Midnight Taxi Tango

by Daniel José Older

  “And that was it? Who did you pray to?”

  She shrugged. “I dunno. The universe? God, I guess? I don’t have a name for it. Don’t need one really.”

  I nodded. I knew exactly what she meant.

  “And then?”

  “And then I went on with my life, or whatever this is.”

  “You felt better?”

  Sasha put on her mean face: eyes slit, both brows raised, neck craned toward me. “No, Carlos, I felt like shit. Yes, I felt better. But it’s not just about feeling better. It’s about letting go. Sometimes you have to do something, you know, something real, to wake yourself up.”

  I hadn’t known I was asleep, but then, maybe I had.

  A bunch of dumb comebacks tried to surface and I discarded them all.

  She was right.

  In a few hours we’d be making passionate love while the morning broke. In another day, she’d figure out what I’d done and impale me with my own sword. A few months after that, we would save each other’s lives amid the near destruction of the natural order of life and death and then say good-bye once and for all.

  But in this moment, I watched her fuss with her hair and I thought about everything she’d just said and everything she was, what I was and how I got there. And I batted away all nagging demons of the future and past and smiled at her with my whole face.

  “Carlos!”

  That’s Riley’s voice.

  “Wake the fuck up, bro.”

  But Riley’s in a coma.

  “Yo, C!”

  Riley stands over me, arms crossed over his broad chest, one eyebrow raised. Lips pursed. This is Riley’s unimpressed face. A crew of soulcatchers lingers behind him, their face guards lifted; I recognize a few of them from the park earlier: Squad 9.

  A thick, surly ghost steps beside him. Sylvia Bell. The horrible night comes back in jolted shivers.

  “He okay?” Sylvia asks.

  Riley shakes his head. “I guess.”

  I’m in my apartment. The windows are open, letting in a cool early-morning breeze. Outside the sky lightens toward dawn. A tiny shimmering phantom bursts through the air, wrapping his hands around a slender brown neck. I jolt up. “Kia!”

  Riley’s barely there palm against my chest sends me sprawling back onto the couch. “Easy, C. She’s alright. Sleeping it off in your bed. But we gotta talk.” He looks at Sylvia. “Give us the room, Syl.”

  Syl?

  She nods at her team and they disperse, mingling with the shadows and then vanishing completely. Riley looks back at me, shakes his head again. “Get up. Make coffee, whatever, but listen carefully to what I’m saying to you.”

  I stand, find my balance, shuffle into the kitchen. Nothing seems too damaged, just a general crappiness that resounds across my body. I fuss with the cafetera. Riley leans over the kitchen counter and gets up in my face.

  “Are you listening?”

  “Mothafucka, you ain’t speaking. Speak and I’ll listen. But get out my face.”

  For a second we just stare at each other. Then Riley says, “You fucked up.”

  I curl my upper lip into a snarl and squint at him. I don’t know what he’s talking about. Hell, maybe he’s right, but it’s what you do when someone throws down like that. It’s protocol.

  “Think I’m kidding?” Riley says.

  “I think you should just tell me what you’re talking ’bout rather than going comandante on my ass.”

  “Kia,” Riley says. He doesn’t waver in his glare. Doesn’t flinch.

  I run it back in my mind. The child ghost, the park around us, the newspapers fluttering in the streetlights. Kia, her eyes wide. She hadn’t seen the dead before last night, I realize. All her dealings with spiritual folks at the botánica and she’d never actually seen a spirit herself. But in that moment, her eyes fixated right on the ghostling. And then the ghostling turned to me.

  “You understand what I’m talkin’ ’bout yet, C?” Riley has stepped back. I’m standing there still holding the half-full metal basin for the cafetera, and Riley just stares at me.

  “I hesitated.”

  He nods. “Why?”

  “I . . .”

  “Stop,” Riley says. “Think about it before you answer.”

