by Nancy Holder
“Nira Surayanto. She called because her ‘supervisor’ was threatening her. Apparently he tried to kill her tonight.” He wished he’d had longer to talk to Nira. “She put a lot on the line to call me.”
“I’m glad she did,” she said simply. “But could you, just once, give me a call and let me in on the action? Let me know when something’s going down? It is my job, you know.”
“All right, Commissioner Gordon.”
She smiled at the Batman reference. “I look pretty stupid when you get to all my crime scenes first.”
“You never look stupid, Kate.” He was sincere.
She sighed and combed her fingers through her hair just as he had, perhaps unconsciously. “What’s your deal, Angel? What are you really doing in Los Angeles?”
“Looking for that big break,” he said. Old questions, old dodges.
She waved him off. “You have the right to go home and clean up before you come down to make your statement.”
“Tonight,” he said. “I’ll come down, and I’ll be chatty. But right now I’m beat. Give me the day.”
She frowned. “That’s a long time to wait for an eyewitness account.”
“The fire was going when I got here,” he said.
“There was a body,” she said flatly. “In fact, strange as it may sound, I think it might have started the fire.”
He looked at her.
She huffed. Kate was not one to share much. “Look, I’ve got some strange homicides I think may trace back to this charming situation.”
“Oh?” He raised his eyebrows.
She shook her head. “Way I see it, you don’t need to get involved.”
“Unless someone asks me to get involved.”
“It won’t be me.” Kate’s voice was firm. “And if anyone else asks you to, I expect to be notified.”
Angel gave her a tired salute and walked into the shadows.
Not on your life, he thought.
Generally, for one reason or another, the people Angel helped couldn’t go to the police. The helpless, Cordelia called them. Angel was their last hope.
And they were his.
He looked over his shoulder. Kate was scowling after him, frustrated. Then she stepped around the sawhorses draped with yellow police tape and began directing beat cops while she talked to the fire captain. Her phone went off, and she took the call. A million things at once.
Business as usual.
The sun was on its way; he could feel its power even in the predawn darkness.
Doyle would be staggering home from the clubs. Cordelia would be asleep, dreaming of fame and fortune. As he recalled, she had an audition today.
It’s just another magic Tuesday, he thought as he climbed into his convertible and started the engine. Talk about a rut.
I need a hobby.
Or a vacation.
But Angel, the only vampire in existence possessed of his human soul, was in line for neither. He had arrived in Los Angeles seeking peace, hoping for sanctuary from his love for Buffy Summers, the Vampire Slayer. He had yet to find it.
He drove the streets. He pulled his car into the covered parking lot and strode into his building. He needed to get inside. The sun was close to rising.
He unlocked the door to his office, crossed the threshold, and shut the door after himself. Quickly he scanned the interior — the well-worn sofa, the desks and chairs, reminding him of an old thirties’ noir detective movie.
The message machine was blinking. The image of the golden woman flashed through his mind as he quickly crossed to the machine. He pressed the ‘Play’ button.
“Um,” murmured a feminine voice, “I need help. I —”
On the tape a dial tone sounded. The caller had quickly hung up.
Or been disconnected by someone else.
Angel dialed *69, only to be informed by a flat computer voice that it was not possible to use the redial feature with the number.
Cell phone, he guessed. Whoever she was, he hoped she called back soon.
If she can.
CHAPTER TWO
In the last traces of night
Deep below the compound, in the temple Jusef Rais had built to Latura, a young girl named Julie Gonda cried out and fell to the floor as he grabbed her cell phone and smashed it against the cement.
“Who did you call?” Jusef demanded.
She buried her face in her hands. He heard her quiet sobs.
She knows I hold the power of life and death over her. There is nobody in her world stronger than I. I am her god. He grabbed her hair and yanked her head back, forcing him to look up at her. The terror on her face was the most powerful aphrodesiac in the universe. He wanted her. But he would leave her untouched. She would be a more fitting sacrifice for Latura.
Latura. He didn’t even know what his god looked like. From the bits and pieces he, his father, and his cousin, Slamet, had gathered over the years, he had tried to build a temple that would please the Lord of the Dead. He must have succeeded at some level, for the god continued to favor them.
More specifically, to favor me, he thought, pleased.
Finally she rasped, “He told me . . . he . . .” She trailed off, as if she realized she had said far too much.
“Decha? Decha Sucharitkul?” he queried.
She gasped.
He ground the heel of his shoe into the fragments of her cell phone, at the same time realizing that he should have left it intact. It would have been a lot easier to find out who she’d called. And how she had managed to get it to work underground.
Well, I can torture it out of her pretty easily.
“You traitors, with your pagers and your cell phones and your ‘lookouts.’ You’re really pathetic.”
He yanked harder. She screamed as a huge chunk of hair was ripped from her scalp. To silence her, he kneed her in the chest. She began to cough.
“Decha told you I was with him, didn’t he? He snuck into a room and made the call. Told you it was safe to sneak in here and defile my temple?”
“It was built defiled,” she said bravely.
He considered that. “True.”
