Fire Season

by Stephen Blackmoore

  “Eric, if there are any personal benefits, they’re all incidental. We’re trying to save lives.”

  “Then where’s everybody else?”

  “Excuse me?” Chu says.

  “There are only three of you. If you saw this as a citywide problem, you’d be calling in the big guns. And why you three? What the hell got you together? I can see you and the lawyer connecting, but what’s with Letitia?”

  “We met at—” Letitia starts.

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “There are only three of us because we’re just getting started,” Chu says. “We’re looking for similarly minded individuals in the mage community that have different areas of expertise. As I’m sure you’re aware, getting mages to do anything is like training a toddler to poop on command. So, we’re taking things slow. But if we had a group of people in various positions of respect among both normals and mages, imagine what we could do. We could unite—Is there something funny about this?”

  I can hardly breathe I’m laughing so hard. “Oh my god, you’re trying to make a Mage Council.”

  “What we’re doing is important,” Peter says, his pale cheeks going red with anger.

  “You know why there’s no high organization of mages?” I say. “Because they always fuck it up. The last time they tried that shit out here was in the 80s. Some of the most powerful mages in the city. Best of intentions.”

  “What happened to them?” Letitia says.

  “They disbanded,” Chu says, waving it off.

  “That’s a nice way of saying they all murdered each other,” I say. “Backstabbing started almost immediately as everybody vied for control, made alliances to undercut the others. Within three months the killings started. By the fourth they were all dead.”

  “How do you know this?” Peter says.

  “My parents were asked to join. They declined.”

  “If I recall,” Chu says, “they tried to organize the big families themselves against Jean Boudreau.”

  “And we all know how that turned out. They were idealists. Idealists get killed. You three want to start yourselves a little magic circle jerk, knock yourself out. But if you want to use me to raise your profile, you can fuck right the hell off.”

  I slam the door on my way out. I start the car I stole with a spell and turn to head down the driveway. I don’t get very far before Letitia runs out after me. Against my better instincts, I stop and roll down the window.

  “Get away from these people, Letitia. They’re gonna get you killed.”

  “Look, I know what you’re thinking because I’ve thought it, too. And you’re right, what they’re trying to do is going to end up looking like the Bolsheviks raiding the Winter Palace. But there’s a reason I’m here, and we—I need your help.”

  Letitia and I never knew each other well. Different circles, different friends. But when high school is 50 hormonal kids all capable of leveling the building when they have a tantrum, they force you to hang out with each other and learn to cope.

  You can’t avoid cliques, but if you can get people to stand being in the same room together, there’s a better chance nobody gets turned inside out because somebody didn’t get a Valentine’s Day card.

  Plus, she stabbed me in class, and once somebody sticks a knife in you, you gain a whole new respect for them. I may not know her well, but I know her well enough that I don’t think she’s lying to me.

  “What do you want me to do? I’m not gonna be bait. I’m not their fucking puppet.”

  “I know that. Can I show you something? It’ll explain a lot.”

  “I’ve got half the mages in the city coming for my head. I don’t have time.”

  “It’ll be an hour, maybe two tops.”

  “Fine. Get in.” I pop the door open and she slides into the passenger seat. “Where are we going?”

  “Home,” she says.

  Chapter 10

  Letitia’s house in Burbank is one of the ubiquitous single-story bungalows that fill the Southland. A sort of yellow-creme color with white trim. Big bay window, a garden filled with rose bushes lining the lawn. It’s . . . cute.

  There are a lot of words I could use to describe Letitia. Angry, capable, vaguely Amazonian. She used to wear steel-toed boots and a green army-surplus trench coat in high school, her head shaved in a mohawk. But cute? Never.

  “That’s, uh . . . a nice place,” I say. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but it doesn’t exactly scream you.”

  “People change, Eric.”

  “You telling me you don’t still have a pair of curb-stompers sitting in your closet for special occasions?”

