by Jason Ridler
Minus the two before me. Ice blue and bright. Nico . . . Tabitha was floating, or so it seemed. Her face shorn of the violent mauling that had hooked my sympathies. Without the scars, it would be safe to say she was among the most beautiful things I’d seen walk the earth, a rare beauty that held breathes and possibilities as it walked by, neither virgin nor slut, neither farm girl nor city posh, as if you could see what you wanted in that beauty . . . without her scars, she was a reflective pool of desire.
“Nico,” I said.
Another crack of her hand and fresh blood and sweat slapped me to my left.
“Tabitha Vance,” she said, with a burr in her voice, still floating eye level. “And don’t you forget it.”
Pain shimmered as I opened my eyes, staring to my left.
Hanging from another pole was the object of my failed quest. Her frail and beautiful body was covered with a thin green sash, ankles and wrists tied like mine, a mane of red hair covered the face I’d seen on a box of detergent.
“Maxine,” I whispered.
Tabitha cackled and slapped me even harder with the palm of her hand and I swear my molars shook two inches away from my gums before snapping back in place. “Yes. Your cherchez la femme is finally over, Brimstone. You win, you fucking loser.” I winced, tucking my chin. She laughed with enough malice to make a sadist cry. I looked down . . . she wasn’t floating. Her sandaled feet stood upon someone’s back. Judging by the purple gown and black heels shining in the torchlight, it was Octavia. Just in case it wasn’t clear who was really running this show.
Her finger stabbed me under the chin and brought my eyes back to her level. “Uh-uh, can’t have you fading into the darkness just yet. I want you to bear witness to my victory—or, should I say my triumph? Do you like that better, Octavia?” she said to her human footstool. “A triumph?”
“Yes, Tabitha,” the older woman said, voice waving with the stress of keeping her master balanced. “It’s lovely.”
“And fitting,” Tabitha said, craning her head and regarding me as one would a crippled bird. “Just like you, playing into my hands. The old fashioned way.” Mock concern stretched across her face. “Aww. Is the little detective having troubling piecing together the clues? Honestly, Brimstone, everything about you is sad. Which makes you being the heir to father’s fortune even more insulting.”
Her words were typewriting on my skull, and my winces were general, hiding the reflexive facial ticks you’d ascribe to someone realizing a hard truth that was in the air . . . She claimed to be Edgar’s daughter. And she thought Edgar was dead. “Heir?”
Her small hand vice-gripped my cheeks like talons. “Don’t play coy, don’t play stupid, and don’t play ignorant. Or I will rip your jaw off and feed you to my brood.”
“. . . Tabitha, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She shoved my head away. “Of course you don’t. You don’t understand anything. Which is why father’s . . . investment in you is vexing.”
That made two of us. Edgar never, and I mean, never said he had any children. I assumed he had none, and figured picking me as an apprentice was some sorta last ditch chance at having a family, albeit a family of master and slave. And yet, here was a twenty-year-old creature of his lineage. Or, at least a creature of his who looked twenty.
Her disdained countenance hardened. “He never told you about me at all, did he? Oh God, don’t give me that look, James. I’m reading your pretty face, not your third-rate-mind. Father kept you ignorant so you would do his bidding without questions. Just like me. How fucking droll.” Lightning crackled against a ink-black sky. “Time for the climax, James.” She stabbed her heel into Octavia, and the old vibrator millionaire started a slow march toward Maxine, tied to the post beside me. “I should thank you, though. You danced so well on my string.”
My wrists grooved in small circles to gauge the thickness of my bindings
“I’d heard father had made you . . . immune to most charms. Aphrodite’s Tears, I suspect. A powerful gift for an idiot.”
The bindings bit hard and sent rivulets of blood down my forearm. Unless I wanted to lose both hands, this was a no go.
“Wasting his time on some carnival rube,” she said, approaching Maxine, voice smooth and frustrated. “A mark from Oakland, pulled by his cock to save a wittle girl with wittle scars on her wittle face. Like some dime novel hero.” She spat on Octavia’s back. “Pathetic.”
