Hex-Rated

by Jason Ridler

  “James, huh?” Bob crooked his head to one side so a gold chain with a pentagram dropped down and hung, then swung. “Look a little bit older than most gladiators.”

  “He’s in better shape than you, Bob,” Haley said.

  “Guess you like our Peaches?”

  I smiled. “Among other things.”

  His head righted itself and a grin crept through his thin beard. “Alright. Costumes. Now. Go.” We strode off. “Nice to be working with you, James.”

  I nodded, then carried on as Bob pushed the cart away.

  “No way you like Bob,” Haley said.

  “The way we like each other?” Rachel said, slipping one hand around my other hip. “Let’s not be sexist.”

  “Ha! It’s not sexist. It’s just different with girls.”

  “You mean women?”

  They both hugged me a bit closer as we approached a wide set of double doors. The powdery smell of foundation, blush, and the stinging aroma of glitter and hair products sizzled some as the doors opened. A row of dressing room mirrors and lights covered one end of the room, a series of dressing room racks full of costumes, clothes and props filled the left: swords, helmets, sandals, more plaster statues of cracked Roman and Greek design. Not a flicker of magic could be tasted in the room . . .

  But my jaw clenched all the same.

  In the far mirror on the left of the dressing room desk, I saw the reflection of one of the actors. He was sitting stiff and proper, being brushed by a makeup artist. He wore nothing but a loin cloth around his waist. His eyes were shut. But they opened before I could think of a plan.

  There was the crooked actor who played the priest at a con job funeral. The one who saw me and Nico at the Dinner when we almost got shot. The only one in this place that knew who I really was.

  Two women’s lives were at stake, and holding their fate was Chip Toledo.

  CHAPTER 33

  “GEMMA! WE FOUND A GLADIATOR!”

  Haley’s siren voice made everyone turn as they pulled me to the chair next to Chip, whose eyes tracked me across the mirror like a ghost trapped in a portrait.

  Gemma was a fifty-year-old woman who wore her close to three hundred pounds like a queen. A long black blouse with hanging sleeves revealed snow-white skin. Her hair was big, bleach blonde, her lipstick brighter than a H-bomb blast, and the pancake upon her visage was thick enough to stop a bullet. Some might view Gemma as garish, but having worked in burlesque houses and more since I’d run from Oakland, I found it both commanding and worthy of respect in a world that spat at women who dared to be grow older and bolder as they headed toward the grave.

  But I said nothing charming or kind as I sat and avoided Chip’s glare in my own mirror.

  “Nice find, ladies,” Gemma said, voice nasally high. “His face is pretty swollen.”

  “Which makes me authentic,” I said.

  “You have a name, gladiator?”

  “Maximus,” I said. Gemma and the girls laughed.

  “He’s got the job!” Gemma said. “Rach, Hale, go get changed and bring him his costume. I need to work fast.” She grabbed a can of High C that looked tiny in her fist and sipped from a lipstick-stained straw until the hollow grind of the empty can made her gasp. “Damn it. I need to stay cool, back in a flash.”

  Gemma waddled away on saddles that flipped and flopped as she shuffled to the opposite end of the counter, where a rack of coolers sat stacked upon each other.

  So it was just me and Chip.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “You . . . following me?”

  I hadn’t even thought of that. “No.” I flared my eyes so I had his attention and then spoke quietly without moving my mouth. “I’m working a case. The girl I was with? She’s now missing. Those responsible are here.”

  Chip sighed. “That’s a relief, man. I was worried you were still pissed at me. But this makes a lot more sense than you hunting me down at a stag flick.” He laughed. “Those pants clash with the James Brimstone I know!” Gemma’s slap-shuffle sandals harkened her return as we watched her make a wide turn and walk back toward us.

  I flared my eyes again. “I’m undercover,” said my soundless mouth.

  “Ah, gotcha!” Chip said, then winked.

  Gemma arrived before I could make it clear to my handsome and idiotic colleague that his life was likely in danger. Oh well.

