by Cory Barclay
“What does the name Shannon Barton mean to you?” Dale asked.
“Nothing. I’ve never heard it before.”
“Bullshit!” Dale roared. Just for good measure, he shoved Michelangelo, hard, in the chest.
The cherub stumbled a few feet backward, but he didn’t move nearly as far as Dale hoped he would have . . .
Steve started thinking that maybe he had miscalculated Dale’s worth in this endeavor.
A couple people who were watching the growing spectacle gasped at seeing the acclaimed artist being pushed. One of them escaped inside the building, presumably to get the gatekeeper.
“It’s the truth,” Michelangelo said. He stepped forward and lowered his chin, gazing into Dale’s eyes. “And don’t try to push me again, you heathen.”
At seeing Michelangelo’s face turn serious and severe, he looked more angelic and radiant and scary than ever before. The color fell from Dale’s face as he must have realized he’d made a serious lapse in judgment in agreeing to be the “tough guy.”
“Okay, I won’t,” Dale spat again, trying to stay tough sounding but utterly failing. “But I still don’t believe you.”
“Angels don’t lie.”
“Lucifer was an angel, asshole,” Steve chipped in. “Pretty sure he stretched a few truths.”
Michelangelo looked down at Steve with a deep frown. “What is it you people want from me, exactly?”
Steve decided Dale was taking too long to get to the point, and when he turned around he realized the puffed-up gatekeeper had just come outside on the grass and was headed in their direction.
“Did you brainwash Mrs. Barton to love you? To command her to try to run me over?” Steve blurted.
The stern look on Michelangelo’s face vanished. It became confused and contorted. “What. The. Hell . . . are you talking about?” He sounded hurt, like he’d grievously sinned in saying the H-word. “I’ve never heard that name, like I said, and also, didn’t Aiden tell you?”
“Tell us what?” Dale asked. He’d been pretty sloshed when they’d first met Aiden and Michelangelo at The Shack.
But Steve remembered. He’d been sober. He started shaking his head and, in a low voice, said, “He can make anyone fall in love with someone . . . but can never find love himself. He’ll be forever lonely.”
“Exactly,” Michelangelo snapped. Now he really sounded hurt. “I can help people fine their soulmate, but no one will ever fall in love with me. That’s my curse.”
All animosity had exited Dale’s demeanor. He hung his head and said, “Aw, wow, man . . . I’m sorry. That really sucks.”
Just then, the exalted bouncer came rushing in. “Excuse me, gentlemen, are you giving our esteemed guest a hard time? Michelangelo, are they giving you a hard time?”
The cherub stared daggers at Dale and Steve, then turned away. “No, they were just on their way out.”
And after that, with $60 wasted, Steve, Dale, and Annabel left the grounds of the museum embarrassed, their tails between their legs.
When they got back in the car, Dale said from the backseat, “Well okay, I forgot about that one, but I have another theory . . . one that involves the succubus we met . . .”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Your first theory made sense, but this one just sounds batshit crazy,” Steve said to Dale as they drove away from the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. He was looking at Dale through the rearview mirror, watching as his friend caressed his double chin.
Dale said, “I dunno, man, I think it makes sense. Who was it that said that thing about ‘confusing lust for love?’ Freud?”
“No, I think Freud was the one who said you want to have sex with your mother,” Steve said.
“Well, whoever it was, that is a thing, Steve-o. Confusing lust for love, I mean. It happens. Hell, I do it almost every time I’m drunk at a bar and see a pretty girl with big ti—”
Steve loudly cleared his throat and stopped Dale cold. “We get it, Fats. There’s a lady present, you know.”
Annabel said, “I can handle it, Mister Steve. I’d like to hear Mister Fats’ reasoning on this one.”
Enthusiastic to please, Dale jumped forward, so his big head stuck between the space between the two front seats. “Okay, so everyone who encounters the succubus falls in love with her, right? Or falls in lust with her. Whatever.”
“Sure,” Steve said.