Dime novel? Shit, I was older than her appearent age two decades, but I’d never read dime novels. How old WAS she? I dug my fingers into the rope and started to pinch with my nails. The strength in my digits was greater than most, but even for me this would need time that was draining out by the second. “Nico . . . Tabitha, listen, please. What you’re messing with is big. Bigger than Edgar. This isn’t even magic, but an abomination.”
“Fulton?” she said. “Make it hard for him to talk.”
The one-eyed monster stalked over. I sucked in a deep breath and braced myself to exhale the impact and avoid what Edgar called Houdini’s fate. Instead of a gut shot, I got a straight right into my groin. White pain flashed across my eyes. Bowels loosened. Guts became a typhoon. Agony ate its way up my spine like a school of piranhas, and a return to Blackout, USA seemed in the cards until I exhaled hard. The sharp edges dulled but I knew I wouldn’t be telling any Cock and Bull stories for a long time, unless it was about Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, whose plight I felt in my numb nuts. My chin stabbed my chest, breath seething with spit.
“What I am doing is my family’s true business,” Tabitha said. “A business you tried to steal.”
I shook my head but no words came, fingers still digging into the rope.
She stood before Maxine, green dress wet and clinging to her breast with desperation. Tabitha’s hands forked into Maxine’s red hair and lifted it from what I gathered was drugged exhaustion. Her eyes were glassy, hollow, and her forearms were covered in stinging scars: sigils cut into the flesh . . . blurry still, but I knew their intent: to control. “When father died,” she said, “I was ready to reclaim the House of Vance for myself. I had charmed all of these . . . dolls . . . these puppets of desperation on the edge of Hollywood. I brought them here to be tendrils of my will so that I could birth a creature that would let my influence grow.” She caressed Maxine’s face. “You were to be my vessel for the creature . . . but I wasn’t strong enough to birth it alone. Oh, Maxine. I’m so sorry.” She pressed her lips to Maxine’s gaping mouth and plunged in a corkscrew kiss that made fresh agony down below. She pulled back while suckling Maxine’s tongue. “And you ran, pretty thing.”
Tabitha slapped Maxine’s face hard enough her drugged eyes opened. “After scaring me.” Another slap. “As if you had the right to hurt your master.” Another one and Maxine whimpered, eyes now open but dull as a caveman’s art. “But those scars were inspiring, too.” She rubbed Maxine’s sex and the poor girl went rigid and Tabitha licked her teeth. “I could use my father’s idiot servant to get what I wanted. But he’d need a story. A sad one. Because James Brimstone is a rube for the pathetic things of this world, and you’d made me one.” Her hand rubbed faster, hard, and Maxine’s jaw clenched and Tabitha’s lips trembled. “Ugly. Spoiled. Ruined. He would follow me into the nether regions looking as I did. Then I sent Fulton out to cause havoc, to give our idiot hero something to follow and feel smart about. Because I knew where you’d be, with that idiot suitcase pimp’s Auntie’s house.” Two fingers entered Maxine who whelped. “Your sanctuary. So while the world’s worst private eye stumbled along to where I would need him, I collected you. Had fun with you. And made sure they both watched until I no longer needed witnesses.”
Maxine screamed with her mouth shut as Tabitha removed her hand from inside her, sniffed her fingers, and wiped them over Maxine’s face. “And it all worked, pretty. I’ve done it. I’ve found the book that will anchor my daemon and give me what I need.”
Book? “Oh hell.”
Tabitha’s laughter jabbed at my ears, as she played with Maxine’s head.. “Yes, the rare tome of Montague Summers you had in your pathetic car? There are few on this earth. Father had one, but his estate has more charms than even I can handle. kiss, “bad,” another, “monster.” You were supposed to go straight to the estate like a good little errend boy and get me the book. Instead you travled across have the city chasing after who-knows-what, like an incompetent buffoon. I had to send Fulton after you.” She plunged into Maxine’s mouth, holding both sides of her face as if a Ming vase. She pulled back, baring her teeth. “But eventually, . The incompetent carney-kid father had chosen over me finally managed to get me my book. All I had to do was returned and gather everyone back into the strands of my sigils.” She caressed maxine’s face “and nurse you back to the Abyss, my beautiful womb.”Maxine shivered. “This time, you will release that which I’ve seeded in you. An abomination that will allow my sigils to burn from film to eyes, to make me worshipped like a goddess who will have every man and woman who sees my visage bend to my will to become my thrall.”
