There was no mercy.
If he had an erection, if he came about four heartbeats before he died, I neither knew nor cared. I crouched there in the frost, beneath that ancient tree, and I sucked and gnawed and worried at his corpse until there was nothing left to take. Then I went on about my way, my mind busy with too many other thoughts to care about his being found. I’m usually pretty good about cleaning up after myself, but, once again, I was sloppy and indifferent.
True story.
More or less.
A billion shades of gray.
But I’m emphatically not trying to shock. Hell, I couldn’t care less if you’re horrified or revolted. Just trying to keep it honest. Just trying to tell it like it was and is and will be until the end of my days.
Cross my heart and hope to die.
• • •
So, after dinner, after stopping by my apartment (door still propped open after Rizzo’s attack, window still shot out, etc.) for a shower and a change out of my bloody clothes, I retraced my steps across the Providence River. By nine P.M., I was in the alley that led to the back of the delicatessen on Atwells. I assumed the Maidstones hadn’t pulled up stakes for another safe house. They hadn’t called to tell me they had, and since I figured Amity figured she had her hooks in me, I figured they’d have let me know. And Drusneth had given me back my phone after letting me out of that cage, so I’d have gotten the call. Or text. Whatever.
I was out of the alley and halfway to the door leading to the upstairs rooms when I heard someone call my name from the shadows a heap of cardboard and crusty snow. Really, it wasn’t so much someone calling out my name, more like what, I suppose, is meant by a sussuration. That soft, below a whisper, like if a voice could be the rustle of wind.
I stopped and stared at the boxes.
My name again, my name as October leaves blowing across an empty parking lot. I didn’t recognize the voice.
“You gonna speak up and come the hell out of there, or am I coming in after you? I’m not in the best of moods, so I’d suggest option number one.”
At first no answer, only the rumble of traffic out on Atwells and the wind between the buildings.
“Patience,” I said. “Not what I got just now.”
The sound of those flattened boxes shifting about, and then a paler shadow stood up, rising from its bed of darker shadows. I didn’t have to ask who it was, though the smell hit me just before I recognized the face. It was Lenore. Lenore, who I’d killed the day before by slamming her into a wall like a goddamn rag doll. I also didn’t have to ask how she was up and moving about. But she told me anyhow.
“Berenice,” she said, and I could tell from her voice that her tongue had begun to swell. “She’s the one who cared about me. She brought me back.”
Jesus Christ on a hobby horse.
“Smells like she did bang up job,” I said.
The shadow stepped out into the streetlight. Her face was white as fresh mozzarella. Her eyes were vacant, rheumy, like the eyes of a dead fish. Her hair, matted and hanging in scraggly tendrils about her face. She was naked, except for a black fur coat, surely stripped from the cadavers of fake minks.
“Berenice,” she said again, “she isn’t half as skilled as her sister. It’s the best she could do. She apologized.”
“Fuck all,” I said. “Did she dump you out here in the trash after turning the resurrection trick?”
“No,” said Lenore, but then offered no explanation for why she was out there with the deli’s trash. “We have to talk,” she mumbled, instead.
“Dead girl, we don’t have to do jack shit. I’m in league with the ladies upstairs, not you.”
“You’ll want to. They can’t give you what you need, Siobhan Quinn.”
“Do not call me Siobhan.”
“They have no idea how to find the unicorn.”
I glanced north at Spruce Street, and at the interstate and train tracks beyond. The Xmas-tree blur of headlights rushed to and fro.
“But you do? You, the zombified gofer? I should believe that why?”
I looked back at her. Her lips were like streaks of blue chalk. Berenice really wasn’t much of a necromancer.
“Yes,” she said. “I have it. I’ve had it for weeks.”
I laughed. See, here we’ve come upon what people who spend too much time thinking about books call a deus ex machina, the god from the machine. You know, when the solution of a story’s conundrum just seems to spring out of nowhere rather from the “logical” consequences of a narrative. See, not quite as ignorant as you might think. I’m not sure precisely why this particular plot device ticks off the book nerds.
