by Tricia Owens
Beside me, Lev snarled and leaped backward off his chair. He shifted into his wolf form. While normally that transformation was pretty interesting to me, this time the change only inspired dread. Once fully wolf, the black animal snarled in the direction of the kitchen, apparently seeing or sensing something that the rest of us didn't.
"I hate when dogs do that," I muttered, feeling the hair on my arms rising to match the wolf's ruffled hackles. "Freaks me out."
"There's something else in here." Christian snapped his fingers to gain the attention of the wolf. "Lev, can we wake Celestina? Is there any danger in that? Lev!"
The wolf only snarled at him.
"That's just great," I said as Lev went back to threatening the kitchen doorway. This was becoming a scene straight out of a horror movie. To Christian, I said, "Let's be safe and leave her be. We can handle—"
The cheese plate went hurtling across the room, nearly striking Christian in the head. We all dove for the floor. The shop began to shake hard enough to make the table legs rattle against the floor. Dolls and candy bars and other offerings fell off the Lwa altar. It could have been an earthquake. We sometimes felt them from California, but I doubted the timing of it.
Then something entered the room. I was as certain of it as if someone had loudly announced, "I'm he-re!"
It was big. Bigger than a person, and it displaced air as though it had physical form. I could feel it moving toward us from the kitchen, some kind of wraith, invisible to the eye but registering on my other senses in a bad way. I tried to remember if wraiths could hurt you, but this just wasn't my area.
"Something's coming," I muttered urgently to Christian.
"I know. I feel it." He wrapped an arm protectively around Melanie who was whimpering. I was jealous, not going to lie. But I also wasn't content to sit there and wait for whatever we'd allowed into this world to come get us.
"I've got to do it," I muttered to myself but Melanie's monkey ears were sharp.
"Anne, you just talked to the Oddsmakers!" she reminded me with brown eyes gone as large as an owl's. "You can't use your magick again!"
"While I agree it's not the best idea, I don't think there's much choice."
Calling up my magick to fight really was dangerous, not only because it would ping on the radar of the Oddsmakers but because every time I gave Lucky enough energy to have solid form, I felt the pull of my ancestral blood and that pull seemed to be growing stronger. It was a frightening sensation, like slowly sliding into madness. In this case it was a madness that beckoned and cajoled, offering the allure of power and freedom.
Just say no to drugs and dragons, Anne.
Hesitation in a fight or flight situation was what got you into trouble. But I genuinely didn't know what to do. The wraith had reached the middle of the room. Now that it was closer I could see a slight shimmer in the air that made everything behind the wraith appear to be melting. And I could smell it, too: cold, stale and slightly meaty/metallic, like the first air belched from a freezer in the garage that used to hold steaks. Was that the smell of where this thing had come from? Is that where we'd end up if this thing attacked us?
"Screw it," I whispered. I started to call up Lucky—
Everything went still.
Lev stopped snarling. The tension in the air vanished along with the wraith. After a few seconds of quiet, I peeked above the edge of the table and looked over at Celestina. She was shaking her head in little jerks, as if she were trying to clear her ears of water. She stopped doing that when she noticed me staring.
"Sorry," she said curtly. She smacked her lips. Did she taste the ectoplasm? "That went off the rails for a bit, but everything's fine now."
"Celestina, what was that?" I demanded as my friends and I climbed to our feet. Lev trotted over to his girlfriend and licked the hand she stretched out to him.
"At the end? An interloper. When you open the gate between planes, pushy things try to squeeze past. Usually they're bad things. But not always. Sometimes a spirit can't or refuses to let go of their former life."
"This one was definitely bad, bad, bad!" Melanie scrubbed her arms violently. "I was super scared."
"That one was not one of the 'good' ones, I agree." Celestina blew out the candles. The smoke that rose up reminded me of the ghostly emissions that had leaked from her face while she was channeling. "Your mom was here," she said, watching me. "In the beginning. The Lwa brought her forward. That part was real. That was her spirit speaking to you."
