I pull a spell together. One I’ve thought about for a while but haven’t actually tried. It shouldn’t be tough. When I killed Jean Boudreau after he’d murdered my parents, I grabbed him, took him over to the other side with me, and fed him to the ghosts.
Like when I moved Werther’s car earlier, I had to take Boudreau to the other side with me. But this spell’s a little different. With Dan here, I just send him.
He disappears, leaving a vaguely person-shaped blob of light thrashing around on the other side of the veil. I can see the ghosts fine. But Dan’s not dead. Yet.
He probably has no idea where he is, or what’s happening, but I bet he’s recognizing a few faces.
And from the way they all descend on him, I think they might recognize him, too.
Chapter 22
“I thought two to three hours was being generous,” Chu says when I finally turn up on his doorstep.
“Things got a little hectic.”
“I heard,” he says, standing aside to let me in.
After delivering Dan to the ghosts I took the cop car far enough to ditch it on a side street and jack somebody else’s ride. The Cleanup Crew can only do so much. At some point the shit I do that makes their jobs harder is going to catch up to me, but I’ll deal with that when I don’t have a price on my head.
I headed back to my motel to clean off the gore, get a change of clothes, and spend some quality time with a first aid kit. Bruised, scraped, cut. I blew capillaries in my left eye and it’s bright red with blood. I think I bruised some ribs, and my back is telling me just how much of an asshole I’ve been to it.
I’m exhausted and in pain and I don’t have time to be either. So I do a suburban speedball with a handful of Vicodin and some Adderall. It’s gonna suck tomorrow, but until then at least I’ll be functional.
“Peter,” Chu calls, “can you get me and Mister Carter a whiskey, please?” He turns to me. “Neat?”
I nod and he yells back the order. Somewhere in another room I can hear the Assistant District Attorney get up and pour me a drink.
“Does he do windows, too?” I say.
“Peter’s just a generous soul, Mister Carter. Can I call you Eric? By now we should both be on a first name basis.”
“No,” I say. I walk past him and into the room where we’d met before. Letitia sits in a corner looking at me with concern. Peter’s poured the whiskey, hands me a glass as I come inside.
“Jesus, Eric,” Letitia says. “What the hell happened to you?”
I down the whiskey in one gulp. “Long day at the office.”
“You’re bleeding,” Peter says, nodding toward my chest. I don’t bother to look.
“I’d be surprised if I wasn’t.” I’d bandaged things as well as I could. Sometimes you miss something.
Chu comes into the room. “Considering how your day’s gone, I’d say you got off light. There’s a been a scramble from the Cleanup Crew to cover up a few things.”
“They find the cop at the Bowl?”
“Yes. He’s being handled by someone in the Medical Examiner’s office. Please tell me that was Sastre.”
“Sadly, no,” I say. “Ran into some guy who thought I’d murdered his dad. Maybe he was after the bounty. His friend probably was. The cop was collateral damage.”
“Are you sure he’s dead?” Chu says. “They only found two bodies. Shouldn’t there be three?”
“As dead as it is possible to be,” I say. “And they can stop looking. They won’t find him. Doesn’t really matter, anyway. We have bigger problems.”
Peter gives me a skeptical look. “We?”
“Yes, we. As in the whole fucking city.”
“Quetzalcoatl?” David says. Peter frowns, passing a look between us, clearly out of the loop.
“I’m keeping that quiet for the moment.”
“Obviously,” Peter says.
“Apologies,” Chu says, ever the diplomat. “I only found out myself a little while ago and I thought it would be best if we had Mister Carter here to talk to before going into detail.”
I take that as my cue. “Short version, I pissed off an Aztec god who is now up here burning shit down and blaming me for it. Sastre works for him. But I don’t think I’m the reason he’s here. If he wanted me dead, he’d just kill me outright.”
“Why do you think he’s here then?” Letitia says.
“No fucking idea. And honestly I don’t really care. We just need him and his pet sicaria gone.”
