by Jenn Stark
It took me only a few minutes to work my way past the cops and out into the cool evening air. I quickly moved across the parking lot to enter the fluorescent confines of DarkWorks Ink, the merry little bells jingling incongruously as I stepped inside the tattoo parlor. There was nobody in the front of the shop, which was not too surprising given the number of police cars in the parking lot, I supposed. Cops would tend to turn off a fair number of prospective customers.
I took a moment to glance around. I hadn’t been back to Death’s official place of business in a while, but it looked the same as it always did. The walls were covered with pictures of happy customers with their newly inked arms, coronas of angry red skin glowing in mute protest around brightly colored masterworks. In books lining the walls as well as countless pictures pinned up to the drywall, there were all manner of flash designs posted. Butterflies, fairies, dragons, flames, skulls of every description, Hello Kitty in ever more unlikely poses. If it was something that some misguided college kid on spring break might consider cool to put on her ankle, it was here.
While I was admiring a particularly involved tattoo of a serpent coiling around a carved staff, a door opened and shut deep in the back of the shop. I looked up to see the small, pinch-faced figure of Jimmy Shadow slouch into view.
“She’s not here,” he said by way of introduction. He nodded at my elbow. “You need a touch-up?”
“I do not need a touch-up,” I said, flinching reflexively. I’d received several tattoos in this shop, as well as a newer image from Death at a tattoo convention in LA that’d felt like my skin had been lit on fire. Since engulfing myself in flames was becoming a regular pastime, you’d think this last one wouldn’t have bothered me so much. You would be wrong. “Is she in town?”
“She is, but she got summoned by the man in the High Castle. I’m thinking either you got the same summons, or you’re about to, or you’re ignoring him.”
I scowled but let my barriers slip slightly, staggering back at the strength of the Magician’s voice pounding against my mind. Yes, I’d been issued an invitation. I clamped my barriers tight again and scowled at Jimmy. “What’s it about, do you know?”
“It’s a meeting, which is enough. She hates them, and the Magician knows that, so for him to be summoning the crowd means there’s something big going on. Probably the same thing that just ripped a bunch of slimy Fomorians out of the primordial ooze.” He grinned with yellowed teeth. “That wasn’t pretty either.”
“Death knew that was happening? She didn’t stop it?”
“She wasn’t on-site, no. She came screaming in like the Fourth Horseman she is about an hour ago, more pissed than I’ve ever seen her. But she no sooner came than she stopped cold. They were there, then not again, is what she said, a door opening and shutting, quick as a wink.”
The important part of that statement should’ve been the bit about the door, but it wasn’t. Instead, I stared at Jimmy. “She said quick as a wink?”
He grinned with dark glee. “Well, she didn’t put it quite that way, no. Her language was more to the point. But then she ran out of here like her hair was on fire. By the time she came back in, she was drenched in sweat, looking haggard. And this is Blue. She don’t look haggard. That’s not her deal. But she said she was too late.”
Blue was Death’s most recent appellation, for those mortals who got a little hinky calling her Death, and served as her calling card for both her tattoo clientele and vehicle owners looking for high-end airbrushing of their muscle cars. Basically, if it involved guns of ink, Blue was the one you wanted.
“Which means those Fomorian things were real. And—she hates them why?”
Jimmy looked at me oddly. “Ahhh…how much d’you know about how Death came to be Death?”
I grimaced. “Not a heck of a lot, honestly. She’s one of the oldest members of the Arcana Council—the oldest, before Michael showed up anyway. But as to how she got that way…”
Jimmy rocked back on his heels, eyeing me speculatively as he went through a laundry list of rationalizations, all of which I appreciated. I was a rationalization kind of girl. “She’s never told me not to tell you. I always got the impression that you knew. She’s inked you with some of her best stuff. She doesn’t have friends, she doesn’t have hangs, but she seems to like you. She’s let me add to her own designs without frying them right off your skin when she’s had the chance—”
I blinked at him. “Wait, what? She can do that?”
