by Jenn Stark
He stiffened. “None of your—”
“Seriously. Stop.” I pulled the phone out of Brody’s hand before he could protest, my blood icing in my veins. The image on his phone displayed a section of a human arm lying on a grungy stretch of asphalt, the stump cut just below the elbow. But what I could still see… “Whose arm is that?”
Something in my voice made Brody go still as well.
“Part of the remains of some John Does left in a Dumpster over on Fifth. Call came in just before Nikki texted me.” He stared hard at me. “John Does who were kids, some of them. No heads or hands. What do you know?”
“Something. Maybe nothing.” I swallowed. “Can we…can we go look?”
Brody didn’t hesitate. “We can. There’s only one site so far. I hope it’s the last, but I’m not counting on it.”
And back we went through the station to Brody’s car, while Soo’s key made a quick change of residence from my hoodie pocket to Nikki’s bra. Her glance told me she could feel the power of the thing too, but hopefully not as strongly as I did.
The three of us remained silent on the short drive, but when Brody parked the car at the crime scene, he didn’t exit immediately. “Something else you should know. Both of you,” he said. “Over the last few days, we’ve been noticing an uptick in the drug trafficking community. Supply seems to be stepping up, which means demand is stepping up. If the traditional drugs are a problem, you can bet it’s because not everyone can afford the nontraditional grade.”
“Technoceutical junkies.”
“I’m thinking. Especially since the pulse of whatever mumbo-jumbo magic the Council let loose a few weeks ago is beginning to wear off from the psychic community. Dixie is dead sure that folks are going to want that replaced with something, and they may not be too picky on how they get it.”
We stepped out of the car, and I wrinkled my nose at the acrid stench. Not human remains, not anymore. But the garbage of three different greasy spoons in a one-block area, which was almost as bad.
“It smelled worse than this?” Nikki protested, taking in the scene. “This reek would cover a rotting T-rex.”
“Our prevailing thought is that the scent was different enough to make the restaurant workers go hunting, thinking that if it was a human body, there might be something worth stealing. When they found what they found, they decided to call. It’s over here.”
We crossed the police tape, and Brody badged us through under the pretext that we were civilian consultants. Nikki’s outlandish attire drew several hard stares, but those stopped when they got to her face. She was all cop now, surveying everything with a practiced eye. When we got to the bodies Brody nodded to the tech kneeling in all the filth. “You ready to move them?”
“Soon,” the man said, his face masked and his eyes covered with goggles. “Don’t touch anything.”
“We won’t. We only need a quick look under the tarp.”
The tech obliged, and I didn’t fight the urge to cover my mouth with my hand. Four bodies lay tumbled together amid the trash, white skinned and naked. Two large, two small enough to be teens. Their heads and feet had been removed, their hands and forearms as well. The one whose chest wall we could see had been disemboweled, the entire cavity cleaned out. But it was the arms of that person—female, based on what I could see of the corpse—that caught my attention and held it, a noose tightening around my neck. “What’s that?” I asked, my voice harsh. It was the arm I’d seen pictured on Brody’s phone.
Brody followed my finger. “We noticed that too. Looks like the edge of a tattoo. It’s the only one on any of the bodies.”
“The only one left anyway,” Nikki muttered.
He nodded. “We figure that’s why the arms were removed.”
“And the blood,” I managed over the bile rising in my throat. “Why isn’t there any blood around the bodies?”
“Cauterized at the sites of amputation,” the tech spoke up. “Professionally done. Amputation was after death as well, cuts down on the blood loss.”
“Humane motherfuckers,” Nikki said tightly. I found I was breathing shallowly, fighting the urge to retreat.
“Any idea of race?” I asked. “They’re light skinned, but that can mean a lot of things.”
“Not yet.” Brody signaled for the tech to drop the tarp again, and the man kept talking as he did so.
“—Refrigerated,” he said and I glanced up from the hopeless tarp to his goggled face. “The bodies were refrigerated. Transported somewhere local, most likely, left in the sun for a while, then dumped. We’ll need the lab to prove it, but there’s some weird marks on the skin, cold patches at the cauterization points.
