Hex-Rated

by Jason Ridler

  Dying. The little bastard was dying on me. The sigil was going to kill him to keep the venom from working. I just signed this man’s death warrant with my own blood.

  In the back of mind, Edgar laughed.

  I wiped my lips across my forearm. “Double damn.”

  I clamped my mouth onto the dwarf’s wound and sucked as hard as I could while my mind raced for the only thing that might help. TV shook as the venom stopped in its tracks and retreated into the blood gathering in my mush. I dug into my back pocket and grabbed the anting-anting. The little man gasped as if something broke and I tore my mouth off the wound, spat blood and venom at the wall, and tied the anting-anting to his arm above two holes made by a dead snake’s fangs.

  TV convulsed as if in a seizure. I plucked the cigar from the ground and shoved into his mouth.

  “Ow!” My hand snapped back. He damn near chewed off my knuckle. “Hey, a little gratitude would be nice.”

  TV’s face huffed and puffed and chewed the cigar, and the rotten flavor of bad coffee and spilled vinegar began to fade. Whatever was in that stogie it was more powerful than a two-cent puff from Century Sam. Damn thing was strong enough to cover up the arcane. You don’t grab such trinkets at Kress’s five-and-dime on Hollywood. Someone had access to potent materials, beyond the Kraken’s eye and dirty Japanese squid books.

  TV’s breathing eased as he took in smoke. The veins above the rope of the anting-anting began to lighten from the black and blue that crisscrossed his face. The more he puffed, the easier he breathed, and the more his natural, creepy color came back to his face and crept down his haggard neck. The amulet of the anting-anting swung like a pendulum above the floor.

  I turned on the sink and grabbed a mouth full of water, spitting out the rest of the truth venom and TV’s blood.

  “Gah!” Part of my tongue was numb. No matter how much venom I spat out, some was in me. Truth serums . . . are not quite charms.

  Terror gripped my balls like a vice. My cover as Maxine’s brother was thin and now on fire, but I didn’t fancy being trapped in this Roman nightmare of porn-and-vice-cops and have my own secrets spilled.

  And as if on cue, a voice pricked up from the ground. “So’s, who are ya? Really?”

  My fingers dug into the porcelain sink like a doll’s neck I wanted to snap. “James Brimstone.”

  “Ha!” TV said. “Stupid name. Must be a Brit.”

  “Stupid name of the guy who just saved your life.”

  “After jamming a snake in my arm.”

  I turned. “You did it first.”

  TV’s defiant and pudgy face puffed up. “Fine. Consider us jake. Now get da hell outa here before I getz mad.”

  I washed snake blood off my chest and arms. “I’m not going anywhere without Maxine and Nico. Tell me where they are, and I’ll leave that charm on your arm so you can live.”

  TV grimaced while he puffed. A trickle of blood ran from his nose as he shook, spat, and sucked in hair. “Youz don’t get it. I can’t help ya. No one here can. What’s going down is going to happen, even with da accident.”

  I sluiced off the light red water. “Accident? What happened on set, that wasn’t supposed to happen? Maxine wasn’t supposed to attack Nico?”

  TV puffed in and out with the rhythm of his breath, a tiny human forge with a cigar that wouldn’t die. “Lips are sealed. Brimstone.”

  “Thanks to that sigil on your back.”

  His eyes went wide. “Don’t know nothin’ about ‘dat.”

  “TV, you may be an idiot, but you’re not stupid. And someone is making you do these things. And I know who. She’s covered her actual dabbling in the arcane with all this Greek and Roman nonsense. She has money, power, influence, and apparently a bottomless supply of actors no one will miss as she screws around with things she can’t control.”

  His chest rose and fell as if whatever I said next would kill him.

  “Tell me how I can save Maxine. Tell me where Nico is. And I promise, I’ll not only let you go, I’ll put you in touch with the only legit hands that can remove a sigil that is burned so deep. You’d be free.”

  That last word was like cold water splashed into his face, a slap of clarity in a hazy world, a wish dangled before him on a very sharp hook.

  “Free?” TV said. “Ain’t no such thing. Not here at da doll house, not nowhere. Look, yous’z saved my life, but if . . . if I’m asked, I’ll cut you through with a rusty nail. Free?” He hissed in breath. “Wouldn’t know what it felt like if it drilled me in the guts.”

