So much for almost human. “Not really. They call it ‘Billionaire’s Beach’ on account of all the celebrities and rich folks that have houses there. In the real world, anyway. In the Between, who knows what it’s like.”
“It’s probably pretty close but we won’t really know until we scout it out.”
“The houses are all right down on the sand, and built really close together. Assuming it’s the same, Dedushka will be able to walk directly from his house onto the beach. There’s no seawall or anything.”
Adan nodded. “We’ll need to let him get well clear of the house before we make a move.”
“Right. We don’t want him retreating to the house if something goes sideways. The beach is wide-open, but confined. There are houses along one side and the ocean on the other.”
“Yeah, but that’s not an advantage. The ocean is a hard boundary for us, but not for the spirit.”
“I agree. We have to take him on the beach. If we let him into the water, the job’s over.”
“I’ve got the sniper rifle. I could take a position on the roof of a nearby house.”
“That’s what I had in mind when I asked for the rifle. By the way, can you actually use that thing? It’s pretty high-tech.” It wasn’t, really, even by early twentieth century standards, but it was a hell of a lot more sophisticated than Adan was used to.
“My father was giving me instruction before he left. Anyway, the rifle is a magical artifact and I have plenty of experience with those.”
“Okay, you and the rifle are backup, though.” Adan started to protest but I shook him off. “No, look, the spirit’s going to have bodyguards around him, so it might be tough to get a clean shot. More importantly, we don’t know what this guy can do. We don’t know how tough he is. If you shoot him and he doesn’t go down, it’s game over. He can be in the water in seconds.”
“You’re going to try to get close,” Adan said.
“That’s the only way to do it right.”
“What makes you think he’ll let you get close?”
“I’m feeling a lot better now that I got some sleep. I figure I’ll use my glamour.”
“Absolutely not, Domino. I know you’re stubborn but you’re not stupid. There’s too much on the line and you’re too important to risk your life playing with somebody else’s magic.”
I didn’t argue. I was secretly relieved. When I’d used the glamour to shapeshift, it had been worse than any pain I’d ever imagined possible, let alone experienced. It had felt wrong, like a cancer spreading through my body. I wasn’t looking for a chance to return to that place. If I had a choice, I’d never go there again.
“What then?” I said. “Maybe Honey can dust me. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Just an invisibility glamour. Just enough to let me get close.”
“I’m sure she could, but like you said, we don’t know what this guy can do. What if he sniffs out the glamour? I don’t know for sure but I’ve heard some of the vodyanoy can.”
“Maybe you should ask the piskies,” Honey said. She and Jack flew in from the Enchanted Forest and landed on the coffee table.
“To answer your question, no, a vodyanoy probably can’t sniff out piskie glamour.”
“Cool,” I said, “then you can-”
“But it will sniff out you,” Honey finished. “He has a nose for human magic, Domino. Most of us from this side do. And remember, that’s all you are in the Between.”
“Damn it, how am I going to get close if he can smell me even if I’m invisible?”
“You have to let us do it,” Honey said.
“Us who?”
“Jack and me. We’re piskies. We don’t smell like you.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but no way. This is my job. I’m not putting you in it.”
Honey’s face flushed and she put her hands on her hips. “Domino, I fought beside Oberon upon Gastonbury Tor in the days before your people discovered gravity. Before our return to Arcadia, Jack was one of the King’s Knives.”
I looked at the piskie. “He’s about the right size, I guess.”
Honey threw up her hands. “The King’s Knives, Domino. Jack’s an assassin. He crossed into the lands controlled by Queen Mab, behind enemy lines, and executed the Unseelie enemies of the king.”
I was suitably impressed but I couldn’t help remembering their glamours had bounced off Abe Warren easy enough.
I didn’t want to piss off Honey any more than she already was, though. I decided to raise my concerns delicately. “He’s probably protected against fairy magic…”
“I knew you’d bring that up! For your information, we didn’t use any lethal glamour against the ghost-hunter. We thought you wanted to talk to him. There wasn’t a whole lot to your plan, as I recall, but you did say ‘grab him’ not ‘kill him.’”
