Fire Season

by Stephen Blackmoore

  “It’s gonna get worse,” I say.

  “They’ll get it under control.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  She considers that. “Did you make this happen?” she says. “Did you and Gabriela do this?”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Fine, but she’s still out. Answer the question. What did you do? Did you kill all those people?”

  “No,” I say, but I honestly wonder how true that is. “We definitely triggered it, though. All that smoke and fire? All those dead? They’re a great big double-fisted fuck you. I told you the basics of me going to Mexico, but a lot more happened than I’ve talked about.”

  I tell her about Quetzalcoatl, his blaming me for his not getting to fulfill a 500-year-old revenge fantasy, his connection to the mage murders, La Niña Quemada, what happened last night.

  “She’s the one who stabbed Gabriela?”

  “Yeah. I had a choice to make: take her down and let Gabriela die, or let her go and get Gabriela back here.”

  “You made the right choice,” she says.

  Did I? Ask the hundreds who died last night, or the ones who are going to die today and tomorrow. Ask the survivors if they think I made the right choice. That fire’s gonna burn for days, if not weeks. If they’re lucky it won’t spread. But it won’t be the last one.

  “Maybe,” I say. “They’ll do it again, though.”

  “This—I can’t believe I’m saying this—this god hates you that much that he’ll burn the city down just to fuck with you?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I have a hard time thinking this is all just petty revenge. But they don’t think like people. Or, fuck, maybe they do.”

  “I still can’t wrap my mind around that. Gods, goddesses. Quetzalcoatl. You know, that’s the only Aztec god I remember. And he’s real. I’m fine with magic because I use it every day, but actual gods? When you told me about Santa Muerte, I figured she was just some demon. I don’t know why I’m okay with demons and I’m having so much trouble with gods.”

  I think about telling her that it’s because they raise uncomfortable questions. Demons are like cockroaches. They’re all over the place and mages learn to deal with them early or we don’t live long. We’ve seen them. Some of us, unfortunately, have touched a few.

  But gods are different. Gods mean maybe you’re not in control. Maybe you don’t have your shit together like you thought you did. Nothing will piss off us magic types more than not being in control. We can twist reality like fucking balloon animals, but there’s something bigger and badder than us out there.

  And Vivian wonders why I never told her half the shit necromancy is about. She has trouble with gods? Imagine if I’d told her the real story about ghosts.

  “Existential crisis?” I say.

  She barks out a laugh that’s just this side of panic. “Yeah. And then some.” She finishes her cigarette, and vaporizes the butt with a gesture.

  “If it helps any, he’s a real asshole. From what I saw, so’s the rest of his family.”

  “You mean your family,” she says. She nods at the ring on my finger. There’s no anger, no bitterness. Just a statement of fact. Pissed off at me, hating me, never wanting to see me again. Those I can handle. But this? Vivian has her shit together. Vivian always has her shit together. Something’s wrong. I don’t know what it is. I doubt she’d welcome any help I might give her.

  She closes her eyes and rubs her temples, a bone-weary sigh escaping her lips. It’s the most emotion I’ve seen from her since I woke up. “What now?”

  “You remember Letitia Watson?”

  “High school, right? Barely. Didn’t she stab you?”

  “Yes, and yes. She’s part of the Cleanup Crew now. Working with the LAPD. Has a side thing going with a lawyer and some guy running for mayor. Councilman Chang, or something.”

  “You mean David Chu?” she says. “I’ve heard of him. His office keeps calling me for donations.”

  “Yeah? He a good sort?”

  She shrugs. “He’s a politician.”

  “He is that. Turns out there’s a whole file on the murders I’m getting blamed for showing that I didn’t do any of them.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me. Why am I just now hearing this?”

  “Because they’re not telling anybody. They want to bring down the assassin who’s doing it, and want to use me as bait.”

  “Do they know she’s with Quetzalcoatl?”

