Ghost Dance

by Rebecca Levene

  He shrugged. "We're at war and you're a soldier. Soldiers fight and they die. It's what they're for. You're twenty-three now. Grow up."

  So that was it, the bottom line. He didn't care about her or what this cost her. He'd make her keep doing it until it destroyed her, and then he'd look for someone else and do exactly the same to them.

  The waitress refilled their coffee cups. PD sipped his as if nothing had happened as the bitter smell surrounded them. "We need to find out more about Maria and the man she was with," he said. "I was going to tell you to take more peyote, but I guess that won't be necessary."

  "No, I guess not." She stood and PD did too. His hand reached out to stop her and she slapped it away. "I'm going to the bathroom. If that's permitted."

  He nodded and she squeezed through to the tiled, low-lit room at the back of the diner. The lock gave a satisfying click as she turned it. She'd sat down, dress bunched around her waist, when she saw Raven's eye twinkling at her from the gloom near the door.

  "Jesus!" she shouted, springing up. The heat of her anger burnt low in her chest, still simmering from her argument with PD. "If you want to say something, say it. You're supposed to be my spirit guide, aren't you? Well fucking guide me!"

  The bird didn't answer, its black eyes blank. After a few seconds staring into them, she began to feel as if she could fall through and into whatever lay beyond. Her head spun with vertigo and she gasped and covered her face with her hands.

  When her hands fell away, she gasped again. The Raven was gone and a man stood in his place. For a second she thought it was PD. He was Native American too, young and handsome. But PD would never have worn what he was wearing, the moccasins and the hide breechcloth and most of all the feather headdress.

  Then she registered the glossy black feathers that made up the headdress and the black shine of the eyes beneath it, and she knew who this was.

  "Raven?" she said.

  He cocked his head, the human gesture exactly like the bird's. "Well, no, I'm human."

  "But you were the Raven?"

  "Oh yes. Or he was me. Or maybe both of us are someone else."

  She huffed in exasperation.

  He looked hurt. His face was far more mobile than PD's, the expressions flicking across it almost comically broad. "Sorry, am I boring you? I don't usually do that. Irritate, yes. I might go so far as infuriate. But I'm seldom actually tedious."

  "Could you just..." She sighed. "Could you just go away?"

  "But I thought you wanted my help. You were quite explicit about it. 'Fucking guide me'. Those were your exact words." He grinned idiotically.

  "Jesus," she said. "I think I preferred you when you were a bird."

  "I'm less obliging when I'm a bird."

  The bathroom was too hot, condensation sweating from its white walls and coating the lid of the toilet when she lowered it. She sat gingerly and studied her spirit guide. He was as solid and real as anything else in the room.

  "Can you make it go away?" she asked him.

  "Make myself go away?"

  She shook her head to deny it and then realised that of course that was exactly what she meant. "Make all of it go away. Make it stop. PD wants this - why not give it to him?"

  He curled in on himself to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of her. "Oh, PD. The man is an apple - red on the outside, white on the inside."

  "So what? I'm white on the inside and the outside."

  He laughed and when she felt the brush of expelled air against her cheek, she realised his head was at the same level as hers though he was sitting two feet below her. If he stood now, he'd need to bend his neck to fit beneath the ceiling, but she hadn't seen him grow or change. She shivered, wondering if the trick was his, or if she'd simply begun to accept the twisted physics of the spirit world without question.

  "And yet," he said, "I chose you. You were picked. Selected. Singled out. Haven't you asked yourself why?"

  "Only every day."

  "And there's your problem."

  She frowned. "Because I don't know the answer?"

  "Because you're asking that ridiculous question in the first place!" He jumped up, looming towards her. For an instant he was still a giant and then just an ordinary man, so close she could see nothing but the brown blur of his nose and the sharp blackness of his eyes as he grasped her cheeks in his palms. "That's like asking why tigers have stripes. Why bees sting. Why dogs growl."

  "We already know the answers to those question." She tried to pull her face out of his grasp.

