“Shit,” I said, and raised a hand for everyone to stop. I held it together, pushing the sickening sensations down deep, and looked to Dragon. Her eyes were veined in burning gold. Vigil’s pistols were in his hands.
“What?” he asked softly.
“Something … not from here,” Dragon said, “a predator, a big one.”
“Come on,” I said, running to the door. “It’s inside!”
“Ballard, wait!” Vigil shouted, charging up behind me. I kicked the door at the knob plate and felt it give, smashing open beneath my boot. My breathing was tight, angry, and not proper or healthy—I didn’t give a fuck—I threw open my Manipura chakra wide and gathered pure, annihilating force around me, like a cloak made of screaming suns. Vigil was beside me, covering me as best he could, the guns arcing, his senses tracking every mote of dust in the air. Dragon appeared at my other side. I could feel the heat roiling off her, streamers of ash smoke wreathing her face, her molten, alien eyes cutting through.
The smell hit me almost at once. Anyone who’s ever dealt with gut wounds knows it, fresh blood and opened bowel. There was music playing on the sound system in the den off to my left. It took me a second to recognize it. It was the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs.” Vigil tried to get in front of me to sweep and clear, but I’d have none of it. I stepped into the doorway of the den.
“Peggy!” I yelled.
“Damn it, Ballard,” Vigil muttered, coming in right behind me.
The moment my boot touched the carpet, it squished. I looked down to see bright, fresh blood pouring out of the saturated carpet. The den looked like it had been decorated by a couple of grandparents from Miami Beach. There were photos from vacations, a nautical themed compass-clock, a stuffed swordfish, a wide-screen TV that was on, but muted, showing what looked like some kind of celebrity dancing contest. A wide static shot, like something out of a Stanley Kubrick film: George Wilde sat on his plastic-wrapped sofa, both of his eyes ripped out of their sockets, leaving ragged, dark holes. His legs splayed stupidly, his checkered golf pants slowly soaking up the blood on the floor, the stains up to the level of his socks. His eyeballs were speared on little plastic cocktail swords, one in each of the large martini glasses on the table in front of the couch, clouds of diffused crimson swirling in the gin and vermouth.
Peggy, Elextra Dare, sweet, funny, honest, comical Peggy, was cut into dozens of pieces, chunks actually, scattered across the floor. Her intestines and organs were partly pureed and sprayed everywhere, as were blood-splattered scraps of paper. I knelt by one of her severed hands. It clutched a stained black-and-white still of Caern Ankou, Crystal Myth, captured from one of her films. I took the photo out of Peggy’s lonely, orphan hand. Something in the picture startled me, jarred a memory loose. I crumpled it up and stuffed it in my jeans pocket, almost without thinking. Of course, some part of me whispered.
“I’m sorry, Peggy,” I said. “I’m damn sorry, Nancy Drew.”
“It looks like they shredded the boxes of Caern’s effects too,” Dragon said, picking up part of a torn cardboard box. Shredded photos and notebook paper tumbled out, scattering pieces of Crystal across the floor to mingle with Elextra’s torn flesh and cooling blood. I heard a squeaking sound, like the rubber wheels on a shopping cart. My head snapped in the direction of the noise, toward an open door and a corridor just outside the den. An odd, boxy-shaped shadow shrunk as its source disappeared down the hall.
“Son of a bitch!” I cried and dove toward the open door. Vigil and Dragon shouted and cursed after me. I spun around the corner, almost slipping on the blood-wet floor, ready to hurl all my seething power, guided by my anger and guilt. I felt more than saw the space at the far end of the hallways twist and fold like origami as something that looked nothing like a human slipped between the folds of what was and wasn’t, and then it was gone. Dragon was beside me.
“What was it?” she asked.
“I have a notion, but it seems impossible,” I said. “They aren’t supposed to exist anymore.”
“One of the Hungry?” she said. “From the outside?”
“No,” I said. “It came from inside.”
There was a shout from the den, Vigil and some other voices. Dragon and I moved back to see what was going on. A man and a woman, the man in a work shirt and Harley-Davidson T-shirt, and the woman in a black pantsuit and white blouse, stood by the broken front door. Vigil was covering both of them with a gun.
