Fire Season

by Stephen Blackmoore

  Gabriela pulls up a plastic chair and falls into it. “Jesus fucking Christ, Carter. How did all this slip past your radar? I thought you were watching out for this crap?”

  “Me? What about you? Dead people aren’t as chatty as you might think. Or as smart. What about this whole fucking criminal empire you got going on here?”

  “When I was an old, scary hag people came to me. I was like Don Corleone. Now that I’m the upstart little shit who fooled everyone it’s the other way around. Nobody talks to me. Everybody from La Eme to the fucking Armenians are testing me, not to mention the other mages who think they can take on a little girl.” She laughs. It’s a bitter, tired sound. “Thing is, they’re not wrong. I’m hemorrhaging resources faster than I can replace them.”

  “That bad?”

  “Enh, I’ve been here before. I’ll win this fight again. Enough about me. Quetzalcoatl’s helper—how do we find them?”

  “I wouldn’t trust any divination spells. If Q’s fucking around with the victims’ families, it’s not a stretch to think he’d do the same with you or me. I could ask some of the Wanderers in the victims’ neighborhoods if they saw anything. But if everybody thinks I did this, those might not be the smartest places to be seen.”

  That little shit hit me with poison today and almost killed me. He’s good, but there’s better and smarter out there. Who knows what the hell I might run into next time?

  “How about Darius?” I say. I don’t like the idea, but it’s the only one I’ve got.

  The Djinn has doors all over the city that lead to his own little pocket universe. He can’t get out, but it doesn’t mean others can’t get in.

  He saved my ass in Mictlan by sending me some conveniently well-timed information. He wanted Santa Muerte and Mictlantecuhtli out of the picture as much as I did. He could have told me sooner, or at least given me some breadcrumbs to follow. But he didn’t. He wanted me to go to Mictlan. Whether revenge for getting him locked in his bottle, or something else, I don’t know. Whatever it was, he wanted me there.

  “Already tried,” Gabriela says. “He won’t even let me through the door.”

  “That happen often?” I thought she and Darius were besties. I’ve been formally banned from his place.

  “A few times,” she says. “But only when he’s pissed off at me. It passes in a day or two, but the timing is a little interesting.”

  “You think he knows what’s happening and he’s gone to ground?”

  “I think he knows more than he lets on, at least,” she says. “If shit’s going down that has him looking to weather out the storm, it’s gonna suck for everybody else.”

  Could Quetzalcoatl hurt him? Who knows. An eight-thousand-year-old Djinn versus a broken-down god? But why would he try? They fought on the same side against the Aztecs, not that that proves anything. Darius probably didn’t have any choice in the matter.

  “Well, shit,” I say.

  “I got an idea,” Gabriela says. “But you’re really not gonna like it.”

  “No,” I say, wondering when we were going to get around to this. “Abso-fucking-lutely not. I’ve already considered it, and I’m not going down that road.”

  “She’s the only one left who actually knows him besides Darius. Probably knows him better than Darius.”

  Goddammit. I know she’s right. I’ve known for months. But I’ve been avoiding thinking about it. Thinking about her. And it’s not for her lack of trying to get hold of me, either.

  I pull a couple of cards out of my pocket, slightly larger than standard playing cards, and hand them to Gabriela. The images are used in a bingo-like game called Lotería. Each card has a title, an image, and a little nonsense rhyme associated with it. If you’ve got a divinatory bent, you can use them like tarot cards.

  The first is El Corazón, showing a picture of an anatomically correct heart with an arrow through it sitting in the middle of a very familiar looking ring with tiny calaveras carved into its surface. Compared to the one on my ring finger the detail’s not as good, but close enough.

  The other is La Muerte, depicting a half-skeletal, half-flesh woman. Though the image is stylized, I know exactly who it’s supposed to be.

  “These first showed up a week or so after I got back from Mictlan. I was getting two, three cards a day for a while. Then they stopped. They started back up last month. This is the fifth pair I’ve gotten in the last two weeks.”

