We walked back into the living room, watching each other warily, and stood over the unconscious man as though we weren’t tromping all over a crime scene. Come to think of it, I didn’t have any evidence of a crime. If he’d been drugged or knocked out with blunt force trauma or any number of things, I could call this in. But if he was bespelled… I didn’t think there was a police code for that. Calling all cars, calling all cars—there’s a 666 going on at the Ramone residence…
“See the image stamped into the coin?” Neith asked me.
“Sort of. Seems like it’s been worn away.”
“Nearly, but if you look closer—” she grabbed the nape of my neck and pushed me down closer to the body. I had to remind myself that I couldn’t take her in a fight—not the goddess of warfare and, particularly, strategy—so I couldn’t rip her arm off for manhandling me. Instead, I ground my teeth. “You see?” she asked, now that I was right on top of the thing. “It’s nearly sphinx-like, but instead of a man’s head, it’s a dog’s.”
“It doesn’t look like any dog I’ve ever seen.”
“Extinct species. Anyway, it’s the symbol of Set, a dog if I ever saw one.”
“Set? As in…Set? The chaos god who chopped Osiris up into a million pieces?”
She let go of my neck and I rubbed it, glaring at her. She glared back. “Yes, that one. Worse, he fed his…er, nevermind…to the fishes.”
His “nevermind”? Wow, chaste was understating things if in all her years she hadn’t come to terms with the word penis. I was tempted to pull a George Carlin and run through all the alternate words for a guy’s man parts, but I suspected she might wash my mouth out with soap…or worse.
“Okay, got it. Really bad dude. You think the Roland brothers have fallen in with him somehow?”
“‘Fallen in’ might be overstating things. Set is still bound. His wife-jailor Taweret assures it. But it seems the brothers have encountered some of his talismans—an amulet and six smaller tokens, based on what’s missing from the museum inventory—and it appears they might be under his influence.”
“That can’t be all there is to it. Objects are objects, aren’t they? I mean, power might be stored or they might be built to do a specific thing, but…”
“And if that thing they’re meant to do is create chaos? Or put a man into a coma-like sleep? Anyway, you don’t understand spellcraft. Everything is representative. You know those thousands of terra cotta soldiers found in China, each different from the others? They were put there to become an actual army for the emperor in the afterlife. The same is meant for the clay representations of food and animals that were sealed into tombs with the bodies in ancient Egypt. So, if an object is created with Set’s likeness…”
“There’s some kind of connection to the man himself,” I finished for her.
“God,” she corrected. “And he’s a right bloodthirsty bastard.”
“Okay, but how do you know all this? Not about the spellcraft. I’ll grant you’ve probably learned a thing or two in all your years. But how are you tracking the Roland boys? The murder only just happened.”
“This murder only just happened. There’s been at least one other.”
Neith pulled out a phone I’d never even noticed. I guess that with her ancient goddess aura I assumed she sent ravens or doves or psychic messages. The modern device in her hand seemed so out of place, especially when she started scrolling through it for photos. The first one she showed me nearly made me lose this morning’s chocolate croissant.
I couldn’t even tell at first whether the body was male or female. There was so much blood. Pools of it. It seemed like she’d been torn open, painted in her own lifeblood and…
“What happened?” I asked, swallowing back bile.
“She was killed. Right in the museum from which the artifacts were stolen. Mutilated, as you can see and…well, best not to talk about that.”
I filled in the blank—assaulted. Given Athena’s history with Medusa, I wanted to lash out and ask her if this was somehow the victim’s fault as well, but despite my efforts to choke it down, bile still flooded my throat. Besides, that was ancient history. It was possible she’d changed with the times. Hera certainly had, no longer revenging herself on Zeus’s lovers, but now an actual woman’s advocate.
“But that’s not even all of it,” Neith continued. “She was found in the museum’s vault. The museum had just gotten in two very unusual sarcophagi. The names have been lost to history, their spirits not commended to the next life, but… Osiris knows the hearts of all those who have died. These were very bad men. Killers, rapists. They’d managed to kill nineteen women and two men back in their day before they were taken down.”
“And yet someone went to the trouble to embalm them?” I managed.
“They weren’t embalmed so much as interred. Spells were set to bind them in, to confuse their spirits so that they’d never reach the afterlife. And if by chance they did…the demon Ammit would be waiting to eat their souls.”
“Fun,” I said. “But I’m not sure—”
“I think it was a…perfect storm, as you would say? Set’s amulets alone—others have handled them and not gone on rampages. I don’t know, but I suspect that there was a sort of sympathetic magic set up when the two brothers, in commission of a crime, came upon the confused spirits of the criminals and that Set’s tokens played some part in joining them.”
“Awesome. Oh, Armani is just going to love this.”
“Who?”
“You’ll meet him soon enough.”
Viktor suddenly jerked and uttered a low moan, drawing our attention to his sleeping form. “Why haven’t you woken up Sleeping Beauty here?” I asked Neith. “Is it dangerous?”
“I wanted to have an uninterrupted look around first.” She gave me the hairy eyeball as she said it, since clearly I’d put the kibosh on that.
