Fire Season

by Stephen Blackmoore

  I don’t think that will happen. Unlike most mages, Gabriela actually cares about people, whether they’re human or not.

  She had a hotel Downtown a while back where she was taking in the supernaturals of Los Angeles: vampires, aswang, naga, ebu gogo, xana, and so on. We’re very multicultural out here. There aren’t many, and the ones that can pass for human mostly hide among the homeless, eke out a living on street corners, try not to grab too much attention.

  Problem is, nobody was going to take a five-foot-tall sorority girl with an advanced sociology degree seriously as a mage protecting homeless vampires. She looks less Morgan le Fay, and more Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Sexism is alive and well in magic land.

  So, she went all Baba Yaga on everybody and made up this ancient, withered hag called La Bruja. Carved a swath through the gangs and Mexican Mafia in her little corner of Downtown. Left calling cards, messages written in blood, skinned corpses, that sort of thing.

  The whole time these guys are thinking they’re dealing with a hundred-year-old monster witch. Even her own people thought so. Until a bunch of Russian thugs followed me to the hotel and burned the place to the ground. And I kinda got a bunch of her people killed. We didn’t talk much after that.

  Word that she was La Bruja got out fast. Things went south. Chunk of her army bailed, Mexican Mafia started sniffing around. A lot of boys who thought they were men had to be forcefully reminded that she was still very much not someone to fuck with.

  Considering that I’ve probably brought a pissed off Aztec god to L.A. looking for revenge, letting me die would really be the best move.

  I honk the horn again. Longer and louder this time. My vision swims for a second before going clear. My heart’s really getting a workout.

  Finally, someone comes out of the warehouse and opens the gate. I drive in, the car lurching, and park crookedly in one of the empty spaces.

  I’m going downhill fast. I’m fever-hot, hotter than can be explained by this weather. I can’t tell if it’s from whatever I’ve been dosed with or my tats really doing their best to keep me alive.

  I push the door open. A step turns into a stumble turns into a fall and the next thing I know I’m face-down in the parking lot as everything goes black.

  * * *

  —

  When I bolt back into consciousness my heart’s slamming in my ribcage like a monkey on a tambourine, but at least now it’s got some rhythm. My breathing is fast, but not as bad as before. Most importantly, my tattoos aren’t reacting. Whatever I was dosed with isn’t in my system anymore.

  My vision is still spotty. It takes a minute to focus on where I am. Then a woman stands over me, silhouetted by a light behind her. It takes a few seconds to realize who it is.

  “Vivian?” She’s grown her red hair out and there are a few more lines around her eyes than I remember.

  “Eric,” she says.

  “What are you doing here?” I’m in a plain room that almost but not quite feels like a doctor’s office, lying on a portable surgical table. The scene is far more familiar than I’m comfortable with. If this is a dream, it’s a pretty shitty one.

  “Saving your life,” she says. “You really need to get some healing charms in that mess of tattoos, if you can find any more space for them.” There’s no sarcasm there, not even a resigned sigh. The last time I saw my ex-girlfriend, she was handing me the deeds and paperwork for my sister’s house and a bunch of properties and storage units that my family kept from my sister and me while they were alive.

  It was cordial, but final. I never expected to see her again. And sure as hell not after passing out in front of Gabriela’s warehouse.

  “Thanks,” I say. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “You know I wasn’t asking why you were here here, right?”

  “Yes.” She pulls off a pair of purple nitrile gloves and tosses them into a wastebasket with a biohazard sticker on the side. There’s a nicely bandaged dressing on my shoulder covering both wounds. The arm’s a little numb, but it seems to mostly work, as long as I don’t lift it very high.

  “Where’s my shirt?” I say.

  “You’re not going to want to wear that again,” she says. She gestures over at the wastebasket with a bright red piece of cloth sticking out of the top.

  “Ah, right. I was doing a lot of bleeding in it.”

  She looks warily at my chest and carefully puts her stethoscope against my heart, all the time looking like touching me is going to shock her. She hands me a white tablet. “Here. Put this under your tongue. Sublingual lorazepam. Should help calm things down a little pretty quickly.” She slowly lifts the stethoscope off my chest and quickly steps back.

  “Is there something wrong I should know about?” I say.

  “One of your tattoos tried to eat my stethoscope.”

  That’s new. “Let me guess, the birds?” One of the tattoos on my chest, right in the middle, is a circle of Celtic ravens. When they’re charged with power I can turn them into actual ravens that fly out and make somebody else’s day really miserable. Until I use them they shift position within the circle, changing configuration from moment to moment. After they’ve been used they’re just another static tattoo until I charge them again.

  At least they used to be.

  “They’ve changed,” she says. “Didn’t they used to be Celtic or something? Because they don’t much look like it now.”

  When I was turning to jade all my tattoos stayed intact. But this one changed. Instead of Celtic imagery, they look more Aztec, and they’re not ravens anymore. I think they’re eagles.

  They also seem to have acquired a mind of their own. When I was in Mictlan they saved my life by coming out without me triggering them. I haven’t done anything with them since it happened. They should just be a static tattoo of birds, but they’re still moving around on my chest.