  Gemma cracked the next Hi-C, plunked in a new straw and gave it kiss until her cheeks were full. “Ahh, better.” She squinted down at Chip. “Your eyes are still too . . . simple” she gripped a eyeliner pencil from a mug with the face of Frankenstein’s monster and then did two hard lines under each of Chip’s eyes. The application was done with a combination of precision and laissez faire mastery from years of stabbing people’s skin with color. “Perfect,” she purred. “Now go and hit your mark while I work over our Spartacus.”

  Chip stood up and his countenance shifted into what I can only call “performance mode,” where Chip assumed a new character—which was Chip-plus-grimacing. “Thanks, Gemma. See what you can do about his guy’s face. He looks old enough to play my dad!”

  And I’ll be damned if that snide comment wasn’t the finest performance I’d ever seen from the one and only Chip Toledo.

  “Don’t listen to him, beautiful,” Gemma said, grabbing a yellow sponge dabbed with flesh-toned color. “He’ll be lucky to be half as handsome when he’s your age.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere,” I said, and we both smiled as she began to daub my chest.

  “My, your face has seen some trouble, huh? And you body has been to a few crash up derbies, too.”

  “I’ve got a few hard miles on me,” I said, scanning the rest of the room. Nothing. No taste of magic. No trace of Maxine, lost somewhere in this madhouse of sex and celluloid, and not a whiff of Nico.

  “Any tattoos I should know about?” Gemma asked, smiling with dark arched eyebrow. “You know, down under?”

  I smiled. “No identifying marks or ink.” None that could be seen. The deepest scar Edgar drove into me, his gift for twenty years of service, was not visible to the naked eye. A hex on my heart. What was known to the Greeks as Aphrodite’s Tear. No spell, no hex, no sigil, and no potion will charm you to be that which you are not. Truth venom may hold you to its promise for a time, but it will fade. But no enchantment on your nature can force you to love, worship, serve other people’s needs. Even my own.

  It would have been a sweeter gift if I hadn’t been tortured in order to receive the tear through a hole Edgar ripped in my aura while I was lost in a nightmare dreamscape too hellish for my waking mind to conjure. Such torture remained invisible to all but me.

  “He’s back!”

  A girl with blue bellbottoms had flown through the double doors, and Rachel and Haley approached wearing matching white and purple loincloths, holding leather straps and a grim black metal mask in their hand.

  “Who, Cheryl?” Haley said.

  “Fulton! Fulton’s back!”

  CHAPTER 34

  ELECTRICITY SEEMED TO INFUSE THE ROOM. BODIES MOVED WITH renewed precision and determination. Rachel and Haley plopped down their costumes and ran outside without turning back or saying goodbye. The only one who moved at regular speed was Gemma: because even my heart was racing knowing that berserker was now back in a contained space.

  “So the captain returns to his ship,” Gemma snorted, dabbing the last coat of skin-colored liquid that suffocated my flesh. “How courageous.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Gemma shrugged, knowing she’d just talked outside of the coven. “When our stars took a powder, he gunned out of here like a madman behind the wheel of Ferrari. Directors, what men. Am I right?”

  I smiled. “I’m just glad for the work.”

  “All scabs are!” she said with a chuckle, then grabbed a mask. “Before I put the dark around your eyes, let’s see how this fits. You have a pretty good-sized mel
on, so we may need a different model.”

  The thud of boots approached. Cheryl ran to the far door with a sign above saying “MAIN SET.”

  “Places! Everyone, places! Our hero has returned.” Anyone who’d been in a war knew that all men can be soldiers, good or bad, but being a soldier never de facto made any man a hero.

  Gemma handed the mask to me and it nearly broke my wrist. The sucker weighed more than a golden skull and smelled like old sweat and rust. Two big slits for the eyes, a circle of punctured holes for my mouth. Worn leather straps fastened it to the back of the head. As soon I brought it close I knew was too small.

  In the mirror reflection of the double doors, Fulton popped into the room and I tasted the faint lash of magic like a leech falling off his catch as I sucked in my cheeks and shoved on the mask.

  Breath whooshed around my face like a squall made of old meat and three women’s tongues: smoky, sweet, and sour. I fastened the mask hard and fast and looked back in the mirror.

  Nothing. But the leechy taste of his rage was a calling card.

  “Who the fuck is this guy?

