The entire building begins to quake, rocking back and forth like a child wiggling a tooth that’s not quite ready to fall out.
Out in the hallway the kinetic air that fills the station reminds Red Feather of the vision he had just this morning of the beings chanting in a celestial stone structure, a blue so effervescent he hoped heaven was so beautiful. All this as he stood in the observation deck of an operating theater and watched these survivors before him come back to life from assorted body parts.
An electrical storm raging outside shoots lightning beams through the glass windows and doors, zigzagging into the station and cracking down around the conference room housing the survivors, several of whom have taken cover under the table.
A bolt of lightning sweeps in and strikes the bird girl Asha Kinsella. She’s thrown across the room and lands in a heap, all singed hair and smoking.
The walls begin to crack from the violent shaking and the floor buckles under the weight of force pressing down.
“Is it The Institute?” Secrete screams, holding on to Chamelia and NRG, who is depleted of knives, the first time in her decades of living that’s ever happened.
Connie Jones begins levitating, her eyes glowing a dangerous fluorescence as the disembodied voice emerges once again from her mouth. “I am the goddess Kaleanathi! Come to me! Give in to me!” Connie raises her arms in front of her, palms up.
The humans begin bleeding from their ears as the barometric pressure drops like free falling from an airplane, tossed from above the clouds.
“What the fuck is she gibbering about?” Trip screams. “Who’s doing this?”
The ceiling begins to cave in, cement and dust raining down, filling the air in a toxic asbestos fog.
Connie’s mouth opens again, a channel for the goddess, whose words vibrate through the entire building. “FEED ME.” Connie’s arms lift above her head and a blast of thermonuclearesque energy smashes forth with such force the others can actually see the air moving.
The survivors feel their bodies being split open, nuclear fission from the inside, centripetal force to tear them into their basest atoms and sucked upwards into the mouth of something horrible.
Their souls scream in unison, centuries of pain in a split second, the eternity of agony in just one moment, the fragility of their existence exposed to raw nerves and the plea for more time.
And just as fast as it started, it stops.
Connie falls from her levitation stance, cracking her head on the edge of the table as she lands unconscious.
The lightning zings into non-existence. A zap and it’s like it was never there. The building stops swaying and groaning from under the weight of the presence that threatened to level the entire structure and all those in it. The silence is as heavy as the noise preceding it.
The survivors gasp for breath and wipe blood from their faces.
Icarus is knocked out from a fallen beam.
Asha Kinsella’s body is blistered from the lightning bolt and her blond hair is burned black.
NRG’s skin bubbles as her knives begin growing again inside her bones.
Trip begins an unscheduled transformation from werewolf back into human form, her bones breaking as she howls in pain, convulsing her way into a female body, her burned werewolf pelt retracting along with her claws and snout.
The smell of ozone in the air is so chemical rich mixing with the myriad strains of takeout food Linda feels her gorge rise. She can’t control it and projectile vomits into the corner of the room, the acid eating its way through an already unstable floor.
Cherie Beauxden is in the middle of the worst cramps she’s ever had and she’s burning up. Tashi sees she’s bleeding through her clothing in thick rivets of clotted menstrual blood.
Tashi’s skin is split all over from her full-body spasm, like invisible fairies attacked her with tiny knives leaving wounds reminiscent of paper-cuts over the entirety of her body. She can’t help but think about being raped and that same splitting wide feeling left behind.
Teresa Chalmers is the flesh fallout from the world’s worst migraine: every piece of her hurts, down to her teeth and eyelashes. She can hear her own scream vibrating in her head.
Chamelia shudders through a number of different forms before settling on her own. “Gods, I feel like that Frida Kahlo painting The Broken Column. You know, the one where her spine is exposed as a cracked pillar?”
“You know Friducha?” Lola asks, still unable to stop fading in and out of invisibility, trying to hold the panic at bay.
“She’s my favorite,” Chamelia says.
“Me too.” And with that both women fix on their forms. Lola back to full visibility, Chamelia in her lizard shape.
Lily’s the only one who feels fine. Not a scratch on her, not an ache anywhere to be found. She doesn’t know she has celestial blood. Kaleanathi’s powers won’t work on her like other humans.
Icarus Lazlo wakes up, his fangs retracted and an apologetic look on his face. “I don’t know what came over me. Please accept my apologies.” His nondescript European accent reminds Lily of Barnabus Collins from the Dark Shadows reruns.
Karma Devi’s long black braid is in complete disarray and her face shines with a layer of perspiration. “Apology accepted, fangface. But fuck with any of us again and I’ll happily feed on you. Capisce?” She’s never tasted vampire testicles before and wonders how they stack up against human ones.
“Understood.” Icarus knows in his gut she’s not speaking in metaphors. He eyes the prostrate Cherie and will wait for everyone to leave the room before hoovering her copious leakage with his mouth. He’s starving.
Secrete finds her body has grown actual vines that bind her to the table leg and even though there’s no water anywhere nearby her legs have fused into her mermaid tail. Pulling at the vines hurts her, so she untangles them one by one. Her human legs return, but not before Chamelia sees her tail and gives her a sideways glace. We’re talking about this later.