Peter takes all this in stride. Whether he believes me or not doesn’t seem to matter. Chu believes and that’s enough for him.
“He’s a god,” Peter says. “What does he need a cartel assassin for?”
“Something he can’t do,” I say.
“Like pull a trigger?” Letitia says. “Light a fire?”
“Fire he does just fine on his own,” I say, remembering a crowd of Sinaloa toughs getting torched in a hotel parking lot in Zacatecas. “But the trigger, yeah. Hard to hold a gun when you’re nothing but a ragged manifestation of wind and fire. I ran into her the other night. She was tying bundles of sticks together. I can’t see her being big on the arts and crafts, so I figure he needs someone with thumbs.”
“Sticks?”
“Yeah, I don’t get it either,” I say.
“What do we do about it?” Peter says.
“I’m tapped. I was hoping y’all might have some ideas.”
“Could you ask your . . .” Letitia starts and raises an eyebrow at me. Okay, so she hasn’t told them everything.
“I did. I got some information. After shit went down, Cortés had him trapped in a clay pot inscribed with binding spells and buried. Over time the spells faded and he cracked it like an egg.”
Chu and Peter don’t seem to like it. Even more loops to be left out of. Letitia’ll get grilled later, I’m sure. Not like it’s much of a secret, anymore.
“So, like a spirit bottle?” Chu says.
“If you mean like a spirit bottle in the same way a nuclear missile is like a bullet, sure. This is a god we’re talking about here, not some pissy little poltergeist.”
I’ve used spirit bottles before. They can be incredibly easy to make, depending on what kind of spirit you want to capture. I’ve got some drunkard ghost I trapped in a half-empty bottle of Stoli a few years back still banging around somewhere.
But this is so far out of the realm of what I can do; hell, what I even know how to do, I don’t see any way to make it work.
“Do you know anyone who can make a spirit bottle that powerful?” Peter asks.
“If I did, you think I’d be here talking to you people? How about you? My name’s mud in this town. You’re the fucking golden children in here.” Peter and Letitia shake their heads. Chu looks thoughtful. “You got something?”
“Actually, I think you might,” he says.
“How so?” People say shit like that, it usually means they know more than they’ve been letting on. I don’t like that.
“There’s a rumor, an old rumor, that your family had been collectors of a sort.” He looks uncomfortable, gauging each word carefully.
“Spit it out,” I say. “I’d like to get some sleep before dawn.”
“The rumor is that the Carter family has been collecting magical artifacts, reagents, spellbooks, what have you, for decades,” he says. “Nobody knows for sure because it’s always been denied and nobody’s been able to confirm because they don’t know where it would all be stored if it did exist.”
“News to me,” I say. “My family and me, we weren’t all that tight.” I catch Letitia watching me out of the corner of my eye. She doesn’t say anything, though I’m sure she knows I’m lying.
Chu nods. “Sure. Of course. But it seems to me that if this collection did exist, it might have something like that in it.”
“Not so far as I’m aware. Most people just write it off as a myth.” He leans forward. “Does it exist, Mister Carter? Might it have something like what we need in it?”
“My folks must have forgotten to tell me about it before they were murdered and I had to leave town for a decade and a half.”
There must be something in the tone of my voice that tells him to back off. He leans back in his chair and picks up his whiskey, swirling it in the glass before taking a sip, like nothing just happened.
“So where does that leave us?” Peter says.
“Can we do something about the assassin?” Letitia says. “If we can’t touch him, what about her?”
“Mister Carter?” Chu says after a moment. “Any ideas?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, that’s probably not gonna work. Tried that. Didn’t go so well. Q was protecting her.”
I’m barely paying attention to the conversation. Instead I’m thinking about what Chu just said about my family’s collection. I doubt he has any idea how big the thing is, though I don’t doubt for a second there are rumors. Considering how old it is, I’d be surprised if there weren’t any.