“And we’ve got a new little hordelet of Fomorians running around, which pretty much are her Ebola. So that’s a good reason too. You could help her. Not that she would ever admit to needing help, but still.”
“And that’s enough reason for me to do it right there,” I said, the soul of loyalty and logic. “So, spill it, Jimmy. If Death is at all linked to whatever’s going down with the Neo-Celts, this murder, the whatever-they-were that just showed up and infested a bride-to-be next door, or this asshat in Ireland, then I need to know, like, right now.”
This wasn’t how I’d expected this conversation to go, frankly. I hadn’t expected to find Jimmy alone, and I certainly hadn’t expected him to be in such a talkative mood. Jimmy Shadow was a chain-smoking, hard-drinking tattoo artist who was more than Death’s right-hand man, he was very possibly her reformed-demon familiar. I’d never quite figured that out for sure, and I’d never wanted to investigate too closely. We all have our secrets. Jimmy was entitled to his.
That said, I was up to my eyeballs in questions right now, and it was past time that I started collecting answers. For Armaeus to be as concerned as he seemed to be about this Green Knight character, something was going on here that I was clearly missing.
Sometimes being the last kid to the party was less than awesome.
Jimmy seemed to agree. “They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, so I’d show you if I could, but Death has done her level best to remove any and all inscriptions, images, historical accounts, songs, or artwork about those dark times. She only tells me the story when she’s wasted, but she’s told it often enough that I can remember it line by line. You repeat any of this to her, though, and my next tattoo will be delivered to me by her foot on my ass. I don’t want that.”
“Understood. If I can avoid telling her, I absolutely will. And if I need her to know what I know in order to help her, which would be a bad day all around if that’s necessary, then I’ll bring you ice for your ass. That’s the best I can do.”
“Fair enough.” He shifted uneasily. “Come on back, then.” He switched the OPEN sign of the tattoo parlor to CLOSED and slouched past me again, heading to the rear of the shop. Passing by the inking rooms, Jimmy didn’t pause until he pushed the heavy door at the end of the hallway, leading us into the wide garage space where Blue kept evidence of her other pastime—vehicle airbrushing. Three motorcycles and a gleaming muscle car sat at odd angles in the wide space, all in various states of augmentation. The detail of her work was breathtaking, earning her a cultlike status in all the circles where she wasn’t already a rock god for her tattooing abilities.
The reason for our transplant to the back of shop quickly became obvious as Jimmy picked up a battered pack of cigarettes and slipped one out.
“Is that a good idea with all the paint fumes back here?” I asked, eyeing him as he lit up the cigarette.
“If I was going to blow up, I would’ve done it a long time ago,” he said casually. I frowned, not quite following that logic, but Jimmy kept going. “So Death was kind of a unique son of a bitch from the very beginning. She lived around 3000 BC, in a village near the west coast of Ireland. She was a druid priestess and sacrificed just about everything to the cause—family, husband, children.”
I blinked, taken aback by the barrage of information, but his last words caught me in particular. “You mean she gave them up? Or she, um, sacrifice sacrificed them.”
He grinned at me, smoke streaming through his weather
ed teeth. “Exactly the same question I asked at this point in the story, so don’t feel bad. She’s a tough nut. But no, she didn’t kill anyone. But she gave up her position in the tribe, which apparently was quite a big deal, since she was the daughter of the chieftain and her mother, supposedly, was one of the fae.”
I lifted my brows. Given my own questionable parentage, I had no room to judge. “The Tuatha dé Danann? Really?”
“Really. But giving up her position meant she could never marry—or have children. And that was a big disappointment to her tribe. She’s never admitted as much to me, but apparently, when she was young, tales sprang up around her like daisies in springtime. She had an unusual affinity with everything bright and beautiful. Flowers burst into bloom around her, the chatter of children would follow her wherever she went, like that.”
“This is Death we’re talking about here.”
He shrugged. “Well, she wasn’t known as Death then.”
“Fair enough. But seriously, the chatter of children? And if you tell me there were little people dancing around her, I may have to kill you. Consider yourself warned.”
