The Night Dahlia

by R. S. Belcher

  The unicorn looked over to the stairway and seemed to look straight at me. They could sense power, and besides it, I was the most powerful thing in the room. The eyes weren’t pleading, weren’t beaten, just full of pain and a deep sadness like it was very disappointed. The unicorn’s gaze was an indictment of the human race. I wanted to look away, but I didn’t. It didn’t send a telepathic message to me asking for help. I wondered if it couldn’t because of the collar, its sickly condition, or if it just knew it would fall on deaf ears. I kept walking up the stairs. Vigil remained, looking down into the light, matching the unicorn’s stare. “What is wrong with these people?” he asked. His hands clutching the stair’s rail, the knight looked to me, almost pleading. I shouldn’t have brought him here. This was sick shit, and he was a good man. He had no business being this deep in Hell.

  A second gate opened on the side of the stage, and a being entered that looked like a young woman with teal skin and long, tangled hair the color of dark seaweed. She wore a leather corset and fishnets with garters. It was a sea nymph, and she was collared as well. Her shoulders slumped, and she shuffled instead of walking. She didn’t look up, and she almost cried when she looked at the unicorn and moved toward it, but I was pretty sure the sea maiden had no tears left in her. I glanced over to Joyce, his face bland contempt. “A fucking Tijuana donkey show? Really? Class.”

  “Watch your fucking mouth, has-been,” Blue’s right-hand man said, pointing up the stairs. “You and your boyfriend can have a good cry after you see Mr. Blue. Move it.”

  I looked back to Vigil as the crowd began to whoop and whistle. I had shaken hands with what I saw in his eyes many, many times in my life; he was close to a dangerous edge. “Vigil,” I said as calmly as I could. “C’mon, man. We got an appointment.” Burris began to climb the steps, his jaw tight, his muscles coiled.

  We were ushered into Roland Blue’s office suite. The window behind his desk looked down into the arena where the nymph and the unicorn were beginning their performance. Blue stood as we entered with his men. The office was decorated in early-contemporary-street-thug-makes-good. Too much gilt, too much flash. The kind of tacky, expensive shit that someone who grew up on the street and got paid would pick out, someone so scary that no one would tell them their taste sucked. In keeping with his name, and his trademark attire, most of the room was done in shades of blue, with gold too, just to remind you he had it.

  Roland himself hadn’t changed much since we’d last tussled. A few more lines around his eyes, which were always the color of whomever he was talking to, or an unnerving polychromatic if he was addressing more than one person. His hair was long and dirty blond, but the gray was catching up fast. He was dressed in a cobalt Kiton suit with a black dress shirt. The shirt had wing-tip collar blades. He wore a cerulean tie. Roland’s patron, a long-forgotten Persian demon, existed anywhere that the color cerulean was present. It was the reason for his street name, the only name he had left since he had undertaken a ritual to blot out his true name with innocent blood.

  “Laytham Ballard,” Blue said, that too-wide, too-toothy grin spreading across his face. He said my name as “Balhard,” his voice pure Baws-ton. “You got a lot of fuckin’ balls to come beggin’ at my door. I could tell my boys to kill you right now.”

  “You’d lose a lot of men, asshole,” I said, taking a chair in front of his Florence Knoll Table Desk topped with gold-veined black marble, “and you’d fucking die, too.” Blue’s men chuckled a little, nervously.

  “You want we should take this bum outside and teach him some manners, Mr. Blue?” Joyce asked, his eyes red pinpricks of light. Blue waved him off.

  “Allaya get the fuck outta here. I got old business with this skid, private business. Screw.”

  Vigil, standing by my side, looked to me. “It’s cool,” I said. “They give you any shit, you do what you gotta do.”

  “Gladly,” Vigil said, looking at Blue.

  Vigil, Joyce, and the rest of Blue’s soldiers took it outside and closed the door. Blue walked over to his bar, dropped globes of ice from a bucket into a pair of short glasses and poured us each a finger of Jameson Rarest. “Nice, huh? I classed the joint up after I gave old Fifi the heave-ho.”

  “Fifi was your best friend,” I said. “The way I hear it, you punched his ticket without so much as a sit-down.”

  “Yeah,” Blue said. “Fuckin’ A, and look who gets a sit-down? Life’s a mystery, eh, Laytham? What the fuck you doin’ here? You outta your fuckin’ skull coming back to L.A.?”

