The Night Dahlia

by R. S. Belcher

  Two of the men were still up, staggered and bleeding. Ankou’s bodyguard rushed the Fae noble out of the conference room, shouting for backup down the hall. Ankou looked back at me, a strange look of serenity still on his face, then he was out of sight.

  I opened the furnace of my Manipura chakra, stoked it with unbearable guilt and rage and let it vomit out of me with almost no focus. The enchanted ropes flared green a second before they became ash. I stood as the guard Vigil had shot in the side of the face turned to shoot me. He turned to ash too, as did part of the conference table and the wall behind him. The last knight standing with a bleeding shoulder had me dead-bang, he raised his gun, began to squeeze the trigger. The message to pull the trigger never made it to his finger as his brain exploded. Vigil tracked the headless body with his smoking gun until it thudded onto the floor. Then he slumped, his eyes closing. I knelt by him, slapping his face.

  “Come on, come on, we got to go before the rest—”

  “No others,” Vigil said. “I took care of them, all of them. Grinner’s alive, down the hall. He’s … in … bad shape, but he’s…”

  He drifted off.

  “Come on, goddamn it, hang on! You’re supposed to be a badass knight!”

  Vigil’s lips opened even though his eyes didn’t. “Not … anymore, burned it all down, not … anymore.”

  He went silent.

  I found a working cell phone in the carnage and called Anna. “Get over here,” I said when she answered. I gave her the mansion’s address. “Vigil and Grinner are down. It should be safe here, but get ahold of Dwayne and have him meet you here. Call ambulances, call cops. Hurry!”

  “Laytham, are you okay? You sound—”

  I hung up. I grabbed a few things from the room and sprinted back toward the garage on the upper level. I took the first car I could find. I don’t remember what it was; it didn’t matter. I noticed the limo that had been in the garage was gone. I cursed as I roared down the drive, through the already open gate, and onto the freeway.

  I did over a hundred the whole way to Encinitas, to Caern’s door. I wished I knew the secrets of the road magic that let viamancers bend space, but I didn’t, and even if I did, I don’t think I had the focus, the calm, to do any working that required clear thought. My mind was a wildfire, there was no reason in it, no plan, just the highway and the sick guilt and dread eating the core of me.

  I screeched to a stop at Caern Ankou’s house, sprinted up the sidewalk, and through the shattered remains of the front door. There was the smell of gunpowder and ozone, the jagged afterimage of sudden violence humming in the now still, silent air.

  Caern’s body was in the hallway, near the shelf of family photos—her new family, her only real family. She was splayed on her stomach, like she had been running down the hall when they got her. She had been shot in the back several times. I dropped down beside her, no strength left in my legs, felt her warm blood pooling around her. Her eyes looked up at me, empty—no accusations, no fear—nothing. I closed them.

  She was clutching one of the photos of her, Joey, and Garland, like a drowning woman might clutch at a life preserver. It was the same photo she had shown me, her favorite one. As I sat next to her, I saw that she had been shot several times in the belly by someone at point-blank range. There were wounds on her hand that made me think she had tried with her last breath to protect the child in her stomach. She was dead, the baby was dead, and I was still living. I wanted to cry, to scream, to tear at my own face and skin, but I had no fucking right to any of it. I didn’t even think I was capable of crying anymore.

  She was beautiful, even now. Crystal Myth, Caern Ankou, mother, wife … daughter.

  I searched the house. There were no other bodies, no loving husband, no little, now-motherless boy. There were no signs of a struggle, only a brutish, hasty search. One of the family pictures from the wall in the hallway was missing. The purple crystal bracelet was still around Caern’s wrist. I took it off and put it in my pocket. I took the photo she was clutching too. I held her still-warm hand for a moment.

