down after Vigil departed, and I felt the raw Svadhisthana force permeate the room, and I was physically at its center. I opened my senses, viewing it like a swirling orange fog, billowing out of every patron in the room. I opened my sacral lens wide and felt the lust, the wordless need, strum my nerves like a harp. I began my tantric breathing, my focus, as the power flowed through me, an invisible river of silent aching, so sweet and so demanding, all at once. Desire makes crack look like Skittles.
I felt myself become aroused. I stoked that fire inside me, almost oblivious to the shabby, counterfeit lust playing out a dingy fantasy on the movie screen. While the intent of many of the patrons may have been unsavory, wrapped in chains of guilt, violence, and repression, their energy was as pure as sunlight. I was acutely aware of myself, of my body and the root power churning around me. My hands clutched the arms of my seat, but slowly my fingers loosened and my hands came free to clasp each other, palm in palm, facing skyward, thumbs in opposition, acknowledging the dominance of the water element at work in this place. I began to shape and carve the energy around me, in me, of me, using very precise hand movements, mudras, as my sculpting tools. To a casual observer, I was moving my hands quickly in my lap in a dark porn theater, nothing to see here.
I felt the sweet pressure build in my loins, and I denied myself the release, raising the desire to even greater levels, build and deny again and again like climbing a mountain built of ache. In a timeless place, my body and mind were aware only of the subtext of my reality, not the trappings. Because of the nature of what I am, my building energy began to flicker at the edges of the other patrons’ auras. I felt several of the men in the room ejaculate, pushed past the threshold of self-control, or casting that control away willingly. To my perceptions, each release was an explosion, a bloom of salamander fire. I almost came too from the flood of sexual energy but my training won out, and I rode the swell of power, greedily hoarding my own sexual energy, using it and theirs to send my call out through the jagged walkways to the other places, the other spheres, lands where energy and intent replaced words and coin. This Svadhisthana power, harvested this way, it was her language, and I used it to barter with her. I felt her near, always near to her city, to her unknowing worshipers and sacrifices, to her sacred places. She was outside, waiting for me.
The movie, the men fucking on the screen, the patrons, many of their faces still locked in a grimace of ecstasy, all slowed to exist in the silence b
etween two heartbeats. The shuddering stream of light from the projection booth was now a solid beam. An orange fog rolled all around me, and the shadows seemed to congeal. I stood, adjusted my jeans to accommodate my tumescence, and headed up the aisle. Best not to keep a goddess waiting.
Vigil was in the lobby, sitting in an old chair with duct tape covering rips in the faux leather upholstery. The chair was next to a sun-faded plastic fern in a pot. He had his cell phone to his ear, engaged in a conversation. The orange fog swirled everywhere, making him move very slowly as it cheated time. His Fae physiology was resisting the spell I had just cast, but the power behind the spell was powerful enough to slow even him down until I got my answers. I walked past Vigil, the recognition and surprise just beginning to spread across his face in slow motion, and waved as I pushed open the lobby doors and stepped out onto the street.
The streetlights and the now-muted glare of the marquee were all pale hues of tangerine. Everything seemed grainy, slightly scratched and jumpy, like an old celluloid film from the seventies. I walked down the rows of hand- and footprints of the old porn stars, carefully avoiding some as I had been told to do, and stepping on others in the correct sequence. It reminded me of playing hopscotch, and “step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” My trip down the sidewalk ended at a young woman who hadn’t been there a moment ago.
She had blond hair falling to the base of her neck and shoulders, styled in a fashion that reminded me a bit of Farrah Fawcett from the zenith of the seventies. Her eyes were large and brown and gave her the semblance of wide-eyed innocence. If you looked closer, weren’t distracted by her youthful body, by those legs, you’d catch the haunted, frightened look that surfaced, fighting against practiced, drugged apathy, and you’d see the real her.
She was dressed in a costume, a caricature of a Dallas cheerleader with white mini-shorts, white cowboy boots, and a blue shirt, open to reveal her cleavage and tied and knotted up to expose her midriff. She held a white cowboy hat in her hands, clutching it tightly. Looking at me, she smiled; it was sweet and very sad, like she was glad to see me, but she bore awful news. Her true name had never been known, but the name she took during her brief time in the porn industry, when she had been alive and mortal, was Bambi Woods.
“Hi,” she said. Her voice was childlike, lilting, almost musical with a raised, halting inflection, like she was reading every word she said off a cue card she had never seen before, like maybe she was a little high. There was a very faint northern New York accent in her voice.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry to trouble you. Thanks for responding.”
“Sure,” she said. “Wow, I’m surprised anyone still knows how to get in touch with me like this. People, y’know, forget.”
Bambi had disappeared after becoming an overnight porn superstar. There were more rumors, urban myths, and speculation about her fate than actual porn films she had starred in. Legend had it that “Bambi” had been ritually murdered in a drug-and-sex-fueled ritual in L.A., back in the early eighties. Another myth was that she was now a plump and happy housewife and grandma in the heartland of America and just wanted to forget her porn star years. Even I didn’t know the full story behind what had actually happened to the real, flesh-and-blood woman behind the sex symbol. I knew a few of the touchstones to the myth, however. She had been drug-addicted, sad, and frightened. She got caught up in the belly of the beast to pay off a drug debt. Was any of it true, was all of it? In this town, what was real and what was fake shifted like sand in the wind. I had learned that the image, the idea of Bambi Woods, had become a separate entity, the Madonna, the holy mother, of the skin trade, an archetype that had little basis in fact, fed and fueled by lust, greed, and fantasy. Bambi had become the Marilyn Monroe of the sex industry, of this dark corner of Hollywood. Bambi died for their sins and for ours.
