Harvest Moon

by Mercedes Lackey, Michelle Sagara

  I felt the ghoul’s teeth grinding against bone. My lungs burned and white spots began to explode before my blinded eyes. I kicked and thrashed, struggling against the weight that pressed down on me, but the ghoul held me fast. I briefly managed to get my head above water and choked down a mixture of sewage and precious air before I went under again.

  Abruptly, I could see. I looked up through the thin veil of foul water and saw the mottled gray form of the monster atop me. Its skin was loose and wrinkled, but the muscles that moved beneath it were lean and corded. I couldn’t see its face because it was buried in my flesh, but the ghoul appeared to be completely hairless. Then it tore away from my shoulder and leaned back. It looked down at me with milky, dead eyes. A gobbet of my flesh hung from its withered lips, caught in a monstrous grinder of crooked, yellow fangs. The ghoul went incorporeal momentarily, flickering like a video image on the fritz.

  The ghoul swallowed greedily, and then it opened its mouth wide, its lower jaw distending until I thought it would snap. It grabbed my head in both hands, immobilizing it, and I felt its claws sink into my scalp. The ghoul leaned down until its horrid maw filled my view.

  Then I heard a muffled retort, another, and another. The ghoul’s head snapped around, looking over its shoulder, and its grip on me loosened. It phased out again, shimmering and ephemeral as a mirage. I pushed my face out of the water and sucked in air. The ghoul became solid again, and a sharp crack followed instantly. The back of the ghoul’s skull exploded, and a black, oily fluid sprayed from the ruin and spattered my face.

  The ghoul screamed but it didn’t die. It thrust away from me and launched itself at Detective Meadows, who was leaning against the tunnel wall and leveling her service revolver at the thing. She fired again as the ghoul rushed her, but it phased out and the bullet passed harmlessly through its center of mass, ricocheting off the far wall. When it was almost upon her, the ghoul became solid again.

  “Vi Victa Vis!” I gasped, and struck the monster with a hammer of force in the small of its back. The spell hurled the ghoul over the detective’s head and to her right, and slammed it into the concrete. There was a wet sound of pulped flesh and the crack of splintered bone, and the creature crumpled to the ground.

  The ghoul twitched and jerked, phasing in and out, and its broken body crackled and snapped as it struggled to its feet. It turned and looked at me with those pale, soulless eyes, and it screamed again.

  I looked at Meadows. “Run,” I said. She looked once more from me to the ghoul. Then she ran, scrambling away as quickly as her injured body could move.

  I looked back to the ghoul. “A great flame follows a little spark,” I said, and the ball of blue-white fire spun into being above my upturned palm. The ghoul screamed again and flung out a gnarled claw at me. The force spell that struck my chest wasn’t as powerful as mine had been, but the impact extinguished my fireball and hurled me backward, tumbling head over heels until I smashed into the opposite wall. The back of my head cracked painfully against the concrete. “Goddamnit,” I said, and slowly staggered upright, swaying momentarily until I caught my balance. I extended my hand and clenched it into a fist. “Man is born free,” I said, “but everywhere he is in chains.” Bands of force encircled the ghoul and began to constrict. The creature went incorporeal again, but I didn’t release it. When the ghoul became physical, I flowed juice into the spell and tightened my grip, slowly compressing the creature’s withered body as if I’d dragged it to the bottom of the sea. The ghoul’s eyes popped and its internal organs were pulverized. Then a staccato snapping filled the tunnels as every bone in its body was ground to fragments.

  When I was finished, the thing I held had all the structural integrity of a sack of jelly. I released it and it sank to the ground almost soundlessly. I walked a few paces down the tunnel Meadows had taken, and then turned. I spun up the fireball again and hurled it at the corpse. When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left of the ghoul except the stink.

  After a few minutes, I found Meadows wandering lost through the sewers. “Detective,” I called, and spun a light spell so she could see. Meadows whirled and leveled her revolver at me, then slowly lowered it until it hung at her side.

  “I knew it,” she said. “I was right all along—about you, about all of it.”

