The coffee’s not bad. Mexicans don’t get all extra about it like most island Latinos do, but they can make a fairly serious cup when they’re in the mood. I find a smile for the portly waiter, and he seems pleased with himself. At the only other table in the place, an ancient mustachioed man in a Yankees cap plays Uno against an eight-year-old girl with pigtails. A couple day laborers in big vests and faded jeans trade stories at the counter.
I wonder if Riley’s gonna be okay. I wonder who Sasha really is, what secrets she’s tucked away inside herself. Then my thoughts glide reluctantly over my own secrets. Which ones slip out when I’m not paying attention, hanging in the air waiting to unravel?
Trevor.
If I hadn’t killed him, would everything be different? I’ve dreamed about that moment—the blade leaving my hand, that awful squish as it found its mark—more times than I can count. What, besides the nefarious Council bureaucracy, gave me the authority to so cavalierly snatch away that man’s life? I try again to imagine a scenario where Trevor and I just have a pleasant chat instead of me slaying him. The truth is, I know he’s wrapped up in this ngk mess, and I know he was about to vanish into Hell’s impossible haze.
I squint into my coffee.
There was no other way. The Council sent me to do a job and I did it. I wonder if it really is that simple for some soulcatchers.
The question lingers.
I would’ve been able to tell Sasha everything.
My heart actually lurches at the thought, and suddenly I’m irretrievably sad. It’s one thing to talk slippery to the Council—it’s a given; a call-and-response game that keeps everybody grumpy but mostly above water. But to have to store away my whole strange existence from this woman who has swept into my life so gracefully and trusted her body with mine—that’s another story. Even poor Riley doesn’t know the full extent of what’s going on with me. And now Dro’s gone. That recurring thought piles another heavy rock onto my heart.
No one knows what’s really going on with me. Not a soul. I only barely understand it myself, and my vision seems to get blurrier by the minute. To top it off, the first however many years of my life are gone, a total void. Without warning, this matters. My whole life. I don’t even know how old I am. What century I came from. How long I was dead. Nothing. I’m empty. Empty of history, of genealogy. Devoid of family. An utter abbreviation of a person.
“Buen provecho,” the waiter says, putting a massive pork sandwich on the table. Besides the pig, there’s every vegetable possible smashed in there. It’s delicious. The eight-year-old giggles every time her abuelo picks up a card. Her laughter rises to a joyous cackle and she crows, “Uno!” The old man fusses with his mustache, furrows his brow, and then picks a card. And then another. “Chingada madre,” he mutters as the laughter continues unabated across the table. “Mierda.” Finally, he puts down one with a sigh and the girl gets real serious, scrunches up her face, and draws a card, then slams it down, yells, “Uno!” again, and resumes laughing.
A hipster, all skinny jeans and big glasses, pokes his head in, tries to ask directions to the train station, and leaves disappointed. The Council, in their infinite smugness, has put me in charge of this investigation. I put some more sandwich in me. Without Riley to bounce my ideas off of, I’m not sure how far I’ll get. No, that’s not it. I’ll untangle this shit, but I’m not sure I’ll make it out the other end intact. And I doubt it’ll lift me out of this preposterous mood.
Another ranchera blasts across the bakery. It’s a swirl of horns and pounding bass drums, somehow both mournful and ecstatic. Also, slightly absurdly loud. The ngks are effectively undefeatable. If this tall hairy fellow’s somehow the source of their sudden appearance, dealing with him might be the only way to get them out of the equation. But the bastard just pulled my ghost-killing blade out of his gut with barely a flinch.
The tangled equation resolves itself into the simple question of how. Perhaps a trap of some kind. The basic laws of physics still seemed to apply to this creature. Didn’t see him walking through walls or flying. He was a solid body, a halfie at the deadest. Certainly powerful in whatever old sorcery he was up to, but not undefeatable. No one’s undefeatable. I might just have to work out some cleverness. What worries me most, though, is time. Now that all these new ngks have scuttled out of the woodworks, there’s no telling how fast the infestation will progress. The Council has soulcatchers out there, stalking up and down Franklin Avenue with their sharp eyes out, but really, what are they going to do? Alert me. And then we can all sit and brood about it more.
