He swirled the liquid in his glass. “So?”
“So maybe we could puzzle out a banishment for any given summoning, I guess.”
“There you go, then.”
I stifled a sarcastic remark and gave him a steady stare. “The original summoning spells themselves are all fucked up. None of them are correct. I don’t think they’re even close.”
A thin smile pulled his mouth tight. “So figure them out. I’ve told you a dozen times, you’ve got a knack for this stuff.”
“It’s bad enough trying to guess at how the reversed spell might work—trying to base that guess off a guess of the original is just about hopeless.”
Now he grinned wide enough to show teeth. “So don’t guess at the originals. Figure them out.”
By my sides, I curled my hands into frustrated fists. “How the hell am I supposed to know when they’re right?” Benedict’s grin widened further. “Oh, Jesus, you can’t mean—”
“You’re a smart kid. I knew you’d get it eventually.”
Benedict threw back the rest of his drink, and, without another word, he walked away.
Next to me, Lazzaro chuckled. I turned to see his face twisted in a manic grin.
“Cool,” he said.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Fuckin’ great.” I looked at the scattered papers and the heaps of books and let out a long, defeated breath. “Let’s finish up with the rest of these, and then—well. And then I guess we’ll try it Benedict’s way.”
We dug back in, but I didn’t have much hope. My lack of hope was amply rewarded when we didn’t find shit else over the next few hours. A few more chicken scratches, a handful of half-assed sketches to throw on the pile.
After that, there was nothing to do but go for it.
* * *
Benedict had a room in back he called his lab, whether seriously or out of a sense of irony I never knew. It certainly didn’t look like any lab I ever heard of. It was just a square room, maybe fifteen feet on a side, walled in concrete. The floor, unless I missed my guess, was sheathed in sheets of solid lead. That seemed like a health hazard, but at my current rate I wasn’t going to live long enough to pick up any effects from long-term exposure, and I wasn’t planning to lick it or anything. My biggest concern was that the room’s construction materials seemed so goddamn heavy they would bring the flimsy building crashing down, but it hadn’t happened yet.
The bland emptiness of the room wasn’t relieved by so much as a single stick of furniture or decoration of any kind. A heavy, windowless door—oak, lined with lead—was the only feature breaking up the gray walls.
“Where do we start?” Lazzaro asked. He’d instinctively dropped into a subservient role as our researches had progressed, checking with me over every detail. I didn’t think he was even aware of it, or it would have pissed him off.
I showed him a diagram copied from one of the books. If I understood correctly, this or something like it was part of a spell that would call up the smallest of the small, some kind of infernal rat-looking thing. Either that, or it would turn us both inside out and spray our guts all over the walls. “We go back through everything, looking for anything that looks like this. Then we sort through that and hope we can piece something together.”
Lazzaro grumbled. I think he’d thought we were already at the good part. Ha.
We spread out over the floor of the lab. With no windows, no clocks, no sound whatsoever from outside those four walls, the lab had a strange timeless and placeless quality. It could have been submerged at the bottom of the ocean or plunked down on one of the moons of Jupiter, seconds taking years to crawl past or years blowing by with every breath as we worked.
At last, we narrowed it down to a dozen diagrams and a page-long list of ingredients and incantations that, if not complete, at least didn’t contradict itself. I cleared everything else away and pushed open the door. Morning light scratched its way around the edges of the window curtains in the next room.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Lazzaro asked. I was fucking spent, and my eyeballs felt like somebody’d popped them out of my head and rolled them in broken glass before jamming them rudely back into their sockets, and he was still ready to go. More charged up than ever, in fact.
“I’m gonna take a piss,” I said. That was the extent of my grand plan at first, but then my overworked brain started filling in other ideas. “After that, I’m gonna go out and get the stuff we need. Where the fuck I’m going to find live chickens is beyond me, but I’m sure I’ll manage.” Lazzaro looked like he wanted to say something, so I rushed ahead over any objections. “You should get some chalk and start the drawings. Hopefully I’ll be back by the time you get done.”
No, I wasn’t supposed to go out alone. He knew that, but he was so eager to get started he conveniently forgot the fact, as I’d hoped.
“Which drawings?” he asked.
I shrugged. “All of them.” Why the fuck not? It would keep him busy. He turned back to the papers, a speculative look on his face.
I left him there and headed out to the main room. One of the guys had fallen asleep in the chair there, and a couple more were crashed out on the couches in the living room adjacent. The sound of snoring tore through the air like an army of lumberjacks denuding an entire valley, presumably the result of a whole mess of septa deviated by years of getting punched in the face. I didn’t know how any of the guys could sleep in here, but if they could sleep through this, I wasn’t worried about waking them up.
I let myself out and re-warded the door behind me, dialing Kit’s number even as I ran down the stairs.
She answered immediately. “Jimmy?”
“Yeah. If you still wanna meet, now’s about the only chance you’re going to get.”
She didn’t hesitate. “Sure. Where?”
I gave her the address of a diner clear across town, a place I couldn’t imagine any of the wiseguys would ever go, let alone at this hour of the morning.
“Great,” she said. “See you in twenty minutes.”
