by Rob Cornell
With that kind of skill, he could have easily caused Sly to come down with his illness…and then kill him.
I clenched my fist. The pain that caused because of my burns nearly knocked me out. My vision closed in, and my ears buzzed. If Mom hadn’t been leaning against me, I might have fallen over.
“We find the person who did this to him,” I said slowly. “And we—”
“Don’t say it.”
I grinded my teeth. “I can’t let—”
“I know. Just don’t say it.” Then she turned her gaze toward our audience in the hall.
One of them was Prashad. He looked at me with such fear, his brown skin seemed a shade lighter. I recognized his expression. I’d seen it on a number of my contracts, right before I burned them to cinders. He must have thought the rage I clearly wore on my face was meant for him.
Just like a doctor, believing he had the power of gods, that he somehow carried responsibility here.
“You are nothing,” I spat.
He flinched.
Mom squeezed my arm. “I’ll stay and take care of the details,” she said under her breath. “You go. Do what needs to be done before the Ministry gets here.”
I nodded, took one last look at Sly, then strode for the door.
The onlookers scattered like a flock of startled chickens.
No one got in my way as I stormed out of there.
No one dared.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I drove with my window down. The snow had stopped. The temperature had sunk too low for it to continue. But, even rushing into my window as I tore down the highway, the cold couldn’t counter my internal heat. I worried I might involuntarily ignite again, only this time I would flake away to ash and bones.
Dawn light stung my eyes. I had known Odi wouldn’t make the trip to the hospital and back to the Ann Arbor house before daylight. So before heading out, we had set Odi up in the guest bedroom, tacking thick quilts over the window to block out the sunlight. Odi, nervous that the quilts wouldn’t be enough, had decided to sleep under the bed.
I could have used him. Having a vampire at your side, even one as young as Odi, made for good backup. A vampire and a sorcerer in one? Better yet.
I had to swing this on my own, though. I wasn’t about to wait until dark before going after the Tree Man. I also didn’t plan on wasting time shadowing him like I had first planned. I was going the direct approach. No fucking around.
Horton Plutskinst lived in a single family home on Detroit’s east side. He had a corner house at the end of the street next door to an abandoned twin of his house with the windows boarded and a fair share of tagging all around the outside. This was one of the neighborhoods where the Ministry conspirators had wanted to turn the residents into hypnotized vamp food. An ugly thought occurred to me as I approached his front porch. If I hadn’t stopped them, Tree Man would be dead, and Sly could still be alive.
I almost…almost wished that was what had happened. But my rage had not left my core that cold. Not yet, anyway.
As I stepped onto the concrete porch, I threw my hands forward, calling on the wind, and blew his front door in, right off the hinges, and splintered some of the doorframe.
Without any loss of momentum, I marched right into a small living space cut off from an even smaller kitchen by a half wall.
There was hardly any furniture, and what furniture there was looked ready for a trash heap. A recliner missing the foot rest and a split straight down the middle of the seat, a long bubble of yellow foam sticking up from the tear. A plain wooden chair with its back broken off so it passed as more of a stool than a chair. A plank of plywood on four cinderblocks was Tree Man’s excuse for a coffee table.
What a fucking pig.
The air smelled of cooked greens and cigarette smoke. Almost every surface in the kitchen shined with a layer of grease, nothing wiped down in years from the looks of it.
I didn’t see any sign of Tree Man. Didn’t hear anything when I cocked my ear either. If this pasty-faced, skinny-assed, tat-wearing motherfucker had a real job and was gone for the day this early, I would have been amazed. More likely, I would go down the hall and find him passed out in bed. Assuming he had a bed. Maybe the roach slept on the floor.
“What the hell you doing?”
I spun around. Out on the porch a young black girl, no older than ten, stood with her arms crossed and her hip cocked. She had on a puffy pink coat and mittens with kitten faces on them. But she wasn’t wearing a hat like she should have in such cold weather. She had her hair in braids and beads that hung to her shoulders. The look in her eyes went twenty years beyond her actual age. In that way, she reminded me of Toft. But she wasn’t a vampire. She did look like she might bite, though.
“I’m looking for Horton.”
“Mm-hm.” Her breath puffed in the winter air. “You need to break his door down like that? You a cop? You look too skinny.”
“I’m no cop,” I said. “But my business with Mr. Plutskinst is private.”
“Yeah, well, he ain’t here.”
“I appreciate that. I’ll check myself, though. Just in case.”
She rolled her eyes and cocked her hip in the other direction. “I’m telling you he ain’t here, ‘cause he’s with my momma.”
I froze, processing. I didn’t want to involve any outsiders. I wasn’t planning on treating Tree Man so well. I figured I’d need to shake him pretty hard to get any straight answers—like a confession that he had killed Sly. So I needed a way to get him alone without spooking him at the same time. If he knew Sly well enough to want to kill him, he might have seen me around, too. If so, the second he saw my face, he would bolt (if he was smart).
I softened my voice as best I could. “Can you take me to him?”
She moved her gaze to the door on the floor. “I don’t think so.”
“Can you tell him I’m here waiting for him? I just want to talk.” That last sentence hurt to say. I didn’t like straight-up lying to a young lady.