  “You sure they’re from her?”

  “Who else would they be from? I just don’t know what they mean.”

  “At least she’s still in one piece. That’s something, right?”

  “No. The plan was to cut her goddamn head off and mount it on a wall.” Things didn’t go as planned. I’m not sure how much of Santa Muerte is still Santa Muerte and how much is her human avatar, Tabitha Cheung. Tabitha played me like a goddamn piano to get me into Mictlan under her boss’s orders.

  My goal had been to kill Mictlantecuhtli and hopefully stop the progression of the jade taking over my body, and then Santa Muerte for killing my sister, though I wasn’t picky on the order.

  Only it turned out to be a con job and Tabitha and I were the marks. Santa Muerte as her alter-ego Mictecacihuatl and Mictlantecuhtli wanted me close enough and mad enough that I’d stab at least one of them in the heart with a god-made obsidian knife.

  If that sounds like a sacrifice, it’s because it was. Once I did it, the connections between me and Mictlantecuhtli and Tabitha and Santa Muerte would be so strong they’d boot us out of our bodies, letting the two gods wander the mortal world in more than just their followers’ dreams.

  But I’ve never found a plan I couldn’t fuck up. I turned it around and shoved the knife into my own chest instead—which I don’t recommend, by the way. Instead of the bond with Mictlantecuhtli strengthening, it snapped.

  In the seconds I was dead Tabitha got hold of the knife and stuck it into Santa Muerte. I was too late, so I did the only thing I could think of. I yanked the knife from Santa Muerte’s bony chest and shoved it into Tabitha’s in a desperate attempt to reverse whatever was happening.

  I don’t remember much after that. Both of them burning like road flares, energy coursing between them like Hot Wheels cars on a Super Loop, then nothing. I woke up alone in the middle of the Mexican desert.

  “Is she the same Santa Muerte?” I say. “Is Tabitha a part of her? Or is she a part of Tabitha? Is it a trap? The Aztec version of playing Peter Gabriel outside my window?”

  “She’s reaching out to you,” Gabriela says, inspecting the two cards closely before handing them back to me. If she finds anything that shows they’re not just card stock and ink she doesn’t say. “For whatever reason, she wants to see you. Use it.”

  “You think I haven’t thought about that? Creepy death goddess wife notwithstanding I don’t even know where to look for her.”

  “Bullshit,” Gabriela says. “You know exactly where to look. There’s that church on Alvarado, that bullshit botanica on Melrose, and at least three pharmacies Downtown that if you go in the back you’ll find a shrine of hers you can talk to. You know she’ll show up. You’re just too chickenshit to do it.”

  She’s right on both counts. “Fuck me. There’s got to be another way,” I say, even though I know there isn’t. Gabriela tosses the cards onto the surgical table behind me.

  “Maybe you’ll figure one out on your way to church.”

  Chapter 5

  I didn’t have time to look over the Cadillac after Malmon put bullets into it. I’ll have to get the driver and passenger windows replaced. Probably the mechanism to roll them up and down. And definitely the locking mechanism on the driver’s side door. Fuck it. I’ll just replace the doors. Where the hell am I going to find doors and windows for a ’73 Cadillac Eldorado?

  I brush shattered glass off the seats. It’s a wonder I didn�
�t shred my ass when I jumped into the car. The Caddy’s a convertible. There’s nowhere to anchor anything at the top, so I can’t even get plastic and duct tape to cover the windows.

  Just as well. The air conditioner’s shot and in this heat I’m driving with the top down most of the time, anyway. But at least it gave me the illusion of keeping all the brushfire smoke out of my lungs for a bit.

  “I’m not sure what surprises me more, that you’re still driving it, or that it’s still drivable,” Vivian says. I didn’t hear her come up behind me. To be fair, I was around gunfire earlier. My ears are still ringing a little.

  “Hey, this car and I have seen a lot together.”

  “I’m sure you have,” she says, an edge in her voice.

  “Oh, there it is.”

  “What?”

