“C’mon,” Genevieve said, and she started walking. Anna was impressed by her energy. It had been a long, tiring, fruitless day, but Genevieve still kept up a happy chatter. Over the course of the day, she’d filled Anna in as much as possible on Mendelsohn and the Brotherhood, but it was mostly the same stuff they’d already discussed with a few colorful but unhelpful details thrown in, like Mendelsohn’s obsession with how his laundry got done, who did it, and how often. Aside from that, she’d talked about her favorite horror movies, places to avoid in Hollywood, roadside taco vendors she frequented, and the goddamn Lakers of all things. Anna had enjoyed the easy conversation and found it fun to try to keep up with one erratic subject change after another, and, despite knowing better, she found herself warming to Genevieve even further.
Genevieve had also managed to work in mention of her ex-girlfriend—stressing the ex—in a way that Anna knew wasn’t accidental. She hadn’t just left that door unlocked; she’d hauled it all the way open, jammed a doorstop under it, and put a sign out front. Anna thought maybe that it was simply an unsophisticated way of trying to get in with her and thus the crew, but that didn’t feel quite right, in part because it had seemed so unsophisticated. The directness of that approach gave Genevieve’s interest a genuine feel that Anna had a hard time believing she could fake so well. Anna knew she shouldn’t take it seriously, shouldn’t pretend for a moment it was a real thing, but it felt good all the same. Maybe that was dangerous, but maybe not. In any case it couldn’t hurt to just enjoy it for now.
Genevieve stopped just after the corner of the building and gave Anna a sheepish grin. “I should probably warn you—Tina’s not gonna be happy to see me.”
“Oh. So totally unlike Chad or Susan or Yuan.” Anna rolled her eyes. In between cab rides and conversation, the two women had spent the afternoon and evening tracking down the handful of people Genevieve could find from the cult, and it had been just about useless so far. Chad had simply refused to let them in, talking only briefly through the gap between door and frame left by the security chain. From the smell of some kind of toxic incense and the sounds of weird recorded chanting drifting out of his apartment, Anna had guessed he’d moved right on to another fringe religion. In any case, he didn’t have anything to say about his time in the Brotherhood. Susan had had plenty more to offer—she’d called Genevieve a witch and several more colorful if less accurate names while threatening to call the cops if Genevieve so much as opened her mouth to speak. They’d run into Yuan just as he was leaving his house. He’d gotten one good look at Genevieve and started running.
“I’m not going back!” he’d shouted. Genevieve had managed to get him to stop running, but nothing he’d said after that proved any more enlightening than his initial statement.
Tina Chen’s place was the last stop. According to Genevieve, there wasn’t anybody from the bad old days left on her list after this. From the look of things, Tina’s fortunes hadn’t improved since her days in the cult. The apartment complex was a pile of shoeboxes left over from the seventies, painted in classic avocado and orange, which didn’t look like it had been touched up since. Each unit was accessed by its own door from the outside instead of a central stairwell, reminding Anna of a roadside motel, the kind of place you stopped, slept a fitful few hours on stained yellow-white sheets, and then got the hell out in the early-morning hours, hopefully before any parasites moved into your hair.
Genevieve had stopped at the bottom of the stairs to the second floor. “No,” she said. “Tina really doesn’t like me.”
“Want me to go first?”
Genevieve stared off into space, weighing the suggestion. “No,” she said at last. “If you start talking to her and then she sees me, she’ll never trust you. Besides, I’d hate for you to take a bullet meant for me.”
“Is that a joke?”
A bemused smile. “I’m not sure.”
“After you, then.”
Genevieve walked up the stairs, hand skimming the rail, and Anna followed. Anna thought she saw the blinds in one of the windows twitch as they approached. Maybe it was just glare, motion from the kids throwing rocks in the courtyard, but she couldn’t help slowing her pace some, letting Genevieve get a little farther ahead.
Genevieve stopped, visibly gathered herself, and knocked. The door swung open a crack on the first knock, and she jumped, startled.
