The Neon Boneyard

by Craig Schaefer

  High school was hard. Facing it as a cambion—half human, half demon—was even harder. A while back, Melanie, was running with a gang of would-be rebels suffering from delusions of competency. That I could hide from her mom. When I caught her getting drunk at Winter on a fake ID, chasing clues to her dad’s murder in the bottom of a cocktail glass, I decided I could keep my lips sealed once I was sure she’d gotten her head on straight.

  This was different.

  This time I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I figured I’d hear the kid out, then decide. She got in and sat there with her head bowed and her hands in her lap. The faintest outline of blue veins pulsed across her face like the pattern of a butterfly’s wings; cambion blood exerts itself under stress. Normally they can keep it under control, keep their true nature hidden from the world, but Melanie was still learning. And I could only imagine how much stress she was feeling right about then.

  “You’re putting me in a lousy position, you know that?”

  She flicked her gaze at me. “How do you mean?”

  “I just got off your mom’s shit list. I mean, just got off it. Now I find out you were at a party where twelve kids overdosed and killed each other. If I don’t tell Emma—”

  “Please.” Her hand shot out and grabbed my wrist, squeezing hard. “You can’t.”

  “Calm. Down. Take deep breaths. Your face is showing.”

  She checked herself in the rearview mirror and ducked low in the seat, doing breathing exercises until the web of blue veins faded away. Four seconds in, four seconds out.

  “I’m not looking to bust you,” I told her, “but you’re one of the only living witnesses and I need to know what happened out there. What were you even doing at that party? I mean, drugs? That’s not the kind of crowd you run with.”

  She found something interesting on her knees to stare at. “You don’t know what kind of crowd I run with.”

  “I know you’ve got a four-point-oh grade average and you’re the star of the school paper and the track team. Trust me, Emma makes sure we know about these things.”

  “Oh God.” She slumped lower in her seat.

  “You think I’m kidding? The biggest crime bosses in Las Vegas are regularly appraised of your academic prowess. The Bishops and the Calles are very impressed.” Deadpan, I waggled my hand from side to side. “The Inagawa-kai think you need to study harder and add some more extracurriculars, but you know the yakuza, those guys are hardcore.”

  Melanie mashed her face into her hand. “I was just…partying, okay? That’s all.”

  “And drinking. Melanie, you know the rules. You can’t be doing that around outsiders, not until you get older and you can keep your blood under control. You flash your real face to the wrong person and then it’s not just your mother who has to fix things. That’s when Caitlin gets involved. What about the ink, did you take any?”

  “What? No!” She glared at me like I’d slapped her across the face. “I don’t do that stuff, okay? But…that’s why I was there. I was undercover.”

  “You’re going to have to explain that one.”

  She took another deep breath. It gusted loose in an exhausted sigh.

  “We’ve never had a big drug problem at my school—a little beer, a little pot, normal high school stuff, but not, like, drugs. A couple months ago, though, ink started going around. I mean, everybody’s doing it. But everybody’s getting it third- or fourth-hand, buying it off somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody else. And I was thinking, if I could break a really big story for the school paper, I mean, real-world-journalism big, it’d look amazing on my college applications.”

  I connected the dots. “You’ve been trying to track down the source. The dealer at the top of the food chain.”

  “Exactly. If I could find the student bringing it in—or maybe it’s even a faculty member—can you imagine? It would be huge. Maybe even the ‘full-ride scholarship and job offers after I graduate’ kind of huge.”

  “Okay,” I told her. “First thing, your Nancy Drew adventure is officially over. Drop the story.”

  “Dan, you can’t—”

  “Oh, I can. We’ve been doing some digging too. Ink isn’t just a designer drug. It’s mixed with alchemical reagents. Nasty stuff.”

  Her brow scrunched up. “There’s magic in it? Why? What does it do?”

  “We don’t know yet, and that’s a big problem. What we do know is the cartel pushing this stuff isn’t any ordinary gang. You do not want to land in their crosshairs. I’m sorry, I know this was a big deal to you, but you need to leave the sleuthing to me. What did you find out?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, sullen, talking to her knees again. “Not much.”

