by Ann Aguirre
“Oh, hello,” she said when she recognized my voice. “I know Jesse will want to speak with you. He’s been very fretful when his meds wear off.”
Well, yeah. He had to be worried. Even with a bullet hole in him and shot up with meds, he still had room in his heart for me. Maybe I’d fought the idea of falling for him because he stood for everything good and decent—and, well, I didn’t. If the past left a mark on one’s soul, mine resembled an old road map covered with dirty footprints, ashes, and spilled wine that looked like blood.
Yet maybe it was time to let the guilt go for good.
“Corine?” He sounded fucking stoned. “You okay? I keep telling them they hafta let me out.”
“And they’re not going to listen,” I heard his mother say firmly. “Not until the doctors release you, and then you’re going straight into protective custody.”
“I’m fine. Just do as Glencannon asks. . . . I’ll be all right. This once, let the damsel save herself.”
The phone clattered, and then Mrs. Saldana spoke. “He’s a bit out of it still. Are you working?” Her tone implied that was the only acceptable reason for my not being at her son’s bedside. The truth would likely make her head explode.
“I’m sorry, yes.” It wasn’t a complete lie, and I couldn’t explain that hanging around his room guaranteed more harm to come.
If I stayed away and caused trouble elsewhere, Montoya and his men should be too busy beating the bushes for me to think about the cop who got away. That was the plan, anyway. I made an excuse about getting back to my job and hung up. Lying to Jesse’s mom made me feel lower than a worm’s belly, but nothing could alter my circumstances.
To get my mind off Jesse, I e-mailed Chuch. He showed up within the hour, sooner than Escobar’s boys. I ushered him into the safe house and he assessed the place with an approving eye.
“This is a great setup. Would take a small army or highpowered explosives to get in here. A Molotov won’t do the job. It’d just burn the paint off the cement.”
“Good to know,” I muttered.
He spread his hands with a cheerful grin. “We all have areas of expertise, right? What’s the plan?”
I filled him in on what I had Escobar’s crew doing. “And so I’m waiting for them to report back. Two houses, two nights running, and I had them leave a calling card.”
“You’re doing that for me and Eva, huh? Hitting him where he lives and all.”
“Yeah. Jesse too.” And Ernesto and Señor Alvarez. For the fact that Shannon and I are now homeless. Oh, yeah, Montoya had given me many, many reasons to fight.
“You got a good head for battle, prima.”
“I want him shaken.” I sighed softly. “I’m not thrilled with hiding while I send other people to do my dirty work, but—”
“It’s better than dying,” Shannon finished.
Chuch nodded. “Nothing wrong with delegation. Speaking of which, you never did tell me how you swung an alliance with Escobar. He never sees anybody. Dude’s crazy cautious.”
“He tested me and found me worthy.” I refused to say more.
The time I’d spent with Kel was too personal to share, even with my friends. I couldn’t let myself think about him right then, where he was, whether he was lonely or loathed his orders. I would later, no question. Kelethiel, son of Uriel and Vashti, had forged a path in my heart that nobody else could tread.
“Claro,” he said, as if that were the natural outcome. “So what’s my part?”
We didn’t have Chance to dowse this time, even if we got a list of properties from Escobar. After our last raid, I doubted we’d have it so easy if we attempted a frontal assault, and with his son or daughter about to be born, I wasn’t sending Chuch into battle anyway. The current plan must stand.
“I need you to use your contacts to get a message to Montoya’s people. I don’t want you carrying it yourself. But you know people who can.”
“That’s it?” His offense was obvious.
“It’s crucial. Now that I’ve done some damage, I need to talk some shit and up the stakes. But I can’t come into the open prematurely.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“For the message? I’m a ghost; he’ll never catch me—I’m unkillable. Maybe even that I’ve made a deal with the devil.” Considering what I’d done for Maury, that statement was closer to the truth than I liked. “Oh, and that anytime he wants to surrender in person, he should drop me a line.”
Chuch laughed softly. “Damn, cuz. That’s gonna burn right into his brain. He’ll probably kill the chingado who brings him word.”