  She smiles at that. “Yeah, okay. Maybe I haven’t changed that much.” Her face gets serious. “But I’ve changed enough. And that’s what I want to show you.”

  I pull into the driveway and we get out. The sky is an angry yellow haze, thick with smoke. With so many nearby brushfires, I can’t tell which one I’m smelling. Griffith Park? Wildwood Canyon? Verdugo Mountains? Flames peek over the tops of the hills while helicopters and tanker planes fly overhead. In the distance I watch a plane dump a couple thousand gallons of red flame retardant over Verdugo. I wonder how effective that’s actually going to be.

  Letitia unlocks the front door, and it’s yanked open from the other side by a short Filipino woman with bobbed hair, high cheekbones, and a scowl on her face that could melt steel.

  “Annie,” Letitia says, surprised. She looks behind her into the street. “Where’s your car?”

  “In the shop. Which you’d know if you’d read any of your fucking texts. Where the fuck is yours?”

  “At the station,” Letitia says. She waves at the stolen car behind us. “This one’s for undercover work.” The lie flows out of her like water.

  Annie narrows her eyes, but doesn’t question it. Then she turns her scathing look onto me. “Who the fuck is this?”

  “He’s from the Police Commission. I told you they’re riding my ass.”

  “I am,” I say, trying hard not to make it a question. “Routine ride-along. All good.”

  “Now I have to get some stuff,” Letitia says, “but tonight we’ll talk.”

  “You’ve been saying that for the last three weeks,” Annie says. “I’m tired of the secrets. I’m tired of the dancing around the subject. You tell me what’s going on tonight, or I’m gone.”

  “Oh, baby, don’t be like that.”

  “Don’t fucking ‘baby’ me.” She turns her glare my way. “You.”

  “Uh, yeah? Me?” I say. I’m staying as far away from this conversation as I can. I can twist reality into knots, command the dead, and walk in the twilight lands, but domestic squabbles? Fuck if I’m getting in the middle of that.

  “You gonna tell me what’s going on?” Annie says. “You’ve been her excuse for a month and a half now. Are you fucking her?”

  “Whoa, hang on. No. No no no. Look, you want the truth?” Letitia freezes, eyes growing wide as I keep talking.

  “Magic. It’s simple. I’m a necromancer. Letitia just saved my ass from a hit squad for some pissed off mages that were trying to kill me because they think I’ve been murdering people by lighting magical fires. People trying to kill me isn’t actually all that unusual. Kind of par for the course, really. In fact, Letitia tried it in high school. That’s how we know each other. High school. She stuck a big old butcher knife right in my back. Skimmed off a rib, so it wasn’t too bad.

  “I probably deserved it. I’d been drinking and raising dead squirrels to run up girls’ skirts. I was an asshole back then. Anyway, she’s brought me here to prove to me why I should trust her now after all this time, and I think the reason might be you.” I stick my hand out to shake. “Hi, Annie, my name’s Eric.”

  Annie stares at me, that scowl never leaving her face. “You think you’re p
retty fucking funny, don’t you?”

  “Frequently,” I say.

  She turns her attention back to Letitia. “This guy’s an asshole. I don’t like being made fun of. Now I got an Uber coming to pick me up in two minutes and I’m going to meet it at the end of the block. Because I don’t want to fucking see you right now. Tonight. We talk. And if I don’t like your answers I am out the door. You understand me?”

  “Yes,” Letitia says, voice quiet.

  “You know I love you, but I can’t do the secrets.” She pushes past us, stalking out of the house.

  I turn and wave at her. “Ta!” She answers me with two immaculately manicured middle fingers.

  “I don’t think she likes me much,” I say.

  “I am going to fucking kill you.” She stalks inside the house and I follow, closing the door behind me. I notice discreet wards carved into the threshold, the door jamb, next to the windows. The magic coming off them is surprisingly loud. I felt them a little from the street, but now that I’m inside it’s like a constant hum of white noise. She’s got this place locked up tight, and the wards very well hidden.

