The Neon Boneyard

by Craig Schaefer

  Twelve dead teenagers, scions of some of Vegas’s wealthiest and most powerful families, was the exact opposite of keeping the peace. Seabrook wanted the city’s ink pipeline sealed up tight, as of yesterday, and the dealers…well, she couldn’t come right out and say what she wanted us to do, but then again, she didn’t need to. We were all grown-ups here.

  “I had ’em stick the kid in an interview room once he started dropping your name to anybody who would listen,” Kemper told us. He shot me a withering look. “Not to protect your little back-from-the-dead routine, either. It’s obvious he’s got something rattling around inside his brain that shouldn’t be there, and I didn’t want him spouting off anything he shouldn’t in front of civilians.”

  The occult underground protects its secrets, a hard job in an age where everyone carries a video camera in their pocket. Sometimes I wondered if we were living at the end of the line, counting down the final days of the greatest scam in history. It was only a matter of time before something big went down, something undeniable under the light of day, and showed the whole world what kind of nightmare they were living in.

  Don’t get me wrong. We don’t keep magic a secret as a public service. We keep it a secret because it makes us money.

  A jangling hoop of keys dangled on Kemper’s belt. He stopped at a reinforced and double-locked door, fumbling with the borrowed keys, trying them one at a time. I glanced left, to an observation mirror set into the wall. A kid, maybe seventeen, sat with his wrists shackled to a ring in a stainless-steel table. Dried blood spattered his high cheekbones and his preppy clothes, none of it his. As I watched, he turned his head and locked eyes with me through the glass.

  Kemper glanced over his shoulder at me, still fighting with the keys. “You got your kit? You’re gonna exorcise him, right?”

  “Little problem there. Demons I can exorcise.”

  He frowned. “Point being?”

  “He told you he was the ‘King of Worms,’ right?”

  “Yeah.”

  The kid spread his lips in a sneering smile, still holding my gaze through the one-way mirror. Then his left front tooth began to buckle under the pressure of his tongue. It pushed outward and slowly tore from his gums like a lifting drawbridge.

  His tooth fell out. It bounced across the interview table, trailing droplets of blood in its wake. The tip of the kid’s tongue, glistening red, poked out through the gap and wriggled at me like the head of a newborn maggot.

  “Far as I can tell,” I said, “that’s not a demon.”

  Kemper opened the door, saw the blood and the tooth. His face went sweaty-pale. I spotted an unplugged security camera in the corner of the room, dangling dead.

  “Aw shit, Faust, don’t let him do that—”

  Jennifer patted his shoulder and skirted around him. “Stand clear, sugar. We got this.”

  “A bold claim,” the teenager said in a voice older, more sonorous, than his spindly chest should have been capable of. Blood from the freshly yanked tooth drooled down his chin and spattered the stainless-steel table. He swung his reptilian gaze my way. “Lazarus.”

  “Heard you were looking for me,” I said, trying to sound more nonchalant than I felt.

  “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies. And you believed in me, in the bowels of that mortal prison.”

  Eisenberg. Trapped behind bars with a target on my back and hired killers closing in, I’d done the only thing I could: reached out, for the second time in my life, to the King of Worms.

  The king defied occult taxonomy. He wasn’t a demon, wasn’t a corrupted human soul or some ancient, undead sorcerer. He was something else, with names and epithets half-whispered down through centuries of occult grimoires. And as he had told me, when his desiccated, eternally rotting servants buried a lethal one-shot curse inside my brain, his gifts were free for the asking.

  His “gifts” had nearly killed me, twice, and what they’d done to my targets was a fate worse than death. I was young, angry, and reckless the first time I called upon the king. The second time, I was desperate. There wouldn’t be a third.

  “And lo,” he said, “you died within those prison walls. And rose again, resurrected and free. Thanks to me.”

  “I thought there weren’t any strings attached to that deal,” I said.

  “There weren’t. But how did you repay me? You lured my poor emissary into the desert and murdered him.”

