Mortal Sins (Conspiracy of Angels short story)
Page 2
The dead woman raised a hand and lightly pressed her gloved fingers against the glass, beseeching. The Renaissance was old enough, the window was a barrier to the both of us. I raised my own hand, and Lil chose precisely that moment to sidle up from the crowd, jamming an elbow sharply into my ribs.
“Hey, flyboy,” she said. “What are you staring at?”
The wraith jerked back as if pulled on a cord. My vision faltered. When I saw her next, she was halfway down the sidewalk, heading toward Prospect Avenue. Her image stuttered as late-evening shoppers strode through the space she occupied. Streaking lights of cars and taxis burned trails against my eyes as I strained to keep the spirit in sight.
She halted a moment, looking over her shoulder and catching my gaze. Then she faded completely, her grayscale figure dispersing into the night.
“Dammit, Lil,” I grumbled. “You scared her away.”
“Was that a ghost?” Lil tossed her head with a scoff. The gesture sent wild waves of her dark-red hair cascading down her back. “Mother’s Tears, Zack,” she swore. “You attract dead mortals like stray puppies.”
“She needs my help,” I objected.
“Sure she does. So does every dead thing for miles, if you give it half a chance. You really need to learn how to tune that shit out.” She shifted her sable driving coat to her other arm, adjusting the grip on her white leather purse. She’d changed out of the navy dress and now wore a pantsuit in the same dark hue.
“There are reasons I can see the things I do,” I insisted. “There must be.”
Lil gave me a flat look. I thrust my hands into the pockets of my jacket and turned away from the window.
“With everything you’ve forgotten, why couldn’t you lose the self-righteous streak?” she growled.
“It’s not like I asked a monomaniacal asshole to shred my brain,” I replied. “Anyway—how is it your business if I want to help her out?”
“If it interferes with what I want, then that makes it my business. Or did you forget about the cacodaimons?” Lil gave me a shove in the direction of the hotel bar. “Our meeting. Now.”
I dug in my heels, gesturing vaguely at the milling crowd.
“Way too loud in here,” I said. “I can’t think straight.”
“How can you tell?” she muttered scathingly.
Half a dozen bitter retorts leapt to my lips, and I surprised myself by swallowing every one of them. Turning in the opposite direction from the bar, I started walking. Lil hovered by the liquid fall of golden curtains, storm-gray eyes tracking me until I was halfway to the revolving doors.
“You coming?” I called, pitching my voice so it carried over the noise of the revelers.
Again the disdainful scoff and toss of her head. Lil followed the gesture by rolling her eyes so hard she could have been shooting craps, as well as daggers.
“Fine,” she called back, practically shouting. “But you chase after that dead girl on your own time.” It was a testament to the mind-numbing din in the lobby that not a single person blinked at her statement.
3
I lingered on the sidewalk along Superior Avenue, searching the cityscape for any sign of the ghost. The wind racing across the lake from Canada carried with it wicked razors of cold. They lashed at my ears and cheeks, and I knew it was bad because I could actually feel the chill.
All the mortals walked bent over on themselves, heads down against the wind and arms folded over their precious centers of heat. February was rarely a kind month in Cleveland. The only things sizzling were sentiments on Hallmark cards.
Lil stepped through the revolving doors, settling her driving coat around her shoulders. The heels of her polished leather boots clicked smartly on the pavement as she approached.
“All right. Where to?” she asked, her hair whipping like scarlet serpents around her heart-shaped face.
I scanned the street again, squinting as I peered consciously across to the Shadowside. Gliding movement drew my attention to the corner of Prospect and Superior. An RTA bus lumbered into view, dispersing the frail figure of the specter, but I was certain she’d been standing there. I headed in that direction.
Lil jogged to keep pace with my long-legged strides.
“You’re not fooling me, you know,” she complained.
Chewing my lip, I kept my vision poised between the two sides of reality. It took more concentration than I knew it should have—I was still relearning things. My frustration vented itself in snark.