“That’s true,” I allowed, “but this guy might be protected against your deadly glamour, too.”
Honey blurred and suddenly my head was jerked backward. The piskie was perched atop my skull holding a fistful of my hair. The other hand held her silver sword in a downward grip, the point poised just above my left eye. “If our magic doesn’t work,” she said calmly, “we’ll poke holes in him until he stops moving. Sound good?”
“I admire the simplicity of it,” I said. “What about the bodyguards?”
“Probably just ghosts,” Jack said. He shrugged.
“We’ll come at him from above,” Honey elaborated.
“The vodyanoy will be dead before he realizes what’s happening.”
“We could cover them with our guns from the houses, Domino. If the bodyguards get in the way, we take them out. Even your pistol should have enough range for that.”
I felt like I should stand up for Ned, but I let it pass. “It could work,” I said. “It’s a pretty damn good plan, Honey.”
“Thanks!” she said brightly. She let go of my hair and landed on my shoulder.
“There’s one more thing I have to do before we can clip Dedushka, though.”
“What’s that?” said Adan.
“It’s the zombies,” I said. “The math is a real problem. There can’t be that many Xolos. I’m worried that by the time we rescue them, there will be too many zombies for them to handle. If there are too many zombies and they’re all creating more zombies, the Xolos will never catch up and we’re all screwed.”
“You need Oberon,” Honey said.
“I need everyone,” I said. “I’ll have Chavez put the other outfits-our allies-on zombie patrol, but we don’t have the manpower to stay ahead of this thing. There are already more zombies than gangsters in L.A. and they’re making more faster than we can put them down. Oberon has the manpower.”
“The question is whether he’ll give it up,” Honey said.
“I’ll ask nicely.”
I called ahead to the Carnival Club and Titania told me Oberon was in the field. The queen gave me the address and I used the traffic spell and two freeways to get to Chinatown in about fifteen minutes. I spun the parking spell and pulled into a spot just across Yale from Castelar Elementary School. Oberon stood on the sidewalk outside a nondescript apartment building watching the front entrance of the school. A waifish female sidhe with dark hair and pale skin stood at his side.
Oberon nodded when I got out of the Lincoln and approached. The woman glanced at me and then turned her attention back to the school.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Catriona tells me it started with a janitor,” Oberon said.
“He came to work this morning-already dead, one imagines-and then turned. There are seven hundred children inside.”
I took a moment to let it sink in. I looked at the cream-colored school building with pink trim, and then turned to the woman. “You’re Catriona?” The woman nodded but didn’t speak. Her skin was really pale-it almost looked bleached-and her eyes were very dark, nearly black.
“I’ve been using the bean-sidhe to locate targets,” Obe
ron said.
“Banshees are fairies?”
“We are sidhe,” Catriona said, and the corner of her mouth quirked up. “We have a particular skill for finding death. It is our privilege to serve our king.”
“I have a squad inside,” Oberon said. “We don’t know yet how many of the children are still alive.”
Population clusters. The Stag geeks had told me this is how it would go. It wasn’t going to be limited to shopping malls and movie theaters. “Goddammit, I need you to get a handle on this shit, King.”
“We are doing what we can,” Oberon said. “There are a great many zombies loose in the city already, and more being created by the minute. Perhaps if we had caught it sooner…”
“I don’t care how many there are,” I said. “You have a kingdom behind you.”
Oberon looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “A kingdom, yes, in Avalon,” he said. “Here, I have only a tiny few who can assist in this effort.”
“Bring in more. I don’t care how many it takes.”
“I cannot do that,” Oberon said, shaking his head regretfully.
“You can’t or you won’t?”
A shadow crossed the sidhe king’s features. “I believe I said what I meant. I cannot bring more of my people to this world. I do not control sufficient territory for them to survive here.”
