Devil's Business

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “No, not really,” Jack said. The missing trail of the thing that had murdered the Cases dogged at him, though he tried to ignore the obvious solution. That would open him up to all kinds of nasty things, lay his mind bare and at the mercy of his sight. He could go catatonic and never come back if he did what most psychics would do in this situation. But he wasn’t most. A mage with the sight was a time bomb as it was, without inviting the entire world of the dead inside his skull.

  “Then what?” the wraith asked. “You’re going to wander around Hollywood waiting to get offed?”

  Jack shook his head. “No, I do have one idea.” A stupid idea, but the only one, as was usually the way with him. “You know where I can find somebody who deals esoterica around here?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Shiver said. “There’s a shop on Cahuenga that I’d trust to sell, and not drop a dime on you after you leave.”

  “You want to get off me bad side, take me there,” Jack said, and tried to ignore the prickle on the back of his neck while Sliver walked them to his car. The feeling that he might have just had his last stupid idea, and the fear of what he was going to have to see. When he’d been shooting heroin, it had kept the fear at bay, along with everything else. Now there was nothing—a few tattoos to keep him from going completely around the bend when his visions kicked in, but beyond that, there was his sight and the void it looked into.

  Sliver’s car was roughly the same vintage as Pete’s loaner, but dented on every sharp edge and pocked with rusted continents floating in a primer-colored sea. “It’s a piece of shit, I know,” Sliver said, “but who’d steal it?”

  “Fair enough,” Jack said. A spring poked out from the upholstery and into the small of his back. They drove east, and Shiver pointed out a bridge across a concrete trough. “That’s the LA river,” he said. “Site of one million movie car chases.” He jerked his thumb at the ironworks lamps flashing by. “The bridge is famous too. Fourth Street Bridge. Look it up.”

  “What is this city’s obsession with the movies?” Jack demanded. “Every bloody person I’ve met had some precious anecdote about the silver fucking screen.”

  “Before the movies, this place was mostly orange groves, train tracks, and a few shitty apartment buildings,” Sliver said. “Not a lot of real history, so we take ours from films.” The shadows under the bridge rippled as they passed, and Sliver pointed ahead. “This is East LA. Badass neighborhood, my girl lives in, too. Don’t wander around here on your own.”

  A few more turns, and Sliver pulled up in front of a bodega, saints’ candles lining the window. “Just tell the old lady I sent you,” he said.

  “Cheers,” Jack said. The shop wasn’t anything special—graffiti covered one of the front windows and the door was bright red, but he could feel the protection hexes vibrating from the sidewalk. Somebody who knew what they were doing had put a tight net over the whole building, and Jack got the distinct feeling he wasn’t welcome. Not that it had ever stopped him. He pushed open the door and a bell jangled to announce him.

  The front of the shop was crammed with dusty junk, rosaries and bundles of sage, more candles, prayer cards, and plaques of the Virgin and the crucifixion dangling from the ceiling. Most esoterica dealers had this sort of window dressing, to discourage the daylight world in general from looking too closely. What was true in porn shops was also true for magic shops—the good stuff was behind the curtain.

  Jack pushed the red glass beads aside, setting up a clatter, and found himself in an even more claustrophobic back room. A small circle on the floor was painted with a veve, to a loa Jack wasn’t familiar with, but the white paint was far less engaging than the woman behind the pile of wooden crates serving as a counter.

  “Well,” she said, setting down her magazine. “Look at you.”

  Jack flashed her a smile. Charming women wasn’t any harder than picking a recalcitrant lock—it just took a little time and a light touch. And working on the assumption that his mark went for scars, leather, and tattoos. The girl behind the counter returned his smile.

  “Don’t get offended, but how the fuck did you get in here? This shop is reserved for select customers.”

  “Didn’t see a doorman,” Jack said. He leaned on the counter, pulling her into the radius of his smile while skimming the surface of her talent. It was there, strong and bloodred. “So explain something to me,” he said, gesturing around the room. “Your select customers, they all vaudaun, into Santeria, and advocates of Santa Muerte at the same time? Because that’d get a touch confusing, speaking for myself.”