  “Melanie.”

  Her shoulders sagged. “Okay, fine. This kid named Rob Ackerman is in my algebra class. It was his house, his party. I heard he was going to have ink, a lot of it, so I bugged him until he threw me a pity invite. I thought he might be the source.”

  “Was he?”

  “No. And he…he didn’t make it out.” She folded her arms, hugging herself as her lips curled. “He was the first one to, you know, lose it when the crazy hit. But I snooped around before everything went bad and found out his supplier is a guy named Todd. Todd something, I don’t even know his last name, but everybody knows him. Major burnout. He drives this van from the eighties, and I think he actually lives in it.”

  “Another student?” I asked.

  “No. I mean, he was. He dropped out last year, but he still hangs around campus, mostly trying to pick up freshman girls. Gross. I think he works at the Burger Barn on Lake Mead Boulevard when he’s not being Creeper McCreeperson.”

  “Did he take the ink too?”

  “No,” Melanie said. “He wasn’t even there. Which was weird, because Rob invited him, and Todd always shows up at parties. Like, whether he’s invited or not. He sold Rob the ink and said he’d drop by later, but he never showed up.”

  It wasn’t weird, not if you saw the world like I did. The pieces clicked into place clear as the desert sky. Melanie was a good kid, too good, too much heart to see the obvious answer.

  “We’ve been treating this like somebody slipped up, contaminated the ink by accident. Wrong assumption.”

  She tilted her head at me. “What do you mean?”

  “Todd wasn’t there because he knew what was going to happen,” I said. “The batch was tainted on purpose. This wasn’t a mistake. It was mass murder.”

  5.

  Melanie sat ash-faced in the passenger seat, looking like a shell-shocked soldier pulled from the trenches.

  “What they did, when they took that stuff,” she said in a small voice. “What they did to each other…I barely got out. If I hadn’t been able to barricade the bathroom door when everyone went crazy then slip out the window…why? Why would anyone do that?”

  Damn good question. The Network was an oiled precision machine, built for stealth. It operated in the deepest waters, and we had no idea how long it had been around. Lurking in silence, an urban legend. If the law or the media managed to swing a spotlight in their direction, they smashed it without hesitation.

  Thirteen dead kids, killed in some of the worst ways imaginable thanks to a bad batch of ink, was a disaster in the making. In one night’s work they’d guaranteed more cops, more feds, more public funding to fight them tooth and nail. It was equal parts pointless and stupid, and the Network wasn’t stupid.

  I tried to put myself in their shoes, work out a reason why I’d pull that move, and I came up empty. If I wanted somebody dead, I put a gun to their head and pulled the trigger; I didn’t toss a hand grenade into a crowded room and hope I hit the one person I was aiming for. Then again, maybe that was the point: to obfuscate the intended target.

  Like the child of somebody they wanted to send a message to.

  “Any of your classmates, the kids at the party,” I said, “do any of their parents work in law enforcement? Or work for the
city, maybe?”

  Melanie walked back through her memories. Aching, and I ached right with her. I knew from experience that she was picturing her friends two ways right now: before, and after.

  “Jenna…her dad’s a lawyer, I think. There’s this one guy—I don’t really know him, he’s in my social studies class—his dad’s a lobbyist, I’m pretty sure. I don’t know.”

  “I’ll figure it out,” I told her. “You should get to class. They’ll probably dismiss early, anyway. Considering.”

  She put her hand on the door and froze.

  “Something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” she said.

  “Shoot.”

  Melanie turned in her seat and looked my way. Her eyes glistened. The threat of tears brought out the red, bloodshot from loss and lack of sleep.

  “Teach me.”

  “Teach you?”

  “Magic,” she said.

  “That’s…that’s not a good idea.”

  She perked up, intense, like she was asking permission to go to a rock concert and had a list of preplanned arguments.

