Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  At the corner, she paused. There really wasn’t any point to walking all the way to the church. The graves that the priest had robbed were back here, and there wasn’t anything to see up there. Turning around seemed unthinkable, though, another taxing pointless exercise in testing her patience.

  Fuck waiting. So the priest wasn’t here. Big deal. There were other people of interest in the neighborhood, and maybe of even greater interest than the priest. And it wasn’t as if she’d even be abandoning her mission, really. It took a long time to dig a grave and fill it back up. She’d go check out Rogelio Moreno’s place and see what she could learn there, and she’d easily be back in time to see if anything further was going on out here.

  She was already moving, as though her feet had decided this was the correct course of action long before her mind reached the same conclusion. The idea that she wasn’t doing her own thinking at the moment was unnerving, so she did her best to forget about it, and she walked a little faster.

  Locos territory was almost ludicrously small, bordered by Gant Street on the southwest, First and Fourth Streets on the north- and southeast, and a staggered collection of small streets on the other side. Two blocks by four or five, with the church close to one of the ends. Rogelio Moreno’s place, nestled in the middle, wasn’t far. It was, in fact, probably the source of the noise from all the partying the other night.

  Anna pulled her shadows close and crossed the street to put some distance between her and the floodlights as she walked past the church. God, the glare was awful. As she approached the end of the block, she realized it had nothing to do with the church. The sole streetlight here was also a beacon of blue-white agony that set up a screaming high-pitched ringing in her head, like somebody had just clouted her on the ear with a brick. Magic side effect? Am I a fucking vampire now? What the hell is going on? She wanted to call Genevieve, but this was neither the time nor the place, and besides, she was worried that unleashing the light from her phone at close range might be tantamount to stabbing herself in the forehead.

  Back into the alley, then. She picked up speed, thinking to get to Moreno’s house quickly, but she took a wrong turn somewhere and her route ended up being more circuitous than planned. She was winded at the end of it, and she distantly wondered how she’d gotten so out of shape that walking a couple of blocks could make her so tired, but at least she’d gotten to the place. It was quiet. She’d expected the lights to be on and a bunch of noise issuing from inside, or at the very least a couple of kids with pistols camped on the front porch, but there was nothing of the kind. Dim light issued from a single window toward the back of the house, mercifully curtained so the worst of the glare didn’t escape. Other than that, the place was dark and silent.

  Anna went around the side. The window was open to let the relatively cool night air into the house, and voices floated out to her. Out of habit, she checked the street. She saw nobody—not, she thought, that it really mattered right now—and crept to the house, crouching beneath the window.

  She heard a cupboard close. A moment later, there was the distinctive sound of a refrigerator opening, followed by the hiss as somebody cracked a beer. A chair scraped against linoleum, then creaked, and then a man sighed.

  “We’re fucked,” a man said. Moreno, Anna was sure. He sounded even more exhausted than he had a week ago, but his voice was unmistakable.

  “God and all his angels are at your side,” a second man said. That was the priest. The cadence of his voice, and the slight, odd accent gave him away. Plus, who else would say shit like that?

  “God and all his angels got no time for a bunch of cholos from East L.A., Padre. I appreciate you’re trying to make this seem bigger than it is, but you’re doing all the work here.”

  “It’s life or death, Rogelio. Salvation and destruction. Do I really need to try to make it seem any bigger than that?”

  “No.” A pause, during which Anna heard nothing. “There’s nineteen of us, and four gangs want to crush us between ’em. Nineteen, and eight of ’em are kids. Two little girls, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re working miracles here, but I don’t know how long even you can keep this up. And I’m . . . I’m getting tired.” The strain in his voice, the hesitation—was he weeping in there?

  “Your heart is in the right place,” the priest said. “I know that. You just need the will to keep going. I can help you with that.”

  “I don’t know if I even got that no more.”

  “You don’t mean that,” the priest said, his voice even and patient. He sounded kind, which made Anna suspicious. She pegged it as the tone of a guy who wanted something, badly, and didn’t care who he used up or manipulated to get it.

  “I let a lot of bad shit happen to get this far. Desecrating graves, man. Don’t tell me that shit don’t keep you up at night.”

  A rustling sound, followed by a creak. “I don’t sleep well, no.” The sound of a chair sliding across the floor. Anna imagined the priest pushing it in, then standing behind it, hands on the back. “What do you want of me, Rogelio? We’re down to our last materials. To our last options.”

  “I shoulda made peace with the ’Teeners.”

  Silence. Anna shifted, straining to hear more, and a sudden dizzy spell seized her, turning the world abruptly to a sickening angle. She reached out, grabbing the windowsill to keep from falling. Shadows flailed around her and across the window, but her fingers clutched the edge with the faintest of sounds, and she managed to stay upright. The dizziness didn’t abate, though, and she felt as though she were clinging to the earth with her fingertips.

  What the hell is this? Some magical defense she’d tripped? Had she eaten today? That couldn’t be it—when she thought about it, she’d barely stopped eating today.