  “We specialize,” said the girl. “We don’t discriminate.”

  “Brilliant,” Jack said. He stuck out his hand. “And you are?”

  She looked at his hand, looked at him, smiled with an expression that could razor flesh. “Out of your league.”

  Jack retracted the hand. “My favorite kind.” She wasn’t touching him, so she was either being smart or really did think she was too gorgeous to be believed. She was, at that—long dark hair twisted in a rope with red ribbon, gleaming skin. She could be one of the saints pasted onto the sides of the candle holders, lit from within by a flame.

  “Bloke who sent me here said you’d be old,” Jack said. “Glad to see he was wrong.”

  “Maybe I am old,” the girl said. “Maybe I’m a wicked witch, sent to lure you into my candy house before I show you my true face.”

  Jack shrugged. “There are worse ways to go.”

  “Well, you’re not Santeria or vaudaun,” said the girl, abruptly shifting from smiling shopkeeper to sharp-eyed avatar. “Death worshipper? Following the saint of killers?”

  “Death more sticks out its foot and trips me if I try and follow it,” Jack said. The girl tilted her head, and then she reached across the counter and snatched his hand in a parody of their aborted handshake.

  Jack got a strong, dark pulse, from his throat down to his cock—bodies piled in trenches, blood running through dirty gutters while wild dogs fought over meat, hollow-eyed men walking dusty streets with guns in their hands and speed in their blood. Skinless corpses dangling from balcony rails while the crows gathered on the roofline. Always the crows, their caws echoing in his skull.

  “You don’t worship death,” the girl said. “But it sticks to you all the same. It’s under your skin.”

  Jack yanked his hand away. His heart and his head both throbbed. “I’m spoken for, luv,” he said. “Death already has her claws in me, so get in line.”

  The girl laughed. “I don’t want you, crow-mage. I’m Death from the dirt and the desert, not some rainy little shithole of an island.” She settled back on her stool. “Now, what can I do for you?”

  Jack decided not to ask why a death avatar was running a shitty bodega in a bad part of LA. He’d seen stranger things—and in the last day, at that. “I need to read a crime scene,” he said. “Psychically. I suppose I need a censer, and the stuff to put me under.”

  “Trancing out at a murder site,” said the girl, and grinned. “All you psychics decide to live on the edge lately?”

  “All?” Jack said. She hopped off her stool and hurried around the room, getting an iron pot and tossing packets of herbs into it, along with a few candles, a bindle of red thread, and a packet of children’s blackboard chalk.

  “There was another pendejo in here about a week ago, wanted to trance at a crime scene.” She set the pot on the counter and rang Jack up on a cash register so old it had a crank handle.

  “This wouldn’t happen to be a fat bastard in a Hawaiian shirt, would it?” Jack said.

  “Nah,” said the girl. “We don’t get many white boys in here. I’d remember that.” She shoved the pot at him. “Six bucks for the candles and the chalk. Consider the rest a gift.”

  Jack narrowed his eyes. The one thing he wanted even less than to owe a demon was to owe one of the Morrigan’s sisters in death and blood debts. “I’ll pay.”

  “Oh, you will,” she agreed. “Just
not today.”

  Jack handed her a ten dollar bill—American money all looked like scraps of dishrag to him—and she made change. “Have fun,” the dead girl told him, before picking her magazine back up.

  CHAPTER 11

  Pete thought he was insane, and told him so, and he didn’t disagree with her. Jack told her she didn’t have to go back to the Case house, and didn’t have to be a part of it at all.

  “Don’t be a fucking idiot,” Pete snapped. “You swallow your tongue, who’s there to roll you on your side?”

  The street was the same when they returned the next evening—quiet shadows broken up with barking dogs and hissing sprinklers. Jack set himself up in the kitchen, in the center of the bloodstain where Mrs. Case had kicked it. If he was going to be mad, he might as well go straight over the top.

  “Need me for anything?” Pete said.

  “Not unless I start choking on my own fluids,” Jack said. Pete peered out the windows.

  “I see a private security car,” Pete said, as headlamps swept the room. “Haven’t seen any cops.”

