I take out a cigarette, spark Mason Faim’s lighter, and let it fall on the table. Spilled bourbon flares up and burns with a pretty blue flame. I grab Mason’s lighter and kick the burning table at the three friends. Grab the sharkskin and drag him to the middle of the bar. The place clears out like we’re a bride and groom about to have our first dance. “Yadokari” by Meiko Kaji plays on the jukebox, all brittle guitar and her sad voice over lush strings.
Thoroughly kicking someone’s ass is a kind of statement, but it’s small-time, like a “Beware of Dog” sign. Sometimes you need to make a point that people can see from space. That kind of point is the opposite of a beating. It doesn’t come from what you do but what people remember, so the less you do the better.
I bark a Hellion hex and Mr. Sharkskin rises into the air, flushed with pus-yellow light so bright you can see his bones. His belt and shoes drop off. Jewelry and bottled souls tinkle to the floor. Another bit of Hellion and his clothes catch fire, flaming off him in an instant, like flash paper.
This is showy arena hoodoo. I used to do stuff like this to opponents in Hell who really pissed me off. It’s supposed to embarrass more than hurt.
Next, his skin does a slow-motion version of what just happened to his clothes. Starting at his hands and feet and moving inward, his skin peels away like a spray-on tan snowstorm. He hangs in the air like a trembling anatomy chart from a Bio 101 textbook.
“Take off your clothes,” I tell his friends. “Or I’ll burn them off like his.”
His friends aren’t dumb. They can’t wait to get bare-assed in front of a bar full of total strangers. The only thing they’re careful with are their own soul bottles. They set them on their clothes like eggs nestled in henhouse nests.
I go back to the floater. I hope people are listening and not just looking. This won’t work if no one hears me.
“I know you have the Qomrama Om Ya. Don’t bother denying it. You have forty-eight hours to bring it to me. If I don’t get it, I’ll peel you down to your bones. And I’ll take my time. You understand me?”
His three friends say, “Yes.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
I pull the floater’s big toe. His shell-shocked eyes turn down to meet mine.
“Do you understand me?”
He nods.
I bark more Hellion and the shreds of his skin float back to his body. But not his clothes. Those are ashes. The rest was an illusion. You can’t really peel a civilian’s skin off. I’ve seen it tried. Their hearts explode or they stroke out. However it happens, they always die, and dying isn’t the statement I want to make today. Today is about wounding. Making the floater’s buddies have to carry him home and explain to their bosses what happened and what I said. The rest of the bar is going to call everyone they know and tell them what they saw and heard. Clever me. I just phoned my demands to everyone in L.A. without using up any of my monthly minutes.
When Mr. Sharkskin looks human again, I drop him. He hits the floor and curls up in a fetal position on a pile of ashes, surrounded by his glowing bottles.
“Hey, Father. Want to save some souls?”
I stomp on a glowing bottle and crush it. There’s a soft sigh as cobalt-blue smoke escapes, rising, spreading, and dissipating. One soul set free.
Traven happily crushes a bottle. Candy throws one against the wall. Brigitte, Vidocq, and Allegra start breaking them, and in a second the whole lousy bar is doing a drunken Riverdance on the rest of the bottles. The place fills with bright blue wisps that rise to the ceiling and vanish.
I burn the rest of the other three Cold Cases’ clothes with a curse. Fish around in my pockets, and between Candy and me we come up with eight dollars. I toss it to the naked idiots.
“Bus fare, assholes. Get out.”
They do. Dragging comatose Mr. Sharkskin off the floor and carrying him outside.
I go to the bar and Carlos pours me an Aqua Regia. I drink it slowly. It gives the Cold Cases enough time to get out and, if they’re lucky, hail a cab that’s going to jack them up for a huge tip.
A good exit is an essential part of making a statement. But you can’t walk out after roughing up just one guy. People might think you had a grudge. To drive the statement home you have to spread the pain. I don’t mean burn anyone else’s clothes off, just make it clear that the statement is for everyone within earshot.
