Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  “He’s got what?”

  “Huh?”

  “Five more guys down with what shit, exactly?”

  Clarence scowled. “What do you think? Talking Greek and drawing weird shit on the walls.”

  “Shit. Here we go again. Look, you gotta keep your guys away from him, Clarence.”

  “Yeah, well, I pretty much gotta do what the fuck he tells me right now, don’t I?”

  “Is that all he’s doing? Finding more guys?”

  “Shit no. He’s got guys out looking for the bullshit relic thing Sobell wants, and a whole lot of other weird stuff.”

  “Other weird stuff? Like what?”

  “Like other weird stuff. Oil, candles, chalk you can only get from these crazy bastards who are all into incense and pentagrams and shit. Fuckin’ goat parts, and I ain’t even kidding. I don’t even know what else.”

  Nail moved away from the counter and rubbed the side of his face. “Any idea what he wants it for?”

  “Shit no. And here’s another thing: I don’t know what he’s telling my guys, but they all looking at me awful funny lately. I get half a chance, I’ma kill that son of a bitch.”

  “You don’t wanna do that. I don’t know if Sobell’s gonna screw us or not, but I know he ain’t got the answer to this. The problem with your guys, and my friend. But Belial might.”

  Clarence closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and middle finger. “Damn.” He opened his eyes. “This is bullshit, Owens. You ain’t got long. I love my nephew as much as the next guy, but this shit is about all I can take. Get me an answer.”

  Nail nodded. “I hear anything else, I’ll pass it along.”

  Clarence wasn’t paying attention anymore, though. He was out the door and gone a moment later, pulling his phone from his pocket. He slammed the door behind him.

  Nail walked around the counter to the sink and threw a little water on his face. It was cold, but not cold enough—he wanted to shock himself awake. Shock himself right into another world entirely, clear his head so thoroughly it wiped away the warped nightmare his life had become over the last couple of months. Like a baptism, cleansing him of the mistakes of his life. Instead, he got a lukewarm, chlorine-stinking rinse that didn’t even get the grit out of the corners of his eyes. Same shit, different day.

  He wiped his face with his shirt and headed back out.

  On the road, he was mildly surprised to see that everything looked normal. Too many cars, signs yelling CLEARANCE! and peddling cheeseburgers and Coke in bright colors, palm trees, and sickly dead lawns. Hard to imagine that life was going on as usual for everybody else when it felt to him that the cancer at L.A.’s heart had suddenly metastasized, gone terminal. Couldn’t anybody else see that shit was falling apart? Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just his own world, and that of the people closest to him. And Sobell. And Clarence. And dozens of other criminals and lowlifes, like some sort of underworld apocalypse, the cops’ ultimate self-cleaning oven. Come to the dark side, and it’ll burn through you like lung cancer.

  And, like a cancer, it would spread.

  * * *

  Karyn kept herself company with morbid thoughts all the way to the meeting spot Elliot had designated, a parking lot outside a Best Buy, of all things. Elliot waited at the edge of the lot, out of uniform today in jeans and a sweater, which made Karyn suddenly wonder what day it was. Was today Saturday? Sunday? Did FBI Non-Standard Whatever people get weekends off? What about bank holidays?

  “What do you have?” Elliot asked, skipping straight to business before Karyn had even closed the car door.

  “Something we need you to have a look at,” Karyn said, producing her phone. Anna’s video was there, along with a couple of photos. She pulled up the photos first. The first was Abas, still in his black robe, leaning over Moreno, who looked to be in some seriously rough shape. The priest’s face was visible in profile, Moreno’s blocked behind the priest’s head. Karyn put the phone on the hood of Elliot’s car. “Do you know this guy?”

  Elliot studied the photo a long time before answering, “No.”

  Nail came around the car and looked over her shoulder as Karyn brought up the next picture. This photo was more of the same, though in this one Abas had moved to Moreno’s other side, and neither man’s face was visible. “That’s a big damn knife,” Nail said.