  Jack wasn’t worried about the police—all they could do was arrest you, whack you a few times in the skull with a stick, and send you on your way. He wasn’t at all worried about anything human that might happen.

  He touched his lighter to the candles and drew a chalk sigil on the tiles—a sort of all-purpose Hey, let’s have a look sigil that psychics and seers used to boost the signal.

  A trance reading wasn’t dangerous to a run-of-the-mill ghost-peeper. A psychic went under, they witnessed the murder via the psychic echoes, saw the dead’s sonar picture recorded for posterity on the site of their passing. They were just an observer, and when they came up they were able to tell the family that Aunt Mabel loved them and had skipped merrily into the light. Except his sight didn’t let him be only a observer. The dead were a tide, determined to suck him under and make him one of them, sooner or later. His gift from the Morrigan showed him death in vivid, screaming reality, and this would be no different.

  He’d done a few trance readings when he was much younger and stupider, one of which had cumulated in the dead girl he’d called up sitting in the corner of a cheap hotel room in Dublin, watching him slice his wrists to finally, once and for all, make the visions and the whispers stop.

  Permanently trapped in the replay of the Case murders, or Pete, and by extension the kid, on the wrong end of a deal with Belial? It wasn’t a hard fucking choice. Jack figured he was already half-crazy anyway.

  “Find some matches.” he told Pete. He dumped the herbs into the iron pot and sat in front of them, rolling his jacket for his head in case he keeled over.

  Pete handed him a blue box, and Jack lit a pair of matches, dropping them into the dry herbs. They lit with a crackle, curling into blackened ash, and smoke curled up, fragrant and overpowering. The back of Jack’s throat went sticky, but he forced himself to breathe the cloying stuff and let it fill his lungs.

  Trances felt like a shitty high at first—none of the warm pool of smack, not even the pleasant fuzziness of pot. You floated, dizzy and sick to your stomach, and then out of the corner of your eyes, you noticed that you were no longer part of the world.

  Jack’s head throbbed once as the smoke filtered into his brain, his sight opening wide and straining to all corners of the Cases’ kitchen.

  It was night, but not the same kind of soft night he’d come from. This was dark, lights glittering through the darkened door higher on the hill. One by one, the faraway lights blinked out, until only the glow of the pool and the digital clock on the Cases’ oven gave light.

  Jack stood up, although the small, remote part of his mind that wasn’t fucked up beyond recognition knew that he was likely sprawled on the tile floor.

  The darkness became absolute, rolling through the crystal water of the pool like a cloud of blood.

  Jack kept his eyes on the back wall, where the trail had been, the erasure of something ripping through the Black that floated over the Case house like a bleak fog. Even before the murders, this hadn’t been a happy home.

  After a time, a figure appeared at the back wall. It was human, Jack supposed, if you were loose about the definition. The limbs were long, ragged with extra skin, sores popping out all over wrinkled skin. A pair of tattered suit pants were barely holding on to starved hip bones. The thing had a beard, long and hiding a hollow-cheeked face, and burning eyes fixed on the pet door.

  The thing wriggled through like a worm, bones rippling under the sagging skin. It turned and stared directly at him, but Jack held his ground. It wasn’t real, just an echo, replaying for his sight like a tattoo needle going over and over a piece of skin.

  He watched as the man—it had been a man, once, before whatever was inside the skin had hollowed it out—went to the knife block sitting on the kitchen island. It pulled out the largest blade, silver-handled and gleaming in the low light, and then reached out and grabbed a bowl of oranges and lemons with a hand ragged and bleeding, nails cracked and brown. It flung the bowl at the tiles, and then it stood, ragged chest rising and falling, until a light flared from the hallway and Mrs. Case appeared.

  In the trance, she flickered, almost transparent. Her echo was much fainter, and with a few decades or a good cleansing of the house by a practitioner, it’d be gone entirely.

  She didn’t see the thing waiting for her. Never saw Death spread its wings and dive. She waddled into the kitchen and saw the bowl. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Underwater whispers, barely a voice. “Badger, did you get on the counter again?”

  Badger must be the mutt. Jack hoped for the furry rat’s own sake he’d clocked the thing waiting for his mistress as something not to be fucked with, and stayed away.