  I walked out of the house, vaguely aware of the neighbors gawking and pointing, some snapping pictures with cell phone cameras. Sirens threatened off in the distance. I got in the car and I drove away.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The executive offices of Pentacle Studios were off Santa Monica Boulevard. Their security was good, even a few tricks and traps for those in the Life. I bypassed most of it with a lifetime worth of skills cultivated toward getting into and out of locked places. The Harryhausen animates, the IMAX tesseract, and the Trebek sphinx proved a little more time-intensive, but I was very focused on getting my face time with the CEO.

  I burst into a conference room full of Pentacle execs, yes men, pitchmen, money guys, and gofers. At the head of the table, looking like a dark, slumming Borgia king, sat Max Winder in a wine-colored button-up with no tie and a black Isabel Marant blazer. His long white hair and goatee were perfect, flawless.

  “Hi,” I said. “Sorry I’m late. I’m the asshole you’ve been trying to kill for a while.” Everyone in the room shut up. They all looked to Winder, whose face remained serene, save for an arched eyebrow.

  “Ah, Laytham,” Winder said, standing. He was a few inches taller than me and I sensed no tension or menace in him whatsoever. He strode to me and extended a hand for me to shake. I declined. “I didn’t know that our meeting was today, but no worries, please have a seat. Espresso? Clif Bar? Bottled water?”

  Winder’s executive secretary rushed into the room, breathless. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Winder, he just ran right past me. He came out of the executive elevator somehow! I’ll call security.”

  “They might take a while to answer,” I chimed in.

  “That won’t be necessary, Glenys,” Winder said. “If you could please make that other call for me, and tell our friend that Mr. Ballard is here now for our appointment?”

  Glenys looked at me like I was contagious and then nodded to her boss. “Of course, sir.” She closed the door behind her. Winder returned to his chair at the head of the table. I remained standing, the door to my back.

  “I know what brings you here, Laytham,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about talking out of school. Everyone here is on the same page. We all travel in the same social circle, or summoning circle if you prefer.” Laughter came from all corners of the room.

  “Makes sense,” I said. “Why meet in some dingy cave when you can have your human sacrifices catered?”

  “Blunt, but essentially accurate,” Winder said. “We’re a Los Angeles tradition, Laytham. We’ve been here since the beginning, through the good times and the bad. We’re bankers and politicians, dream makers, and working stiffs, the homeless and the one percent. We cross all the lines, all the barriers. We are explorers in sensation, we breathe in the universe and it breathes us in.”

  “You’re murderers and molesters,” I said, walking around the table, looking from face to face, some amused, others guarded, most of them bland. “You destroy lives and you poison souls. There’s nothing noble in what you do, nothing enlightening. You’re self-centered bastards who muck in people’s lives and don’t give a damn about the consequences.”

  “Sound familiar to you at all?” Winder asked. “Like you, Laytham, we take the universe as it is, not as we wish it to be. We use whatever works, we know the only sin is to miss out on something, some scrap of experience. Can you honestly say you’re any different than us?”

  “You corrupt souls and then you devour them,” I said. “You can’t justify that.”

  “Nor do we see any reason to,” Winder said. “Laytham, my senses are as acute as yours. I see the scars and the stains on your aura. You have done everything you are accusing us of, yourself.”

  I paused. I hadn’t slept or had a drink in over two days. I felt thin and full of holes. Winder’s words hit me hard, as hard as Ankou’s accusation. I kept getting locked in rooms full of mirrors and I wished I coul
dn’t see.

  “This world is a moral vacuum,” he said, standing again, walking toward me. “We, those like you and I, those who follow us, possess the power and the wisdom to move through it like gods.” He stood before me, still placid. “Who can stand in judgment of gods, Laytham?”

  “The Nightwise,” I said, feeling my resolve return. “They can, and they do. They stand between all the sick, twisted, hungry things in the darkness and the Jane Does, the Crystal Myths of this world. All the connections to the murdered women and you, to your companies and your sick little club, everything that we dug up, I had it all sent electronically to the Maven of the Nightwise. They know about all of you now and they are going to shut your asses down.”