“Shit,” Anna said. “Get away from the door,” she added in a hushed voice. From where she stood, she could see the splintered jamb and the hole where the strike plate had been torn free. She glanced down at the courtyard, turned her body so that nobody down there could see what she was doing, and pulled her gun from the waistband of her jeans.
Genevieve walked straight in. Anna cursed and followed just as Genevieve started to run.
Anna caught no more than a glimpse of the room—furnished in Budget Single Woman, but clean and squared away—when she saw a woman lying on the floor, soaked in blood, fumbling with a smashed cell phone in shaking hands. Blood had leaked in blotches over the beige carpet, and there was a smear of it where the woman had crawled across the floor.
The woman looked up, and the glaze in her eyes cleared. “Gen. You gonna kill me?”
Genevieve was already crossing the room.
“Call nine-one-one,” she said. She dropped to her knees next to the woman and pulled up her bloody T-shirt.
Anna ignored the instruction, swung her gun into readiness and pivoted. The kitchen was visible in its entirety from where she stood, and nobody lurked there. She crossed the room quickly and checked the bedroom. Nobody there, or in the closet, or in the small bathroom.
“Nobody’s here,” she said, returning to the main room.
Genevieve had Tina’s head propped up on her lap while she held her hands over a deep gash in Tina’s side. “Come on,” she was saying. “Hold on, just hold on.” She looked up at Anna, her face streaked with blood and mascara. “Call nine-one-one, dammit!”
Anna hesitated.
“Now!” Genevieve said.
Anna dashed across the room and snatched up the phone. Moments later, a 911 operator was asking her, in an entirely too-calm voice, what the nature of her emergency was.
“There’s a woman here. She’s hurt. She’s been . . .” Anna looked to Genevieve.
“Stabbed,” Genevieve said quietly.
“Stabbed. She’s been stabbed.” The operator tried to say something else, jam some more questions in, but Anna gave the address over his protests and hung up.
“I have to go,” Anna said. “I don’t want to deal with the cops.”
Genevieve didn’t look at her, just cradled the woman’s head in her lap and whispered meaningless reassurances. “Whatever,” she said.
“I have to go,” Anna said, but she didn’t move. Genevieve—the bad girl, the one whose very appearance was calculated to deliver the maximum fuck-you to everyone she encountered—held her own hand over a slowly oozing wound and stroked the woman’s forehead with her free hand. Somebody who’d hated her passionately, and here she was, staying with her until help came, and never mind how many questions the cops would have when they got here.
It’ll be a shitstorm, Anna thought. She’ll never get clear of it. Questions and more questions—and what if we catch the blame somehow?
And that was it—as soon as she let slip the word “we” in her inner monologue, it was done. “Shit,” she said. She went to the balcony adjoining the bedroom, looked down the street, and, as soon as she thought it was clear, she threw her gun across the street into a stand of ragged palms. This is going to get me fucked somehow. I know it is.
She went to the kitchen and got a glass of water. When she came back, Tina was staring at Genevieve with a dazed, numbed sort of fear on her face.
“You gonna kill me?” Tina whispered again.
Genevieve brushed a lock o
f hair from Tina’s eyes and Anna was surprised to see a softness in her face, a slight sheen to her eyes as she looked down at the other woman. Anna put the glass down next to her and pressed back into the corner near the kitchen, feeling suddenly like she was in the way.
“No,” Genevieve said. “Help is on the way. Hush, now.”
“Then you’re not with Mendelsohn anymore,” Tina said.
“No.”
A long silence followed this pronouncement, during which Anna could hear the clock on the wall ticking, the drone of the highway in the distance, and the wail of an ambulance. She felt more than ever that this was not a scene she was supposed to be witness to.
“Drew,” Tina said. “You gotta find Drew.”
“What? Tell me he’s not in the Brotherhood now.”