My fingers bled from the friction of severing ties of ripe one strand at a time, but if I kept her talking I had some kind of chance instead of a certain death.
“No,” I said, despite knowing one-eyed Fulton was ready for another round of speed bags on my low hanging fruit. “What you’re raising? It can’t be controlled. Not by humans. I saw its true form when I fell into the nowhere spaces when I was almost in a pain coma. It is not a servant, Tabitha. It’s a beast . . . the tower for a darker king. Edgar couldn’t rule it, even with Aphrodite’s Tears. So what chance does some runaway starlet think they have?”
“Ah!” she said, but here eyes were still on Maxine. “Do you hear the dead man talking? He thinks I’m going to make the same mistake twice. But we know better. That’s why he’s tied beside you. You see, my darling, you will surrogate my familiar.” Maxine shook and Tabitha shh’d her and cooed as if talking to a baby. “No, no. It won’t lash out. Not this time. You see, according my book, it was angry for food. It needed to be fed. And not just any milk would do.”
Her head turned so that I got full charge of her withering gaze. “It needed someone touched by magic.”
CHAPTER 38
MY FINGERS GROUND AWAY WHILE TABITHA HEEL-KICKED OCTAVIA and walked back to her throng. “I thought you’d go to father’s estate to help me, James. To take one of his many artifacts. Why did you avoid it?”
“I’m not an heir,” I said, face still singing echoes of agony from Fulton’s right hand. “The only thing Edgar left me was funeral debt. That’s why I took your case.”
Tabitha considered me very carefully, and my fingers froze in bloody submission. “Yes. I learned that while you were running around the city. As part of my ruse, I sent Fulton to Vance Manor.”
Edgar had a home in West Hollywood where he’d teach me, a bungalow filled with memorabilia but never any real magic, unless he brought it himself. Vance Manor was forbidden to me. Only die-hard magicians knew where it was. The one time I’d decided to hunt for it, the clues led me to storage unit. Inside was a dead cat and a note from Edgar that not only had I failed to find his “moving” mansion, I’d been so slow that this cat had starved to death. Worse, it had been pregnant. My curiosity had literally killed a cat. I got the message and kept to my studies.
“And how’d that go?” I said, looking at one-eyed Fulton.
Tabitha sighed. “Poor Fulton was . . . redirected.”
“And sent back to find me?”
Octavia led Tabitha through the throng. “Fulton is good at many things. Killing gooks, making awful films, and hunting people.” The people parted so she could caress his cheek. “But contending with magic of Vance Manor . . .” She stroked his hair. “Father loved his privacy more than anything,” Tabitha said as she rode back to me. “Certainly more than me. Do you even know where Manor House is, James?”
“I gave up trying to find it a long time ago.”
“Giving up,” she said with disgust. “Isn’t that the story of your life?”
I said nothing.
She smiled and heeled Octavia to bring her toward me. “You didn’t even know I existed. Yet I know you. I never gave up trying to find every ounce I could about father’s little pet project, the throw away from the rails of Oakland, the runaway who joined the circus, then ran away to war when your heart got broken. How sad, dull, and pathetic. I see why father wanted you: broken, desperate, willing to take orders.”
I smiled. Because everything she said was right.
Until this morning. I don’t take orders. “You know what Edgar said about his amazing daughter?” I said. It was there, the barest of flickers, a slice of vulnerability so thin it would melt on your tongue. “Zilch. You weren’t even a ghost. It was as if you’d never been—”
She curled her fingers into her palm. The knots around my wrists and ankles bit into me, and nearly tore through my fingers.
“Don’t speak to me of being born. Of legacy. I am my father’s daughter. But where he played an old man’s game, I am going to rule the new horizon. You’re not even chosen, Brimstone. You’re a thrall without a master. Your story is over. And the last good thing you will do in this world is usher in a new one.” She held out her hand. Fulton reached into his vest and pulled out something dark and familiar.