“It’s a risk you take working for crazy-ass cartel bosses,” Shannon noted.
“So can you find someone to carry the message?”
Chuch considered. “Yeah, but you’ll have to write it down and seal it. Otherwise, nobody’d be dumb enough to take that shit to Montoya.”
“I can do that. And I’ll send this along as my calling card.” I held up the red hair extension. In this light, it was so obviously fake it wasn’t funny.
Rummaging turned up a pad of paper, and I always had a pen in my purse. I scrawled my comments in particularly taunting cursive, and I didn’t sign it. The red hair would do that for me.
Shannon watched, half-horrified, half-amused. “I hope to God Escobar knows what he’s doing.”
“Me too.” I abhorred bullbaiting, but we were doing exactly that to Montoya. Only I didn’t feel sorry for him at all. However this ended, he had it coming.
Chuch stood. “Do you want me to come back after I get this done?”
I considered. The less traffic here, the better, so I shook my head. “Just e-mail me a simple confirmation.”
After he’d gone, I realized I’d treated him like one of Escobar’s men. Find a Chuch-shaped task and aim him at it. I almost called him back to hug him or something. I didn’t want to start seeing people as useful. Christ, that would make me just like Escobar—worse, even, because I knew better. I’d been a better person once.
“What can I do?” Shannon asked. Not her too. But the truth was, I had an idea, and she read it in my expression. “Spill!”
“Since I don’t know much about Montoya and nothing about his sorcerous brother, I can’t target them. The spells my mother left me rely on personal experience or sympathetic magic.”
She nodded. “Right. You need hair, blood, or nail clippings. I’m familiar with the process.”
“Without those components, I need to know where they are and what they look like. So even if I was an experienced, well-trained witch—and I’m not”—frankly, I wasn’t sure what I was, and right then it didn’t matter—“it would be unlikely I could get a spell to work.”
“I get that. How can I help?”
“The pants I wore the night Jesse was shot are bloodstained. Two of the shooters died at the hospital.” Surely she’d see where I was heading with this.
“And you want me to try to use that to call one of those ghosts.”
“Not if you don’t want to. But we might be able to use his spirit in lieu of scrying. Find out how Montoya is handling the stress, which would offer insight on where to strike next. I want to break him, so he’s ready to act on Chuch’s message when it arrives. I want him frothing at the mouth at the prospect of killing me himself.”
“What if he does?”
“Kill me? He can’t. Heaven doesn’t want me and hell can’t handle me.”
She smiled at the stupid line. As I’d known she would, she said, “I can try.”
“You have your radio, right?”
“It’s in my bag. I never leave it behind.”
She’d carried it away from the ashes of her old life in Kilmer; it had belonged to an elderly man who spent his life fixing broken things. Too bad he’d died before he could take a crack at me.
“Then I’ll leave it up to you. If you’re scared . . . or even a little nervous, we don’t have to do this.”
“Check the cupbo
ards for me.”
I went into the kitchen, since I knew why she’d asked. If this went wrong, she needed a quick fix to offset the damage. I found some sugar cubes and tea bags. Not a Snickers bar, her preferred prescription for a nasty spirit suck, but it would do the job. I put the kettle on, just in case.
“You set?” I asked, coming back into the living room.
“I’m good. Get the focus item.”
Gross. I went into the bedroom and rummaged in the flowered suitcase. I’d stashed my bloody clothes in a plastic bag. The stain didn’t amount to much, just what I’d stepped in, helping Jesse to the sofa. Hopefully, Shannon could work with it.
I rejoined her and gave her the jeans. “On the hem, there.”
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t know. Want me to try to find a picture?” There might be photos in the newspaper. Sometimes they put convicted criminals in the headlines, along with old mug shots, but I didn’t know whose blood it was for certain.
“I’ll see what I can do without it.” She put one hand on the radio and the other hand on the denim. Immediately, the room chilled and the antique device crackled with an unearthly sound. A shiver ran through me. No matter how many times I saw her do this, it always caught me in the gut.