“That’s good,” I replied. “Wouldn’t want your staggering sense of superiority to falter.”
Lil smacked the back of her hand into my bicep hard enough that I could feel the sting of her knuckles through my jacket’s thick leather. She did things like that a lot. It would have seemed abusive if I didn’t know the kind of violence she could inflict when she was actually trying.
Up ahead I spied the striped awning of a restaurant. Dark blue alternating with white, I could just make out letters on the sign above it. Aradia’s. The spirit winked into view for a moment, flickering against the restaurant’s front window.
“You in the mood for Italian?” I asked. I crossed the street before she could object, and beelined for the door. As I yanked it open, the crooning voice of Sinatra spilled out, enumerating the qualities of a very good year.
The interior of the restaurant was dark but cozy, caught somewhere between a bar and a bistro. A crepe streamer of pink and red hearts was tacked above the bar, the only nod to the holiday. The rest of the décor consisted of old black-and-white photos arranged in clusters on the wood-paneled walls. Many of them seemed like family portraits interspersed with scenes from bygone decades of Cleveland. The Soldiers and Sailors Monument. The old May Company building. A parade for what looked like the Feast of the Assumption along Little Italy’s Murray Hill.
Pale votives burned in squat settings of cobalt glass on the center of every table. There were perhaps five other people in the entire establishment, three of them sitting at the bar. Empty as the place was, the scent of food coming from the kitchen was amazing.
The bartender—a stout man in his middle forties built like a pickle barrel with legs—looked up as we entered. His nametag caught the light, proclaiming him to be “Benny.” He stared for a long moment, his heavy brow beetling with disapproval. Maybe it was the biker jacket. I held my cowl tight, though—I didn’t want a repeat of earlier.
The ghost flickered into view at the very back of the restaurant, disappearing through doors that looked like they led to the kitchen. I almost charged after her, but managed to hold my ground behind the “Please Wait to be Seated” sign near the hostess stand.
“No way,” Lil said after a quick look around. She turned to go.
“Hang on.” I caught her elbow, my attention still fixed on the spot where the spirit had disappeared.
Lil shrugged me off. Dropping her voice to a whisper, she hissed, “Something isn’t right here, Zack. Pick another restaurant.”
“She’s here,” I responded. “You’re probably feeling that.”
“You think I can’t see her?” Lil snapped. “I just don’t care about every lost little ghost. Come on. There’s a shawarma place right around the corner—”
“I’m not leaving. Not until I have some idea what she wants.”
Lil rolled her eyes, complaining, “Nights like this, I really miss the old Zack.”
“I’m not that guy anymore,” I shot back.
Lil gave me a speculative look.
“No,” she assented. “No, you’re not.”
An odd note in her voice made me bite back the remains of my tirade. The emotion was echoed on her bronzed features, keen and bright as a lightning strike. That look stirred memories of some significant moment from the past. Jazz music. A smoky alto. A long, sleek dress with a midnight’s wealth of stars. As soon as I grabbed for them, the images dissolved, subtle as smoke. Memory was like that now. Even the few scraps left to me remained elusive.
/> The kid at the hostess stand interrupted, menus tucked neatly under one arm. Olive-skinned and with a silky fall of dark hair, her eyes were bright as agate. She studied first Lil, and then me. The broad expanse of her brow and the little cleft in her chin echoed the features of the bartender, though nature had painted her with a much more delicate hand. The girl offered us a practiced and very convincing smile.
“A table in back?” she asked mildly.
“Yeah. That would be great,” I said.
The hostess headed off, and I strode swiftly after her, glancing over my shoulder. The Lady of Beasts hesitated near the front of the restaurant, her full lips twisted into something very close to a pout. She eyed the doors for a moment, as if plotting her escape. Then, muttering curses in a language long dead, she followed.