  Sitting there on the floor, leaning against the wall with a stain of blood and venom, sucking in smoke and breathing out disdain, TV was a tragic sight. This are . . . places where people were controlled with dark magic stabbed into their skin. Forever. Whatever skills he had in the arcane, they weren’t enough to save him. For the first time since coming into my line of sight, I actually felt pity for old TV.

  Then I drilled him in the chin with a straight right so hard I bet Cactus would have been proud.

  TV’s head bounced off the wall. His cigar dropped to the floor and rolled under the sink. “Sorry, friend,” I said, checking his pockets. “But I believe you. Can’t have you stabbing me in the back after I saved your life. Too damn tragic, even for me.”

  TV’s wallet was starved, but I had to look at the driver’s license. “Tiberius Valentino?” I said, then let it rest on his tiny knee. “And you thought Brimstone was tacky.” There was nothing of value stitched into TV’s clothes. But the anting-anting hung off his arm like a warning bell: Don’t leave me behind! See how I saved him? Do you want to run around this place on your lonesome?

  But venom still dripped from TV’s wound. Venom that had tainted my own blood. I was compromised in a major way in a house full of dark magic. Serums and poisons weren’t charms, but Edgar fed me enough of them that they didn’t last long. I needed time without the truth coming out of me . . . or an anting-anting to cut the poison’s power.

  And it was tied around the arm of a midget who tried to kill me.

  I got up, grabbed the keys from my pocket, then opened the bathroom door. TV was now being missed by Octavia. She’d send someone after him. Time to hustle.

  I opened the door to the chorine and bleach haze of the hallway. Even with terracotta slacks and a pistol, I felt naked as a babe in house that aimed to kill me. Time for the prey to become the predator.

  CHAPTER 30

  MOISTURE DRIPPED OFF THE TAUPE WALLS. WHICH MEANT ONE thing: Octavia was rich enough to have an underground pool in the valley, a pool where no one could see you, one hidden from the elements. Perhaps buried deep enough to stifle the screams of those who had become toys for blasphemous spells.

  I passed a winding, dark staircase that lead to the main floor, then halted. The moans and groans of Vice squad’s second round of sexual graft was in full swing, far slower and more grinding than the first but no less repugnant. I was as liberated a man for my age as I knew, and as far as I was concerned, a lady could use her body for whatever she wanted. But there was a story emerging from Nero Studios: one where you served the will of someone else. Cops paid in flesh. Sigils as slavery. Your life controlled by others.

  Edgar’s voice giggled in my head. Yes, James. Just establish my death among my peers, buy me the gift of oblivion from this world, and you will be free and our partnership broken. But it was no partnership. It was master and servant. I had no beef with dirty pictures, but I was going to burn this place to the ground, even if I died trying.

  A thick wooden door waited at the end of the hallway, deep, sweaty groves on its skin like black scars from a thousand lashes. The aroma of chemicals thickened with each step. The brass lock on the door matched the brass key on TV’s ring. I clocked the hammer on my pistol and turned the key. The tumblers dropped like gasps in a drowning man’s throat. The door opened into darkness. My Night Eyes steadied. A sauna of dark tiles shimmered before me. Everything echoed. My breath, my steps, the closing
of the door behind me. The air was rife with chemicals meant to burn and kill life. The taste of sanitized death.

  An exposed doorway sat on the opposite side of sauna. The darkness was deeper, but the heavy drip of a faucet head made it clear it was the shower, probably before the entrance to the pool. I’d search this floor and, if there was nothing here, no Maxine or Nico or snakes the size of midgets, I’d wait until the last moan of Vice had turned into a snore and then sneak upstairs and get Octavia, who had to be the sorcerer TV was serving.

  I stepped into the shower. It was twenty feet long and I hated to think of all the fluids that had washed down the drain’s crosshatched mouths. On the opposite side was another large wooden door.

  My feet gripped the concrete of the shower floor, when giggles and laughter came at me from both sides: the pool door, and the entrance to the sauna.

  “Damn it!” There was only one move to make.