“Staged,” I said. And suddenly, I knew. I knew who had been here with these bodies, and I knew why. It was a warning, and not a very subtle one. Much like a man standing in the shadows, whispering for me to stay in the city. “This was staged for us to see here, today.”
“I was afraid of that.” Brody grimaced. His expression told me to shut up, and we strode back through the small collection of uniforms out onto the clear pavement. We didn’t stop until we got in the car, and I held my stomach, queasy as we rolled out onto the street. “Who is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know much about him.” I stared out the window, my voice leaden. “A name. That’s it, no location, no base of operations. But that mark on the corpse’s arm looked—” I shook my head, remembering the glyph on Soo’s skin. “It looks a lot like a bondage tattoo inked into the slaves of a dark practitioner who goes by the name of Gamon.”
“Gamon.” Nikki’s stare shifted my way. “Never heard of him.”
“I’ve never run into him personally, but he’s known in the black market. The darkest of dark practitioners. My guess is he called up one of his minions with a corpse or four that would work, maybe tailored the one body to leave us a clue with that tat, and dumped them here.” I didn’t tell them about the sidewalk chat. I should, I knew, but the sight of that tattooed arm seemed to burn a hole in my mind, blotting out everything else.
“But why?” Brody snapped. “Why here, why now?”
Brody’s phone buzzed at his side, and he pulled it out and up to his ear in one smooth motion. “Rooks.”
Whatever was said made him punch the gas pedal. “On it.”
He threw the phone down and glared into the rearview at me. His eyes had gone a soulless gray.
“There’s another one.”
Chapter Seven
There were three total, in the end. Spread out around the city in a triangle, with the Strip in the dead center. All the bodies were positioned similarly, none of the others with a visible mark indicating that a tattoo had been present on the forearm. There only needed to be one, though. Gamon’s curse would have adorned each of these slaves.
Given the state of the bodies, cause of death was impossible to determine, though at least the amputations had happened postmortem. The victims appeared to be somewhat deliberately exsanguinated, but not completely. It was unclear how much blood was taken, or, of course, for what use.
“Nothing in the media. The rash of drug busts are drowning out everything else.” Brody typed at a keyboard in his cramped home office, leaving Nikki and me sitting in other chairs, staring at his wall-sized map. Las Vegas was laid out in front of us, a virtual pincushion, with clusters of brightly colored tacks marking the various gangs, safe houses, persons of interest—and Connecteds, too, I realized. At least he’d given the psychic community purple to help us stand out. Purple was nice.
Three new red pins connected with string also adorned the board. The locations of the body dumps.
“No messages to the precinct house, people claiming ownership?” Nikki asked. After the scene at the first drop, she’d persuaded us to stop by her apartment for more suitable clothes. Now she sat in her black-and-white camo pants and a tight black T-shirt, her black Chicago PD ball cap suspiciously well worn. The longer I got to know Nikki, the more glimpses I got i
nto who she was before the fabulous hair, glittery nail polish, and cherry-red stilettos.
No stilettos tonight, for certain. She balanced her chair on its two back legs, her feet encased in sturdy combat boots capable of kicking a rhino to death.
“Not a blip.”
“Talk to me about the drug busts. Why are they different?” I sat forward, focused on the triangle. Something about the use of the symbol was important. It was exact, each distance carefully measured out. Dumpsters had served as ground zero for the first two locations, but the third set of bodies had been found in a large plastic bag behind a series of tract houses. The cops had discovered it last, exactly where Brody had radioed them it should be after he’d considered how tight the first two sites had been to the Strip.
“No product,” Brody said. “By the time our guys caught up to the users, they were in full sway of the drugs, but the product was gone. We’ve stopped five or six known dealers. They didn’t have product on them either, but they’re all scared as shit. Won’t talk but in no way are they resisting arrest. They’re practically begging us to lock them up.”