“Well, then, I’ll do the honors.”
I pulled my jacket sleeve down over my hand and went to lift the coin from the forehead of the man I presumed to be Viktor Ramone.
He came up kicking, his booted foot landing hard on the table, knocking over used beer cans and sending one pizza box crashing to the floor. Neith instantly dropped down on top of him, nearly sitting on his chest with her arms outstretched to capture his wrists. I grabbed for his feet, catching a mule-kick to my thigh before I got them under control. He screamed, incoherent with fear, his eyes rolling in his face like he was a googly eyed doll in the hands of a child. It took a full on minute for him to calm down and his eyes to focus. When they did, they were still spooked, but they latched on to Neith.
The look changed from fear to bafflement. “You’re not a demon,” he said.
She huffed and said in her melodic voice, “Nice of you to notice. Are you okay. If I get up, will you hurt yourself or others?”
Us, she meant.
He looked around wildly before answering. “Where are Ian and Richie?”
“They were here?” she asked. We both knew that they had been, but he might clam up later, so better to get the confession now before he had his wits about him to invent whatever story would serve him best and keep him from an accusation of aiding and abetting.
When he didn’t spot them, he relaxed. His legs slumped in my hold and it seemed safe enough to let them go. They thumped down on the table, knocking around the bottles that remained.
Neith wasn’t ready to do the same with his arms, but speared him with her gaze while she held him bound.
“They’re gone,” she told him. “Had you invited them in?”
He tried to shrug in her grasp and found he couldn’t “They’re my friends,” he said instead. “Well, were my friends, anyway. Something’s gotten into them.”
“Like murder?” she asked, studying his response. From where she was, holding his wrists, I realized she could probably
feel his pulse. I wondered if she could sense his truth or lies from the pace of it.
I watched his face. His eyes got really big at that. Huge. And he started to struggle again, less wild but more desperate, as though he suddenly felt his vulnerability.
“Murder?” he said, his voice shaky. Then, “Let me up. Who are you, anyway. You’re not the police.”
Neith seemed satisfied by his reaction and eased up off of him. She even reached down to help him stand. He was taller than her by several inches, so it was odd I had the impression she towered above him. It must have been the force of her personality. If she’d worn six-inch heels, like all movie heroines seemed to do regardless of their ridiculous impracticality, she’d have been totally over the top.
“I’m a bounty-hunter,” Neith told him, flashing me a glance daring me to contradict her. “And Ms. Karacis here is a private investigator. You really don’t know about the murders?”
“What murders?” he asked, clearly frustrated.
Viktor Ramone was a big man. With his work-boots, jeans and serviceable shirt, he looked far too blue-collar and work-a-day for the Hollywood Hills. He looked maybe like a stuntman or stunt coordinator…until you got to the mullet. I didn’t know how he expected to be taken seriously with that. But then, Dogg the Bounty Hunter rocked a mullet, and I didn’t see too many people underestimating him.
“The Roland boys killed their parents,” she said baldly. In her Oxford English spoken with her melodic accent it came out sounding a lot less harsh somehow than if I’d said it.
“Allegedly,” I added, for form’s sake. And in case it made him more apt to talk. “The entire L.A. police department is looking for them. We want to find them first.”
“But…why?” he asked, face scrunching in bafflement.
“Why do we want to find them or why did they kill their parents?”
“Either,” he said. “Both?”
“First, because it’s our job. Second, we’d like to ask them the very same question. And you—what happened here?” I’d answered his questions. Only fair I got in some of my own.
Neith took a step closer, as if to intimidate him into answering, but I didn’t think that was going to be necessary.
“I was just heading out the door when they showed up out of nowhere,” he said, eyes still a bit glazed over and wide with sincerity. “They didn’t call first. Nothing. I told them I was running late, but Ian practically pushed me back inside. His eyes were…not right. I thought he was maybe on something—crack or meth or…I don’t know. Then Richie stepped in and closed the door behind us, leaning against it. I’m twice their size, but something felt off about the whole thing. People can do anything hopped up on drugs, you know? I told them they had to go, that I was on my way to a set, but they wouldn’t leave. Ian asked if they could stay, but not like he was asking, if you know what I mean. When I tried to force the issue, Richie said something strange. I’m not even sure it was English. And then I woke up to you in my place and…all this.”
He gestured to the mess. “I mean, the pizza boxes are mine, but the rest…”
“You woke up fighting. What did you expect to find?”
“Nightmares.”
“Can you be more specific,” Neith asked, microfocusing on him, taking another step forward until she was right in his personal space. He stepped back and she moved with him.
“Whoa, babe, boundaries,” he said to her, taking another step. He waited to see if she’d advance again, and when she didn’t, he went on. “It’s all fading now. And it wasn’t that clear to begin with. You know, kind of like a Michael Bay film—all action and explosions, very little storyline. There was blood and violence and…stuff. And there was a man…or…something. He didn’t look like any guy I’ve ever seen. His skin was white, but not like albino-white, where it’s really more pale pink. More like birch-bark white. And he had flaming red hair. His eyes were… I’m not a words guy. They were, like, agony and pain and bat-shit crazy all rolled into one, if that makes any sense. Like, worse than Charles Manson’s shark-eyes.”
