The Night Dahlia

by R. S. Belcher

  “Iyolo tlahtec nian cuaz,” Francisco commanded, his hand outstretched. I felt a horrible pain in my chest, like it was splitting. I flexed my Manipura chakra, as I anchored myself with my Muladhara, and the pain decreased, but it had given me pause. Francisco pressed his attack. The otherworldly force he had entreated hovered over him, ready to spike my spells back, but I had an idea about that.

  “Coatl cocoliztli izqu cocoa,” he spat. My blood felt like it was beginning to burn in my veins, and I felt sick, like I was going to vomit. He had tried to turn my blood into venom. I closed the gap between us. I was close enough now to drive a right hook into his face. Francisco managed to block part of the punch but not all of it. His head snapped to the side, and he grunted out a spell.

  “Fenestra aperta est. Et omnes leges ejus. Intrate, grata,” I said as I punched Francisco again, this time in the stomach. It was getting hard to see straight; the poisoned blood had done a number on me, but I needed to push through. No time to fall back.

  There were shouts from upstairs, the clatter and dull thuds of automatic weapons and grenade launchers as something crashed through the compound gates. Dragon had arrived. I wish I could have seen the look on the faces of the tired, drunk, stoned mara members as an armor-plated, thirty-two-short-ton garbage truck blasted through, Lauren at the wheel.

  Dwayne and Gretchen tore through the MS-13 soldiers like a buzz saw. Bodies and parts flew everywhere. The man and the dog moved in seamless coordination. More bangers were pouring down the stairs into the living room. Several of them fired on Dwayne as they descended, but he spun his body, twisting and snapping the chain. Impossibly, the chain was everywhere a bullet was supposed to be, knocking them off their path toward him. Dwayne launched himself up the stairs, plowing into the stunned mass of gunmen. Gretchen had Dwayne’s back, finishing off the last of the gang standing in the living room, ripping at their shins and wrists, maiming them and disarming them.

  Francisco shoved me back, trying to get enough space to cast. He barked out a quick, dirty spell, “Totonqui xochitl tlaxilia,” and flowers of black fire spilled from his free hand, engulfing me in ebony flames. I felt my clothes begin to catch and smelled crisping hair, but I had to hold. I charged at him, low, with a roar and felt my arms wrap around his legs in a football-style tackle. We both went down, and he began to burn too.

  “Coyonia,” I began, speaking in the ancient Nahuatl, the language of Francisco’s gods, “talaih tlamanalli…”

  “No!” Francisco shouted. The awareness of what I was doing fell on him. I had torn down his pacts and wards with his own patrons. He was just another piece of sacrificial meat to his vengeful gods now, like the rest of us. I was offering him up, along with myself, if I died. Bloodthirsty gods hated getting played by mortal wizards, and they really couldn’t pass up a twofer.

  “… otechompahpaquilti,” I finished as I began to feel my skin redden and blister from the black fire. I grabbed a pistol off the floor, discarded by a now-dead banger. Francisco struggled with me, panic giving him strength. I jammed a thumb into one of his wide eyes, and he screamed and let loose of the gun long enough for me to double-tap two rounds into his chest. I rolled off him, both of us burning, me hacking and tossing the gun. “Aquam mergit et lenire flamma ignis,” I gasped, and the wizard fire was gone. I was smoking, and soaking wet. My burns stung, but they felt better, a temporary magical remedy. I leaned back and watched Francisco burn, as a proper sacrifice should.

  “Good to see you again, Francisco,” I wheezed.

  There was a loud boom, and the house shook. I was pretty sure that was our ride backing up to the front door. I struggled to my feet, pausing on my knees to puke. My blood still had more than your daily recommended requirement of magic venom. I knew the spell would unravel and fade now that Francisco was past tense, but in the meantime I felt like ass.

  I looked around at all the bodies and recalled why I had wanted Dwayne with me. He had already worked his way upstairs, and I noticed that it seemed pretty quiet in the house. I stumbled against the walls, like a pinball, until I reached the front door, unbarred it, and opened it. The garbage truck’s interior, usually filled with garbage, was on the other side of the door. The compartment was clean and had benches for passengers. The walls of the chamber were packed with bulletproof blankets. I heard an intercom speaker hiss as the mike in the cab was keyed. “You got him?” Dragon asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. “I ran into Francisco, you remember that asshole?”