“Yeah. Hey, Kit?”
“What?”
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could bring a couple of live chickens?”
She hung up. I stared at the phone, wondering if she’d interpreted the question as some sort of obscure innuendo, or if she just thought I was being stupid. At least I’d managed to find a way to meet her.
Still didn’t know what I was going to do about those chickens, though.
* * *
Kit was waiting for me when I got to the diner, which wasn’t too surprising. I had taken the scenic route, to say the least, making damned sure nobody followed me. The odds of that were vanishingly small—wiseguys weren’t awake at seven in the morning, in general, unless they were still awake—but the insides of car trunks make me claustrophobic, and I’m not too keen on being dismembered, either, so it seemed like a good idea to take a little extra care.
Kit was sitting in a booth way in back, dressed in her civilian clothes—black sweater, blue jeans—and she frowned at me as I eased myself onto the cracked red vinyl.
“Took you long enough,” she said.
I shrugged. “Sorry about that. Trying to keep my head attached to my shoulders.”
“Are you in trouble?” She managed a weak smile, strangely disarming in the soft morning light. “Or should I ask, how much trouble are you in?”
“Of course I’m in trouble. Everybody’s in trouble. Don’t you know there’s a war on?”
Her smile faded slowly, but when it was gone, it might as well never have been there. “What can you tell me?”
I almost started running my mouth, but I thought better of it in time. “You called me, remember?”
She hammered away at me with one of her patented pile-driver stares, but I said nothing. I couldn’t tell if she was summoning her resolve or trying to break mine, and I suddenly had a vision of her running out of patience and slapping some cuffs on me right there in the restaurant. Would
n’t that be fun to explain to Benedict and company?
The waitress came by and interrupted our staring match, and I was reminded that I’d been up all night and hadn’t eaten since . . . When had I eaten? I ordered a third of the menu and a gallon of coffee. Kit just had coffee.
The waitress left, but her brief visit had broken the tension. Kit pulled a bit of paper out of her pocket and slid it across the table. It was a triangular scrap, flaking black char running along one edge, but there was enough left for me to be able to make out the outer arc of a spell diagram. I leaned forward, half out of my seat, to get a better look at the thing.
It was a summoning diagram, and my heart started playing a drum solo when I saw the sigils near the arc. Oh! It goes like that!
Too late, I realized my mouth was hanging open and my eyes were half bugging out of my head. Kit looked at me with interest nearly as avid as that with which I’d looked at the diagram. So much for my poker face.
“You know what this is,” she said flatly.
I thought about sitting back and nonchalantly claiming I had no idea, but I didn’t figure that would fly. “Sort of,” I said.
“What is it?”
“Where did you get it?”
She ignored my question. “Is it a code? A message?” She paused, watching my eyes for any kind of movement or flicker. “Is this some kind of Satanist thing?”
“No,” I said. Unless maybe I’m a Satanist now. How would I know?
“Then what is it?”
“Again, where did you get it?”
“What’s it matter?”
I tried my best to look as earnest as I felt, but her cop glare made me feel shifty regardless. “Because, depending on where and how you found it, you’ll believe me or not. If you just picked it up off the street, you’re going to think I’m f—you’re going to think I’m crazy. On the other hand, if maybe you found it under some weird circumstances . . .”
“Officer Fred Koestler is in the hospital,” she said. She took another swallow of coffee and looked away from me for the first time since we sat down. Just for a moment, but it felt like I could inhale all the way again.
“With?”
“Animal bites.”
“What kind of animal bites?”
I’d thought she was invulnerable, but her face changed and I realized I was wrong. The frightened look in her eye scared me as badly as anything else in this whole mess had. “I don’t know what it was,” she said softly. “It was dark, and—and I didn’t get a real good look.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Kit.”
She pushed her jaw forward, and her eyes hardened. “I saw something before the place went up in flames. There’s no animal like that, Jimmy. There isn’t.” She took in one long, deep breath and then let it out slowly, shuddering slightly as she did. “I don’t know who else to talk to about this. I think I must be going crazy.”
“You’re not going crazy. Your guy is in the hospital, isn’t he?” She nodded. “How bad is it?”
“The bites aren’t very bad. Just a series of puncture wounds in his calf. But they’re infected or something. His leg was red past the knee by the time we got him to the hospital, big nasty streaks.” She blinked a glimmer of moisture out of her eyes. “Blood poisoning doesn’t set in that fast. No way. So what was it? And what was that thing?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what it was,” I said. That was honest, technically. “But I can tell you who you need to look out for—a guy named Kelsen. They’re his pets.” I thought of Benedict’s words before continuing. “If you know where he is, or if you run across him, don’t mess with him. Call me. Immediately.”
“I’m a cop, Jimmy. We’re not in the habit of calling up Mafia guys to do our jobs for us.” She grinned a little as she said it.
“Trust me, you’re going to need help. Did the guy who got bitten get off any shots?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Yeah. Missed.”
“Missed? While it was chewing on him? I don’t think so.” I could tell from her expression that she understood what I was implying, and she didn’t like it one bit. She believed it, though. “These are things you don’t want to mess around with. Please trust me on this.”
