Dead to Rites

by Ari Marmell

  “After you,” I said.

  Baskin glared at the gun, at me, then tossed the thing over behind the sofa and grumbled past me up the stairs.

  “You wanna tell me why you let a couple goons outta the cooler to rough me up?” I asked him as we climbed.

  He shrugged without turning.

  “Where else was I going to get them? Would’ve taken a lot longer to find criminals out on the street.”

  Was he tryin’ to make with the funny?

  “That… ain’t really how I meant the question.”

  “I guessed that might be the case.”

  We’d reached the second floor, now. The banister overlooked the sitting room we’d just come from; up here were a handful of doors, one of which was cracked open enough to show a claw-footed iron bathtub. The carpet and wallpaper upstairs were an off-cream, which is about the dumbest color for carpet and wallpaper imaginable. If you ain’t gonna go white, at least go dark enough so it ain’t gonna show dirt, yeah?

  Oh, right. And I also recognized the lingering traces of familiar perfume and a natural musk. Ramona may notta been there now, or maybe she was hiding and focused on keepin’ me from sensing her aura, but she damn well was here, and not too long ago.

  “I knew they wouldn’t be able to do you any real harm,” he said, finally answering the question I’d actually asked, “let alone kill you. I just wanted you out of action for a few days.”

  “Long enough for you’n Ramona to finish whatever it is you got cooking? Weren’t sure what she pulled was gonna keep me laid up long enough?”

  “I’m sorry, I still don’t know who you’re referring to. Or what. If you were already injured, I assure you I had no idea.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  We’d stopped in front of a door that didn’t look at all different from any of the others. Baskin obviously didn’t wanna turn that knob. I wasn’t gonna let him off the hook, but since I had another question, I gave him an excuse to put it off another minute.

  “Tell me something, counselor. Did you already know about me when you hired me last year? ’Cause I’ll tell ya, I certainly didn’t get that impression.”

  Now he did face me. I didn’t even have to try tasting his emotions; I could see in his face that he was measuring his answer, deciding if telling me the truth would spill any secrets or reveal any weaknesses he didn’t want me knowing about.

  “No,” he said finally. “I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it’s pure coincidence I hired you—I’ve come to see that the mystical has its own ways of shaping things…”

  I nodded.

  “…but no, at the time I had no idea you were anything more than what you seemed.” Then, maybe thinking a friendlier approach might work out, he expanded on that. “Truth is, when we met, I was only just learning of the existence of the supernatural at all. When I was trying to retrieve those photos I eventually hired you to find, I came across some… interesting methods. That was my next step, if you’d failed.”

  Huh. And in little more than a year, he’d learned enough to construct wards, assemble enough of a collection to make himself a contender, acquire the services of someone like Ramona, and get at least some notion of what I was and what I could do? Either he was lyin’ through his teeth about when he got started, or he’d had some big-time help.

  In any case, I offered up a glitzy smile like I believed every word and didn’t have a question in my noggin, and gestured toward the door. He gave up a sigh in return—as though I was somehow gonna have forgotten that I wanted in there—and opened up.

  Yeah, the room definitely had additional wards, meant to make its contents harder to detect. Soon as the door opened, the energies hit me like the burst of heat from a blast furnace. Wasn’t the largest collection of mystical artifacts I’d ever seen, not by miles, but more’n I’d expected.

  He’d divided the room—which was pretty sizable, probably occupying at least half of the second story—into a series of aisles via rows of half-height bookcases. Many of ’em were empty, or held random curios that looked interesting but held no power or intrinsic value. He owned a buncha books, most of ’em on the history or detail of various occult practices, from the Goetia to Vodoun to Kabbalah to Renaissance treatises on alchemy. A few were actual grimoires, spellbooks of this tradition or that; presumably Gina’s stolen tome was supposed to have found a home among ’em. At the room’s far end lay a cement slab with a rune-inscribed pentagram etched into it, makin’ me wonder if Baskin had already been fiddling around with conjuring.

  Gods help all of us if he had.