  I dropped my trousers, tossed the keys and gun into the pile on the floor outside the shower, and turned the nozzle at full blast. Iced water flowed until I could adjust the nozzle to a happy medium that hopefully reduced the shrinky-dink effect to my lonesome member.

  Lights snapped on from the sauna, but the first voice I heard came from the pool door. “Come on, Rachel! Let’s do another lap!”

  “After what we did, boss, I need a shower.”

  Then, from the sauna end, two more voices. “You haven’t lived until you’ve had a sauna party.”

  “Sure thing, baby.”

  On each side of me came a buxom twenty-something dragging a slimy member of Vice. To my right, from the shower, was a soft brown-haired gal with the body of a swimmer, hard muscles beneath her skin, small, pert breasts and a doe-eyed faced streaked with garish eyeliner thanks to swimming and sex. Her beau was a hirsute with a thick mustache, wavy hair, and a bronze body from tanning; a career Angelino who made Vice his heaven. To my left approached a strawberry blond with a choker featuring a bull that resembled the mark of Augustus Caesar. She had many rich curves, tanned to a high gloss of bronze, and devilish eyes to counter a dimple-sharp smile. Her Vice was a milky-white novice, five o’clock shadow creeping on his face, still wearing his briefs and black socks.

  All four pairs of eyes took me in as if I was a rat in the pantry.

  “Who the hell is this guy?” Mustache said.

  Baby Face also moved to the fore to protect his girl. “What’s your name?”

  “James Brimstone,” I muttered, the snake venom in my blood still too damn strong that I can’t keep my mouth shut from telling the truth. I thought of a dozen great lies . . . but before they pierced my lips a stabbing pain thundered in my heart. Damn it!

  But maybe there was enough truth I could drop to get myself out of this jam.

  Mustache mouthed. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m taking a shower.” I rubbed my hair. “I just had sex with Terra Nova.”

  Whew! No stabbing needles of agony in my heart. I couldn’t lie, but I could pick what truth to share so long as I didn’t hear a question. I blasted each ear again.

  The girls laughed, covering their mouths, then spoke to each man while the shower blasted my ears and I prayed that TV didn’t wake up and ruin everything. I pulled out of the stream. “I’ll leave once I finish my shower,” I said, dopey and stupid as both men looked me over, then looked at my clothes. The gun’s nose stuck out from one of the folds. In the dark, it didn’t look like anything more than a patch of gray. With the lights on, it might as well be smoking.

  “Hey!”

  The water stopped.

  Mustache’s long, strong arm stretched out alongside me, hands clawing the faucet.

  “We asked you a question.”

  “I can’t hear well with water in my ear,” I said, honestly.

  The slap came fast and obvious but I had to take the hit: the left side of my head stung as the water dripped out of my right ear. “How about now?”

  “Only my right ear,” I said.

  The next slap came, right on cue.

  “You a Midnight Cowboy?” Mustache said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m a private dick.”

  Both Svelte and Choker loved that line, and so did the Baby Face. “Come on, Cirello. We’re off duty.”

  “Fuck you, Heinz,” Cirello said, then glared at me. “Creepy bastard.” Cirello crossed his arms as I knocked the last warm drip of water from my ears. He gripped Svelte’s wrist. “Stay out of our way.”

  “Planning on it.”

  “Hey, I wanted to shower,” Svelte said, holding her ground. “Why don’t you sit in the sauna for a—”

  Cirello yanked. “I wasn’t asking.”

  “Let her go.”

  All three words spilled out of me as the last drip dropped on the tiles.

  Cirello’s eyebrow arched. “What was that, Cowboy?”

  “You’re pretending not to hear me because you think I don’t have the guts to threaten a cop,” I said, oh-so-honestly, and realized my fate was being sealed tighter than a noose. “But I do.”

  The finger of authority jammed in my face. “You threatening me?”

  “Your use of rhetorical questions is a real indicator of your stupidity.”

  “You calling me . . . don’t call me stupid, faggot!”

  “I’m not gay, but appreciate the compliment.”

  “It’s not a compliment!”

  “Only to idiots.”

