by Devon Monk
He grinned and tucked his thumbs in the sides of his Dockers. “Yes, I was. Still am.”
“That’s Dahlia Bates,” Pike said, indicating the woman who sat on a metal folding chair next to Sid.
She was motherly looking and had short hair colored from a box that was probably called Glorious Sunset. She exhaled like she thought holding her breath would make her invisible. Or maybe she just hated the stink of mold as much as I did. Downers, I guessed. Maybe Valium.
“Davy Silvers.”
A young man, thin, also sat in a metal chair, the back of his head resting against the brick wall, dark circles beneath his closed eyes. His skin was a little too pale and green. Out of the bunch, I figured he was the one who answered the phone when I called.
He lifted one hand in a wane hello but did not open his eyes. Alcohol. Probably something else in the mix too.
“Anthony Bell.”
I glared at Anthony, who still stunk of the sweet cherry scent of blood magic and drugs, probably coke or speed. He sniffed and spit on the floor. Nice.
“Theresa Garcia.”
She stood slightly away from the wall and, from my vantage, studied me from just above Pike’s left shoulder. She wore a suit jacket and black slacks over her solid build. Her hair was pulled back in a braid. She couldn’t be over five feet tall but looked like she could wrestle a bull elephant to the ground. Her hazel eyes were sharp and inquisitive, and she did not break eye contact. I figured her for hard core exercise and maybe the occasional weekend bender.
“Tomi Nowlan.”
A girl who looked like she was twelve going on twenty-one leaned hip and shoulder against the wall, and chewed gum. Her dark hair was tucked behind her ears but a lot of bangs hung in a heavy curtain to edge her eyes. She had on a hoodie and low-waisted jeans that showed a thin glimpse of hipbone where three thin razor scars shone white against her white skin. Her belt was wide and black, anchored by a heavy silver buckle shaped like a doggy bone. She gave me a flat stare, blew a big pink bubble, and bit it with her back molars. A cutter.
“Beatrice Lufkin.”
Beatrice was also standing, wearing jeans and a nice beige sweater. Walnut colored hair stuck out in wild curls barely kept in check by her wide flower-pattern headband. Her eyes were too large in her round, freckled face, but she smiled, revealing dimples, and surprise, surprise, she seemed genuinely happy to see me. “I’ve hoped to meet you for some time now,” she said. “You’ve done some really great jobs in the city.”
“Thanks,” I said, feeling like I might have a chance at making friends with her. I guessed her drug of choice was probably weed, mushrooms, and wine coolers.
“Jamar Legare.”
Jamar was at least three inches taller than me and wore his mustache and beard in a circle around his mouth, his dark curls shaved close to his scalp, and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses that did nothing to hide his deep brown eyes. He had on a jean jacket with a hoodie under it and seemed comfortable surveying the room, one thumb tucked in his front pocket.
“Afternoon,” he said.
I nodded to him. Tough call, but I’d guess alcohol.
“Jack Quinn.”
Whiskey Guy, the closest person on my left, was in the middle of lighting a cigarette. He gave me a brief nod.
The prospects of me having my own bit of wall to lean against were pretty low, since the room wasn’t very large, something made worse by the low ceiling. Everyone was scattered to maximize the distance from each other. So I just stood to one side of the door, nearest Whiskey Guy-I mean Jack-and blond Sid on the other side of the door to my right.
“Davy,” Pike said, “is this it?”
Davy, the Hangover Kid, opened his eyes and looked around the room. “Yep. Everyone who said they’d come.”
I was right. He was the one who answered the phone.
Okay, so my theory that Hounds didn’t know one another had been seriously thrown out the window in the last minute or so. It looked like all these people knew one another and knew other Hounds working in the city. Maybe I was the only one disinclined to hang out. Maybe in my push to be free of my father and his expectations, I’d taken the concept of solitary into every other aspect of my life. Maybe Hounds hung out all the time at special Hound bars, had Hound parties, and, hells, did Hound job-share and babysat one another’s Hound kids.
