by Jenn Stark
Maria went over it all again in her mind. She’d started working in the gym five months ago, instantly catching Jack’s eye as she’d planned. But she’d had to beat him flat twice before he’d so much as talk to her. It’d taken another four months to get the Guardia lieutenant to turn. Four long months of sparring that had shaped her already lean physique into hammered iron. Jack had liked that, had liked her. Drugs had ruined his ability to make love and had also tanked his libido, but that was a secret no one in the gang knew. And once Jack had told Maria that and had found in her a sympathetic ear…the other secrets had come fast and furious. He’d been the biggest break she’d gotten in her search for Takio in years. Because after she’d been given approval to reveal that she was a cop and she’d brought Jack in, Jack had given up intel on anyone and everyone in the gang. In return, he’d get to walk free when this was done. Thanks to Jack, Maria was that much closer to the man responsible for killing Cara.
Or was she? What was really going on with this gang?
No response was needed to the text, of course. This was a one-way communication. Instead, Maria found her hand lifting to Cara’s necklace. Almost without thinking about it, she stood and drifted over to the plywood bookshelf, then pulled out the box of photos she kept there. The photos were a nice touch, she thought. For anyone who’d come snooping around, they showed that Maria was a simple girl from this same neighborhood, and that she cared about family. No one would ever look too close, but if they did, they’d see her as a young girl, playing with her friends, her family, her…
Maria paused as she stopped on a picture of Cara. Cara had been barely ten years old in the photo, five full years before she’d died, already in and out of trouble. But beautiful—so beautiful. She’d fairly radiated with life and energy. And this picture had been taken at a park not ten blocks away from where Maria was sitting now. The place was now gang territory, but back then, it’d been an oasis. Clean and open and remarkably trash free, at least on that morning. The kids were all in dresses, even Maria, bouncing around, little more than five years old. Cara had a basket filled with brightly colored plastic eggs. Maria couldn’t quite remember that day. She’d been so young, and so much had happened after it. Her mother’s death, moving in with her aunt. Cara dying in her black patent leather Mary Janes. Everyone drifting away like ghosts on the hot breeze.
But on this day, everything had been good and full and…
Maria stopped, then picked up the photo, studying it more closely as she fingered Cara’s cross with her other hand. Cara wasn’t wearing the cross in this photo—there was no sign of a tattoo on her either. But then, she’d been only ten. Behind her and Maria, there was a crowd of parents—what she assumed were parents—standing in the background, watching the kids. Laughing, chatting.
And there was a man in their midst too. He didn’t look out of place, exactly, though his suit was all wrong. Where every other adult in the picture wore khakis and pastel or white polo shirts, this man was in a suit with an actual tie. That seemed a little intense. Everything about the man struck her as a little too intense, actually. Intense and…weirdly familiar.
She blinked, making the connection. It was his eyes…he had the same weird eyes that Bonnie had, that she’d seen—maybe—in Cedo as well. Were they all on the same kind of drugs? Maybe not the newest strain that had damaged Bonnie so obviously, but something that affected their eyes? Something she’d seen…and that Cara’d seen too? Maria frowned, looking from the picture back to her tablet, then realized her other hand remained lifted, her fingers still playing with Cara’s tiny gold cross. She dropped the pendant back to her neck, ran her hand through her still-damp hair. Tonight wasn’t a good night for her to be thinking of the past like this. The girls and boys in their brightly colored Easter outfits, the parents laughing, clearly relaxed, having a good time. In this picture, Cara still looked happy and Maria’s mom was still alive. It was the kind of picture that made you believe everything was going to work out fine.
Maria sighed, then dropped the picture back in its box. She was tired, she thought. She needed to get more sleep—especially with Jack picked up and given Maria’s new status with the Guardia. She needed to be extra careful going forward, and she needed her sleep.
“I miss you, Cara,” she whispered, putting the box back on the shelf.
Then she went back to her bottle of wine.