  The door, still to my back, clicked open. I turned to see why Winder was smiling. Gida Templeton, the High Maven of the Nightwise, returned Winder’s smile. “Hello, Max, Laytham,” Gida said. She paused to kiss me deeply as she passed me and then took an unclaimed seat at the conference table beside Winder’s. “I hope he hasn’t been too disruptive, Max,” she said. “He’s good at making messes. I know, I’ve had to clean up enough of them.”

  Max patted me on the shoulder and then crossed to give Gida a peck on the cheek before he sat down. “Not at all. We’ve been having a nice chat. Can I get you anything, my dear?”

  “Tea, please,” she said. One of the hangers-on in the room fetched Gida a hot cup and saucer. She regarded me. “Bewilderment does not suit you well, Laytham,” she said. “The unflappable detective struck mute. No witty quip? No lighting a cigarette with an accusing ‘ah-ha’?”

  Another flutter of laughter from the room.

  “How long?” I said to Gida. My throat was dry.

  “Since before I recruited you, my dear boy,” Gida said, then sipped her tea and held up the cup. “A touch more cream, if you please?” The gofer obeyed as Gida continued. “I met Max back in … 1978, was it Max? We were so young! We crossed swords a few times when I was an investigator in the field. I dealt with some of his early efforts and made it my business to delve deeper into his background. Within a few years, I knew about his father and the cult, and that was when he made me his sales pitch. It was very convincing.”

  “So you kept the Nightwise away from the Dugpa, from the murders,” I said.

  Gida nodded.

  “And from poor Roland Blue,” she continued. “He was our weak link, our necessary vulnerability, I’m afraid. Rolly knew it, though, and he accepted that he might be disposable one day. At least I like to think he understood that.”

  “He found Crystal for us,” Winder said as Gida sipped her tea again. “He and my son, Brett. They recognized how powerful an … asset a full-blooded Fae would be.”

  “Asset,” I said, shaking my head. “Why don’t you just call her what she was to you? A mchod pa, an offering, a sacrifice.”

  “The strongest we’d ever hoped to have,” Winder said. “Even greater than the high workings my father orchestrated for the group in the late sixties.”

  “Your father?” I said.

  “Yes,” Winder said, “you met him at Corcoran, at the prison.”

  “Manson,” I said. “Your father is Charles Manson.”

  “Yes,” Winder said. “The group, they called themselves the Process Church back then, they hid me away in the early sixties. I was a mchod pa in a sense, myself. I was given to the group, by my father, raised in wealth, power, and privilege among other members, given a bulletproof name, the keys to the Hollywood kingdom, taught the true nature of reality, the jagged path to enlightenment. I was raised just as I have raised Brett.”

  “So Helter Skelter, those murders were more sacrifices for you bastards,” I said.

  “Yes,” Winder said with a chuckle. “The group has always had so many agents, knowing and unknowing in Hollywood. We control this city and all the power within it. My father may be a coarse man, like you, Laytham, but in his own way, he is a savant, just as you are.”

  “Which brings us full circle,” Gida said.

  “You’re going to try to kill me,” I said, “as a reminder of what happens when someone meddles in your business?”

  “Furthest thing from it,” Winder said. “We want you to join us.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said.

  “Laytham, I didn’t recruit you for the Nightwise,” Gida said. “I recruited you for us, for the group. You’d be perfect.”

  “Why do you think you’re still alive?” Winder said. “We had opportunities to kill you back in the eighties when you began poking around in the sacrifices. Gida said you were worth salvaging and found other ways to keep you off our trail.”

  I looked at Gida’s painfully sky-blue eyes, as guiltless as infancy. “You. You’re the one who set the frame on me back then. You set me up.”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic,” she said. “You were in descent after Nico died. You were on your way to being a dirty cop. I just moved that process along a bit.”

  “Did you have Nico killed when he wouldn’t drop looking into the killings too?” I asked. Gida pursed her lips and sighed. She ran a hand through her fine, silver hair.

