by Brian Hodge
Eva remembered that fateful day almost precisely a year ago when they pulled her off her regular shift and had her come down to the Crowley Barrens. It was all shrouded in bureaucratic mystery, and she was paraded in front of these six old men like a prize poodle in a metaphysical dog show. She would be the prototype — the first detective to be recruited into the Patrol. They never really gave her a choice, and they put her through a gauntlet — these six old men in their white tunics and hooded faces — that would have made King Arthur cringe. In fact, in many ways, the initiation emulated the ancient Arthurian rites, as well as the four traditional magical weapons.
Eva had to complete a series of brutal, exhaustive obstacle courses, laced with holographic predators and intra-dimensional labyrinths. Afterward she was instructed to construct a Rod — a sort of metallic club — in secret, by herself, out of some material that was meaningful and/or sentimentally valuable to her. The Cup, which was meant to serve as a container for Eva’s elemental ammunition, was supposed to be given to Eva by a loved one. And finally, the Disk was to be presented by police officials, a medallion embossed with the new mission legend: “Ad Purgare, Ad Capere, Ad Adversari Malevolus.” (To Cleanse, To Contain, To Counter the Malevolent).
Eva chose a family heirloom for her Rod, one of Grandma Miersol’s teak wood wands which Eva dipped in jeweler’s silver. Her Cup was a petrified gourd that a neighborhood boy had given her, gift-wrapped with his own sticky little hands as a thank you present for helping his family with gang trouble. Eva cried when she got it, and later had it plated in foxglove and arctic silver. And finally, Eva had a ceremonial Disk attached to the inside lining of her duster, just under her detective shield.
But it was the Sword that was the hardest won, the most densely packed with neural-microbes.
Eva earned the Sword at the end of her initiation, after confronting the six old men. For thirty solid minutes she screamed obscenities at them, cursing them for putting her through this charade, wailing at them for singling her out for this idiotic exercise. Much to her dismay, the tirade had had the opposite effect than the one intended. The old coots were impressed by her backbone, her passion, and they awarded her the highest honor for a practitioner of white magic. They gave her a Sword made out of a new alloy, as big as a hog’s femur, with a perpetual power pak. But it was probably Eva’s emotions that truly charged the weapon with SuperMatter. Eva had white-hot rage going for her at that point. Rage at the way she was being treated. Rage at all the secrecy and bullshit. Rage at the state of imbalance in the universe. And rage for all the stress this new assignment would put her under….
“Your gun, ma’am,” the young cop was saying near the exit door, his voice shaking Eva out of her rumination. He handed over the elemental.
“Thanks.” Eva holstered the weapon and made her way down the air-lock tunnel.
Eva’s car was in the underground lot, waiting in a pool of halogen. A tricked out ’41 Suzuki Mongoose with shielded panels all around, the unmarked sedan was standard issue — a big block of brushed black steel. The interior smelled like Eva. Cloves and stale cigarettes and arrowroot and old leather. Where the windshield used to be was a layer of lampblack lead, the sensors connected to view screens on the inside console. Windows were another thing-of-the-past. Nobody went exposed anymore. Too tempting for a random trickster to identify a face, throw a spell through the glass.
Eva fired up the Mongoose, then pulled out of the complex, emerging from the cold, artificial tungsten into the grey, corrupted sun.
The city was laid out in a hex pattern — the central district forming five square miles of monolithic office blocks built on blessed bone, positioned in harmony with the planets, the residential communities jutting off like the extremities of a six pointed star. Most these new developments were overlaid upon the rubble and detritus of the old, leaving behind a war-torn patina, a mish-mash of gleaming alloy and shriveled urban decay. Like a painted corpse. From the sky, the city resembled a vast Seal of Solomon — the shape of benevolent magic, the icon of the Good.
At least that was the theory.