I wonder if he’s right. Maybe there is something in there. I recall seeing lots of spirit bottles listed in the ledger. Some of them even had some promising descriptions. I stand up, bringing the conversation to an abrupt halt.
“Problem?” Chu says.
“I have to go,” I say. “Gonna take me a while, but I’ve got some ideas. I’ll swing by tomorrow when I know more.”
“Call ahead first,” he says. “I’m having a fundraiser here in the afternoon.”
“People are actually giving you money?”
“That is how one runs for office, yes,” he says. “Campaigns run on cash. Cash comes from donors. We can’t all be trust fund babies.”
I ignore the dig. I get it. My family had money, and apparently a hell of a lot more. But it’s a bullshit insult. Any mage worth a good goddamn can get money. He’s playing the self-made man angle for the normals. He doesn’t need cash, he needs influence.
“Sure,” I say. “Wouldn’t want to frighten away the bourgeoisie. I’ll show myself out.”
Letitia follows and catches up to me before I get through the door. “The hell are you doing?” she whispers.
“Following through on an idea,” I say. I should trust her. She hasn’t done anything but help me. But she’s still working with Chu, and I don’t trust him. I’m not about to tell her a goddamn thing about the storage unit.
“Is this an idea that’s gonna fuck everything up?”
“Do you honestly think anything I do can make things worse?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Okay, fair point. I promise I will do my best to not fuck things up worse than they already are. Happy?”
“No, but it’ll have to do. Just be careful. Lives are on the line.”
“You realize it’d be easier for everybody if you just shot me, right?”
“I’ve thought about it. You gonna at least tell us what this idea of yours is?”
“No,” I say. I leave her at the door, where she watches until I’m down the street and can’t see her in the rearview anymore.
Chapter 23
I head down to Ventura Boulevard and park in an empty lot. It’s wishful thinking, but with all the crap my family’s collected over the years there has to be something in the ledger that’s a powerful enough spirit bottle it can hold Quetzalcoatl.
I scan through page after page, writing down every entry that looks promising on the back of a Taco Bell receipt I find in the car’s cup holder.
It takes almost an hour, but I’ve got it narrowed down to six possibles, none of which I’m crazy about. Two don’t just pull in a spirit, they pull in all the spirits around for a mile and a half. Even the ones that are still in people’s bodies. They’re probably strong enough to pull in Quetzalcoatl, but I don’t really want to be stuck in there with him.
The third one’s less a spirit bottle, more a magic vacuum cleaner. Literally. It’s an old Electrolux from the fifties that was used to rid a hotel of demons. Only problem is that the bags were enchanted, too, and they all got used up.
Number four is a clay vessel that was used in Iraq to trap an Ugallu, this nasty Persian storm demon. I’ve heard of them, but never seen one. It starts off looking promising, but a series of addendums shows that it’s not an Ugallu, it’s about fifty of them, and they’re still in there. To make things oh-so-much more interesting, sometime in the thirties it kind of went on walkabout and nobody’s clear what happened to it.
The fifth one looks like it might do the trick. It’s from the late sixties, a prototype built for the government. It’s about twice the size of a bottle of Jack Daniels, made of titanium, and uses an ensorcelled piece of plutonium as a power source.
Now the downsides. It has to be kept and transported inside a lead-lined case, and if you’re in its vicinity unshielded for more than a day you’ll come down with radiation poisoning. Oh, and since it was designed as a prototype, it’s bright yellow and covered in radiation hazard stickers and warning labels, like THIS END TOWARD ENEMY and DO NOT EAT. Not exactly subtle.
Number six looks, if not the most promising, at least not as personally threatening.
November 19th, 1947—Spirit Bottle: Glass and metal. Unbreakable. Appears to be designed to trap and contain powerful entities. January 14th, 1948 Addendum DO NOT USE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES
Leaving a note for mages saying DO NOT USE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES is like sticking a banana in front of a monkey and telling it not to eat it. There’s no description as to why it shouldn’t be used. There’s nothing saying what’s wrong with it. And if it were really dangerous, you’d think whoever wrote that entry might mention why.