“And even Scarlet told us it’s not just men who fall in love with her. That leads me to believe women could fall for her, too. Right?”
“So far so good.”
“So, the succubus brainwashed Shannon Barton—or used her lust-powers—to get her to try to run you over. Fortunately, Shannon is a woman, and therefore a terrible driver—”
“Hey!” Annabel said.
“I’m sorry, but I’m just stating facts here, Bel,” Dale said, obviously not citing his sources on those “facts.” “The fairer sex are worse drivers than us ogres.”
“Tell that to Danica Patrick,” Steve said.
“Thank you,” Annabel said, bowing her head slightly to Steve.
“We’re getting off track here!” Dale waved his arms around in the air.
“Even if what you say is true about Scarlet, do you think she would have the power to actually brainwash someone to carry out murder for her?” Annabel asked.
Dale shrugged. “I don’t see why not. Succubi are demons, right? Demons are known to be quite murdery, Bel.”
Steve was shaking his head. He pulled the car up to a red light and ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t like this. It’s one thing to accuse an innocent angel of this type of thing . . . but Scarlet . . . she’s the Druid’s daughter for Christ’s sake. If what you say is true, that means not only can we not trust Scarlet, we can’t trust her mom, either.”
“Yeah,” Dale said, “it’s all very Usual Suspects. Who is Keyser Söze? In this case, I think it’s a murderous succubus who’s capable of stealing the hearts of men and women.”
“What do you think, Bel?” Steve asked, yielding to the only expert on Mythics in the car.
Annabel sighed. “Dale’s theory does have credence, as much as I would like to believe it doesn’t. We can’t just strike it from the record because we don’t like it.”
“Thank you,” Dale said, nodding his head and sitting back in his seat.
The light turned green and Steve put his foot on the gas. As the car rolled onward, everyone inside fell silent.
A minute later, Steve said, “Why don’t we go talk with January? See what she has to say about this?”
Dale was incredulous. He immediately leaped forward, putting his face back between Steve and Annabel’s. “And collude with the enemy?! We can’t do that!”
“We don’t know if she’s the enemy, Fats . . . it’s just your wild hunch. What if she knows nothing about this? Maybe she could clarify some of this. She does seem to be the most reliable source on these kinds of things.”
“She can also twist the truth any way it suits her, Steve-o. She could have been filling you with lies this entire time!” Dale said adamantly. “And besides, I’d think she would know if her daughter was doing some dubious shit behind her back.”
“You’ve never had a daughter, Fats, and neither have I. But I’ve seen enough movies to know that teenage girls can do some pretty reckless things without their parents knowing about it. This could be one of those cases.” Even though Scarlet isn’t a teenager, Steve thought, but didn’t want to undermine his own argument out loud.
“And if she’s an enemy?” Dale asked. “What then? Then we’ll be even more confused. She could be the final boss for all we know!”
Steve groaned. “She said she was my father’s lover. If she was a bad guy, do you really think she would have told us all about Myth Seekers and Myth Hunters and all that? Why would she help us at all, if she was trying to hurt us?”
Dale chuckled condescendingly. “You clearly don’t know how bad guys operat
e, Steve-o.” He pointed a finger at his temple, indicating his brain, and said, “They try to get in your head. Like Freud.”
“Please, not Freud again . . .” Annabel muttered.
“She’s not a fucking James Bond villain, Fats,” Steve retorted.
“You’re right,” Dale said. “I see her as more of a Disney villain . . . because she’s magical. And Annabel is the Disney princess who’s gonna get got if we don’t do something about her.”
“Enough,” Steve said with finality. “You still sound drunk. I think you’re way off base here.”
“I was meaning to go talk to January again . . .” Annabel murmured in barely more than a whisper.
“Oh?” Steve asked, glancing over to her for a split second, before turning back to the road.
“Well, I wanted to show her the business card, make sure it’s the Conveyor . . . make certain we’re doing the transfer right. For when the time comes, I mean. I want to have all our ducks in a row.”