  “The disdain. I thought we were past that. Or at least I thought we weren’t going to bump into each other again, so it didn’t matter. What happened to your plan for leaving L.A.?”

  She wraps her arms around herself as if to ward off a chill in this triple digit heat. “I’m still going. I just haven’t, yet.”

  “Okay, sure. None of my business. Might want to do it sooner rather than later, though.”

  “What’s happening?” she says. “You show up at Gabriela’s bleeding out and poisoned and then the two of you have some hushed conversation when I leave the room. Something’s going on.”

  “No shit,” I say. “Honestly, I don’t know why she wanted you kept in the dark. She’s funny that way. Here’s the short version. A pissed off Aztec wind god is framing me for multiple homicides and arsons, probably just to fuck with me, and is probably responsible for most of the wildfires going on right now, too. Anybody near me is going to get caught in the shitstorm. I’d really rather you not be one of those people. Again.”

  She doesn’t say anything for a long time, her eyes getting that thousand-yard stare. “I’m afraid to leave,” she says. “Except for college and med school, I’ve spent my whole life here. All of my memories about Alex are here. I’m afraid if I leave I’m going to lose all of them. I have to look at his picture every day to remind myself what he looks like.”

  I wasn’t expecting that. It comes out of her like water from a burst pipe. Things must be bad if she’s telling me this.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, not knowing what else to say. I wish I could forget what Alex looked like. Best friend growing up and my last image of him is his possessed body strangling me right before I had a zombie put a bullet in his head. I keep telling myself he was already dead, but it doesn’t matter. Either way I killed him.

  “I know,” she says. “Maybe I’ll just leave town for a little while. Go up the coast.”

  “I think that’d be a good idea.”

  “Do me a favor, would you?” she says.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t get hurt. As long as I’m on Gabriela’s dime I’d probably be the one to stitch you up. And I don’t want to see you again.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  * * *

  —

  There comes a time in every person’s life when they have to take a long, honest look back on their life choices and admit that they really fucked it all up.

  I didn’t expect to run into Vivian again, like ever. I’d made peace with that, with the guilt, with the fact that I’d destroyed somebody’s life and there was no going back. And then I wake up on a table with her patching me up.

  Seeing her threw me. I can’t imagine how she reacted. Not well, probably. I wouldn’t blame her if she’d just slit my throat while I was passed out, but I know she wouldn’t have. That’s more my style than hers.

  I’ve fallen into complacency. With nobody trying to kill me and no oblivion hanging over my head, I stopped paying attention. I might have been looking for signs that Quetzalcoatl was coming for me, but I never really believed it. Or at least I didn’t want to believe it.

  I pull the Cadillac onto the 101 Freeway and head toward Alvarado. One of Santa Muerte’s churches is there, in a strip mall between a nail salon and a Chinese fast food joint. I haven’t been there in a long time, not since I first came back to Los Angeles.

  The church is part of that special L.A., the schizophrenic one that can’t decide what it wants to be. While the tourists are busy looking for movie star houses and waxed porn stars, life is happening all around them. Messy, filthy, violent. And they never see it.

  I hit the Four Level, a series of Downtown freeway interchanges that cross over and under each other like an Escher painting connecting the 101 to the 110. It’s a complicated knotwork of concrete and steel and almost everyone driving it doesn’t know that it’s literally a knot.

  It’s a protection spell that was laid down in the forties during construction by a group of mages. Nobody remembers what it’s protection from, though. It sure as hell isn’t earthquakes, violence, and drought. And why doesn’t anyone know what it’s for? Because the mages who designed it all killed each other about a month later. Friendship is magic.

  I head down the 110 and get off at 8th. You can watch the money fade away like a disappearing shore the further you get from the high finance of Downtown. Steel and glass towers give way to bricks and bars on windows, strip mall donut shops and signs offering payday loans in English, Spanish, and Korean.

