by Chuck Wendig
“What happened to my heart?” Mookie asks. A small, soft question. It occurs to him suddenly: I’m afraid.
Him being scared scares him even more.
“Years of Blue probably contributed,” Minerva says. “But the Red? Blue can be hard on the mind, but Vermilion is hard on the body. You can only push those limits so far before things start to... break apart.”
“Wasn’t the first time I did it,” Mookie admits.
“Well, there you go,” Woodwine says, sounding pissed. “It wasn’t the fall that killed you. It was the heart giving out.”
“Sorry about your jaw.”
“Jaw’s fine,” the man answers. “Tongue feels fat. And I don’t find the taste of my own blood to be particularly appealing. You know what? Fuck that, I need a palate cleanser.” He walks over to the bookshelves and opens the glass to withdraw a bottle of something dark and murky. Woodwine holds it up. “Minerva, you mind?”
She shrugs. “I don’t drink the stuff. That’s for Rufus.” She gives Mookie a small stitched smile. “My husband.”
“Uh-huh.”
Woodwine comes back with a pair of glasses and the bottle. To Mookie: “You joining me in this, Pearl?”
Bellbook protests, “I hardly think this is a good time to—”
“Just pour.”
John Wesley nods, pours two fingers, then hands over the glass. Mookie’s nose already detects the smoke and peat and brine. He slams it back. It’s smooth. Frictionless. Like it floats down his throat, round and buttery. A swampy, charcoal finish.
“God, fuck, that’s good,” Mookie says, drawing breath through his nose. Everything feels warm and momentarily complete.
“Laphroaig forty-year,” Woodwine says. “You can practically taste the Druid sacrifice in there. The older it gets, the mellower it goes. Amazing. Thanks, Minerva.”
She scowls. “I think it tastes like barbecued swamp logs. Please enjoy.”
“Your heart,” Woodwine says. “It’s still half-yours. The other half is artifice. Built by a... an acquaintance of ours. It requires fuel.”
Bellbook waggles a round tin at him.
“Cerulean?” Mookie asks.
“Viridian,” she says.
The Green Grave. The final Pigment. Once he thought they were all a myth, but since the death of Konrad Zoladski he’s had his hands on Vermilion, Ochre, Caput Mortuum, and obviously, Cerulean.
“I’ve never seen that before.”
John Wesley sips the whisky. “We have access to a supply.”
“And if it runs out?”
“Then your ticker stops ticking.”
“Shit.”
“That’s why we need to move fast on this.”
Mookie sneers. “Fast on what?”
“You’re gonna crash a wedding,” Woodwine says, grinning through bloody teeth. “Nora’s, in case you missed that part.”
“I still don’t know what the fuck is going on.”
“It’s like this. Your little girl bought a ticket on the 13 Train. We don’t know what happened next, only that the train? It fucking fell off a trestle. Just the one car. But she must’ve survived because two weeks ago she resurfaces—eh, so to speak—beneath L.A., and next thing we know she’s taking a meeting with Esmerelda Candlefly.”
Candlefly. Mookie feels his blood pressure go high. So high he can hear the blood rushing like a river behind the drums of his ears.
Why would Nora meet with any Candlefly?
Goddamnit.
“Rumor is, she’s looking to marry into a daemon family.”
“Why?” Mookie growls, clutching the glass so hard he thinks it might crack.
“Because she believes it’ll get her out of Hell. Some old ritual, some rite she discovered, says that if she marries into a daemon family, that’ll get her a ticket out the door.”
Bellbook says, “And it’ll get the daemon who marries her a ticket back in.”
“How do you know all this?” Mookie asks.
“We’re daemons,” they say at the same time.
Goddamnit.
“Problem is,” Woodwine says, “this marriage would be bad news. The Bellbook prophets—”
“You guys have prophets?”
“Are prophets,” Bellbook says.
“You don’t look like a prophet. You look like an accountant.”
She smiles, mirthless. “That’s all prophets are. Accountants. Keeping the ledgers of what has been, is now, and will take place.”
“I’m just saying I got a hard time picturing you sorting through pigeon guts.”