“Smart,” Steve said. He pounded his fist on the steering wheel. “Then it’s settled. We’ll kill two birds with one stone. We’ll go see January, talk about the card, and then try to slyly weasel in something about her daughter trying to kill us.” He looked back up to the rearview, saw Dale was back in his seat. He could only see the top of Dale’s head, leading him to believe the big guy was on the phone. “Fats, does that sound good?”
“Huh?” Dale asked, apparently having lost all motivation to pursue his theory once disagreed with. “Yeah, sure,” he said absently. “But I’m gonna have to split on this one. Aiden just texted me.”
“The leprechaun is texting you now?”
“Yeah, and he wants me to meet at the house. Supposedly there needs to be a third-party witness for when we sign the investing documents—someone who isn’t profiting from the deal, so it can’t be you or Bel. He wants to make the contract legit.”
“Sounds reasonable to me,” Steve said. “Think you can handle it?”
Dale said, “Of course. Just drop me off at his house before you go on your ill-conceived quest, will you?”
STEVE AND ANNABEL DROPPED Dale off at Aiden’s house at around 1:00 p.m. It had turned into a glorious day, the sun finally melting away the rough gray clouds from earlier in the morning. It was a typical San Diego afternoon, bereft of any signs of seasonal changes.
Once Dale excavated himself from the Lexus, Steve and Annabel immediately took off the way they’d come, back toward Pacific Beach and the tarot shop.
“Should we call her first this time?” Steve asked.
Annabel shrugged. “Wouldn’t hurt. I’d feel bad barging in on her if she was in the middle of a séance or something.”
“True.” Steve reached in his pocket and, since he was driving and was trying to be a responsible Samaritan, tossed his phone to Annabel.
“What’s her number saved as?” Annabel asked, scrolling through Steve’s “Contacts” list.
“Gandalf,” Steve said seriously.
Annabel turned to him with upturned eyebrows. “Gandalf?”
“Yeah,” Steve said unabashedly. “She’s our wizard, right, leading us through Mordor?”
Annabel chuckled. “I suppose.”
Steve’s voice went low as he said, “Though maybe I should call her Saruman if she’s trying to sabotage us like Dale thinks . . .”
“What?” Annabel asked, the phone up to her ear.
“Never mind.”
Fifteen seconds later, Annabel said, “No answer,” and tossed the phone back to Steve. “I guess we’ll just have to show up unannounced, as usual.”
Steve smiled. “We’ve become quite adept at that, if I do say so myself.” He thought back on the first meeting with the Druid, and the morgue, and Michelangelo’s art show . . .
The route from Bay Park to Pacific Beach was less than a ten-minute drive west. They didn’t even need to get on the freeway, but rather stayed to Balboa Avenue, which turned into Garnet Avenue after crossing the I-5 freeway.
As they passed the burned-out ruins of Remington Studios, still black and boarded and surrounded by yellow tape, Steve felt his heart sink. He became acutely sad at the sight of his old residence and business, relegated to the “Permanently Closed” section of Yelp.
A few minutes later, they reached the cross street before the tarot shop.
Already Steve could tell something was wrong. His heart started racing as he pumped the Lexus’ brakes and came to a crawl, due to traffic stopping.
There was a large police presence outside where the tarot shop was located—it looked like maybe Wells Fargo, next door to January’s place, had been robbed. Four cop cars were positioned to cut off traffic, like they’d haphazardly parked to run into the Wells Fargo. Their lights blared blue and red. Two of the police vehicles were actually parked inside Wells Fargo’s parking lot.
Steve and Annabel shared a worried look. It took five agonizing minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic for them to hit a small side street that Steve could turn off onto. He turned right onto Gresham Street and found a parking spot about two blocks from Garnet.
He and Annabel jumped out the car and took off down the road in a sprint. When they turned the corner onto Garnet, Steve’s heart sank even lower.