“Anyone have any news?” Pike asked.
No one spoke. Not even me. I had no idea what they considered news. Did ghosts count? Being hunted by a blood and drug lord? Magic assassins?
“Anyone have any complaints about an employer?”
Silence.
“How about leads on jobs?” he asked.
Nothing.
At this rate, the meeting was going to be over in about thirty seconds.
Pike pulled a small notebook and pen out of his shirt pocket. “Who’s working where?”
Sid cleared his throat. “Gotta job with the cops. Don’t know where yet.”
Pike noted that in his book and then looked expectantly at motherly Dahlia next to Sid.
“Nothing that I know of,” she said.
“Davy?” Pike asked.
Davy didn’t even bother opening his eyes. “The college wants me to run the halls for a couple days. Probably do it this week.”
“Do it sober,” Pike said.
Davy shook his head like he’d heard that before and hadn’t listened last time either.
Anthony spoke up. “I’ll be wherever you are, old man.”
Pike noted something in his book. From the motion of the top of his pen, I was pretty sure he’d just written “ass.”
Theresa the elephant wrestler said, “I’m still on retainer with Nike.” She shrugged. “It’s been quiet.”
“Good,” Pike grunted. “Tomi?”
“Jesus, Pike,” the cutter girl said, “do we have to do this every week?”
“Every week you show up. Every week you want someone to know where the hell you are and who the hell you’re putting your life on the line for.”
She chewed, blew, popped. I noticed Davy’s body language changed, and Tomi glanced from beneath her heavy bangs over at him, at his still-closed eyes, at his just-a-little-too-shallow-to-be-relaxed breathing, at his hands that had clenched, probably unconsciously, into fists.
She bit her bottom lip and looked away.
“I have a private client,” she said in a dull tone. “In the West Hills. That’s all I’ll say.”
Davy’s fists went white at the knuckles.
“Bea?” Pike asked, shifting the tension in the room.
“Me?” Beatrice smiled, and those dimples nipped her cheeks. She nodded, her wild curls bouncing. “I’m still pulling morgue duty for at least the rest of the month. And if I get killed there, at least you’ll have plenty of witnesses on the slab. If you can get them to talk!” She giggled.
My eyebrows shot up. Okay, she wasn’t all freckles and sweet strawberries and cream like she looked. I made a mental note: never underestimate Beatrice. Or anyone else in the room for that matter.
Jamar just shook his head and smiled. “Damn, girl. You gotta get a different job. You sound like you’re starting to enjoy sniffing corpses.”
Bea, still giggling, gave him a huge smile and shrugged, her hands up, like who could blame her.
“I’m working a new section of MLK Boulevard for the police,” Jamar said. “Mostly day work, looking for trap and trigger spells, illegal Offloads. Gang crap. Nothing I can’t handle.”
“They going to open that up for another Hound to work it with you?” Pike asked.
Jamar pushed his glasses back up on his nose. “I asked maybe a month ago. Don’t think they have it in the budget.”
Pike noted that and then waved his pen at Whiskey Guy. “Jack?”
Jack exhaled smoke. “City called me in for some piddly things. Public nuisance illusions, screwing with the art in the parks, stink spells in public halls, that sort of shit.”
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nbsp; “Okay,” Pike said.
And that left me.
“Allie?” Pike looked over at me.
“I have a job for the police. Tonight. With Detective Stotts.”
At the mention of his name, the body language in the room changed. There wasn’t a person in that room who liked Stotts. Interesting. Apparently his cursed reputation had proceeded him.
“Has anyone ever worked for him?” I asked.
Sid, next to me, rubbed at the side of his nose. “I Hounded for him. Once. Spooky shit happens around him. People die.”
“So I’ve been told,” I said. “But since I’ve been out of the loop with all this”-I waved my hand to include them all-“Hound bonding stuff, I was hoping someone here could tell me what’s so dangerous about working for him. Maybe give me a couple examples of what happened to other Hounds.”