  Every street has something like this. Twists and turns of culture if not geography. Walk across the street, turn a corner, you’re in a different L.A. Like how Skid Row is within walking distance of the mayor’s office, or the Police Protective League, the LAPD’s very own union, sits directly across from the ACLU.

  In fact, it’s sitting at a stoplight between those two buildings when I get ambushed.

  I barely have time to register the spells going off, the same flavor of magic coming from three different directions. I slam on the gas, 280 horses under the hood shoving the car through the intersection. But it’s already too late.

  The entire back end of the Cadillac shears off just behind the driver’s seat, and explodes. Metal and glass turn into a fireball of shrapnel behind me. The front of the car drops onto the pavement, throwing up sparks with a noise like God’s own belt sander.

  The car’s front wheel drive and I haven’t let up on the gas. It continues down most of the block. Then, like a man realizing his heart has stopped, the engine dies from lack of fuel. Hard to drive a car when the gas tank’s a shower of confetti behind it.

  The car spins. There’s no power in the steering and it’s like trying to control a panicked bull. The car plows through a chain-link fence surrounding a basketball court and finally comes to a stop when it hits one of the basket poles.

  I feel like I’ve been body slammed by a luchador with anger management issues. The seatbelt won’t unlock, so I pull my straight razor and slice through the strap. I fall through the open doorway out of the car and onto my knees. I’m not sure where the driver’s side door is.

  I pull myself up, wipe blood out of my eyes from a cut on my forehead. Everything hurts so much I’m not focusing on my wounded arm and I can’t tell if my hammering heartbeat is the remains of the poison or just adrenaline. So that’s a plus.

  I don’t see anybody, but whoever blew up my car will be here in a second. That or the police, paramedics, or maybe some random normals, and I’ll have all sorts of new and enjoyable problems.

  I don’t have to wait long. Three people in thick, hooded robes step over the wreckage of the chain-link fence and stand in front of me like executioners. The hoods hide their faces better than normal hoods should. The formless robes are black and covered with golden sigils, most of which are the equivalent of getting a kanji tattoo and finding out later that it means “ramen.”

  Still, they’re real mages, even if they can’t spell right. I can feel the magic they’re drawing from the pool, the spells they’re crafting. They�
��re sloppy. I’m not sure what the spells are, though I can guess, but I can tell that they’re struggling. It’s like watching toddlers put together a five-thousand-piece Lego set.

  I’m not topped up myself, but I’ve got plenty of power. No reason to draw from the pool, and if I need a spell, I can think of a dozen I can pop off with barely a thought. Just because they showed me theirs doesn’t mean I have to show them mine.

  “Wool robes?” I say. “In this heat? You lost a bet, didn’t you?”

  “Shut up,” one of them says, fists clenched, a blue glow building up around them. “You’re a murderer and a monster and we’re here to pass judgment on you. I declare you guilty.” The other two chime in with their own cries of “Guilty!”

  “Wow. That’s some high-pitched squeaking you got going there. Okay, either one of you is a girl, or you’re a boy whose balls haven’t dropped yet. I’m going with option two. How’s puberty treating you, Junior?”

  The first one throws off their robe. It’s a man, white, early thirties, maybe. “You killed my wife, you sonofabitch.” The other two drop their robes.

  One’s a black woman about the same age as the guy, and the third is a gawky, acne-riddled Latino kid with a rage in his eyes he’s finally figured out what to do with.

  “My husband,” says the woman.

  “My mom,” the boy says.

  “Holy shit, am I a real bastard, or what?” I should be talking them down, not goading them on. They really think I killed their families. But the fuckers blew up my car. My car. Okay, yeah, it was stolen, but the guy who it belonged to was already dead. And yes, admittedly, I’m the one who killed him, but he was a very bad man.

  “I’m gonna fucking kill you,” the kid screams and, instead of letting loose a spell, he does what every angry young man does. He rushes me. I put up my shield. The kid smashes into it, bouncing to the ground, slamming his head on the blacktop hard enough I don’t think he’s getting up any time soon. His spell, a fireball by the looks of it, goes off.