An ambulance was arriving onto the scene, its siren blasting. The white emergency vehicle was forced to honk and drive up onto the sidewalk, so heavy was the local traffic during peak lunch hour.
Annabel put a hand to her mouth and looked at Steve with fear in her eyes.
Steve took Annabel’s other hand, squeezing it tight, and they ran together down the sidewalk, pushing past and through onlookers and passersby.
There was already yellow tape up across the entire side of the street Steve had been driving down—heading westward toward the ocean. A cop with a bright orange life vest was in the middle of the street directing the slow crawl of traffic, detouring them away from Garnet Avenue and whatever was happening there.
For Steve, seeing the cops and the yellow tape, it was a horrible reimagining of when his studio had burned down, which was still recent and painful in his mind. As they came up to the yellow caution tape, he realized he was squeezing Annabel’s hand much harder than he’d meant to. He loosened his grip and stood on his tiptoes, trying to see over and between the shoulders of the other people gathered at the edge of the crime scene.
Some people were frantic in the chaos, throwing out questions for a law enforcement representative who tried to answer their inquiries.
Steve recognized the cop as none other than Detective Gary Richmond.
Already there were news vans showing up in the distance, unable to get through the nightmarish traffic, the reporters and cameramen abandoning their vehicles in the middle of the road, so they could sprint to the scene and be the first ones to break the news.
Steve called out, to no one in particular, “Was it Wells Fargo? Was the bank robbed?”
A few heads turned in his direction and looked at him as if to say, “What do you think this is, the 1920s?” And when Steve thought harder about it, it did seem to be a stupid question. Bank robberies in broad daylight on one of the busiest streets in San Diego weren’t exactly that common these days.
No one dignified him with an answer, but Detective Richmond did have an answer for the reporters when they finally arrived. The female reporter shoved a microphone in the cop’s face, and the cop took the opportunity to get his Fifteen Minutes in.
And Steve and Annabel listened with dread at the news they were fed.
“This afternoon, somewhere before 12:30 p.m., an elderly woman was found dead in the Pacific Beach Tarot Reader. We believe there to be foul play—”
“The hell does that mean?!” someone screamed from the audience.
The cop frowned at the crowd, then turned back to the reporter. “Due to the amount of blood on the scene, we believe the woman to have been murdered. This is now an open investigation and crime scene.”
�
�What was her name?” Steve cried, but he already knew the answer.
The cop looked at a notecard, then looked back up, noticing Steve in the crowd for the first time. His face contorted with a “What the fuck are you doing here?” look. To the reporter, he said, “Her name was January Amos. If anyone knows of anything that might have led to this tragic event, please be sure to call the San Diego Police Department. For now, I have no further comment.”
Detective Richmond walked away, toward a police car and his buddies, even as the reporter followed him and tried to ask an array of questions.
Steve felt his skin grow cold. Then he was shivering. He turned to Annabel and saw she was even paler than usual. Steve wondered if his skin getting so cold could have come from Annabel, from holding her hand . . .
There was an expression of complete righteous fury in Annabel’s face. But that fury quickly melted into grief, and she started sobbing.
Steve’s eyes were bulging. He pulled her close and hugged her, nestling her head in the crooks of his arms, against his chest. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “It’s going to be all right.”
Just then, the door of the tarot shop opened in front of them.
Even from this distance, nearly thirty feet, standing at the edge of the yellow tape, Steve could see the mayhem inside: blood was splattered on the walls, on the floor, even on the inside of the front door.
His heart and mind both started racing at the same time.
What does this mean?
Who killed her?
How could this have happened?
We’re too late . . .
He remembered a specific line January had said last time they’d visited her:
“As long as I’m around, you’re safe.”
Now, their protector was dead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Someone must have known she was protecting us,” Steve said once they were back in the safety of the Lexus. He’d peered over his shoulders like a paranoid crackhead the entire walk back to the car.
How quickly will it be, now our “protector” is gone, before someone tries to kill us again?