"Hi Rosa. What a lovely surprise running into you." I tried to sound as pleasant as I could muster. "Again."
I'm not going to lie; when she came up to me I flinched. I could feel the blow coming. Instead, she stopped just inside striking distance and even though she was shorter than I was she still somehow managed to look down on me. Despite all I'd been through, she still managed to scare me.
"What the hell's going on brujo? You're a bad penny. You give me answers, you give me answers now."
"Yes ma'am," It was like I'd been compelled. And hell, the lady kind of deserved it, "But…you're going to think I'm crazy."
"I already think you're loco, now get your white ass inside before some real gangsters shoot you."
Chapter Thirteen
Despite the initial feeling of walking into the lion's den, Rosa's house was pretty damn nice. Cozy, even.
All the furniture was used and second hand and none of it matched, but it was all in good repair and clean. Everything I could see was clean, obsessively; there wasn't a molecule of dust or dirt anywhere. We were sitting in a tiny living room, Swift and Hack packed next to me on an old leather sofa. Hanging on the wall across the room was a painting of some doe-eyed saint that tracked me across the room as we entered, and kept staring at me.
Jesus and his friends had retreated to somewhere in the back of the house, I could hear the low thud of a stereo playing and caught the faint aroma of something that might have been medicinal. Rosa had disappeared into the back after we had gotten inside and she commanded us to sit. She came back out wearing a pair of sweats and an old black and silver jersey, with her salt and pepper hair out of a bun it fell down to the middle of her back. Even relaxed, the lioness is still a deadly creature. Her eyes were smoldering when she came out and sat in a recliner across from us.
"So, get talking brujo," she said.
"What does that mean, anyways? Is it like a puto? Cause you keep calling me that too."
Next to me, Hack and Swift made laughing sounds under their breath. I turned to look at them, but they both stared inconspicuously off in different directions.
"A little. Puto means bitch, brujo means witch," Rosa stated flatly
.
This is my life.
"Screw the both of you." I turned back to Rosa. She didn't seem to find much amusement in it either. "Okay, so maybe one of those I can…kind of understand, but witch?"
"Which one don't you understand?"
"Witch."
"Which one?"
"Oh for…Why did you call me a witch?" I grumbled out.
"Why do you think? Throwing fire and crazy shit, I've seen a lot of things but I ain't ever seen anything like that. Walking furniture, crazy white fuckers with glowing eyes." Rosa screwed up her face while she talked, like remembering it was leaving a bad taste in her mouth. One's first encounter with the wider world can have that effect on a person.
Discovering that the world really isn't what you'd always believed can have a number of profound, and sometimes traumatic, effects. Some people just can't handle it, the weight of realizing reality is infinitely bigger and scarier than they ever imagined. I mean, I grew up my entire life with this stuff, family tradition and all. But for the vanilla folks out there, Christ, I couldn't even imagine what it would be like to wake up one day and know that monsters are real, and they definitely want to eat you.
And they're everywhere.
Rosa got a double dose of it; she got to see some of the crazier denizens of the Other Side and a mage at wit's end slinging volatile forces around. Despite the barely contained anger that hung around her like an aura, she was taking it rather well.
"You're not far off, actually. But I prefer to be called a mage; witch just has a lot of weird connotations." I'd have to try and break it all down as simply as I could manage. I didn't want to risk provoking the wrath of the volatile cleaning lady, "But yeah, I can…cast spells."
Rosa sat and absorbed that, then folded her arms across her chest and narrowed her eyes.
"So you know magic?"
"It's more like I perceive and manipulate the underlying forces of creation, bending them to my will to alter reality," I said matter-of-factly.
"Magic, asshole."
Hack snorted and choked down a laugh, I elbowed him in the ribs. People just don't respect the finer subtleties of working with the powers of the universe. Anyone could dumb it down and call it magic, but it was so much bigger than that. Guys like Hack tend to take it for granted. They do quick and dirty magic and make it look easy, pulling from reserves of power built up over decades and centuries of practice. As mages go, I was still a young buck even though I'd seen most of three decades. Everything I did was relatively tame in comparison. I could bend reality, not tear it a new one.