  The face. It was just a child. I mean, you could tell from the back it was a child ghost, but then he turned and that young face was still pudgy with baby fat but contorted with rage, eyes sunk deep in his skull, mouth stretched wide, teeth long and sharp.

  “Why’d you pause, C?”

  But past the demon there was still something in there, a glimmer of what that kid had once been, some flicker of life. He’d turned to me, and in that millisecond I’d seen through the mask of rage and into its core. “Because I saw past the demon.”

  “Wrong.”

  “What?”

  “You’re missing something, man. Go deeper.” The instinct to push back rises again, but Riley cuts me off before I can start. “You’ve sliced demon kids before. I seen you do it. No one likes to. It’s never easy, but we do what we have to do, right? We always do what we have to do.”

  I nod. The worst was two years back: a toddler who had burned up in a tenement fire started plaguing the ER waiting room at Woodhull. Asphyxiated an old man and was about to possess one of the security guards when Riley and I caught up to him and put him away. The shit doesn’t usually bother me, but I didn’t sleep for a week after that night.

  “And your friend was in danger last night, C. You had every reason and cause to move with unfettered ruthlessness. To be that unhesitating bad mothafucka that I personally know you to be in a time of crisis.”

  “But I paused.”

  “Why?”

  “Riley.” Sylvia Bell appears in the doorway. “He’s up.”

  I hear the cafetera clatter into the sink. “He . . . the ghostling? He’s here?”

  Riley squints at me. “This conversation isn’t over, Carlos.”

  “You brought him here?”

  Sylvia vanishes into the hallway. Riley shoots me a final, penetrating glare and then heads after her. “We locked him in your bathroom. Come have a look.”

  • • •

  The Council has an official policy against hiring child ghosts. It sounds good on paper, but the result is a bunch of young souls loitering around the living world. Most of them end up running dumb errands in exchange for toys or candy, and when the Council’s dumbass telepathy shit breaks down, they head right to one of those deserted alleyways full of little floating ghosticles with a handful of mints.

  So there you have it.

  Every once in a while one goes malignant. I’ve never gotten anyone to explain how this happens. Pent-up bitterness, some unresolved shit from their life, the infinite angst of being dead and aimless among the living. Everyone’s got theories. However it happens, it’s a terror to behold. They tend to lash out in random bursts, exploding through a room like tiny translucent Tasmanian devils and leave it a disaster area in seconds. And then they’ll vanish, sometimes for days, and pop up again a whole borough over, kill or maim a bunch of folks real quick again, with no apparent pattern or logic, and be gone. It’s rare, thankfully, but when it happens, it means they gotta get got quick. That’s the rule. See one, take it out.

  And yes, it’s fucked up, slicing a tiny shiny ghost, even when you know you’re sparing the world from an endless series of massacres. Doesn’t matter. We’re hardwired to protect anything small and helpless-looking, even if you walk up on it strangling a little old lady.

  Or your good friend.

  I shudder, soft-stepping down the hall behind Riley’s shimmering glow. I know he’s right and I still don’t know how to answer the question, which makes me want to kick his ass. A dull thud comes from behind the closed bathroom door, followed a few seconds later
by a scratching noise. Riley smiles back at me, and I flip him off. The thud happens again, then more scratching.

  “You put down one of those oogy-boogy ghost boundary things y’all love using?” I whisper.

  Sylvia nods. “He’s not going anywhere.”

  We stand in a semicircle facing my bathroom door. The thing thuds again, scratches. “Tell me again why y’all subdued this thing and brought it here for a sleepover instead of taking him out like we supposed to?” Sylvia opens her mouth, but I cut her off. “Because I seem to recall about five seconds ago having my ass handed to me for not dispatching him myself.”

  Riley shakes his head. “That was different. You hesitated and got jumped. We captured him. Tell him, Syl.”

  “He’s not acting right,” she says.

  “No shit. He’s been killing people in the park for a week.”

  “One.” Sylvia raises a finger. “He’s stayed within a set four-block radius. Two.” And another. “The attacks have happened one at a time and usually with twenty-four hours between them. And three, he followed Kia.”