  “I’m really not sure what their deal is,” I say. “You said they ate your stethoscope?”

  “Tried to.” She shows it to me. There’s a small dent in the disk.

  I have no idea what to do with this information, so I change the subject. I’ll think about it when I’m not lying on a hospital table.

  “Thanks for saving my life,” I say. “Poison and blood loss really do a number on a guy, huh?”

  “Double whammy. You’d been pumped full of . . . something. An anticoagulant, something like oleander and warfarin, I’m thinking. You weren’t clotting. Your heart rate was cranked way up, making you bleed out faster. I’m honestly surprised you’re alive.”

  “I lose a lot of blood?”

  “Enough. But I gave you a charm that should get your blood volume back up without a problem. And the lorazepam should help with the heart rate.”

  I’m surprised she saved me. I got her fiancé, Alex, probably the best friend I’ve ever had, killed. Then I brought more trouble to her doorstep in the form of a face-shifting Russian gangster. And now this.

  “I don’t think my heart’s slowing down,” I say. Vivian starts to put her stethoscope to my chest and pauses.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “They won’t do it again.” I hope. The birds stay calm as she listens to my heartbeat.

  “Take a few minutes,” she says. “It was a lot worse an hour ago. I got the poison out of you, but there are some effects that we just have to wait out.”

  “How did you—”

  She shows me a disposable, plastic water bottle filled with a tarry, black liquid.

  “Come on, Eric. You know I’m not a regular doctor. I see you haven’t broken your nose again.”

  “You did such a good job with it last time, I’d hate to mess up your work.”

  “Doc’s on retainer for us,” Gabriela says, stepping into the room. I catch a glimpse behind her. She’s built this surgical suite insi
de her warehouse. Between the infirmary and a mage doctor on her payroll, I wonder how much use she’s getting out of it. She doesn’t do anything without a reason, so things must be worse for her than I thought.

  Now that she’s not doing her Old Hag of the Woods shtick, she’s gotten a lot more colorful, and clearly gives no fucks about it. Purple jeans, sparkly Doc Martens, a t-shirt for some punk band called Bad Citizen Corporation.

  She dyed her hair since the last time I saw her. Red fading into purple, with blue highlights. It’s pulled back in a ponytail, and despite her My Little Punk Pony getup she gives off this sixties rebel, Che Guevara vibe.

  Of course, that just might be because of the big fucking machete in a scabbard across her back.

  She throws a white button-down shirt at me. “That should fit. I understand you and the doc know each other.”

  “Not anymore,” Vivian says before I can open my mouth. The pause goes on a little longer than anybody’s comfortable with.

  “Okay, then,” Gabriela says. “Moving on.”

  I pull the shirt on, wincing as I lift my arm. Even with healing magic, that’s gonna suck for a few days at least. The shirt’s a little too tight across the shoulders, but it’ll do.

  “I like the My Little Pony look,” I say.

  “Thanks. Since I can’t scare the shit out of the Mexican Mafia as somebody’s nightmare grandmother, I figured I’d go the other direction and really make them underestimate me.”

  “Is it working?”

  “You want to see the heads I’ve collected?”

  “Maybe later. How bad was I?”

  “Almost dead,” Vivian says. “A couple more minutes and you would be. Dan could have done a hell of a lot worse to you.”

  I slowly slide off the table. I accidentally brace myself with my left hand and pain shoots through my arm. Yeah, I’ll be popping Vicodin like breath mints for the next week or so.

  “Wait. Who?”

  “Dan Malmon,” Gabriela says. “I had one of my guys run the address you gave me. The guy who died in the fire was his mother, Kate. She was one of us.”

  “Dan’s a real winner,” Vivian says. “I’d heard Kate had died in the fire, but I thought—hell, I’d hoped—Dan had gone up with her. If for no other reason than to get a menace off the street. I didn’t hear anything about him so I figured he was either dead or bailed. When I got here Gabriela told me where you’d been and what was happening. I assumed you had a run-in with Dan.”

  “Let me guess,” I say. “His knack is poisons?”

  “Poisons, drugs, whatever. Let’s call it creative chemistry,” Gabriela says.

  Every mage has one particular area that they’re stupidly good at. Divination, protection wards, predicting the weather, whatever. I got dead things. Dan, apparently, can give Pablo Escobar a run for his money.

  “A guy who can make his own ecstasy must get invited to a lot of parties.”

  “Not anymore,” Vivian says, anger bleeding through her professionalism. “He’s a serial killer. He’s murdered at least thirty people, that I know of.”

  “Normals?” I say.

  “Of course,” Vivian says. “So of course nobody cared.” Nobody important, at least. That’s the thing with mages; we don’t have any laws per se. And let’s face it, when you can bend reality around your pinky, some of us don’t see normals as real people. You have to draw too much attention, piss off enough of the wrong people, whatever, before someone decides you need to get stomped on for messing with normals.

  “Then he killed a mage last year,” Gabriela says.

  “And then people cared? We kill each other all the time.”

  “Yes, but we usually have a reason for it,” Gabriela says. “Even if it’s just ‘Hey, I want your stuff.’ He said he wanted to see what it would be like.”