  My hand throbbed with the memory. I was flat on my back in the dirt, inches from my fallen shotgun as Damien Ecko ground his heel against my broken fingers. Storm clouds roiled in the night sky and blotted out the stars as he raised one clawed hand. He spat out an incantation, a ritual call to the shadows, and then…nothing.

  “You abandoned him,” I said. “Ecko prayed to you, and you abandoned him.”

  “The necromancer had grown complacent with the passing of centuries. Lazy. Against anyone else, I might have aided him, but you…you I’ve been keeping a curious eye upon. I wanted to see who would win. If he had slain you with his own magic, I would have considered him worthy of my continued investment. Instead, you’ve forced me to seek a new servant.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “This is the part where you tell me that you’ve chosen me to become your next emissary.”

  He let out a wheezing, raspy laugh. “You think too highly of yourself. Lazarus received a miracle. He didn’t perform them. Arguably, his greatest contribution was testimony. Telling people of the glory he’d beheld.”

  I leaned in. My splayed fingertips brushed the cold steel of the interview table. I stared down at the kid’s torn-out tooth and swallowed a surge of anger.

  “I’ll be happy to tell everybody in town about you,” I said, “as soon as I figure out what the hell you really are. But to be honest, right now I just want to know what it’s going to take to get you out of that kid’s body without doing any more damage.”

  He shook his head with a half-hearted snort. “The child is lost and damned. Not to your hell, but to mine. It was fated to be so, the moment the tainted sacrament melted upon his tongue.”

  2.

  The sacrament. Ink. The kids at the party had gotten a bad batch, all right, but even that didn’t explain the spontaneous possession. Thanks to Jennifer’s chemists, we’d sussed out the ingredients. Mostly a mild opiate, a dash of LSD for spice, and trace amounts of a magically active alchemical reagent. Why it was in there at all, we didn’t know. I was starting to get an idea, though.

  Ink had boomed onto the drug scene overnight, but all the usual suspects were coming up empty-handed. The Five Families, the Bratva, the Cali Cartel—none of them were involved in the trade or the pipeline, and everybody wanted to know who was slinging the stuff. I’d found the answer. It was an urban legend come to life, an outfit called the Network whose operatives had a knack for melting into thin air. Their foot soldiers had their minds and their tongues bound with curses, and they were recruiting world-class sorcerers for upper management.

  The Network had tendrils everywhere, and I had a feeling we’d only seen the tip of the iceberg. We didn’t have a clue who was pulling the outfit’s strings, not until now.

  “It’s you.” I glanced sidelong at Jennifer. “The man at the top.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “We were looking for human gangsters, or maybe some demons who went rogue from the courts of hell. No wonder nobody can find the Network’s head honchos. They’re runnin’ the show from…well. Dunno. Not here, anyway.”

  “The Network,” the creature in the teenager’s body said, “is a clockwork toy. My brother kings and I wound it up many, many years ago and let it spin. We watch it, for amusement. Guide it where it needs guidance, answer the occasional prayer. And every now and then they come up with something to surprise and delight. Like this wondrous chemical that makes it so easy for us to slip into your world. Not the intended effect, but I won’t let it go to waste. I’d almost forgotten the tiny pleasures of mortal flesh.”

>   He pressed the tip of his index finger against the edge of the steel table.

  Then he shoved down. The fingernail ripped up by the roots, tearing flesh, and oozed crimson along the exposed nail bed. Kemper shouted. He ran in and grabbed the kid’s shackled wrists, trying to stop the king from hurting him again. Then a sound like a thunderclap exploded in the interview room and Kemper went flying. He hit the cinder-block wall and crumpled to the floor in a daze.

  Steel flashed in the corner of my eye. I wasn’t sure how Jennifer had slipped her razor blade through the metal detectors, but the edge slashed across her forearm. Her blood and her power burst forth, each fueling the other, and a ribbon of spilled scarlet twisted in the air above her open palm like a cobra ready to strike. I hooked my fingers, hissing the opening words of an exorcism chant in bastard Latin. Pressure swelled in my sinuses, the feeling of three magical fronts converging to brew a violent storm.