He and the others had built the temple as best they could. Their information had been very spotty, so they had improvised. They assumed that the God of Death demanded images of death in his holy places. They had done their best to please: The walls were painted with murals of mass tortures, executions, and the heaps of dead caused by disasters and plagues. Piles of skulls, both human and animal, lined the walls like bookcases, with prayers to Latura stuffed into the jagged mouths. Candles gleamed in the eye sockets.
Atop the skulls lay written spells, or mandi, written on bamboo rods and pages made from bark, as in the old days. They were prayers of supplication for protection, for revenge, and to aid in the quest of finding Latura’s Book. The blood of their victims had been sprinkled over the spells to transform the words from thoughts into being. For as it was said in many religions, The blood is the life.
Buckets of blood were stacked in the four corners of the temple, which had, itself, been carved from living rock. The original builders of the compound — which dated from the twenties — had not used the subterranean spaces at all. The realtor who had sold the three-acre compound to Jusef’s family had been told that the caverns were originally created in order to house bootleg liquor. But that plan had not been put into effect, and they had sat idle all this time.
After some debate Jusef had succeeded in convincing the others not to use electric lighting in the temple. In the ancient days Latura had felt closest to the cannibalistic headhunters of Nias, and the people had burned torches for their heat and light. Fire was a god to them. And so fire would light Latura’s new temple.
Soot scorched the fantastic ceiling, which was carved by Indonesian artisans to resemble a rib cage. The individual ribs stretched from behind the stacks of skulls to the top of the tall room.
The sacrificial altar itself was the literal heart of the room
. Likewise carved from stone, it was coated with metal — Jusef’s single concession to the changes time had wrought in Latura’s legacy. When victims were made to burn on it, the metal increased their agony. Agony was important to Latura. Pain and terror were the only sensations available to him in the Underworld, for they belonged to the damned and dying.
A likeness of Latura, demon god of shadow, embraced the altar. Again, working from vague references, Jusef and the others aimed for correctness in depicting their master, but had no idea how close they had come. In the jungles of Java they had listened to recited accounts of the First Servant, passed from generation to generation in song and dance.
Based on those tales, they had carved in stone what they believed Latura looked like: His face was a nightmare of slashes, wounds, and a huge, gaping maw. His gigantic head and huge, glowing eyes towered over his thirteen arms, covered with spines made of sharp stainless-steel knives. Jusef never washed the knives. Layers of blood had thickened, hardened, and grown moldy. The lesson: Beneath the decay exists that which does not rust.
Life eternal.
More spines covered his bent legs, of which there were seven, ending in webbed, taloned masses of stone. He had a forked tail, and his wings were huge. They enfolded the altar in jealous possession.
Maggots and other bugs skittered night and day over the stone and metal. Jusef knew they had sacrificed over two hundred people on this very altar, and many more back in Indonesia.
But the Gonda chick had begun to undo some of the work: She had begun the Rite of Cleansing, which Jusef didn’t know. Left of the altar there was a clean spot, devoid of the unholy power of Latura. That meant that she had been successful in her magickal efforts, as far as she had gotten. So either the opposition had learned more scattered bits of knowledge about Latura than he and his family, or they actually possessed the Book. That notion was almost too painful to entertain, but as his father always said, Prepare for the worst, and hope for the best.
Either way, he would know everything this girl knew before she died on the altar.
“Resuming,” he said calmly. “I assume you called our friend Decha some time ago to make sure the coast was clear. Did you call him back just now to let him know you’d gotten in here?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Liar!” he flung at her.
“I’m telling you the truth,” she insisted. Her voice quavered. “Please, Pak Rais, believe me.”
He grabbed her by her hair again and started dragging her across the stone floor.
“He’s dead,” he said calmly. “He’s been dead for hours. After he refused to tell me anything useful, I set his heart on fire.”
Though tears welled in her eyes, she kept her face a mask. He was impressed by her courage.
He said, “You can’t talk to dead people, no matter how powerful your cell phone.”
She smiled — actually smiled — at him.
“You’re right,” she said.
She began to gag. He watched, perplexed. Blood and spittle foamed over her lips.
“No!” he screamed.
She smiled once more.
Blood spurted from her mouth like a geyser, spraying him. A wave of blood smacked him in the face and dripped down his chin as her body flailed in violent convulsions.
“Stop it, stop!” he cried.
There was a mixture of triumph and sadness in her face. Then she went limp. Her eyes lost their focus.
She was dead.
“Latura, eat her soul!” he shrieked, livid. In his rage, spittle flew from his own mouth.
He threw the body down and stood. Facing his god, he made two fists and shook them.
“Latura, drag her down into hell with you!”
“It’s a little late for that,” said a voice in the darkness.
Jusef turned.
A blue pinpoint of light hovered in the blackness of the cavern. It grew, and spun. It gained size as well as speed.
His father appeared, surrounded in blue energy.
“Father?” he asked, stunned. “How . . . what was that? Are you a spirit?”