The muscles in my chest squeezed tight for a moment. My mom had been here. She'd talked me. As best she could, at least. What was it she'd said?
Miss you so much.
I had to blink rapidly for a couple of seconds to stem the emotion that wanted to boil up and over. I never cried over my parents. I cried over the loss of them, over the life I'd been forced to live without them, but not over them in particular. I didn't know them.
But those four words were a parent's words. A mother's words. Words that I hadn't heard in over twenty years. Later, I promised myself, I would pull up the memory of the séance like a favorite book, and I would pore over every word and allow myself to feel the sorrow and pleasure that they invoked in me. But now was not the time for that.
"We need to write down everything she said." I looked around for paper and a pen and settled with grabbing Melanie's phone and accessing the memo app.
I entered the words as my friends called them out. When we were finished, I studied everything I'd typed with a frown. "Was she trying to say the gargoyle now lives in Texas?"
"Near a lake in Texas," Melanie suggested. "We can look that up!"
"I think the lake reference was about Lake Mead." I related what Vale had told me about the golem and how it had been made from the mud of the lake.
"What does the 'like us' comment mean?" Celestina paused in the middle of the room, cheese platter in hand. "Dragon sorcerers can make golems?"
"Not that anyone's ever told me. Otherwise I would've constructed a housekeeper and a cook by now."
Christian laughed. "That's all? Oh, that's right, you ran into Vale again. So you're good in that department."
I gave him a look before concentrating again on what my mom had told us. She had specifically said a dragon had made it. How was that possible? Had my parents been hunting down another dragon sorcerer who'd gone rogue?
Or was the 'like us' comment something simpler, an indication that the golem-maker was a magickal being? Or perhaps even Chinese? Or a woman? So many possibilities...
Melanie picked up a fallen piece of cheese, blew on it, and popped it in her mouth. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"That's usually dangerous or crazy," I replied. "Or it involves sugar."
She grinned around the cheese. "What if that dragon we saw out in the desert tonight was the guy who made this golem thingy? What if he's coming for you, too?!"
I'd already considered that but it didn't make sense to me. "Why tonight? Why come after me over twenty years later? Why not hunt me down when I was just a kid and didn't have a good handle on Lucky?"
"Maybe they didn't know about you until now," Celestina suggested. "You said you used a lot of magick to defeat the demon inside Vale. Maybe the Oddsmakers weren't the only ones who noticed when you did that."
That made sense and it worried me. I preferred flying under the radar. Attention usually came from the wrong sorts of people, even if on the surface they seemed friendly or were admirers. When people came looking for you, they usually wanted something from you, if only a chunk of your time.
"I hope you're wrong. Both about someone noticing what I've done with Lucky and about the dragon on the playa being a signal that someone's coming after me." I walked to the table and picked up my panda pin. I rubbed it for good luck. "Unfortunately, I won't know for sure until someone one day shows up. Until then, we need to keep digging. We need to find out what Texas means. And this thing my mom said: 'under dark city'."
"
Las Vegas is never dark, so it can't be here," Christian pointed out.
Celestina clucked her tongue at him like he'd raised his hand and offered the wrong answer. "Have you considered that 'dark' is meant metaphorically?"
Christian winked at her. "Too large a word for me."
She rolled her eyes. "Many people would say Vegas is dark and sinful. I say this is referring to the city's underbelly. The seedier sections."
"So going with that interpretation," I said, thinking out loud, "would mean something beneath the bad part of town. North Vegas or somewhere around downtown."
"I still think that's playing fast and loose with interpretations." Christian obviously didn't like it. "What if your mother was referring to an old mining town? Someplace abandoned? There are a few around Vegas."
"We can keep those as options, but Vale said the golem-maker was in the city." I closed the phone. "I think I'm going to spend some time looking at maps and come up with a plan."