  “Yeah, you were right. What are you going to do now?”

  “I can’t do anything, can I? No one will believe it, and even if they did, you wouldn’t let me do anything, would you? You could put a hex on me, make me forget. You could make me disappear.”

  “I’m not going to do that,” I said.

  “And Shanar Rashan? He’s real too, isn’t he? He’s not just an urban legend.”

  “That’s a name you’d do best to forget.”

  “Meaning what?”

  I shrugged. “I won’t harm you, Meadows. But it isn’t just about me.” I might be disappearing myself, soon enough, and I wouldn’t be able to protect her if she went poking her nose where it didn’t belong. I wasn’t going to press the point—Meadows was the kind of person who needed to figure it out for herself. I knew the type pretty well.

  “So what now?”

  “I guess you know Sullivan is dead. I leave and you call it in. You put down a serial killer tonight—there’s plenty of evidence back there. They’ll be able to identify some remains. I had to torch the ghoul, so you may have to get a little creative with the paperwork.”

  “Ghoul? Is that what it was?”

  “I guess. This was my first one, so I’m not exactly an expert.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” Meadows said, shaking her head. “You think you’ve seen the worst these streets have to offer, and then you find out there’s a whole other world that’s uglier than you ever imagined.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s why it’s better if people don’t know.”

  “But I do know. Now I’ve got to figure out how to live with it.”

  “I could make you forget, if you want me to.”

  “No, Riley. No way. Don’t do that to me. Please.”

  I nodded and turned to go. “Take care, Detective.”

  “See you around.”

  “I hope not,” I said, and I left.

  When I got back to the Lincoln, I pulled my cell out and saw I had seven missed calls from Chavez. I hit the speed dial without checking the voice mail and he answered on the first ring.

  “What’s the news?” I asked.

  “Chola, we got a problem. Alexander grabbed KZ.”

  “What do you mean he grabbed him?”

  “I mean, he took him fucking hostage or something. I don’t understand it, D. Look, I was asking around about the kid, like we said, doing the due diligence in case we wanted to bump him up. But I was discreet about it, D—no way Alexander got wind.”

  “I think I know how he found out, Chavez, and it’s not on you.”

  “You say so, chola. Thanks. What’s our play?”

  “Where is Alexander holding him?”

  “The Paradise, that abandoned theater on South Broadway. Used to show porn there. The boss wants to reopen it, turn it into a juice box. I told him nobody goes to fucking porn theaters anymore, but he—”

  “Okay, Chavez, I got it. What’s Alexander doing? Has he made any demands?”

  “He’s not talking, chola. Far as I know, he hasn’t got any demands. He went to the mattresses. He’s got the rest of his crew in there—maybe they’re backing him, maybe he took all of them hostage. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell, because he brought in some outside muscle.”

  “Who?”

  “A crew from Pico Union, Salvadorans. Mean motherfuckers. Looks like he brought them in last week.”

  “Last week? What the hell?”

  “Yeah, I been busy, D. I found out this motherfucker was planning to hit Leeds last week. That’s when he brought in the Salvadorans.” Last week. Before I hit Benny Ben-Reuven. Even before Benny tried to hit me. Which meant…Alexander knew Benny was going t
o make a move on me. And he knew I’d kill Benny. And he knew Carmen Leeds would be the next in line. So he gets in front of the thing, sets up a hit on Leeds in advance.

  It was a reasonably good theory, except for all the holes in it. Like, if Alexander was enough of a psychopath to murder everyone in his way—and I had no reason to doubt him—why not just murder Benny himself? Why wait for Benny to make a move against me and get himself killed? Plus, even if everything goes down the way he wants it to, he has to know I’d never let it stand. He has to know—he smokes Leeds, I smoke him. So why go to all the trouble?

