Devil's Business

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Jack started to reply, but out of the corner of his eye, the statue moved. He blinked and looked again, putting it down to the flickering flames all around the edges of his vision, but no. The skinny girl’s arm, holding its long scythe, was definitely lifting, and the cheap robes wrapping the plaster were ruffling in a breeze.

  The candle flames flickered and went out wholesale, filling the room with cloying beeswax smoke. Jack coughed and waved it away from his face. In the blur, the girl and the statue became one, the girl’s face growing and skeletonizing, the statue beginning to move, to take on skin and flesh and life.

  You want something? The statue was grinning at him, the painted mouth slipping crookedly off the plaster hunks. There was no way the thing was moving and yet it was, pointing and talking at him.

  “As a matter of fact,” Jack said. “Yeah, there’s something you can tell me.”

  Nothing’s free, crow-mage, the statue hissed. What you got for me?

  “I gave you blood,” Jack said. “That’s enough.”

  Can’t live by blood alone, the statue said, and coughed a laugh. Got something else I want, crow-mage?

  “Might as well ask, then,” Jack said. The statue was changing, growing details, the limbs moving as the skeletal feet picked their way delicately over the bowls and candle wax.

  Got any smokes? The statue grinned at him.

  Jack fished in his pocket and brought out his half-squashed pack of Parliaments. “Need a light?”

  Nope. The cherry flared and the skeleton sucked in smoke. It billowed out from between her ribs, and she sighed. That’s the good shit.

  Jack had seen stranger things than a cheap Mexican saint statue sit up and cadge a fag, but the smoke was getting thicker, making him dizzy, and he sat hard in the scarred kitchen chair. “You feel like answering a question for me?”

  You can always ask La Flaca, the statue hissed. But you might not like what she has to spit back at you.

  “I’ll take my chances,” Jack said. Things crawled in the shadow behind the statue, things with snakes’ bodies and women’s faces, and they leered at Jack in the low light.

  Then shoot, brother, said the statue. A friend of the Hag’s is a friend of mine, you know.

  One of the snakes wound its way around Jack’s wrist, pushing his sleeve back and exposing the Morrigan’s marks.

  “I need to know where Lucinda Lanchester is buried,” Jack said. “Her body was moved and it’s apparently a big secret now.”

  Poor little lost Lucy, the statue purred. Rolled the bone dice with a bad man and came up snake-eyes.

  “It’s important,” Jack said. “If we don’t find her I can promise your city isn’t going to be around much longer.”

  What do you care about the living? the statue asked. You’re one of the dead, crow-mage. The walking dead, but dead all the same.

  “None of your business, you hollowed-out bitch,” Jack said. “How about that?”

  You think once the four are back underground that everything will come up roses? the statue said. You think you’ll save the world and stand in the sun?

  “Don’t care about that,” Jack said. “I care about a self-righteous prick not getting to play with the entire world like he’s having a tantrum in a sandbox.”

  You can keep fooling yourself, amigo, said the statue. But sooner or later you’re going to see it. You have death inside you. It’s in your bones and it’s in your blood, and sooner or later death will take you for her own. You can’t fight death. We’re the end of all lines, the last stop on that dark highway, and sooner or later you’ll take that exit, crow-mage. Your kind always do.

  “If you’re not going to help me you can save the bullshit for some gang-banger who’s impressed with it,” Jack said. “I know what the Morrigan wants from me. It’s the same thing she’s always wanted, and my answer is the same, too: you death-cunts can fuck off. The lot of you.”

  The snakes were thick around his ankles now, worming their way up his legs, spilling over the altar. The statue cackled, plaster teeth clacking and raining dust down on the heaving backs of her serpents.

  I can see why she chose you, Jack. She dropped the end of the cigarette and went back to her repose on the altar. Little lost Lucy is buried behind Paramount, looking at the lake.

  The statue froze again, and Jack came back to himself. He wasn’t sitting, but on the floor, and the girl crouched beside him, wearing human skin once again. “What did you see?” she said.

  “Snakes,” Jack muttered. The scent of incense and the taste of tequila in his throat mixed, and he retched, bile running in rivulets across the dirty, wax-covered floor. “You put something in my fucking drink.”