We sat at a table against the back wall. Rigidly polite with the waitress, Lil took her menu and held it open between us. I felt like I was staring at the Great Wall of China.
“Get on with it, already,” she grumbled.
“What?” I asked. The memories still rattled uneasily in the back of my head, hollow echoes like pebbles tumbling down a very deep well.
“Whatever the hell you’re going to do with the ghost,” she responded. “Have a heart-to-heart. Send her into the light. Something. Just get it out of your system so we can talk.”
“No one’s twisting your arm to stay, you know,” I reminded her.
She grunted a non-comment and went back to glaring at her menu. We were matched, stubborn for stubborn, so I dropped it. I might have a penchant for tilting at windmills, but with Lil, I knew when to quit.
Closing my eyes, I focused on my sense of the space—the patrons, the flow of history along the walls, the conspicuous absence that was Lil as she shielded herself from me. My senses expanded, little fingers of light tracing all the dark corners to see what they held. There was a subtle thrumming on the air, and it grew more pronounced as I concentrated. We were near a Crossing—a little tear between the realms of spirit and flesh. That didn’t bode well for the dead woman. Crossings most often showed up in places where someone had suffered a traumatic death. It was starting to look as if my ghost was a murder victim.
The edge of the Crossing was close—I could almost touch it, if I extended my wings back far enough—but the heart of the disturbance lay beyond the doors to the kitchen. I dropped into a deeper focus, reaching with my mind as far as I could into that central pulse of terror and pain.
Echoes of the spirit’s imprint flickered on the edge of perception—the dark curves of her face, her eyes, tearful, pleading. Then I felt a jolt, like I’d run headlong into an electric fence. Light and symbols exploded in my head. I shook myself, blinking.
“What did you just do?” Lil hissed.
The bartender’s head whipped around and he glared at us. I could feel his attention crawling against my scalp.
“Hey! What are you doing back there?” he called.
“Told you so,” Lil mouthed. “The place is warded, isn’t it?”
I tried to clamp down on my cowl and look innocent, but it was too late for that. The bartender threw his dishrag aside and headed our way. His big, meaty hands looked more accustomed to breaking jaws than polishing glasses, and he brandished them at me as he stomped toward our table.
“You’re so good at making friends,” Lil snarked.
I got up hurriedly from my chair, holding a hand out to halt the guy. “Hey—we’re just here as paying customers.”
“Oh, baloney. You know what I’m talking about,” he rumbled. His accent was so thick, he sounded like he was making a conscious mockery of The Godfather. Then he squinted at me and said, “Wait a minute. I know you. You’re one of Salvatore’s goons.”
“Salvatore?” I wondered, turning to Lil. “Does he mean Saliriel?”
Sal was one of my many siblings, and somewhere along the line she had decided she liked life better as a woman—Machiavelli in garters. Lil pressed her full lips together and said nothing. She despised Sal to a psychopathic degree. To be fair, I wasn’t exactly a member of Sal’s fan club myself.
I took another step or two back from the table, maintaining my distance from the fuming Benny. This also had the effect of bringing me closer to the edge of the Crossing. I could feel its energy vibrating against my cowled wings.
“Just hang on a second. I don’t work for Sal,” I objected.
“Yeah, pull the other one,” Benny replied. “I remember you from the Statler, when Joey Porrello called his big meeting. That was decades ago, so don’t pretend you’re a normal guy. What are you doing pissing around my momma’s restaurant?”
My mind raced down the few corridors of memory left open to me, trying to make sense of his accusations. All I dredged up was some vague knowledge of an old mob meeting at the Statler hotel—from the late twenties. If Benny had been around back then, he sure didn’t look it. Then again, neither did I.
Lil stood slowly, one hand on her little clutch-purse. If I knew the Lady of Beasts, her trusty Derringer was tucked inside. She turned on the dazzle, flashing an apologetic smile to Benny.
“Sorry. Blind date. This always happens to me,” she said sweetly.