A wide smile lit up Tina’s face, made her look almost healthy despite her waxen pallor. “Not anymore.” And, just as abruptly, the smile was gone, leaving her expression haunted and grim. “They’re looking for him, though. That’s why they were here. And . . . they’ll find him. When they were cutting me, I . . . I told them things. Names of his friends. They’ll get to him.”
Genevieve’s face hardened. “Not if we can get to him first. Do you know where he is?”
Tina paused. She studied Genevieve’s face and narrowed her eyes, searching for something. Anna supposed she must have found it, because she nodded. “Yeah. He doesn’t even have a phone number, so you’ve gotta go to him.” She gave an address, nothing that Anna recognized. Genevieve repeated it back, and Anna did her best to commit it to memory.
“Do you know why they want him so bad?” Genevieve asked.
Tina didn’t seem to hear the question. “Go find my little brother, huh?”
“Yeah.” Genevieve bent over Tina and kissed her on the forehead. Her shoulders hitched once, as though she were holding back a sob.
The sound of approaching sirens wafted in through the open window.
Chapter 7
“The Brotherhood is cleaning up after themselves,” Anna said. She sat leaning forward, elbows on the table, looking at each of the others in turn. “It used to be, you left the cult, and that was it. They made a few runs at re-recruiting you, but nothing else.” At her left, Genevieve nodded absently. She seemed to Karyn as though she was half-lost in some inner world, but she was evidently following along. Anna continued. “I don’t know what changed, but the word is that, in the last three months or so, nobody’s gotten out. And lived, anyway.”
“Whose word?” Nail asked, saving Karyn the trouble of asking the very same question.
“Tina Chen. Ex–cult member from a year or so back.”
“And she knows this how?”
“Up until about three weeks ago, her brother was in. Now he’s on the run. Some of Mendelsohn’s guys paid her a visit this afternoon to try and find out where he is. They stabbed her four times and left her for dead.”
“Did she tell them anything?” Karyn asked.
Genevieve stiffened, showing signs of life for the first time that night. “Fuck yeah, she did. They fucking stabbed her four times.”
An awkward silence hung in the air, and Karyn felt like she’d pushed in a direction she shouldn’t have. Anna coughed. “She’s in the ICU at UCLA. They think she’ll be fine.”
Genevieve studied her fingernails. “Yeah.”
“What else?”
A grin spread across Anna’s face. “We got an address for her brother. It’s pretty low on the radar, so we might be able to get to him before Mendelsohn’s guys—she said all she gave them were some names of people who ‘might’ know where he is. They’ll find him eventually, but we’ve got a head start.”
“How the hell did you manage all that?” Nail asked.
Anna tipped her head toward Genevieve. “Girl’s got game. You should’ve seen her work the cops. They’ll want us again for questions, I guess, but once she got done and Tina put in a good word, that was it. She’s good.”
“Man,” Tommy said, shaking his head. And—boom—in the space of a blink, his left eye was gone, the hole a deep red gouge in his skull surrounded by ragged tatters of skin. He pivoted, pointing the ruined socket right at Karyn. A wet remnant of torn tissue twitched in the hole.
Karyn seized the edge of the table with both hands. Not real. That’s not real.
“Sorry I missed it,” Tommy said. He looked normal again, panting in Genevieve’s direction.
What the hell was that? Karyn thought. I took my blind. I took a lot of it. And it wasn’t his divination this time. I don’t think. Am I finally losing it?
Nail held out empty hands. “Well, like I told our fearless leader, I ain’t got shit.”
“Tommy and I got a little,” Karyn said. She read her notes aloud and avoided mention of her vision of Tommy, though at the point in her notes where he’d started shouting about his eyes, she found a strange reluctance to look at him—or at Anna.
“So, we figure that tells us a few things,” Tommy said. “One, the bone is usually kept in Mendelsohn’s basement. Two, he keeps it under heavy guard. It’s locked up and there are a mess of human guards at the very least.”
“And three,” Karyn added, “he brings it out sometimes for important ceremonies.”
