by Claire Kane
“C’mon,” he said, gliding cautiously toward the car.
“Since when,” Jessica replied, “did you become ‘Mission Command’?”
“Just try to keep up. You heard what she said on the couch. We can’t just let her kill someone.”
“But we don’t know—”
The Jetta coughed to life, then roared, before thunking into reverse. Victor half expected to see the tranny drop right there in the parking stall, but the little car managed to grind its way backwards into the street, and then shuffle toward the apartment’s main gate.
“We don’t need to know,” he said, flying after the car, but keeping out of reach of the hive of evil spirits still swimming around Cindra. Jessica followed, a determined look on her face.
The Jetta made its way to the nearby freeway entrance, then managed to reach adequate speed less than a mile after merging with freeway traffic. Victor and Jessica easily kept up as the witch headed into town. Victor spent the next twenty minutes alternatively trying to tap Cindra’s mind for her plans and praying hard that the woman didn’t accidentally kill anyone, the way she swerved and jerked through evening traffic. Jessica huffed in irritation a few times, but he knew she was praying too. Miraculously, by the time the battered Volkswagen lurched to a stop, Cindra hadn’t sent anyone to the hospital.
Victor took in the scene as Cindra parked and got out. “She brought us to The Illusion?”
Jessica shrugged. “I’m a fashionista-turned-mommy-turned-demon slayer, not an anthropologist. Who knows why people waste all their money here?”
Victor descended as close to Cindra as he dared. “If all she was going to do was blow a paycheck, I wouldn’t be worried.”
Without warning, Cindra thrust her hands into the air and cackled. “I’ll teach you, you pompous Nazis, not to steal my show out from under me. Let’s see how you handle real magic! You’ll pray for dawn before I’m done.” And with that, she began chanting. Legion and the other dark spirits seemed to quiver with a strange mix of pleasure and pain. An ebony vortex appeared in the ground next to her, starting small, but soon growing to the size of a car. What looked like a pool of green lava bubbled up from inside it.
“That’s the kind of thing I worry about,” Victor added with wide eyes.
Jessica scowled at the other woman. “Invoking the devil in a parking lot? So tacky.”
Victor’s jaw dropped. “That’s what she’s doing? And… the best adjective you can find for it is ‘tacky’?”
Jessica shook her head. “She won’t get far, thankfully—the portal to the Underworld is still closed. The whole way she’s going about it tells me she’s a clueless amateur. But she’s drawing an awful lot of dark ones to her. That’ll cause problems all by itself. Time for me to go to work,” she said, ignoring his question. With that, her face softened into that perfect serenity he’d seen earlier. Her whole body glowed, but not just with the “I’m an angel and this is what we do” kind of glow, but the “I’m an avenging angel, and let me show you what I’m going to do” kind. Then she bolted straight for the suffocating black cloud. In an instant, she vanished.
Victor stood, stunned for the briefest of moments, then barrelled after her, completely forgetting everything he’d been taught about fighting demons. All he knew was that Cindra needed to be stopped, and that he could somehow help.
A wave of force stopped him in his tracks, and Jessica’s upper body emerged from the cloud. “Stay back, Victor,” her calm voice showing clear signs of strain. “You’re only fueling them.” Tentacles of sin reached out to drag her in, but she rebuffed them with a stiff wave.
“But I can’t just—”
“You can and you will. Let me focus on dealing with this mess. You just track Cindra if she runs.”
He clenched his teeth and nodded, stepping back. His soothed the impulsive rage from his mind and tried sending calming, happy thoughts toward Jessica. Privately, he was beyond words for how such a flippant, shallow woman could have turned into a steady, responsible, demon slayer as he saw before him.
In a strange, angelic way, he was startled to realize the change was a turn-on. “I’m dead,” he muttered to himself. “I checked my libido at the Pearly Gates.”