I started to fidget. Nikki glanced at me, caught my eye, and tapped her temple. I sagged a little in my seat. As a seer, she could see what other people were seeing—or what they imagined in their mind’s eye. What they thought they were seeing. So while I stared at the map and saw all the little pins and strings, superimposed over that map was the shadowy figure who had stalked me on the Boulevard. And because I saw it and she was so attuned to me, Nikki could see it too.
Which meant she knew I was holding back.
I had the ability to shut her out of my mind, yes, but…I didn’t want to use it. Not with Nikki. It was nice having someone I could count on to back me up, even if only in my mind.
I couldn’t keep this a secret, though, my tongue finally ungluing from my mouth. “I think Gamon is here. In the city. So he might be behind the drugs as well as the bodies. I don’t know enough about the guy to know what he markets.”
Brody spun around. “You’ve seen him?”
“Maybe. Someone warned me right before we got in the car with you. Stranger to me.”
“And you’re just now getting around to telling me?” He turned to Nikki. “You got any local players who could actually be this Gamon character?”
“I don’t think so.” She shook her head. “He’s a big deal. He wouldn’t blend in too well.”
“True,” Brody nodded, scowling.
Still, there had to be a reason for the Vegas connection. Why was Gamon here, and why now? Soo was arguably the strongest black market kingpin, and she certainly had it in for Gamon, but she was in Shanghai, safe on her own turf. The local Spinners didn’t swing all that dark. Which left…
I swallowed. “What about ties to the Council? I asked. “The Emperor has just set up shop here. You hear anything about Viktor hosting a house party?” Viktor Dal, the Emperor of the Arcana Council, was the newest returnee to the Council’s Vegas home base. He and I already had a lot of bad blood between us, dating all the way back to my teen years as Psychic Teen Sariah. For him to be behind Gamon’s arrival in Vegas made sense…but if so, why hadn’t Kreios warned us?
Viktor’s name brought Nikki forward on her chair, its front legs settling on the carpet. “I could ask,” she said. She could too. Nikki had an inside man—well, demon—in Viktor’s entourage, and Warrick owed her large. “But I don’t think so. Viktor hasn’t stepped foot out of his digs above Paris Casino, and he’s the kind of man who’d want to show off if one of his homeboys was in town.”
“Fair point.” Brody blew out a breath. “But the technoceutical dealers can’t be the only ones who know this Gamon character is here. You said the dark mages didn’t.”
“Not that we could tell.” I shrugged. “We weren’t checking them out for that, though.”
Nikki shook her head. “Like I said before, there’s dark and then there’s dark. Based on tonight’s work alone, this Gamon character is bad news, way out of the league of the local crew.”
Brody’s phone rang, startling us all, a winsome chirp completely unlike his work tone. He pulled it off the table and held it to his ear. “Brody,” he said.
Nikki’s eyes fluttered wide. Dixie, she mouthed.
I grimaced at her, but I did not, for the record, roll my eyes. Because I’m mature like that. Brody and Dixie had been fanning their own flames of everlasting love in the stars for the past few weeks, but I was fine with it. I’d crushed hard on the guy when he’d been Officer Brody back in Memphis, but I’d been a love-struck teenager. Which didn’t count. At all.
Remotely.
“You’re kidding me.” Brody’s voice indicated he wasn’t in the mood for a joke, then I heard Dixie’s dulcet Southern tones over the phone as well. She was excited but not scared, not exactly. More amped up. I frowned at Nikki, and she shrugged. Brody stood as he talked and gave us the “round-’em-up” sign with a twirl of his fingers, then stuck his phone in the crook of his neck as he gathered his own things.
“Right, right, we’ll be there in fifteen.” His voice dropped to a soothing tone, and I headed for the door, Nikki on my heels. I could handle Brody and Dixie dating. I couldn’t handle them canoodling.
“You gotta put out that torch, girl, it’s blinding me.”
“I do not have a torch lit,” I snapped. “He’s a bad habit I can’t shake. Like nicotine. That’s all.”
“Yeah, well, mebbe look into the patch. I don’t want you to be shooting eyeball daggers at Dixie if they start going all kissy-face.”
I shuddered as she cackled, then Brody was out of the house as well, the three of us heading for his car. “Dixie’s got company,” he said preemptively.