“You need more juice,” I said.
“I do. There are thousands of zombies in the city, Domino. To sustain the numbers I would need to contain them, I will need far more juice than I can tap from Hollywood.”
So that’s how it was. Oberon was going to use this crisis to expand his territory. Or, he’d let the zombies wipe out half the city’s living population, and then he’d move in. He was a cunning motherfucker, no doubt, but I also had the idea he was telling the truth.
“You can pull more juice from my turf,” I said. “I’ll give the word. You can put your taggers on my streets. But, King, let’s be real clear. This is a temporary arrangement, feel me?”
“I do, indeed,” he said. “Inadequately temporary, I’m afraid. I will not ask my people to come to this world, save your people in this time of peril, and then go back where they belong once you’ve no further need of them. My kingdom must be large enough to welcome all those I ask to serve.”
I clenched my jaw and glanced at Catriona. She was smiling. The sidhe were the only game in town and I needed tickets. They both knew it. “Fine,” I said. “You get Mobley’s turf when this is all over. I’m not sure how your snow-white Irish ass is going to run those neighborhoods but that’s your problem.” I also wasn’t sure how Terrence was going to feel about it when I served up some more shit for him to eat. Of course, there was a good chance he wouldn’t survive the war with Mobley anyway.
“Done,” Oberon said, inclining his head. “That should be sufficient to support a few hundred of us. We shall do our best to stem the tide.”
The sound of breaking glass drew my attention back to the school building. A small boy-perhaps seven or eight years old-crashed through the front doors and sprawled on the sidewalk. He crawled to his feet and looked around, his head darting wildly from side to side. The boy’s face and hands were streaked with blood, and despite his tumble through the glass doors I was pretty sure most of it wasn’t his own. His eyes latched onto us and he started across the street, a wide, bloody grin twisting his face into a terrible mask.
I pulled juice from the street and prepared to spin my ghost-binding spell. “There’s just one more thing, Your Majesty,” I said. “Sooner or later, you’re going to be up against a wall and you’re going to come to me for a favor. Rest assured, I’ll offer you the same friendship you’ve shown me today.”
“Are you threatening me, Domino?” Oberon said.
“Not at all, King. You’re my ally and I’m grateful for your assistance. I’m just saying, when that day dawns don’t forget your wallet. I don’t come cheap.”
The vodyanoy’s beach house was a modern two-story affair of redwood and beige cement wedged between a white cube with round windows on the right and something that looked vaguely Art Deco on the left. All of them had the faded, sepia tone look of an old photograph, and it made for an eerie accompaniment to the air of nostalgia that hung over the secluded beach. No ghosts roamed the strand and no gulls wheeled overhead. The light surf rolled silently against the shore.
There weren’t many access ways down to the beach through the tightly packed homes, and we didn’t want to cross in front of the vodyanoy’s house. This might have presented a minor obstacle in the real world, but fortunately, we didn’t mind trespassing. We chose an older wood-frame beach house a few doors down to the east. When we were as sure as we could be it was uninhabited, we went in through the front door.
The house was narrow but had three floors. The upper floors had wide covered balconies that ran the entire width of the beachfront side. The balcony on the top floor was crowded with boxes and spare furniture. Whether its current owner or one long dead, someone seemed to have used the balcony for storage. The neighbors probably wouldn’t care much for the untidiness, but the junk made a convenient concealed position for a couple of snipers.
We all sat on the deck and huddled around, waiting for showtime. Adan was working the bolt of his rifle back and forth and sighting along the barrel. Honey and Jack sat cross-legged facing each other, whispering in their own musical language. I just sat quietly and watched them. None of them had to be there. Even Adan could have stayed behind to run the business side of the outfit. We still needed juice, after all-now more than ever. They weren’t there because they were getting paid. They weren’t there for power. I knew why Honey was there-she was my friend.