“We don’t read the future in guts, Mr. Pearl. We read them in books.”
“Whatever. So, you saved my ass so I can save yours.”
Woodwine clinks his glass against Mookie’s empty one, then finishes it.
Bellbook reaches down, pulls a ticket. Presses it into Mookie’s hands. “This is an airline ticket. The flight leaves tomorrow morning for Los Angeles. You will be on this flight. The wedding is in three weeks—on the vernal equinox, March 20th. A necessary date—the length of day and night are precisely equal. That will give you plenty of time to stop these events from occurring. In whatever way you deem most... appropriate.”
“I’m not going on that plane.”
Bellbook stiffens. “Excuse me?”
“I got something to do first. Got a book I need. The Maro Mergos.”
“That book doesn’t exist,” Woodwine mutters.
“It does. I’ve seen it. I know who has it. You want me to get my little girl out of there? Fine. But I gotta have something to offer her, first. Something real. My girl grew up and I didn’t really know her. But I know her now. And she’s like a dog with its jaws on a bone—she won’t let go until you give her a steak. I need this book.”
“Absolutely not—”
But Woodwine jumps in. “No, Minerva. He’s right. And there’s time. Get the book. We’ll offer what help we can but if it’s gone into Hell, we can’t follow. The gates of the Great Below are closed to our kind and have been for a very long time.”
“Fine,” Bellbook says after some hesitation. “Fine. But believe me, Mr. Pearl, this heart we have given you requires a fuel that I suspect you will not be able to farm for yourself. As such, you are tethered to us because, without us, your heart will stop beating. The machine will break. The muscle that remains yours will pucker up like fingertips left too long in bathwater. And you will die. Are we clear?”
“Just let me do my thing,” Mookie says.
“So be it.”
19
The ritual is this: if I’m willing to marry a member of one of the demon families—of which there are seven or eight, I guess—then I’ll be able to leave this place. And whoever I marry will be able to enter the Deep Downstairs, too. We get to have our cake and eat it, too. All this has to take place on one of the equinoxes. That part’s easy; one is coming up soon. What I don’t know is how such a wedding would even work. I can’t go up to the surface. And the demons—sorry, Hrothk reminds me that it’s “daemons”—can’t come down below. Gonna make it hard to trade vows with someone I can’t physically be with. Hroth and Burnsy say they have a solution, though. They’d better.
— from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl
*
Mookie stands by the front door of the house. Slipping on a jacket that’s not his with a ragged fur-lined hood. As he zips up, his thumb catches the slight protrusion of the ring covering the hole in his chest.
“It’s still cold out there,” Woodwine says. “First of March and still cold.”
Mookie grunts. He grabs the cleaver, slides it into his sheath, then hooks it to his belt. Bellbook’s not here—she remained in the library.
Mookie puts out his hand.
Woodwine shakes it.
Mookie squeezes. Knuckles grind—Woodwine’s knees go weak with the pain and he starts to droop but Mookie keeps him up.
“The Green Grave, asshole. I
’m not trying to shake your hand. I need the stuff if I’m gonna be out there.”
John Wesley pulls away. “You don’t appreciate what we’ve given you.”
“No, I suppose I don’t.”
He fishes in his pocket. Pulls out the round tin. “The Viridian.”
“What’s this stuff really do, anyway? I know the yellow stuff opens gates. Red makes you go big and scary. Blue is blue. Violet—” Brings you back from the dead. “What’s this stuff?”
“It does a few things, it seems. It opens your awareness, like the Blue. It heals even the most grievous of injuries—”
“Like the little mushrooms.”
Woodwine clucks his tongue. “Not quite. The Caput Mortuum brings you back from the dead. The Viridian should stop you from getting there. You’ll not only be able to take one helluva beating, but you’ll come back from it a lot faster with the Green pumping through your heart.”
“How often I need this shit?”
“You’ll know when you need it. A teaspoon—and there’s a little spoon in the tin—would get most men a week.”
“I’m not most men.”
“That’s no bullshit, is it? You might get three days being as big as you are and hard as you roll. Push yourself too hard and you might need it sooner. This is a finite supply. We have more, but even that has an end. Get the book. Come back. We’ll rebook the flight. The clock—”
“Is ticking, yeah.” Mookie shrugs. “Bye.”