A second spurt of emerald lava grabbed his attention, but whatever Jessica was doing, it seemed to be working. Through the choking vapors writhing around Cindra he could see snatches of holy light. The fiery bubbles began to quickly recede, and the portal shrank just as quickly. An anguished cry went up, followed by an inhuman shriek. The vortex violently imploded and vanished in a whimper of smoke. Within seconds, the tattered image of Cindra Fey staggered quickly out of the swarm of her demon companions, and toward The Illusion, her face twisted in angry frustration. Jessica did not follow. Victor turned for his former girlfriend, but her voice pierced his mind.
Just tail her. Please trust me. I’ll be fine.
He halted halfway between Cindra and Jessica. Cindra may have appeared broken, but her ability to make mischief was still clear, though she didn’t seem like much of a threat at the moment. The monsters trying to eat Jessica, on the other hand…
Yet the holy light still flashed, and he could feel just how strong his once-girlfriend had become. Clear images of her child flashed in Victor’s mind, and he knew Jessica was using them to keep her centered and to do what she was doing. She was right. He needed to trust her; she was better at this than he was anyway. And so he followed Cindra into the hotel.
The woman made her way to a side door, found it locked, and growled in frustration. She circled the perimeter until she found an open loading dock at the far back of the casino, then made for the entrance. A security guard caught up to her before she even reached it.
A crowbar came out of nowhere, and took the man in the face. He stumbled back with a cry, and Cindra hit him three more times in the head, leaving him unconscious on the floor. She tucked the hunk of iron back in her coat and pulled out a heavy-duty pistol. After watching the woman playing with magic, moments ago, the pistol and crowbar looked laughably weak. Still, you could kill a person with either and even if he couldn’t get much from her mind, her intent was murderously clear.
She pushed through a set of double doors and prowled into the bowels of the hotel. Behind her the alarmed chatter of a security radio played on the shoulder of the downed guard, and Victor breathed a sigh of relief. Hotel security would be all over this any moment. They’d surely seen her in the cameras, and were probably on their way now. Victor followed her anyway.
Yet, when three minutes passed with no sign of security, and Cindra roaming freely through service corridors and muttering about vengeance, Victor’s own alarms started going off. What was happening in the hotel that prevented them from dealing with a psychotic woman wielding a gun and a crowbar? Surprising the guard on the dock was one thing, but she should have been nabbed before even the first minute had elapsed.
That meant that something else was at play. Victor’s complete ignorance worried him almost as much as watching Cindra barge into the backstage area of The Zigmund and Ross Show, pistol ready to shoot.
THIRTEEN
Lacey readied her pistol. She stopped and looked down at the gun, wondering why she had even pulled it out of her bag. Feeling foolish, she set the gun back in her purse.
“What is the matter with you, Lacey?” she asked, forcing herself to stroll as casually as she could along the back corridor Ross had directed her to take.
The hallway was surprisingly nice, with ample lighting and wood paneling on the walls. Even the industrial carpet had colorful patterns on it. It was the oppressive stillness that got to her. That and the lingering sense that the security guard, Konski again (who had admitted her with the barest glance at her I.D.), might still be watching. The way he’d eyed her, as she’d past, sent shivers down her spine. Though she hadn’t glanced back, she felt his eyes on her all the way until she turned a first corner a very long half-minute later.
As she
made her way deeper into The Illusion, the nice, “executive office” feel gave way to “working industrial,” as carpet was replaced with concrete, and canned lighting gave way to buzzing fluorescents, the only sound between her and maddening silence. Ross had given only vague instructions in the few moments before she’d hung up, and she struggled to make sense of them, wishing she had paid better attention to things the last time she’d been down here. Then again, she’d nearly been eaten by a tiger, so she could forgive herself for missing details that didn’t pertain to survival. Still, she was certain she was going in circles when she started seeing the same posters for the Zigmund and Ross show plastered on the walls. She couldn’t help but remember nightmares of being lost in a haunted fun house.
Forget worrying about paranoia. She brought out her gun.