  He held on tighter, fingers digging into her as he shook her head from side to side. "But we don't ask them when the dog is mauling us or the tiger pouncing! Think, girl. Think. You want to escape. So what's the question you should be asking?"

  "How to stop the dog attacking. Or how to get away when it does."

  He sagged back, as if her answer had cost him great effort. "Yes. Oh yes. So, Alexandra Keve, just how are you going to get away?"

  She slumped back too, the cold square outline of the cistern pressing uncomfortably into her back. "I don't know."

  "Well," he said, "I guess you'd better start figuring it out."

  Alex didn't need to test her boundaries to know they were there. PD wouldn't just let her give him the slip. It was in the way he watched her, the covert glances from the corner of his eye as he drove. And he was still angry with her. She could read that too, in the tense set of his shoulders and the muscle that jumped in his jaw.

  The grubby streets of the Tenderloin flicked by on the journey to Alamo Square. She knew that her chances of escape grew slimmer with every block they passed. PD's contact was meeting them in Alamo park, near Jacob Marriot's residence. The contact had intel on Maria's dinner companion as well as plans of his nearby house. Marriot had returned to LA after last night's meal and PD wanted to break into his place while he was gone. He wanted Alex to view it through the lens of the spirit world and tell him what she saw.

  And when she'd done that, there'd be something else that he wanted her to do. And so it would go on, week after week and month after month until all the fight had left her and she was just as much a company zombie as he was. She felt a momentary surge of self-pity and fought it. Raven was right. Feeling sorry for herself got her nowhere.

  They'd almost passed the bank when she called out sharply to PD to stop. He obeyed immediately, swerving the car to the kerb as his brakes screeched and the normally placid San Franciscan traffic honked behind him.

  "What?" he said. "What did you see?"

  She forced the anger out of her face so that it was merely blank when she turned to him. "A bank."

  "And? Are you saying this place is connected to them?"

  "It's connected to me." She released her seat belt and grabbed the door handle.

  PD's hand closed over hers, stilling her. "Where do you think you're going?"

  "I need to transfer some funds. I spent a fortune on clothes yesterday and now they're all gone. We can't go back to that hotel and I've got to have something to wear. I'd rather get out of this dress - too many unpleasant memories."

  The words and their meaning hung in the air between them for a moment. It was PD who looked away first. "You really think this is the right time? We're working."

  "Which makes this time different from any other time of the day how exactly? We're always working. I need money, it will only take ten minutes, and you've just wasted three."

  "Fine. Get it done." His hand released hers, leaving a moist patina of his sweat on her skin.

  She almost fell onto the sidewalk in her haste to get out of the car. The sun was bright but the air cool and she took a deep, steadying lungful of it. Then she couldn't stop herself turning to look at PD. He glared back at her, and she knew that if she took a second longer than ten minutes, he'd come in after her. She could make a run for it, but he'd find her or call someone else who would.

  She squared her shoulders and turned back to the bank. It didn't matter - she j
ust had to find a way to slow the pursuit while she escaped. And ten minutes should be plenty of time to set that in motion.

  The inside of the building was hushed and gloomy with armed security guards loitering in the shadows. She walked past them and joined the shortest line for a teller, pulling out her iPhone as she took her place behind a gawky teenager wearing a T-shirt a shade redder than his zits.

  A quick search of White Pages found the restaurant's telephone number. She could picture their waiter smiling as he'd introduced himself and the less amiable expression on his face as he'd watched her being frog-marched towards the waiting car.

  "Hey," she said, when the ring-tone ended. "Listen, I'm a friend of Jeremiah's and he isn't answering his cell. Is he working with you right now?"

  "Let me just... Yes, he's-" the woman said, and Alex tapped call end, then stored the number. The pimply boy had finished his transaction and she strode forward confidently, like she owned the place. It wasn't far from the truth. Her mother was a major shareholder.

  The teller smiled at her as she asked to see the manager, the smile tightening a little when Alex told her it was urgent. A moment later the man emerged, hand outstretched for a warm handshake.