  “It’s nothing I wouldn’t give my grandmother,” Ana said. “Just a little encouragement to help you see. You’re a stubborn boy. You wouldn’t look unless you had help taking the ride.”

  “That wasn’t a ride,” Jack said. He sat up, swiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. His tongue and throat still burned. “That was dragged behind a fucking lorry. What was that shit?”

  “It’ll wear off soon,” Ana said. “What did she say to you? La Flaca?”

  “A lot of bollocks,” Jack muttered. “Riddles, just like the bitch I usually deal with. What is it about death that makes you such a cryptic slag?”

  “This body and La Flaca aren’t exactly talking,” the girl said. “Santa Muerte lives in all of us. Once, this body was a girl named Ana from Juarez. But I’ve been living here for a while. It’s comfortable. There’s a lot of death here, a lot of souls drifting on the Santa Anas.” She smoothed her hands over her skirt. “Anyway, I’ve seen her movies. Lucinda. They’re shit. What do you want with her?”

  “‘Lucy is buried behind Paramount, looking at the lake,’” Jack grumbled. “How is that in any way useful? I ask you.”

  Ana, or the thing that had once been Ana, cocked an eyebrow. “Paramount, the studio? In Hollywood?”

  “Dunno,” Jack muttered. “Guess so.”

  “There’s a cemetery behind Paramount,” Ana said. “The Hollywood Forever. And there’s a big man-made lake inside, which is usually full of garbage and goose shit. It stinks. Douglas Fairbanks has a huge crypt on this island in the middle. Bigger than this fucking apartment.”

  “This town seriously has a boneyard calling itself ‘Hollywood Forever’?” Jack said. Standing was a risky proposition, but he managed, by clawing hand over hand along the faded wallpaper.

  “Hey, man,” Ana said. “This is LA.”

  “Thanks,” Jack said. “I sincerely hope I never see you or Little Miss Skeletor again, but I suppose that’d be too much to ask.”

  “You can avoid her,” Ana said. “But she’s waiting for you at the end of the road. For all of us. Sooner or later you’re gonna take that last ride.”

  “Cheers, luv,” Jack said, and ducked through the twin sets of curtains to the front of the shop. The last thing he saw before the door swung shut was Santa Muerte, grinning her frozen grin.

  CHAPTER 28

  “Took you bloody long enough,” Belial said. “You’re going to cost me my weight in car fare.” He examined Jack under the dome light of the taxi. “You look like shit.”

  “Just drive.” Jack ignored him. He felt like shit—hammered, flattened shit. His head throbbed, and all of the bumps and blows he’d taken in the past days were catching up with him. He needed a drink, some sleep, or preferably a hit of smack. But that wasn’t an option, not until they’d found Abbadon, and by extension found Pete, so he told the cabbie to take them to Hollywood and put his head back against the seat, watching the neon and palm trees and faces pass by.

  Hollywood Forever sat on a quiet stretch of Santa Monica, nearly deserted after dark. The cemetery was closed, but Belial walked straight ahead, across the car park and past the chapel.

  In the dark, the cemetery was full of stone spirits, white mausoleums and graves scattered across flawless green lawns. Cemeteries in London were w
ild, overgrown, crowded to the brim with the dead. Too little land and too many bodies. Here, the dead went on forever.

  “By the pond,” Jack told Belial. He smelled it before he saw it—goose shit and algae, just as Ana had said. The Fairbanks mausoleum loomed over the water, reflecting its own ghost into the dank water.

  Belial walked from tomb to tomb until he stopped at a small flat-roofed Egyptian box, then kicked his foot against the iron door. “This one.”

  Jack examined the unassuming tomb. The grass was mowed, but all of the flowers placed on the steps were dead, and somebody had graffitied the ironwork on the doors. “You sure? I don’t really fancy getting pinched for cracking open some random bird’s final rest.”

  “Haven Carstairs.” Belial pointed at the brass nameplate bolted to the granite, rust rivulets running down the face of the tomb. “One of her characters. Gangster boyfriend shoots her to death after she finds Jesus behind the settee or some rot. On-screen death scene. Decent stuff.”

  “Great.” Jack rattled the doors. “Locked, too.”