“You might have to wait a while. He and Momma got a special relationship.”
Okay, that sounded weird. And maybe a little gross. “Um…”
Her skeptical frown broke into a toothy smile. She practically beamed. “You should hear them. Like a couple hippos. You know, I seen hippos at the zoo doing it. Momma tried to cover my eyes, but I seen it.” She giggled into her hand. “Yucky.”
I had no idea what to say to that.
“You know. I changed my mind. Come on. Let’s go visit the hippos.” She waved a mittened hand at me to follow, then turned and skipped off the porch and headed down the sidewalk, leaving scuffs in the snow behind her.
I stood stuck for a stunned second, then shook it off and went after her.
I jogged up to her side as she skipped along. “What’s your name, kiddo?”
“Queen Latifah.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
She laughed. Her beads bounced around her shoulders as she skipped. “You a stranger. I don’t tell strangers my name.”
“That’s probably a good idea.” We rounded the corner at the end of the street. “Is there a reason you changed your mind about taking me to see Horton?”
“It’s gonna be funny.” She stopped all at once, and I went on a few steps before realizing. I turned to her. She had that big grin on. The cold didn’t seem to bother her a bit. Meanwhile, my ears had started to burn from the bitter air. The little girl had defused my anger with her silliness, so I didn’t have that heat to keep me from freezing anymore.
She said, “You promise to break down the door to momma’s bedroom like you did over there.” She aimed one mitten in the direction we’d come. “That’ll be the best.”
Once more, the girl left me speechless.
She narrowed her eyes. “You one of them, ain’t you.”
“One of who?”
“The special people. The magic people.”
Interesting. Seemed the girl might know a li
ttle about the paranormal. Made me wonder if her mom was a practitioner, too. Maybe she and Horton were working more than the standard magic in the bedroom. Sex could work as a powerful source of magic if you knew how to harness it.
I decided to play it straight with my new little friend.
“I’m a sorcerer.”
She smiled again. “That how you broke the door.”
“It is.”
She clapped her mittens together and did a little bounce on the balls of her sneakered feet. I noticed one of those sneakers was missing its laces. “Momma gonna be soooooo freaked.”
I crouched to her eye level. “There’s more to this than being funny, isn’t there?”
She struggled with it, but her smile faltered. That stern stare she gave me when we first met returned. She answered with a question of her own. “You don’t wanna just talk to him, do you?”
Again, I stuck with the truth. Those extra twenty years in her eyes told me she could handle it.
“No.”
“Good. ‘Cause he and Momma make weird things happen.”
“What kind of things?” I asked.
“Bad things.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
As promised, I blew down Momma’s bedroom door, but only after the little girl—still insisting I call her Queen Latifah—promised me she would stay outdoors while I did what needed to be done.
As the door flew across the room, my anger reignited, a fresh flame in my belly, and a hard pulse in my head. I charged in after the door and found Horton and Momma.
They were on the floor, surrounded by a circle of salt with a pentagram drawn in red on the dirty beige carpet. A limp, headless chicken lay in a bare corner of the room, blood spattered across the wall, and more droplets peppering the floor. Didn’t take a genius to figure out they had drawn the pentagram with the chicken’s blood.
I had a wonderful view of Horton’s skinny bare ass as he took a rather large black woman on her hands and knees from behind. They were both completely naked, except Horton still wore a pair of saggy gym socks with blue stripes around the calves. They also wore a fair amount of chicken blood painted in streaks across their bodies.
Like little Miss Latifah had said, they grunted and moaned like a pair of wild animals. Unlike her, I had never witness a pair of hippos going at it, so I couldn’t confirm that specific sound.
The pair were so wrapped up in their ritual, neither of them had flinched when the door sailed off the hinges and to the far wall, cracking the plaster before it dropped to the floor. Horton had his head thrown back as he thrust away. He chanted in Latin with the occasional name, Steve Anders, slipped in among the words. A rough translation had him calling for horrible pain to befall Steve.
Then I noticed the torn fabric clutched in Horton’s thin, knuckley hand. Probably torn from a shirt or other piece of clothing belonging to poor Steve. A long distance curse needed something personal from the target, something cherished. In this case, probably Steve’s lucky t-shirt or something.
In that moment, I had no doubt Horton—and maybe his mate there—had caused Sly’s death. That fire inside of me flowed from my stomach all the way to the ends of my toes and the tips of my fingers. I could have thrown a fireball and obliterated the two of them in a single flash. Only two things kept me from doing so.
First, the little girl. I couldn’t murder her mother while she waited just outside the house. I didn’t know if the woman had any involvement in Sly’s illness either. But it did bother the fuck out of me that she would practice this kind of black magic around her young daughter.
Second, I had to ask Horton Why? What possible thing could have angered him enough to kill Sly? I couldn’t turn him to human bacon until I got that answer from him.
Still didn’t mean I couldn’t throw around a little fire.
I started by kicking at the salt on the floor, breaking the circle.
Momma threw her head back and screamed as if I had stabbed her in her sweaty back.