  “Leave. The kid. Alone,” I said through gritted teeth.

  The king gave us an almost-pitying smile. “He is beyond mortal sensation now. And I cannot be contained.”

  He twirled his wrists. The shackles fell free, unlocked, clattering to the blood-spattered table. The kid’s body rose, chair scraping back. Then his sneakers lifted from the concrete floor. His arms and legs dangled slack and his shoulders slumped as he levitated, hovering a foot off the ground.

  I leaned down and gave Kemper a hand. He winced, rubbing one bruised shoulder, as I hauled him to his feet. The kid’s head lolled to the left and right while his unholy passenger surveyed the three of us in amused silence.

  “You didn’t do this for shits and giggles,” I told him. “You want something. Spill it.”

  “You weren’t entirely wrong before. Damien Ecko failed me. With his death, I require a new emissary. Every king needs a prince. Or a court jester.”

  “Not interested,” I said.

  “You aren’t first in line for the crown. There is a man, a prominent mover within the Network, who craves my personal attention. A magus of rot, deeply devoted, with great potential. I’m thinking of anointing him as my chosen servant.”

  “Might have better luck with a temp agency,” Jennifer said. “Maybe hire two or three this time, so you’ve got a spare handy. Your ‘chosen servants’ don’t last too long when they get in our way.”

  “That is the case.” The possessed teenager’s head bobbed, his sneakers swaying above the floor. “And so, I think I’d like to play a game. With you, Daniel Faust.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “What if I don’t want to play?”

  “You possess every freedom, except for that one. The game has already begun. If this ambitious necromancer manages to slay you, I’ll grant him the honor of becoming my servant. If you defeat him, the honor will be yours instead. In three nights’ time, one of you will be dead, and one of you will be anointed. Either way, I benefit.”

  “Call off your dog. Already told you, I’m not interested.”

  “I won’t try to tempt you with occult majesty,” the king said. “You already know I could grant you the power of a charnel god. If that isn’t enough to make your mouth water, what about the greatest power of all? Knowledge. You could share in the resources of the Network. A thousand eyes and ears. You could confound your enemies, and lay their plans to ruin.”

  “I already do pretty well in that department,” I told him.

  “Ah, but what about…the Enemy?”

  That got my attention. The kid’s lips curled back in a sneer of triumph.

  “Now you’re listening,” he said. “The mantle of the Thief has been forced upon your head. And as the story always repeats itself—always—it will kill you if you don’t find a means of returning the role to its rightful owner. You don’t know how. But I do. And I could tell you.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” I said.

  “Time is not on your side. And what about your wondrous new discovery, Howard Canton’s wand? Why is the Enemy so afraid of Howard Canton, a man who lived and died while he was trapped in a prison-world, a man he never met? I could tell you. That wand isn’t his only legacy. I could show you. And lead you to a treasure beyond imagining.”

  “And all I have to do is serve you and get cozy with the Network.” I put one hand on my hip. “We still don’t know what your endgame is, but as far as I can tell, you’re just as bad as the Enemy.”

  “Hardly. Do you know what the Enemy desires?”

  I did. I’d come face-to-face with the bastard at long last, in a blood-soaked vault beneath a Texas ranch. He wasn’t shy about his intentions.

  “He wants to burn it all,” I said. “Everything. Every world, every life, every spark of hope. He wants to be the last man standing.”

  “Our ambitions are unkind,” the king said, “but far less nihilistic. We—my brother kings and I—have use for this world, and for humanity. We have use for you.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  He inhaled. The teenager’s chest swelled. And kept swelling, as his lungs expanded to the point of bursting. His ribs made a faint crackling sound as they began to fracture.

  “Ahh,” the king sighed, letting the air out in a long, sultry hiss.

  “You’re done here,” I said. “I don’t know exactly what you and your ‘brother kings’ are, but I’m pretty damn sure that Jennifer and I have something in our collective arsenal that can hurt you. Get out of that kid’s body, or we go nuclear on your ass. You’ve got five seconds.”