“Restless dead, I call you,” she whispered. “You’re lost, and I can help you find the way home.”
That might be a lie. I didn’t know what happened to the spirits when Shannon finished with them. The room temperature dropped further, so that I could see my breath when I exhaled. Her voice softened, becoming crooning and tender.
My knees gave way and I sat on the edge of the couch, trying not to get in her way. When the shade manifested fully, it passed through me. Reaction hit in stages, like the sudden shock of ice crackling beneath your feet, followed by the inevitable fall. The preternatural chill lingered.
She tinkered with the tuning dial, looking for this spirit’s frequency. “Are you there?” she asked yet again. The radio read 1490 AM.
“I’m here,” came the tinny response.
With some effort, I corralled my visceral terror. The ghost wouldn’t hurt me. No ordinary specter ever noticed me, so long as Shannon beckoned like a lodestone. I wondered how she looked to its otherworldly eyes.
“You worked for a very bad guy,” she said softly. “And you died for him. Now I need you to do something for me.”
“Montoya,” the dead man whispered. “I remember him.”
Shannon’s voice took on the weight of a command. “Haunt him. And in the morning, tell me what you saw.”
“Yes. I will. And then you’ll send me home?”
“Certainly.”
Her power astonished and humbled me. The ghost bled away in a trail of icy tendrils, leaving us both shivering. Without being asked I hurried to the kitchen to fix twin cups of tea. I laced hers with sugar cubes and carried the mug to her.
“They’ll do anything for you,” I said, sitting down.
She played with the spoon, eyeing me somberly. “Within their power.”
“The ghosts in the Kilmer wood were uncommonly potent?” They’d killed for her, as I recalled.
“I think, because of the demon, they were different. They fed on the grief, fear, and pain there, just as it did.”
Yeah, the one I’d unleashed on the world with a partner in crime. “That makes sense. So this one can’t kill Montoya for us.”
“Not unless he takes fright and falls down the stairs.” She shrugged. “But not everyone can perceive the spirit world. The shade may spend its time following Montoya in impotent silence.”
“Since the guy tried to kill Jesse and me, I don’t feel sorry for him.” I paused, hands cupped around my mug. “Thank you.”
“Anytime,” she said, and her smile made her look younger. “We’re besties.”
’Cause, yeah, the way to prove a friendship is to raise the dead. But hell, I’d do it for her. If she needed me to, I’d summon another demon and not even ask why.
“Yeah. We are.”
“You wanna order pizza while we wait for the goons?”
“Secret safe house in allegedly abandoned building. I’m thinking no pizza.”
“Oh, right. This sucks.”
“You said it, sister. I’m going to lay some wards. Just for practice. You want to help?”
“Sweet.”
“I figured I’d start with the door. In the blue grimoire, there’s an exploding rune that’ll go off if anyone enters with ill intent.”
“Do we even have the components?”
“It’s energy work, actually. The more advanced stuff is.”
“Then I revise my objection—should you try that? I thought you wanted to start with the easy spells first.”
“These times do not lend themselves to simplicity. If someone comes to shoot us in the face, I’d rather not square off with Conchita’s Unstoppable Tickle.”
“You totally just made that up.”
I grinned. “Maybe. But I can try an easier spell first, if you want.”
“What did you have in mind?”
I explained my ongoing problem with law enforcement and how I thought a trust me charm might come in handy. Since it required far less energy and came from the simple grimoire, Shannon seemed more at ease with my attempting that one. She finished her tea while I set up.
After reading the spell six times, I said, “I need a token, something to invest.”
“Maybe a coin you could keep in your pocket,” she suggested.
“Great idea.” I dug in my purse and came up with a “lucky” penny.
Curling my fingers around it, I whispered the words and called the heat. It singed my fingers against the metal; this was far worse than using the touch. The magic poured out of me until the penny blazed like a live coal in my palm. Gradually, the pain became almost unbearable, but I didn’t stop until I’d finished, and then it cooled. When I opened my hand, the copper was misshapen, as if it had been run over by a train, and I wore a new mark. That was new; I didn’t gain scars from the touch, but certain spells would inflict them. Good to know.