“So you wish,” Bang Rais said. “You have no idea what I’m capable of, Jusef.” He narrowed his eyes. “But I’ve had a pretty good idea of what you’re capable of. For some time.”
The blue glow dissipated. Bang Rais, one of the most feared men in Asia, regarded his son with contempt.
“You thought you would cheat me,” he said. “You thought you would lie to me.”
He took a menacing step toward his son. “You also thought I was in Dakarta. That I had no idea that you have been trying to defraud me out of my chance for immortality.”
“No, Father,” Jusef said, backing away. “If you’ve heard anything, it’s wrong. It’s my enemies, trying to cause problems between us.”
His father shook his head. “Don’t try to save yourself. You killed Decha Sucharitkul trying to learn the location of the Book. When the apartment caught on fire, you had no thought of consequences.”
“It didn’t seem as if there were any,” Jusef said weakly.
His father narrowed his eyes. “But what you didn’t know was there were girls there, locked upstairs by one of our sweatshop supervisors, because he wanted them to become prostitutes. One of them had already called the outside for help.
“That help arrived. In time. But she didn’t call a man, my son. She called a demon.”
Bang Rais stared at his son. “It was a demon I failed to kill. Now he will follow the trail you’ve left.”
“Who? What kind of demon?”
“No one you need concern yourself with. Since you’ll be dead.”
Jusef held up his hands. “Father, no. You misunderstand.”
His father walked toward him. He was tall and muscular. But he was also tired. The magickal means — unknown to Jusef — that his father had employed to transport himself into the temple had exhausted him.
This is my only chance to save myself, Jusef thought desperately. But how can I? I don’t know the magick my father does. I don’t even know how that Gonda girl got her phone to work in here.
That girl . . . Jusef was seized with sudden inspiration.
The cleansing.
He walked toward his father and said, “Father, aren’t you feeling well?”
Then he grabbed Bang Rais, who towered over him, and flung him into the spot Julie Gonda had sanctified. It had been said — but never tested — that Latura would abandon anyone who walked on holy ground. Jusef crossed his fingers that the god would consider a cleansed portion of his own temple holy.
His father was startled. “What are you doing?”
Taking care to remain out of the cleansed area, Jusef pulled out a talisman and held it before himself. It was a miniature version of the Mark of Latura: a fiery heart set within the mouth of a demon skull.
“God of Mystery, stop his heart,” he chanted. “Stop the beat. Stop the blood.”
“Jusef!” his father roared at him. “Stop this!”
“Stop him,” Jusef continued. “He is a clean thing. He is a thing of goodness. Feel his goodness, and destroy it.”
“No!”
Bang lumbered toward him. Then he cried out, clutched his chest, and fell forward. His face made a hard smack against the concrete. Blood pooled out.
He lay facedown and didn’t move.
Warily Jusef watched him. He watched him for at least half an hour.
Then, satisfied that his father was dead, Bang Rais’s only son began to laugh so hard he cried.
Later that morning
Meg was still sobbing when Jusef came into the Venice Beach dance studio not far from her apartment. Jusef rented the place for band practice when there were no dance classes. Guitars, percussion instruments, and a drum kit took up some of the space. The rest was taken by the traditional instruments of the ancient gamelan music of Bali: the ugal, a xylophone-like instrument; gong chimes, drums, cymbals, and gangsa, played with hammers.
/> Jusef had recently showered, and he smelled of sandalwood soap and coconut shampoo. He was wearing black jeans, cowboy boots, and a black T-shirt. Despite her meltdown, she was stirred by the sight of him. The word honey came to mind, in all the languages she was fluent in: Bahasa Indonesia, English, her native Javanese dialect, and Dutch.
“Meg, what’s wrong?” he asked, filled with concern. He crouched down beside her chair. The rest of the band had gone out back to smoke, giving her some privacy.
“There was another burning,” she said. In the two weeks since Olive’s death, there had been three more like hers. “It was on the news.”
“And it’s hitting too close to home,” he said. She nodded.
“Did the police call you this time?” he asked. They had, the other two times, only because she knew Olive. So they said. But she wondered if they knew about her past.
“No. But that same detective, that woman who talked to me, was on the news. Detective Lockley.”
“Do they have any leads?” he asked, caressing her shoulders. She rested against him, feeling the muscles in his chest pressing on her cheekbone. No one on earth was as strong and powerful as Jusef. No one would ever take as good care of her.
“They didn’t say. It was at an apartment building in the garment district. They said people were living there and the conditions were terrible. Some man owns it and he said he didn’t know what it was being used for. He just rented it out.”
“The police didn’t call,” he repeated.
She shook her head. “Why should they?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He laughed and ran a hand through his hair. It was incredibly silky and full. His eyelashes were long; they brushed against her skin as he pressed his forehead against hers.
“They said it might be necklacing,” she continued, in a hushed voice. “That’s something they do in Africa.”
“Also, it’s a form of execution in organized crime,” Jusef said. “Gangs and tongs do it here in the States. It’s a painful way to die, so I’m told.”
She shivered. “When I was growing up, I always heard that America was a violent place. I had no idea.”