  “The child is dead. His soul is mine.”

  “Four seconds.”

  “Find my would-be protégé,” he said. “Slay him, before he slays you. His plans are already in motion. The game has begun.”

  “Two seconds.”

  “No worries,” the king rasped.

  The teenager’s arms shot up. He grabbed the sides of his head and his fingers curled tight in his unruly hair.

  “I’ll see myself out.”

  The kid’s neck cracked like a gunshot as his hands wrenched his head to one side. His feet hit the floor, then the rest of him, collapsing glass-eyed and stone dead.

  Kemper raced to the kid’s side. He dropped to one knee and leaned over him, feeling for a pulse, hammering his motionless chest in a haze of denial and hope. I was past both of those things, standing stock-still with a breath trapped in my throat.

  “Sugar,” Jennifer said.

  “I know. These Network assholes. Priority one.”

  “With a bullet,” she said.

  “With as many bullets as it takes.” I turned to face her. “We need a meeting. Full Commission.”

  Kemper waved a flustered hand at us. His eyes were yellow-tinged, his half-blood nature rising to the surface with his stress. Glistening with the tears he was fighting to hold back.

  Gary Kemper cared too much. He was a good cop.

  “Don’t say this shit in front of me,” he snapped. “Just…not another fuckin’ word. I don’t wanna hear anything I’ll have to lie about later. And before you do whatever you’re gonna do, you need to see Mayor Seabrook. I was supposed to take you to her once…once you fixed this.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay, Gary.”

  “Just go. Damn it, I need to take care of this, make this shit disappear. Just go.”

  So we left. Jennifer and I held our silence until we were out in the parking lot. She clicked her key fob and an alarm system squawked. Headlights flicked to life and painted the stucco walls in gauzy white. After her Prius had gone out in a blaze of dubious glory, she’d upgraded; her new ride was a sleek Tesla Model S in metallic blue, with a jet-black leather interior and ash wood trim. Business was good.

  “Plan of attack?” Jennifer asked me.

  “We track that bad batch of ink to the source. Somebody sold it to those kids. And there’s a good chance the rest of his supply is just as tainted. We need to get that shit off the streets before more people end up dead.”

  “Or worse.”

&
nbsp; I opened the passenger-side door. “Or worse.”

  “What about all that other stuff he said, this ‘game’ he wants to play?” She slid behind the wheel and I got in alongside her. The seat molded itself around my shoulders. “If he’s sending another killer like Damien Ecko your way, you need to get ready to scrap.”

  “I can’t worry about that right now. Can’t let myself get distracted. Finding whatever’s left of that bad ink has to be our top priority. And if we play our cards right, we’ll take the dealer alive.”

  “He’ll probably be like the last one we caught. With the, uh—” She gestured at her belly and winced. So did I. The last dealer had been bound by a geas—a magically enforced taboo to seal his lips—and we’d gotten a nasty surprise when I tried to set him free.

  “We’ll be ready for it this time. These people aren’t untouchable, Jennifer. Every clue we dig up, every scrap of intel we gather, puts us one step closer to taking them down. There’s a gap in their armor. Every organization has a gap in its armor. We’ve just got to find it.”

  She pushed a button on the dash. The panel lit up, glowing in the dark, the engine running silent.

  “Agreed. So. Seabrook’s office?”

  “Seabrook’s office.” I sagged against the seat. “Let’s get this over with.”

  3.

  A lone security guard waited for us at the doors to city hall. He locked up behind us and pointed the way down a half-lit corridor without a word. A janitor buffed the gleaming marble with a floor polisher, his eyes down and his ears buried under orange plastic headphones. He bobbed his head to a song I couldn’t make out, just the thrumming traces of a steady bass beat, as we skirted around him. At the end of the hall, white light shone against the pebbled glass of the mayor’s office door.

  The glass rattled under my knuckles. “It’s open,” called out a tired voice from the other side.