  All the bolts slid into place, neatly filling the holes in my theory. Alexander also had to know I’d be out of the way. He had to know Benny was packing a badass death curse. That’s why he didn’t do Benny himself and why he wasn’t worried about retaliation from me. I kill Benny and get popped by the death curse, Alexander just has to stay alive a few days until the curse finishes me off. Maybe he even thought it would be immediate, didn’t know about the mandatory three-day waiting period. Either way, he just has to buy some time. That’s why the little cocksucker seemed so smug and agreeable at our sit-down.

  I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I got played, Chavez.”

  “Yeah, maybe we all did, but that don’t matter. Let’s go get this motherfucker.”

  “No, I mean I got played.” I filled in the details for him—the death curse, Samael, everything. “Jesus Christ, chola,” Chavez said when I was finished. “That’s one sneaky fucking white boy. Even mi madre wouldn’t have seen that coming.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You should go to Rashan, D.”

  “And say what? That Alexander played me and would he please pull my ass out of the fire? Come on, Chavez, you know how this thing of ours works. Rashan will cancel my health insurance and give Alexander my job.”

  “No way, chola. He likes you. He wouldn’t cut you loose.”

  “Fuck you, Chavez, he didn’t make me lieutenant because he likes me. He gave me the job because he thought I could do it better than anyone else.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m working an angle.” I looked at my watch. “But I’ve still got time to kill Jefferson Alexander.”

  The Paradise was one of those screen palaces from a different age, a time when going to the movies was still an event. That age was long dead by the seventies, and the Paradise reinvented itself as a joint where middle-aged guys in raincoats went to thoroughly enjoy the latest adult films. By the mid-eighties, home video had killed the porn-theater star and the Paradise became a drug haunt, just like every other derelict building the city hadn’t gotten around to condemning. Now the ghosts of Bogie and Bacall, Chambers and Holmes mingled with those of junkies and crack whores, and the theater had become a kind of sorry-ass monument to urban decay.

  In other words, the Paradise had juice. I could see why the boss wanted to bring it back online.

  I parked down the street and walked cautiously along the sidewalk to the front of the theater. There was only one word spelled out on the marquee: CLOSED. The glass was long gone from the ticket booth and the entrance, replaced with sheets of plywood. The sheets were nearly hidden under a thick layer of graffiti, and I recognized our gang tags.

  I placed my palm flat against the door and flowed a little juice, unlocking the wards. I pushed it open and stepped quietly inside. It was dark and I powered up my nightvision spell. The Paradise had probably had a grand, ornate entry when it opened. All that finery had been replaced by more utilitarian decor during the adult-film era, and now even the metal fixtures, linoleum, and stain-resistant carpet had been removed. The place was gutted, with exposed mechanicals in the ceiling and bare, cracked, and pitted concrete floors, also liberally adorned with graffiti. A rusting metal staircase led up to the projector room and balcony.

  A shadowed figure appeared in the doorway at the top of the stairs. I felt the unmistakable electrical tingle and building pressure of magic gathering. The figure shouted something in a language I didn’t understand but that sounded vaguely Asian, and a fiery lance streaked down at me.

  It was solid spellcraft, accomplished even, and it reminded me this was a good crew, one the outfit needed. The spell also provided sufficient illumination with my nightvision that I could identify the gangster attacking me. It wasn’t Alexander, it was a Vietnamese kid named Bobby Nguyen. He had some juice and he looked scared. He was backing up his boss, but he didn’t seem happy about it.

  I spun a spontaneous counter and caught his spell in midair. I reversed it and flicked my hand, hurling the spear back at Nguyen so fast it blurred to an indistinct, orange streak as it flew toward him. I froze the spell inches from his face.

  “Get lost, Bobby,” I said, and jerked my head in the direction of the door behind me.

  Nguyen swallowed hard and nodded. He eased carefully around the fire spell and down the stairs. He gave me a kind of embarrassed wave, and then darted out the door.

  I curled my hand into a fist, and the lance diminished to a tiny point of orange light and then vanished. I went up the stairs. I figured Alexander was in the main theater, but I didn’t want to leave any of his crew at my back. I ducked my head into the projector room, but it was empty. I pushed through the swinging doors and stepped onto the balcony.