He stopped, swallowed hard and waited for us to show some sign of sympathy or understanding. We both nodded.
“And he was wrapped all in chains. They cut into him in places and in others the skin was rubbed clean away… He was screaming something, but I don’t know what. And there was something about a hippo and a scorpion, like I was on a really bad acid trip… Not that I’d know anything about that.”
Neith’s eyes were blazing. “You’re sure he was still chained?”
“What, you know this guy?” he asked. “He’s…he’s for real?”
But Neith was looking to me now. “As I said, Set. Thank the gods he’s still bound and only acting through agents.”
“And if he gets free?” I asked, afraid for the answer.
“Take your greatest nightmares and multiply them exponentially. He’s got millennia of scores to settle and ages of pent-up chaos. I can only imagine.”
Viktor looked at us like we were both crazy. It was nice to have company for a change.
Hermes, aka Mercury, aka Iemisch, Spider, Coyote, Loki and a gazillion different gods throughout history, had done his best, I thought, to keep chaos alive. I didn’t guess Set was going to be satisfied with that. Oddly, now that I thought about it, Hermes had been associated with about all the trickster gods through the ages and yet Set seemed to be entirely separate…or was he?
I asked, and Neith answered. “Set was…set apart.” A twist of her lips said she understood the verbal irony. “He was infertile, and so he had no offspring. He was responsible for fratricide and attempted incest and other atrocities. Some sources link him to Typhoeus—you might know him as Typhon—but since Typhon was the Father of Monsters… No, Set’s line stopped with him. Some of his powers were mirrored in others, who took on his attributes, but he was…discontinued.”
I stared at her in shock. Viktor stared at us both. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
Neither of us answered. I had to imagine that being so completely packed away and forgotten had to be the worst torment for a god, one used to being worshiped and revered, especially for a god from a culture that believed in the continuation of life ever after. The rage that must have built up over the millennia…
No, he could never be allowed free. I had no idea what connection the Roland boys might have to Set, but they were a link at the very least, and one we had to sever. Belief and worship fueled a god’s power, and if they were able somehow to make him strong enough, it was possible he could bust his bonds and we’d be in a world of trouble.
“Where would they go?” I asked. “Richie and Ian? They came to you, but you weren’t in a position to help. Where else would they go?”
“I don’t know. They have lots of friends…or, at least, people they party with. I can give you some names and numbers, but…do you really think they killed their parents.”
“Yes,” I said, meeting his gaze dead on. “I really do.”
Chapter Four
I’d put it off long enough, but I was going to have to call Armani…again. He had to talk to Viktor. He’d want to take a statement, go over the place, find out if anything was missing or if anything from the Roland crime scene had transferred.
And he was really going to want to meet Neith, see the photos of the museum crime scene, talk about what happened in Egypt. Luckily, she wasn’t law enforcement. There weren’t going to be any international hoops to jump through. No joint task force and Homeland Security getting all involved. The Roland boys were undeniably human, so she couldn’t even argue that the gods policed their own. If everything went the way it should, which, sadly, it rarely did, she could see about Set and let Armani worry about the brothers. It seemed perfectly fair to me. Armani had already been hurt more times than I could count fighting gods and monsters. Maybe he could sit this one out. But th
ere was no way he was going to let the murders go unanswered.
The front door to the bungalow blew open right then and two figures suddenly appeared in the door, guns out and aimed our way.
“Police!” the front figure said. “Everybody, hands up.”
Viktor and I raised ours instinctively, but Neith looked thunderous.
“Hands up,” I said out of the corner of my mouth, oh so subtly. I gave my hands an extra little raise-the-roof motion so she’d get the point.
Slowly, with a glare all around, she complied.
I recognized the woman giving the orders. I’d seen her back at the station with Nick…Armani. She was the one he’d sent Jessica off with. His new partner?
Her gun lowered only slightly when she recognized me. “What’s going on here?”
“Did Jesus call you?” I asked, wondering if I’d taken too long to get back to him.
“Jesus?” she asked, clearly at a loss. She sighed. “Stand down,” she told the uniformed officer with her. “Tell Detective Armani the place is secure. And tell him…well, just tell him,” she said.
Armani must have gone around the back to secure other exits.
Then she fixed us with a look. She and Neith could easily have done a stare down and I’d have had a tough time calling a winner. But it didn’t really phase me. Unless she could shoot lasers out of her eyes, I had her beat.
“What’s going on here?” the detective asked. Reyes, I remember Nick calling her. “And who are you?” she asked Neith.
Neith inhaled, and it seemed to blow her up an extra inch or two. She reached into her vest and pulled out a wallet, which she flipped open, showing some kind of badge. She reached behind it to pull out a card as well and to hand it to Detective Reyes.
“Neith Sais,” she said, “insurance investigator. I’m tracking Ian and Richie Roland for suspected antiquities theft.”
I should have known that the goddess of strategy would have a cover story. Maybe it was even true. So many of the old gods had day jobs now that their worship and tribute had dried up.
Blood Hunt Page 5