  “If they do, they didn’t say anything. I’m not inclined to tell them either. It’s one thing to have some people trying to kill me out of misplaced vengeance, it’s another to have everybody trying to kill me to get rid of Quetzalcoatl.”

  “If you’re dead he’s got no reason to stick around,” she says, producing another cigarette and lighting it with her fingers. “It would solve the problem.”

  “I think you and I might have differing opinions on that. More to the point, if Chu and his Merry Mages know she’s behind the Vernon fire, they might be more inclined to let everybody else know about her. Having L.A.’s mages pointed at her instead of me might slow her down a little.”

  “You think they’ll do that?”

  “Not Chu,” I say. “He’s looking for political capital with the mages and wants to be at the center of whatever takes her down. He’s been making Mage Council noises.”

  “Oh, for fuck sake,” Vivian says. “Is he that much of an idiot? Those always end with corpses.”

  “I think he’s just fine with the idea so long as he’s not one of the corpses. Anyway, he wants to use me as bait. If he controls this information, he probably thinks he can control me, too.”

  “You’d think Letitia would have warned him about that.”

  “Letitia has her own reasons,” I say. “I don’t think she wants to rock the boat too much. And honestly I can’t blame her. I think it might also make her the best person to talk to. We at least have history.”

  “Yeah. If you consider her stabbing you in high school history, sure.”

  “I have low standards. Besides, she’s with Chu because she’s afraid of what will happen to her family if she gets targeted.”

  I stand up from the couch, my legs wobbly, my body filled with overlapping pains. I swear I can feel every bruise, puncture and abrasion. I’m a little afraid to see what I look like in a mirror. The tattoos help me with the worst of the damage, but they don’t make it feel any better.

  Between being poisoned yesterday morning, jumping off cars out of the void, getting the shit kicked out of me by a cartel sicaria, and feeling the deaths of 800 people like a gut punch for every single one of them, I’m not exactly at my freshest.

  “There a car in the lot I can borrow?”

  “What, you’re not stealing one?”

  “Ugh. Too much effort. I’m tired.”

  “Here,” she says. She pulls a set of keys out of her purse on a nearby table and tosses them to me.

  “You’re trusting me with your car? You do know I’m pretty hard on cars, right?”

  “It’s insured, I don’t much like it, and I’m going to report it stolen as soon as you walk out the door.” She gives me a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.

  “Good to know.”

  “And before you see anybody,” she says, “take a shower. Maybe change your clothes.”

  She’s got a point. My clothes are more red than anything else, and the fabric has gotten stiff from dried blood.

  “Fine. But pretty soon everybody’s gonna be wearing blood-crusted clothes and you’ll see the genius of my fashion forward sense.”

  “That’s actually what worries me,” she says, and turns her attention back to the fires on the horizon.

  Chapter 16

  You’d think after being back in L.A. a few years and actually owning property I mig
ht spend some time in it. I don’t. My sister’s house in Venice is vacant, the other properties my family left mothballed and covered in dust. A few were nothing but empty lots, and stay that way.

  Instead I move from hotels to motels to trailer parks to Beverly Hills mansions empty while the occupants are summering in the Caymans. I never stay more than three, four weeks in the same place, the same neighborhood. Shake up my routine on how and when I go in and out.

  Right now I’ve got a room at the Biltmore in Downtown under my own name. But I’m staying about three miles away at a ramshackle motel on Third and Alexandria right at the edge of Little Bangladesh.

  Yes, I know. It’s called paranoia. With a load of mages, a pissed off god, and a cartel assassin after my ass, not having a fixed address is something of a bonus. Anything with my name on it might as well be a bomb site.

  Paranoia’s also one of the reasons I keep a handful of burner phones around. The one I used for my room at the Biltmore is ringing. Caller ID shows me that it’s coming from the hotel desk.

  “Hello?”

  “Mister Carter, this is Kevin from the front desk at the Biltmore. I’m calling to let you know there’s been an incident in your room.”

  “What happened?”