There’s a couple of Foxy Reynards by the door. Hoodoo con men. You ever wonder why tourists on Hollywood Boulevard play three-card monte with guys at bus stops, knowing they’re going to lose? The Reynards’ swindle isn’t the game. Any idiot can learn to palm a card. The Reynards win because they make you want to play even when you know you can’t win.
I collar the older of the two.
“The same goes for you as those other lowlifes. If you know who has the 8 Ball, urge them in the strongest terms to hand it over because I’m coming for you next. Let’s see how many of you bad dogs the city pound can neuter.”
Now it’s time to go.
I wait at the corner and light a Malediction. The others catch up to me a few seconds later. It’s laughs all around. For once, even Allegra doesn’t look mad at me.
I DON’T HEAR a word from the Cold Cases. No one sees any of them for the next few days. Not at any of their usual bars or restaurants or even their Wilshire Boulevard business offices. An entire industry gone to ground.
I’m not entirely surprised they ducked out. If they’re going to try any retaliation, they’re not going to do it themselves. They’ll hire someone and they’ll want a good alibi when it happens. Not that I’m sitting around waiting for a piano to mysteriously fall on my head. I hit gangs every day for the next week, sometimes two a day.
First, a big Nahual smash-and-grab collective. Their clubhouse looks like the dumbest garage sale in the world. Everything from diamonds and gold-plated tire rims to broken clock radios and dusty cassette players that have been sitting around unsold since before Atlantis pissed off to the bottom of the ocean.
I hit a couple of Ludere underground casinos. Besides gambling, they launder money for L.A.’s unsavory Sub Rosa and civilian swells. That one’s sure to come back and bite me in the ass, but it was too much fun flipping the roulette and blackjack tables, like rock-and-roll Jesus versus the moneychangers.
I hit a Wise Blood coven, part of a ring selling bootleg potions. Some stolen but most nothing more than colored water and a little laudanum or strychnine for a kick. Imagine going to some old bruja to cure Granny’s cancer and getting something as useful as a Diet Coke.
I don’t let civilians off the hook. I slap around some ghost agents in the Valley. Third-rate shit birds that buy and sell the wild-blue-yonder contracts of B-list celebrities. Everyone who thinks they’re anyone has a blue-yonder contract these days. It sets up their ghost with a talent agency so they can keep working after they’re dead. If you’re Marilyn or Elvis, it’s a sweet deal. If you’re a presidential candidate who lost, a one-hit-wonder singer, or someone who played the wacky neighbor on a forgotten sitcom, not so much. Your contracts gets sold off to small fries who put your ghost on the carny circuit, starring you in celebrity bum fights or snuff flicks.
I give each gang a different deadline. One day. Three. A week. Confusion is its own kind of statement, whether it’s in the gangs or on the street. Fear and anarchy. Tons of fun. Maybe one of the gangs can put a bullet in me, but they know I’m hard to kill, and when I’m better I can step out of any shadow and hack off a part of them that they like.
I have to admit, it’s fun busting heads. It feels like I’m becoming me again. Playing around with the Mike Hammer sleuth stuff can be fun, but it’s not what I’m best at. Even the angel part of me, the smart and reasonable part, gets sick of it, especially when the clues and rumors don’t go anywhere.
I know letting the arena part of my personality loose in the regular world isn’t a good thing, but sometimes holding it back makes my head fill up with so much poison and fury that I want to rip it off. Candy understands, but being around me makes her all too ready to go Jade and start tearing into people, and I don’t want to encourage that. All the fun and games she plays with the world . . . I know that underneath it all she feels like I do. She needs to let the beast out now and then or she’ll die. It’s why we’re good together. Neither one of us is afraid of the other because looking at ourselves, we’ve seen the worst about what the other can be.