  Other gewgaws on the shelves, and in a few glass display cases, radiated real power. A Grecian urn, cracked and discolored, hummed at a level too low for mortal ears with what mighta been the voice of the original potter’s shade. An Austrian knife from the battlefields of the Great War was crusted and profanely empowered with old bloodstains in shades of brownish-violet, spilled from somethin’ that sure as hell hadn’t been human. A sliver of dried pumpkin rind from the Jack-o’-Lantern Gate, which hasn’t opened since Washington was president. A protective talisman here, a shamanistic fetish there. Even a Fae wand, worn and a lot less potent than my L&G, with only a few traces of magic left. I saw one glass display, open and empty, that woulda been just the right size for a certain spear Ramona’d tried to acquire a short while back.

  And off on a shelf in the rearmost case, a small pile of rags. All worn, tattered around the edges, some browned with age, some relatively new, some…

  I froze, claws of ice scraping down my spine, each vertebra a key on an old, crumbling xylophone. I shivered where I stood, and I don’t fucking do that. Somebody hadn’t just walked over my grave, they’d soaked it in diseased blood and salted the earth.

  Something in that heap of scraps and tatters was ugly. Profane. An oozing canker in the world. It wanted me dead; and not just dead, but damned.

  I whirled, grabbing the top couple of rags and tossing ’em over my shoulder, ignoring Baskin’s shouts. What I found was an old cleaning cloth, gray with dirt and oil. In the center of the fabric was a blotch of rust and filth where it’d once been wrapped around a hunk of… something. Something metal, obviously. Something, now that I looked closer, vaguely pistol-shaped.

  Fuck every heaven and hell. I knew what I’d been sensing, what was chewing at me.

  “Do you actually have it?” I was damn near shrieking, and I barely even noticed.

  “Goddamn it, Oberon, what do you think you’re—”

  I had the collar of his robe in my fists and the man himself completely lifted off the floor.

  “The Braddigan Gun! Do you have it?”

  I don’t think Baskin fully understood—I don’t think you do—how close he came to dyin’, in that moment. How near I was to turnin’ everything I had, everything I was, loose on him, on that house, and damn the consequences. Some things are too horrible to be allowed loose in the world. In any world. I woulda killed him, a thousand more like him, Ramona, Pete—God help me—if it meant takin’ that atrocity outta play.

  Except…

  “No! No, I don’t have the damn thing! I acquired the rag and I thought maybe I could use that to find the gun, but it never worked!”

  His panic carried the tang of truth in it, and while he mighta been a good enough liar to sometimes keep me from bein’ positive if he was talkin’ square or not, I was pretty sure he didn’t have the skill to fake the taste of that much honesty.

  I put him down, smoothed out his rumpled collar—rather polite of me, I thought—and took a long slant around the room. Yeah, as I’d figured, he had a buncha modern comforts scattered amongst the various dinguses on the shelves, so he could spend his time in here comfortably. I wandered across to another shelf, dropped the rag in an ashtray and picked up the rounded, brass-shelled cigarette lighter next to it.

  “Hey! Don’t you dare even think—!”

  I dunno exactly what he saw in the expression I shot him, but while he didn
’t look remotely happy about it—steamed as a lobster dinner, in fact—he shut up quick.

  Me, I made sure the oily, rusty rag had good’n caught, was already well on its way to cinders, before I even looked away from the ashtray.

  And by the way? No. No, I ain’t about to tell you one damn thing about the Braddigan Gun. Not what it is, not why I lost my head over it. Maybe one day, if I gotta, but… Fuck. Some things, I just damn well don’t wanna talk about.

  But the sensation I described to you—that I got just from the cloth it’d been wrapped in, not even from the vile thing itself—oughta give you some idea.

  “So, is this why you’re here?” Baskin snarled. “To just tear through my home and destroy my collection piece by piece?”

  “I probably oughta, you incomparable moron! You got no friggin’ idea what sorta power, what wonders and horrors, you’ve gathered here, do you? Hell, the fact you even wanted to find the gun is proof enough of that!”