  Thud.

  “What?”

  Scratch-scratch-scratch.

  “Yep,” Riley says. “After your milquetoast-ass save-the-day fail, Kia ran and the ghostling went after her. Followed her halfway up Marcy, and then she dropkicked the thing. Then Syl snatched him out the sky and we bagged it.”

  “Shit. So he’s . . .”

  “Not just some random angry child spirit gone bad,” Sylvia finishes.

  I look back and forth between them. “The fuck is it, then?”

  Riley shakes his head. “I hate to say this, but it seems like he’s been weaponized.”

  Thud.

  “Weaponized?”

  Scratch-scratch-scratch.

  “Like someone caught a child ghost, broke him, made him their own personal killing slave, basically, and then released him into the world.”

  “And who was he trying to—” I start to say, but I don’t have to finish. Riley’s staring at the bedroom door. And he already said the ghostling chased her. “No. Why would anyone—no.”

  Sylvia nods.

  “She did used to hang out at that park every day,” I whisper. “And then she stopped for a while, over some boy, I think. So you think”—thud—“the thing was operating on old intelligence, and when she wasn’t where she was sposta be, he just started killing folks randomly, waiting for her to get back?”

  Scratch-scratch.

  “Man.” Riley shakes his head. “Something like that. I know it’s not a perfect theory, but what else we got to go on? I never seen a wild ghostling act like that. I never seen anything act like that.”

  “So you brought the demon-child assassin to my house and locked him into the bathroom across from the girl he’s trying to kill?” My whisper is more like a strained cough.

  “The fuck else was I sposta do with him, man? This the only way we gonna find out what the fuck is going on. And anyway, I’m not really interested in your opinion at this moment. Consider your decision-making skills in question. Feel me, Dr. Hesitation?”

  “My decision-making . . . My?”

  “Listen, boys,” Sylvia says, inserting her formidable bulk between us. “You gotta relax. This isn’t going to . . .”

  The bedroom door opens, and we all whip around to see Kia staring wide-eyed from the darkness. “What . . . the . . . fuck?” she gasps.

  I feel my heart crumble a little. She heard everything. She stares at Riley’s floating translucent form, then Sylvia’s. The ghost’s touch gave her the Vision, alright. She blinks away tears, mouth a twisted frown.

  “Kia,” I say.

  She slams the door.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Kia

  I get my stuff together while Carlos knocks on the door and tries to sound reassuring.

  Fuck that. I heard what they said. I saw what I saw.

  Don’t have much. My phone and house keys are on the bedside table with my glasses and a hair clip.

  “Kia, answer me. We have to talk.”

  I brush down Carlos’s burgundy sheets—what kind of creep has burgundy sheets?—pull out the wrinkles, and find my jacket and shoulder bag in a big leather chair next to a bookshelf. Creep.

  I try to pull my mass of hair into something I can fit under a du rag. Give up. It’s doing what it wants and so the fuck am I.

  “Kia?”

  The thing . . . the demon child—its face flashes, that huge mouth stretches open, rows of sharp teeth and those dead, sunken-in eyes bore into mine. It’s just across the hall, thumping away in the bathroom. Trying to get to me.

  Fuck everything.

  “Kia, I’m coming in. I know you’re upset. I just need to talk to you, okay? I’m coming in.”

  I open the door and try to push past him. I just want to make it outside before I burst into tears or get my soul eaten by that demon child, but Carlos steps his tall lanky-ass self right in front of me.

  “Kia.”

  “Move.” I shove, hard. He must’ve been caught off guard, because I’m sure I’d never be able to actually move Carlos if he didn’t want me to. He stumbles back, a satisfying look of shock on his face. I’m halfway to the door when he grabs my arm, and I can tell by the grip there’s no shaking it. I try anyway.

  “Let the fuck go!”

  He spins me toward him and then holds both my arms.

  “Listen to me,” Carlos snarls. “This is not some teen-angst situation, Kia. Your life is in danger.”