  “Two people tried to break in, but were stopped by our . . . by security measures, before they could enter. We’ve called the police and they’ll be contacting you soon, I’m sure.”

  That didn’t take long. “Did they catch them?”

  There’s a long, awkward pause on the other end. “They . . . were found on the floor outside your room. I’m afraid the police will have to give you details.”

  “My god, I hope they’re all right,” I say, knowing they’re not.

  “I really think you’ll want to speak with the police about it. We merely wanted to let you know so that you didn’t come back to an unfortunate surprise.”

  “I appreciate it. Thanks for the call.”

  “If there’s anything we can do—”

  “No, I’m good. Thanks, though.”

  If things went the way they were supposed to, what Kevin from the Front Desk isn’t telling me is that these people were found turned inside out. It’s a really nasty ward I learned a couple months back after I almost got gunned down in a hotel in Zacatecas. I put it on the door. If anybody used a key it wouldn’t have triggered. The last thing I want is a couple of dead housekeepers outside my room.

  But try to jimmy the lock or break the door or whatever and off it goes. The really horrible part is that you’ll stay alive for about five minutes before all your organs shut down and you go into hypovolemic shock from blood loss. I kind of feel sorry for whoever had to clean them off the floor.

  I pull the battery out of the phone as soon as I hang up and toss the phone into the wastebasket. I take my pocket watch out. The watch speeds up time drastically. It’s effective, if difficult to control. It doesn’t always work the way I want. I don’t know if it can do anything else, and I only figured this out with trial and error and more than a few dead cats. I’m just fine not experimenting any more with it.

  I point the watch face at the phone at the bottom of the wastebasket. I wind the crown a couple notches and push it down with my thumb. The phone goes brittle, the glass cracks. Stress fractures appear across the surface and the plastic flakes away until there’s nothing but a pile of plastic shavings and bits of metal at the bottom of the wastebasket. There’s a rusty hole in the bottom of the wastebasket, too. The watch doesn’t have great aim.

  The first time I tried disposing of a burner phone like this, I didn’t take the battery out first. Turns out rapidly aging batteries explode. The more you know.

  I shower, washing off Gabriela’s blood, counting the cuts and bruises, finally stopping when I can’t tell where one bruise ends and the other begins. Everything hurts: muscle, skin, bone. It’s usually a little difficult to see the bruises under all the tattoos, but these are fresh and clear as crystal, deep purple marks going green at the edges.

  I change my clothes, tossing the blood-covered ones into a trash bag I’ll burn later. At this rate I could probably just leave it lying around and let Quetzalcoatl burn it for me along with the rest of the city.

  Once I feel a little more human, I call Letitia. It takes a few tries to get through to her, and when she finally answers I hear telephones ringing and raised voices in the background.

  “Letitia,” I say. “Busy day?”

  “Jesus, Carter, haven’t you heard? A couple miles of industrial buildings in Vernon went up last night.”

  “Yeah, about that.”

  Silence. Then, “You know something?”

  “Oh, and then some. And you’re gonna want to hear it. And I don’t know if you’re gonna want to tell your boss about it.”

  “David’s not my boss.”

  “Yet you knew exactly who I was talking about when I said it. Can you get away for a bit? We’ve got some things to discuss.”

  “For this, yes. Where at?”

  “You’re operating out of Downtown, right? Meet me at the King Eddy in an hour. And remember, don’t tell your boss.”

  “He’s not my—” But I hang up before I can hear the rest.

  Talking to her is a risk, but she’s my conduit to Chu, and Chu’s got that file. I give it a couple of hours after I tell her what’s going on before she calls him. If she skips the bit about Quetzalcoatl, I’ll be pleasantly surprised, but I don’t expect it. I can only hope he’s as much a politician as I think he is.

  I can see why Vivian wants a new car. This one’s a dinky little Fiat that looks like it wasn’t built so much as shit out of an incontinent elephant. I may set it on fire once I’m done with it. Maybe I’ll toss my bag of bloody clothes in first.