Eva took the main beltline across the Druid Span and into the east bay area. The blur of chartreuse flames ghosted by her on either side of the thoroughfare, blooming on her thermal screens, coming from inside dark allies. Petty BlackCrimes yielded these hot-spots — ‘green fires,’ the natives called them — always burning in some corner of some darkened tenement, the residue of magic vandals.
At Eighty-Seventh Street Eva turned south and roared into Ghetto-3.
Ghetto-3 was a desolate sector of magic-worn, low-rent housing blocs infested with drifters, BlackStuffers and onyx pushers. On every corner, plumes of stage-smoke from errant tricks rose over puddles of shattered amber-glass, while broken liquid-halogen signs shone garishly over the crumbling storefronts. Most of the passers-by shuffled anonymously along under aluminum-alloy awnings, their faces veiled by shields and visors, their bodies encased in tattered charmsuits. No eye contact. No conversation. And everybody wore static gloves and hair nets in order to avoid any tissue loss. People were paranoid about leaving stray hairs in public. Or fingernails. Or dead skin. Or blood. Or any other discharge that would enable a malevolent practitioner to target them.
Maccabee Lydon lived in the heart of this sector, in a tiny shotgun flat across a vast courtyard of mangled wreckage and gnarled trees.
Eva parked the Mongoose outside the entrance, lifted the collar of her duster, pulled down her visor and got out. She positioned the elemental in the small of her back so as not to raise any suspicion, and then adopted the slumped walk of the denizens. Don’t look at me. I’m nobody. I’m nothing.
She got half way across the courtyard when she saw the figure crouched in the doorway. He was wearing a torn reflective charm-tunic and an archaic leather flying-ace helmet. His face was turned away, pressed against the rampart, his back hunched and facing Eva as she approached.
Eva called out, “Three-oh-three?”
No answer.
“Hey!”
The figure didn’t move, just continued crouching there like a little boy who had been naughty and was being punished.
“Hello?” Eva said, approaching cautiously, her left hand curling inward, her fingertips brushing the tip of the Rod nestled in her sleeve-sheath. She was close enough to see the ashy dust on the shoulders of Lydon’s tunic, close enough to see the man trembling faintly.
Somewhere in the distance a blackbird cawed.
“Lydon?” Eva said as she drew near the figure, using the man’s private name, trying to provoke a reaction. The man just shivered, the back of his head shaking convulsively, the smell of bone dust coming off him.
Eva touched his shoulder —
— and her hand passed through the reflective fabric as though it were smoke.
Jerking back with a start, Eva let out a grunt and reached for her Rod, but it was too late. The figure spun around to face her and revealed the bleached white skull inside its helmet. A skeletal arm shot out at Eva’s throat, but Eva jerked away just in time to swing the blessed length of steel. The Rod passed through the doppelganger’s torso with a crackling whisper of static electricity.
“Shit!” Eva hissed, stumbling backward onto her ass, cursing herself for misidentifying the doppelganger.
The ghost dissolved into a seething, fizzing mass of spiders that poured across the ground.
Across the courtyard, maybe fifty meters away, there was a blur of movement.
“LYDON!!” Eva sprang to her feet, spinning toward the street, reaching for her elemental. Her cover was blown now. Too late to worry about getting made by the BlackStuffers. Nonexistent arachnids were flaking around Eva, sparking and sputtering like shreds of weak video snow.
Seventy-five meters away, the little junkie named Lydon was racing toward the street.
“HALT, ASSHOLE!” Eva hollered, then started after the little addict.
The man in the tunic stumbled over the cl
uttered parkway, then turned south.
Eva gave chase, uncertain whether she was pursuing the junkie or being led by him.
4.
The Facade
To kill someone slowly: Make a Witch’s Ladder out of a string of thirteen knots, then bury it in soil that’s been prepared with moonseed, dimethyl sulfate, scorpion fish, and tissue from the victim’s feet. Unless the victim can find the string and untie the knots, he will slowly expire.
