by Chris Lowry
Las Vegas in their beautiful language.
CHAPTER
Kiko glanced over at me.
“Now that you have the vampire’s permission to operate on his land-,”
“I don’t need permission.”
“Which you now have.”
“But I didn’t need.”
I gave her a grim look that reminded her I was the man in charge. She looked back at me like she knew better.
“It’s not permission,” I said. “It’s a trade. Technically.”
She rolled her hand in the air like she was dismissing a fly.
“Whatever you need to tell yourself Marshal.”
“It’s not a fair trade,” Elvis said as he floated behind me.
His form was hard to make out in the sunlight, but I could feel the tug of whatever ethereal leash connected us.
“It’s fair,” I said.
“He gets you to find what’s hunting his food for him and save the vampires and what do you get?” Kiko asked.
She thought I was talking to her.
“Permission,” she said with an air of finality.
I took a breath.
Liked the way it felt, all calming and zen.
Took another.
“Look,” I explained.
“Where?” she searched the tunnel entrance.
The sun wasn’t up yet, but the purple gray light of a breaking dawn meant the orange orb wasn’t far behind.
“I mean,” I sighed. “Something is hunting the humans who live underground, and it’s not the vampires who feed on them. It’s my job to find and stop it, even if he didn’t ask for my help.”
“If it’s magical,” she pointed out.
“It’s magic,” I said. “And it’s bad news. Whatever it is. If only I had someone who knew about magical creatures that hunt humans in the dark.”
“That would help you tremendously,” Kiko agreed.
“I’m trying to remember,” Elvis said in a pained voice.
It cut me deep. He was a ghost because of me, tethered to me because of a spell, and he was forgetting everything he knew as a Watcher.
I reminded myself to research a restoration spell as soon as I could and glared at the black gaping maw of the tunnel entrance.
“We’ll go in and have a look,” I offered. “That good?”
Kiko pointed her face toward the tunnel and took a whiff with her nose.
“I’m not going in there,” she scoffed. “It stinks.”
“Yeah,” I said. “A lot of people in a small space.”
“And feces,” she grunted.
Gross.
“Urine.”
Yuck.
“And a creature.”
Now that was interesting.
“A creature?”
Her eyes narrowed as she turned her head toward me.
“Did I say that out loud?”
“What kind of gnome can smell a creature underground?” I asked.
“I’m not a gnome,” she said. “Are we going to go in there or what?”
Kiko took off for the entrance to the tunnels like she was daring me to follow.
“Stay close,” I said to Elvis.
Like he had a choice.
CHAPTER
I could have called up a ball of light to show us where we were stepping. But stuff squished and squelched under our feet as we marched through the tunnel and all I could think about was Kiko smelling feces.
I hoped for mold. I hoped for the gunky stuff that builds up when the rains washed lawn debris down here and it turned into a wet mulch.
I hoped like hell that's what it was, all the while my nose was screaming a different story. A Kiko was right story.
The tunnel was fifteen feet wide, with a three foot channel cut in the middle, like a constantly moving stream.
Even though people in Vegas weren't supposed to water their lawns, that didn't stop them from trying to make green grass grow in the desert.
Which required a lot of water, and even though the dry ground soaked up a lot, and more evaporated in the sunshine, there was still runoff.
And it ended up here.
In a poo stream.
That's Vegas magic.
Up ahead there was movement.
Shadowy stick figures huddled and shifted in front of small boxes built from pallets, insulated with cardboard and covered with tarps, blankets and pieces of fabric.
There were fires in barrels cut in half, burning wood, and broken pieces of furniture and who knows what scavenged from dumpsters and garbage cans.
I could see a stack of glossy fliers advertising sex for sale and massages delivered to hotel rooms next to one of the barrels. Even as I watched, one of the figures reached forward and dumped the lot of them into a barrel, poked the flames with a piece of rebar.
The fires were spaced enough to knock some of the darkness back, but there was still enough to make out impressions.
The air was filled with smoke, and fog and the stench of too many bodies in too small of a space.
And poop.
