“Believe me, there are plenty of people I’d have no problem eating for lunch. My life is already torture. Do you have any idea what it’s like to live in a place where everything is just so fucking perfect all the time? Everyone has the perfect family, the perfect house, the perfect car, the perfect clothes, the perfect hair, and God help you if you ever express an opinion of your own about anything. It’s all bullshit. My sister pops pills and shoves her fingers down her throat after every meal. My father is doing the housekeeper, which wouldn’t be so weird if my brother weren’t doing her, too. Meanwhile, my mother can’t get her nose out of a martini glass long enough to notice any of it. No, the real problem would be deciding who goes first.”
“It’s easy enough to say, but when you are confronted with the prospect of actually ending someone’s life, well, that’s different. Could you do it?”
“You’ve met my sister. What do you think? I can’t believe you haven’t wanted to kill her. Most people do at some point.”
She is not incorrect.
“Your sister is one of my best customers. If I killed her I’d be out a lot of money.”
“You know she steals, don’t you?”
I really don’t care where the money comes from. I start to think this conversation has gone on for much longer than it should have. I have other appointments before the sunrise, after all. “Natalie—”
She fixes me with a glare. Those eyes. Lilliana’s eyes. It has been so long since I met someone willing to be turned.
“What was it like, when it happened to you?” she asks. “Did it hurt?”
“I don’t remember very much about it.”
“I don’t think you’re telling the truth.”
I shrug. “Suit yourself. It doesn’t change anything.”
“How long ago did it happen? Who was it?”
“1825. My fiancée.”
“Romantic.”
“As much as Russians can be I suppose.”
“What exactly do you remember?”
“I’m going to guess you don’t get taught very much Russian history in school.”
“That’s a very good guess.”
“In 1825, I was a young lieutenant in the army. I let myself get caught up in radical politics because I thought it would impress Lilliana. Her father was a general and a very staunch supporter of the tsar. She hated her father.”
Natalie smirks. “Well, we have that in common.”
Not the only thing.
“In December of that year, Tsar Aleksandr died,” I explain, “and many of us saw an opportunity to demand reforms. I joined about three thousand fellow soldiers in Senate Square in St. Petersburg the day Aleksandr’s brother Nikolai proclaimed himself tsar. We never expected Nikolai’s guard to open fire.”
“You were shot?”
I nod. “I was fortunate. Many people tried to escape by crossing the frozen River Neva. That was when the artillery barrage from the Winter Palace broke up the ice and plunged them all into the freezing water. I managed to stagger away from the square and find shelter in an alley. I began to shiver, but I knew it wasn’t from the cold. I leaned against the wall and slid to my knees. I clutched my side where the bullet ripped through my jacket, but the blood seeped through my fingers and stained the snow red. By some miracle Lilliana found me. At that point I was barely conscious. She knew I was dying. She did what she had to do to save me.”
“She was already a vampire?”
“A witch, actually. Her mother was...not Russian. She taught Lilliana many things the Church would not have approved of. I remember the snowflakes sticking in her coal-black hair as she leaned over me and began whispering words in my ear I didn’t understand. At the same time she placed her hand on top of mine, the hand that clutched my wounded side. I cried out, but it only hurt for a moment. The blood that had been flowing out of me, creating a crimson pool on the white ground, slowed to a trickle and then stopped. After that I blacked out. As I said, I don’t remember what happened.”
I start to walk away again.
“Valentin, you bastard,” Natalie calls after me. “You know that’s not the whole story.”
I stop and turn around. “If I tell you will you go away?”
“If you don’t tell me, I won’t go away.”
“Fine. When I woke up it was night. Lilliana lay on the ground next to me, like a fallen angel in the snow. She was barely breathing. Her lips were blue. I gazed at her pale neck exposed to the cold, and I suddenly felt hunger like I’ve never felt. Pain tore through my mouth as my eyeteeth pushed through my gums. Before I even knew what I was doing, I closed my mouth over her throat. My teeth pierced her soft skin, and I began to drink. I suspected she knew what was going to happen.”