  In the next picture, the priest was cutting Moreno. It wasn’t a good shot of the priest, but Moreno’s face was visible.

  “Who’s that?” Elliot asked.

  Karyn considered. She and Elliot had an arrangement, but Karyn wasn’t sure she wanted to test just how far that extended. If she answered Elliot’s question, that whole area of town might end up crawling with feds in short order. On the other hand, given the grave robbing, the name Moreno seemed essential to this whole weird business, and she didn’t think answers were coming from elsewhere. “A gang leader named Rogelio Moreno,” Karyn said.

  Elliot nodded acknowledgment.

  The other pictures were more of the same. The video, though—ugh. Karyn had watched it earlier, and it kindled the same sense of sick revulsion in her as boxing movies wherein somebody got punched to death. Moreno’s grunts as he held back screams were bad enough, and the jerky, violent motion of his body even worse, but what really got to Karyn was the sudden snap, a sound that had to be bone cracking, standing out clearly above the background noise of the video. Even Elliot, impassive to that point, winced.

  When it was over, Elliot played it again. Karyn leaned back against the car and sat that one out.

  “Do you mind if I send myself a copy?” Elliot asked.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  She fiddled with the phone for a minute and then handed it back to Karyn.

  “Well?” Karyn asked.

  Elliot sat on the hood of the car, facing Karyn. Her face was open, frank. “I can tell you I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Great. Is there anything you can tell us at all about it?”

  “Not right now, but we’ve got archives. Documentation. I can see if there’s anything I can dig up on the ritual in the video.”

  “Such as?”

  “What it does, where it came from. Who else might be involved. It’ll tell me some things about the practitioner, too.”

  “Abas. The priest.”

  “Sure, if that’s what he is. Every working—‘spell,’ if you want to call it that—has some signature elements to it. There are often lots of ways of achieving similar effects through a working, so the specific methods a practitioner chooses to get a given job done can tell us some things about where and from whom he or she has learned their craft. Hints about their occult lineage, if you will.”

  To Karyn, that sounded pretty thin, but she and the crew had put together some pretty useful info from disparate elements in the past, and she wasn’t in a position to discard information. Any little bit would help.

  “You ain’t got a whole lot of time before the situation on the ground deteriorates,” Nail said, interrupting Karyn’s thoughts.

  “How do you mean?” Elliot asked.

  “Belial is out recruiting. Or infecting. I don’t know what the right term is.”

  Elliot chewed her upper lip. “Are you sure?”

  “The guy that told me wouldn’t have much of a reason to lie. He’s freaking out.” Nail swiveled the chair to his left, then back. “Can’t you just arrest the guy? Belial, I mean?”

  A pained expression contracted Elliot’s brow. “First of all, I don’t know where he is. Second, and probably more important, I’ll never be able to get a warrant.”

  “A what?”

  Her smile was equal parts bitterness and wry humor. “A warrant for his arrest. He hasn’t committed a crime.”

  “Un-fucking-believable. He hasn’t committed a crime?�
��

  “That we know about. That we can prove. Unless your friends are willing to testify.”

  “I thought this is what you did,” Nail said, brushing right past the dirty t-word to Karyn’s relief. “Arresting fucking crazy magic people.”

  She shook her head. “There’s nothing illegal about being a fucking crazy magic person.”

  “Un-fucking-believable,” Nail said again, this time dragging the syllables of the word out over several seconds into an expression of patience at its absolute limit, looking up at the sky like he was sending a particularly useless prayer up to the heavens.

  For her part, Elliot seemed in good humor, which was baffling as far as Karyn was concerned. Maybe she liked the challenge, or the novelty of some new occult facet she hadn’t seen before, or the intellectual exercise, but Karyn couldn’t so much as find a smile right now, and Elliot’s attitude was galling.

  “So, what now?” she asked. “We just wait and see?”

