The Night Dahlia

by R. S. Belcher

  “Can you give me some time to think about it?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “You walk out that door without committing to us, then you are going to die, Laytham. No threat, no hyperbole. Just a fact. For once in your life, do the right thing.”

  “What makes you so sure that Crystal had a child?”

  “Our people got onto the crime scene,” she said. “I saw the photos on the wall. Yours too, from the neighbors’ cameras. Don’t worry, I swept up after you with the regular cops, had the amber alerts and the BOLOs canceled. We gathered the little boy’s hair, a few other sympathetic items. We’ll track him soon, bring him into the fold.”

  “What about his father?” I asked. Gida gave me a pissed-off look.

  “Don’t insult me with that question and I won’t insult you with my answer. The boy’s father is nothing exceptional, one of Roland’s old goons. We have no need for him. The official version will be that he killed Crystal in a tawdry and common domestic dispute and was brought to justice, dead or alive. The poor little boy will placed in a good home, one of ours.”

  Gida looked at me and I saw an idea blossom behind those beautiful eyes. “You could be his father, Laytham. Raise the boy, convince yourself you’re keeping him safe from our evil influence if that makes you feel better. When he’s old enough he will rise and destroy his grandfather, claim the House of Ankou for his own, for us. You can be by his side, his wisdom, his protector, his voice of compassion. You can make sure he doesn’t grow up without a father like you did.”

  I didn’t know what to say; my words, my thoughts, were breaking into one another, tumbling, like icebergs crashing. I had no instruments, no radar. I acted, not thinking. I was good at that. I walked to the door and looked back at Gida one last time.

  “Pull the trigger,” I said. “I’m taking as many of you with me as I can.”

  “So a glorious death, going down swinging against the assembled Nightwise,” she said. “That is a fitting method of suicide for Laytham Ballard.”

  “Death by cop? Something like that, yeah,” I said. I began to open the door.

  “We had a child,” she said, “you, and I.” I stopped, looked back to her again. “I found out after you left L.A., left the Nightwise. She’s powerful, Laytham, like you, like me, maybe even stronger than both of us together. She’s your blood. You could still meet her, still be part of her life if you join us.”

  “She’s better off without me,” I said, and walked out the door.

  * * *

  There’s always a drink when you need one, some dark dive, or pub, a mom-and-pop corner watering hole, or an expensive club where the drunks hide behind craft beers and expensive wine. You’ve got the brightly colored chain restaurants with their island bars when you can watch the drunk in a facsimile of his native environment while you enjoy your potato skins and sliders. There’s liquor stores where the faithful pull up twenty minutes before the place opens and grab their bottle while still in sweatpants and a robe. Hotel and airport bars, where lost, wandering souls gather trying to pantomime at real life or soothe the ache of being away from home. Bowling alleys, with the ubiquitous plastic pitchers and clear disposable cups; convenience stores and drugstores with yummy bottles of cough medicine; alleys; in your car in a parking lot; the shade of an underpass, cars roaring above you, the smell of diesel in the dark air. Pick a city, any city, and you’ll find yourself a drink. The truth is, for a real, Olympic-level drunk the where is irrelevant, all that matters is the when.

  I sat on a bar stool and looked at myself in the mirror, my face welled in shadows above the necks of bottles, a city of glass and distilled annihilated memories. This bar was in an old Chinese restaurant that catered to Hollywood tourists, neighborhood regulars, and a smattering of hipster college kids looking to slum safely. It was all scenery, like on some back lot of a studio; none of it mattered, none of it was real. The bartender was as tired and disinterested in me as I was in him. He paused in his orbit, gave me a steady look, and waited for me to say my line.

  “You’re not the Devil, are you?” I asked. The guy narrowed his eyes, already pissed at my inclusion in his world. “Scotch and soda,” I said. He started to walk off to fill my order as quickly as he could and get back to the business of ignoring me.

  “Hey,” I said. He sighed as he turned. “Hold the scotch.”