  “I came for a missing person’s job, Rolly,” I said, taking the offered drink. I sat it down on the edge of the desk. It seemed a million light-years away from my mouth. I could smell the whiskey, and I licked my dry lips. “It ended up complicated.”

  “Yeah, no shit, I got ears,” Blue said, returning to his seat and sipping his drink. “You pissed on the maras, the fuckin’ Cambodians, even your own crew, the owls. They’re all gunnin’ for you, and I sure as hell ain’t gonna give you sanctuary. This ain’t no fuckin’ church, and I ain’t no fuckin’ priest.”

  “Not looking, not asking,” I said.

  “Good,” Blue said. “You still hate me. I can see it. You should. I know I still hate your cracker ass.”

  “I think you had Nico killed,” I said, “cut in half with a fucking twelve-gauge in front of his wife and kids. I came for you the night he died. You ever hear that? You can thank the Maven and Dragon for saving your life, Rolly.”

  “The Maven.” Blue laughed. “Well ain’t that a pisser! Let me enlighten you about that, Ballard. First off the jump, don’t think you’re still fuckin Gandalf. Your ass is old and used up. Most of what made you so fucking powerful, such a big-fuckin-shot, you’ve flushed it away. I could take you then and I sure as hell could take you now. If old Gida saved anyone’s life that night, it was yours, and that was because you were fuckin’ her.

  “And two, I liked Nico. There was no bullshitting in him. He was a good cop, he knew when to take, and when to look the other way. He had a line, you fucked with him and he’d fuck you back, hard. His dying was bad for everyone’s business, especially mine. Why kill cops when you can rent ’em? Nico was all right, but you, Ballard, you I hated the first time I laid eyes on your shit-kickin’ smart-ass. You wanna know who got Nico killed? You look in the fuckin’ mirror, if you haven’t already hocked your reflection.”

  “I want to know about Brett Glide, and about Crystal Myth.”

  Blue laughed and then drained his drink. I saw the ice shift in my full glass. It was goddamned obscene to let smooth-as-silk whiskey just sit there and get watered down, sacrilege. I flicked my eyes back to Blue’s; they were my eyes. “The light fuckin’ dawns!” He saluted me with his empty glass. “How many years you been sniffin’ around that shit, and you finally got a fuckin’ clue. Good for you!”

  “I don’t take you for a Dugpa, Rolly,” I said. “So I figure you for being their pimp. How’s it work, exactly? Glide aims women that have potential as sacrifices toward you and then you tag-team them to drag them down into the sewer, something like that?”

  “Close enough,” Blue said, rising and refilling his drink. “You, ah, you need anything, Ballard, while I’m up?” I shook my head curtly, tried not to look at the drink on the desk. “Y’know, you’re looking in the fuckin’ bag, awful rough, awful old. You need to do better by you. Life’s too fuckin’ short.”

  “Your concern is touching, Rolly, really. All I’m looking for is the girl, Crystal. My client can make it worth your while. I’m going to shut the Dugpa down, but you don’t have to be part of that if you help me.” Blue returned back to his desk with a fresh drink. Mine was sitting there, sweating and getting nastier by the second. It was bad manners. I was being a bad guest.

  “Your client?” Blue said. “You mean, Theo Ankou, her pops, right?” I kept my gaze even, tried to not give him anything. Blue nodded, “Yeah, her old man. The Ankous, they got some juice, but I hope you’re
not plannin’ on getting paid, Ballard, I already barked up that tree.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

  “That fuckin’ piece o’ shit, Glide,” Blue said. “He discovered her, Crystal, whateva’ her fuckin’ name was, and eventually he aimed her at me. We both knew she wasn’t human, that she was Fae, and oh man, let me tell you what a sweet piece a’ ass she was too. You ever bite into a ripe piece of fruit and have it dribble down your chin—fuckin’ sick, man.

  “So, the way this little bitch talks and acts, all lace curtain, I figure her for slummin’ and I figure that mumzie and dadzie will pay big not to see their little princess taking a pipe on YouTube, so I start diggin’ and I find out she’s the fucking Thin White Duke, Theodore Ankou’s, fuckin’ daughter. Holy shit, right? Like hitting the fuckin’ Powerball, you’d think.”