Go ahead. Stop reading. Feel free to “throw the book across the room.” That’s your prerogative, and I say again, it sure as shit won’t hurt my feelings.
Anyway, I’m straying, digressing again, and that sort of thing also pisses off more than a few readers. Point is, like a bolt from the blue, here was Lenore, who I’d killed but who hadn’t stayed dead, telling me not only that she knew where the dildo was, but that she’d had it all along.
“Bullshit,” I said.
“I’m telling you the truth. What do I have to gain by lying?”
I looked up at the windows. There was a light burning. “I can probably think of half a dozen things, you give me a few minutes. So you betrayed Berenice?”
She hesitated, then replied, “I’m not proud of it. But I’ve never really had shit, not really, and I held that much power, and—”
“Fine,” I interrupted. Power corrupts, we always hurt the ones we love, et cetera. I got the picture. “You say you have it, then time we play show-and-tell, dead girl.”
“I don’t have it with me,” she mumbled around her puffy tongue, with her already decomposing vocal cords.
“You know, Berenice didn’t exactly do you a favor, hauling you back like that. Another few days—”
“I know,” she said. “I know that perfectly well. But I also know she meant well.”
The best goddamn intentions of mice and men and stupid women who don’t have the good sense to let the dead stay dead. I wanted to punch Berenice Maidstone in the face, but not for dragging the goth chick back—just for being such a ham-fisted idiot.
“You’re saying it’s real.”
She sorta shuffled a step nearer. “I am.”
“And you got your hands on it how?”
She hesitated, let those blank fishy eyes stray to the asphalt between our feet. “Your boss’ guy, Lashly, I took it off him.”
Okay. Hold the goddamn presses, right?
“You what?”
“I know Amity led you to believe she killed him, but—”
“She didn’t come right out and say it.”
“She didn’t deny it, either. She insinuated.”
I laughed and shook my head. “Right, but by then you were already dead, so—”
“Berenice told me.”
“Of course she did. Fine, okay, you’re telling me that, somehow or another, Shaker Lashly found this piece of junk right off the bat, but you got wise to him—because, I guess, the Maidstones might have had you following him—and you shot him, took the dildo, and dumped his corpse in the river. But you didn’t take it back to the dreadful duo. You kept it for yourself. This is what you’re telling me.”
“Yeah.”
“You know,” I sighed, and it was a very loud and very exasperated sigh. I took out a cigarette but didn’t light it. One day, I was gonna kill that bouncer motherfucker stole my Zippo. “You know, I don’t believe even the tiniest crumb of your story. I don’t know what you’re playing at, but I ought’a chop you up in itty-bitty fucking undead pieces just for wasting my time.”
Thing is, I was beginning to believe her, even if I wasn’t sure why.
“I can take you—”
“First, how about you tell me how you got hold of it?”
Lenore swayed, and I reached out—just instinct, I guess—and kept her
from falling.
“Thank you,” she said.
“How did you get it, Lenore?”
She licked at her cyanotic lips with the tip of her distended tongue. “Lashly, he took it off Samuel, the bogle from up in Salem, up in Marblehead.”
Yeah, that’s what she said: Salem Sam.
“And he got it from?”
“He’s the one crossed over, stole it from Harpootlian. Well, someone works for him crossed over.”
“Worked for him. Past tense. I kinda shot him in the face tonight.”
She stared at me, wrinkled her forehead like I wasn’t quite making sense, then went on. “Well, he stole it. Don’t know how Lashly took it from him. Thought for sure your boss would know he had it.”
“My boss, despite what he might think of himself and want others to take for granted, isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Where is it now?”
“Now?”
“Yes, sweetie, now.”
Berenice really had done a piece of hack work. Already Lenore’s brain was starting to short out. Which meant, if she wasn’t lying, she might not have much longer to finish her dubious tale of skullduggery.
“You know the marble drinking fountain on the sidewalk in front of the Athenaeum? On Benefit Street?”
“Sure.”
“Look behind it. You’ll find the unicorn. I buried it in a locked box in the ivy there behind the old drinking fountain.”
She stopped looking at me and stared up at the sky.