  “Yeah,” Dragon replied with a hiss and click. “You give him my love?” I looked back at the still-burning remains.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I did.”

  “Okay we got incoming, LAPD and sheriff’s department, in about four minutes,” she said. “Get your answers and let’s go!” I struggled up the stairs, pausing until a dizzy spell passed, and reached the second floor. More bodies, and Dwayne and Gretchen leading a man in a Thom Browne suit and tie out into the hallway. He looked Middle Eastern. His haircut was short and professional and he carried a dull silver armored case. He looked more pissed than scared.

  “I was just bringing him down to you,” Dwayne said. “This guy gave me like twenty different names, but he was packing up and deleting computer stuff in there, and the computer told me his real name is Luis Demir.”

  “You looked him up using his computer?” I asked. Dwayne shook his head.

  “No, brah, the computer’s shot. The spirit in the computer actually told me; it’s got a voice, man, we’ve discussed this.”

  “I don’t know what sitcom you two fell out of,” Demir said in flawless, unaccented English. Gretchen growled at him, showing bloodstained teeth.

  “Three,” I corrected. “She’s touchy about that.”

  “But you have no idea how big the people are you just fucked wi—”

  “Let me save you some time,” I interrupted Demir. “I don’t care about you or your business associates. You acquired identity data from a girl some years back. Her name was Caern Ankou. She was in Greece at the time. You traded her identity for a fake one, and you got her off of Spetses. I need all the info on that identity you cooked for her and where you last saw her.”

  Demir shook his head. “You set all this shit up for that? Are you fucking mental? You have any idea how many paper spoofs I do in any given month, a year? How many identities I farm or buy from paper farmers? You really expect me to remember one name out of hundreds of thousands, out of dozens of countries?”

  I slipped the photo of Caern out of the dry inside of my wallet. It was the one Dree had given me of them. I slammed Demir’s head hard against the wall behind him. I was beginning to hear sirens, and I felt another wave of nausea churn inside of me. I shoved the photo into his face.

  “Okay, I’ll make this easy for you, since you’re such a busy man. One of the girls in this picture is the girl you helped out. One of the girls in this picture has a father with enough juice he makes you and your business associates look like fly shit, and who will personally oversee your vivisection if you don’t help him and us, his humble representatives, find his daughter.” I smashed his head against the wall again. “Is this thing on? Is this working? Anything coming back to you?”

  “Okay! Okay! Shit!” Demir said. The sirens were louder now, closer. I nodded for Dwayne and Gretchen to head on downstairs. They did. Demir knelt and opened the case at his feet. Inside nestled in cut foam cradles were hundreds of small, black, cylindrical, encrypted USB drives, each with a tiny numeric keypad on their face. Demir ran a finger along the rows and finally pulled one loose. He handed it to me. “The key is,” he closed his eyes, recalling, “2621985045.”

  “Ballard! Cops, brah!” Dwayne yelled from the front door.

  “I remember her,” Demir said with a grin. “Sweet young thing, running away from something, burning down her old life, so she sold it to me. Gave something else to me too on the boat. She was my little cabin pet for the whole trip. She fought for a little bit.
I was her first. By the time we reached Portugal, she was broken in just fine.”

  A cold snake of bile and anger thrashed in my guts. Part of it was the poison, but most of it was Demir. “You left her in Portugal?” I said coolly. I was looking around the hall. Demir nodded.

  “Yeah, but she told me she was coming here. I toyed with the idea of selling her or keeping her for myself, she was a sweet little piece, but she bolted as soon as we were off the boat. End of story. You going to get me out of here now, or what?”

  The sirens were on top of us. “Yeah,” I said gesturing toward the stairs, “go on, get to the truck.”