No one said anything for so long, I figured the Hound bonding stuff didn’t include sharing the details with the new girl of how one another died. Or maybe they didn’t know.
Then Jamar spoke. “I heard about a guy, name was Piller, I think. He worked a serial murder case for Stotts. Some lowlife robbing old people, killing them, and dumping the bodies up in the coast range. Used a lot of Binding, Hold, and Influence spells. There was always a mark of magic left behind in the old people’s houses. The killer liked to leave a ‘note,’ you know? Anyway, on the third time out, Piller was Hounding back a spell-getting close, real close to the killer. But just before he could pin the guy, Piller walked off the Steel Bridge and died.”
“Walked off the Steel Bridge?” I asked.
“That’s what I heard.”
Bea piped up. “Remember Rosalee? She took a job with Stotts. Illegal tapping into the cisterns of magic beneath the city and Offloading the price of using that magic onto some unregulated S and M joints-killed a few politically influential customers while they were doing some back door ‘negotiations.’ ”
She giggled, and several other people chuckled. “I would have killed to see that! Anyway, Rosalee took her money and left the state the day after the job was finished. They found her dead at a truck stop in Nebraska.”
“That could be a horrible coincidence,” I said with little conviction.
Sid snapped his fingers. “Wasn’t Herm-Har-What was his name? The Swedish guy?”
“Herlief,” Dahlia chimed in.
“Right,” Sid said. “Herlief. He worked a couple cases for Stotts-maybe three or four. Did okay. Until his head fell off.”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
Sid put one hand over his heart. “I swear, it’s true. He was Hounding for Stotts. I don’t remember what the case was-” He looked around the room.
Jack stabbed his cigarette toward Sid, leaving a trail of smoke behind. “Magical coercion-someone trying to make people join something, give all their money to something…”
“Right,” Sid said. “So it wasn’t even dead body and kinky sex stuff. Herlief traced the spells back to the perps, and then the next day while he was getting coffee, a cable from a construction site snapped, whipped down, and bam!” He snapped his fingers again. “Severed his spine. Took his head right off.” He chuckled.
Okay, this was one sick group of people. Still, I understood the laughter-gallows humor. It could have been anyone of them, anyone of us, in those Hounds’ shoes.
As a matter of fact, tonight, it was going to be me.
“But no one actually died during their Hounding job, right?” I asked.
Pike shrugged. “It’s happened. Death is a risk when you work for the police. Any of them.”
And his understated acceptance of that did more to calm me than if he had told me there was no chance anything would go wrong. After all, Pike had been Hounding for the police for years. And he wasn’t dead yet.
“Okay,” I said, bracing myself for my next question. “Any of you ever seen a ghost?”
The easy smiles stalled out, and even Davy opened his eyes and leaned forward to give me a weird look.
“I have a possible client who says he’s seen a ghost,” I said with a straight face, because Grant might someday be a client, and he told me he’d seen a ghost once. I know, I was lying and justifying my cowardly behavior. But I didn’t feel the need to come off like one hundred percent wacko at the first meeting.
“He’s seen full-body apparitions and glyphing that appeared on a wall and then disappeared. He thought the glyphs were warnings.” I left out the Death glyph part.
Davy was the only one who spoke. “You Hounded a ghost sighting?”
“No. Look, I’m just asking if any of you have had any experiences involving ghosts.”
Everyone shook their heads. But it did not escape my notice that they had all become awfully quiet and sober at the change of subject. Strange. Ghosts could startle them to silence, but people’s heads popping off-that was comedy.
Or maybe asking about ghosts meant I was nuts. I mean, I had a reputation too. Besides my being the daughter of Daniel Beckstrom, it wasn’t exactly a secret that magic knocked holes in my memory. It didn’t take a genius to wonder if magic took potshots at the rest of my mental facilities.
Screw it. I so didn’t care what they thought.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
Pike gave me an I’ll-talk-to-you-later look. That, at least, was something.
“Anything else?” he asked the room in general.
More head shaking.