  “Your particular talent, isn’t it?” Belial said. “I’m a demon, not a petty thief.”

  “You lot are useless, you know that?” Jack said. “Amazed you don’t just get flattened by a bus.”

  “I’ve been walking this earth a lot longer than you and I’ll be walking it often,” said Belial. “Open the fucking tomb, will you? I haven’t got all night.”

  Jack placed his hand over the lock and let his talent flow into it. After his time in Hell and in the void of Locke’s mansion, it felt like cool water filling the space behind his eyes to feel the Black again. It was strong here, a dark vein of power running under the cemetery, fed by both the restless dead and the living of Los Angeles.

  The lock popped open and Jack shoved the door wide.

  Lucinda’s coffin was encased in cement, which had cracked across the top. Cobwebs drifted back and forth in the draft from the door, but otherwise the tomb was undisturbed. Belial pushed a chunk of concrete off the coffin with a clatter and swiped the dust from the nameplate with his sleeve.

  Lucinda Carpenter

  Beloved Daughter

  1919–1939

  “Lanchester was a stage name,” Belial said. “She was from Waukegan. Not really surprised she cut a deal. Miserable place.”

  “I have seen Bride of Frankenstein,” Jack said. “’M not a complete tit.”

  Belial grabbed one end of the coffin by its pallbearer handle and tugged. “Come on, Winter. Help me get this dead bitch out and about.”

  The coffin was heavy, in the way that old things were heavy, and landed on the floor of the tomb with a crash. Jack felt something spasm in his back and let his end go. “Try not to alert the entire city, yeah? I can’t exactly nip back to the Pit when the cops show up.”

  “You’re a great nanny,” Belial said. “I remember the days when you had balls.” He grinned, and Jack could see the gleam of his teeth as the demon went about prying open the coffin. “The dad-to-be bit softened you up, has it? Made you all gooey on the inside? I tell you, the thought of a little Winter toddling about got me excited, rightly enough. Imagining what your blood and the Weir’s will do together is one of my favorite daydreams.”

  Jack moved without thinking, moved because the cold was in his blood again, and slammed Belial into the broken concrete, holding him there with fingers clasped around his windpipe. “You shut your fucking mouth or it’ll be the last thing you live to regret saying,” he whispered. On the backs of his hands, the Morrigan’s marks writhed, and where he touched Belial, the demon’s skin went pasty and blue, like he’d contracted a bad case of frostbite.

  “You need a good wank, mate,” Belial croaked. “You are wound way too tightly for your own good.”

  “You and I have our thing,” Jack said. “But you leave Pete out of it.” He let go of Belial and shook off the cold. It was what he imagined being possessed felt like—an alien presence inside his skin, moving and talking for him.

  “What you have is an unhealthy obsession with that woman,” Belial said. He straightened out his suit and rubbed his neck. “She’s not a saint, you know.”

  “She’s as close as I’m ever going to get,” Jack said. “So if you want my help, stay fucking quiet.”

  “Fine,” Belial said. “You talk too much anyway.”

  Jack ignored him. Belial was only doing what he did best—getting under a man’s skin and prodding all of his weak spots. It was the instinct of all demons. He just wished Belial wasn’t so fucking good at it.

  The coffin was old, not airtight, and the lid wasn’t hard to break off. Lucinda Lanchester was little more than a skeleton with brown leather skin stretched over it, nibbled by rodents. Belial wrinkled his nose.

  “At least she’s old enough that she doesn’t stink. Small mercies.”

  Jack lifted up the remnants of the silk dress Lucinda had been buried in, which came apart in his hands. He felt under the skeleton, through the dust of the flowers that had been laid in the coffin, and felt nothing. He looked back at Belial. “Any time you want to jump in here, mate. Any time.”

  “You’re doing a splendid job,” Belial said. “Really.”

  Jack patted down the lining of the coffin, which had been pink at one point, but was now faded to a sad urine color. If he hadn’t been prodding he would have missed it—a small crackle against the wooden side of the coffin. He ripped it away and saw a single square of paper folded and taped to the side.

  Belial snatched it before Jack could get a look. “Oi,” he said. “Didn’t anyone teach you not to be grabby?”

