Dead to Rites

by Ari Marmell

  I’d fully expected the inside to be a lot nicer’n than the outside, see? I knew Ramona wasn’t gonna live in the kinda squalor implied by the rest of the building. This, though? This went beyond “nicer” and plunged straight into the heart of “you gotta be kidding me!”

  The lingering scent of fine incense and perfumes was one thing; I wouldn’t have wanted to smell the rest of the building, or the corpses of a few hundred dead cigarettes, either. But beyond that? Mink carpeting. Silk curtains. Crystal chandelier. Fine china and polished silver settings on antique furniture. Quick glimpse through one door revealed a massive full-canopy bed with honest-to-Dagda gold caps on the posts.

  Beyond luxurious, this was. Opulent, excessively so. Frankly, it disturbed me more’n a little; this was a side of Ramona I hadn’t seen and didn’t much care for.

  Because of that, it took me a minute to recognize some other important signs. That chandelier in the main room? Only electric light in the place; the bedroom and bathroom had candles, just waitin’ to be lit. No radio, just a hand-cranked phonograph. The apartment did have a phone, but it was off in a corner in the kitchen, far from the bedroom as you could get and still be inside the apartment.

  Well, okay, I’d already supposed Ramona wasn’t human, especially after discovering Carmen McCall had the same magics, but corroborating evidence never hurt any. Neither that, nor critiquing her interior decorating—however much it wanted critiquing—was why I’d come, though.

  There was no real point in tryin’ to hide that someone had been here; she’d be able to tell that much soon as she discovered the broken wards on the door. But I didn’t see any sense in wreckin’ the place, either. Might as well try to minimize how steamed she was gonna get when she discovered the B-and-E. So I started my search real careful, rifling through the wardrobe without pulling anything out, digging through drawers with everything in place rather than emptying ’em, that sorta thing.

  I shouldn’t have bothered. She hadn’t even gotten around to puttin’ the damn thing away yet.

  I found Gina’s missing grimoire buried in a heap of papers on the end table beside the bed. Seemed kinda careless to me at first, but I guess Ramona’d figured that her wards were security enough. Guess in most cases they woulda been.

  It wasn’t much as magic tomes go, pretty beginner-level stuff, but that made sense. I stuck the grimoire in a pocket, to decide later if I was actually gonna return it or not. Nah, it wasn’t that potent, but I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted Gina learning anything more’n she already knew. Right now, she was smart enough to keep outta mystical goings-on that didn’t concern her; gaining even a little new power might change that.

  But as I said, I’d decide later. Right now I hadda find the lady of the house herself.

  The rest of the papers didn’t tell me much. Few days’ worth of newsrags, some bills addressed to a couple different names I’d never heard. (Figured ’em for Ramona’s aliases.) A few scraps and envelopes with notes penciled on ’em. Those had some potential, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of ’em. Some were names, or times, or addresses, but none matched up. Without context, there was no real way to know what any of ’em meant, or how significant they were. Certainly not enough to tell me who she was working for, or what she was working on, or where she was, or, well, much of anything at all useful.

  I stopped and went back to a couple of ’em more than once, though. Something about the handwriting… It wasn’t Ramona’s, but I had this nagging in the back of my noggin that I’d seen it before.

  Gah! This was more frustrating than if I’d found nothin’. What little I had wouldn’t have been enough to recognize even if I’d known the writer real well. If it was just somebody’s scribbling I’d seen in passing? I could sit here noodling over these broken scrawls from now until doomsday and never come up with a name.

  Goddamn it.

  I was just deciding that I had no options but to settle in and wait for her to come home—however long that might take—when the front door drifted open with a low, furtive creak.

  And yes, a furtive creak sounds different than a normal creak. Just trust me on this.

  Even if it hadn’t, though, I’da known it wasn’t Ramona. The emotions pourin’ off the guy like a fever sweat were clearly masculine. The gink was absolutely furious, terrified, obsessed to a scary degree, and lusty as an adolescent satyr.

  “I know you’re in here, you fucking bastard!” Something whooshed through the air, followed by a loud and teeth-jarring crash.

  Terrific.