  I was thirteen in an eighteen-wheeler at a rest stop off I-64, just over the Kentucky line. He had picked me up, fed me, let me sleep in the warm cab when it was so cold outside. He put something in my food, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t think while he touched me and made my body respond to his dirty thick fingers all over it. He tore me as he entered me from behind; it felt like fire, like broken glass pushed by stone, like my insides were going to crush up into my heart, my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. It hurt so bad and I was so ashamed.

  I had the power of the stars and the planets, the whole universe, turning inside me, like a secret clock, and only I had the key to turn it, to make it spin, to slow, to stop, or to break the whole fucking thing. I was a young god, and I could do nothing while he stole the last shreds of me not dipped in pain, and loss, and fear. Adult me knelt in the hallway as Demir descended the stairs and the sirens heralded consequence. I stood.

  “Hey,” I said. Demir turned to look back. He saw the pistol in my hand, aimed at him. “She was thirteen.” I shot him in the head, and his face folded in as it disappeared; a dark mist sprayed out the back of his skull. He tumbled down the stairs and was still. I dropped the gun and headed down the steps. I almost fell. I was dizzy and sick. Everything seemed like a dream, and I had nothing left. I reached the bottom and started to turn toward the short hall, the front door, and the garbage truck. I sensed something was wrong and turned.

  The death hex sizzled the air as it bore into me. I reacted with nothing but animal instinct, trying to deflect it with raw power—no spell, no focus, no finesse—just my life screaming “No!” If I hadn’t stolen that tiny dram of life force in the transfer when I saved the dog’s life, I’d be dead, courtesy of a spell designed especially for me. The blast took me off my feet, knocked me back into a wall. Everything in my chest felt broken and jagged inside, as I slid down the wall and coughed, choking on my own blood. I heard Dwayne shouting and Gretchen barking. The sirens were a chorus of demons, singing hallelujah as they opened the gates of Hell for me.

  There was a man, dressed in black, wearing gloves and boots. A hood hid most of his face. His skin was black and had pockmarks on the chin from a bad bout of acne. He wore a black nylon combat harness with various holsters, sheaths, and pouches all over it. Behind him, one of the large windows that gave a view of the mountains and canyons was melted. He seemed impressed I was still alive. He casually fired a blast down the hallway from the completely, magically, silent machine pistol in his hand. I thought I heard Dwayne shout and dive back for cover. The assassin was standing in front of me, bringing the machine pistol up to my head. The gun was covered in arcane runes, and I was pretty sure the bullets in it were too, built special to deal with folks like me. Some part of my brain that hadn’t already shut down knew this had to be the Carnifex, the hit man that Ankou’s rivals had sent. I looked up and could see his eyes under the hood; they were yellow, the color of strong piss. There was no gloating, no smart-ass lines. He was just going to pull the trigger and that would be that.

  “You can’t cast a death hex for shit,” I muttered, blood spilling out with my last words.

  Another of the windows behind us exploded as a figure flew into the room, wreathed in a million tiny slivers of glass, all reflecting the morning sun. It was Vigil, and he had a pistol in either hand. A bullet from one of them had shattered the window; he pumped three bullets into the assassin’s back with the gun in his other hand as he hit the floor and tumbled behind one of the couches.

  The Carnifex had defensive magics, bullet wards, and the like, but I was certain Vigil’s guns were enchanted too. In a war of magic weapons, the side with the most money usually won. A hot spray of the Carnifex’s blood hit my face and chest, even as he dove for cover behind a steel-and-glass entertainment center. My vision was narrowing, but I saw the Carnifex touch a rune on the machine pistol, and the rune glowed for a moment. The hit man whispered something to the warm metal of his gun. He held his arm out, straight up, and pulled the trigger, letting slip a burst of silent fire and a swarm of bullets. The bullets zipped skyward, then twisted in midair and headed for the other side of Burris’s couch. There was a series of dull thuds as they hit behind the couch. Everything was silent.

  I lost awareness for a second, but when it came back, I saw the Carnifex carefully peer out of his cover, stand, and begin to advance. Vigil popped up a second later, behind the couch, holding the corpse of an MS-13 solider in one hand, like a shield, and his pistol in the other. His suit’s upper chest was stained with blood from a hit. Burris fired again, and again, advancing on the killer. Vigil’s initial volley of bullets ripped into the side of the Carnifex’s face and his collarbone. The magical assassin grunted in pain but didn’t drop.