She rounded a corner that seemed to match Ross’ directions, and stopped with a yelp, whipping her gun in front of her. There, looking back at her, was… herself. And five other “Laceys” all seen from different angles, standing in the after-hours darkness of a prop room. Her shoulders slumped as she exhaled, and she laughed, chiding herself for being so jumpy and working to calm her racing heart. Still, she kept her gun out as she turned around.
“Fräulein?” a hoarse voice called from deeper in the room. “Lacey? Is that you?”
She turned. “Ross?”
“Can’t… speak well. Please, come on back.”
“I was hoping to meet somewhere a little, ah, better lit?”
Ross coughed. “This is the perfect place for sharing secrets, Fräulein. Please, hurry. Ziggy would not be pleased if he knew what I was doing here. He does not wish for me to speak of the dark arts. He is an unbeliever.”
Lacey bit her lower lip and searched in vain for a light switch. “I thought you said you didn’t do black magic?”
“Lacey? Please hurry.”
“Coming,” she said, scowling. The darkness gave her all the more reason to move cautiously as she pressed forward, passing lifelike mannequins, smoke generators, lights of all kind and a veritable obstacle course of mirrors. “Can you meet me halfway?” she called. No reply.
A movement caught her eye and she spun, gun forward only to see her reflection again. A cold sensation crept down her back and she forced herself to control her breathing. Ross was being incredibly bizarre about this, but if his information was as good as she hoped, she’d wrap up the investigation here and now, and be done with this circus for good.
There! The movement again, only this time she heard footsteps. Keeping her pistol low but ready, she put her back to a wall. Cautiously, she called, “Ross? I know your voice is bad, but could you keep talking even just a little, to guide me in through this mess?”
She heard a skittering and some angry mumbling from beyond the wall. “Hello? Ross?” The skittering stopped, but she could sense that whatever was making it wasn’t far. Something crashed, and she jumped. She heard a masculine, strangled cry from somewhere ahead. She avoided the instinct to simply run, but instead inched forward, keeping low, scanning the scattered mirrors for signs of what was going on.
There was another crash. “Lacey!” Ross sounded terrified.
Forgetting herself, she rushed forward, banging and tripping her way through props and cords. A dark figure reflected in three mirrors beyond her. Its hand came up, and a glint of polished steel betrayed the gun in its grasp.
“Ross! I’m coming!” It was stupid to announce her presence, but she whirled past the mirrors to where she could see the shadowed person, gun still coming up. The figure twisted awkwardly toward her, gun coming to bear.
A shot rang out.
Lacey screamed and fired twice.
There was a sickening thump.
Someone ran, cackling.
Lacey rushed after them, but tripped on a prop she hadn’t seen and went down hard. Stumbling to her feet, she brought her gun up, praying she wasn’t about to get shot. Instead, she heard a low moan from the figure lying on the floor. She inched toward whomever it was, covering them with her Magnum. The person seemed to still be breathing, but only just. Then, the shadowed person exhaled in a very final way.
Sensing she was out of danger, Lacey hurried forward, pulling her phone from her bag and turning on the flashlight. She screamed despite herself, and her phone clattered to the floor beside the perforated body of Pietr Ross. Her hands flew up to her mouth and bile rose in her throat. What had she done?
She was vaguely aware of the sound of voices and footfalls coming in her direction.
“Lacey,” a man said behind her. Distantly, she recognized the voice came from Victor St. John, her one-time boyfriend who had become her partner in crime fighting after his untimely murder. “Lacey are you al—” He stopped short, and from the corner of her eyes, Lacey could see him gaping at the dead man. After a long moment, he turned to her, eyes shining with concern. She was sure she was going to be sick.
“Lacey,” Victor said, placing his immaterial hands on her shoulders, “it’ll be best to turn yourself in. Just tell the cops the truth I can already see in your mind. Trust me,” he said, leaning forward, “it’ll be better this way.”
A second later, a door she hadn’t even been aware of was kicked open, and a pair of police officers rushed in, weapons drawn. “Metro PD! Hands where we can see ‘em!” Lacey slowly raised her hands and quietly began to cry.