  I dropped the papers back on the nightstand and stepped out into the main room—a room that was now decorated with the shards of what used to be a fairly nice picture frame.

  “What’d that glass ever do to you?” I asked him.

  He was unshaven, unshowered, and smelled like a laundry hamper. His current wardrobe was an undershirt and slacks, shoes without socks, and a baseball bat with some brand-new shards of glass stickin’ out of it.

  “You can’t have her! You can’t fucking have her! She’s mine! Mine!”

  “Well, long as we’re gonna be reasonable about this…”

  He charged me, shrieking, glass crunching underfoot, bat raised overhead.

  Aw, Ramona, what’d you do to this poor dumb sap?

  I stepped into his lunge, grabbin’ the bat in one fist just above his grip. Swept one foot out and back, stomping on the inside of his knee. He went down; the bat stayed up. Then, since I had it anyway, I swept it back toward him, smacking the back of his conk with the butt. Not all that hard, but enough to put him on his face on the carpet, rather than on his knees.

  I turned, tossed the bat over one shoulder, reached down and flipped him over like a pancake so he was starin’ up at me. Then it was just a matter of divin’ in through his peepers like they were a swimming pool. Wasn’t quite the duck soup it shoulda been—in addition to being royally scrambled by Ramona’s magic, the guy was so sloshed on cheap hooch you coulda gotten lit off a fifth of his sweat; so his thoughts were a bit harder to sort than normal. Try to imagine shufflin’ a deck with cards made outta onion skin. Still, it only took a moment or two.

  Look, I ain’t gonna repeat the conversation verbatim, okay? Even with me in his head, he spent way too much breath rantin’ and ravin’ about Ramona, how much he loved her, how it was only a matter of time before she gave herself to him, how me’n all the other guys who wanted her were flat-out goofy for even thinkin’ we hadda chance but he was still gonna beat us bloody, etcetera and so on. I ain’t got the stomach for quoting all that. So you get the summary.

  Thank me later.

  Obviously, Ramona can’t have this effect on anyone and everyone nearby; if she did, it’d be impossible to hide. So I wasn’t surprised when Mr. Smitten admitted to me that she stopped to jaw with him regularly—never for very long, just a quick “Hi, how ya doin’?” but that was more’n enough for her to do her thing. Long as she touched it up every now’n again, she had the guy wrapped so tight around her finger she coulda had him set with a diamond.

  Odds are he wasn’t the only one, either. I wasn’t gonna take the time to confirm it, but she probably had half the hallway swept off their feet. Made sense, really. If you’re gonna be in and out at all hours, movin’ stolen goods, meeting with God knows who, you can try to hide all that from the neighbors—probably without much success in a tenement where the walls are fingernail-thin and the rats can be bribed—or, if you happen to have the ability, you can bind ’em to you with mystical fishhooks through their hormones, and not have to hide.

  And no, before you even stoop to askin’, I wasn’t jealous of the attention (however twisted) she was payin’ these mugs. Not remotely jealous.

  Not jealous.

  (And if I had been, it wouldn’ta been my fault, anyway. Just so’s we’re clear.)

  So of course, I grilled him about the last time they’d booshwashed, if she’d said anything about where she might be goin’. He hadn’t wanted to
spill—which was less about protectin’ her, I suspect, than about not wanting to tell one of his “rivals” how to find her—but I was already in his head, so it didn’t take long to pry it outta him.

  She’d been on her way out, just that mornin’. And in exchanging the usual pleasantries, she’d told him she was off to a day at the fair.

  Well. Well, well, well now.

  Chicago had more’n a few, of course, little festivals and traveling carnivals and all that, but usually not too many at any one time—especially these days, as I think I mentioned earlier. I told my reluctant stoolie to take a long nap, wandered back into the bedroom, and checked the newspapers again. Sure enough, an older one—from a few weeks back—had been opened to a page that included an ad for one of those traveling carnies, listing its dates of operation, hours, all that good stuff. She hadn’t left it open on that page, but it ain’t just my peepers, ears, and scnozz that’re keener than yours. I could feel in the folds where the paper’d been left open a lot or flipped back to a lot. Sure, that wasn’t proof that she was goin’ to this particular fair, but it was a pretty solid sign.