~~~~~
I spent the rest of the night on the internet, studying maps of the city, zooming in on street images, and even looking beyond Vegas at the old abandoned towns that Christian had suggested. There were a half dozen old mining towns scattered around southern Nevada, the most promising of which was Nelson, home of the Techatticup Mine where lots of men were killed. It was a regular Wild West killing fields. Sometimes when a place became violent like that, it didn't happen naturally, or else the killings built upon a single event that permanently stained the place with bad mojo. No doubt there was a magickal connection in there that might exist to this day if I looked deep enough.
But I felt that leaving the Las Vegas city limits was a mistake at this point. We needed to focus on the magickal heart of the valley because that was where a magickal being was most likely to gravitate. All of us felt a subconscious pull to the city because our bodies recognized the chance magick that pooled here, growing larger each time a gambler made a bet. That chance magick made spells, curses, hexes, and magickal constructs stronger, and who wouldn't want that?
Bleary eyed from staring at squiggly lines for hours, I finally crashed in my bed around nine a.m. Not even the steps of the entity on the roof could prevent me from sliding immediately into deep dreams. I dreamed of flying over the desert in my dragon form with a gargoyle by my side. I couldn't tell if the gargoyle was Vale or the golem. My dream self didn't care, nor did I care that I must have given in fully to my nature and lost touch with my humanity. That was supposed to be the worst thing I could do—surrender to the dragon in my blood—but in my dream, being a magickal beast was freeing and glorious.
The gargoyle and I flew over the valley. Sometimes fireworks shot up at us like missiles. But we were as agile as birds and ducked and wove between the sparking lights with ease. I roared my joy. It was a sound that rattled my bones and tickled my heart. I was meant to be a dragon. This was my calling. This was—
I woke up, suspicious and nervous. The protection wards had activated, humming against my senses.
Squinting against the afternoon sun, I made my way into the shop and peered through the front window that I'd had fixed after Vale's gargoyle shattered it. The rock pattern in my yard remained undisturbed so the wards were still up. Beyond the black iron gates separating my yard from the sidewalk sat a tall box. UPS? But why would that set off the wards? Last I knew, Gary, the driver, was just some guy with a son who was a football wunderkind who Gary hoped would one day play in the NFL.
I dragged on some clothes and my sunglasses and let myself outside. Heat punched me in the face, but Vegas in July was like that. You never, ever went around barefoot unless you were practicing for fire walking in Hawaii.
When I reached the box I circled it. No shipping labels, which meant it hadn't come from UPS, FedEx or the Postal Service. Melanie would yell trap, and I'd be yelling with her, but I couldn't simply leave this thing here. What if it was a trap and it sprung on one of my customers or a kid walking by?
I took a careful look around the neighborhood. Everyone would be home and every shop would be open at this time of day. Fremont Street was visible from where I stood. This wasn't the ideal location to call up Lucky. Way too many witnesses.
"Maybe it's time you start learning kung fu," I told myself.
In lieu of that, I kicked the box over and jumped away from it.
It fell over easily. Whatever was inside didn't weigh very much, maybe a couple of pounds at most. I crept closer and kicked it again. It slid up the cracked sidewalk to the border with Celestina's yard.
Since nothing seemed to be alive inside it, I decided to risk opening it. I approached it from the bottom, though, just in case it was booby trapped. With my fingernail I picked up the edge of the strapping tape and then pulled the long strip off until the bottom flaps fell open.
Inside were a pair of jeans, a dark T-shirt, black Converse, socks, boxer briefs...and Vale's gargoyle statue.
I grabbed everything and hustled inside my shop, where I chucked the box and then placed the statue on the counter. The snarling gargoyle looked none the worse for wear. The volcano rock or whatever magick stone he was comprised of was still crazily light weight and unmarred.
"So instead of sending me a cake and jumping out of it, you send yourself to me in a box as a gargoyle. Real romantic, Vale."
A Post-It note was stuck to the gargoyle's muscled chest.
Moody,
Don't go anywhere without me. I have learned something important. Be ready at sundown. Do not leave without me!