  * * *

  Anna was sitting in the hospital room beside Vigil’s bed. She was curled up in her chair, legs folded up, reading a book on her tablet. She looked up and saw me in the doorway.

  “Laytham!” she said, standing. “You shouldn’t be here. The Nightwise have guards posted to protect Vigil and Grinner; there are detection spells!”

  I pointed to the purple quartz Fae bracelet wrapped tightly about my wrist. “We’re clear, at least for a few minutes. This thing is powerful as hell.” She hugged me and kissed me, it felt sweet and soft and good. I pulled away. The last thing I deserved was comfort. “How is he? How’s Grinner?”

  Anna looked at me like she hardly recognized me. “When was the last time you slept or ate? Your face is all bruised up. You look terrible.”

  “Anna, how are they?”

  “Grinner was in surgery for fourteen hours. They reattached everything; they will have to wait to see how much mobility he retains, if any. His wife, Christine, and baby got here in the middle of the night. They are in the ICU with him now; would you like to see her?” I rubbed my face. I felt very tired and a little dizzy.

  “No. I can’t.”

  “Laytham, whatever happened at that mansion, it’s not your—”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Please don’t say that.” Anna nodded. She took my hand. I nodded to Vigil. The knight was covered in bandages, drains, and tubes, and was breathing with the help of a machine. “How about him?”

  She sighed and shrugged.

  “He’s a hard case,” she said. “They pulled nine magic bullets out of him—what do they call those damned things?”

  “Rune bullets,” I said. “Enchanted for maximum effect, maximum damage.”

  “Well, the doctors didn’t know any of that, but they did say he was fighting very hard to stay alive. They said it’s up to him now.” I nodded and headed back toward the door.

  “Stay with him. He doesn’t have anyone else.”

  “Where are you going?”

  I didn’t answer her.

  “Laytham, what are you doing?”

  “Making this right,” I said, “as right as I can. Tell Grinner and Christine I’m sorry. Tell him to take all the rest of the money out of the dummy accounts he’s set up for me. It’s his now.”

  Anna shook her head slowly. “No. No, you’re not doing that, you’re not going out in some stupid blaze of glory. I don’t care if you believe it or not, but there are a lot of people who love you…”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m doing this for them. No more people dying for me, no more people sacrificed on my altar. You tell Lauren…” I couldn’t fit the words in my mouth. They were for real people, real boys with a whole soul and no blood on their hands. “Anna…”

  She nodded. “Come back and tell us, tell us both.”

  “Hell, tell that fat sack of a hacker I’m sorry. There have been so few things in my life that were … real. You, you were all real.”

  I walked through the halls of the temple of suffering, each room a gallery of pain. I stole a few things I’d need from a nurses’ station and found my way outside.

  * * *

  Theodore Ankou’s eyes fluttered open. He was tangled in fifteen-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. His hotel suite window burned from the light of a million counterfeit stars in the heart of the city. My hand was on his throat. His eyes snapped to full predatory awareness, obviously shocked that I had been able to sneak up on him, to get this close. He was about to shrug off his mortal guise and send me flying across the room when he felt the hypodermic needle resting against the plump, pulsing jugular vei
n in his neck.

  “So, Mr. Ballard,” he whispered, careful to not move too suddenly against the needle, “to soothe your damaged ego at your failure to keep poor dead Caern safe, you are now the avenger, is that it? Pathetic. Didn’t you learn anything from my little lesson? You did what you always do. You kept yourself alive, hale and hearty. You preserved your legend, even if good people had to die to do it.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I did, and you’re right, I’ve done it before, screwed over people, had them die so I didn’t have to. It’s funny, there was a time, it seems like a million lives ago, when I would rather die than do something like that. What happened to that me? Was he real, is this me real? So, you see, your lesson was more of a refresher course than a revelation, Theo. I wanted to thank you properly for it all the same.”

  “My men are trained to sense a whisper of power, a hushed word, even a violent thought. They will be in here any moment,” he said.

  “No, they won’t,” I said. “I killed them. Caern had a little gift from her mother, an artifact from the old country. It hides one from scrying and detection spells very well. They never knew what hit them, just like you, Theo. You’re alone with an unwashed, savage ape at your throat. How does that feel? I want to know.”