  “Badger?” Mrs. Case bent her knees with difficulty, pregnant belly swelling under her robe, and started picking up the glass shards. “Goddamn dog,” she muttered.

  The thing moved then, behind her, pressing the knife against her neck and wrapping its free arm across her breasts. It whispered something to her that Jack didn’t catch, but Mrs. Case went limp, and the thing laid her out in the spot that Jack’s body occupied in real time.

  It pointed the knife at Mrs. Case. “Tape.”

  She was shaking, eyes filling with tears. “Drawer by the sink. Please don’t…”

  “Shut up, bitch.” The thing had an ancient smoker’s rasp for a voice, gravel and phlegm rattling in its chest. It hacked and spat a gob of something on the tiles.

  Mrs. Case’s eyes roved around the dark kitchen, lighting on the glass shards. While the thing turned its back, she reached for one, but it lay out of her grasp. She clasped her hands over her stomach again, shaking uncontrollably. “What do you want?”

  The thing turned back with a roll of packing tape. It bound her wrists and slapped a piece over her mouth. “I told you to shut up.”

  It finished taping up Mrs. Case and then turned, nostrils flaring and burning eyes widening.

  “Honey?” It’d be Mr. Case, coming to save the day.

  Jack watched, following in the wake of the thing, as it met Mr. Case just over the threshold. Quick, brutal jabs, knife angled up, piercing vital things like lungs and heart and stomach. Mr. Case gurgled, and the thing stepped back and drew the knife across his throat in a slash. Blood hit the walls and floor, and pooled with startling speed.

  The thing’s bare, knobby feet slicked in Mr. Case’s blood as it turned and focused its attention back on Mrs. Case. Her wide, marble-like eyes watched its every move. Jack did too. This was a predator wearing human skin. Belial’s vague scary story aside, Jack could see when something was not of the daylight world, when it crawled from the shadows to hunt and feed.

  It crouched above Mrs. Case, and pulled her robe away with its half-rotted hands. She mewled under the tape, and thrashed as best she could, and Jack wanted to tell her not to bother. Mrs. Case was dead. She just hadn’t caught on yet.

  Pushing up her pale blue nightgown, the
thing let its palm rest on Mrs. Case’s belly. It grinned, and Jack saw teeth that were black and gums that oozed rot. He couldn’t begin to guess what shape the body had been in before the passenger had climbed inside, but it was falling apart faster than an imitation handbag.

  “You had to know it would be this way,” the thing told Mrs. Case. “You had to know you don’t turn your back on something like this once you’ve agreed to it.” He peeled back the tape and cocked his head. “Got anything to say for yourself, you lying whore?”

  “I didn’t agree to this,” Mrs. Case gasped. “I didn’t agree to … you…” She trailed off, sobbing too hard to get any words out. The thing slapped the tape back over her mouth, and even though he was less than a ghost here, Jack crouched by her head. He needed to look into the thing’s face, try to see what was behind the eyes.

  Mrs. Case jerked as the thing placed the knife against her stomach, screaming behind the tape, strangled and animal-like. She sounded like a pig hanging in a slaughterhouse rather than a person, and the thing laughed. “We all pay our debts, kiddo,” it said. “One way or another, blood or money, we all pay. You, me, everyone.”

  Mrs. Case tried to speak through the tape, but the knife went in, and the thing drew the blade across the curve of her belly in one economical motion. Jack watched, not wanting to blink, as the thing went about its work, cutting the child from Mrs. Case and holding the slick, still body in its palms.

  Mrs. Case’s eyelids fluttered, but her fingers flexed as she reached for the child. Jack gave her full credit—even hacked to bits, she was a tough bird.

  The thing wiped the blood and amniotic fluids away from the baby’s mouth and nose with a ragged fingertip, and then breathed into the tiny mouth until the child wailed.

  Jack reached out reflexively, but it was like being stuck in one of those dreams where you couldn’t move your own limbs. The Case baby wasn’t dead—the thing had cut it out of its mother and breathed life into it. “Why?” Jack said. “What could you possibly want with a fucking baby?”