  His fist reeled back so fast I almost didn’t see it coming. Thankfully, the venom hadn’t killed an iota of my reflexes. Cirello’s punch came at me hard and fast and missed by a country mile as I ducked to the right and turned my body to one side. His fist crashed into the shower’s concrete wall at full speed, and my now-dry ears enjoyed the wet crunch.

  “Goddamnit!” Cirello said, pulling back a mangled fist while his adrenal glands flooded him with so much machismo his face was a blanket of white, hot rage with a hairy lip.

  “Cirello! Don’t!” Heinz said, reaching out, but too slow to stop it.

  Cirello’s left hand swung in a wide hook, straight for my jaw. I ducked, and he tried again, this time aiming for a body blow to crack my ribs. I slid on my heels and watched as his left hand banged into the faucet. Blood rained from fresh cuts and his face was white with pain. “I’m going to kill you!” he grunted in a whisper.

  “No. You won’t. Too many witnesses. You’d have to kill them all, and you look lazier than Charles Manson having other people do his dirty work.” Heinz moved forward and I shook my head. It kept him in place. “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to take your partner and leave the party. Grab your clothes and just roll out. Tell everyone there was a car accident and his mangled hands were from stabbing the dashboard.” I was relieved as hell that telling other people to lie wasn’t in and of itself a lie, and pondered for the briefest of seconds on the philosophical quandaries of snake venom truth serum before I remembered I was naked at a sex palace.

  Cerillo staggered back, two limp wrists pointing at me. “Kill him, Heinz!”

  Heniz looked at his partner, then me.

  “Pretty sure killing me increases the bad news for you two. You’ll have to murder these two ladies as witnesses. And then maybe some of your brothers in blue who think murdering women is bad mojo. Then you’ll be forced to turn on each other when Internal Affairs goes ape. Or, and this is just a suggestion, given freely by a naked man dripping before you, you could go get that hand looked after, make up a great lie about beating a guy so bad your hands broke, and call it a night.”

  Heinz surveyed the whole situation like a far future computer tabulating probabilities on punch cards. He nodded at the door. “Let’s go, Cirello.” His partner fumed. “I’ll make sure you see Nurse Lola.”

  The name made his eyes switch from rage to lust, then back again for one last dagger-stare at me. “Got your name, Brimstone. When we meet again, you’ll be the one dragged to the ER.”

  “
I doubt it,” I said, honestly chugging wild. “I hate violence. It’s the lowest form of entertainment. But I’ve broken tougher critters than you. Including tonight.” I smiled, because when you’re that honest, anything else would be disrespectful.

  The ladies’ eyes went wide, mouths were covered by painted nails. And we all waited for Cirello’s next move.

  His eyes bunched. He huffed once in my general direction, and then he lifted his mangled hands. Tears pulsed out the sides of his lids. He grimaced with gooey spit on his teeth. No words came, but agony hissed within his breath as Heinz pulled him away, giving the illusion that our hero of the busted hands was one step away from beating me to death, regardless of the pain of fifteen broken bones, crushed knuckles, and ripped skin.

  Cirello staggered out, Heniz pulling up the rear. They shuffled past my clothes.

  The butt of the gun still hung out like a traffic light in the desert and Heinz kicked the pile, with a familiar clack on the ground.

  Heinz looked back.

  If I said anything, I’d reveal the pistol. If I said nothing, he’d look at the floor. So I did something that was not in the Gentleman’s Guide to Proper Conduct. I grabbed Choker by the shoulders and mashed her mouth to mine.

  She surprised me by biting mine, pulling it down, and then licking the damage. Svelte’s taut breasts then stabbed my backside as her hands weaved across my chest and down my thigh.

  “You’re a real bastard, Brimstone,” Heinz said as he dragged his partner out the far door.

  If there hadn’t been a tongue in my mouth, and a soft hand around my cock, I would have said, “Indeed.”

  CHAPTER 31

  CHOKER AND SVELTE WORKED ME OVER LIKE A VETERAN TAG team, and I didn’t stop them. I had to work out the venom in me or the next ti1me someone asked me a question I wouldn’t just shove my foot in my mouth, but probably a gun. Which mean sweating out the venom, and keeping their mouths occupied, as well as mine. Wordless and primal sex. Not my forte, but my only route to finding Maxine and Nico.