I killed my one lead. Slept with my other. At this point, all I got is whatever trail of Post-it notes Trevor left behind at the library.
The driving ranchera grinds to a halt just as the little girl finally defeats her grandpa and erupts into giggling again. He shuffles the deck and deals, sighing heavily through his mustache.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Riley found me on Mama Esther’s stoop one afternoon during my recovery. I’d been alive again for a few weeks at this point and was getting some sense of my body back. I could walk around and talk to people without sounding like a total moron. I was beginning to get a feel for things, understand my own strange powers, and grow into myself.
Riley looked me over for a few seconds. “How you feel, Cee?”
I stretched my arms out and rolled my head around, cracking my still-achy joints. “I feel good. How you feel?”
“I always feel good, man. I’m dead.”
“Right.”
“Let’s go upstairs. I want to talk to you about something.”
* * *
I could already feel it then, the urge to hunt. The pulsing inside me that would start up at any old time and take over. I was still physically diminished, could barely move my bad leg at all at that point, but it was like I could see a fiery image of what I would one day do, a woulda-been version of myself tearing loose from this somewhat useless body and launching gleefully into the night. That me, the hunter, would stop momentarily and take in all the wild, churning signs and hints that the city had to offer. He would sniff the air, feel the breeze on his face, and understand all the stories and implications of each tiny detail, each swirling plastic bag and scattering rat. The universe became an ecstatic puzzle to this hunter-me, a magnificent path fingerprinted across the night to some abstract moment of glory: the capture.
I’d been hungering like that for a few weeks. And then Riley explained what exactly the Council had in mind for me, and it sounded like an answer to my prayers. “It’s a bureaucratic disaster, Carlos,” he warned me when he saw that thirst in my eyes. “I’m telling you now so you don’t get to act surprised later. It’s a whole fuckpot of politics and ego and all kindsa bullshit. But it’s gainful employment and some measure of stability with an occasional sense of being useful and doing something right in the world. And you don’t have many options open to you with your chilly gray half-dead ass. No offense.”
I nodded, still thrilled.
“All right, then. Here.” He held a walking stick out to me. It was mahogany and elegant without being bougie. I reached for it. “Wait.” He pulled the handle up and a shiny silver blade appeared, glowing gently. My eyes got wide. “It’ll fuck up a living person too, but the steel’s sanctified and specially designed to deal the Deeper Death to the already dead.”
I nodded. I musta looked like an addict staring down a fix. Still, I willed my fingers not to grab for it again. Riley watched me carefully and then sheathed the blade back into the cane and placed it in my hands.
“When you’re not such a disaster, I’ll start showing you the ropes.”
* * *
Most of these damn books are in languages I don’t know. The one in English is the diary of some monk that went batshit in the sixteenth century. I skim the pages until I get to the parts where Trevor’s scribbled-on Post-its get excited: “Wrath, borne unto me one miraculous and terrible night, now poisons my bosom with such a
rage as I cannot describe.” Splendid. I don’t have time for this shit. “’Twas a time I remember not, but had to recatalog the events of my life as described in my own hand, through these many years, to retrace the arc of my own history.”
Now that I can simmer with. “A singular event, a single scrap of memory, is all I possess, and I suspect that without the guidance and support of my fellow Fathers of Christ, I would be lost, a heretic, exiled from myself even and cursed to wander like a Jew from town to town.” Also unpleasantly resonant. “Still, I resign myself to these dark cloisters, like the suddenly empty recesses of my mind, and here I shall stay and dissipate in the waning years of my life. I suspect my end can’t be far, for I am grown gray, deathlike in my countenance even as my energy and virility seem heightened with each passing day. Oh, Lord Father, help me to understand these cruel changes that have settled upon me!”
Another tormented halfie.