*
Stepping foot outside, he feels the wind whip up and lash at him like a dragon’s tail. It’s all cold scales and sharp ridges. He looks up. Fancy brownstone. Looks around. Upper East Side. Not far, he bets, from where Zoladski had his little mansion.
Three weeks till the equinox. Three weeks to get out to the West Coast.
Three weeks to stop his daughter’s wedding.
That’s some crazytown bullshit, right there. Nora? Married? Jesus. He knew she was getting close to Casimir Zoladski, but then that poor kid had to go and get himself killed by the god-worm that had inhabited the Big Boss’ flesh—but even then, would she really have considered marrying him? She didn’t love Casimir at first; he was just a stepladder so the little girl could reach the top shelf. But then she fell for him. What if she falls for one of these Candlefly sons-a-bitches?
The wind steals his breath.
He cinches the hood.
He needs that book. The Maro Mergos. It’s the only thing he can offer her. Only thing that’ll sway her hand, change her course.
Three weeks.
That’ll be easy, he tells himself.
*
Mookie needs the book. He knows who has the book: Lacey Aces, once of the Get-Em-Girls. He wants her, he’s got to find what’s left of the Get-Em-Girls. He wants them, then it’s best to check out their old stomping grounds. Which means hitting up their old warehouse in Hell’s Kitchen.
Inside: a thudding bass. Dull music. Some kinda techno crap. Mookie’s not a big music guy but when he listens to tunes, it’s got to be something with a little soul, a little heart. Muddy Waters. Stevie Wonder. Jeez, he’s loathe to admit it, but his wife, Jess, loved Hall & Oates and now he can’t not think of her when he hears them.
Whatever sound is coming through that door isn’t Hall & Oates. It sounds like Hall & Oates being thrown in a wood chipper and set to a beat: grindy, glitchy, booming.
Mookie knocks on the door.
Nothing. They can’t hear him over the aural abortion they call “music.”
He pounds on the door. Just shy of knocking it off its hinges.
The music volume dips. Mumbles. Shouts. Footsteps.
The door opens.
Some raggedy ginger opens it—freckled, pocked, Droopy Dog face like he’s got invisible fishhooks dragging the sallow bags under his eyes ever downward. Loose Celtics jersey. Gold chains. Pale and orange like a koi in a rich man’s pond.
He smokes a nub of a cigarette. Shows off track marks in the well of his arm.
“Yo, man, whatchoo need?” he says. Cocky lean to his face. The ghost of a smile. He thinks he’s tough as a bent nail, this guy.
“I need information,” Mookie says.
“Like, directions and shit?”
Mookie shrugs. “Sure. Let’s go with that. Directions. Can I come in?”
Droopy Dog laughs. “No, man, you can’t come up in here. That’s funny.”
“People often say I’m a real comedian,” Mookie says. No smile.
Droopy’s smile melts away. “You need to go now.”
The wind kicks up trash on the sidewalk.
Mookie tilts his head, looks at the guy’s arm. Sees a tattoo there on the lanky, blown-tire bicep—green shamrock with a gold crown in the middle. Letters CCG in the middle. Mookie knows who they are. Coonan-Cochran Gang. Irish. They run drugs. Girls. Mostly, though, it’s violent bullshit—robberies, smash-and-grabs, hit jobs. Nothing sophisticated. That’d be too smart, too savvy. They make Mookie look like a combination brain surgeon / rocket scientist. A rocket surgeon? Whatever.
Never had a place in the Organization, but always collected at the edges like medical waste washing up on the beach at the Jersey Shore. They’re in Jersey City, Trenton, Baltimore.
Gathering at low places.
Except now, with the Organization gone, Manhattan has been brought low. And now they’ve settled into the Get-Em-Girls’ digs? Where they had a hole to the Deep Downstairs? That means...
Mookie grabs the dipshit’s face. The dickhead cries out, tries throwing a punch—but Mookie just tilts his skull so that the top of his forehead takes it. Bam. The kid’s knuckles crack and he howls in pain.