Since that and the nuclear one are both in the Sherman Oaks storage unit, I figure I’ll grab both and just not tell anybody that if they stand too close to one of them they might go sterile.
I head toward the storage unit, but double back, head a few miles out of my way. Keep my feelers out for any magic. It doesn’t look like I’m being followed. So off to the building I go.
It’s how I left it. Considering the wards and charms on the place, I doubt anyone could get inside without leveling the building. Heading in feels just as surreal as before, with the added benefit of having spent some quality time with the ledger, so I feel like I’m walking through a minefield.
Crates and boxes, desks and bookshelves. So much shit collected over decades, I have to wonder who organized it all, if you can call this organized. How many people know this place exists? This couldn’t all have been done by my family. There aren’t that many of us. My parents and grandparents had no siblings. So far as I know, I’m the last one standing.
Questions to answer another time, I suppose. I’m just thankful the place is air conditioned. After nine o’clock and it’s still up in the 90s. The sooner I can get those two spirit bottles and get the hell out of here, the sooner I can get Quetzalcoatl off my ass and keep him from doing whatever crazy-ass shit he’s trying to pull.
The radioactive bottle is surprisingly easy to find. It’s in one of those thick steel briefcases you expect to find nuclear launch codes in, which makes a certain amount of sense. I crack open the case. There are lead panels covering the insides. The ledger entry for it went into more detail than most. It’s just the way it was written, even down to the warning DO NOT EAT.
I close it up before my hair starts falling out. Fucking technomancers, man. Mages are kind of like mad scientists, always pushing what we can do with magic, but those guys are real mad scientists. Half the shit in here was made by a technomancer and it’s probably the half that’ll kill you out of spite. The only good thing about technomancers is they tend to blow themselves
up before they cause too much trouble.
I decide to leave the portable nuclear disaster-waiting-to-happen where it is for now. If the other one doesn’t pan out, then I’ll give this one a whirl.
After an hour of looking, moving crates and hauling boxes, I can’t find the other bottle. Even with this ridiculous lack of organization I should be able to find it pretty quickly. Everything’s got tags and numbers and they’re roughly in order, but the damn thing just isn’t here.
I’m about to give up and go with the nuclear option when I have a thought. I’ve moved crates to check the ones behind them, but what about the ones against the wall?
Another twenty minutes and I find it, a safe recessed into the wall behind a stack of metal and wooden boxes. Thing’s a fucking antique, but it has the ledger entry number painted on it in more modern military stencil. Gold filigree around the edges of the door, the words CARY SAFE CO. BUFFALO NY written in gothic script. Thick hinges, lever to open it. But instead of a dial, there’s a metal plate about ten inches square with runes etched along the edges.
At least I don’t need to figure out a combination. It’s pretty obvious what the plate’s for. I put my hand on it and it either unlocks or it kills me. I try the lever first. I’ll feel real stupid if I die and it turns out it was unlocked the whole time. But no, it doesn’t budge.
Well, shit. I press my left hand against the plate. There’s a loud click of bolts disengaging. No fire, no explosion, no turning into a frog. I try the lever again. It turns easily in my hand.
Somebody went to a lot of trouble to make sure nobody found this thing and only certain people could open it. I’m starting to think I should leave the bottle where it is. But if I do that, I’ll never know what the big deal is. Maybe it’s exactly what I need.
I pull on the lever. The door opens like it’s on freshly oiled hinges and inside . . . there’s a cocktail napkin.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
A goddamn cocktail napkin? I pull it out to take a closer look. It’s from Kelbo’s, a chain of old L.A. tiki bars that started in the forties. I remember the last one closing down in ’94, the year before I left L.A. I turn the napkin over and written in pen is “TRinity 34778”.
Fire Season Page 16