"Right. Okay. Magic."
"And what the hell was going on at the Bastille? Magic turf war?" Rosa asked.
"Not quite. I'm trying to find something, before some very bad people do." I glanced over at a clock and saw it was getting close to three in the afternoon. We had to get moving. "If we don't, its game over for everything."
"Why don't you, I don't know, call the cops? The FBI?" Rosa asked like it made perfect sense.
As much as I'd love to call in the cavalry and inform them of the impending apocalypse, it would be opening up a whole new can of worms. The Others have spent millennia hiding their existence, manipulating legends and mythology to cover their tracks, using disbelief and science against lowly mortals.
Humanity, while puny and relatively powerless, outnumbers the Others by a shocking margin, and would no doubt go to any lengths to exterminate every last remnant of the paranormal if it came to light that demons, monsters, aliens, vampires, and more dark and sundry entities existed. It would get really bad, really fast.
Hack let out a snort, and shot me a side-long glance, old wounds, memories of an old argument. I frowned; now wasn't the time to go digging through the dirt.
"Not an option. And as much as I'd love to sit and chat about the finer details of the madhouse that is my life, I don't have the time." I rose off the couch and slung my bag over my shoulder. Hack and Swift took the hint and followed suit, "You probably know too much already. It might be dangerous just for me to be here."
"So that's it? You're telling me there are monsters out there, and now you're leaving? What if some more crazy shit happens?" Rosa stood.
"That's why I have to go. I'm already pretty sure someone's dogging our tracks, so the sooner we leave -" A heavy-handed pounding came from the front door, "Expecting company?"
Jesus must have been expecting someone, he came sprinting down the hall and went for the door. Rosa looked like she was about to say something, but he already had the door open. There was a loud crack and the guy went flying back down the hall to slam into a wall and land in a senseless heap. Rosa screamed bloody murder, and two massive burly looking figures wearing slouch hats and festively colored ponchos came through the door.
"Should've seen this coming," Hack spat.
The two men had to stoop, and just about turn sideways, to squeeze themselves through the door. Both stood easily seven feet tall, with ridiculously wide shoulders and arms as thick as telephone poles that ended in shovel-sized hands. I could make out lantern jaws under the hats, and they both had blunt tusk-like teeth jutting out from their mouths.
"Ogres? I hate my life," I muttered.
"But it's never boring." Swift moved forward, looking almost happy at the intruder's appearance.
Then Rosa came flying out of left-field, screeching one of her patented expletive-laden battle cries, brandishing a solid looking wooden foot stool. She blew straight past me and slammed the stool into the leading ogre, catching it straight in the face. She might as well have been hitting a tank for all the good it did. The stool splintered and rebounded off the big lummox's head, knocking its hat in the air and revealing its beady little eyes. It grunted and sent Rosa sprawling with a cas
ually tossed back-hand.
"You take the ugly one," Hack said, little arcs of electricity crackling and racing up and down his arms.
"Which one's the ugly one?" Swift said and launched himself at the lead ogre, hitting it like a freight train and plowing it into a wall.
I made a dive behind the couch as Hack cut loose with the light display, launching twin streams of lightning at the remaining ogre. It squealed like a stuck pig but didn't go down. From behind the couch I could hear lots of yelling and crashing about. This was terrible.
And then it got a lot worse.
Of course.
I took a look around the couch in time to see Jesus's friends crowding down the hall to see what the commotion was, and then lose their collective shit when they saw the ogres. A couple of them went into attack-mode, the rest made a mad dash to turn and go back the way they'd come. This had the bonus of adding not just more yelling to the mix, but random bursts of gunfire as the panicking gangsters began unloading their guns.