  Ankou swallowed hard, and his artery squirmed against the surgical steel of the needle. He was sweating a little too. “You think I’ll behave as you did? I am Fae, a superior being. How do you know that manticore venom will even affect me?”

  “If it didn’t turn you into a vegetable, you’d have become a hurricane and shredded me by now,” I said. “You wouldn’t be sweating. You wouldn’t be afraid.”

  “If you leave now, I’ll pay you what you’re due for the service you rendered me,” Ankou said.

  “You wouldn’t be bargaining, would you?” I said. Anger darkened his eyes, but the fear remained.

  “I have money,” he said, “a large amount, bearer bonds in a case with me. In the safe in this room. It’s been enchanted to destroy everything in the safe unless the proper code is entered as the password. You can’t magically bypass it. I’ll give it all to you if you leave me unmolested.”

  “Combination?” I said. Ankou’s face changed just slightly. He felt on steadier control now, was using me again, as it should be.

  “How do I know you won’t inject me and then just take the money?”

  “How do I know you won’t kill me the second I take this hypo away?”

  “I give you my word,” he said. “I swear upon the singing star of the First World. I swear upon my family name. What assurance can you give me that is worth anything to you, Ballard?”

  I thought for a moment, then I said, “I swear on the soul of your daughter. You have my word, on Caern’s soul.”

  Ankou was silent for a moment. “You thought she was your salvation, didn’t you? Thought that if she could leave behind all her pain and all her failures, you could too. She climbed out of the pit, so you thought you could as well. She was your hope. I see. Very sentimental, very in keeping with who you are. Very well, on Caern’s soul.”

  He gave me the combination to the safe. I felt him relax a little, the tension of his demise leaving him with my payoff.

  “You didn’t have to kill her,” I said, my voice cold shale. “Why did you?”

  “It was always my intent,” Ankou said. “She would never give me the heir I needed, never submit to her proper place in the scheme of things. And she had tainted her womb with human seed, produced a half-breed bastard as the only one to carry on my family name, and another abomination stewing in her belly … disgusting. The thought of my blood out in the monkey world being diluted down to nothing … no. You are a prideful man, you understand, even if you wish you didn’t. No, Mr. Ballard, you were always to be the instrument of her death. I just had to embellish it for you, appeal to your tattered illusion of being a good man, of being the hero.”

  I gestured with my free hand. “Sit Manus Mea.” The closet opened. The wall panel slid aside and the proper buttons on the keypad pushed themselves. There was a soft electronic beep and the safe door swung open as well.

  “Now, your turn,” Ankou said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “My turn.” I slid the needle into his neck and pushed the plunger down hard. Ankou began to try to sit up. He made a faint popping sound in his throat, like he was fighting to get air and slumped back onto the bed.

  “I want the last thing you can comprehend to be this,” I said. “You plan to hunt that little boy down, and kill him, as easily as you killed Caern.”

  Ankou’s form shivered between his mortal self and his true Fae nature, like a switch was being flipped by some mad, spasming god, snapping him back and forth between his real self and the diminished mortal illusion.

  “I gave her my word too,” I said. “That didn’t work out too good for her either.”

  The Fae lord’s polychromatic eyes dimmed and rolled back in his skull as his body thrashed, fighting the invading poison. Drool spilled from his mouth, gasping like a fish out of water.

  “You’re right. I’m a son of a bitch,” I said. “You reminded me there’s a cost to trying to play at being anything else.” He shriveled back into his mortal guise and lay on the bed shuddering with each breath. “As to breaking my word, Fae have no souls for me to swear on. Everything Caern was is gone now, thanks to you. And when you leave this world after however long you exist in that tortured prison of a body, you will be scattered on the wind, gone forever. I wanted those to be the last words in your ear that made any sense to you as your brain was set on fire. You fucked with the wrong monkey, Theo.”

  Ankou made a whistling noise and his eyes rolled wildly around, searching, fighting to remain still, to focus on anything. He was gone.