“Good. Anyone Hounding for non-police want backup?” No one answered, including me, because I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Looks like we have Sid, Jamar, and Allie doing police work,” Pike said, referencing his notes. “Who volunteers for backup?”
“I’ll take Sid,” Jack said, exhaling smoke. “I’m on call, but I already did a job today. Don’t think they’ll call me back until tomorrow.”
“That’s okay with me,” Sid said. “So long as you keep a low profile. And stay downwind with those cancer sticks, okay? They kill my sniffer.”
Jack just gave him a crooked-tooth smile. “You won’t even know I’m there.”
“Theresa,” Pike asked, “do you have time around your Nike duties to take Jamar?”
“This week, sure,” she said.
“Don’t know that I like that,” Jamar said. “It can get dicey in that part of town. Lots of drug movement over there.”
“You do your job,” Theresa said, “and I’ll do mine.”
Jamar just took a deep breath and let it out while shaking his head.
This looked like some sort of weird buddy-system, job-shadow matchup.
“Anyone want to tell the new girl what’s going on?” I asked.
Pike continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Who wants to take Allie?”
“Take Allie what?” I said.
“I’ll do it,” Davy said.
“Do what?” I asked again.
Tomi stiffened and stopped chewing her gum. She glared at Davy.
Davy looked across the room, made eye contact with her. “I’m not doing anything tonight,” he said to Pike, though it was obviously aimed at Tomi. “And the college doesn’t need me for a few days. I’m free.”
Tomi held very still, her face blank. But she was young. She hadn’t figured out how to keep the pain out of her eyes yet.
She did know how to recover quickly though. She tossed her bangs and muttered something that was ninety-five percent obscenity and five percent poetry. She looped her thumbs in her belt and stared Davy down, daring him to challenge her.
Pike broke up the little lovers’ spat by speaking up so Davy would have to look at him. “Drink and eat something first. I don’t want to hear about Allie tripping over you or her worrying about you being out there.”
“Wait,” I said. “Out there? Do you mean when I Hound for Stotts tonight? No. Absolutely not. No way. I work alone. I always Hound alone.” I so didn’t want this kid on my tail. Especially if Trager were after me.
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sp; “Settle down, Beckstrom,” Pike growled. “He’s not going to do any Hounding. And you don’t owe him a cut on the job or any favors, unless maybe someday you want to volunteer to shadow him. He’s just going to be in the neighborhood while you’re doing your job. An extra pair of eyes and ears. Someone to call for help if things go wrong, that’s all.”
“That’s all?” Okay, why was I the only one in the room who thought this was a massively bad idea? “People die when they Hound for Stotts, remember? Heads fall off?”
“I’m not Hounding for Stotts,” Davy said. “You are. All I’m going to do is be on the same street or block when you’re working, keeping an ear out in case something comes up.”
“Well, good luck, because I’m not going to tell you where I’m Hounding.”
Davy grinned, and some of the pale sick look seemed to leave him, revealing a mischievous, disarming twinkle in his eye. He was young-maybe as young as seventeen-but he was also very clearly a smart, ambitious man. “You won’t have to tell me. Finding you will be half the fun.”
I opened my mouth.
“And,” he said, cutting me off, “I’ll stay so far out of your way you won’t even know we’re in the same city.”
“That’s it, then,” Pike said. “We’re done.”
Everyone pushed away from walls and chairs and started toward the door. They all filed out, no one touching each other, not even inadvertently. No one talking.
Too damn weird.
Pike was the last to get up, which was good. I had some talking still left in me.
He pulled his coat off of the back of the chair and put it on while he strolled over to me. “Glad you could make it.”
“Pike,” I said. “This is crazy.”
He paused in his effort to zip up his jacket and gave me a hard look. “You have some problem with me trying to make sure people stay alive?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t want to hear it. You don’t like it, don’t show up next week.”
He walked past me, waiting for me to leave the room so he could turn off the light and shut the door.
“Until then, you’re stuck with Davy keeping an eye on you tonight. Don’t underestimate the kid; he’s good.” Pike started down the half-constructed hallway.