  “They blackballed him,” Vivian says. “That’s all. He’s murdered more than thirty people and people just kind of shrugged their shoulders.”

  “‘Excitable boy, they all said,’” Gabriela says.

  “Hang on. He’s what, nineteen now? Twenty? How long had this been going on?”

  “I think since he was, what, twelve? Thirteen?” Vivian says. “Apparently it was an open secret among the sorts of people we don’t hang out with.”

  She’s pissed off about it, and doesn’t like it any more than I do. Normal, mage, inhuman, people are people. A lot of us can’t see that. I’ve never been in the loop much, mostly because I hate people, other mages in particular. But this seems like something I’d have heard about.

  “Don’t look at me,” Gabriela says. “I can’t kill every motherfucker in this town. I got shit to do.”

  So do I, but if he comes for me again I will kill him. I’m really regretting not letting him die on the street back there.

  “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. His mom gets killed, he comes after me, poisons me—”

  “Yeah, about that,” Gabriela says. “Did he hit you with an arrow or something?”

  “The street.”

  “He poisoned the street and threw it at you?” Vivian says.

  “Shot it at me, but yeah, pretty much. Here’s what I don’t understand. Why? He said I’d killed his mom. Only I didn’t. I haven’t killed anybody.”

  “Recently,” Gabriela says.

  “Uh huh. How’s that head collection coming along? Stones and glass houses, chica. I didn’t even know who the hell either of them was until just now. So why did he think I’d killed his mom?”

  “Not just his mom,” Vivian says, not meeting my eyes. “All the other ones, too.”

  Chapter 4

  “Other ones?” I say. “Back up. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Kate’s not the first to die that way,” Vivian says. “Over the last month this has happened to at least seventeen families scattered around the city. All mages. House burned down, one person in it, nothing but fragments of bone left.” And too hot to find a bullet, probably. Just a little dot of slag in a pile of ash and bone.

  “How did I not hear about this?” But I know how I didn’t hear about it. I didn’t hear about it the same way I didn’t hear about a serial killer mage who was poisoning people.

  We’re a secretive bunch, us mages. We don’t talk to each other much and what little community we have is tight-knit and paranoid. Probably nobody started putting pieces together until it hit critical mass. And even then, information wouldn’t just get out there. The ones who knew would keep it close.

  And let’s face it, though I grew up here, I’m an outsider. My name’s known, and not in a good way. I’ve brought some shit down on this city a couple of times. Gotten good people killed.

  A lot of mages won’t give me the time of day. Gabriela’s an exception, but I understand why she does it. Hold your friends close, your enemies closer, and your shit-magnets close enough to use them as a shield when the shooting starts.

  “People started connecting the dots about a week ago,” Vivian says. “I only found out myself yesterday. Once I came over and heard about what had happened and that it was you, I told Gabriela about it.”

  “You didn’t know about this?” I say to Gabriela. She doesn’t say anything, but I can tell she’s not happy.

  “Great, we’re all out of the loop. Now what’s this about me killing all of them?”

  “I don’t know where it started, or how, but it seems everybody got the same message a couple days ago. Eric Carter killed your fill-in-the-blank.”

  “And they believed it?” Gabriela says.

  “I did,” Vivian says. “At first.”

  “Fair point,” I say. “Wherever it started, it would have to have come from a trusted source. There’s nobody out there all of us trust. So, it can’t be just one. It has to be a lot of them.”

  What would I do if I wanted t
o find who killed a family member? I know exactly what I’d do because I’ve done it. I’d track down their ghost and ask them. I tried that with my sister, but like the woman in the West Adams house, she was just an Echo.

  Everybody’s got their own methods for finding things out that they trust. Maybe not talking to ghosts. Could be tarot cards, goat entrails, whatever. The point is that they’re all only going to trust their own methods.

  “Divination,” I say. “They all went looking for answers their own way. Something got in the way.”

  “Somebody broke into a divination to point this shit at you? Some of these people are really, really good, Eric,” Vivian says.

  “If you really believed that you wouldn’t have pulled that poison out of me. Because they’re so good is why they fell for it. They all made a phone call and the wrong guy answered.”

  “Somebody really has it out for you,” Vivian says. “Have you narrowed it down to the thousand or so people you’ve pissed off in the last fifteen years?”

  Gabriela and I exchange a look. “Doc,” Gabriela says, “can you give us a minute?”

  Vivian looks between us, not happy about being kept out of what’s going on, but finally relents. She collects her plastic water bottle full of poison, drops it in her bag. “Sure. Some of your boys and girls need a checkup anyway. I’ll be downstairs.” She doesn’t say goodbye, or even look at me as she leaves.

  “Jesus,” Gabriela says. “What’d you do to piss her off so much?”

  “Dated her,” I say.

  “Oh. Yeah. That would do it.”

  “You know who this is,” I say. “Quetzalcoatl’s the only thing I can think of both strong enough to intercept divination spells without the casters noticing, and also wants my head on a stick. You heard Viv. These people are powerful.”

  “Were you this much of a pain in the ass before you came back to L.A.?”

  “If you ask Vivian she’ll probably tell you I was this much of a pain in the ass before I left.”