“Stand down,” the woman said.
“Not going to happen,” Vigil said, his gaze as unswerving as his hands. A glowing, golden light shimmered into being around the left hands of both the man and the woman. Vigil began to squeeze his triggers.
“Vigil, wait!” I said. The knight held his fire as the glow diminished. A swirling, three-dimensional five-pointed star—a pentacle—hovered silently above the two strangers’ hands. I recognized it, it was the Brilliant Badge. Vigil recognized it too.
“Nightwise!” the man said. “By order of the powers that bind and protect, stand down.” Vigil holstered his guns, and looked to me and Dragon.
“Bridgette, Luke, what are you two doing here?” Dragon asked.
“Got orders, Lauren,” the woman, Bridgette, said. “We were told to find Ballard and bring him in, now. Didn’t realize we were going to be walking into a goddamned slaughterhouse, but then again, that is Ballard’s reputation.”
“Bring me in,” I said, “for fucking what?”
“Just conversation,” the man, Luke, said. “The Maven wants a word with you.”
SEVENTEEN
Sections of Chinatown are a little run-down, not the kind of places a tourist would, or should, go. You’d drive by the brick, three-story warehouse on North Spring Street that was the home of AAA Distribution without giving it a second glance, never realizing one of the most powerful sorceresses in the world worked there.
The two Nightwise goons, Luke and Bridgette, parked their Range Rover on the street and led me inside the warehouse. It was close to midnight by then. AAA received all kinds of cheap goods manufactured in China, stuff like menus, fortune cookies, those wooden chopsticks in red paper envelopes for American Chinese restaurants, flimsy folding Chinese fans and parasols made of paper, and small smiling Buddhas carved from red teak or fake jade, the kind of tourist-chow sold a few blocks over in souvenir shops. We walked past crates and plastic-wrapped pallets of that stuff on our way to the venerable, closet-sized elevator that led up to the business offices of AAA. It was like stepping back in time, the sawdust and ginger smell of the place, the dim metal-cage-covered lights hanging from the exposed steel beams of the ceiling. Even the stiff, formal way my chaperones were on guard around me. Ah, it was like I’d never left the order.
There had almost been a throw-down when Bridgette had explained that my invite to see the Maven was for me only. Vigil had been adamant in his refusal to let me out of his sight, and I thought the situation was about to get very Tarantino very quickly, but between Dragon and myself reassuring him that no harm would befall me, he finally relented to search the crime scene with my ex-partner and then head back to the Hard Limit.
My shadows and I crowded into the elevator. There was a little less than a foot of open space with all three of us in the car. The old, dented, and scarred door slid shut and the elevator groaned and lurched as it lifted us. I looked over at Luke. He was watching me, but his eyes darted away from my gaze. I smiled.
“I don’t bite, rookie,” I said. His complexion darkened.
“You try it, and I bust your teeth in, Ballard,” he said tersely, but he knew behind the cop-talk I saw his nervousness.
“How’d you get partnered up with a fire hazard like old Bridgette, here?” I asked, looking over to his partner. She had been with the order for a few years about the time I had left L.A. Bridgette narrowed her eyes at me, not bothering to disguise her revulsion.
“Behave yourself, Ballard. Don’t let this broken-down old skell rattle you, L
uke. He’s not worth spit anymore.”
“Very true,” I said.
“What’s it like to be the biggest fuck-up in the Life?” she asked. “The order’s greatest mistake?”
“It’s sort of like this,” I began. I drove my knee into Luke’s balls as I crunched my elbow into Bridgette’s face, hard, driving her head back into the wall of the car. As she slid to the floor, leaving a red smear from the back of her head, I gave Luke, who had instinctively bent forward in the crowded car, an uppercut that lifted him straight off his feet. He slid down on the opposite side of the car from his partner. The door opened on the third floor with a feeble ding, and I stepped out, letting the sprawling bodies of the two Nightwise slump over and jam the door open.
I walked down the hall past the door labeled ACCOUNTING and the one that said DISTRIBUTION AND SALES to the inconspicuous door at the end of the hall labeled only PRIVATE. I opened it without knocking.