Let’s just be honest, it smelled like doo doo. I saw Kiko breathing through her mouth and debated if I should try it.
If the air smelled that bad, did I really want to taste it?
“Get out!”
A wild haired lady with gray skin stumbled in our direction, waving her hands as if to shoo us away.
“You’re not welcome here.”
“Don’t have to tell me twice,” said Elvis.
The woman shrieked as she stared over my shoulder and turned to run. I guess she forgot about the shit creek running through the middle of the tunnel.
She ran like it was a flat solid surface, which it was, until the edge of the creek. Her first foot went over the end, found nothing to support it, and kept going sixteen inches down til it hit concrete.
At which point a couple of things happened. Gravity, for one, took her overbalanced top portion and yanked it to the ground.
She was short. Taller than Kiko, but then there were a lot of things over the age of twelve taller than her.
The wild hair woman slammed into the other side of the trench with her chin hard enough to make me wince.
Turns out, hard enough to snap her neck backwards.
Physics, angles and accidents all combined to crack her spine in less than a second, leaving us to stare at her dead body as water pooled around it and began to tug at her legs.
“Kuso,” Kiko snorted. “I did not see that coming.”
“Crap,” Elvis said behind me.
I glanced up from the dead body and followed his finger where he was pointing.
The shade of the newly dead woman stood on the other side of the trench creek and glared at me.
“You did this!” she shrieked.
Kiko shivered.
“Did you feel that?”
The ghost woman took a useless careful step across the trench and floated toward us.
“Get out! You’re not welcome here!”
“You said that already,” I told her.
“No I didn’t,” Kiko argued. “Do you have a hearing problem?”
The woman kept advancing, her shriek drawing out into a long grating moan.
I took a breath to flick her away with magic, but my ghost bodyguard intervened. He floated between us and moaned back.
She stopped and stared at him.
Moaned something that sounded like a question.
Elvis moaned again, and she glared at me, glared at him and settled down.
“You speak ghost?”
“Who knew!” Elvis sounded pleased and surprised and a little scared at the same time.
“Ghost?” Kiko stared at me like I had lost my mind.
Then she looked at the woman’s dead body and back at me.
“Oh,” her eyes lit up. “You’re one of those.”
“One of what?”
“You can speak to Yurei.”
“Yuri’s a weird nam
e for a girl,” I said.
I thought we should do something about the body, but before I could move for it, the water nudged it loose from whatever was holding it and it began to drift in the fast moving current.
“Yurei are Japanese spirits of people who die by violence,” Elvis explained.
“But that was an accident,” I scoffed.
“You’re not going to blame me,” said Kiko. “And run.”
“What?”
She sprinted past me and ran back toward the light at the end of the tunnel.
A dull roar echoed from the darkness as the sound of a thousand feet pounding on the concrete bounced off the walls.
“Marshal!” Elvis screamed over the noise, loud enough to draw my attention to where he floated over the water.
The trench was full and spilling over, the current racing now faster, full of items from homeless camps. Wood. A floating barrel of flame. Glossy fliers twirling in the muck.
The homeless ran past me, a huge herd of them on full stampede, racing the current, racing the roar, running from whatever came behind it.
They split around me, brushing against me with small jostles and tugs, but never enough to move me.
As if they were afraid to touch me but had no choice.
I took a breath.
Gathered my will and even though I didn’t need to aim my fingers, I did anyway, because it looked dramatic and cool.
I was ready for whatever was coming.
“Light,” I ordered and shot a blue ball of lighting toward the roof of the tunnel as far back as I could see.
It revealed a gray wall of tumbling water, foaming and chaotic as it scoured along the walls, filling it up from one end to the next.
It picked up the runners racing toward us, tossed them, swallowed them and kept coming.
I turned and ran.
The wave roared and sprinkled dark water across my back, like slobber from a slavering beast as it grew closer in relentless pursuit.
The light at the end of the tunnel was a bright square of freedom and safety.
But the homeless couldn’t move as fast as me. Wouldn’t get out of my way.
They shuffled as they ran, trying, grunting, but it was a pretend run. Like a good intention that they could never uphold.
I helped them.