  “You’re with a normal.”

  “I almost wasn’t thanks to you.”

  “You live with this woman and you’ve managed to keep magic a secret from her? I’m impressed. There are plenty of normals who know about us. Why not just tell her?”

  “That’s a stupid question,” she says.

  It is, but I’m genuinely curious. We all have our reasons to hide ourselves from the rest of humanity. Some of them are better than others. Magic isn’t something you tell just anybody about. Not only because we try to keep a tight lid on that shit, but because it’s dangerous. Normals and mages are complicated.

  Take my sister, for example. Lucy had next to no power in an influential family of mages. All that did was paint a target on her back. We hid her away like Bertha in Jane Eyre. Changed her name, made up a bullshit story that she was an orphan our parents had taken in. We distanced ourselves in public as much as possible from her.

  If you’re with a normal you have two choices. You can keep them safe, or you can tell them the truth. I prefer option three. Don’t get involved with them in the first place.

  “Okay,” I say. “So why don’t you cut her loose?”

  “I—Goddammit.” She throws herself onto the living room couch.

  “She’s your reason, though, right? That’s why you want me to help? You’re afraid your girlfriend’s gonna get caught up in this.”

  “My wife,” Letitia says. “I wasn’t expecting her to be here. I was going to show you our wedding albums, and tell you about her and—Fuck!” She slams her hand down on the arm of the couch.

  “Annie’s all I’ve got,” she says. “I can do my job with the normals, I can do my job as part of the Cleanup Crew. But I can’t fucking do it if I don’t have somewhere to come back to where I’m not constantly reminded about all of it.”

  “I can understand that,” I say. “But you made a choice, and there are consequences. Trust me, I know all about consequences. You think Sastre’s going to come after her? Why?”

  “We fit the profile,” she says. “Everyone who’s died has lived with one other person they’re close to. A single father and his son, twin sisters, an adult daughter taking care of her grandmother. Even Werther. His granddaughter was the only family he had left here. Everyone else is in Europe waiting for him to bite it so they can loot his corpse. These are people who are so close to the victims it breaks them. If people actually stopped to think about it, they’d know this isn’t what you’d do. People are after you because you’re a convenient target for their grief. And nobody likes you much.”

  I sit in an easy chair across from her. “Shit.” I wish I could say I think she’s wrong. But she does fit the profile. And nobody likes me much.

  “You’re afraid Annie’s going to be killed.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I don’t know if I could go on without her. I’ve worked serial cases before, but I’ve never fit the victim profile.”

  “Leave town,” I say. “Take an extended vacation. I did piss somebody off when I was down in Mexico, and if it were just some cartel boss I wouldn’t be worried about it. If it was just Sastre coming after me, I wouldn’t be worried about it. But there is more going on here than you know, and if you get in its way, you’re gonna get hurt.”

  “Eric, this is my wife.” She points to the ring on my finger, even though she’s conspicuously missing one of her own. “You understand that, right? Help us,” she says. “Help me.”

  If I laugh I’ll have to explain my being railroaded into marriage with a death goddess and we’ll be here all day.

  “Okay, say I throw in with you and your politician buddies. What’s the plan? And don’t say to just do what I would normally do until she shows up, except that you’ll be following me.” She doesn’t say anything. “It is, isn’t it? Goddammit.”

  “But you’ll be surveilled,” she says. “And you’ll have a wire. There will always be someone nearby, another mage.”

  Aside from the fact that having anybody looking over my shoulder freaks me out, what happens if Quetzalcoatl goes after whoever’s watching me? And how do I know whoever she has watching me isn’t blaming me for these murders too and takes a shot?

  “No,” I say. “It’s a stupid plan. It’ll get me killed, whoever is watching me killed, and probably several bystanders. I’ll keep you updated when I find anything out, but it’s better if nobody knows where I am.”