“I miss the stars,” she said. “Grew up on a farm in Massachusetts. There were always so many stars.”
“You’ve told me all of it?”
The clock was ticking faster than I’d thought.
“Behind the old fountain? You’ve told me all of it? Didn’t leave anything out, like the box is booby-trapped with fucking C-4 or some shit?”
“First star to the right,” she mumbled, “and straight on to morning.”
Which is when I did my good deed of the month. I ripped her head off and bashed it against the deli wall until there wasn’t anything left but jelly speckled with bone and shards of teeth. I’d have used the Glock, but the last thing I needed was to attract attention just then, especially that of Amity and Berenice Maidstone. Her body just dropped to its knees and then keeled over on its chest, nothing left in that husk but a few twitches. I tore off the back of the fake fur coat and did a halfway decent job of wiping my hands clean.
And then I headed to Benefit Street. Because, you know, Elvis just might have been abducted by aliens the same night a woman in South Bumblefuck, Nebraska, gave birth to the two-headed love child of Bigfoot.
• • •
A long time ago, the marble fountain out front of the library used to actually be a water fountain, spouting water straight from the Pawtuxet River. Not sure when that stopped being the case. The thing was put up in 1873, and probably people drank from it for, like, a hundred years. Okay, maybe not that long, but still. These days, the basin below the spigot is usually filled with trash and cigarette butts. But. Getting back to the point, the ivy that grows all around the fountain, a great huge patch of the stuff between the sidewalk and the marble steps leading up to the Athenaeum.
Wouldn’t have been my first place for a spot to hide a magical geegaw, but there you go.
On the walk back to College Hill and Benefit Street, I was cursing Harpootlian and her seagull for having caused me to crash the Econoline. Maybe I don’t exactly get tired the way mortals do, but all that walking gets goddamn boring, and I also had a feeling that time was more and more of the essence, as they say.
Assuming Lenore hadn’t lied, maybe I actually was, finally, on the trail of the object from Mona Mars’ short story, the sorcerer’s sex toy that had landed Natalie Beaumont—if she did, in fact, exist in another universe—in some perdition of Harpootlian’s choosing. But okay, what were the demon and Amity up to as I trudged across town? As I trudged across town again. Also, I had no idea whatsoever what I’d do with the dildo if it actually was there. That part, I’d decided, was a bridge I could cross when, and if, I reached it.
Benefit was deserted, only a few cars, and despite the streetlights, I had no trouble not being seen.
Behind the low marble obelisk, I brushed aside the rind of snow and pulled up handfuls of the ivy. Below it, the frozen earth had been very recently disturbed. I dug with my bare hands. Fuck a shovel or spade. Not like I needed one. Not like the ground, even in an especially frigid February is a match for my fingers. About six inches down, in a shallow grave indeed, I found the metal box Lenore had told me I’d find. It was no more than a foot wide by a foot long, and just one sharp bump against the back of the fountain was enough that it popped open.
Inside was a roll of blue velvet.
I sat down in the snow and ivy and lifted the velvet from the box. It was heavier than I’d have expected. I held it maybe a full minute before I unwound it to reveal what was hidden inside.
It was pretty much what Mona Mars had described as coming from the “finely carved wooden box,” lacquered red as blood, that she’d found with the corpse of a dead Chinese man. A phallus carved from what looked like ivory, yellowed with age, since it no longer wore that misleading coat of black porcelain enamel. On the one hand, my head sort of reeled with the possibility that this thing might actually exist and that I was holding it. On the other hand, I was also thinking how it could have been carved from an elephant or mammoth tusk, or the tooth of a narwhal, or maybe from some ivory-bearing animal in that place Harpootlian had come from, an animal that doesn’t exist in this world. Either way, here was a game changer. Whether or not it really was what I’d been told it was, it was real. The wild goose chase, well, it had just become the payoff at the end of a goddamn African safari.