There’s another book that Trevor seemed particularly Post-it happy with, but the damn guy went ahead and wrote his notes in Flemish, or whatever the hell language this is.
I pour a glass of orange juice and squint at the ancient pages. Someone went through a lot of trouble to make this book ornate. Its swirling illuminations look like they’ve been encrusted with gold; each page reveals a whole new universe of vivid, monstrous illustrations. Here, right in the middle, is the part that obviously interested Trevor. His handwriting gets more frantic; things are underlined several times and there’re explanation points all over the damn place.
The central motif is a black-robed figure on a horse. A monk kneels before him, his face all torqued with fear, mouth wide open as if begging for his life. Naked bodies lay scattered like fallen leaves around them. Their skin is pale, and most of them have been run through with spears, but all their eyes are wide open. Above them, the text wraps around a giant skull that levitates in the sky. I run my finger along the page, feel the thick texture of the paper, and trace a triangle from the top of the skull to each edge of the picture.
A wildly elegant border runs the perimeter. At first I think it’s just ornate, golden vines snaking up a pillar. Then I notice something in the spiraling vegetation: an eye. I squint and get all close to the page. Then I almost fall backward in my chair. There’s a fucking ngk in there. It’s hiding in the damn foliage. I quickly scan the rest of the border and find at least six more of the little fuckers. Each one is mostly concealed; just their evil little faces peer out from behind leaves and branches.
I need to know what these damn words mean.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Mama Esther?”
“Hm?”
“You all right?”
A weighty pause. I wonder about all the different ghosts and near-ghosts that have passed through these walls, unloaded their troubles to this great mother spirit, got some sense of peace, and kept it moving. “I’m fine, Carlos.”
“More lies.”
“Perhaps. But what are you going to do about it?”
“I’m working on it now, but I need your help.” I take out the massive book and lay it open to the illumination that Trevor was so interested in. Mama Esther looks it over without a word. “Can you translate it?”
She opens and closes her mouth, her eyes scanning the picture. Then she leafs a few pages forward and backward in the book. “It was written by a monk in the twelfth century. He’s going on about death and the devil and all this for a little while . . .” She’s a few pages back now, running her huge finger along the words. “‘Oh take my soul, ye vast armies of the night, for I am unworthy of inhabiting this frail human flesh. I am but a meager spirit, a humble servant of the Lord,’ et cetera, et cetera . . . and then . . .” She raises one eyebrow. “Blah blah blah, Christ Jesus, rejuvenate my tired soul, blah blah . . .” The other eyebrow arches up. “‘The Darkness came over me on the same day I was overtaken by a stranger on the road. He was as one dead but still in a mortal skin. A wizard or warlock from the pits of Hell, I am sure. He’s caused in me such a tremulous fear. I nearly collapsed before him as one before the altar does kneel. The stranger had no name and was clothed all in robes of black, torn and shredded and reeking of burned flesh. I know not from whence he came.’ Blah blah blah, he invites the stranger into his house—smart—and . . .” She turns the page. “Whoop, big surprise—the guy puts him under a sorcery of some kind. And then . . . they do something that makes the giant skull appear. Not quite sure what. This whole page”—she points to the drawing with the ngks hiding in it—“is like a grocery list of sorts. ‘A grounded spirit, long since known to reside in the sleeping chamber, the brethren infants, the stranger himself and I, the gatekeeper, now that he hath laid his cold hands upon me and made me a pillar of damnation. I shall play this role, for I am cursed.’”
“And then?”
Mama Esther flips to the next page, which just has a single sentence: “‘Death is all I see.’”
“Damn.”
“Mm-hmm.”
We ponder the drawings for a minute. Then I say, “Well, clearly, the brethren infants are the ngks. We can agree on that, yes?”
Mama Esther thinks for a moment, then nods. “Would seem so, yes.”
“And the stranger, let’s say that’s this other basement dweller.”
“Fair enough.”
“That leaves the bedchamber ghost and the monk himself.”
“That’s me.”
“Who, the monk?”