  Two more of Benny’s gangsters were waiting there, a guy and a girl, both young. I recognized them but couldn’t remember their names. The guy was the one at the construction site who’d opened the trailer door for me, the one with the Uzi. He still had the Uzi, and he let loose with it when I came through the doors.

  I triggered the crucifix—I’d charged all my talismans before coming to the theater—and bullets hammered the shield, setting off a miniature fireworks display as the sapphire energy discharged. Bullets chewed into the paneling of the doors and wall behind me in a blizzard of splintered wood.

  “All movements go too far,” I said, tearing the submachine gun from the gangbanger’s grasp with the telekinesis spell and pulling it through the air into my own. “Vi Victa Vis,” I said, extending my hand toward him, palm out. The force spell hurled him backward and knocked him off the balcony. Fuck him, he tried to shoot me. Anyway, the balcony wasn’t that high—he might live.

  While I was dealing with the shooter, the girl was spinning a spell. I use famous quotations for my spellcraft, but the activity can be anything that helps you flow the juice and create the right pattern for the spell. She used finger tutting, which was new to me but made a lot of sense. On the downside, it required some really intricate hand gestures and positions. On the upside, it was nonverbal and looked really fucking cool.

  I felt the magic well up in my mind, whispering to me inside my skull, calming me, encouraging me to throw down my weapon and give up the fight. I shook my head at the girl and smiled, flowing my own juice and washing out the hostile magic. Her eyes got a little wider and her shoulders slumped. She dropped to her knees and laced her fingers behind her head, like I was planning to read her Miranda rights. Good enough.

  I moved to the edge of the balcony and looked down. There were half a dozen more gangsters in the theater, the big hitters in Benny’s crew. At the front of the theater, on the raised platform where the screen had once been, KZ was bound to a wooden chair with a strip of duct tape covering his mouth. He was enclosed in a circle that had been laid down with red spray paint. By my witch sight, I could see the juice flowing through the circle and I could even get a sense of its purpose. It was a ward against my magic, but it was more than that. Alexander had also tied off a killing spell to the symbol. He’d be able to trigger it with little more than a thought.

  I spun my levitation spell, floating over the banister and out into open space. I spread my arms dramatically and hung in the air above the gangsters below. Most of them started backing away, unwilling to attack me, but two of them cast halfhearted combat spells my way. I reached out with the juice, intercepting the spells and snuf
fing them out.

  “Vi Victa Vis,” I said, and hurled my force spell down at them, modifying the pattern in my mind and rearranging the magic in midcourse. The spell forked and struck both of my attackers at once, and they crashed through several rows of dilapidated seats before finally coming to rest, unmoving, on the theater floor. The others turned and ran.

  I floated down from the balcony and landed in the center aisle. I spun my eye in the sky spell and positioned it just below the ceiling. The spell would give me a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of anything in the theater. I walked down the aisle toward KZ.

  Through the eye spell, I saw two of Alexander’s Salvadorans step through the doors at the back of the theater, moving into position behind me. They must have followed me in from the street. So much for keeping the bad guys off my back. The Salvadorans’ faces and heads were heavily tattooed and both were representing MS-13 colors. They’d probably come up in the gang, and I guessed old habits died hard.

  The access door at the front of the theater opened, and two more of the Salvadorans came out and took positions on either side of KZ, just outside the circle. Finally, Jefferson Alexander made his appearance. He was dressed just as he’d been at our sit-down and looked a little crusty. He’d probably been too scared to leave his escort long enough to get a shower or a change of clothes. That made me happy.

  Alexander walked over to stand closer to the Salvadorans. He spread his hands and sneered at me, as if daring me to make a move. “No one asked for you, bitch,” he said. “Get the fuck out of here.” He looked at the nearest Salvadoran and laughed, but got no reaction. Even his hired killers couldn’t stand the fucking guy.

  I kept walking. With the eye spell, I saw the Salvadorans by the door move up behind me. I stopped when I was about ten feet away from Alexander. I focused my attention on the two Salvadorans standing with him and spoke to them in Spanish.