  “My mom would be okay with it! I asked her! I mean, not about you, specifically—she wants to set me up in a mentoring program with this guy she works with, ew, no thanks—but in general she’s okay—”

  I cut her off with a distracted wave. “That’s not the issue. I had an apprentice, once.”

  A little of her energy faded, and I saw the look in her eyes; she had her junior reporter hat back on.

  “What happened?”

  Then it was my turn to look back and see the before and after.

  Before: thick as thieves, my arm around Desi Srivastava’s shoulders, snapping a selfie with a disposable camera in front of the dancing fountains at the Medici. I still had the photograph. I took it out sometimes, when I was drunk and felt like torturing myself.

  After: sand swirled across the floor of a deserted office lobby, rising up in a whirlwind, taking on form. A drooling crocodile snout, shimmering armored hide. A custom-built trap for me and my crew, at the end of a heist we were never supposed to survive.

  “I can do this, Dan!” Desi’s voice echoed off the inside of my skull. “I can do this!”

  Her head hit the floor, bouncing across the blood-streaked tile, two seconds before the rest of her body did.

  “It ended badly,” I told Melanie.

  “That doesn’t mean this will! I’m a good student. You know I’m a good student.”

  “I know you are. I’m not a good teacher.”

  “I don’t believe that. And I don’t want to learn from my mom’s friends. She’s already pushing me to intern at Southern Tropics over the summer, and I…” She shook her head, her bottom lip trapped between her teeth. “I don’t want to work for those people, okay? I don’t want that.”

  Southern Tropics Import-Export, aka the shell company that covered the Court of Jade Tears’ operations on earth. Emma was the queen of the boardroom, handling Prince Sitri’s cash, and she expected Melanie to follow in her footsteps.

  “Don’t know if you heard,” I said, “but apparently I work for ‘those people’ now.”

  “That’s not the same thing. You know why Prince Sitri knighted you.”

  “Do I?” I arched an eyebrow. “Clue me in.”

  “Because he thought it would be funny, and he wanted to screw with you. Duh. Come on, even I know that. You can mostly still do whatever you want. I mean, you’re Daniel Faust. Nobody really expects you to toe the line. Any line. For me, it’s…it’s different. I’m supposed to be all on board.” She shook invisible pom-poms. “Yay, hell. I’m supposed to be all excited about spending the rest of my life working for my mom’s shitty company, surrounded by jerks, which will put me on an amazing fast track to spending all of eternity being surrounded by even bigger jerks. I know, I’m a cambion, that’s supposed to be my thing—”

  “Your thing is whatever you want your thing to be,” I said. “Your blood doesn’t get a say in the matter.”

  “See? See, that’s what I’m talking about. You don’t try to put me in a box like that. When I’m talking to you I never feel like I’m…I don’t know. Wrong inside.”

  I decided to shift gears. Melanie was a pressure cooker about to burst, and there was more going on than a sudden desire to expand her studies.

  “You know,” I said, “knowing magic doesn’t make anything easier. Life is tough, especially at your age. There aren’t any cheat codes.”

  “I don’t care about easier. It would make me safer. Hello? I could have gotten killed last night. And it’s not the first time. Remember the Redemption Choir? Or when Damien Ecko set a zombie loose in my house?”

  “You got through it okay.”

  “I was lucky. I can’t count on luck.”

  “You can’t count on magic,” I told her. “Why do you think I carry a gun?”

  She pushed her head back against the seat and balled her hands into fists. Out of words, out of oxygen.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s going on with you? Talk to me.”

  She forced a breath, but her muscles stayed taut, like she had steel cables under her skin.

  “You know where I want to go to college? Emerson. Their journalism school is the best, okay? God tier.”

  “Okay.”

  “And Emerson,” she said, “is in Boston. About two thousand miles outside Prince Sitri’s borders. And my mother is a dignitary in his court. Which means I can’t go to Emerson, because I’d probably be kidnapped or killed the second I got off the plane. I can’t go anywhere.”