  I head Downtown, passing by the Biltmore. I watch as two black body bags are loaded into the coroner’s vans. I wonder who they were. This might be the thing that bothers me the most. If someone’s going to try to kill you, you should damn well know their name. This random stranger bullshit is getting on my nerves.

  The King Eddy is a Skid Row bar that was there long before Skid Row was. It was a no-name bar for the King Edward Hotel in the early 1900s and when Prohibition hit it turned into a basement speakeasy using Downtown L.A.’s maintenance tunnels to smuggle in illegal hooch.

  Not that anybody really cared. Prohibition didn’t really take out here like it did in some places. Mostly because everybody in the city government was on the take. And then when Prohibition ended, the bar came out from behind the piano store it was using as a front and went legit.

  After the War things went to hell. The Red Car stopped going down 5th, the hotels all turned into flop houses, cheap rents pulled in the kind of crowd that cheap rents pull in. Next thing you know, you’ve got Skid Row, junkies, drug deals, beat poets. The King Eddy was a survivor.

  But the one thing it couldn’t survive was gentrification. Eventually it closed down, then got bought and opened back up. Now it’s a hipster version of a Bukowski dive bar with eight-dollar Budweisers.

  I liked it better when people were doing coke and shooting heroin in the bathroom stalls, getting into drunken fights out on the sidewalk. Yeah, it was a mess, but it was real life, messy, and visceral and full of drama. Even the ghosts were more interesting back then.

  I park Vivian’s Fiat in a lot on Main, slapping a Sharpied sticker that says STEAL ME on the windshield, and walk the two blocks over to 5th and Los Angeles where the King Eddy sits as a cornerstone of the King Edward hotel.

  The bar’s just opened and it’s still quiet. Not even the jukebox is playing. A handful of regulars who came back after they re-opened sit at the bar. I score a table in the back with no one else around. My back to the wall, paying attention to the flow of magic around me, the people walking by on the street outside, feeling for any disturbances, spell
s, draws on the pool. It’s quiet on the magic front, too.

  About twenty minutes later Letitia wanders in. By then I’ve already downed two cups of coffee and am contemplating a third. She’s given in to the heat and is wearing a skirt that doesn’t seem like the sort of thing the LAPD would be okay with for on-duty detectives, and a blue blouse that’s already staining in the armpits.

  She sits down opposite me and starts to talk, but I stop her with an upraised finger. I pour the table salt out into a pile, spread it with my hands, and use a finger to draw a rune through it. There’s a sudden silence as all of the sounds outside our table go away. It’s a simple spell, small and unobtrusive enough that anyone walking by probably won’t notice. It’s also a pretty crappy one. No one can hear in, but we can’t hear out.

  “Okay, spill,” she says. “What happened last night? What did you do?”

  “Don’t look at me. Your sicaria did it. I just spooked her.” I don’t mention Gabriela. She’s already mixed up in this bullshit and I don’t want things getting worse for her than they already are.

  “You spooked her enough that she blew up Vernon?” she says, eyes going wide.

  “I think it was more that I pissed off her boss, who’s also in town, by the way.”

  “No shit,” she says. “We’ve been trying to find her for weeks. All the scrying comes up empty.”

  “I found a loophole. Unfortunately, one that’s probably been plugged up tight since last night. I went looking for something I know she has. I found that, I found her.”

  Letitia narrows her eyes, doesn’t say anything. It’s adorable when police try to do the silent intimidation thing on me. Most people hate silence. They’ll say all kinds of shit just to fill the hole.

  I lean back in my seat and sip the last of my coffee. One of us is going to start talking soon, and it isn’t going to be me.

  She breaks after about two minutes. “All right, before I go on to who her boss is, I’m going to ask how you knew what she had.”

  “It’s a lighter. It’s what she’s using to set everything on fire. If you look at one of your border surveillance photos you’ll see it in her hand after she’s lit a cigarette. She made a point of having it in that shot while she was looking directly into the camera. She was sending me a message.”