Ideas fed power often take off on their own, become boilerplate in this shared hallucination we call reality. Bambi was hardwired into the universe of porn now, into the growling, humming nexus of the meat-grinder that took in people and spit out husks. She was the Pornoracle, and she saw it all, all the time.
“I’m looking for someone,” I said. She nodded.
“Yeah,” she said. “You’ve been looking for her for a really long time.”
“Actually, not that long. Her working name is Crystal Myth. What can you tell me about her, where she is, if she’s alive?”
“Yeah,” Bambi said, taking a step closer to me. “She’s alive, but she won’t be for much longer. That’s sad. And Crystal Myth, that’s only one of her names. You’ve been looking for her for a real long time, Laytham, as far back as when you used to jerk off to those videos and think of Rosaleen just before you came.”
“Wait, what are you saying? Rosaleen … how?”
“I could see you on my side of the screen,” she said and giggled a little. It was practiced and fake. “I’m on the other side of all the screens, watching.
“Y’know Rosaleen, that necromancer you were so hot for? You’ve been looking for Crystal, for all of them, since back when you still used to cry. She’s got lots of names, lots of faces, always a pretty face, never torn up. You’ve searched for every one of them.”
“What are you trying to say?” I asked. “Are you telling me the asshole who’s been killing women since the eighties, been destroying their souls, is hunting Crystal now?”
“Yeah,” Bambi said, nodding, a shadow of a smile at the edges of her face, her eyes full of wisdom, fraught with pain. “They are, but they didn’t start in the eighties. They’ve been at it for a real long time, honey.”
“They?” I said. “Who, please, Bambi, tell me who’s been doing this to these girls? Why are they after Crystal now?”
“A lot of it’s outside, y’know, my field of vision,” she said. “They have lots of names. They’re real old. ‘Dog’-something? They wear like … hats? I don’t know, sorry. But they’ve been here, in the city, for as long as the movies have been made, and they’ve been killing, destroying, all that time … ten to the hundred and nineteenth power … plucking petals off a flower … so many petals you can never see an end … but each one diminishes the flower. They do all this…’cause they like, y’know, get off on it, the annihilation.” Bambi cocked her head and looked directly at me, into me. “They’re … kinda … like you.”
“No,” I said. “They’re not.”
“You guys have a bunch of stuff in common, y’know? That’s sad too. I thought you were a nice guy.”
“I am nothing like the sick bastards who did this!”
“She’s the last,” Bambi said. “Crystal, she’s gonna be the last petal that gets plucked.”
“Where is she, Bambi? I need to know, I’ve got to get to her; I’ve got to stop them!”
The Pornoracle looked at me so wistfully, like she knew the saddest secret in the whole wide world.
“Try to remember, okay, Laytham? I know it gets hard with all the little cuts that you get moving through life, but please try to remember how you were a long time ago. Bye, the movie’s over. I’ll see ya around.”
The streetlights all went dark for a breath, and when they came back up they were their normal color again. Time had caught up to me, and Bambi was gone. Vigil burst through the lobby doors. I think he expected me to be long gone.
“How the hell did you get past me?” I shrugged. “We good?” he asked, his hand moving away from his gun under his jacket.
“Jury’s out,” I said. “But I’m done here. Come on, let’s go.”
FIFTEEN
We took Dragon’s jeep the following night to go find Elextra Dare, Caern’s old porn-star roommate. After a few hours of dead ends and cold leads, Vigil, Dragon, and I finally found the porn diva and her producer boyfriend in downtown L.A. at the Vault, a nightclub and lounge located in what used to be a bank.
Grinner had wanted to ride along too, but I’d said no. “I need you,” I said, “to watch a lot of porn for me. Any
thing and everything with Crystal Myth in it. I want to know who she’s worked with in the industry, what companies, what producers, directors, talent. I want as much intel as you can gather on all of them too.”
“Affirmative,” Grinner said. I handed him a cardboard document box. “What’s all this?”
“LAPD homicide files,” I said, “plus everything the Nightwise had on the same cases. Nine women over the last thirty-four years, all Jane Does, all cold cases.”
“What the hell does this have to do with your missing fairy princess?” Grinner asked.
“Can you use these photos of the victims and see if you can locate them online, make some IDs?”
“Yeah,” Grinner said, taking the box. He opened the cardboard lid and leafed through the folders inside. “I can mash up some military and intelligence facial recognition software with an AI program they’ve been developing to scan photos online … see if we can get some hits. You didn’t answer my question. What’s this got to do with what you’re working?”
“Nothing, I hope.”
The music, a cover of “Sweet Dreams” by JX Riders and Skylar Stecker, boomed as we moved through the line at the bar and skirted the edges of the dance floor. People knew on an instinctual level of self-preservation to give Dragon space and clear a path for her, despite her seemingly innocuous demeanor. She was dressed in a gold-and-black, leopard-print blouse, a black, leather coat that fell just above her knees, black leggings, and Dr. Martens. Her long hair was up, held aloft by two solid jade hairpins, both carved to look like Chinese dragons. I had given them to her a long time ago. Vigil was in a charcoal-gray Desmond Merrion suit, looking like he just fell off a GQ cover, and yours truly was slumming in a black-and-silver paisley button-up, black leather pants, and boots. I’d tripped over a razor and finally managed to shave too. I let my hair fall to my shoulders. Who says a country boy can’t dress up all dapper in the big city?
The Night Dahlia Page 20