  Behind Gemma, Fulton hissed breath with a low and nasal refrain. He hadn’t said many words while he was pounding Izzy’s door to shreds, so I was surprised his vocal chords wheezed and his voice was high. He filled the mirror. “I’d remember a body like this one.”

  Fulton looked like hammered shit. His wide face was ghost pale, the gold-rimmed sunglasses he wore matched his green army vest as hallmarks of his lost days in ‘Nam. The muscles in his arms were hard, defined. His pallor was so corpselike I wondered if he’d sweated out all his liquid and replaced it with formaldehyde. But he looked smaller. Half of the juggernaut I’d tussled with in a vet’s clinic. And yet, no taste of magic.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  But still a first class asshole.

  Fear cooled to an easy breeze in my guts as a theory was soon to be tested: I assumed Fulton’s jacked-out attacks and creeping were about Nico. Some men, when charmed or enchanted, are given to heighten senses of smell and can track like a beast in the urban jungle. As soon as I said a name, any name, he’d pounce.

  “A friend of Chip Toledo,” I said. It wasn’t so much a lie as an exaggeration of a fact.

  “Do I fucking know who that is?” Fulton said. “Who are you and why do you think you can come on to my set, grab one of the most important roles of my film, and think you can get away with it?”

  Gemma stood back, knowing well and good to leave this maniac to his mania.

  “My name is James Summers,” I said, unable to think of anything more clever than the last name of the author who drove me here. “I’m . . . I’m scab labor.”

  Fulton growled. “Scabs on my set.” He gripped the back of my chair and it shook with his anger.

  “Fulton!” Cheryl cried. “Lighting outside is perfect. We’re ready for the gladiator scene!”

  Shaking gave way to a tight calm. Fulton leaned down until his mutton chops scratched my mask with the sound of churning blades. “Summers, you make my day any worse than it is, and I will fill this mask with crazy glue and pound it on your face with a nine-pound hammer. Test me, kid. Test me and I’ll read the riot act into your flesh. Now get off those idiot pants and get on set before I rip you a new one.”

  He shoved himself back so hard I was tossed into the makeup mirror, mask-first. A crack snapped across the mirror’s skin like lightning. In the crackled reflection, Fulton stormed off without once looking back.

  But I could taste it. Acrid, bitter, and twisted, but it was magic. A flicker of the rage-magic I’d tasted at Izzy’s place.

  Gemma’s face crinkled. “Oh, God, you’re a mess.” She meant the dozen or so colors that had ruined the masterpiece of smooth-colored skin on my chest. Fulton’s demonstration of dominance left me stained with make up from the counter. “Better start from the top.”

  Gemma went back to work dabbing me to perfection, but my breathing was easy and sharp.

  Fulton hadn’t tracked me to Izzy’s because of Nico’s scent or presence on my skin. That would have led him to her first. Not me.

  So, had Fulton had been looking for me?

  Which means someone tipped him off that I was on the case. Me, James Brimstone. Someone turned this shell-shocked maniac into a ICBM looking for yours truly and then told him where to hunt. I keep my private life goddamn private, and my past is as locked up as Edgar’s coffin.

  Someone had seen me with Nico. The same someone who had dragged her away from the motel. Because it was hard to believe she vanished on her own.

  Gemma gripped my face “Okay, handsome. He was right about those slacks.”

  Pants off, loincloth on, I was halfway into my last sandal when someone screamed. “Places!”

  Then I followed the last of the set hands racing toward vast double-doors. They opened to the nightscape outside the mansion, to the backyard, heading toward the scene of the crime.

  CHAPTER 35

  THE WIND SMELLED OF OCTOBER, BUT THE HEAT WAS PURE LA, AND being outside made me feel alive, vulnerable, and humble.

  Octavia’s back yard wasn’t a backyard: it was an outdoor movie lot an inch smaller than a football field, covered in palm trees that cut the distant sound of the highway to a magnetic hum, and littered with tents, lights, and cameras in sections cut to look like Roman ruins and edifices: Now it was obvious why no one complained about the Porn Queen next door: she owned the block I’d drove up, put up houses, and had one massive back yard for filming in the Valley without having to go out for a shoot. Stadium lights blared down on the scene of the action, one house over.