Warrick crunched across the broken glass in the parking lot beneath the hot Los Angeles sun—unusually hot for this time of year, he was given to understand, especially for LA at Christmas. He had been to the city so many times in the last two centuries, he should have an opinion on it. But the truth was, his times on Earth all blurred together, even when he didn’t want them to. He remembered moments, crystalline shards of time, that stuck out like diamonds amid the endless sand falling through the hourglass. A mother’s face wet with tears and hope, a father falling to his knees, the surprise—and it was always surprise, in the end—of one of the horde realizing that Warrick was going to make good on his threat of banishment after all. That he wasn’t going to change his mind at the last second and go dark.
He’d gone dark a long time ago. He still was dark. That didn’t change his job.
A horn blared too close, and Warrick turned and scowled as the car he’d cut off screeched to a halt. As usual with these things, time slowed, fragmented. The horn becoming separate motes in the air, floating almost casually forward. The rush of the vehicle reduced to the barest inching forward, the movement scarcely detectible, while Warrick turned easily, taking in the two males in the vehicle. They were young, laughing, hats askew on their heads, bulky jackets obscuring too-thin, almost emaciated bodies, gaunt cheeks, hollow eyes, the stain of ink crawling up their necks and playing over the fingers of the hands grabbing the wheel. The driver was grinning, his teeth mottled and broken, already showing the impact of his meth addiction.
God’s children.
Warrick curled his lip. He extended a hand, flipping his fingers slightly—only slightly. He wouldn’t kill the idiots. They were doing a good enough job of that on their own without his help. But neither could he tolerate their foul weaponized vehicle distracting him from his path. He had too much on his mind.
The car spun away from him, executing a full one-eighty that should have been impossible in the tight lane between the stacked-up vehicles. But nothing was impossible for a demon. Almost nothing, anyway.
Not everything was illusion.
Time rushed forward once more, and there was a scream, the release of ammonia in the fetid air, the screech of brakes too late applied as the human’s car bucked and coughed. Some of the humans in the lot had seen. Warrick could feel their shocked gazes going from him to the car that now lurched away at increasing speed. He didn’t care if they saw. He hadn’t fully worked out his glamour yet, but when he did, they would remember what he wanted them to remember.
Not everything was illusion. But when it came to human perception, most of it was.
He entered the cavernous mall and tasted decay, depression. Less death, he thought, than the precipitous human decline of the will to live. Several stores down the long, brightly lit corridor were empty, gates of twisted metal spires shuttering them off from the remaining life in the mall. There were more people inside than he expected, but still fewer than there should have been given how crowded the parking lot was. Too many people were jammed together in this city, he thought. Jammed together and broken apart at the same time.
The large anchor store at the far end of the mall carried the heat signature he was looking for. Male, thick and marbled with fat, his heart muscle strained nearly to the breaking point with too much sugar and too much caffeine, disease only now beginning to worm through it. Wouldn’t even be noticed for a few more years, Warrick thought, and picked up the twitchiness of Stanley Harris’s hands. The police sergeant wasn’t carrying, and he wasn’t used to not carrying. And the mall cameras made him nervous. He was worried about
the cameras catching his image.
Warrick shifted glamour midstride, assuming the appearance of a middle-aged woman in nurse’s scrubs as he stepped closer to Harris and the woman who was nearest to him, the shooter from the other night. Both of them pawed through a rack of men’s clothing.
Warrick had gleaned a lot of information from his brief interview with Stanley Harris—and from his even briefer interaction with Jack Mangia, once Harris had gotten him in to see the Guardia thug, still in police custody. The undercover cop’s name was Maria Santos. Warrick would need to figure out what she knew more in depth before this day was over, but the cross was going to make that difficult. It was more than a typical cross, he’d realized, probably specially blessed somewhere along the line.
Fortunately, he didn’t need to worry about the woman quite yet. Warrick shifted his gaze to Harris and focused.
The man’s demeanor changed immediately. His features smoothed out, his heart rate dropped, his fingers relaxed their death grip on the light gray men’s shirt he’d grabbed from the rack. Slowly, deliberately, he replaced the shirt, then pulled a long-sleeved blue pinstripe free.