  “Likely the same person who failed to teach you,” Belial said. He unfolded the paper carefully, mindful of his pointed nails, and then grinned. “Oh, this is a laugh.”

  Jack yanked the paper back. A sigil took up the center, of the page. None he’d seen before but not head-twistingly complicated, the sigil was surrounded by numbers and symbols. Jack had quit going to school long before he learned any of them. Math was never his shining glory.

  “What the fuck was Locke on about?” he said. Belial chuckled.

  “Abbadon said it was physics, didn’t he? Magical math. Expressing the door to Hell in numbers and sigils. That’s clever, that is.” He held out his hand. “Give it here. For safekeeping.”

  “Fuck off,” Jack said. “I give you this and you’re going to skip straight back to the Princes and act like the good little scent hound.”

  “I’m not that predictable.” Belial snatched for the paper again. “Come on now, Winter. Don’t be a cock.”

  Jack folded the paper and tucked it inside his jacket. “Or maybe I was wrong,” he said to Belial. “Maybe you’ll hold on to it and use it with the Princes to leverage yourself. Get yourself a room in that tower and a nice little legion of your own to command.”

  Belial’s lip curled. “Now you’re thinking like a demon, Winter. Always said you had it in you.”

  “Either way,” Jack said. “We’re holding on to this until Abbadon and his merry band shows.”

  Belial stepped out of the tomb, onto the grass, and folded his arms. “You really think I couldn’t take it from you if I wanted it?”

  “You really think I know you wouldn’t have already tried if you could?” Jack said. “The Princes hung you out, mate. You’re not on your home turf, and you’re pissing yourself because Abbadon can play footie with your head as long as we’re in the daylight world. So just simmer down.”

  Belial set his jaw, but he sat down on the steps of Lucinda’s tomb and looked at the lake. “This place is a laugh,” he said. “You’d think Roman emperors were lying in state.”

  “Close,” Jack said. “Film stars. Rock stars. Basically the same thing in America.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how many bargains I’ve wrought with the stiffs in this place,” Belial said. “Me and others.”

  “I would,” Jack said. “Would explain most of cinema for the past twenty years.”


  “Isn’t that the truth,” Belial said. “I used to try to bargain with the ones who actually had some talent, but there’s only so many Connerys. The rest are Luncindas and Lockes.”

  Jack watched the lamplight on the lake. If Abbadon came, he couldn’t rely on Belial. To defend Locke’s secret, yes. Him, no. He was expendable, and Belial would probably enjoy watching him twitch while Abbadon ripped his guts out.

  “This is your fault, you know,” Belial said. Jack turned on him.

  “Yeah? How is possible Hell wrought on earth my fault, exactly?”

  “If I had never made that bargain with you, back when you were lying there bleeding out lo these many years ago, then we wouldn’t be here.” Belial sighed. “What can I say? It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “You fucking stoned?” Jack said. “I wasn’t exactly specific. I was dying, and I was looking for anyone. You just happened to be in the neighborhood.”

  “No,” Belial said quietly. “I wasn’t.”

  Jack felt a cold in him that had nothing to do with his talent or his tattoos. He hadn’t called any one demon, that day fourteen years earlier. Hadn’t even expected it to work. It was a last gasp. He was dying, he’d drawn a summoning mark in his own blood, sent out the call to any bottom-feeder who bargained souls from the boot of his car. And instead Belial had come, one of the Named, and cut him a sweetheart deal. Thirteen years of life in exchange for his soul. Of course, he hadn’t mentioned that a decade of that would be spent in a smack haze, sleeping on floors and hustling for cash, but demons weren’t famous for specifics. He’d lived, and Belial had saved him. That was all it was.

  “So what?” Jack said at last. He lit a fag, the one thing that could reliably calm tremors in his hands and disguise fear as something else. “You just hung around waiting for some ghost to rip my lungs out during an exorcism and swooped in for the kill?”

  “Think it through, Winter,” Belial said. He shoved a hand through his hair, and in the low light the lines of his face were stark. The demon looked tired, if such a thing were possible, and worn down in the way of long-term addicts on the arse end of a bender. “A Named demon doesn’t show his face because you scribble something in your own blood and flop about like a fish, calling down every elemental and scum-sucker in the greater London area.”