Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  A few minutes clicking around on her phone and she didn’t know a lot more, but she knew enough to get started. “GSL,” “Locos,” and the number seven all applied to the Gant Street Locos, and Eighteenth Street was another gang from the same area. Doyle Gardens. It might have what Sobell was looking for, and it might not, but if Anna was down there, that was where Genevieve wanted to be.

  She did a little more research on her phone, sent Anna another text message (Everything OK?), and got up. After a quick walk down to the corner store for a Red Bull and a piece of greasy pepperoni pizza, she started to feel half human again. Now if only she could arrange for a shower.

  Sobell was sitting up, wiping sleep from his eyes, when she came in. His shirt was rumpled and his stubble had gotten to the point where it was starting to look like a very short, unkempt beard. There was grime rubbed into the lines on his forehead. His hands were shaking, too. They did that nonstop these days. Yet he was smirking, like this whole clusterfuck of a situation was amusing somehow.

  Genevieve closed the door.

  “Another night, and Belial didn’t eat me in my sleep,” Sobell said. “I’m starting to wonder what I did to deserve such good fortune. I don’t suppose you’ve got another slice?” he asked, pointing at the half-eaten pizza in Genevieve’s hand.

  “No,” she said. But, since she’d been designated chief errand runner, she hadn’t come unprepared. She put a box of donuts and a tall cardboard cup of coffee on the table.

  “Do you know what I miss?” he asked.

  “Caviar and expensive prostitutes?”

  “The latter, certainly. Caviar is foul. But no. I was thinking of the newspaper.”

  “I can get you a newspaper,” Genevieve said. “Get you a whole stack—nobody reads them anymore.”

  “It’s more the time. Twenty or thirty minutes in the morning, before all the day’s mayhem and conflict begins, to simply read about yesterday’s events in peace.”

  “Without worrying that Belial is going to eat you.”

  Sobell nodded. “Or anything else. A few quiet moments to myself.”

  “It’s the solitude you miss, then. Not so much the paper.”

  “Perhaps.”

  He pushed his blanket aside and got to his feet. Genevieve turned away. It was somehow weird to see Enoch Sobell, infamous crime lord and sorcerer, in his boxer shorts with his skinny white legs sticking out like a pair of chopsticks. She wasn’t sure why—the man had to exist in his boxer shorts sometime, and, as a particularly vulgar friend of hers used to say, “Even the president gets a little shit on his finger from time to time”—but it was unsettling all the same. She wondered if it was less the exposure than the sense of frailty. She was relying on Sobell for a lot, and for better or worse she’d hitched her wagon to him. The idea that he might be only human after all was not reassuring.

  Thankfully, he pulled on his pants and slipped on his shoes, and Genevieve could get about the business of putting it out of her mind.

  “We’ve got a truly stupid amount of ground to cover,” he said, scowling at the map.

  “That’s why we have three groups.”

  He scratched at his new beard while he stared down at the map. “This is going to take forever.”

  “Where do you want to start?” Genevieve asked. “Any ideas?”

  “I know some people in Elysian Valley and the area. I suppose it couldn’t hurt to start there, then move up the river valley.”

  “Hmm. I’ll take Doyle Gardens,” Genevieve said, trying to keep her tone even. “I’ve got some contacts there.”

  Sobell gave her a flat, disbelieving stare. “You have contacts. In Doyle Gardens.”

  She’d pushed it too far, she thought, but there was no backing out now. Not without giving something away. “Yeah.”

  “You’re welcome to it,” he said. “Don’t spend a lot of time there, though. The projects wouldn’t be my first guess for the location of a precious relic.”

  “I won’t.” Her throat had gone dry. She swallowed. “I was thinking I’d work downriver from there.”

  “That leaves us with . . .” He tipped his head toward Belial’s makeshift cave. “Which is a problem.”

  Genevieve lowered her voice. “We could leave him here.”

  “It,” Sobell said. “Never think of it as ‘he.’ It’s not even human, so I don’t think those pronouns apply, and in any case they lead you to believe you understand things about it that are at best inaccurate and at worst wildly misleading. Sloppy thinking lowers your guard.”

  “Fine. We could leave it here.”

  “The whole point was to get those of us who actually have some experience with this type of thing out in the field. However, I’m concerned that it might do something rash.”

  “It’s not stupid. It needs this as much as we do.”

  “I don’t for a moment believe it’s stupid, but I think we can agree that impulse control is not its strong suit, and it seems to be deteriorating.”

  “I think—”

  A rustling sound and a rough cough heralded Belial’s emergence from his—its—nest. It stood with one hand braced against the cubicle divider.

  Genevieve suppressed a shudder. The rash on Belial’s arm had spread up the side of its neck to its face, and raw red fissures had appeared in the skin. One eye moved independently of the other. The stink had somehow gotten even worse.

  Surprisingly, Genevieve felt a wave of pity and sorrow. She’d learned a lot from Hector, and he’d been as good a guy as any she’d known in occult circles. The usual fate of those who spent their lives tinkering around with the occult was demonic possession, but that was typically a short, brutal existence that ended violently or when the body simply gave out after a few weeks. Belial had been in there for months, along with who knew how many of its underlings, and Hector’s body had been pushed well beyond its normal limits. Surely this couldn’t go on much longer.