The book by Montague Summers.
“I recently discovered there are only two first editions in existence,” she said. “One in father’s library. And this one.” She gripped it with both hands as if it were her very first Big Mac. “It’s charming to me that the one good thing you did on your first day as a detective will be the thing that births my new age.”
“What age is that?” My fingers moved at a glacial pace, but the tightening of the binds had snapped some of the fibers. I needed to egg her on. “The age of daughters with daddy issues?”
Another hex in the air and the binding bit harder . . . and while blood ran down my forearms, more fibers snapped. I seethed in the pain.
She smelled the pages of the book with a deep, erotic inhalation. Those blue eyes closed. “Of idol worship. And one idol above all. The last one. The only one.” Her eyes opened. “Me.”
A flutter of movement came from the glazed crowd, as if a dog was sniffing his way through the legs of the charmed and chosen. Not a single note of worry came from Tabitha, who seemed high from the book’s pages. “Ah, now we are all here.”
Cutting through the legs, TV arrived, still puffing away. He had a first-class shiner from where I popped him in the eye. His left hand held my pistol as if it weighed a ton, but he’d rolled down his sleeves where I’d plunged the snakehead . . . and where I’d wrapped the anting-anting. Which meant there was a good chance that he was no longer charmed. My fingers worked the rope as Tabitha patted him on the head.
“How is my little hammer?”
TV grunted. “Found da guy’s cannon.” He gripped the nose of the pistol and handed it to Tabitha. She placed it snug inside her black belt.
“Well done, my first conquest.” She turned away, kicked Octavia again, who led her to stand between me and the barely conscious Maxine. TV grimaced, face ashen minus my shiner, and looked at me. That beady little eye was the only thing uncharmed in this land of rot and beauty.
“Tonight!” Tabitha said, voice strong as a dagger in the heart. “Tonight, my pretty things, we will watch the birth of a new age. An age of beauty and rapture, where all who watch my visage shall fall under my spell and worship my majesty until the eons break against the shores of time.”
“Please,” Maxine said, ghostly fragile. “Please . . . Nico, don’t.”
Tabitha raised her chin. “You were honored, Maxine. Don’t forget the ecstasy when I put that Kraken’s eye inside you. The bliss. The blood. The wonder. The kind you only feel when you resist before you surrender.” Nausea at the thought of brutal sex magic almost tore me from my mission. “And no,” she said. “
You will succeed where we last failed. You will call forth your progeny. I will tame it with words from a sacred tome. It shall feed upon James Brimstone. And its favors will be all mine.”
“Last positions, everyone!” Tabitha glare snarled at me. “Last positions, all!”
CHAPTER 39
LIGHTS BLARED AT TABITHA’S BACK, SENDING A SHADOW BESIDE Maxine, whose head slowly crept up from resting on her ample bosom. Cameras craned their necks, took us all in: the siren, the breeder, and the snack.
“Action!” Tabitha screamed, and my raw, blood fingers worked overtime as looked upon my day: it started in a graveyard, and it will end with my death.
My fingers dug deeper, fingers flexing at the frayed bits, the nausea from Fulton’s ball-killer punch still shivering through my body.
Tabitha raised the book above her head as thunder rolled in dead clouds. Her voice rang out in a hodgepodge of German and Japanese. “I call upon the spirit of the butchered Kraken, rapine lover of the sea, seducer of wives and killer of men. Hear me! I call you from your slumber.”
Maxine’s head rolled up, jaw dropped, eyes as dead white as Little Orphan Annie. A sound rippled out that beautiful mouth the color of lost nightmares, her lips baring teeth, a hiss that painted the air green.
“You are angry, my pet,” Tabitha said in English. “You fear I will play with you, but not care for you.”
Maxine’s neck craned from side to side, body riding waves of supernatural horror.
“Taste the air.”
Maxine’s tongue craned out.
“Taste the essence of power I have brought for you to sup.”
Maxine’s tongue darted to her left and those dead eyes were reckoning with mine.
“Be born! Be mine! Anchor your power on this earth to my will!” She raised the book above her head. English vanished as she returned to the twisted tongue of German and Japanese, a language of corruption and hate.