Una gives painful birth to a sickly looking blob that turns black and melts into a viscous puddle.
Connie comes to, feeling like twice baked shit, rubbing the side of her head that hit the table, her hand coming off sticky with blood, her eyes back to their usual silver instead of the surreal blue glow. “What the hell was I saying?”
“You said your name was the goddess Kaleanathi and were to come feed you,” Tashi Lhamo says. “None of you got that?”
Teresa Chalmers helps Connie up. “Nope, sounded like Greek to me. You speak Greek?” Teresa uses the corner of her hospital gown to wipe some of the blood from Connie’s face, ignoring the mess of her own. Crises put her in mom mode.
“Apparently as of today I understand all the languages,” Tashi shrugs. “Any of you ever heard of a goddess Kaleanathi?”
Mumbled negatives from the group. Icarus Lazlo says nothing and continues licking his wounds—physical and emotional—even though he’s heard whispers of a new goddess who lurks in the smog above Los Angeles.
Detective Red Feather props himself up against the conference room’s doorframe, hand to his head and bleeding through his fingers from where a chunk of ceiling landed on him. Had he been an inch to the left the pipe embedded in the concrete would have just pierced his heart. “Everyone alive?” Günn is never going to believe any of this.
Assorted grunts and moans as he does a quick headcount. “Let’s get you all somewhere safe.”
“Was there ever there such a place?” Tashi asks.
“No philosophy, Tash, everything hurts too much right now,” Cherie moans. Do these and it’s all good to go.
“Could someone get me some clothes?” Trip says, fully human and fully naked.
“Storage room down the hall.” Red Feather gives Tashi the code and she returns with a black shirt
and sweatpants embossed with LAPD, standard police physical training gear.
“Guess I’m going commando,” Trip says, a wry smile on her red and patchy post-transformation face.
Still shaking from the side-effects of the massive energy pull, the group staggers from the wrecked conference room, wading through the backflow of a dozen exploded toilets, wondering who—or what—will come after them next.
And curious who—or what—saved them again.
The Ethereals
You never expected anything could put asunder Mother, The Ancient One’s fury, but put it aside she does and helps you protect the human chosen for the last time. She uses every last drop of her power as well as yours to block Kaleanathi’s hungry spell.
You were never so grateful that Kaleanathi, bane of the heavens, was not here to see Mother so weak. She might have aimed to consume her. Subsume Mother, and assume her throne.
And for the first time you also understand what it must be like to be human and mortal, always needing protection, always fearing illness, worrying that one day you just might not recover, succumbing to an inevitable death.
You don’t recall ever feeling so spent, so completely drained of life force, a shell of yourselves with only the most superficial of traits to distinguish you from each other. Maga’s magical violet blurring with Amaria’s red aura melting with Ganza’s maroon vengeance blending with Lastyme’s blue tears melding with the gold of Veritas’s truth sliding into the iridescent shimmer of Prophesia’s new foretellings:
The cosmic fabric has been irrevocably torn and no amount of stitching can fix the rupture in time and space. Now it is only to wait and assess the damage.
Mother has returned to her resting place for now, but she will not return to her slumber until the reckoning to which you and The Elementals will have to submit, in recompense for the many disasters of this day.
You should return to your corners and rest yourselves. You know you need it, and especially for what’s to come.
But you can’t.
Instead you turn over in your collective mind all the intersections of choice at which you took the wrong turn.
You vow never to be so shortsighted again.
You hope you’ll have the chance to keep that promise.
8:45 PM The Barona Estate
The first wave of findings in the mansion and further out into the acres of land send Günn into an emotional tailspin, the likes of which she’s never experienced.
Based on the blueprints of the home, which do not match what the CSIs find as they work their way through, there should only be twenty-five rooms. Thus far, there are twenty-five rooms just on the first floor east wing. The house is an optical illusion.
Nobody can begin to process the reports of dozens of shallow gravesites around the property since identified by cadaver dogs as holding human remains. These will later be identified as Barona’s former household staff, the majority of whom were undocumented workers from Central and South America. The freshest grave is that of Consuela Bustos, a Costa Rican grandmother living in the US illegally with her American-born children.
A locked cabinet in Barona’s home office reveals files for all the children she’d adopted over the last decade, along with stacks of forged documents ranging from birth certificates to hospital records, including Janosh Barona, her butler and adopted son. They also find Janosh on one of the Countess’s tapes, a seven-year-old boy getting his tongue cut out. It’s the only video in which the Countess herself appears.
The investigators also find the blackmail tapes from Barona’s bordello, The Cove, some of which are as grotesque as her torture rooms. Not to mention all the familiar faces in political, business, and celebrity circles. These boxes are going to tear Los Angeles a new one. What’s left of the City of Angels after the blob’s rampage will soon have no more secrets to hide.