  “Nice doing business with you, Lord Ankou,” I said, dropping the empty needle on the edge of his bed. “Enjoy your early retirement.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  It took me a day to find the old ranch in Leucadia that had belonged to Joey’s late uncle. The hunt was complicated by the fact I didn’t know Joey’s last name, or his uncle’s. I knew Caern’s son, Garland, was named after the dead man, but that was it.

  I decided not to use magic to find Garland because the Dugpa or the Nightwise were out there, sniffing for him and for me. A shiver of a power, especially from me, might catch their attention. The Fae artifact, Caern’s mother’s necklace, was hiding me quite effectively, and I saw no reason to do anything to change that. I figured I had given House Ankou enough to keep them busy, so I didn’t worry about them making this more of a cluster fuck than it already was.

  The scant intel I had would have been more than enough for Grinner to find the place, but Grinner was down, maimed. I searched the old way, the hard way. I did title searches at the county courthouse, looking for any Garlands, or even the first initial G. I looked for properties maybe far behind on their property taxes, just scraping by. I also looked for transfers of property within families, and finally for condemned properties in Encinitas. Then I drove around, talked to farmers, ranchers, surfers, convenience store clerks, even a few wandering cops. I had lies for all of them. I finally found it on a lonely, rocky, wooded lot off east Neptune Avenue. It was a run-down California-style beach house. The yard was kept up somewhat, but just on the verge of being overgrown. It was off from the road a bit, with walls of foliage separating it from its more affluent peers, taking up the better part of a large corner lot. The whole neighborhood was a mixture of wealth, middle class, retirees, and blue collar. The late Uncle Garland’s house probably saw its heyday in the late sixties, when this area was most likely more working class and surfer.

  After scouting around a bit, I found a 7-Eleven. I thought about calling Dwayne for some backup and muscle in case things got rough. Then Grinner and Vigil punched my memory and I decided if it got rough I’d deal with it on my own. I also considered buying a forty of some malt liquor; I managed to pass that up too, but it was even harder. No
fuck-ups, not now. Too many sharks circling.

  I came back after dark to the old house. There were no cars parked in the driveway that wound up the hill, no lights on in any of the windows, in fact, no indication of active electricity or habitation at all as I drove by. I parked Ankou’s stolen sports car down Neptune, and walked back up, heading into the brush at the edge of the wooded lot, about a half acre from the ramshackle house.

  Skirting through the darkness of the stand of trees, I could hear the ocean waves off to my left and below the cliffs. Stray gulls, hurrying home after dark, challenged the surf’s roar with their lonely screeches. I could smell fresh mint and sea salt. I felt my body relax in spite of itself. Dwayne would have moved through the lot without making a sound, like poisoned thought. I am not Dwayne. Still, I’ve done my share of B and E’s in my time and I managed to get close enough to the edge of the tree line to see the dark house and the backyard without tripping and falling on my face or making too much noise.

  I sat on a stump and watched for a while. Nothing. Dark on dark. Occasionally light and shadow thrown off Neptune from the distant street on the other side of the house would twist into view as a car turned and its lights grazed the house for a moment. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw what I suspected was a path off to my left that started in the backyard and most likely led down through the rocky slope to the beach at my back.

  If you spend enough time waiting and watching your internal clock gets pretty accurate, especially when you’ve been sober for days. My best guess was that it was nine o’clock now. No signs of any activity, any life. I had deliberately avoided buying cigarettes at the 7-Eleven so I couldn’t be overcome by the urge I was having right now for a smoke.

  Maybe I was wrong, maybe Joey wasn’t pushing his luck twice. He may have bundled Garland up and took off in a car headed for anywhere but here. That’s what I’d do, run like hell and keep running. That’s a hell of a way to raise a kid, though, and Garland would be reeling from the death of his mother. Shit, I didn’t know. I couldn’t take care of myself, let alone a kid, I wasn’t sure what he’d do. This was just my best hunch and my last scrap of a clue in this long trail that started in Greece.