The script was neat and masculine, so I guessed that Vale had written it. Though I was annoyed that he wanted me to sit around on my butt all day, I appreciated that he entrusted me with his most vulnerable form. When he was a statue he was incapable of defending himself. I could do anything to him right now, including smash his statue. Would that end his life? I wasn't sure. Gargoyle lore was still a mystery to me. But I suspected that being shattered wouldn't feel too great if it didn't outright kill him.
"So maybe this is a bit sexier than a cake," I allowed as I placed his statue where the Egyptian canopic jars used to sit before he and Lucky destroyed them in an aerial battle inside Moonlight.
His statue was pretty cool looking and I would have liked it even if I hadn't known it was Vale's form. Maybe subconsciously I had a thing for gargoyles. Or as the cursed cameos had claimed, I was fated to fall for him. I gave the statue a fond pat on the head and went back to my studio to prepare for the day.
A quick shower in my sometimes-bloody bathroom preceded a quick blowout of my long, dark hair. Melanie had stocked me up with two slices of chili-papaya bread from her family's food truck. I swore she was trying to make me bust out of my jeans. One slice and a cup of freeze dried coffee later, and I was ready to face a partial day of retail.
Not five minutes after I turned on the neon Open sign, my first potential customer walked through the door of Moonlight.
"I need cash," said the young girl who hurried up to the counter.
She was younger than me, maybe barely twenty-one. Bright blond hair the color of straw was braided and fell over her tanned shoulders. She wore a turquoise tank top and frayed white shorts and flip flops. A tattoo of Totoro sat on the top of her left foot. In her right hand she held a gun.
I didn't hold up my hands in the international sign of "don't shoot". Instead, I called up Lucky as a cool breeze that looped through the shop behind the girl.
"Are you robbing me?" I asked her.
Most pawn shops used hired muscle at the door. A lot of customers at these types of places were desperate and if they didn't get the price they wanted for their item they sometimes decided to try robbing you for the money instead. I never felt the need for human security just because there were ways to use my sorcery that were just as efficient and frankly more amusing.
Plus, I wasn't too keen on sharing Moonlight with an employee. The shop technically still belonged to my uncle, and I felt a sense of obligation to him to keep thin
gs just as he'd left them. It was optimistic of me, since it'd been over two years now since he'd gone missing, but letting go of hope was difficult, and I hadn't completely done it yet. Until that time came, Moonlight would never have a second employee.
"Am I robbing you?" the girl repeated, eyes wide. "What are you talking about?"
"You're pointing a gun at me. You told me you wanted cash."
"Oh, shit! Sorry!" She slammed the gun on the counter so hard it made me wince. Especially when the cursed cameos woke up.
"Anne Moody...death will meet you!"
"...prepare to meet your maker..."
"Death to Anne Moody!"
I gritted my teeth and did my best to ignore their high pitched voices as I carefully slid the gun to the end of the counter, its barrel pointing at the wall.
"I just want to sell that," the girl said dismissively, like she was trying to pawn an ashtray. She flipped her braids over her shoulders. "It's my boyfriend's but he dumped me so eff him. If he wants it back he can buy it back from you, right?"
She gave me a look like she thought I'd want to high-five her in the interests of female solidarity, but I wasn't interested in playing along.
"Wrong," I said with a sigh. "Some pawn shops buy guns but Moonlight isn't one of them. Sorry."
"But—but, look at it! It's all shiny. It's brand new. It's gotta be worth a lot of money." She looked around as if preparing to tell me an off-color or racist joke, and whispered, "It'll be between us. Our secret. You can sell it to some gangbangers later for a lot of money."
"Gangbangers." Was this girl for real?
"Sure, they're all over, right?" She waved vaguely at the street. "Downtown for sure. Some skeevey guys tried to sell us cocaine last night. Like I'd ever buy from someone I don't know." She pinched her nose with two fingers. "And besides that, blech, did they stink! Joey—" her breath caught over the memory of whom I assumed was the asshole ex-boyfriend, "—said that they were probably homeless or living under the freeways or something. They shouldn't allow that. The city, I mean. They should ship them out into the desert or something. Those guys were disgusting."