“So she made you a vampire and you returned the favor? How did you know how to do it?”
I hold up a chiding finger. “There are some secrets we will never reveal.”
“So what did you do after that?”
“What you would expect. We spent decades living lavishly in St. Petersburg and then in Moscow. Every so often, we took on new identities so that no one would grow suspicious. During the October Revolution, we backed the Whites. When they lost, we took out our frustrations on hapless Reds, but we knew Russia was no longer the place for us. In 1925, we came here.”
“Voluntarily? Here? You could have gone to New York, or Boston, or Chicago. Hell, Omaha would have been a better choice.”
“It was different then. Los Angeles was a boomtown. More people poured in every day. The optimism, the hope, the innocence, the naïveté—they were all palpable. Easy pickings. The possibilities for Lilliana and me seemed endless. I thought we would be together forever.”
Natalie raises an eyebrow. “Past tense? She’s—”
“Gone.”
“It must get lonely.” Natalie reaches out and takes my hand. Unlike most people, she doesn’t flinch at the coldness of my skin.
I make myself pull away. “Natalie, stop. I could just as easily kill you as turn you.”
“I don’t think you want to kill me. My sister’s party is Saturday. Our parents are out of town—again. I’ll be here.”
***
Chelsea isn’t the only customer I meet in the park. I have a transaction there almost every night. Less than twenty-four hours since my conversation with Natalie, I find her sitting on a bench with a boy her own age. There is very little space in between them. For me it’s a simple task to eavesdrop on their conversation from a safe distance away.
“So what’s so urgent that you had to talk?” Natalie asks. “What’s Chelsea done this time?”
“Not Chelsea, my dad,” the boy replies. “I told him I didn’t want to go to West Point in the fall. The fucking prick told me I don’t have a choice in the matter. He said I’m going whether I like it or not because it’ll make a man out of me. I guess being on the football team and the wrestling team and dating a cheerleader isn’t enough.”
“Andrew, you can’t let him dominate your life. If you don’t do something now it’s only going to get worse. I know how much you hate football and wrestling, and you’re pretending to date Chelsea because I’m not appropriate girlfriend material. At least I hope you’re pretending.”
“Natalie, you know how I feel about your sister.”
She unleashes her wicked grin again. Lilliana’s grin.“Just checking.” Then her smile fades. “Seriously, though, you have to stand up to your dad. It’s your life, not his.”
“You know what will happen if I do that. He’ll cut me off. I won’t have anything. And I don’t see your parents taking me in. I just don’t think there’s any way out.”
“What would you say if I told you I know of one?”
“I would ask you why you haven’t told me about it already.”
“I can’t, not yet.”
/> “Natalie—”
She holds up a hand. “Just wait a few more days. A few more days and we’ll both be free of this bullshit. You’ll see.”
He wraps his hand around hers. “Promise?”
“I promise.”
I feel what blood I have begin to rise. My mouth starts to ache as my eyeteeth grow and push through my gums. I leave while I can still control myself.
***
Saturday night I find Natalie in the park again, just as she said. She looks around, no doubt wondering where I am. She walks toward the tree where I met her before, not thinking to look up in the branches.
I wait. She puts her hands on her hips, scans the park again, then pulls out her phone to check the time. I see the worry creep into her expression. She’s no doubt wondering if I’ll show up at all, but I don’t plan on disappointing her.
I just need her to take a few more steps.
When she’s almost directly underneath I let Andrew’s body fall. Blood from the gaping hole in his neck spatters her clothes when he hits the ground. She screams.
I drop down behind her. “Hello again, Natalie.”
She spins around, terror filling her eyes as she watches me lick the last few traces of Andrew’s blood from around my mouth. “Oh my God. What did you do?”
I run my blood-slicked fingers along the rim of my fedora. “What, no compliment for my new hat? Doesn’t this one make me look dapper?”