If I’d been a normal person, it would have been an easy thing to take for granted. Well, if I’d been anything like normal, I probably wouldn’t have been sitting in a beach house in the spirit-world version of Malibu waiting to do a hit on a Russian river spirit. That aside, friendship wasn’t something I could take for granted because I’d never really had it. Chavez was the closest I’d really come to it and even then the outfit was always between us. We were probably as close as two gangsters could be. Maybe someday, on the other side of this war and with the outfit behind us, we could have a real friendship, a normal friendship. Of course, I knew the chances weren’t very good that either of us would live that long.
And that made me think of Adan again. It seemed like just about everything made me think of Adan. He was a gangster now, too. So what made me think he was my friend? He’d been given power and authority within the outfit, but he had little if any support. He needed to make his bones, prove he had juice. He needed to win friends and influence people, and from what I’d seen, he wasn’t all that good at it. He was smart, but he didn’t know the outfit. He didn’t know the underworld, didn’t belong to it. Adan didn’t have a history in my world. He needed to form alliances and win the respect of the big hitters and their crews to consolidate his power.
If I looked at it with a clear head, that’s why Adan was here. The wartime captain is in a tight spot, here’s Adan to step in and save the day. He wasn’t my friend. He was playing an angle, just like everyone else.
Adan wasn’t the changeling. He looked the same, talked the same, had all the same mannerisms and body language. At the club, he’d even smelled the same, like apples and cinnamon, though I couldn’t be sure if that was Adan or the fairy mojo Oberon had put on us. Since squeezing the changeling, I had defenses against fairy glamour, but I’d either let them down or Oberon’s magic was powerful enough to defeat them. What about Adan’s glamour? Why had he smelled like apples and cinnamon that night? Was it possible he knew the effect it would have on me? Might he have used his glamour to seduce me?
There was a fine line between healthy suspicion and paranoia, and it was especially fine where fairies and victims of fairy abductions were concerned. Fortunately, I didn’t share Adan’s weaknesses. I knew the underworld, I knew the outfit and I k
new a thing or two about exposing rivals and forging alliances. The key to both was to slow the fuck down. Don’t make assumptions. Don’t jump to conclusions. Sit back, watch and learn. You couldn’t always know what was in another gangster’s heart, but if you had some patience he’d show you soon enough.
I glanced up and caught Adan staring at me. He smiled and went back to playing with his rifle. All I needed was a little patience. Lie back in the weeds and let this guy reveal himself. Maybe he’d prove himself an ally, a partner, even a friend. That would be nice. And maybe I’d find out he was just playing the game. That wouldn’t be so nice, but it wouldn’t be the first time and at least I’d know how it was. The ball was in Adan’s court, and I could play it either way. The truth was, he needed me more than I needed him. I liked it that way. I always had.
“It’s time,” Adan said.
I sat up and looked down the beach. An old man with a close-cropped white beard walked toward us along the high-tide line, surrounded by half a dozen ghosts. He wore an old felt hat and a bright red track suit-what was it with Russian gangsters and track suits, anyway? His bodyguards looked like disposable muscle, except that some of them had obviously drowned. Their bodies were pale and bloated and their clothes hung in damp tatters. A couple were even sporting long strands of seaweed like feather boas.
Jack pulled Honey to him and kissed her, long and hard. Then they both nodded to us and disappeared. Adan and I lay flat on our bellies, aiming our guns through the slats in the balcony railing. I’d cautioned Adan to stay back-you wanted to sight through the railing, but you didn’t want the barrel extending past it. It was the kind of thing a trained bodyguard could spot, more easily than you’d expect.
It was still daylight, though it was late enough I imagined the sun would be setting into the sea in the real world. The light in this place was indistinguishable from midday, and we’d have good visibility-by the standards of the Between-if we needed to use our weapons. The plan was for the piskies to attack when the group drew even with our position, to give us the widest possible field of fire. We waited and I watched Adan out of the corner of one eye. He was calm, breathing deeply and easily, his finger resting lightly on the trigger of the rifle.
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