  “I will need appropriate attire,” Belial said. “Clothes.”

  “Sure,” Genevieve said, somewhat startled. Belial had shown no interest in the normal trappings of human hygiene and propriety, at least not lately. Perhaps it was making a special effort now, understanding that it had to put on something of a public face. Another reminder, as if she needed one, that it wasn’t stupid.

  As it happened, they’d anticipated the need for different clothes for the three of them. “Clarence is bringing some,” she said.

  “Good. Good.”

  “You’ll be with Clarence’s group,” Sobell said. “He can handle most of the talking. All he needs from you is any insight you might have. Otherwise, just stay out of the way.”

  Belial sneered. “I have been a king. A god. I will reach into the stinking corpse of this city and pull out its heart.”

  Sobell winced. “That’s not precisely what I was going for.”

  “I have worn priests and whores, beggars and bankers and indolent sons. I can walk here without fear.”

  “That’s . . . better. You’ll start in the Valley, unless you have something better in mind. I have a contact in Burbank, of all places, that is expecting you.”

  “Fuck Burbank.”

  “Yes, well, I think it’s safe to say that we all feel that way about Burbank. But Tomas likes it there, and he’s connected. You, on the other hand, have been holed up out of communication with the outside world, and any contacts you might have had were burned when you decided to smash Nathan Mendelsohn into little bits and take over his cult.”

  Genevieve expected another tirade of profanity, another round of grandiose boasting, or maybe outright violence, but Belial simply grinned, as though reliving a fond memory. “Fair enough,” it said.

  The three of them sat in uneasy silence, much as they had over the last few days. Genevieve suppressed the urge to get out her phone again, worried a
bout drawing attention to it. Instead, she mostly stared at the map, waiting for Clarence to arrive.

  After forty minutes, a nagging fear surfaced: what if Clarence didn’t show? Sobell would be furious. Belial, likely, would be furious at Sobell. With the overall tension level here, she doubted they would resolve any major argument with simple recriminations and apologies. This whole situation could explode. She pulled at the stud in her eyebrow, drawing a glance from Sobell. Yeah, she knew it was a nervous habit. Fuck him if he had a problem with it.

  At ten a.m. on the dot, somebody knocked on the door, and Genevieve bolted from her chair to answer it. Clarence stood there with a plastic bag in hand. Three cars, each with three or four guys in it, were parked in the lot behind him.

  “Come in.”

  “Clothes,” Clarence said, dropping the bag on the table. “My boys,” he said, pointing outside.

  Sobell looked out and frowned. “Shut the door, please.” Once Genevieve had, he turned to Clarence. “That’s substantially less manpower than we discussed,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, we got a problem.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. You wanna start in the Valley. You wanna start in East L.A. That’s cool, you gotta do what you gotta do, but you think about how much attention you gonna draw if you roll up with a dozen brothers down there? In the Valley, y’all be in lockup inside a hour. East L.A., they just shoot you.”

  “I had assumed you would find . . . appropriate personnel for the job.”

  “This might surprise you, but my crew don’t roll all that deep up in the finance district. I work outta South Central. The fuck did you expect?”

  “So the solution is to send us with no manpower at all?”

  “Not no manpower. A few guys each. Muscle and connections. Better than nothing, but low profile enough I don’t end up with more guys dead and in jail.” He frowned at Sobell. “You the last motherfucker I know wants to attract extra attention to himself right about now.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Sobell said. “You’re right, of course.” He sighed. “Let’s see the clothes.”

  Clarence dumped out the contents of the bag. Sobell grabbed a pink polo shirt and a pair of khakis. “They’ll suffice,” he said. He handed a long-sleeved button-down and another pair of khakis to Belial. “Here. Go in there to change, please,” he said, pointing to Belial’s cave. Genevieve felt a surge of gratitude. God might know the full extent of the horrors that had been wrought upon Hector’s body, but Genevieve hoped never to learn.

  Lastly, Sobell gave Genevieve a pair of green running shorts and a white tank top. She laughed. “Sure, whatever.” It might look a little silly with her boots, but too bad. Now was not the time to get picky.

  “Want some free advice?” Clarence said to Genevieve. “Lose the hardware.”

  “The . . . ?”

  “That shit in your face. You goin’ to a rough neighborhood. Be a shame if something got caught on somebody.”

  “I’m not planning on getting in a brawl.”

  He shrugged. “It’s your face.”

  How did I end up here? she thought, and not for the first time. Between magic and three or four armed heavies, if she ended up in a fistfight, things were well and truly fucked. Still, she thought about an old friend of hers who’d gotten jumped one night, the plug torn right out of his earlobe, leaving two ragged flaps of skin, and she started taking out her various bits of jewelry. An eyebrow ring and two bars, the bridge, the labret spikes, the Madison. Half a dozen rings from her left ear, nine from her right. She’d never been into earlobe plugs, so at least she didn’t have to worry about that.