  "My driver's double-parked, so I'll keep this brief," she said as he led her to his office. "I need to make a large cash withdrawal today, and I want to ensure you have the funds available to cover it."

  "Large?" He raised an eyebrow.

  "Three million."

  "Ah. I'm not sure I can accommodate you on that, I'm afraid, Miss...?"

  "Keve. Alexandra Keve.

  His expression brightened. "I'm sorry, Miss Keve, I didn't realise. I think we can arrange something. Will the end of the day be soon enough?"

  "Two hours, maximum."

  He only hesitated a second. "Two hours, then. I'll need to make some calls. And you have ID, of course..."

  She was still smiling as she climbed back into the car with PD ,nine minutes after she'd left it. "Are you ready now?" he asked.

  "Well?" Raven said. She could see him in the rear-view mirror, perched cross-legged on the back seat. "Are you ready, Alex?"

  "Yes," she said. "I think I am."

  CHAPTER NINE

  Morgan used the bus journey back into town to study Coby. Their elbows pressed awkwardly together, cramped side by side in the narrow seat, and he could smell the other man's body, the unpleasant tang of stale sweat. Coby looked nervous, but that was hardly surprising. His teacher and his fellow student were both dead - believing someone was out to get him didn't seem like paranoia.

  Still, Morgan thought there was more to it. There was something unnerving about Coby's pale brown eyes. There was an absence in them that Morgan couldn't name but thought he might have seen in his own reflection.

  Coby sensed him looking and turned to catch his eye. "I'm not asking you to trust me, you know."

  Morgan shrugged, unwilling to have this conversation in public.

  Ten minutes later, the bus dropped them off at the same stop he'd first caught it from. He stood at the shelter and scanned the streets, then turned to Coby. "You were watching me here."

  "I knew I needed your help," Coby said, walking away. After a few paces, he turned down a narrow, cobbled street.

  "But you waited to ask for my help until after I'd seen Dr Granger's house," Morgan said as he followed him. "Why?"

  Coby's eyes snapped to his face and then away, the movement almost too fast to spot. Morgan found himself picturing a lizard's tongue flicking out to taste the world. "I needed to make sure you weren't actually the person who's hunting me," Coby said.

  "How do you know I'm not?"

  "He would have burnt down the house if he'd seen what you saw in there."

  They lapsed into silence as a jostling group of school children passed them by, and then they were back on a main street again and it was too public to talk. Morgan chewed his lip as he thought about what Coby had said and what it meant. The Israelis wanted to put a stop to Dr Granger's research. After what Morgan had seen in her attic, he didn't find that hard to understand. He couldn't imagine the Hermetic Division would be too keen on it either.

  Coby finally stopped in front of a scuffed black door beside a newsagent's window. There were four bells with smudged names in ink alongside them. Coby's was at the top: Bryson. Inside, threadbare carpet led them up three flights of stairs to another door. Coby pushed a key into its lock, but Morgan put a hand on his shoulder to still him. The wood was dark-stained and the marks were hard to see, but when he flicked on the light they leapt into sharp relief. Someone had painted a red cross on the door. The red was too watery to be paint. Morgan was almost certain it was blood. He released Coby's shoulder and stared at him in silence until the other man spoke.

  "Protection," he said. "Come in and I'll explain."

  The place was a bedsit, smaller than Morgan had expected, cluttered, dark and grubby.

  Coby noticed his expression as he looked around. "Yeah, I know. Not exactly the dreaming spires, right?"

  Morgan guessed Coby was quoting from something and felt a twinge of pain as he thought of Tomas and his poetry. He shook his head and said, "I live down the Elephant and Castle. Looks all right to me."

  Coby's eyes didn't leave him as he crossed the room. "So I guess you know what Dr Granger was researching."

  He slid into a sagging armchair and Morgan perched gingerly on the sofa opposite. He didn't like the way the soft springs swallowed him up. They'd delay his response a crucial second if he was attacked, and Coby didn't look like a threat, but he didn't seem entirely safe either.