Fuck, Günn thinks. We’ll be investigating this case for the next year. If we work fast. Yes, it’s time to cash in those months of accrued vacation days. She cannot stomach the thought of all the dead children inside the mansion, a number that has since risen to fifty-two. And keeps rising as they find more hiding places for visual evidence. Not with the child growing inside her own belly.
Günn finds a clear spot and vomits again until she’s only dry heaving, but still she can’t stop until an investigator taps her on the shoulder.
“Boss,” CSI Mazzotti says, “you’ve got to come and see this.”
I don’t want to.
Günn puts thoughts of escape aside and follows her colleague into what will soon be known as Hell House.
The techs uncover a hidden wall panel that opens into a home video collection bigger than Blockbuster. “She filmed everything. The children don’t have names. They have numbers. And look here, from before VHS tapes. Eight millimeter film. And even older, Super 8. Reel number one is dated 1962. The newest tape is child number three hundred sixty seven.” He points to it with a hand shaking like DTs.
Günn’s mouth goes numb and her heart pounds.
Mazzotti goes pale and green at the same time. He doesn’t make it out the door before he joins the vomit brigade.
When everyone thinks they’ve uncovered all of the mansion’s gruesome secrets, a crime scene tech whose specialty is skeletal biology notices that the Countess Barona’s china sets are not ceramic at all: they’re bone. He finds ornately carved teeth ground, shaped, and colored to look like semi-precious stones in the dozens of fine art paintings adorning each room’s walls. And in a cabinet tucked away, a display of teapots, each the size of a child’s skull.
For the majority of witnesses in Hell House, this case would be the last they’d work with the LAPD before finding new employment as teachers, mailmen, car salesmen, dogwalkers. Any banal job to afford more time at home with their families and less time to think. Even so, each one of them would wake up in the middle of the night for the rest of their lives screaming, unable to forget the tiny bodies in their death rooms and the unimaginable fact that a woman not only tortured children, but got away with it for decades. The thing that will haunt them all, almost as much as the bodies and the videotapes, is that nobody even suspected.
9:00 PM West Hollywood PD
Günn drives up in a borrowed patrol car. She looks pale as a blood-loss victim, a fleshly ghost, driving like a drunk after a bender.
Red Feather sits on the stoop outside the station smoking a cigarette. “Jesus, partner, what the hell happened to you?” Red Feather calls.
Günn parks the car, missing the spot by half a car width, and stumbles out. Red Feather crushes his cigarette and goes to her, worried. She throws her arms around Red Feathers neck and sobs into his shoulder. Wild, wracking sobs that almost pull him to the ground. She’s incoherent; the news hasn’t properly reached the stations yet and Red Feather’s been busy resettling the survivors, to whom trouble seems to have a gravitational pull.
Günn’s sobs quiet and she wipes her eyes. “Can I have one of those?” She nods at the pack of cigs in his front pocket.
Red Feather hands one over, takes one for himself, and walks them back to the stoop. He’s never seen her this inconsolable.
She lights her smoke and takes a huge drag, appreciating the burn in her lungs and the fact that if she decides to keep the baby she won’t enjoy these for a long time.
“I thought that Barona cunt was evil in a Beverly Hills bitch kind of way, but I had no idea she’s some next level antichrist shit.” Günn tells him only some of what they found at Countess Barona’s Hell House. The mummified children. The decades of numbered tapes. The falsified papers. The bodies. So many little bodies.
She doesn’t even get to the part about the porno basement with the perverts and that demon woman turned to stone before Red Feather lurches from the stoop and up comes all the ethnic food he sampled with the
survivors, along with what feels like a gallon of bile. He finds his sea legs and on wobbling knees settles back down next to his partner. He has no idea what to say.
“Oh, and by the way, I’m pregnant.” Might as well hit him with it all.
“Wait. What?” He’s actually relieved to not talk about Barona until his stomach settles.
“Remember Spaetzle?”
Red Feather nods, and his eyes widen as the truth dawns.
They pulled lead on the Spaetzle case a few months back. Franz Spaetzle locked his daughter Melody in the basement for seventeen years after telling his wife she ran away from home. Spaetzle sired four living children by Melody, seven who didn’t make it, bones buried out back. Severe deformities, even in the ones who lived. Only reason anyone found out was because Melody collapsed in the underground lair and he brought her to the hospital. She went into a coma, from which she never awoke.
The Spaetzle case shook them both bad. Seeing the children with their malformed heads like inbred Appalachians was a scene from a horror movie. The 30-year-old daughter looking a decade older than her own mother. The basement complex, meticulously soundproofed for Melody and brood’s total isolation. Chilling. Red Feather had his first thoughts about leaving the LAPD after that case. Günn was on the verge of a meth relapse.
When they closed the case Red Feather and Günn went for a drink that turned into a bender and led to a two-week affair. The Spaetzle monstrosity left them clinging to companionship in a way no other case had done before. The affair ended as quickly as it started. Red Feather knew there was a spark between them missing, nobody’s fault. Günn reverted overnight to her withdrawn and clinical self, no room for emotion with the debriefing over.
Crime Rave Page 35