  “That was quite the production,” Sobell said. He’d changed and even trimmed his beard in the few minutes it had taken her to remove everything.

  “Don’t give me any crap,” Genevieve said. “You look like you ought to be managing coders for a low-rent tech start-up.”

  “Good. I doubt the FBI is looking for a software developer.”

  “How you wanna do this?” Clarence asked.

  “You,” Sobell said, “will take Hector here to meet Tomas Kapinsky. His address is on the back of the card. He might have a lead for you, and he might not, but he will certainly be able to point you in the direction of your next stop.”

  “And then?”

  “You keep looking until you find anything that might be the relic in question, and then you bring it back here. Hector will be able to tell you if you’re wasting your time. We’ll meet back here by midnight. If that looks like it will be a problem, or if you run into any other trouble, call Genevieve at the number below Tomas’s address.”

  Clarence held the card as if it were a counterfeit fifty, and his face bore the same skepticism. “Yeah. All right.”

  Genevieve changed behind a stack of boxes, and then the four of them went outside. Clarence waved a couple of his guys over. “Ricky, you with Bill here,” he said, pointing to Sobell.

  Sobell extended a hand and put on a fake smile. “Hi. I’m Bill.”

  Ricky slapped his palm against Sobell’s. “Ricky. We ready to roll?”

  “Just about,” Sobell said.

  “Clap, you with Miss Genevieve.”

  A short Latino guy with shoulders about the width of a car nodded at her. “Cool.”

  “Just Genevieve,” Genevieve said. “No ‘Miss.’”

  “Cool,” he said again.

  Genevieve followed Clap—a nickname, certainly, and one she did not want to know the origin of—to his ride, a dusty green Taurus. Three guys were jammed shoulder to shoulder in back, each wearing a sagging face of near-terminal boredom.

  “I even get shotgun?” Genevieve asked. “You guys are real gentlemen.”

  “That’s Rat, Slammer, and Tulip, and you’re the first person in the world to ever call them gentlemen.”

  “As long as they got my back.”

  “No problem there.”

  She got in and said hello, and then the three cars left the lot, the one with Clarence and Belial in it in the lead and Genevieve’s bringing up the rear. Clarence peeled off to the right before too long, and shortly after that, Sobell’s ride pulled up to the curb. The driver waved at Clap to pull over behind him.

  Sobell got out of the car and walked back. Genevieve rolled down the window.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “You and I need to talk. Would you join me on the sidewalk for a few moments?”

  She got out. Sobell led her a few steps away, into the shadow of a white-painted brick building.

  “Belial is a problem,” he said. He’d found a pair of sunglasses, so he was even harder to read than usual.

  “I know that.”

  “It’s increasingly erratic and wholly untrustworthy. If it does find the relic for which we search, I’m not convinced it won’t simply run off with the fucking thing.”

  Genevieve squinted against the glare and watched the street, thinking. “It might need us. It needed four people for the ritual with Karyn.”

  “It might need us,” Sobell agreed. “Then again, it might not. It might get us killed. It might kill us. It might call down a conflagration of demons on us.”

  “A conflagration of demons?”

  “If you have a better suggestion for the collective noun, I’d be open to considering it.”

  “What’s with the grammar lesson today?”

  Sobell said nothing, but Genevieve could feel him studying her from behind the black lenses of his sunglasses. Another car went by, and Clap shouted something rude at the driver.

  “I’m considering asking Mr. Wilkinson to take Belial somewhere out of the way and dispose of it.”

  “Dispose of it as in . . . ?”

  “Don’t be obtuse.”

  Was this a test? A joke? The latter didn’t seem Sobell’s style
, but this didn’t seem like the time to be messing around with the former. It would be a good test, though—even after everything, she wasn’t sure she wanted Belial dead. Sobell didn’t seem to know any way to deal with Anna’s affliction, and while Belial claimed not to, either, it was surely a hell of a lot closer to the source. It would be stupid to blow the chance. “I don’t think that’s the best idea,” she said.

  “I believe we’re in a race against this creature. Easier to win if it’s out of the picture.”

  “I think it’s hiding something from us. I think it might know something it’s not saying, and I don’t know that we can cross the finish line without it,” Genevieve said. “Do you know what do to with this hypothetical relic, even if we do find it?”

  “If we’re not going to kill Belial—and I’m not at all convinced that forbearance is the right approach here—we need to make certain we find the relic before it does. All our leverage is there.”

  “How good is this Tomas guy?”

  “He’s useless as suspenders for an elephant. Most likely, he’ll give Belial some worthless piece of information that sends him haring off to God knows where. There’s a small chance that he’ll serve Belial up some piece of obvious fabrication or outright fraud, in which case Belial will likely turn him inside out. The only real danger there is that Belial might direct his ire at us afterward.”

  The only real danger. Aside from turning a man inside out. “I didn’t send him—it—there,” Genevieve said. “If it comes back pissed, it’s all on you.”

  “I’m sure I’ll manage. For now, whatever you find today, if anything, update me and only me. Nothing useful should be shared in Belial’s presence. Do you understand?”