  "You told me already," he said. "You and Julie. Angels, immortality - the philosopher's stone."

  "Yeah, but you thought I meant in a theoretical, academic sort of way. Now you know differently. You know it's real"

  "I always knew that."

  Coby nodded. "Of course you do - you're Hermetic Division."

  "How do you know about the Hermetic Division? How do you know about any of it?"

  "I'm a historian, a good one - and so was Dr Dee. I just followed the trail he laid down. Before I started, I thought... What we all thought, I guess, before we got sucked into this. That the world was an ordinary sort of place, with maybe the occasional odd thing in it. Like a brightly lit room with just a few shadows. But it's night out there, isn't it?"

  Morgan narrowed his eyes. "And you've discovered something that someone wants kept in the dark."

  "Dr Granger discovered it. She was dying, you see. Cancer. Slow-acting, but fatal. She never had much interest in Dr Dee or his experiments before her diagnosis. But afterwards..."

  "You're saying she discovered the secret of immortality?"

  Coby smiled. "Sounds crazy, right?"

  Morgan stood, cracking the bones in his neck as he straightened. "My standards of crazy have changed recently. So what was the secret?"

  "I don't know." His eyes followed Morgan as he paced the room, watchful and just a little fearful. Morgan wondered what Coby was afraid he might do. Or was it something he was afraid Morgan might find?

  "You don't know," Morgan said. "Then why would anyone want to kill you? He's already got rid of Granger and Julie. The secret's safe, right?"

  His pacing took him to a battered armoire at the end of the room. He heard Coby shift in his seat as he approached it. When Morgan turned to face him he slouched back just a bit too quickly, faking nonchalance. Whatever it was he didn't want Morgan to find, it was here.

  "Well?" Morgan said.

  "Dr Granger and Julie don't know the secret either. But they knew - and I know - how to get hold of a man who does."

  "I'm listening." Morgan turned back to the armoire. When he slid the draw open there was nothing inside but a dried-up can of deodorant and a packet of disposable razors. The surface itself was loosely scattered with papers but they were all red bills and bank statements. He flicked his eyes to the cracked mirror which hung above it, hoping to catch Coby's
reaction to his prying, but the armchair he'd been sitting in was empty.

  Morgan turned to find that Coby had moved to the small kitchenette at one end of the room. Water gurgled as he filled a plastic kettle. "I need a drink," he said, glancing over his shoulder.

  "You're avoiding the question," Morgan said. "Who knows the secret?"

  "Dr Dee."

  Morgan closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. "I'm this close to just beating the fucking information out of you."

  "I'm serious. You spoke to Julie, didn't you? Before she..."

  "Yeah."

  "Then she must have told you about Dee's spirit communications - that he talked to angels."

  "She said Dr Dee claimed he'd found a way to contact them."

  Steam from the boiling kettle wreathed Coby's face as he poured water into the mug and the smell of cheap coffee spread through the room. "He did find a way. He used scrying mirrors - portals into the realm of spirit. There's one in the British Museum. It's made out of obsidian and it's older than Dee. It's Mexican, actually - a cult object associated with Tezcatlipoca, the god of sorcerers. His name means The Smoking Mirror."

  Morgan couldn't help snatching another glance at the mirror behind him. He knew better than anyone what could sometimes be seen in the silvered glass. When he turned back round, he found that Coby had moved again. He was perched on the arm of the sofa, mug cradled in his hands.

  "Dr Dee's mirrors let you contact spirits," Morgan said. "You're telling me this - this obsidian mirror - you could use it to talk to Dee?"

  "Not that one, no. Dee used the one in the British Museum to summon the angels he talked to and tried to bargain with. But there's another one he valued even more highly. He was afraid to die, you see. Why do you think he was searching for the philosopher's stone? So when he knew the end was coming, he took his most powerful mirror and he looked into it at the moment of his death. He believed his spirit would be caught and preserved in it forever, like a fly trapped in amber. That's the mirror you need, if you want to talk to Dee."