“Pardon me,” he began, and Maria looked up, her dark eyes flashing despite her easy smile. She wasn’t happy, Warrick decided. “Can you help me out with this? I need to make sure it’s a good color for me.”
She tilted her head. “I think you were better off with your first choice.”
From his vantage point in the center of this section, Warrick got his first look at the woman who’d summoned him only two days earlier. Maria Santos was bone-achingly beautiful—though not in any traditional way. Too thin, with a body that looked hard and functional, she currently wore her thick black hair braided and hanging down her back. She was deeply tanned, with a veneer of sunburn in places. Her hands were abused, the knuckles scraped and bloody, the skin bruised.
She stepped closer to Harris and pulled a different shirt. “Or this one.”
Now that she was close to him, she lowered her voice and spoke rapidly, but Warrick could hear her without issue. “What’s happened?” she demanded. “They bought that Jack was picked up, bought that he was going to be in the tank for a while. If you guys have finished questioning him, he should be halfway to Florida by now.”
“It’s not him. There’s a new operative in play,” Harris snapped back, parroting the words Warrick had fed him the day before in his office. “Trained infiltration expert. One of the alphabets sent him down, wanted him dropped in cold.”
Maria jerked as if struck. “A plant? Are you insane?” she hissed.
“Apparently, whatever La Noche is cooking in that drug lab has people concerned at the highest levels. They want their guy in there to assess the situation. His cover is that he’s a buyer from another organization, the Red Spider. He’s there to check out the merchandise.”
“No way,” Maria said, but Warrick could hear the waver in her voice. He’d done his homework. The Spider was an infrequent but high-dollar customer of La Noche. If the gang was creating something new and hot, they’d want in. And it wasn’t unreasonable they’d want to know exactly how new and how hot the product was.
Still, Maria wasn’t quite ready to give up. “These guys do not play around, Stan. They’ll spot a Fed trying to act like a high-level lieutenant in thirty seconds. They’ll pop him before he clears the first door.”
“Which is why you’re getting him through those doors. He says he can convince them once he’s in, and I’ve met him. He can.” Harris fixed Maria with a hard gaze. “It’s not like you don’t have a mess of your own to fix. We got word of the casualty. Guy died right on the floor of that club. In front of you, word has it.”
“Not my fault, not my gun,” Maria asserted emphatically. “You won’t have any way of checking, but my conscience is clear. I did not kill that man.” She shook her head. “Honest to God, I don’t know who did. He bled out way too fast, and then…”
Harris looked at her sharply. “And what?”
“There was something…weird about the way he died. You guys getting wind of any sort of drug interaction that messes up the blood? I mean, really messes it up?”
“That would be every single drug out there right now.”
“This one’s different,” Maria countered. “And since you’re saddling me with this new guy, you owe me. Look up incidences of deaths with evidence of thick black emissions from the deceased, like blood that’s been mixed with crushed coal. Check the coroner’s office. They’d know.”
Harris still held the shirt, narrowing his eyes at her. “And this matters why?”
“Because the dead guy didn’t simply go down. He dropped way too fast, then spewed enough blood for three guys. On the heels of the blood that spilled out of his chest, there was…” She flapped her hand. “I don’t know how to describe it other than as black goop. But I saw it with my own eyes, and another guy in the room said that he’d seen it a few days earlier at a club called Jackal’s. I think we may have a bad strain of pills or crack or—something, in the city, and it’s going to incite panic if we don’t brace people for it.”
Harris made a face. “I don’t see how—”
“Just check it, Stan. Least you can do if you’re asking me to walk some Fed into the belly of the beast to pass him off as a legit buyer. Where will he make contact, anyway?”
“The gym.” Harris sounded like he was surprised to be saying it, but Warrick didn’t miss the gleam of interest in Maria’s eyes. He’d guessed correctly. He’d show up, spar with her, get them both straight that he wouldn’t cause her a problem. Then they’d make a plan to go in.