That escalated quickly.
One of the ogres roared, and I saw Swift go flying over the couch. Somewhere I could hear Rosa groaning, and Hack was yelling a prodigious number of very creative profanities as he kept blasting like a semi-human artillery piece. I belly-crawled along the ground behind the couch and made my way to Rosa, she had landed on the other side of the living room and was on her back staring up at the ceiling with glassy eyes. She already had an ugly lump showing up on her cheek where the ogre got her.
"Rosa? Rosa are you okay?"
"I'll kill it...hurt my boy...I'll kill it..."
She was totally out of it. I started dragging her back to the relative safety behind the couch when a massive boom shook the entire house and everything stopped. I'd never been one for praying, but I was about to pick a deity and start. I poked my head up over the top of the couch and saw that one ogre was down, Hack crouching on its chest with his hands pressed against its face. There were smoking blast marks all over it, its head resembled a charcoal briquette. The boom, though, had come from Swift. Debris was still falling from where he and the ogre tore their way through a whole wall of the house, and apparently the gangsters regained their senses long enough to make a break for it and had bolted out the door.
That drew all the wrong kinds of attention. I could hear more yelling rising up from outside, and screeching tires. Somewhere in the distance was the wail of a siren.
"Swift, knock it off, we have to get out of here." I said and stood.
Rosa was up, leaning against a wall and surveying the damage to her home with a look of utter disbelief on her face. When her eyes landed on the crumpled body of Jesus, she must have gone into super-mom mode. She vaulted over the couch, past the wreckage and over to him in the blink of an eye.
While she was trying to shout consciousness back into her son, I picked my way through the war zone of the living room. Swift was picking himself up out of the tumbled down wall, splattered in thick, greyish ogre blood and dust. The real kicker, his hair wasn't even messed up. Not a single strand. Add perfect hair to an absurd list of super powers.
"Was that entirely necessary?"
Swift looked from me back to the mess he'd created and started laughing. From what I could see of the ogre buried under the rubble looked like it had been beaten to death by a wrecking ball.
"Boy we better get. Crowd's gathering, law's on its way," Hack said.
"On it. Rosa, come on you have to go. We have to get out of here."
Rosa was helping Jesus to his feet. He looked pretty battered but not bad, all things considered. He had the thousand yard stare of a man recently concussed. I was quite familiar with the look.
"You think I'm going anywhere with you psychos? You just destroyed my house!"
"In our defense, they totally started it. And there's probably more on the way. Not to mention the cops. We don't want to be here when either of them shows up," I said and made for the door. Hack and Swift were already outside and heading for the car Rosa had shown up in.
She mumbled something I didn't catch under her breath, but it sounded pained and exasperated, and started making her way to the door while supporting Jesus's weight. Getting the hell out of Dodge was going to take forever at this rate. I went over and got myself situated under Jesus's arm and between Rosa and me, we made it out the door. I saw Jesus's pistol lying in the rubble, Swift must have dropped it, scooped it up as we went and dropped it in my bag.
Swift either used his crazy Angel of Death magic or hot-wired Rosa's low-rider, and had it pulled up in the front yard of the house with Hack riding shotgun, blue spotlight eyes scanning the area. There was a decent sized crowd of neighbors out on the street, trying to see what the destruction was all about. A shocking number of them appeared to be armed. I threw the back door of the car open when we got close and managed to maneuver myself, Jesus, and Rosa into the backseat. Swift didn't even wait till the door had closed all the way to stomp on the gas pedal.
"Any idea what the hell that was all about?" Hack asked after we had gotten some distance between us and Rosa's house, making our way through the Gardens.
I had a pretty good feeling what Thing One and Thing Two had been there for, it was about the only thing that made sense. We were being followed, most likely had been all damn day; first Bugbrain's multiple assaults, Flesh-Thing getting handled, and now the ogres showing up out of the blue. And who could forget about the fucking zombie pigs? There had to be agents of the Sleeper following us; Sleeper agents? They got the book away from Flesh-Thing, and sent in the bruisers to try and get me out of the picture so I wouldn't interfere with the Sleeper's minions trying to awaken it.