  “You telling me you reached out to Ankou about his daughter?” I leaned forward. My nerves were screaming. I couldn’t tell if it was what Blue was saying or my aching thirst for that drink, but I felt jumpy as hell.

  “Nah, I never got the chance,” he said. “Crystal took off on me, on Glide, on everybody. I was going to rescue her from Glide and the Dugpa and get her old man to give me a nice retirement reward so I could head for warmer, safer climes.”

  “‘Rescue’?” I said. Blue shrugged and sipped his whiskey. Behind and below him, the crowd howled as the performance on the stage reached some new hallmark of depravity. “You seriously going to give up L.A., Rolly? All that power you’ve been scraping for your whole miserable life? That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “I cross the Dugpa over the girl, I can’t stay here,” he said. “They’d already given Crystal the sacrificial mark. You know about that, right? Yeah, I figured, you’re a fucking professor, Ballard. I fuck them over for Ankou, I’d end up as one of their sick fucking psychological experiments, end up offing myself, or somethin’, or they’d send old Crash Cart out for me. No thanks.”

  “You saying you couldn’t handle the heat from a bunch of pervy Buddhists, Rolly?” My nerves felt like they were being plucked by talons of ice. I was breathing heavier, sweating a little. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was fighting off the urge to drink. “How the mighty have fallen.”

  “You joke all you want, Laytham,” Blue said. “Those fuckers been creeping around this city a long time before you and me were swimmin’ in our pops’ balls, as far back as there have been people comin’ here with dreams. That’s power, baby, hard-core, hardwired power. They own L.A., shit, they own me, and a lot more than me. They used to own you too, and you were too fucking stupid to know it. Why you think I’m being so goddamned accommodating to you, telling you all this shit? They told me you were coming, told me to expect you, told me that you’d spoken with that psycho, Manson. They told me you weren’t to be harmed unless you got unreasonable. They got plans for you, Ballard.”

  “Who runs the cult, Rolly?” I asked. “Who’s in charge? Is it Glide?”

  Blue snorted. “Brett Glide, shit. Little pissant, he don’t wipe his ass without clearing it with…” He shut up. He was scared of them, really scared of them, and that scared me. Something was trying to get my attention, something was wrong on a basic, subatomic level, some metaphysical fire alarm was screaming. I was close to what I needed. I focused on Blue. “Look, I don’t know no names ’cept Glide’s. Period, end of fuckin’ sentence.”

  “Right,” I said. “Well, here’s another name you might be familiar with.” I said the name; it was a common, northern, blue-collar, American name, nothing special, except to the person who gave it and the person it belonged to. Roland Blue visibly paled when I said it.

  “How the hell did you get that?” He stood. The blood returned to his face and his wide smile was gone. He was furious, afraid, and panicking. “How?!”

  “I guess I hocked my reflection for it,” I said. “Sit the fuck down, Rolly. Have another drink. We got business.”

  Wayne English had done me one more solid, an ace in the hole. He had hacked into the Akashic record, the sum total of all human knowledge, past, present, and future, and found a long-hidden name for me, Roland Blue’s true name. That simple identifier gave me direct access into the man’s soul, into the very core of him. The Akashic was tricky to navigate, and English was the only wizard still alive that I knew who wasn’t afraid to go in there. Complex questions with complex answers could take weeks, or longer, to be answered, but a single name, obscured by pact magic with nickel-and-dime entities that the Acidmancer could dig up in the short time I had given him.

  “You son of a bitch,” Blue said. “I should have known you wouldn’t show your ass to me unless you had a fucking ringer. You’ve always been a sneaky piece o’ shit, Ballard. You remember Logan Goddard?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You guys were tight, went way back.”

  “You remember killin’ him? Hittin’ him with a cheap-as-fuck spell from behind?”

  “Vaguely,” I said. “I was pretty high at the time. I killed him because he was your friend, Rolly. I thought you should know that.”

  “You fuckin’ mouth-breathin’ redneck bastard,” he said. I felt him marshaling his power, drawing on his rage to build an invisible murder machine.

  “You think I’d go to the trouble of digging up your true name and walk in here unless I had something special to lay you out with?” I said. “Drop that working, or you die right now.”

  Blue released it. It fluttered angry and hot between us for an instant, then it was gone. I smiled. Blue glared at me across the desk.