  But none of that mattered. I’d hadda pretty solid guess which carnival she was goin’ to from the instant I’d heard the word, see? All this diggin’ through papers and all was just me confirming what I already knew.

  I knew, because I’d been there a few days before. Because I never had sussed out why Shea’s Uptown Boys had had the slightest interest in a cheap amusement park, never had figured what connection they had with Hruotlundt or the rest of Chicago’s nonhuman community.

  But if Ramona was lookin’ into a carnival, too? Nope, I wasn’t about to buy that as a coincidence. There was somethin’ hinky about that carnie, and I wanted to know what—and I particularly wanted to know if it had anything to do with whoever was lookin’ into me’n Ramona both.

  I coulda just settled in and waited for her to come home, of course, but that wouldn’ta gotten me a look at whatever was goin’ down out there. So, pleased as punch that I might finally be on the verge of some answers, I headed back for the parklands off the shores of Lake Michigan.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Had me some time to ruminate on the L, during my ride over, but I was still comin’ up empty. I just couldn’t figure why Shea—or his boss, Fleischer—would have much interest in a podunk carnival, leastaways not one so far south in enemy territory. And any ideas that seemed even vaguely possible didn’t explain Ramona’s interest. Nah, it hadda be something more occult than criminal, but what?

  Yeah, I was about to find out, but I hate goin’ into a situation blind.

  Was comin’ up on late afternoon by the time I finally made my way to the front gate, idly wondering if any of the Uptown Boys were back up on that hilltop, keepin’ a slant on the place. All the greasepaint and sweat and manure, helium and oil, sweets and slow rot, spun and twisted around each other like partners on the dance floor, mixing to create an atmosphere you just don’t find anywhere else. Balloons bobbed above the heads of the listless crowds, occasionally escapin’ to go drifting off to wherever they were destined to end up. (A small portion of ’em wouldn’t come back down to earth anywhere in your world.)

  Kids skittered all around me, dressed for a day out, parents chasin’ after ’em with a lot less enthusiasm. Thankfully, whenever I almost got used to the shouting and screeching, the carnie’s pipe organ burst out with the shrieks of the damned cleverly disguised as music, just to make sure I couldn’t get too comfortable. My dogs stuck to the ground every fifth or sixth step, and I decided I was happier just assuming it was due to spilled soft drinks and lost tufts of cotton candy. The other possibilities didn’t bear much thinking on.

  You know what, though? I’ll give the place this much: set up here, near some of Chicago’s less hoity-toity neighborhoods, the carnival was a lot more mixed than a lotta the city’s other entertainments. Children black, white, and various shades in between ran and played together without much care, and if some of the adults occasionally cast a few suspicious glances when they thought nobody’d notice, at least they were all civil about it.

  Yeah. Welcome to “Rounser’s Remarkable Fun Fair and Excellent Exhibition.” I had no notion who Rounser was, but I gotta say he had a more generous definition of “remarkable” and “excellent” than I did.

  I wandered through the gates, poured my handful of change into the waiting palm of a barker who was either too young for his beard or too old for the rest of his face, and just set my Oxfords to wandering. I didn’t really have anywhere specific to look, so I waded through a shallow ford in the stream of kids, dodged one kiosk where a perky brunette sold candy at a markup that woulda made Capone cry robbery, slipped beside another where they were takin’ song requests for the band organ, nearly socked a horrific and phantasmal face leering at me outta the shadows until I realized it was a clown (and then nearly socked him again because I’d realized it was a clown), and finally found myself in a tiny pocket of peace and relative quiet, beneath a heavy banner swayin’ gently in the lake-blown breeze.

  At which point I looked up and actually read the banner.

  “Aw, fuck.”

  See, I’d never gotten anywhere near enough to see the signs on my first visit. I was too busy chattin’ with Nolan Shea, and also not having the slightest inkling the carnival mattered. And on my way in today? I’m sure they had banners up out front, since this was obviously their main attraction, but I’d missed ’em. Just chance, I guess. I’d wandered in at the wrong angle, or I’d been distracted by the crowd. Now, though? Now it was emblazoned overhead like the word of God Him-, Her-, or Themselves.