Horton coughed and clawed at his throat, the breath knocked out of him. That’s what happened when you practiced black magic. Bad shit happened when you lost the protection of your circle. I didn’t get the impression from Horton’s chant that they were summoning demons, but if they had been, when I broke that circle, one or both of them would have been as good as possessed.
Horton flopped onto his side and writhed as he tried to catch his breath.
Momma rolled onto her back. Her large breasts sagged apart. A roll of flab creased her waist. She panted, but it looked like her shock of pain had already passed. She lifted her head to see me, and her eyes went wide. “What…fuck…you…doin’,” she said between rushed breaths.
I flicked the fingers of one hand open dramatically and filled my palm with deep orange fire. “You’re a sick woman doing this kind of magic around your daughter.”
Her wide gaze locked on my flame. “You…Ministry…? Hey, we just playing here. Sex stuff, ya know? Make it better.”
There was such a thing as increasing the pleasure of sex with magic, but this bitch must have thought I had donated my brain to charity if she thought I would see this for anything other than what it really was. I kind of liked the idea she thought I was Ministry. I didn’t correct her.
Horton coughed one last time and finally sucked air like a Hoover. His eyes bugged as they rolled around to see me and my fire. “Oh, shit,” he creaked.
“Hurts, huh?” I kicked him in the ribs. Not as hard as I could have, but I wasn’t gentle either. “I’m gonna hurt more than your nasty magic, though.”
Cringing in pain, he held his hands out close together, his knobby elbows sticking out at his sides like a pair of featherless chicken wings. “Hey, man. You don’t have to get all butt hurt. We wasn’t hurting no one.”
“No?” I kicked him again.
He curled up on his side, and with him naked like that, he looked like an ugly, overgrown fetus.
“My Latin ain’t great,” I said, “but I recognize a death call when I hear one.”
Momma whispered a curse under her breath.
Horton was too busy squirming in pain to say anything.
“You gonna take us in?” Momma asked.
“If you didn’t have a little girl depending on you, I’d do more than take you in.” I threw a small fire bolt just past her head.
She screamed and threw her hands in front of her face.
The bolt burst against the floor behind her and started the carpet on fire. Before the little fire got out of hand, I directed my magic toward it, grasped control, and snuffed it out.
“Get dressed and get the fuck out of here,” I said. “I need to talk to Horton here alone.”
At the sound of his name, Horton looked up from his pain position. “Why me? This was all her idea.”
“Why you son of a whore.” Momma rolled up to a sitting position then scooted on her wide, bare ass within striking distance of Horton. She started smacking him. Each slap against his bare skin sounded like a whip crack.
I wasn’t about to get in there between them. The thought of touching either one of them made my skin crawl. But I had to break it up. I wanted to get my own hits in against Horton.
I ignited my fist. “Hey!”
She stopped smacking.
He stopped cowering.
Both of them honed in on my fiery hand.
“I told you to leave,” I said to Momma.
She nodded quickly, scrambled to her feet—giving me way too much of an eyeful—grabbed a wad of clothes off the bed, and hurried out, fat rolls jiggling.
“What you want from me, hey?” Horton asked, voice cracking.
I glared down at him. I wanted to slam my flaming fist right into his mouth, make his eyeballs boil, his face slough off.
Not yet, though.
“Get some clothes on before I puke.”
He moved stiffly, wincing as he pulled on his jeans. I’d kicked him pretty good, but I thought some of his pa
in came from the side effects of a broken black ritual. All magic comes at a cost. The dark stuff liked payment in flesh or soul.
Like Sly’s soul.
That this fuck had poisoned.
Once Horton pulled on his t-shirt, I kicked him in the stomach, doubling him over. I gave him a shove toward the bed and he bounced onto the mattress. I gave him another kick in the ass to coax him the rest of the way onto the bed.
The bed was tucked in the corner, and Horton wormed his way along the bed into that corner, and pulled his bony knees up in front of him like a scared kid after a nightmare. “What you want, man? Just tell me what you want.”
“Sly Petrie.”
He ran a hand over his shaved head and absently streaked chicken blood across his scalp. His black eyebrows drew together. “Why the fuck would I know where that shit head is?”
“So you know him.”
“Yeah. He used to sell me good shit. This herbal mix blow your fuckin’ mind. I used it to slip into the astral plane, man.”
I thought I saw where this was headed. “What did you do on the astral plane, Horton? You try to play incubus with some poor, defenseless girls asleep in their beds?”
He pressed his thin lips so tightly together they practically disappeared. Shook his head.
His eyes told a different story. Guys like this who managed to astral project, first thing they wanted to try was to rape a girl, only they didn’t think it was rape because it wasn’t with their physical bodies. Just some harmless fun, they told themselves. And the girls got a nice dream out of it.
Only most women had nightmares instead. And they suffered all the psychological trauma of a rape victim, but they couldn’t comprehend what had happened to them. It was a sick practice, and not at all harmless like the assholes doing it tried to convince themselves.
“Sly figure out what you were doing with his mix?” I asked.
He shook his head again, mouth locked closed.
“He refused to sell to you once he knew. And that pissed you off, huh? That’s what that argument was about. That’s why Sly said you made him sick.”