The first thing Eva noticed about the narrow ghetto street was the deepening darkness. Soaring towers of scorched graphite rose all around her, blocking out what was left of the daylight, forming a cavernous channel of shadows. Forty meters ahead of her, the junkie was barely visible, barreling headlong down the cracked pedestrian walk, his skinny legs churning, the leather flaps of his flying-ace helmet bouncing.
Eva raced after him, a powerful sensation of being watched pouring over her on a wave of cold chills. She didn’t want to lose control of the situation, but the surroundings were closing in on her. Cops were persona non grata down here, and there were plenty of amateur sorcerers lurking in the alleys, only too happy to hurl a spell at a white patroller. Eva flipped down her visor as she ran.
Up ahead, Lydon was stumbling around a corner, digging in his charm-tunic pocket. Eva’s scalp prickled with alarm. The junkie was about to throw something back at her, cast something at her to throw her off.
Eva reached down to her right hip and unsnapped the safety on her elemental. The workhorse defensive weapon for the white patrollers, the elemental was a small flare gun with a large circular template at the end of the barrel suspended in mercury and calibrated like a compass. Specially designed rounds loaded with the four Elements — oxygen, inflammable magnesium, water, and granulated obsidian — were propelled through the muzzle at extreme velocities, the projectile expanding according to the corresponding Cardinal Directions. East for air, south for fire, west for water, north for earth. It was like shooting someone with denatured magic. Eva didn’t like to use the elemental on the run. It weighed nearly ten pounds, and was awkward and bulky in her slender hands. It required a high level of concentration, but in certain situations it was unavoidable.
Like this one.
Ahead of her, the junkie had vanished around the corner of a building. Raising the elemental with both hands, clenching her teeth, preparing for the worse, Eva approached the intersection. The edge of the sky rise was a jagged pillar of decaying bricks, ruined by pollution and black-residue, shaded by layers of torn awnings. Eva thumbed the hammer back, then quickly lurched around the corner.
A wendigo was waiting for her.
“Abraca-fucking-dabra,” Eva uttered through clenched teeth, stumbling to a halt, raising the gun at the monster. Thirty-feet away, the wendigo tossed its head and roared, the sound like nothing Eva had ever heard, a million claws on broken slate. Three stories high, yellow-eyed, its scaly flesh the color of dead fish, the wendigo was a nightmare made flesh, and Eva’s righteous war cry seemed to align its filthy molecules.
“AGLA!”
The wendigo pounced at her, and for one frantic, frozen moment, Eva was looking straight down the jaws of hell, the rows of giant uneven incisors dripping with pus, the festering pit of its throat, something pink and bulbous throbbing down there. Then Eva fired off a single round of concentrated magic, the scarlet flash blooming from the muzzle.
The round struck the projection dead-center and cocooned its body. It was as though an antique photographer’s powder-flash had popped in Eva’s face. She jerked back, startled by the smell and the heat as a massive shriek rose up and decayed in the air. The wendigo imploded like a giant wine bladder collapsing, its leprous flesh sinking inward, its head shrinking in a convulsion of sparks and blue flames.
Eva blinked and slammed another round in the elemental’s breach.
In the ensuing haze she simultaneously noticed two things: First, Lydon was fifty meters away, wide-eyed and panicky, backing away from the purple cloud of witchcraft. Second, a tiny object had materialized within the bowels of the dying wendigo, falling to the ground as though a string had been cut, clattering across the sidewalk.
Eva reacted instinctively, her cop-reflexes kicking in. She called out at the top of her lungs, raising the elemental at the junkie: “ONE MORE STEP, LYDON, AND YOU’RE AN OILY SPOT ON THE PAVEMENT!”
Half a block away, the junkie froze.
Eva kept the gun trained on Lydon as she cautiously strode toward the tiny object on the cracked cement. It was some kind of totem or icon. Probably Shambler, maybe even Destroyer. She knelt down by it, keeping her gun-sight beaded on the skinny man ahead of her. She glanced at the object. It was another miniature.