Another long drag on his cigarette. He was almost down to the filter already. Were cigarettes really that short-lived? Or was Jimmy an expert inhaler? “You believe in gods, right? Since you’ve been up to your ass in them?”
“Of course.”
“The fae were gods. Nothing more, nothing less. Gods. You can wrap your head around that?”
“Of course,” I said. “But—”
“No buts. I’m not here to argue sprites and brownies or fairies whispering limericks in the shadows. They’re just the foot soldiers. What you need to focus on is the original fae, the reason behind all those stories. The Tuatha dé Danann, or the Tuath Dé. They weren’t the first gods of the Irish, those were the Fomorians, but the Tuatha dé Danann get all the press. They conquered the Fomorians, who are generally portrayed as the dark and ugly stepcousins of the swamp monster, while the Tuath Dé were not only supernatural, they were supernaturally beautiful. Not too surprisingly, they’re the ones who went on to capture thousands of years of Irish literature and the world’s imagination.
“Well, I happened to get a good look at the Fomorians, if those were the creatures who hopped a ride inside Lenora Drake. They were looking pretty spry for a conquered race.”
Jimmy made a face. “Why do you think Death was so pissed? And before you tell me, she already knows about the Irish guy at the festival. Seamus McCarthy. Apparently, she gave him some pointers when he messed with the Fomorians the last time. She knows he didn’t pull this.”
“She’ll keep him safe?”
He snorted. “She’ll make sure he doesn’t die by the Fomorians’ hand. Beyond that, no promises.”
I considered that, then shut it up in its own blinged-up box of crazy for the moment. “Okay, so keep going. Death was a druid priestess.”
“One of the best.”
“According to her own story.” I grinned, defanging my words. Jimmy grinned too.
“Yeah, which pretty much means that she wasn’t one of the best, she was the best. By a long shot. Without her coming right out and saying it, she had the entire fucking western half of Ireland by the short hairs, and she had more woo than she knew what to do with at her fingertips. But it wasn’t enough.”
“Why’s that?” I asked as he shook another cigarette out of the pack. “What was going on in 3000 BC that was that big a problem? Besides basic survival, anyway.”
“Like I said, the Tuatha dé Danann defeated the Fomorians, but quite a while later, the Tuath Dé had their own battle to fight with the mortals themselves. The humans defeated the Tuath Dé, but they didn’t defeat them entirely. They more sort of came to a truce, where the humans agreed to live in the upper world, and the Tuath Dé disappeared into the mists, never to be seen again.”
“Seems like the humans got the better end of that deal.”
“You’d think so, but there was always something slippery about the Tuath Dé. They never made a deal where they didn’t have the upper hand. It was kind of a thing with them.”
“Yeah, I read Shakespeare too.”
“Exactly,” Jimmy said, though he didn’t really seem the type to go in for The Bard. “And that was what was vexing Blue so much. Her name wasn’t Blue back then, but even with as lit as she’s gotten, she’s never told me what her original human name was. I get the feeling it was a name of great and terrible power, and probably something quite beautiful. Names mattered back then in a way they simply don’t now, but that’s all I’ve been able to get out of her about it. That and that she decided to ascend to the Council only after she helped dispatch the Tuath Dé once and for all. From what I could tell, that was a bitch of an experience in more ways than one.”
I rubbed my jaw. “Was she hurt?” The only person older than Death on the Council was none other than Michael the Archangel. But he wasn’t the type to sit around the campfire and tell stories about the way things used to be.
“She never said, but something hinky definitely went down. And when the Council came knocking on her door, she took the offer they made. The same offer they gave you, in a manner of speaking. Ascend to the Council, and you’ll have more power than ever to keep the gods at bay, particularly the gods that pissed you off the most. She bit.”
“But why, after all she’d done—after knocking the Tuath Dé out for good—did she choose to ascend as Death, if bunnies and rainbows scampered around her wherever she went? Was that the only position that was open on the Council at the time?”