  “You’re a good man, Rogelio. You know there was no lasting peace to be had there. Only drug wars and more violence.”

  “You seen anything different since you been here? Wake up, Abas! What else we got? Bills gotta get paid, am I right? Ain’t enough dollars to go around.”

  “You made the right decision,” the priest insisted. “These people are your family, you said. Would you have them doing Stash’s work? He will use them. Destroy them.”

  “So here we are. Gonna be destroyed anyway.”

  “There are . . . sacrifices that can be made.”

  “More sacrifices. Blood, right?”

  Anna leaned in to hear better, but everything sounded far away and receding, echoing around corners and draped in a rushing sound. She tried to get to her feet. The world slid sideways, and she lurched, tripped, and fell to the dusty ground. Somebody inside the house shouted. She pulled her shadows closer.

  The world filled with a grainy black haze, and then it slipped away.

  Chapter 16

  Genevieve shifted her position, trying to get the morning sun that crept around the edges of the blinds out of her eyes. She glanced nervously over at Sobell’s sleeping form. A pocketful of drawings was all she’d gotten from the previous day’s trip into the Gardens, and she hadn’t shared them. She’d need to do better today. The night before, when they’d all returned to the shit hole known as home base, both Sobell and Belial had had a little something to show for their efforts. Each had come back with a story of a priest looking for relics, which was surely not coincidental. It might have been her imagination, but she thought they’d both given her peculiar looks when she said she’d come up empty.

  There was shit going down here. Sobell had been every bit as slick as she might have expected, and she couldn’t detect the slightest change in his mannerisms since announcing he wanted to kill Belial. He treated the demon the same as he had before, with the same alternating respect and mockery, and his interactions with Genevieve were likewise unchanged. No overlong, significant glances or sudden silences or anything. Slick and flawless. She th
ought she ought to make a note of that. If one day he decided to fuck her over, she wouldn’t get the slightest warning from him.

  Slick as Sobell had been, Clarence had been the opposite. The guy was a seasoned criminal, and you didn’t get to be an old man at that unless you were a hard, dangerous, unflinching sort of person, but he was rattled. He’d said nothing at the short meeting, but he kept chewing at his lip, and he’d made a slight, barely perceptible change in his position at the table—half a step farther back than before. His earlier nonchalance was gone, too, and his gaze flitted from Sobell to Belial to Genevieve, constantly taking each person’s temperature. It was like he’d taken his neighbor’s dogs for a walk, only to realize once he’d got them on the leash that all three of them were wolves, dangerous and unpredictable. What had Belial done to him or told him? Something had happened besides a boring visit to Tomas Kapinsky, that was sure.

  And then there was Genevieve herself, feeling less like a wolf and more like somebody who’d chosen to walk among them for reasons that must have seemed appropriate at the time but were getting harder to remember by the hour.

  She stood up. Time for some more gross pizza or, if she really wanted to live dangerously, an egg sandwich that might not be loaded with salmonella. Or maybe just a Clif Bar and a Red Bull. That would kill her, in time, but not today. She wondered if you could you get rickets living off this shit.

  Behind the stack of boxes she’d made to give her some privacy, she studied the drawings she’d gotten from Black Cat. Even with her backpack of reference material with her, she still had no way to make sense of them. She shuffled through the drawings, looking for anything familiar, and once she felt she’d got a good clear mental picture of each, she leafed through her notebooks, looking for anything that matched. She found damn little, and nothing she hadn’t guessed at already.

  The smart thing to do, if she just wanted to end this, would be to get Sobell in on it. Give him the whole stack and see if he could make any sense of it. If she recognized a little, surely he’d recognize more. Take him aside, away from Belial, and get him to explain it. Any of it.

  But there was Anna to think of. How was that going to end? Sobell didn’t give a shit about her, and after watching his performance with Clarence yesterday, she knew she couldn’t take any of his assurances at face value. A priest was supposedly responsible for the drawings, and it had to be the same priest Sobell and Belial had been pointed toward. A resolution was in that direction, but was Genevieve ready to turn those two loose on the guy before she figured out what to do about Anna?

  She wrote Anna a text: They’re looking for a priest. That would serve as a warning, at least, and hopefully an indication of good faith. She pressed SEND and waited. No answer returned in the five minutes she spent with her phone in hand. Not surprising—it was early, by Anna’s usual standards. She liked to get up around noon and spend half the night roaming from one seedy dive to another, catching up with friends and acquaintances at each. Probably wasn’t much of that going on now, though. Genevieve wondered if she’d ever get back to that.

  This is it. This is rock bottom. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so desperate or disconnected. Even during the ugliness of the Van Horn job, it had never been this bad. Between the two of them, Sobell and Belial held a curtain that sealed her off from the world, her lover, and the few people that might be friends, if they got half a chance.

  For the first time, she wondered, for real, if she was going to survive this.

  Across the room, Sobell stirred, jolting her from her thoughts. She stowed her drawings and got up. Fucking guy would be expecting breakfast, and as much as she wanted to tell him to go get it himself, she knew he couldn’t be seen hanging around the same place day after day. Guaranteed to attract notice.