  “Now I go do some homework. Find out more about this Abas character, if possible, and see what I can link him to. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to figure out what he wants down in gangland, and what Belial wants with him. From there . . . who knows?”

  Chapter 20

  “My God, Anna, are you okay?” Genevieve’s voice had gone up an octave into squeak territory, and the words spilled into the phone in one undifferentiated rush. She glanced over toward where Clap and company sat on the curb, eating oily noodles from cardboard boxes, and she took a few more steps away.

  “Yeah.”

  The faint static sound of the open line whispered in Genevieve’s ear. There was a rustle as Anna moved, but no more words.

  “Thank God. Wait—you’re not calling me from a hospital bed somewhere, are you?”

  A dry chuckle. “No.” More static, then: “How did you find me down there?”

  “The picture you sent me.”

  “Ah.”

  Again, Geneveive waited, and again Anna added nothing to her single syllable.

  “That place is going to hell,” Genevieve said. “I don’t know what kind of crazy shit Gant Street is using to fend off the enemy hordes, but it won’t last forever.”

  “No.”

  Across the street, a man covered in way too many layers of clothes for the weather hit up a couple of women at the bus station for spare change. With his wild beard and hair in all directions, he looked, Genevieve thought, like nothing so much as a graying dandelion. He got a couple bucks from the first woman and nothing from the second while Genevieve waited for Anna to say something. By the time he wandered off, the silence had become perverse.

  “Please,” Genevieve said, “talk to me. I miss you. This feels awful. Everything, and I mean everything, is going to shit. I’ve been holed up with fucking Sobell and a fucking stinky-ass demon for days, and I spend my days running errands for them with a bunch of hired fucking criminals. I was ten feet from a gunfight today. My breathing hasn’t slowed down all the way yet. I feel like I’m one sudden car backfire away from a full-blown screaming panic attack. Please. Talk to me. Please.”

  A silent moment during which Genevieve felt a scream building in her throat, and then Anna coughed. “Everything is going to shit.”

  Genevieve could picture the expression on her face, just from the tone of voice, down to the last detail. There would be this little grin teasing the corners of her mouth, pulling at the lines of her face, but no trace of humor would register in her dark eyes. An expression that said, This is funny, yeah, so I have to smile, but really it’s not funny at all.

  It softened something in Genevieve. Warmed her, just the thought of that fatigued, raw smile.

  “I miss you,” she said again.

  “Where are you?”

  Genevieve closed her eyes. Would it have killed Anna just to say the same words back? “Huntington Park. I think. Hanging with some paid lowlifes. I’m not sure if they’re supposed to be helping me or watching me.”

  “Sobell? Belial?”

  “Not here. Out looking for answers, I guess. That’s all pretty unstable, too. Sobell wants to kill Belial,” Genevieve said. Much as she wanted to try to draw Anna out, talk about anything but demons and criminals, it appeared playtime was over. “Just trying to figure out when and how, and if he needs the creep to get what he wants first.”

  “Lots of people want to kill that creep. I want to.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “I’m cracking up,” Anna said, the words at odds with her quiet, even tone. “Almost bled to death last night working some kind of way-fucked-up camouflage spell. It was like I had a huge cape of shadows or something. You would have liked it. It was cool. Up until I collapsed.”

  “Jesus. Are you okay?”

  Anna grunted. Genevieve could hear the shrug in her voice. “For now. Eating lots of red meat. Drinking lots of water.”

  “Good. Um.”

  “The diagram is a curse,” Anna said. “Heavy-duty bad luck to anybody who crosses it who doesn’t belong. I broke it last night. Today, people died.”

  “That was you?”

  “It’s not that I feel like I’m not in control,” Anna said, hauling the conversation in an abrupt new direction. “I feel in control. I feel like I know exactly what I’m doing. It’s just that lots of things seem like good ideas that didn’t used to seem like good ideas. Sheila told me this would happen. Before she died.”