"We're being followed; someone knows we're after the book."
"But who else even knows about the book?" Swift asked as he drove, taking us out of the Gardens and back onto a main road heading for town.
"The Sleeper and its band of merry pranksters, obviously, and Devlin. He was the one who started this whole mess." I watched things pass by out the window while I tried to take a mental inventory. "And, if Flesh-Thing's memories are to be believed, my great-grandfather."
"Not possible. I was there when Henry died, Tommy. It ain't possible," Hack said.
"Have I mentioned you're all crazy?" Rosa spoke up; Jesus was sleeping comfortably with his head on her shoulder.
"That's not very helpful. Well if it wasn't Henry who beat the freak to death, it was someone that looked a whole hell of a lot like him. And why would someone do that? Swift, take us back to my place. There's something there I have to check, and we should be safer. I'll lock it down."
"What about my car?"
"Uncle Satan's people won't mess with it, it'll be safe. We can pick it up after we're done saving the world and not getting killed."
I was tired of reacting to everything; I'd been getting bounced around and beaten up since I agreed to find the damned Libro Nihil. I was tired of getting hounded by an enemy I knew nothing about. This was no ordinary job; this made the Broken Circle look like breaking up a rowdy frat party.
Getting into the supernatural investigations business was a great way to pay the bills if you could live long enough to get paid, and it was a fantastic way to pad my burgeoning collection of weird crap, but one day it was most definitely going to catch up with me.
Chapter Fourteen
When we got back to my place, there was company waiting for us.
A car that looked like it was probably worth more than my whole house was parked out front, and Devlin stood next to it. For the first time in all the years that I'd known him, he looked frazzled. He always maintained an appearance of control, the old monarch, but now he looked like a man falling apart. He shuffled back and forth in the dirt, clutching at his cane, when he saw the Caddy approaching he froze up like a deer in headlights.
Swift parked and we all piled out. I helped Rosa get Jesus out, who was at least able to stand on his own power now. Devlin perked up visibly when he saw us, and ru
shed over.
"Sarah's gone."
"Sarah, your nurse, Sarah?" I could still remember the smell of sunshine. Devlin nodded, now he was closer, I could see his cane looked beaten up, cracked and burned in spots.
"Get inside and tell me everything."
I went through the business of unlocking the steel security door and held it open as my rag-tag collection of guests went in. They made their way to the living room as I shut the door behind me and locked the locks again. I checked over my shoulder to make sure everyone was down the hall, then turned back to the door and laid my palms on it.
I shifted my sight to the Other spectrum and the door and stones around it lit up with ephemeral sigils and formulae drawn over them.
Not only had Henry built the house to withstand nuclear attack, he had also worked protective magics into the stones themselves, and over the years I had layered some of my own into the mix. I'd never had a real reason to test the security system, but I'd always been glad to have it, and now it looked like it might come in handy. I pushed a fraction of my will into it and felt a gentle vibration thrum through the house as the defenses activated.
In theory, that should keep any unwanted guests out, unless of course we really were dealing with Henry Grey, in which case he'd shut them down and just walk right in. Fingers crossed. I slipped back to normal sight and meandered down the hall to the living room.
"You live in a dump, brujo," Rosa said when I entered.
She was making her way around the room pulling the white cloths off everything, revealing furniture and things that hadn't seen the light of day in years.
"Not all of us can afford a cleaning lady."
Jesus was shuffling around looking at my father's collection of curiosities in the china cabinets, African ritual knives and ancient fertility idols from the Amazon, the pickled fetus of a therianthrope and other things. Swift was busying himself with getting a fire started in the fireplace, and Hack sat in one of the big recliners with his arms folded over his chest giving Devlin the stink-eye.
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