  Then, before the pressure I could see buildin’ under his skin burst out through his yap in a form we’d both regret, I continued, “But no. I’m here lookin’ for something in particular.” Right about here I made a point of giving an obvious up-and-down to another of the display cases, a massive, wardrobe-sized thing lyin’ on its side with a stone bench—what could only be described as a bier, really—inside it.

  Baskin braced himself. No way he’d admit it until I forced the issue, but he knew what I was about to ask; ain’t as though I was bein’ remotely subtle.

  So of course, I didn’t ask. Not yet.

  “Whaddaya know about Saul Fleischer?” Might as well try to learn somethin’ useful while keeping the guy on his heels.

  “Uh…” Yeah, definitely not what he’d expected. I hadda assume he was better at this in the courtroom. “What?”

  “Fleischer. Saul. Northside Gang. Works for Moran.”

  “Yes, I… know who he is. Is this why—?”

  “Way I figure, counselor, you keep an ear to the ground where trouble boys are concerned—and an even sharper ear when they’re wrapped up in your—” I waved at the shelves. “—other interests. So tell me what you got on him that I ain’t gonna find in a file in your office.”

  Baskin staggered to another cabinet, poured himself another glass from another bottle. He waved it at me, in what I guess was meant as an offer. I waved back, in what he guessed—correctly—was a “no, thanks.”

  “Fleischer definitely has some occult interests,” he said, suddenly all too happy to be helpful. “I don’t know much of the details, or how deep those interests—or his knowledge, or his skill—reach.”

  “Huh. You know what tradition he practices? Or traditions?” If I knew for sure what to watch for, and if I wasn’t recovering from a head wound next time he and I met…

  “He’s Jewish. What do you think? He’s a Kabbalist.”

  I shrugged at him. “Never presume, bo. I know of a rabbi down in Galveston, Texas, who practices Haitian Voodoo. And one of the most powerful Russian witches I ever met was Jewish.”

  “What, really?”

  I smiled.

  “Well, whatever. In this case, yeah. Kabbalah.”

  “Right. That’s useful to know. Thank you.”

  “Of course. Was that all? If I’d known what you were looking for, I’d have been happy to help without all the—”

  “Well, that and I wanna know what you and Ramona did with the mummy you stole.”

  It took a sec for his jaw to realize his brain wasn’t tossin’ words through it anymore, and to finally stop waggling.

  “We di—I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he finally forced out.

  “Uh-huh.” I pointed back at that display case. “What’s that for, then?”

  “It’s not for anything in particular! I just had differently sized cases built in case I wound up needing them!”

  “Uh-huh,” I said again. “I’ll just keep on nosing around, then. Ain’t as though this house is all that humongous.”

  He was muttering again as I reached the door—not the one back to the hall, but the nearest of several others that mighta led to closets or different rooms—and it was only when my mitt closed over the knob that I realized the bastard was murmuring in Ancient Greek.

  You gotta be fucking kidding me. He couldn’t be that dippy, could he? He wasn’t really gonna try…?

  He was.

  I felt the house wards, and particularly the glyphs focused on the collection itself, strengthening, reaching out to me, tryin’ to bind me in place with grasping fingers of old magics and barely constrained power. For the span of a few breaths, my stomach knotted, my soul quivered, in a faint but unmistakable echo of what I’d felt in times past when confronted with genuine, significant, hostile magics. Orsola Maldera’s wards, f’rinstance.

  And then I let go of the doorknob and turned back toward Daniel Baskin. Shoulders rigid, eyes unblinking. The whole second story trembled, just a little, as my own magic swept back over the runes, rushing up and over Baskin’s chant in a backdraft of invisible flame. The lights flickered, dimmed; the display case that I’d figured was for the stolen mummy cracked across its nearest side.

  “You stupid, stupid little man.”

  I drank the magics infusing his aura, his voice, leaving him gasping for breath, spitting words without meaning.

  “You think because you’ve learned a few tricks, amassed a few relics, you know anything?”

  I felt the power of one of the glyphs starting to slip through my own defenses, through a spiritual crack that shouldn’t be there, wouldn’t be there if not for the cloud of bad luck hovering around me. I channeled some of the power I’d just taken from Baskin back into it, shoring up the breach, sweeping the groping tendril of magic back the way it’d come. He choked, staggered back so that only the wall held him up. His glass tumbled from limp fingers to the carpet, spilling the last few gulps of whatever booze he’d been sipping.