  Genevieve put her hand against a wall and lowered her head, leaning as if she was trying to push the wall over. “I told Sobell to hold off. We might need Belial. We’re gonna get you out of this, I promise.”

  “How can you promise? You don’t know. Nobody does. You know what they call a promise when you don’t know?”

  “What?”

  “A fucking lie.”

  Genevieve reached for the stud at her eyebrow, and of course it wasn’t there. She settled for pulling at the flesh beneath the eyebrow instead, tugging the skin, feeling the empty little hole there against her forefinger. She glanced at the curb. The two guys weren’t eating anymore, but they weren’t particularly concerned with her. They were shooting the shit, pointing at a couple of kids fighting over a skateboard across the street. Making bets, it looked like.

  “Sobell doesn’t know,” Genevieve said. “He doesn’t know anything about how to help you, how to help himself. He says the diagram you saw is from an ‘alternative tradition,’ whatever that means, but he was cagey about it, and I really think he doesn’t know much else. Belial’s got the answer, if anybody does, but of course he—it—isn’t saying, and I don’t know how to get it out of him.”

  “We get what he wants first,” Anna said. “That’s always been the plan. He helps us, or we destroy the relic thing.”

  “That works if you’re negotiating with somebody rational. I’m not sure that’s the case here. He’s . . .”

  “I know,” Anna said, the two words loaded with quiet anger. Given that Belial had infested her with a demon for what appeared to be the pure fun of it, Genevieve supposed Anna understood better than she did herself.

  “He’s worse now. Worse all the time.”

  “Me, too.”

  Another long pause, and Genevieve couldn’t think of a single thing to fill it. Anna was unreachable, hunkered down at the center of a forest of thorns and spikes, anger and betrayal, and it was impossible to cut a path through.

  “I feel . . . ,” Anna began, pulling Genevieve from her thoughts. “I feel . . . you should get away,” Anna said, and Genevieve couldn’t escape the feeling that she’d changed what she was going to say, as though it was too dangerous to approach directly. “Don’t come down to the Gardens no more. It’s gonna get bloody.”

  “I know that,” Genevieve said. “You’ve got four gangs waiting to crush the Locos, just as soon as they can figure out how. You
gotta get what you need and get it out of there, as soon as you can.”

  “You gotta tell me what it is. You’re close to both of them, Sobell and Belial.”

  Sure. Just pry loose their most important secret and betray the both of them by handing it over to their enemies. That was insane. Impossible. Unthinkable. “Okay,” Genevieve said, without the faintest idea of how she’d even approach it. “I’ll try.”

  “I wish this hadn’t gotten so fucked-up,” Anna said. “I miss you.”

  Genevieve closed her eyes and pressed the phone tightly to her ear, as if she could just keep the words there, echoing forever.

  Chapter 21

  Sobell rested trembling hands on the table in front of him. Belial was out, doing whatever it did—and that would have to be discovered, and soon—and Genevieve was playing games with gang members in a particularly awful neighborhood in East L.A. There were facts piling up here, and Sobell did not like the look of any of them. This mystery priest with his God-damned sigils and wards right at the center of what Sobell was increasingly sure was the location referred to by the prophecy. Add to that the prophecy’s note about Gomorrah, and he started to get a glimpse at the underlying structure of the thing, and he was not happy.

  He was out of allies. Tired of living in this hole. Tired of hiding. It had been years since he’d had to hide, and now what? His underlings in the underworld—both criminal and occult—were so desperate to get away from him and the shit storm that he’d wrought that many of them were actually leaving town. His so-called allies in the city government, fair-weather friends at best, had distanced themselves and were probably already preparing to testify against him. His lawyer had abandoned him, which he frankly would have put beyond the realm of possibility, as long as his money was green.

  Oddly, he missed Van Horn. They’d been friends once, or as close as practitioners tended to get, before they had mutually screwed each other—over what? A moldering grimoire fragment that they probably could have simply shared if they could have brought themselves to trust one another. It had seemed important at the time.