  “You’re going to tell me who yanks Brett Glide’s chain,” I said, “or I will give your true name to every second-rate demon, back alley spirit, and negative entity you’ve hustled or shook down over your illustrious career. They won’t find a body. They won’t even find a grease spot of the great Roland Blue.” A dry, rasping chuckle seemed to emanate from inside the cerulean-colored tie.

  “But first, the warm-up round. Crystal Myth,” I said, “Ankou’s daughter. You said she split. You and the Dugpa must have looked for her. They had too much invested in her, and you saw her as too good a meal ticket to just let slip away.” Blue nodded, his gangster cool shattered. He was pale and sweaty now, just like me.

  “You feelin’ that?” he said, rubbing his face. “Like someone crappin’ inside me, like catching the flu on the fuckin’ wind. What the fuck is that?”

  “The girl, Rolly,” I said. He nodded, wiped his head, and rubbed the sweat onto his pants leg. I was feeling claustrophobic, like I needed to throw up, to run.

  “Yeah, yeah, we turned the city up as much as we could looking for her,” he said. “Buses, trains, airport—zip. We thought we might have her when she went to the doc they sent all the girls to, but she never showed.”

  “Doctor?” I said. I could feel it now, the pressure on my Ajna chakra, like a psychic sinus headache. “She needed a doctor?”

  “She was in, y’know, a family way.” I remembered what the Weathermen had told me about Caern getting sick at the party and saying she was pregnant to Red. “The Dugpa had me send all their girls that got knocked up to this one doctor. She never showed up, though.” All my instincts were in fight-or-flight mode, and I honestly couldn’t figure out why. Blue’s office’s defenses were fine; something was wrong but I had no clue from where. It was time to wrap this up and get the hell out of here.

  “Now for the grand prize,” I said. “I forget your true name, and we never had this chat. Who runs the Dugpa, Rolly, who’s Glide’s boss, and how do I find him?”

  Something was shitting itself into our world, our space-time, right on top of us, a tumor made of infected emotion. Shadows deepened, stretched, grasped at the edge of the room, as the linkages to our world shivered and warped. “Rolly.” I stood, knocking my chair to the floor. Blue stood as well, feeling its arrival, realizing as I did that the ill feelings we had both been experiencing were our world fighting off the infection of this invader.
I felt Blue’s defenses rise around him, and I snapped mine up too. It was here, tearing through the membrane of the real, born out of nothing, spewing malice as afterbirth.

  The thing creaked on three rubber wheels instead of legs and feet; one of the wheels was palsied, like a broken shopping cart’s. It sped out of the darkness it brought with it and came directly at Roland. Its face was crumpled metal married to savaged flesh, partly hidden by a blood-soaked surgical mask. Blue spit out a curt spell and gestured with his hand toward the thing. There was an arc of purple electricity from the gangster to the creature, but it didn’t even slow it down. I brought my hands together like a funnel and sent directed Ajna force from my third eye into the thing, a spear made of pure thought. That got its attention a little; I thought it might. It had six arms, three on each side of its boxy, metal torso, all of them like flexible steel cables, smeared in blood and oil. The arms were growing blades, like petals opening on a flower. Two of the arms shot toward me, growing, stretching at dizzying speed. I dove for cover under the heavy marble table. The table shattered, taking the hit for me from one of the tentacles, the other sliced into my back, and I screamed as multiple knives stabbed me and then spun in the wounds.

  I looked up to see Roland Blue being run through, torn, and shredded by the spinning bladed arms. He screamed as long as he had the functioning equipment to do that, then he just sagged and jerked. Some of his blood splashed on my face, more of it, and soupy parts of him splattered on the stainless steel tray of rusted surgical instruments that was bolted to Crash Cart’s torso. I reached back and tugged at the alien, unyielding arm that was tearing apart my back and headed toward my spine. It was too strong, too slippery with fluids. The arm that had shattered the marble desk was headed for my face, its blades whirring. I heard the “pop, pop, pop” of small arms fire and the chatter of machine-gun fire as the office door crashed open. I knew none of it would do any good, any more than any spell, any effort. Crash Cart was a mental projection, imagination given form and power. There was only one way to stop it. I knew what I had to do and I had to do it now, no hesitation, not a grain of doubt in my mind, no fuzzy thinking, no distraction. The blades came at my face, the pain in my back was burning, twisting, humming agony.