It was the first time she’d ever killed another human being.
FOURTEEN
“It wasn’t your fault,” Victor said, standing beside Lacey who was a crumpled mess on the holding cell’s floor. “You were acting out of defense. You were trying to save Ross.”
“And instead I killed him.” Tears streamed down Lacey’s sullen expression as she scooted in closer to her corner.
“Someone else was in there,” Victor said, trying to console her by adding things up further. “A gunman.”
“What does that matter? Again, I killed Ross. I was the gunman.”
Blue eyes widening, Victor took a seat beside her, wishing he could grab her hands and give her courage. “No, it was someone else, and I think I know who.”
Lacey finally looked up, making eye contact.
“Her name is Cindra Fey. She’s another magician—this goth chick who uses black magic. I’ve never seen so many demons around one person.”
“Hm,” Lacey barely hummed.
“Listen, I’ll see what more I can find out. You won’t be locked up for good. I’ll find a way to prove your innocence. You may have shot Ross, but there was someone else there.”
“Victor, just please go.” Lacey ran a hand through her hair with a look of total defeat. “I need… a break. To have my own thoughts to myself. I don’t even like you seeing me like this.” She shook a hand. “I’m completely fallen apart.”
“You’re still beautiful. Always.” He softly grazed her cheek with a hand. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when you needed me.”
Lacey looked at him with her big almond-shaped eyes, and he knew she was feeling a war within her heart. But she ultimately said, “I didn’t ask you to be there for me. In fact, I told you not to be.”
Victor shoved his hands into his ethereal jean pockets. “Like you’re doing now.”
Lacey tilted her head in irritation. “Yes, like I’m doing now.”
Without thinking, he said it. “I love you, Lacey.”
Lacey simply shook her head. “Why?”
“Why?” he repeated with raised brows.
“I mean, I’ve told you over and over in so many words, Victor, that we could never work. We’re not compatible.”
He shrugged a shoulder. “I think I make you happy. I make you laugh.”
“That’s not all love’s about.”
“Have you ever been in love?” His eyebrows went up with hope.
“No.”
“Coming from experience, I—”
Lacey slapped a hand against the concrete floor. “No, Victor. I don�
�t need this right now. I’m locked up. I’m in jail. And you—you’re dead! Don’t talk to me about love. It’s an unwanted topic and not even remotely appropriate.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Just go. Please.”
Victor hesitated for an uncomfortably long moment, then, with a sigh, faded from sight. The next moment the cell rattled open and an officer called Lacey forward.
*
Having confirmed that Jessica had resolved the situation with Cindra’s demons, Victor had asked her for some time alone. She agreed, and he set off, meaning to aimlessly walk The Strip and think things over. Instead, an urgent force grabbed him and hauled him skyward at astonishing speed, and through a blinding curtain of light. Calm music filled his mind and scents that were literally heavenly enticed his nose. Earth had no peace to compare to what he felt as he passed into that higher realm. And yet he sighed, knowing that if he was being recalled so abruptly that it was because all was not well in the Sky.
He was, therefore, unsurprised to find himself landing in front of a scowling black-and-gold tabby. So you think that was funny, do you? she demanded.
Victor rolled his eyes. “I was about to make a comment about women’s unrealistic expectations that men be mind readers, then I remembered that I really can do that here, so… no. I don’t think it was funny for me to jump into that tiger like that. In fact, it was really weird, and almost… icky? That sounds like such a sissy word.”
Rao glowered. You took unauthorized possession of another creature’s body. Do you have any idea how violating that is? How utterly against what Heaven is about?
Victor gaped, thinking about the tiger that nearly ate Lacey’s face off. “Yes, of course I knew. I grew up reading The New Testament at New Life Church. But are you saying I should have just let Lacey die?”
Rao stuck her nose in his face. You know death is not the worst thing that can happen to someone. Look around. She waved testily at the breathtaking surroundings.