“The grounded ghost,” Mama Esther says. “That’s what I am.”
“What does that mean?”
She moves her mouth from side to side a few times, trying to figure out how to explain it to me. “I’m affixed to this building. It’s part of me and I’m part of it. The building itself is me. I can’t totally make sense of it to someone—no offense—but to someone in a flesh-and-blood body, because you guys have different ideas of space and boundaries than we do.”
I wave a hand to tell her none taken.
“But you are around enough dead folks to get that we have some loose physical boundaries with things. I’m not just the spirit of one soul, but rather several powerful women from a few generations and families, combined into one.”
“And they all lived in this house?”
“Or spent time here, yes.”
I pause to let that settle in. I’d figured it was something like that, to be honest, but had never played out the thought all the way through. Mama Esther is a house ghost; that’s all I really needed to know. “So you can’t leave?”
“Not without taking the house with me.”
“What I don’t understand is, where’s the grounded ghost in this picture? I see the ngks, the cursed monk, the stranger, the dead . . . Where’s the grounded ghost?”
“There.” Mama Esther points to the giant skull floating above everything. “That’d be me.”
There’s an uncomfortable pause. I’m tussling with the truth of how much a target Mama Esther is, and I’m pissed that it’s taken this long to figure that out. “Wish you’d showed me this earlier,” I say.
Then I feel like an asshole.
“Well, I didn’t, Carlos. I already told you that’s not how I do things. First of all, I had no idea that what that halfie had his nose in was gonna come back to bite me so.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“And second of all, I know neutrality is a myth, but I’m going to come as close as I can, even if it means pissing off certain foul elements upstairs at the Council.”
“Botus.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“He mentioned you at the hearing today.”
“I’m sure he did. They were none too happy when they came to get Riley. Apparently, the fact that I saved his life is of no consequence to them.” Mama Esther rubs her face and then directs an angry gaze out the window.
“He’s going to live?” I ask.
“If he does, it’ll be because you got him here quickly and I did what I had to do.”
“Thank you.” It sounds lame, given everything that’s going on, and she shrugs it off with a sigh.
“He knew about you, Carlos.”
“Who, Trevor?”
“He thought maybe you could be some kind of . . . alternative? He was fascinated, entranced by Sarco, but terrified too. Especially right before he vanished. He wanted me to help him find you.”
I rub my eyes. It’s what I feared. The knowledge just sinks like a stone into my tired mind. “You didn’t.” I can’t change what I’ve done. The only path is forward. And I don’t know that means.
“Of course not, but I knew your paths would cross soon enough. Who else would the Ignoble Seven send against a halfie?”
* * *
Someone’s in my apartment. The atmosphere is all off, tainted with whatever vague vibrations the intruder let linger. I unsheathe my blade and creep forward, letting each foot settle gently on the floor, edging ahead inches at a time. The bathroom is clear. No one’s in the living room. I put my cane ever so silently against the bedroom door and push.
Sasha stands there, looking about as distraught as I must’ve yesterday. There’s no tear traces, just an overwhelming solemnness about her: slumped shoulders, face tightened, body tense like at any given moment she’ll either pounce or shatter. We regard each other silently. My face tells her face I can see something’s horribly wrong; she nods.
“Make yourself at home,” I say quietly, opening the door for her to come out into the living room.
She semi-smiles. “I didn’t touch anything. Didn’t look at anything. I just needed to be somewhere. Besides my place.” She walks past me, and I’m briefly put out of service by the rush of her scent and all the memories of last night that it carries.
“Nice place.” She’s looking around, and I’m suddenly self-conscious. It’s not a mess, just oddly put together. There’s a lot of exposed pipes and random furniture, the product of living in a somewhat renovated warehouse and shopping on a whim. Mostly though, there are books. It’s like a mini version of Mama Esther’s; bookcases line almost every wall, and the books themselves seem to topple out of them and gather in unruly clusters around the apartment. A wan smile passes briefly across her face as she takes in the view, and then it’s gone.
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