The office was cramped and looked like it belonged perfectly in this dingy warehouse. There was a whiteboard on the back wall, covered with obscure alchemical formulas. The desk looked like something picked up at an old city school surplus sale. There were two folding metal chairs in front of the desk and a several-years-old PC and monitor on it along with a corded, multi-line telephone. Two dented, gray file cabinets rested side by side in the corner opposite the door. There was a window on the left wall. The old, tattered metal blinds were pulled up to accommodate a decades-old air-conditioning unit that was almost more duct tape than plastic.
“Nice to see you redecorated,” I said to the woman behind the desk. “That new tape on the AC?” The woman was in her mid-sixties, with a body still hard from a daily regimen of swimming, racquetball, and kickboxing. Her hair was silver more than gray and worn high, always up at the office, but I suspected it still fell to her shoulders when she allowed it to come down. Her features were noble, almost haughty, in their proportions and beauty. She had the face of someone who commanded obedience and was used to getting it. There was nothing soft about her, including those piercing, blue, intelligent eyes. Looking at her brought back up some of the feelings I’d had for her over thirty years ago. She was powerful, beautiful, terrible like a storm, and I still felt the power of her pull. Her name was Gida Templeton, and she was the High Maven of the Nightwise.
“What did you do to them?” She sighed, closing the file in front of her.
“They’re napping in the elevator,” I said, sitting down in one of the folding chairs before her desk.
“I warned them,” she said, “but you can come off so … unassuming. You look terrible, Laytham. Are you taking care of yourself?”
“As quickly as I can,” I said, smiling as I rummaged for a cigarette, “but I keep putting up a fight. What do you want, Gida?”
“I want to know why you’re crashing about my city, stirring up elements of the Life and the gangs, leaving chaos and dead bodies in your wake, like you never left. Why?”
“I’m working a job,” I said. “Missing person. Nothing to do with you.”
“Rubbish,” Gida said. “You have been leaving big, muddy boot prints all over since you arrived back in Los Angeles. In roughly a month, you’ve managed to infuriate MS-13 by assassinating one of their in-house brujas, rile up a Cambodian Yeak gang, bring a Fae Carnifex to my doorstep, and get two civilians murdered, one of them turned into bloody compost, all on my watch. So please, Laytham, spare me your innocent lamb routine. It only played well when you really were one, a million years ago.”
“In my defense,” I said, “I was in a near-death coma for at least two of those weeks.” Gida opened a drawer of her desk and removed a bottle of 1926 Macallan whiskey, her favorite, and two tumblers. She poured me a glass and slid it across the table to me, then poured herself a glass.
“Well, let’s hear it for effective time management,” she said. “Three times the cock-ups in half the time.” She raised her glass and I did the same. “I am glad you’re not dead, Laytham. Cheers.” We both drank. “So tell me about your missing person.”
“Daughter of Fae nobility, the Ankou clan, went missing in 2009. Dad may want her back for some kind of political marriage or a Mob alliance. I told him I’d look into it. If the girl doesn’t want to be found, I intend to let her fade away again. It looks like she may have been mixed up in Roland Blue’s grotto trade.”
“Blue, eh?” Gida said. “Nasty business there. You have a picture of the girl?” I handed her the photo that Dree had given me of the two of them at the concert, and then a printed still of her face from her last porn film, courtesy of Grinner. I kept the crumpled, torn photo I recovered from Elextra’s bloody den my little secret for now. The Maven studied them for a moment and then slid them across the table back to me and sipped her expensive whiskey. “And what is your percentage in this mess?”
“The dad owes me a favor,” I said. “A sizable one.”
“Favors,” Gida said as she casually scanned me with her bright, cold, diamond eyes, “the only currency any wizard worth his salt gives a damn about. That’s adorable by the way.”
“What?”
“The way you honestly think if you find her that you’ll just nobly let her stay hidden if she doesn’t care for a family reunion. You still want to be the samurai so badly, don’t you, Laytham?”
“That’s the plan,” I said and took another long sip of the whiskey. “No way in hell I’m dragging her back kicking and screaming to this guy if she doesn’t want that.”