  “You’ve got options—”

  “No,” she said. “I…I don’t. I don’t. My entire world is Jade Tears territory, because I can’t leave. Because I’m a cambion, because I’m Emma Loomis’s daughter—I was born with a target on my back and I can never, ever take it off. And all my friends? They’re leaving. They’re going to Chicago, and New York, and Boston, and Florida. They’re going to all these places I can never go, will never go, and I’m never going to—”

  The dam broke and the tears flowed at the end of a ragged, strangled word. I pulled her close and she let me, and she shook for a while. I held her shoulders and felt my shirt grow damp.

  “Once we graduate, I’m never going to see any of my friends again,” she whispered into my chest. “And my mom is like, it’s fine, you’ll make new friends at Southern Tropics, and I hate those people. I need…I need to be able to make my own choices. I need something that’s mine.”

  I understood. Just like I knew I couldn’t give her what she needed. I let her finish, holding her until there was nothing but a few wet sniffles left. I wiped her eyes with my sleeve. A stray, salty drop splashed across my fingers.

  “I’m here for you,” I told her. “I will always be here for you. Know that. But…I can’t teach you, Melanie. It’s not you. It’s me. I can’t do that again.”

  The hope in her eyes sputtered out and died. Her smudged tears felt like fresh blood on my hand.

  “Fine,” she said. “Thanks for nothing.”

  “Melanie—”

  She shoved open the door and turned her face away.

  “I’m late for class.”

  She was gone before I could think of a way to make her stay. I understood better than she thought. I wasn’t far from her age when Bentley and Corman took me under their wing. They did more than teach me: they gave me confidence, an anchor in the world, a source of strength.

  Something that was mine.

  I could have said yes, could have passed the torch along, but I’d tried that once before. When I looked into Melanie’s eyes, all I could see was Desi. I cared too much about Melanie to ever let her get that close to me.

  6.

  The sunset bled tangerine in long streaks across the desert sky. The Vegas Strip came to life and fired up the neon, unleashing its clarion call to the gamblers, the pleasure-hunters, the hungry of all appetites. I looked at the ghost of my reflection in a floor-length window. Suite
d up, Italian loafers, paisley silk handkerchief with a razor-sharp crease.

  We’d rented a conference room at the Flamenco. Pixie came early, swept for bugs, and jetted before the meeting started. I did my part at the same time, hunting for witch-eyes and scrying spells. The room was clean. The attendees weren’t, and most of them were wearing a small stolen fortune on their backs or their wrists. We’d turned the place into a den of thieves, the head honchos of the city’s biggest crews coming together for our regular sit-down.

  “You look upset. I get nervous when you look upset.”

  Chou Yong, the recently promoted Red Pole of the 14K Triad, stood on my right. He’d earned his stripes in the field after his boss got eaten by a shape-shifting assassin, so I could understand where he was coming from. His double chin bobbed as he looked me up and down.

  “Had to disappoint somebody today,” I told him.

  “I do that every day.” Yong rolled his eyes to the darkening sky outside the window. “My mother. And she makes sure to remind me.”

  “Think we’re about ready to get rollin’,” Jennifer called out. She took her seat at the head of the long, oval conference table, mahogany inlaid with black leather and an alligator-hide sheen.

  I sat at her left hand and took a long, slow look around the room as everyone got settled. In the wake of Nicky Agnelli’s downfall, the self-proclaimed King of Las Vegas escaping just ahead of a federal dragnet, Jennifer had taken the feuding factions of the city and forged them into a more or less united front. We had the top men in the Cinco Calles and the Fine Upstanding Crew sitting side by side, after five years of scrapping. The 14K and the Inagawa-kai were being civil to each other. Even the Blood Eagles had come to the table, taking time out from their busy schedule of roaring down the desert highways and stomping anyone who looked at them sideways. Our feud with the Chicago Outfit had cost us, but we came out on top and tighter than before.

  “We’re starting to look like a serious threat,” I murmured.

  Jennifer cracked a bottle of Perrier and gave me the side-eye. “Sure thing, sugar. Thanks to…the guy.”