  The Carnifex stopped the Elf knight’s advance with a withering blast of machine gun fire that forced Vigil to dive for cover behind one of the stone Aztec coffee tables. The silent blast of bullets sent drug and booze debris flying everywhere. There was a rattle and a crack as a chain shot out from the corner of the hall and snapped the machine pistol out of the Carnifex’s hand. It fell to the floor, out of the hit man’s reach, and I heard Gretchen’s triumphant bark as Dwayne ducked back behind cover, a second before that whole area was blasted full of bullet holes from the Carnifex’s backup pistol, which he had drawn with his still-functioning hand even before his machine pistol had hit the floor.

  Burris took the second the assassin was firing at Dwayne to pop up from cover and put another rune-covered bullet into the trigger man’s upper back. The Carnifex’s defensive wards were losing their effectiveness and he hissed and staggered at the hit. Vigil dropped back behind cover.

  “Enough of this,” the Carnifex rumbled. “Chak zam nan sal sa a monte ak touye motherfucker sa a, kounye a!” Every loose gun in the room floated into the air; bolts and slides clicked and moved into place of their own accord. The animated guns all aimed at Vigil from every direction. He was dead.

  I tried to stay aware, but it was so hard, and I was really cold. Someone was shouting on a bullhorn, and the sirens were the wail of a heart monitor flatlining. The pain was far away, but so was my body. I made myself feel it, fought the slipping away, fought the warm comfort of the big sleep. I wiped my face, made a fist full of blood—the assassin’s blood—and aimed it at the Carnifex’s exposed back, just as he was hissing out the final syllables of his spell to fire the hovering guns. I spit out all the malice I had left in me. After this night, I was pretty much running on empty, so I pushed the thimbleful of hate with the last burning embers of my life force; I gave it up, burned it like nitrous. The hex hit the assassin, and he gasped and fell to his knees. Every floating weapon fell with him. I felt him die as my will, my life broke his. The Carnifex slumped face-first.

  After a night of drugs, drink, rock and roll, old pain, old enemies, being burnt, shredding souls, human sacrifices, and getting death hexed, I was done. Not a bad last night as bar stories go, I thought with the last sputter of my awareness. Not bad at all.

  “That,” I said, “is how you throw a death hex, motherfucker.”

  And then the party was over, and someone shut off all the lights. No encore, no sea of trembling lighter flames, only the gray hum of an unplugged amp, then silence. I was thankful for the peace and quiet.

  TWELVE

  May 1, 1984

  The ride
out from L.A. had taken about three hours, so the sun was just starting to climb behind us as we neared the beach. “Panama” by Van Halen was playing on the tape deck in Nico’s 300ZX. You couldn’t find a decent radio station out here, and he had been playing the album to death since it had come out at the beginning of the year.

  Nico had picked me up at my apartment after we caught the call at around three. My partner looked pissed, but then he usually did. Nico Flores was half-Cuban, half-Mexican, and all badass. He was thirty-eight, gaunt, with thinning black hair he kept slicked straight back. Ever-widening gaps of scalp showing through the combed-back hair often reminded me of rows in a garden. Nico had a mustache that was Magnum P.I. meets Ron Jeremy. He wore a rumpled, Hawaiian shirt that was so bright it could keep you from getting shot in the woods by hunters. Around his neck were several short beaded necklaces, Ilekes, Santeria charms of protection and power made from different colored eleke beads, to represent different Orisha. He had a cigarette dangling at the corner of his dour mouth. I knew how much Nico hated working these late night cases now that Doris was so far along. In spite of his often public and vocal bitching about his family, I knew how much he cherished them, and that he was with the Nightwise in large part because he wanted to keep the monsters of the world away from his beloved wife, little girls, and soon-to-be-born baby boy. This close to the birth, he wanted to be there for his wife and the girls, but most of the things the order needed us for only came out at night. I had offered to go out on the call alone when he picked me up, but he had just grunted. “Get the hell in the car,” he said, and that was pretty much that when it came to Nico.