  She went out to go find some pizza. Or whatever.

  * * *

  The next few hours were a replay of the previous morning. Clarence showed up on time, and if he looked a little drawn and haggard, nobody there was in any shape to throw stones. Genevieve had had doubts that he’d show at all, but not only had he knocked on the door at the dot of nine, but he’d brought a change of clothes for everyone. There had been a brief conversation around the table about everybody’s mission for the day—essentially a repeat of the day before, with the overall level of suspected backstabbing turned up a notch. The grin on Belial’s face made Genevieve find excuses to look anywhere else. Clarence, too, from the look of things.

  The group packed up and headed out and, just like the day before, Sobell’s driver flagged her car down before she got very far.

  Sobell walked back to her car, just like the day before, and she got out, dreading his words.

  He didn’t disappoint. “What did you learn yesterday?” he asked. Not even a lead-in or a preamble.

  She froze. She’d known this moment was coming and had considered half a dozen replies, ranging from demurring to manufacturing outright lies, and now she locked up. Sobell watched her calmly, but all she could think of was the way he’d been with Belial after casually talking about killing it. Calm.

  “Hold that thought,” she said, accompanying the words with a smile that felt wholly unconvincing, and she turned back to the car. She reached in through the open window and pulled out her backpack. All the scenarios she’d run fled from her head, and even her consideration of Anna’s fate had dropped in priority. They’d figure that out. Sobell would even help, right?

  “Here,” she said, taking out her sheaf of drawings. Just that easy, Sobell had drawn it out of her. She wanted to blame some malign magic or trickery, but she knew better—simple cowardice on her part had sufficed. When had she become so afraid?

  She watched his face as he paged through the stack. The tightening of his brow could indicate consternation or merely interest, but he didn’t give her much more than that. He studied each page for what seemed like a long, long time, clocked by the rhythm of the street as cars rolled by, and the traffic light at the corner changed.

  He went through the entire stack twice, his expression barely shifting both times. Then he handed them back. “Where did you get these?”

  Genevieve took the papers. “What are they?”

  Sobell waited, evidently not in the mood to have his questions answered with questions.

  “Doyle Gardens,” Genevieve said. “They’re up on buildings all over the place down there.” She paused, waiting to see if he had another question. When he said nothing, she tried again. “What are they?”

  “I’m not entirely sure.”

  “I thought you knew everything,” she said, adding a weak chuckle at the end.

  “These are . . . unusual. In fact, I’ve only seen something like them a few other times.”

  “Such as?”

  “Belial’s working, with your erstwhile friend Karyn.”

  Genevieve’s stomach knotted. “This is Belial’s work?”

  “No. I very much doubt it. However, this work is drawing on a different school or another tradition than is commonly done, in my experience.”

  “I don’t understand. Magic is magic, right?”

  “You would think so.”

  Another pause while she waited for him to expand on that, but he added nothing. The light went from yellow to red, and a couple of guys on loud motorcycles blew through it anyway.

  “How do you erase them?”

  Sobell’s eyebrows shot up. “I assume the normal means have proven insufficient?”

  “Quite.”

  “Then I’m afraid I haven’t got a clue. It’s fascinating, but does it have any bearing on our current issues?”

  “I’ve got a lead on the priest,” Genevieve said. “He’s the guy doing these. But if I don’t give up some info on this stuff, I won’t get anything back. It’ll turn into a dead end.”

  “Very well. Take me to your informant
.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the best idea.”

  “Explain.”

  “It’s a street gang. They’re . . . insular. They don’t trust outsiders. They certainly don’t trust me. If they think I’m out spreading their shit around, they won’t take it well.” That was probably true, but she had another motive. Even another couple of days to get ahead of this would be valuable. She’d practically sold Anna out already, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t reel the situation in, at least a little. “You can’t really strong-arm them. If you give me a couple of days to build up a little rapport, it might go better.”

  Again, Sobell waited, studying her. At last, he nodded. “One day. Two at the outside. I’m loath to fuck things up by acting in haste, but time is drawing short.”

  “Is there anything you can tell me that I can pass along, as a show of good faith?”

  “You say you can’t erase them?”

  “Or cover them, either,” Genevieve said.

  “I suppose ‘Don’t cross them in anger’ wouldn’t be regarded as particularly useful advice?”

  “I think they’ve figured that part out.”

  “Here’s what I would tell your associates down in the Gardens: the drawings are from a peculiar tradition at odds with much of the, ahem, ‘mainstream’ occult. There are a handful of practitioners worldwide, if that. It is virtually impossible to unmake the curse without the full cooperation of the person who put it in place.”

  “That’s terrifying.”

  Sobell shrugged. “And not at all true, as far as I know.”

  “Which part?”

  “If they get it in their heads that they can simply kill this priest and end their troubles, we will have even more problems than we do now,” Sobell said. Genevieve couldn’t help noticing that the statement both sidestepped the question and offered up enough of an answer to satisfy. No point in pursuing it, she supposed.