The stumpy bartender flicked his gaze toward my companion, but evidently decided she wasn’t much of a threat—which was incredibly stupid on his part. He turned his glare back to me. His bloodshot eyes were set close to his great potato of a nose, the brown of his irises so dark they looked almost black in the lighting.
“We had a deal,” Benny growled.
“Let’s say I don’t exactly remember the terms,” I said, stalling. It wasn’t a lie, either.
“Don’t play dumb with me. That pulse-sucker, Sal, asked us to stay out of his business, and he promised no one would come poking around in ours,” Benny said. He stabbed a sausage of a finger toward my chest. “You’re poking.”
Pulse-sucker. Sal was the next best thing to a vampire, and Benny knew it. Which begged the question, what the hell was Benny? While I struggled to remember anything that didn’t involve knowledge picked up from history books, Benny advanced on me. He shook his knuckles again, and this time I could practically taste the power gathering around him—tiny dark stars in a tightening orbit.
Of course the mob had magic. Why did that even shock me?
The whole restaurant fell silent around us. Not a single person moved either to interfere or to flee. That was a bad sign—it meant they were used to outbursts like this. The dark-haired girl at the hostess stand stood rigidly, copper-penny eyes fixed on Benny. Focus, not fear, etched her expression. The fingers of her left hand were threaded in a peculiar gesture. Power crackled around her.
Magic was a family affair.
Lil stepped neatly around the table, nudging me toward the exit.
“I know a great Thai place just a block over,” she chirped. “Italian always gives me indigestion anyway.” She had the “I’m a normal human” mask so firmly in place, even I wanted to believe it.
I started to turn away from the Crossing and head toward the front door. The hostess watched us warily while Benny practically simmered with a pent-up desire to clobber me. The ghost coalesced into view just over his shoulder. She locked her pleading eyes on mine.
“Help me,” she mouthed.
Two words I found irresistible.
My own mouth started racing before good sense could catch up with it. “You have this dead girl attached to your restaurant,” I told Benny. “Did you know that?” His features darkened, that orbit of power growing more concentrated. Running would have been the smart thing—at least until I knew what I was dealing with—but I couldn’t stop myself. “African descent. Twenty-something. Looks like she’s dressed for Easter Sunday. I get a feeling somebody murdered her. You know anything?”
“I warned you!” the bartender bellowed.
“Why can’t you come with a mute button?” Lil groaned.
“Guess that’s a yes,” I said.
Little black sparklers burst in my vision and the world smeared like an Impressionist painting. I scrubbed at my eyes.
It didn’t help.
“What the hell?” I sputtered.
“You’ll back off if you know what’s good for you,” Benny snarled. He was already calling up another salvo of whatever magic he’d dished at me.
“I’m not with stupid here,” Lil declared. She took a decisive step away from me. “And I’m leaving.”
Benny spat on the floorboards. “Good idea, sweet cheeks.”
“Sweet cheeks?” she squawked. A spike of ozone tickled my nose and I thought for a moment that he’d pushed her too far, but then I heard the harsh report of her heels as she marched toward the front door.
Once Lil was out, the hostess threw the deadbolt. I still couldn’t see clearly, but the girl’s voice reached me. She murmured rhythmically—some kind of chant. I could feel lines of power tightening around the space. She was locking the wards down—and those were a way bigger problem for me than deadbolts.
“We’re playing for keeps now, buddy,” Benny said, winding up for another spell.
“How many times have you watched Scarface?” I asked. “Nobody talks like that anymore.”
While he sputtered a response, I turned toward the psychic stain of trauma soaked into the space behind me. I was certain now it marked where the ghost had died—but that meant it was as good as a doorway for me. Benny wouldn’t see that coming. I caught my breath as I plunged through the Crossing.
The veil or whatever Benny had thrown across my eyes peeled back as I tore through to the Shadowside. The last thing I noticed before the fleshlands slipped away was one of the old photographs. It looked like it dated to the thirties.