I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Only, the bridge wasn’t a bridge at all. It was something more like a five-way intersection. All at once, I had to make a decision, and it wasn’t any sort of decision I wanted to make. I could head right back to Drusneth and Mean Mr. B and hand it over, then hope Harpootlian decided I wasn’t worth the trouble when she went after the two of them. Or I could take it back to Amity and Berenice—but that would just be fucking stupid. It was plain they posed the least threat to me, and whether or not they got their way was no longer something about which I gave a shit. Or I could put it right back in the ground and pretend zombie Lenore had never told me jack shit. But the smart thing to do, that would have been finding Yeksabet and giving her what she considered was rightfully hers, then facing whatever music I’d have to face from B and Dru (and screw the Maidstones). Yeah, that’s what an intelligent werevamp would have done. But, see, there was that fifth turn at my intersection.
Hang on to it for the time being. Hide it again, where no one was going to find the “dingus.” Because maybe I’d just graduated from a pawn to an actual player in this game.
And I knew where I could hide it, where no one would be likely to go snooping about, and even if they tried, they wouldn’t find squat.
Aloysius.
Sitting there, I was tired and pissed. I was sick to puking death of the ridiculous ditch B had dug and tossed me into, hoping for a fat payday. I’d spent more than six months being his bitch, too intimidated by the threats he made. How, without him, all those nasties I’d pissed off—on his account—would come swarming down on me in a great black vengeful wave if I ever dared cross him.
Fuck him. Fuck him and Drusneth, the Maidstones and Harpootlian. I had the prize. Finders keepers. Well, at least until I had time to consider the situation, my options, just a little more. I wrapped the dildo in the velvet again, then quickly put the empty lockbox back in the ground, reburied it, and covered the dirt with ivy and a few handfuls of snow. I stood up and wiped the dirt off my hands and onto my jeans.
Which is when I heard Burt Rizzo pump the slide of a shotgun, chambering a round.
’Cause you know how it is. The fun nev
er ends.
“Turn around,” he said, his voice sorta like the rumble of distant thunder. “I want you to see this coming.”
“Dude, that’s all kinds of stupid and you know it. You got me,” I said, staring across Benefit Street at the courthouse, quickly trying to guess just how far behind me he was standing. Not very fucking far. Two feet at the most. The shotgun would take my head straight off my shoulders, and all the vamp mojo in the world wouldn’t bring me back from that.
“Not like you haven’t ambushed me before. Hell, twice in one week. Just pull the fucking trigger.”
“Turn around,” he said again, and now the thunder in his voice sounded a lot nearer. I reminded myself how Rizzo wasn’t some Bobby Ng screwup. I reminded myself what an idiot I’d been passing up two chances to put Rizzo down and be done with it.
“But I just cried ‘uncle’ and everything. C’mon, you think you’ll get a chance like this again?”
It would have been a goddamn ignominious end, getting my brains blown out there in front of the library. On the other hand, though, let’s be honest. Not like I didn’t have it coming.
“Are you deaf, monster? Now, for the third time, turn around.”
“Or what? You’ll shoot me?”
I wondered how much it would hurt, decapitation by two barrels of double-aught buckshot, and I wondered for how long. I wondered how many fuckers would be waiting in Hell to settle their scores with me, the ones I’d put there. I wondered what would become of the unicorn.
“Fine,” I sighed, feeling all those muscles tensing I’d never known I had until the Bride and Jack Grumet came down on me. Feeling the blind survival instinct that drives every nasty, from pole to pole, kicking in. I very fucking slowly turned towards him.
“But don’t you dare say I didn’t give you—”
The shotgun roared.
The blast missed me, but not by much. I’d tumbled to the left, rolling away through the shrubbery towards that black wrought-iron fence. The back of the fountain, it wasn’t so lucky.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I heard myself saying, over and over like some Catholic—my mother, for example—praying the Rosary. I was up and on my feet almost before I knew I was up and on my feet. Rizzo didn’t have even half a chance to reload the shotgun. I hit him like a pile of bricks, and the gun sailed away into the darkness. My ears were ringing, but I heard ribs cracking, and I heard one of the bastard’s lungs collapsing. And when he hit the granite steps leading up to the front door of the Athenaeum, I clearly heard a sickening crunch, and I didn’t need to be some ER doc to know I’d snapped his spine. The cold air suddenly stank of piss and shit.
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