  Night air braced on the fistful of items that amounted to my costume, one without a gun, without cards, without an anting-anting. The mask echoed my breathing like a dirty masher practicing for a crank call as I hustled toward where the stadium lights burned down: a pit, surrounded by giant torches like it was a Tiki Party. Three cameras and dozens of stagehands circled the mouth. At the far end, a canopy had been built and painted black and silver. Inside upon a gaudy fool’s gold throne sat Octavia. A producer starring in her own shows was the height of narcissism, but in terms of appeal I could see it. She possessed a regal bearing, was beautiful for her age, and imperial in her countenance. Her faux throne was about as Roman as a candle. Rachel and Haley flanked her in thin purple robes, two different kinds of beautiful heightened by touches of eyeliner, eye shadow, hair in curly waves.

  A filthy taste of magic bristled in the night air. Metallic and sour, and something foul and fetid, magic twisted, turned, brutalized. The taste of ruin among these faux columns and artifacts. I tried to swallow and almost gagged.

  Fulton’s vestedback was facing me as I walked toward the set, but his voice was loud. “We are not doing this all night. One take, one time, that’s it.” He pulled his head away and barked more instructions for how he wanted the light, how he wanted the shadows. “Where the fuck is my new gladiator?”

  I jogged toward the pit, but one eye stayed on Octavia, who glared into the pit, head nodding as if approving some human chess match. She was flanked by pages and crew and younger makeup artists with dirty blonde hair. Getting to her would not be easy. “Here I am, sir,” I said meekly.

  Fulton pulled himself from the film camera’s eye, grabbed my shoulder, then tossed me into the pit. “Then fall, idiot.”

  Tarzan Jane had warned me on how best to take a “bump” in a wrestling match: “It’s physics, kiddo, just spread out your arms to spread out the impact. Land like you’re on a cross.”

  The earth smacked my back as I shot my arms out. The thudding pain made me wonder if TJ was playing a gag, or just made of sterner stuff. I coughed, then shook off the pain from hitting clay and dirt.

  “Nice crash landing, dummy. But if you’re done playing Jesus,” Fulton said, “get off your ass and take your mark.”

  As I pulled myself up like Frankenstein’s monster, I realized he’d said “gladiator.” N
ot gladiators. And traditionally, when gladiators weren’t fighting each other they fought . . .

  Fulton growled. “Where the hell is my snake?”

  Oh God.

  “And where the fuck is TV? It’s his damn pet.”

  Ah, shit.

  I wiped dirt off as PAs scrambled and Fulton tore off his vest. “Fuck it. If that rodent can’t be here, he can’t dictate the script. His was the one that fucked us over this morning.” A collective hush ran through the crew. “And unlike all of you fuckers, I fucking went out and looked for the fucking girls. They are gone and ain’t fucking coming back.” Meaning Fulton was either lying or didn’t know that Maxine was somewhere on this set. But his hunting for Nico had led him to me, perhaps.

  “They ain’t coming back,” he repeated, as if lost in thought. And a glazed countenance flashed over his face like being hit with splash of wax. It burned away with the scrunched anger that was his normal mug. “And it is my fucking movie. Somebody get me a helmet and a loincloth! And Greg? You’re on camera one. Do not fuck up the exposure or I will tear off your arm and beat you with it.” He tore off his boots and trousers. “Now listen up, here’s the scene. Fuck the idea of them pining for one guy and the Queen sentencing him to death with the cobra. And fuck Terra for being late. Octavia’s the queen now. Let’s get this shit going.” It was not a cobra that I had ripped the head off of, making it clear that Fulton was not a driving force behind the picture or this sorcery at play. “The two pussy princesses have picked different gladiators instead of fighting over the same one.”

  “Wasn’t that originally going to be Riley?” said Greg at the camera.

  “That dumb fuck?” Fulton screamed and Greg shivered. “He’s a dick with a pulse and never seen combat. Now listen. One of the pussies likes the masked guy, the other likes me. We’ll fight until the scab wins, the Queen calls for archers to kill, and the pussy sisters kill their mom and take their prize. Sound jake?” He looked around.

  The crew grunted agreement to this Roman atrocity featuring sister incest instead of an Oedipal complex, but it made my shit itch. And calling women pussies was being a first-class shithook.