“Oh, of course not,” she said. “You will convince the poor child it’s her own idea. As great a wizard as you are, and you truly are brilliant in the craft, you’re a savant in emotional manipulation. At that you are unmatched … except for me, of course.”
“Of course,” I said.
“You possess the aptitude to talk the knickers off a nun, dear boy.”
“I recall talking yours off a time or two,” I said. Gida smiled.
“You did indeed,” she said, “just like I wanted you to.”
“Okay,” I said. “It’s been a slice of peach pie catching up, but I’ll be on my way now.”
“Yes,” she said, “you will. I want you out of L.A. by tomorrow.”
“I want Salma Hayek’s digits,” I said. “We don’t always get what we want, Gida.”
“I usually do,” she said. “You were a … rare exception. I expected too much from you and you fell, hard. To call you a mercenary now is to be generously blinded by nostalgia and my past affection for you, Laytham. You are not one of us anymore, you really never were. I took a feral thing and tried to domesticate it. I failed. To put it in the vulgar but accurate parlance of the street, you’re dirty, and I don’t need a dirty ex-Nightwise—the only ex-Nightwise—wandering my town causing trouble and poking into our cold cases.”
“This is about the murders,” I said. “Just like it was back then. They are the real reason you pushed me until I left, back when there were only two of them; now you’ve got what, nine? Great progress, Maven.”
I saw Gida’s face shift slightly. If you didn’t know her as well as I did, you’d never see it, but I had spent countless hours kissing those lips, watching ecstasy and weakness, cruelty and joy shift behind those blue eyes. Now I saw anger, cold and sharp, but always controlled.
“You’re no better than Roland Blue,” she said, “a street-hustling criminal, a predator, a user. The only difference between you two is that Blue is honest enough with himself to admit what he is. You, Laytham, you cling to the delusion that you are a good man, a just man. You hang onto it like a drowning man clings to a life preserver. You failed as a samurai; you failed as a rōnin, even. You have no code, no honor. You do as you please and try to justify it later, and you have the audacity to sometimes call it doing good. Tell me, Laytham, can you still summon it? Can you?”
I said nothing. I looked at my empty glass. I knew what she was talking about. There is a working taught to each prospective Nightwise. A simple exe
rcise for one trained in magic, to summon a three-dimensional symbol made of light and will—a five-pointed star, a pentacle of protection—the symbol of warding from the forces, agents, powers, and principalities of the darkness. We … they call it the Brilliant Badge. It is a secret ritual, taught only to those who wish to be Nightwise. To summon it you must believe, truly believe in the cause of the order, in protecting the weak and the innocent, to selflessly stand between the blind world and the things that would devour it. It is an act of ultimate self-sacrifice, of self-discipline, of faith. You can’t lie to the Brilliant Badge; the spell’s far too simple, too beautifully direct to counterfeit. You either believe or you don’t. It’s part of what keeps the Nightwise honest, above reproach. In the Life, it’s a powerful currency. You live or die by your reputation.
“You show me that you want justice for those murdered girls because it’s an affront to your sense of decency, to your desire for justice, not because it’s a challenge to you, to catch the killer, to win to soothe your own rapacious ego. Do what you enjoy doing so much, Laytham, prove me wrong. Summon it.”
I raised my palm. I focused my energies, the lenses of my chakra opened. They were the visualization I had settled on as my primary focus for my power. They couldn’t help me here. This was rote magic, a specific visualization exercise, which tapped into your mental state, your belief systems. It was, in a way, like a Rorschach test for wizards. You had the qualities the spell sought to unlock its tumblers and activate, or you didn’t. I tried to focus my thoughts on Jane Doe, on all the Jane Does, on the horrible things that had been done to them, to the ultimate affront of having all that they were torn from them and just … ripped apart, lost, gone, forever.
Unbidden, my thoughts went to the man at the dogfighting house, the one I had casually reaped of his soul. I felt the current of his life force burn through me, and the high, the almost godlike purity and power it gave me. I had done the same thing the killer had done, almost without a thought, and it was far from my first time doing it. The Brilliant Badge flared for a moment, then sparked feebly in my hand and collapsed. The light failed, and my palm was empty. Gida said nothing for a time. She slid the bottle across the table to me.
The Night Dahlia Page 23