“Right, okay. Fine.” Maria glanced at Harris. “I still think it’s a mistake, but with enough confidence, you can pull off anything, I guess.” She pointed to the shirt, spoke more loudly. “You going to buy anything else to go with that?”
“No, that should do it,” he said, and she nodded as if this was a routine exchange between them, indicating there was nothing more to say. She turned to make her way down the clothing aisle. At the last minute, she stopped and looked back.
“When?” she asked, and Harris shrugged, still looking down at the button-down he was holding, as if now seriously considering the purchase.
“Give it a few hours. He’ll be there.”
“Fantastic,” Maria muttered. And despite himself, Warrick grinned. She thought he was going to be a liability, but that was only fair. She hadn’t met him yet.
He wouldn’t need long to change her mind.
Chapter Four
Maria sagged against the heavy bag, her lungs heaving. She’d long since figured out that Stan’s “few hours” apparently meant “whenever the Fed feels like showing up.”
It wasn’t so much that she was eager to meet the guy, but she was eager to figure out what the hell it was he thought he’d accomplish. A buyer for the Red Spider? She’d barely heard of the organization, and she wasn’t about to bring up the name to Cedo before the guy made his appearance. She’d have to be doubly careful, especially if Cedo’s warning from two nights back was true. She’d taken out one of Takio’s guys, and apparently, that was a coup of some sort. Though she hadn’t seen anyone tailing her, Cedo’d been pretty sure that Takio would be pissed. Maybe pissed enough to want to see her. That could be her chance to get inside his inner sanctum, into the heart of the Citadel. Once she got there, she needed to find something big enough, damning enough, that Takio couldn’t talk his way out of, despite all his money and guns. Maybe evidence of a drug that turned its victims into black-goop-filled aliens.
Maria grimaced. She had no doubt that someone else would take up residence in the Citadel the moment Takio vacated it, and in most cases, the new guys ended up being bigger assholes than the old guys. But not this time, she thought. Forget this newest drug—from everything they’d heard on the street, though they could prove nothing, Takio had killed the leaders of at least three rival gangs in the area, and he was rumored to have their h
eads displayed in the Citadel to keep the locals in line. He’d trafficked women and children into the sex trade. He’d run enough drugs to light up half the northern hemisphere. He was mysterious and deadly and seriously bad news, and he clearly got his rocks off burying himself in the Citadel, where law enforcement would have to come at him through concrete blocks and machine guns instead of driving their cruisers up a long manicured drive and through a stately private gate.
Suddenly, a voice cracked across the stillness of Lucy’s, old Charlie’s unusually cheerful cry of welcome bouncing off the concrete walls. “Hello, friend. You Warrick?”
“That I am. You must be Charlie.”
Maria stiffened, hearing the voices but not processing them correctly. Charlie was as much of a permanent fixture in Lucy’s gym as the sweat-stained concrete floors, an old boxer who’d gone from fighter to trainer to cleanup patrol as his body had grown more bent and wizened. He’d never lost his love for the sport, though, and his eyes were still remarkably sharp, despite all the knocks to the head he’d sustained.
He also wasn’t big on new faces in the gym. It’d taken him a full month to even acknowledge Maria, yet here he was laughing and chatting with the newcomer as if he was his long-lost friend.
Maria pivoted and focused on the speaker, who stood easily with Charlie while the old man grinned and rubbed his bald head. It was one of Charlie’s most endearing habits, as if he was always a little surprised that he didn’t have hair anymore. It also showed that Charlie was completely comfortable around the stranger, who hovered over him at easily six foot six.
Definitely no one she’d seen before.
The guy who’d entered Lucy’s was a brawler, all right, but unlike most of the boxers who frequented the gym, he looked like he’d been professionally trained. His body was big—and not barbell big. The kind of big that made you think he could just as easily haul himself up a mountain as throw punches into a heavy bag or another man’s jaw. Long, sinewy muscles, broad shoulders, powerful legs, tight abs. Which she knew because he was wearing a tank top that was little more than a few artfully arranged strips of cloth that had been ripped to reveal the impressive swath of muscle underneath.