  “You think you are anything?”

  What pain the wards had inflicted on me I now balled up in one mental fist, mixing in the lingering ache of the head wound, feeding both with the rest of what I’d taken from Baskin until they blended and flared in a psychic flame. It was probably just as well I hadn’t taken the time to draw my wand; if I had, the agony might’ve been enough to kill an unprepared mortal.

  As it was, when I thrust that pain into his thoughts and dreams, the wall wasn’t enough to hold him any longer. He collapsed to the floor with a piercing scream, one arm bleeding as it crushed the fallen glass beneath it.

  I knelt beside him, more myself, more in control, but still furious as a wet cat in an aviary.

  “You have no goddamn idea what you’ve gotten into, do you, Baskin?” I let the worst of the pain I’d inflicted on him fade, just to be sure he could hear’n understand me. “You don’t have the foggiest notion what’s out there. What you’re playin’ with. You think you do. You think because you got someone to whisper forbidden knowledge in your ear that you’re a force to be reckoned with. You thought that knowin’ what to call me, that the name aes sidhe, meant you knew me. You’re ignorant. You’re a kid with a Tommy gun. ‘Collector.’ Like these are coins, or rare liqueurs, or fucking stamps? You don’t even know enough to respect the power you’ve gathered around you.

  “Where. Is. Ramona?” I poked his cheek with a fingertip. “Where’s the mummy?”

  He kept his trap zipped. I’ll give him a few points for guts, even if the stifled moan at the back of his throat, or the fact he was lyin’ in a sticky puddle of expensive hooch did sorta spoil the effect some.

  “Okay, pal. Your call.”

  I stood, and now I did draw the L&G. He flinched, hard, but I wasn’t aimin’ at him this time.

  “How many of these relics and dinguses are hot, counselor? How many people—or un-people—are out there, steamed and hunting for their missing toys? How many others would be real taken with the idea of acquiring a hoard like yours all in
one fell swoop? Way I see it, that’s the main purpose of all the wards you got inscribed around this room, this house. Gotta make sure every Tom, Dick, and Horrid with a nose for mojo can’t find you in their sleep.”

  I picked a random direction, pointed the L&G, and started draining the luck and magic in its path, sweeping it back and forth. Not from any of the relics—I made sure to avoid those, or pass over ’em—but from the room itself.

  The room… I don’t wanna say it shook, ’cause it wasn’t anythin’ that physical; didn’t flicker, ’cause it wasn’t visual. But something shifted, something unseen, something I don’t think most people could even have been aware of.

  But I was. And Baskin was.

  “How many of those wards can you lose?” I asked. “Can any of those folks and Fae you’re afraid of sense this place yet?” I very deliberately raised the wand, then slowly lowered my arm to point at a different side of the room. “How many more can you spare?” I started gatherin’ my will again…

  “Enough! Dammit, Mick, enough. You’ve made your point.”

  She stood in a doorway, framed in the lamplight of what looked to be a pretty swanky bedroom. She wore a sheer bathrobe over a silken nightgown, a combination that, if I hadn’t been through everything I had over the last week, mighta made me forget why I was here. As it was, all it did was make me wonder if that was the entire point, or if this was just what she wore to bed.

  At Baskin’s house.

  Yeah, okay, that bothered me. Only a little, though.

  “Ramona. Lookin’ right at home for someone Baskin ain’t ever heard of.”

  She crossed her arms and scowled fierce enough to scare off a rabid cu sidhe.

  “You think you’re so funny, don’t you? You think you know everything!”

  “Well, you’re half right.”

  “Do you have any idea how much danger you might’ve put Daniel in just now?”

  I carefully slid the L&G back into its holster under my coat.

  “I’da looked pretty stupid if I hadn’t. Melodramatic, even. You know how much I hate that.”

  “Goddamn it, Mick!”

  “Go help your boss up, Ramona. Maybe fix him a drink; looks as if he could use one.”