A little twist of magic, made larger by the panic of the water boiling at our heels, the screams of the others as it caught them.
I nudged.
A lot.
A knot of people exploded out of the end of the tunnel on an invisible wall of willpower that carried them out of the entrance and onto the sides of the hills where it deposited them none too gently.
I had just enough time to congratulate myself on saving their lives when I hit daylight and the water hit me.
Almost.
A slender hand grabbed me by the jacket as I ran and swung me up on a rock wall next to her.
“What took you so long?”
I pointed to the people I saved as I laid there gasping.
She shook her head.
“Stop wasting time, will you?”
And she nodded.
I rolled over and looked at where she was indicating.
A single black storm cloud hovered over a storm drain. It was hard to tell distance from here, but it was a mile or two away and it was pouring a downpour on a small section of street.
I got up and brushed off my jeans and jacket, then offered a hand to Kiko.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I saved your life,” her eyes twinkled. “Now you owe me.”
“Owe you what?” I asked her back as she stalked to her car.
But she didn’t answer.
Part of me was glad she didn’t.
“Marshal,” Elvis stood on the rushing water as it trembled and tumbled underneath him. “Look, I can walk on water.”
“Funny,” I said as I ignored him and glared at the black cloud.
A mile, maybe two on city streets could take ten minutes. Whoever called it up would be long gone by the time we got there.
Elvis floated over next to me.
“Huh,” he sighed.
“What?”
“Water washes away magic,” he said. “I remember that.”
“Kuko,” I grunted.
Water washed away traces of magic too.
Someone was covering their tracks.
CHAPTER
“Did the vampire send us into an ambush?” I asked Kiko as I slid in the front seat.
She gave me a sniff.
I ignored it.
“You have fecal water on your jacket,” she said.
“So sue me.”
“You’re getting it on my Caddy.”
“Send me the cleaning bill.”
“I think you are being very unreasonable for a man whose life I just saved and am helping,” she said as she dropped the car in gear and pulled away from the tunnel.
The displaced homeless gathered on the banks of the new river that was beginning to shrink and disappear back to its former size. I guess they were going to let it dry up and out and go back down to rebuild again.
“I had it under control,” I said and hoped it didn’t sound like a lie.
“I could tell,” she said. “You looked like a real Barney about to go into the green room.”
“Marshal don’t surf,” I said.
She snorted and gripped the wheel with two hands as she pulled onto the roadway.
“Do you want to go see where the cloud was?”
“No point,” I told her. “Whoever made it will be long gone.”
“I don’t think the vampires are employing magic users,” she said. “I haven’t seen any proof.”
I sat back in the seat and wished for a beer. It was easy to think about a problem with something cold in hand.
“Turn here,” I pointed.
“There?” she sneered.
But she wheeled into a liquor store parking lot anyway and stopped in front of an old fashioned payphone and a plastic newsstand plastered with bumper stickers.
“Want anything?” I asked as I got out.
She shrugged.
“To not be here-,”
I let her stew while I went in and grabbed a six pack from the cooler. I added a couple of bottles of water to it, because were in the dessert, and carried it to the register.
Elvis bounced along in my wake, staring around the room in sad eyed wonder.
The girl behind the counter looked me up and down as she rang up the beer and water and breathed out hard twice through her nose.
“No offense, but you don’t smell so great,” she said.
I handed her some cash and waited for the change.
“Thanks for letting me know,” I said and pushed through the door into the hot Nevada air.
The Caddy was gone.
“Guess you should have said thank you,” Elvis said from beside me.
I guess he was probably right.
CHAPTER
“Marshal,” Kiko called out.
She had moved the Caddy into the shadow cast by the building on one side.
I walked over and plopped in the seat. It was at least ten degrees cooler, but the difference between ninety and one hundred didn’t feel like much.
At least it wasn’t humid.
I could still smell me though and thought the girl in the liquor store was being kind.
I pulled out a bottle and twisted off the top. Made it halfway to my lips before Kiko snaked it out of my hand and took a sip of her own.
She watched me, eyes twinkling, like she was daring me to take it back.