She glanced back toward Andrew’s body. “Why, Valentin? Why?”
“I just wanted to show you what it’s really like before you made your final decision, Natashenka. It’s a permanent condition, after all. You’re a smart girl. You’d survive well. You’d have centuries of blood and gore to look forward to. Thousands of deaths. But you know what? There’s no guarantee of forever. There wasn’t for Lilliana. There isn’t for any of us. Do you still want it? Even though now you can’t ever have the person you love?”
“You fucking bastard.” She chokes on the words as tears well up in her eyes.
I make an exaggerated bow. “At your service.”
I leave her kneeling over Andrew’s body, screaming every profanity she can possibly think of at me. I know the answer to the question I asked of Mercedes’s saint. In the east, the sky lightens slightly, though not enough for any human to see, as it’s still hours before dawn. It’s going to be another scorching day in Los Angeles, and I think of snow.
Little Gods
Neal F. Litherland
Chicago was a dirty, backwater marsh town grown long in the tooth, and broad in the shoulders. When he was decked out in a pinstripe suit with a ring on his little finger, it was easy to miss the scars on his face, and his sunken, brawler's knuckles. Beneath the high collar one could glimpse the tattoos of a hardscrabble empire, and though his eyes glimmered with bowery lights there was no warmth in them. Chicago was a city who knew where the bodies were buried, and if someone asked politely it might hint at a few places.
Richard Blackheart was a true son of the Windy City. With his long hair and short goatee he looked like an Old Testament devil—the kind who stalked the dark places of the world, and who lurked in deserts with murder on his mind. Lean and hungry, there was something lurking in the corners of his switchblade smile. He was a bad luck man, a sorcerer who dealt in sorrow. Worse, he did it for money.
The Sterile Saint had put word on the street she was looking for him. Blackheart knew her by reputation, but little more. A force to be reckoned with, she had been a Santera once upon a time. Her blasphemies were so numerous, and so black, that even her name had become taboo among the city's spirit workers. Since then she'd wandered like a ragged ghost, pulling up the souls of the dead like rotten molars and making them tell her their secrets. Those who sought her help paid a steep price for it, and those who caught her attention tended to do as she asked. Blackheart didn't like death dealers or soul slavers, and he had little patience for people who skulked around and waited for him to take note. So he'd come loaded for bear, ready for anything she might throw his way.
He found the Saint's regular haunt, a no-name back alley bar down a wind-scoured throat on the city's South Side. Inside was a haze that stank of unfiltered cigarettes and hand-rolled incense, along with a dozen shadowy forms bent over glasses of coffin varnish. The patrons glanced in mirrors or peered over raised glasses when he opened the door. Most put their gazes back into their cups rather than meet the gaze that swept the place. All except one, who watched from her perch in a back booth on a raised dais. A little smile quirked the corners of her mouth. Blackheart waded into the fog, his ironshod boots thumping a counterpoint to the metal ferule of his blackthorn stick. The other patrons parted, eager to get out of his way.
The Saint wore dingy white, and it made her look like something from an antiseptic hell. Her skin was mahogany faded in the sun, and her hair was fire-blackened moss curled in tight ringlets. She had strong Latin features, but they were mostly lost behind a mask of mortician's makeup. Her deft hands rolled small, sharp bones across a faded, oft-folded map of the city proper. She didn't look like much. Looks could be deceiving.
“You're just in time,” she said without looking up. “He told me you would be. Please, seat yourself.”
“You've been looking for me,” Blackheart said. The words were mild, a soft bass rumble that was nearly a purr. The tone didn't fool either of them.
“I have,” the Saint replied, gathering her fortune tellers into a pile. “And here you are, just as my new friend said you would be.”