She reached across the table and took my hand, startling me. “Thanks, Jimmy. I’ll . . . I’ll try.”
Breakfast arrived about then, half a dozen plates that crowded the table in gorgeous, greasy splendor. I started shoveling it in. If Kit had more to tell me, she could talk while I fueled up.
Two things occurred to me while I ate. The first was that Kit had promised some intel from the police department on the Russians, and she hadn’t exactly delivered. The paper scrap was payment enough, and then some, but she didn’t know that, and it would be awkward to explain. I wondered what else she’d brought.
The second item was of greater importance—her goddamn partner. There was no way Kit knew Eddie Donnelly was Joey the Slob’s tame cop, and there was no way I could tell her. She’d kill him or at least arrest him the next time she set eyes on him, and then it would surely come back to me at some point. And then, hey presto! It’d be the fabled .22 slugs for me, or worse. On the other hand, if she let slip to Donnelly where she was getting some of her information, it would also come back to me. This was getting pretty fucking precarious.
I swallowed and put my fork down. “Kit, you gotta promise me something. You can’t tell anybody you’ve been talking to me. Anybody. If somebody hears I’m talking to you, I’m a dead man.”
“I’m not stupid, Jimmy.”
I picked the scrap of paper up from the table and held it up. “I’m gonna take this. It might be useful.”
From the look on her face, I could tell she wasn’t getting it.
“I’m guessing this is evidence, right? Taken off a crime scene?”
She shot me a look that could have frozen the harbor over, and I could see her jaw muscles clench. “Yeah, I hear you. You didn’t have to blackmail me. Asshole.”
Ah, hell, I thought, trying not to wince. Overdid it. I probably could have trusted her without turning the screws. Still, it felt the tiniest bit reassuring to know that she felt some of my uncertainty now, some of what it was like to have your fate in somebody else’s pocket. “Just so we understand each other,” I said, and I put the paper away. “What else have you got for me?”
Something like hatred flashed in her eyes, and then her face was still again. “Nothing, Jimmy. You got enough.”
I surveyed my half-destroyed breakfast. My appetite was gone. “Great.” I threw fifty bucks on the table, and I left.
* * *
I showed up back at Benedict’s an hour and a half or so after I’d left, and everybody was still sleeping. No sweat. I went deeper into the apartment, back to the lab, and opened the door.
Lazzaro looked up at me from where he crouched on the floor and scowled. He glanced at the cage in my hand and the scowl deepened.
“The fuck are those?” he asked.
My face reddened, and I followed his gaze to the chirping green and yellow birds in the cage. “Parakeets.”
He rolled off his knees and sat. Around him, over a dozen elaborate diagrams were sketched on the floor. Each was roughly circular, about eighteen inches in diameter, and crowded with a mess of arcane glyphs and other scrawlings. Lazzaro spread his hands out. “I’ve been here drawing every last goddamn detail of these fucking things right down to the gnat’s ass, and you come back with parakeets?”
“What am I supposed to do? Where the hell do you expect to find live chickens in city limits? Took me forever just to find these.”
He didn’t look impressed.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t think the exact type of bird is important. It’s the blood, or maybe the life. I think these will work just fine.” I had a hard time meeting his eyes as I said that last bit. I had no idea if these would work or not. “I got the incense, too,” I said. “And the candles.”
“Birthday candles?�
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“No, real candles. Dickhead.”
He grunted. “I’m just about done here, I think. Can’t tell if any of the damn things will work or not, but I guess it doesn’t matter. Probably won’t work anyway, because of the goddamn parakeets.”
“All right, I get it. If we can’t get it to work, I’ll find some goddamn chickens. Now, let’s see what you got here.” I set the cage down on the floor outside the room and came in. The drawings were a mess. Exact enough—he’d done a good job with that—but all wrong. They felt bad, for one thing—well, no. Not bad, exactly, but inert. They had about as much potential to channel magical energy as a velvet Elvis. For another, the scrap I’d gotten from Kit had cleared up a few things for me. I assumed that spell had actually worked, given the fate of Officer Koestler. The other alternative was that this paper was part of an elaborate trap set for me by Kelsen, but I chose to disregard that possibility. If he was capable of that kind of subtlety, we were fucked anyway.
I picked out the most promising of Lazzaro’s works and scooped up a piece of chalk. Lazzaro watched without protesting while I erased much of the inner ring on the diagram and started filling it in with other bits. It took about twenty minutes before I had it down to my satisfaction. When I was done, I felt, or imagined that I felt, a latent energy lurking in the resulting drawing, like a static charge that threatened to discharge if I got too close. Lazzaro nodded as he looked at it. He could feel it, too.
I went to the door and grabbed candles and incense from the bag outside. “Here,” I said, tossing them to Lazzaro. “The candles go in the circles near the edge. I don’t know where the fuck the incense goes.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Deal with the birds,” I said.
There were six parakeets in the cage, all the pet store had had. Besides, I figured if we didn’t get it right after six, maybe we would need actual chickens. I reached into the cage and grabbed one of the birds. Perhaps sensing what was coming, it proceeded to bite the shit out of my hand. I gritted my teeth and endured it.
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