“Did it work?”
“I don’t see how we can tell until we run across someone to influence. I mean, you trust me already. Right?”
She hesitated a little too long. “Right.”
Before I could address that pause, a thump from behind the sofa distracted me. With Shannon close behind, I went to investigate and found Butch. He’d toppled a Scrabble game off the shelf and was busily pawing at the letters.
I sighed. “Feeling ignored, little man?”
He barked twice and kept worrying the tiles. Brow raised, I knelt. He was spelling something. No shit. In a freaky world, things just kept getting weirder. Instead of picking up the mess, I watched the sentence take shape:
The bad man is coming.
Storm Warning
“It has to be a coincidence,” Shannon said.
“Like a hundred monkeys writing Shakespeare?”
Butch cocked his head, disappointed in us. He scrabbled at the tiles until the letters made no sense. Then he barked twice. No. Not a coincidence.
She studied him for a minute. “You know, we could ask him actual questions. And see if he answers.”
Feeling like an idiot, I sat down on the floor. Shannon dropped down beside me. “What bad man?”
Butch went to work on the tiles. Wants to kill you.
“You mean Montoya?”
One yap offered the answer; he didn’t need to spell it out. But, Jesus, this couldn’t be happening. “How do you know?”
More tile work. U didnt see, but ghost came back.
“The one Shannon sent out? When?”
He rearranged them again. While U did spell.
I wondered how the hell the dog could see and hear ghosts, but it seemed like the most normal part of current events. “And he said Montoya’s closing in on us?”
Another affirmative bark.
; Anybody else would think I was crazy, but I took Butch’s warnings serious as a heart attack.
I glanced at Shan. “We need to move. Get your stuff.”
Next I grabbed the dog, plus the Scrabble tiles. We might need them later. I had more questions, but this wasn’t the time. Within five minutes we’d packed and run for it. Laden with Butch, my purse, a plastic bag containing my grimoires, along with my suitcase, I didn’t move as fast as I needed to. Shannon fared no better. Her backpack, the antique radio, and laptop bag weighed her down. We made it halfway to the Forester before the weather hit.
Black storm clouds swelled overhead, and thunder boomed. The torrent came out of nowhere, pouring buckets so we could hardly see. Lightning split the sky, touching down perilously close to our location. I ran full-out, my stuff bouncing. This was a solid nature spell, and if we let the weather slow us down long enough for Montoya’s men to get here, we were so boned. Apparently, the sorcerer could do more than major sendings and summon demons. He was a damn jack-of-all-trades, this Vicente—and I wanted him dead almost as much as his brother.
It also meant someone had sold me out, either Chuch or one of Escobar’s men. I didn’t want to believe that of my friend, but if they’d taken him during his attempt to find a messenger for me, I wouldn’t blame him for giving me up to save his wife and unborn child. In fact, I’d be mad if he didn’t.
The wind made it hard to move; it pushed us toward the building like giant invisible hands. Head down, I shoved back, but each step felt like a mile. Blinded by wind and rain, I reached for Shannon’s arm. Then the hail began, the rain turning to ice. Big as golf balls, it pelted our skin and left giant welts.
Together, we fought to the SUV and managed to slide inside, but visibility was nil. Worse than that, the fence meant to protect us would have to be unlocked manually. I knew the combination, but that meant more time wasted. Still, it wasn’t like I had a choice. At least since it was magickal in origin, this storm couldn’t follow us. My amulet, tucked away beneath my shirt, should still be functioning fine, so we just needed to get out of here.
I jammed the keys in the ignition and whipped us toward the fence. In the dark and wind and rain, I couldn’t see it until I got right up on it, and then our outlook worsened. An SUV barreled toward us, head-on, from the street. We didn’t have any weapons, and my spell casting wasn’t good enough to help in a fight. Not yet. I kind of doubted they had any objects they wanted me to read. No, they had been sent with heavy weapons and orders to kill.