She shook the bones again, and tossed them with a flick of her wrists. When they came to rest, a broken grin smiled at the ceiling. The jagged teeth were carved with scrimshaw siguls, and they pulsed with an invisible, decaying heat. One of the canines was chipped, and something slick and dark lurked inside. The essence smelled like a festering soul. Blackheart had seen that smile before; he'd personally beaten some of the teeth out of the previous owner's head. Gideon Fallwell knew too many of the wrong secrets, and his lips were looser than was good for a man who moved in dangerous circles. The runes of protection hadn't done the man any more good after he'd died than before, apparently.
“It's bad form to dig up a wizard once he's been buried,” Blackheart said. The Saint looked up. Her gaze was calm as a stagnant pond, and she met the sorcerer's eyes without flinching. Both the dark pool of his right eye, and the ghostly blue of his sinister one.
“I have a proposition for you,” the Saint said in her toneless, disinfectant voice.
“I don't like necromancers,” Blackheart replied. The Saint smiled, an expression as believable as a grocer's false front.
“You don't have to like me,” she said. “Just help me.”
Blackheart quoted a price. The Saint's eyebrows rose slightly.
“That's more than your going rate,” she commented.
“It's my price for you,” Blackheart said.
“You don't even know what I need you to do.”
Blackheart shrugged, resting his hands on the head of his stick. The Saint sighed, and took a plain manila envelope from the seat beside her. She handed it to Blackheart, who lifted the flap and counted the bills. The amount he'd quoted was there, no more and no less.
“The dead do love to gossip about what's to come, don't they?” he said, tossing the envelope onto the table. He sat down across from her. “What do you want?”
“I need a competent exorcist willing to go into Bachelor's Cemetery with me tonight,” she said.
“An exorcist?” Blackheart frowned.
“You'll do.”
“Is that so?” Blackheart asked. “Says who?”
She smiled again, and looked down at the dead man's teeth. It seemed Gideon knew more about Blackheart than the sorcerer had given him credit for.
“I need someone who can pull a death grip off an objec
t of power,” the Saint replied. “And who won't talk about it afterward.”
Blackheart grinned back at her, a junkyard dog showing its teeth. He glanced at the envelope, then at the scattered bones on the table. Three of them had fallen in a trifecta around the abandoned cemetery; two whole canines, and the broken tooth. The sorcerer looked more closely at the sigils.
“Which object of power?” he asked.
“The Hook,” she replied.
Blackheart nodded slowly. There were myths in the city; stories people told around burn barrels, and whispered to their friends when the hour grew late. Stories like Bloody Mary, the Hitcher, or the Woman in White. Of them all, the Hook Man was one of the most infamous. The stories said he was a deranged lunatic, with a shining metal hook he used to disembowel young lovers who sneaked away to abandoned places to be alone together. Some of the tales claimed the Hook Man was castrated as well, and that if the girl didn't die quickly enough he'd use his hook for things it had never been meant for.
The Hook Man was not the first of the little gods of slaughter. Before him there had been Rawhead and Bloody Bones, a terror that walked when the land was still fresh beneath the boots of colonists. Before that was Wendigo, who haunted hungry winters and lurked in empty bellies. There had been others as well. Kate Hatchet, the Horsetooth Hag, Black Joe, Bloody Jacob, and a dozen more besides. Each of them was different, but they'd been killers one and all. As one legend waned, another waxed. Eventually the new legend rose, and eclipsed the one who had come before. The Saint wanted to take the Hook Man's power for herself, but she was either too smart or too scared to try it by herself.
Blackheart closed his eyes, and breathed through his nose. He smelled cheap whiskey, and fried grease long since sunk into the floorboards. He caught a whiff of the rot in the tooth, and felt the bound spirit staring at him. He let his wind out slowly. He didn't owe the wizard any favors, but Blackheart didn't like the way the setup smelled. He made a decision.
“And what has our mutual acquaintance Gideon Fallwell said about this endeavor?” Blackheart asked, using the departed wizard's true name. The broken tooth shuddered like someone had slapped the underside of the table.
The Big Bad II Page 32