  “THE DUSTY TOMBS OF FORGOTTEN DYNASTIES OFFER UP THEIR SECRETS!!” it said. “COMMUNE WITH A GOD-KING FROM THE DAYS OF ANCIENT EGYPT!! WITNESS ONE WHO WATCHED THE BIRTH OF CIVILIZATION WITH HIS OWN 2 EYES!!”

  Then, in much smaller print, “Bring the family! Educational and fun for kids, all for less than you’d pay for a day at the museum! Only at Rounser’s Remarkable Fun Fair and Excellent Exhibition’s Funhouse of Mystery!”

  They had a mummy. This rundown, flea speck of a sideshow carnie had a goddamn mummy.

  Didn’t know they did that? Yep. Respect for the dead’s nifty and all, but it don’t pay. Some of Egypt’s preserved dead got lucky; once their burial treasures’d been raided, they at least got sold to this museum or that private collector. Sure, they’d be displayed like something from a tourist gift shop, but they were reasonably well preserved and often stored alongside some of the riches that’d been theirs in life and afterlife.

  Others, though? Well, if they weren’t sold as kindling—yes, really; kindling—a few ended up as attractions in traveling fairs and funhouses. Offered a nice touch of spooky atmosphere, something to chill the onlookers just enough to tell their friends and maybe sell another fucking ticket.

  Some carnivals pretended to have ’em and didn’t, of course; just more fakery and sleight-of-hand, another con in a long line. But Rounser’s? Had too many peepers on it—some of which belonged to people who knew their stuff—for it to be a sham. There was a genuine mummy here, and both Ramona’s and Shea’s bosses clearly believed it still had some power or value to it.

  And hey… That might explain somethin’ else, too. This wasn’t the only mummy in town; the Field had a new Egyptology display that included a couple. But those didn’t have any lingering mojo, or at least not enough to reach beyond the walls of the museum.

  If this one did, though? Well, some of that power might be in the form of a curse. Yeah, mummy’s curses are real, though not exactly common. And if most but not all of that curse had faded over the centuries, there might not be enough left to pester you lugs—but some of us Fae, with our sensitivity to luck and magic? Yeah, the last fading echoes of a curse might, just might, explain the run of misfortune I’d been having lately.

  Seemed as though this desiccated corpse might hold the answers to a whole variety of questions. If nothing else, I needed th
e chance to give it the up-and-down before Ramona or Shea or whoever else tried to make off with the damn thing. It mighta still held traces of genuine Egyptian magics; heka they called it. Or it coulda had old spells or occult knowledge written in the wrappings; that was a pretty common part of the ritual. Or, or, or. Without knowing why they wanted it, or what sorta power or secrets it held, I wasn’t real inclined to let it fall into anyone’s hands, and this place sure didn’t have even the mundane security of the Field, let alone defenses against more magically inclined thieves.

  Casually, tryin’ to make it look like I was just idly wandering and taking in the sights, I started making my way toward a funhouse I didn’t honestly figure was gonna be much fun at all.

  As far as what happened next, I’m gonna make some excuses for myself. I was focused so hard my thoughts were aching and my brow was furrowed so deep my skull almost folded. I was casting out in all directions for the slightest feel or mystical “scent” of Ramona, or anyone else who mighta been packing magic heat, while also keepin’ on guard, ready to push back against the first hint that she was plucking at my emotions. I knew what kinda power she held, what kinda effect she had on me, and no way was I gonna let myself get empathically bushwhacked. And I was working at staying inconspicuous in the process, which don’t exactly come easy when you’re a lone grown man in a greatcoat at a carnival fulla kids and families.

  In other words, I was a touch preoccupied.

  If it’d been an attack of some sort, it woulda caught me square on. Since it wasn’t an attack, I only almost jumped outta my skin when the call rang out, “Come, stranger! Vould you gaze into your future and see vhat destiny has in store for you?”

  She was addressing me, specifically. I dunno how barkers and showmen do it, somehow “aiming” their voice through a milling crowd, but the experienced ones somehow pull it off. Guess I coulda ignored it, but I’d already turned to look despite myself.