“Right on,” Tommy said. He grinned at Genevieve. “I got a few tricks, too. Wanna compare notes?”
The sharp edges had been worn off Genevieve’s smirk, and all she managed was a tired curl in her upper lip. “Not tonight, Merlin.”
Karyn cleared her throat. “Four: There’s a big horrible something in the basement. I don’t know if it’s actually a guard or if it just lives down there, or if Mendelsohn keeps it around to eat people who piss him off, but it’s really, really bad news.” She gave Genevieve a pointed look. “You know anything about that?”
“Yeah. Stay the fuck away from it.”
“You didn’t think to mention that before? Like, maybe that’s important?”
“Look, I didn’t think it was an issue. It doesn’t exactly have the run of the place, you know? Just . . . leave it alone.”
“Anything else you might have forgotten to mention? Booby traps? Maybe a giant moat filled with alligators and piranha? Little things like that?”
Genevieve shook her head. “No. Just the thing in the basement. That’s all I know about, I promise.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a monster. What the hell did you think it was? A genetically modified hamster?”
Karyn stifled an urge to snap at Genevieve, or maybe to go over the table after her, but she forced herself to calm down. She waited a moment, breathed out, and asked in a soft voice, “What does he want with it?”
“Honestly? I think he wants to bribe it into giving him the secrets of the universe. Since it’s still there, I’m guessing that hasn’t worked out too well, and he’s moving on to torture. Too bad torture is pretty much the same as foreplay to a thing like that.”
Tommy, Karyn was sad to see, was sopping up every word. “What is it?” he asked.
“I told you. It’s a monster. An honest-to-God fucking monster. What else do you need to know? Hit points?”
Tommy snickered. “If you know ’em.”
“Nobody knows ’em. Sorry.”
“Come on, you gotta know something about it. How did it get there? Did you help him conjure it up?”
“No. Kind of. I got some of the stuff together, but that’s it.”
“It can’t get out,” Nail said, his low voice injecting a little calm into the room. “That what you mean when you say it doesn’t have the run of the place?”
Genevieve nodded. “Yeah. If it could, Mendelsohn would be a pile of guts with a head by now.”
“How far can it go?”
She shrugged. “Don’t know. Used to be one corner of the b
asement, but I have no idea what he’s done since then. Could be it can move around some now. I kinda doubt that, though—even Mendelsohn’s not stupid enough to give that thing any more freedom than he has to.”
“All right,” Anna said. “We don’t have a lot of choice, then. We avoid the basement.”
Nail nodded. “Hell yeah. Too hard to do recon, too easy to get lost or trapped, and there’s a fuckin’ monster down there. That about ties it up.”
“So we have to wait until they bring the bone out,” Karyn said. “When’s that?”
Anna smiled at her. “I bet Tina’s brother knows.”
“And look,” Nail said. “My appointment calendar is wide open.”
Chapter 8
Drew Chen’s “off-the-grid” hideout was in a run-down area of L.A. near MacArthur Park, a place Karyn had always hated. It was probably her imagination, but everywhere near the lake seemed to stink of piss. Even here, blocks away, she felt smothered in the stench of seagulls and garbage.
Tommy and Nail hung back and watched from an unobtrusive distance while Karyn, Anna, and Genevieve approached the garage that Drew was supposed to be staying in. Some people felt less threatened by women, Karyn and Anna had learned over the years, and that could open doors that might otherwise remain shut. The occasional dimwit felt so unthreatened that they were emboldened to act in stupid ways, but that was rare, and Anna was more than capable of disabusing them of any misapprehensions they had on that score.
The three of them approached slowly with hands in plain view, and Genevieve knocked. A little metal door at eye level slid open. Who rang that bell? Karyn thought, and she stifled a grin.
“What do you want?”
“Drew Chen,” Genevieve said. “He’s in trouble. We need to talk to him. He’ll remember me.”
The eyes roved up and down Genevieve’s body. “I’d remember you.”
“That’s great. Can we talk to Drew?”
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