There. The ghost of blue stains on the temples.
Blazehead.
The Blue stuff is out there now. Not just for those in-the-know. Not just for Moles, not just for rich fucks or club kids. If common thugs like this jabroni have access to it, it’s blown open. Blue. The Below. All of it.
By now the thug is screaming. Kicking. Trying to hit and failing.
Reaching in the back of his baggy shorts for what is probably a pistol.
That’s a no-can-do.
Mookie spins the fucker like a top. Pins his wrist against the small of his back. Gives a hard punch to the gun hanging in his waistband—the boxy Glock drops through the shorts and out the pant-leg like a loose turd. Mookie steps on it, and shoves his way inside, using Droopy as a shield.
It goes about how you’d think.
It’s a warehouse space—which the Girls used to use as a practice flat track for roller derby moves since in addition to being a gang of stone cold bitches they were also a bonafide roller derby team—and the thugs have divvied it up like a giant studio apartment. Couple ratty couches. Flatscreen TV on an old steamer trunk. Coffee table heaped high with just what you’d expect: guns, a bong, bag of weed, bag of white powder, video game controllers.
Mookie’s not a math whiz, but he can add, and as soon as he comes in the door he counts six other motherfuckers that need dealing with. Three fuckos on the couch. One guy standing at a food-shellacked microwave with one hot pocket already in his mouth, another coming out of the hot box like a steaming pile of doughy feces. Two more Irish wags on a rickety four-poster bed, tagging some frizzy-haired blonde from both ends, working her like they’re two lumberjacks sawing a big log.
Mookie knows subtraction, too. And he knows he needs one, just one, of these assholes alive to get the information he needs.
Trick is knowing which one.
Not a lot of time for that calculation, because the shit doesn’t hit the fan so much as a manure truck gets sucked into the turbine of a 747 airliner.
The three thugs scramble. Baggy, flabby, each with the muscle tone of a boneless chicken thigh. They all do the same thing—reach for the guns on the table. Mookie picks up Droopy, throws him bodily into the table. He shrieks. The table breaks. Guns scatter. The bong shatters.
Everything smells like bong water.
One dude with rubbery jowls goes for an Uzi still spinning on the floor like a gunmetal top. Mookie steps down on both the dude’s hand and the gun. Bones break. The dude screams, “What the fu—” and then Mook is splitting the dude’s mouth open with a hard pop of his knee. Jowly cries like a spurned toddler as he tumbles onto his ass. Three teeth clatter like thrown dice.
Cleaver, out. Second dude rushes up, arms pinwheeling like a clumsy carnival ride. Bucktoothed mouth open in an inchoate roar.
Mookie smacks him with the flat of the blade. Bucktooth goes down.
Then, suddenly, it’s three on one. The third flabby couch motherfucker, and two naked dudes. One ripped, muscles so tight he looks like he could use his thighs to crush a bear skull. The other is a long, loose rope with braided, corded muscle. That’s the more dangerous one. Guys with big muscles usually don’t know what to do with them. But ropy, rangy guys like this other fucker—he’s the one to watch for. He’s a scrapper.
They try to surround him. Ropy on his left. Muscles on his right. Flabs still standing head-on.
It’s Flabs that moves first. Maybe because he wants to show how tough he is. Maybe because he’s dumb as a bag of hair.
His wrist flips—flickety-click. Butterfly knife. Gleam in the blade.
Flabs lunges.
So do the other two.
Good.
Mookie grabs Flabs’ hand—the one with the knife. He cranks the dipshit’s arm—the elbow breaks, but hey, whatever, it is what it is—and points the knife right toward Ropy as he lunges. Muscles meets the flat of the cleaver.
Flabs screams.
Mookie buries the cleaver in his head. Dull crunch reverberates up Mook’s arm. A mist of blood hangs in the air, a red vapor.
Ropy staggers back. Butterfly knife buried to the hilt in his chest.
Muscles tries to get up. He’s bent over on his hands and knees, giving Mookie the full fruitbowl—so Mookie crushes the plums with a hard boot kick right up the assbone.
A woman shrieks.
There—the woman from the bed.