  “That’s exactly why I’m trying to get the hell out of here, man.” My voice is wet with an oncoming sob, but I’m not gonna cry in front of Carlos. That’s not gonna happen. “Maybe I can find someone better equipped to save my ass out there.”

  Carlos blinks and straightens like I just clapped him across the face. I guess in a way I did. “I . . . I deserved that.”

  I stare at him. The urge to run seeps from me, and now I just want to hug Carlos and tell him it’s gonna be alright. Confusing-ass emotions. Then the thing thumps against the bathroom door again. We both look at it.

  “Let’s go up to the roof,” Carlos says. “We gotta talk.”

  I nod.

  • • •

  A muted daybreak opens across the warehouses and fancy new high-rises around us. The East River sparkles beneath the growing dawn, still alive with the last of Manhattan’s shine.

  We absorb it in silence for a few minutes, and then Carlos takes out one of those nasty-ass cigars he likes and offers me the pack with his eyebrows raised.

  “No, thanks, man. I want to reach voting age without my larynx rotting out.”

  He shrugs and lights his.

  “So.” I put my hands in my pockets and keep my eyes on the gray sky above the rooftops. “Turns out you’re not some crazy hallucinating guy.”

  Carlos barks a laugh. “And neither is Baba Eddie.”

  “Well, I knew that. And this Riley guy?”

  “My partner.”

  “He’s . . . dead.”

  “Very.”

  A seagull circles in front of us, caws its complaint, and then veers off toward the bay.

  “I guess I always thought . . .” I pause, search for the words. What did I always think? Everything’s a jumble right now. “I thought the whole ancestors thing Baba Eddie’s always talking about is more like a metaphor, you know? Like, he puts down food for them and smokes cigars with ’em and shit, but I thought that was just like . . . you know, symbolic.”

  “Nope.”

  “And you’re . . . Carlos, you’re dead too?”

  “Half.”

  I shake my head. “Alright, man. It’s all just a lot.”

  “I know. And I know last night was scary. Really scary.”

  I rub my neck and
try to cast off the unceasing memory of that face in mine.

  Carlos pulls on his cigar, exhales a pillar of smoke into the sky. “And we’re gonna figure out what the hell is going on, Kia. I know I was ragging on Riley about it, and I know it seems ridiculous, but he was right to bring the thing here.”

  My whole body tenses. I stay quiet, push back a sob.

  “There’s no other way to find out who sent it and why.”

  The sun emerges from a hazy muddle of clouds; it throws the scattered shadows of circling pigeons across our faces.

  “What . . .” I pause. Collect myself. “What am I supposed to do now, Carlos?”

  “I wish I could say everything’s just gonna be alright,” he says, “but that’s not a promise I can make you, Kia. You gotta live your life, but you gotta be careful. You have the Vision now; you’re gonna be seeing ghosts.”

  I shudder. “Like, everywhere? Man, I can’t handle this shit. I didn’t ask for this.”

  “Not everywhere, just . . . around. And I know it’s a shock at first—believe me—but you have to stay sharp. Just stay away from them. If one starts coming at you, you gotta run. I mean, most of them are harmless, really, and I don’t want you to walk around the rest of your life being afraid of the dead . . .”

  “No, why would I ever do that?”

  Carlos has already learned when not to take the bait with me. He stays the course. “Look, right now it’s clear something’s after you. And we got this one, but we can’t be sure there ain’t another one out there looking for you.”

  “Great.”

  He crouches and unstraps something from his boot. It’s a dagger, sheathed in a metal holster wrapped in worn leather. He holds it out to me with both hands, all ceremonious-like.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a blade like mine. It kills ghosts.”

  “Carlos, man . . .”

  “Kia, take it. I don’t usually give things to people, especially not ghost-killing things. This is important.”

  I scowl at the dagger, my arms crossed over my chest. It is pretty cool though. “Where am I supposed to keep that thing, man? You do realize I’m black, right?”