  My phone rings in my pocket, cutting off whatever she was about to say. It’s Gabriela.

  “A little bird told me you had a car accident on the way to see your honey bunny,” Gabriela says.

  “Please don’t call her that,” I say. “I’d like to keep my breakfast down. Yes, I did, and no, I haven’t seen her yet. But I did find some things out.” I fill her in on Sastre, taking care to circle around Quetzalcoatl, and the lighter.

  “I take it you’re not alone,” she says, catching on.

  “Ran into an old high school acquaintance. She helped fill in the blanks.” Letitia gives me a questioning look, but I ignore her.

  “And her knowing that gods are involved might not be prudent?”

  “I’m still figuring that one out.”

  “Got it. Come on by the warehouse when you get a chance. All this Secret Squirrel shit over the phone gives me a headache.”

  “I’ll see you later tonight.”

  “Who was that?” Letitia says as I slip my phone back in my pocket.

  “A friend.” I stand up, fighting a wave of dizziness as my heartrate jackrabbits for a second before calming down. Between the poison, the stab wound, having my car blown up behind me and doing moving car gymnastics, I think maybe I need to take a nap. Like that’s gonna happen.

  “I really can’t convince you to let me put surveillance on you?” she says.

  “No. But you’ll try anyway. So, know this. If I find anybody tailing me I’ll assume they’re trying to kill me. Don’t let it be one of your people.”

  Chapter 11

  Sometimes you have to take a moment to take stock. Look around, get clear on the things you have, the things you don’t, for good or ill.

  Things I have: a gun, a straight razor, a messenger bag holding the accouterments of my craft, a leather-bound ledger that has more secrets in it than I know what to do with, an assassin in league with a pissed off wind god, a shit-ton of corpses, mages who want to put me into the ground, a stab wound in my shoulder, and the lingering effects of a really nasty poison in my system.

  Things I don’t have: a lead.

  I don’t know where Sastre is, I don’t know where she’s going to strike next, I don’t know which mages want my head on a stick, and I don’t know when this fucking poison making my heart play bongos in my chest i
s going to finally run its course.

  And I don’t have my Cadillac. Pieces of it are sitting in a Catholic school basketball court, or being sent to storage for the police to comb over. I wonder what they’ll find out about it.

  Of all the shit that’s happened today, that’s the thing that pisses me off the most. I really liked that car. Now I’m stuck in this shitty Honda that whines every time it shifts gears. Sure, the Cadillac wasn’t mine to begin with, but I murdered a mage in Texas for it.

  Okay, that sounds bad, but he was eating the souls of young Loa, Voodoo spirits, children really, and he had it coming.

  Finding Sastre is my next step, but the question is how? I could summon some Wanderers, ask if they’ve seen anything, but that could take hours and might not get me anywhere. I doubt Gabriela’s going to be much help on that front. She has informants and lackeys and some decent divination, but her street cred is in the shitter right now and she doesn’t have the eyes and ears she used to, not to mention Q fucking with the divination airwaves.

  I could go where I was originally going, to get an audience with Santa Muerte, whoever she is now, but I really don’t want to. Asking favors of gods and spirits hasn’t really worked out for me lately, and the last thing I want is to find myself in debt again.

  I pull a tracking charm from my messenger bag, a small hematite pyramid carved with runes and hanging from a string. I used this in Mexico a few times. I don’t know if it’ll work, but what it does should at least give me a better idea of what I’m up against. Quetzalcoatl might have a lock on questions about the murders so everything points back to me, but how well is he hiding her? Does he know that I know about her?

  If the charm can find her it will lift toward the direction she’s in. If it doesn’t, it won’t do anything. If she’s being shielded and it can’t get a bead on her, it’ll spin in slow circles.

  I dangle it from the string and concentrate on Sastre. At first nothing, then it begins to slowly spin. Okay. That’s good to know. He’s got her protected from scrying.