To tell the truth I’m not even sure sometimes if I’m laying into these gangsters to get info on the 8 Ball or just to pay back the world for hiding it from me. I don’t want to be the goddamn savior of mankind. I’m barely over wanting to snuff the world myself. I know where the Mithras is—the first fire in the universe, the fire I could let loose and burn all of existence to ashes. I don’t think I’d ever use it, but it’s comforting to know that if the Angra come back and start tearing the universe apart, I could. I wonder if I’d last long enough in the flames that when the universe is gone I could set off the singularity, Mr. Muninn’s backup plan. It’s a sort of big bang in a box that will trigger a new universe into being. I wouldn’t be there and neither would Candy or Vidocq or God or the others, but it could still be a sweet revenge on everyone. Burn the world. Barbecue Heaven and Hell, the Angra, and everything else, and then start something new. Maybe better. Maybe worse. But something that fucks over every holier-than-thou son of a bitch in existence. Reset creation to zero and let it go again.
The idea that maybe I can save Candy the way I couldn’t save Alice is what lets me sleep at night. My friends are what make me wake up and start punching things because there’s no way I’m going to lie down and let some old gods or whoever is hiding the 8 Ball walk away without a limp. I’ll die and crawl out of Hell and do it again and again until there’s nothing left of one of us. Unto the fucking end of fucking time. Hallelujah.
A COUPLE OF days later, Candy and I are walking back to the Chateau after I ditch the Audi we used to crash a necromancer key party. You haven’t lived until you’ve busted in on a bunch of naked, pasty-ass necromancers going Playboy After Dark on a roomful of reanimated corpses. I don’t have to make any threats at this point. Everyone knows what I’m there for. Candy and I just steal some beers and leave them to their smelly fun.
It’s early evening. The streetlights have just come on. There’s a crowd in front of the Chateau. The police have the front of the place cordoned off. Techs from the bomb squad are packing up and a hazmat team is surveying the area with handheld poison detectors. It reminds me of a Vigil operation.
Someone has staked a nithing pole in front of the hotel, a little up the driveway from where it turns off Sunset.
The pole is ten feet tall, with runes carved down its sides. On top there’s a hog’s head, with the skin from the body draped underneath it. Your usual nithing pole uses a horse’s head. I guess the hog is supposed to be some kind of insult to go along with the curse, but really the little feet dangling in the air, bathed in the blue and red disco lights from the cop cars . . . it’s more funny than it is menacing.
From across the street, Candy and I watch as the hazmat team goes to work. They put up a plastic-wrapped ladder and carefully lift the head off the pole. Put it in a double-thick plastic bag and seal it like the hog is made of plutonium.
“Who uses a nithstang anymore?”
“Seriously. Someone’s in big trouble with PETA,” says Candy.
“There’s symbols carved into the pole. Can you see them?”
“It’s too far away.”
“Damn. I wonder if I can pickpocket a camera from one of the looky-loos.”
“My phone has a pretty good zoom. I’ll try to get some shots.”
We cross the street and blend in with the crowd. Candy snaps away. When she’s done I take her through the shadow at the corner and we come out in the hotel garage.
It’s a long walk through the hotel lobby. I want to slink my way through. No one says anything, but I know the staff blames Mr. Macheath and his weirdo friends for bringing a cursing pole to their front door. I almost want to apologize. Instead, I pull Candy into the first elevator that opens and we head upstairs. I know I shouldn’t order room service tonight, but seeing that hog made me hungry for pork ribs.
As soon as we get in the room Candy e-mails the photos to Kasabian.
She says, “I’m going to take a shower. I need to wash off the smell of lube and dead titties.”
I go over to where Kasabian is working. The big screen is turned to a news channel. There’s an aerial shot of the scene out front. Ghost-suited hazmat workers skulking around Hollywood with ritually slaughtered animal parts. Little starbursts as tourists snap away with phones and cameras. They came here hoping to see some movie stars and now they’re getting a full-fledged L.A. freak show.
“Candy just sent you close-ups of the pole outside. You should get them anytime—”
“I already have them.”
“Can you have a look around online and see what they mean.”
“Don’t have to. I already know.”
He opens up some photos on the screen. The first one is a group of smiling people in what look like shitty homemade Renn Faire robes.
“Recognize anyone?”
“Nope.”
Kasabian zooms in on one of the faces.
“Now?”
He has a beard but I can make him out.
“It’s Trevor Moseley. What’s he got to do with this?”
“Look at his robes, Sherlock. The symbols match the pole.”