“Nah…” Jimmy broke off then, and turned to look at the wall for a long moment. When he started speaking again, he still wouldn’t look at me. “Blue wasn’t an idiot. She knew what she was giving up and the toll it would take on her family, her tribe. She’d already sacrificed so much to keep them safe, and she couldn’t bear to leave them. So she took the one role where she’d be guaranteed to see them again, each according to his time.”
I stared at Jimmy in horror. “Because they were dying?”
He nodded. “She inked each of them with her inscription so that at the moment of their death, no matter where she was, she would be able to find them, to hold them, and to help them over to the other side. Death can shepherd any soul, but she doesn’t have to shepherd all of them. Those she chooses to aid make the passage filled with joy. To be marked by Death in that way is sort of a gift and a curse all wrapped up in one.”
I frowned. “Curse how?”
“The gift is that she will be there when you pass. The curse is that she knows you’ll pass before her.” He stubbed out his cigarette in a tray filled with about five hundred others and pointed at my arm. “You look close sometime, you’ll see you’ve been given that tattoo too, deep in the mix of all the others.”
I frowned, looking down at my arm, willing myself to see through my sleeve. “Well, when I met her, I was mortal. She wasn’t. Of course, she thought she was going to live longer than I will.”
“You keep telling yourself that.” He lifted his own hand, and a tiny blue tracing flared to life amid my ink. “It’s a gift. And a curse.”
Chapter Eleven
I barely made it out of DarkWorks when my barriers finally gave way to Armaeus’s demand—with unfortunate timing. A knot of LVMPD’s finest was standing and arguing about something, the missing Lenora Drake most likely, but my exit from the closed tattoo parlor did not go unnoticed. I suspected that neither did my super-smooth self-immolation move, or its attendant yelp of pain.
I stepped back into real time at the base of the Luxor casino, the corporeal starting point for the Magician’s fortress, Prime Luxe, which soared above the Luxor with spectral magnificence. Many of the Arcana lived along the Strip in lofty residences that only the most powerful of Connecteds could see, but the entrances to these shadow casinos were almost always embedded within the lobbies of the casinos they surmounted. In other wor
ds, in order to access the spectral wonderland of the Arcana Council above, all you needed to do was enter the kitschy, flashy lobbies of casinos like the Luxor, Flamingo, and Excalibur—and know where to look.
Here at the Luxor, I could easily spot the onyx-and-silver elevator doors for Prime Luxe, wedged between the golden glam of the kitschy casino’s primary bank of elevators, but I didn’t approach it right away. For one thing, I was still a little singed. For another, I felt ill-equipped to face the full brunt of the Council quite yet. It was my first official meeting since becoming a full member, and I hadn’t even brought cookies.
I pulled my Tarot deck out of my hoodie and, with the ease of long practice, shuffled the deck as I walked, thinking back to the young woman in Sariah’s tent. Lainie Grant had far more reason than I did to be afraid of what her future held. She was beset with psychic visions for the first time in her twenty-odd years, whereas I’d built up to this point gradually, even if I hadn’t fully realized it at the time. Granted, I wasn’t used to the Magician going max corporate on us all and demanding a staff meeting, but I shouldn’t be feeling quite so uneasy about Armaeus’s summons. What was going on here? What was I missing?
I drifted to an unoccupied blackjack table and sat down, grateful that even at this late hour, the casino wasn’t stuffed to the gills. Shuffling my well-worn deck a few more times, I quickly drew three cards, laying them facedown in front of me. I had a strong urge to do a traditional reading too, which struck me as odd. I hadn’t pulled a full Celtic cross in longer than I could remember. Then again, I was dealing with a problem that centered in Ireland, so maybe I had shamrocks on the brain.
Either way, it was too late now. The cards had been dropped.
Quickly, before I could draw too much attention, I flipped the three cards upright. And rolled my eyes. The Magician, The Devil, Death. Well, that was super helpful. I suspected if I kept going along this route, I’d probably draw the entire seated Council and that would prove nothing at all.