“And, what?” I asked. “She wants us to round out her dinner party?”
“Three refugees with tattooed arms.” Brody’s harsh words froze both Nikki and me in the backseat. “I gotta think it’s the same tattoo. She said they speak Romanian, and there’s a fortune-teller—”
“Madame Anya, Circus,” Nikki said, leaning forward. “She could talk to them, definitely.”
“Not that it will do us much good. The adults are shell-shocked, the girl is traumatized. Other than some rudimentary Romanian, they keep saying the same thing over and over, some kind of mantra for eternal salvation—and they’re using Hebrew words.” In the streetlights, we could see him grimace. “Actually, eternal salvation is probably not too far off the mark.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “What are they saying?”
“Sheol, Sheol, la, la.” He glanced back at us, then refocused on the road. “Sheol—that’s Hell, right? So they’re saying they don’t want to go to Hell, or they don’t want to stay in Hell, or they’re worried about Hell, or—hey.” Another hard glance. “Are you guys listening?”
“Read you loud and clear, Buttercup,” Nikki said, her voice a touch strident. “Can you get this thing moving any faster?”
By the time we reached Dixie’s, the Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars was lit up like a prison break, high-voltage floodlights transforming the white stucco chapel into a glow-in-the-dark beacon of forever romance. I peered across the parking lot as we bounced onto the pavement, but the tattoo shop across the lot seemed barely visible in the glare.
“Is she trying to be seen from the sun?” Brody muttered.
Nikki snorted. “Last week, Dix married a couple from Omaha, the nicest man you could possibly imagine and the dancer he swore he wanted to take away from it all. They met during a lap dance, and the girl herself is sweeter than the man, if you can believe that. Dixie was so tickled with them both that she married them for free, and not five days later, these lights showed up on a truck. Apparently, the guy sells floodlights for car dealerships and football stadiums. And apparently, he does pretty well.”
“Apparently,” Brody said dryly, squinting at the chapel. “I think my retinas are scorched. Let’s get in there.”
The tr
io of victims were in the secondary chapel, the man and woman hunched together, the girl sitting apart, cloaked in heavy blankets…several heavy blankets, from what I could see. I avoided the inevitable love-struck reunion of Brody and Dixie by walking over to the short, plump woman sitting in front of the couple. The victims didn’t appear to be paying her any attention, but she focused fiercely on them, her hands slightly raised. I hesitated, not wanting to intrude.
“Good. You’re here.” I blinked, startled, as Mistress Anya glanced over and gave me the thumbs-up. “Sara Wilde. I saw what you did for those poor kids in the meat truck last week. You performed a great service, and you’ve clearly got the touch. You get the young one. She won’t give me the time of day.”
“I…what?” I gaped at the psychic, then swiveled my gaze to the teen. “I’m not a therapist. Or a doctor. She’s in shock.”
“She’s in a cave, searching for light.” Anya poked her chubby finger at me. “That’s you. Now, shoo. I’m trying to get these two to sleep.”
I glanced at the couple, startled, and sure enough, they were sagging toward each other, probably out of grief and fatigue. Nikki had vanished, so I wandered over to the girl, sliding into the pew in front of her and swiveling to face her.
She stared out, catatonic.
“Hey,” I tried, lifting my hand gently in front of her face, as if to smooth her hair back. She didn’t flinch, but I didn’t want to get too close to her. I knew trauma victims could lash out unexpectedly, biting and tearing. I certainly would if some stranger started flapping her fingers at me.
I dropped my hand again. I didn’t speak Romanian, and I didn’t speak Hebrew. I was of limited use here. “Do you have a name you like to go by?”
“She gave me one, but I don’t know if it’s her actual name,” Anya called over to me, her voice little more than a coo. “She said it was Rutya.”
The plump woman came over then, and stood off to the side. I glanced at the couple, and they were, in fact, asleep, each providing support for the other as they leaned together. Anya spoke again in her soft, cooing voice, and when she got to Rutya’s name, the girl shuddered. Her eyes lifted and fixed on me.