  “Yes. I tried to aim him toward the same path you were staggering down, avoid anything so messy and sad, but he wouldn’t have it and he began to suspect me, so I had Roland kill him.”

  “The only reason we tried to eliminate you at Roland Blue’s club,” Winder said, “was we couldn’t be certain if you’d accept our offer and we couldn’t allow you to compromise the integrity of the group. When you blackmailed Roland, we had to do something to shut him up. You would have just been collateral damage in that. You understand, Laytham. How many times have you thrown someone under the bus to serve your own interest? It was nothing personal. Crash Cart is an excellent tool, but I’m afraid he gets a bit too exuberant in his work.”

  “Manson, your dad, he taught you how to dredge that thing up, didn’t he?” I said, walking to the wall-length window that gave an inspiring view of the studio grounds and past that, the city. From up here everything looked clean and ordered. It was a great special effect.

  Winder smiled. “Yes,” he said, “and I taught Brett. My father was unable to be very present in my life for reasons both practical and psychological, but he did his best to impart to me his truths, and I have found him to be very wise. In a different age, a different world, he would be an oracle, a sage. A Wisdom, like you and your grandmother.”

  I turned from the window and it began to crack, a wide, radial spiderweb with me at its center. The room dropped several degrees and many of the faithful suddenly looked less smug, more frightened.

  “You,” I said, “never mention her again. She’s too good for your toilet of a mind, your filthy fucking tongue, to ever even acknowledge her existence. I will turn you inside out and keep you awake while I do it.”

  Winder’s smile never left his lips. “Of course, my apologies. I know how sensitive that subject is for you. We cultivate our children, show them the wisdom we have culled from our experience, and set their feet upon the path. They are the future, our future. While it is regrettable that Crystal’s father caught up to her before we could, her child will find sanctuary with us.”

  “What did you say?” I asked, narrowing my gaze at Winder.

  “Max, you think Laytham and I could have a moment alone?” Gida asked.

  “Of course,” Winder said. “Let’s take five, everyone. Give our new potential recruit a few moments to process all this.” The conference room began to clear; there were murmurs of normal water cooler conversations, the game last night, the big joke on the latest sitcom, plans for the weekend, not the kind of things you’d ever expect soul-corrupting and ritual-sacrificing dark tantric sorcerers to discuss.

  Winder was the last out to ensure the room cleared fully. He put a hand on my shoulder and spoke to me as earnestly as a preacher at a funeral. “Think about our offer, Laytham, please. We can give you a place to belong. We can be your family.” He n
odded to Gida and then ambled out of the conference room door and shut it behind him.

  “He’s right,” Gida said, “about everything. You’d be so good here, with us, we’d be so good together again.”

  “Were you ever really what you pretended to be?” I asked as she pulled me close to her. She had the faintest scent of Clive Christian No. 1 and alcohol. Her hair smelled of wind shivering through wildflowers. Her voice was intimate, close to my skin.

  “Were you?” she said. “All that talk of nobility, agonizing over honor and duty. I tried to show you when you came to my office. We are animals, Laytham, delusional animals. We stumble between what we believe is right and wrong and then try to justify our every action to ourselves, to some fairy-tale god, to each other. That is an exhausting way to live. It wore me out.” She brushed my fallen hair out of my eyes. “I know it wears you out too.”

  Her lips pressed gently to my throat. I was back in that conference room, that frozen moment with the metal stinger of the syringe to my flesh, the wildfire panic, the scramble to survive, undamaged, no matter the cost. Ankou’s words, now Gida’s words. “What happens if I refuse?” I said, stepping back from her. It was harder to do than it should have been. Gida sighed.

  “You’d be committing suicide,” she said. “The Nightwise will hunt you down wherever you go; no one will believe you if you try to tell them about me. Your reputation is less than dirt, mine is immaculate. Best case scenario: they capture you, convict you of our crimes and send you into the Hollow Lands, you never see Earth or another living soul again. Since I know you, I am fairly certain you’d go down fighting before you’d let the order banish you from Earth. Either way, you die.”