Eva picked it up and took a closer look, the chills stitching up her spine.
“What the hell is going on?” she said, looking up at the junkie, who was paralyzed at the end of the block, his bony fingers splayed in the air above his head.
“You got the wrong guy, Seven!” Lydon hollered in a broken voice.
Eva rose to her feet with her elemental locked and loaded in one hand, the miniature in the other. She started toward the junkie. “It wasn’t a rhetorical question, Lydon!”
“What?!”
Eva approached, waving the miniature. “This! This! What’s the idea?”
“I found it, I swear on the gods-head, I found it!”
Eva reached the skinny man and shoved the elemental in his face. “What are you talking about?!”
Under the flying ace helmet, Lydon’s sallow face trembled, his eyes shifted nervously. “I found it on my doorstep last night, on the — whattyacallit? — the stoop! The stoop! There were two of ’em, I swear, look in my pocket! The other one’s in my pocket! I swear!”
Eva patted him down and found the second miniature lodged in his pocket.
It was a perfect miniature of Lydon himself, right down to the ludicrous little leather helmet. About three inches long, it even had Lydon’s buggy eyes — a pair of petrified, bleached salamander eggs. The resemblance was uncanny. But it was the other one, the one that had fallen from the guts of the wendigo, that most disturbed Eva.
“Why don’t I believe you?” Eva growled at the skinny addict, shoving the second doll into her pocket with the first.
“Go ahead and spell me, shank me, do whatever you want! You ain’t gonna get anything else!”
Eva stared at him for a moment. From the dark canyons above them came the scream of another crow. Eva grabbed the junkie by the collar, then shoved him into an adjacent alley, out of the view of the shadows.
“What do you know about this Disciple character?” Eva hissed at him. “The one that bought it last night!”
“I— I don’t—”
“Think hard!” Eva barked, pressing the elemental’s muzzle against Lydon’s carotid.
“Okay, look, look, you didn’t get this from me, okay, but I remember from when I was running with Kenny, this Disciple guy was one of the big thinkers with the Shambler’s.”
“What do you mean, big thinkers?”
“Big ideas, you know, deep thoughts, deep thoughts about things and shit.”
“What things?”
“I don’t know, Shambler shit, you know, the Big Invite, some shit like that.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“The Big Invite, the Invite, you know, the Summoning. This guy was part of the team working on tapping the other side, getting through to some other fuckin’ dimension, some crazy shit like that.”
Eva’s gut tightened. “What happened?”
Lydon swallowed hard. “What do I know? The guy got cold feet, saw something in the tarots he didn’t like, tried to pull out, I don’t know, I swear, that’s it, that’s all I know, I swear!”
Eva drilled her gaze into the junkie’s sickly egg-yolk eyes. “Where’s Anger?”
The junkie blinked and trembled. “What?”
“You heard me. Where’s Kenny Anger?�
�
“I have no idea.”
Eva pressed the muzzle against his forehead, grabbing him by the neck. “You better get an idea— quick!”
“I haven’t seen the guy in ages, I swear, all I can remember was the place he used to go to, the warehouse, used to call it his studio!”
Eva stared at him. “I’m listening.”
The junkie swallowed hard, trembling. “I remember it was over on Razorfield, near the piers.”
Eva thought about it for a moment. “Try again.”
“What? — what do you mean? — that’s where it was! — on Razorfield down by the docks!”
Eva tightened her grip, Lydon’s face turning a livid shade of purple. “That’s impossible, asshole.”
“What do you —?!”
“Razorfield stops at Avenue Z.”
“I’m telling ya —!”
“Does he live underwater?!” she yelled. “Because that’s where it would be! Under fucking water!”
“I don’t —”
“IDIOT!”
She shoved him hard against the alley wall, and the back of his head tagged the brick with an audible thump. His eyes showed the whites and he folded like a rag doll, sliding down the wall and collapsing in a heap.
